The AI Frontier: Reshaping Marketing Marketplaces

As a marketer, you know the perception from other teams, especially the Finance team, that you love spending company money. Well, it's not too far off the mark, and this perception is pretty common. From decorative things like danglers to expensive giveaways for customers, marketers spend a lot of money. This is all part of our never-ending quest to create warmth for everyone.

It's the same with digital marketing. We spend money on PPC ads, display ads, social media ads, websites, plugins, and so much more. The digital budget has gradually taken over a large part of marketing budgets. The global advertising firm, Dentsu, estimated 58% of all marketing budgets would be spent on digital ads in 2023.

Most of this money goes to ads, website improvements, and martech tools. Over the years, martech platforms and tools have evolved into a mature tech stack that's improved digital marketing effectiveness. Marketplaces that integrate seamlessly into these platforms and tools are one reason for their success. These marketplaces are driving their adoption and making them different and unique. Let's look at how these marketplaces are helping marketers, and how AI is transforming them, adding to their shopping carts.

Marketplaces - fast growing ecosystems for marketers

The rise of marketing tools and platforms has completely changed how businesses market their products and services. These solutions cover everything from content creation and social media management to campaign analytics and marketing automation. The shift to central marketing platforms has helped marketing teams be more efficient and productive. With one platform, marketers can manage all their campaigns without having to juggle multiple point solutions. Furthermore, marketing platforms offer access to valuable resources and marketplaces, which helps marketers execute.

These platforms have marketing marketplaces that connect marketers with resources and services to support their campaigns. Let's take a closer look at the most common types of marketing marketplaces.

Content marketplaces are sites that offer tons of pre-made content, like articles, infographics, videos, and social media posts. Marketers can buy individual pieces of content or subscribe to a service that gives them access to a bigger library. Marketplaces like Draft, MarketMuse, and ClearVoice help businesses that need high-quality content but don't have the internal resources to do it themselves.

Freelancer marketplaces: Websites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Behance let businesses hire freelance marketers with specialized skills. A marketer can post project descriptions and budgets, and qualified freelancers can submit proposals on these websites. With this, businesses can tap into a global talent pool without having to hire full-timers, saving both time and money.

Social media influencers have become a powerful marketing force, and influencer marketplaces help brands connect with relevant influencers they can work with to reach their target audience. Marketers can find influencers based on demographics, interests, and follower engagement metrics, on platforms like Upfluence, Grin, and Afluencer. They can also help manage influencer relationships, track campaign performance, and measure ROI.

Data marketplaces: Customer data is the lifeblood of modern marketing, and data marketplaces let you target audiences, optimize campaigns, and perform market research. A lot of datasets can be purchased or subscribers can subscribe to services that provide ongoing access to a variety of sources like AWS, Adobe Audience Manager, and Oracle Data Marketplace. Data marketplaces can help businesses find new marketing opportunities, understand their target audience, and make data-driven decisions.

These ecosystems have immensely benefited the marketers

There are so many avenues and possibilities with digital marketing platforms. Each possibility comes with its own workflow. Cummulatively, they can add more to the marketers' workflows making them harder to manage. One of the advantages of platforms is that they streamline workflows without needing to access multiple platforms offering different functionalities at different stages. Think about a typical content marketing workflow. You can write copy for an e-book using one tool, design it using another, schedule it using a social media manager app, and queue it up in an automated e-mail sequence using an automated tool. There's a chance you'll make a mistake or get a delay with this much switching between tools or apps.

Many of these features are available within popular platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot. If you need integrations for other marketing needs like social media listening or webinar hosting, they offer extensive marketplaces that can help you put together a custom martech stack.

The efficiencies marketplaces bring to your workflow are another benefit. You could automate your whole workflow or just part of it. Automation of social media and e-mail marketing is pretty common. Marketplaces can also help you connect with relevant influencers based on demographics, audience interests, and engagement rates. Or you could automate tasks like campaign management, influencer outreach, and performance tracking. This would free up your bandwidth to focus on developing creative influencer campaigns and measuring their effectiveness. Besides sourcing customer data, some data marketplaces also let you analyze it, like identifying customer segments and predicting behavior.

Marketplaces like these can also help you find freelancers and agencies with specialized skills. With this, you can scale your team's capacity and get access to expertise. It's particularly relevant for small and mid-sized businesses, or in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, or legal.

How is AI re-shaping these marketplaces?

Recent years have seen AI emerge as a game-changing technology that is rapidly changing marketing. It's a little unsettling at times. It's already changed how you make content. It's also changing the way you hire freelancers, reach influencers, and get actionable insights from your marketing data. It is also gradually changing how you can solve certain problems associated with discovering genuine influencers. By gathering and analyzing social media data, it can identify influencers aligned with your brand's vision, products and services, and campaign goals. Making the discovery process faster and easier.

Artificial intelligence can also help you find genuine influencers by detecting accounts with fake followers. It can help you keep an eye on unusual spikes in their audience and figure out why. You can use AI to generate scripts for videos that will appeal to their audience. During all this, AI can monitor campaign performance and generate real-time insights you can use to optimize the campaign.

It's no surprise that AI has made its way into the martech stack. All the way from advertising to data analysis and activation. The fact that it's on marketplaces isn't surprising either. Some marketing automation platforms and the tools that integrate with them have become redundant, or at least less relevant. Many of them are also bringing AI-led features so that they remain relevant.

That's more true for marketplaces for apps and tools throughout the martech stack. There's a bit of a difference when it comes to freelancer marketplaces. In most cases, freelancers who offer services like copywriting, design, social media management, PPC, etc., AI can deliver impressive, high-quality content in real-time, so platforms like Fiverr and Upwork don't seem to be doing so well. AI hasn't completely replaced services like video scripting and editing or web development yet.

With new AI-based synthetic video generation platforms like Sora and Stable Video Diffusion on the horizon; and AI-powered video editing tools like Veed growing in popularity; and major web dev platforms like Figma, Wordpress, and Elementor introducing AI features too, it's only a matter of time before AI takes over everything. There seems to be a lot of promise in web builders based on AI, like Framer and 10Web.

It's clear that AI is accelerating existing marketing use cases and creating new ones wherever tech and data are involved. The marketplaces catering to these categories are already using AI to stay relevant. But what happens to marketplaces for freelancers and influencers? Considering these marketplaces have a higher human element, the answer will probably remain a debate for a while.

It seems more likely that these marketplaces will be reshaped rather than killed by AI. It's mostly because of four things. AI is still learning. Although the content it's generating is high quality, it's not the best. A lot of times, it has generated inaccurate content, and it has sometimes exhibited high levels of bias that caused controversies. With ethical questions behind the source of the data and being used to make malicious content like deepfakes, AI-generated content isn't 100% reliable. Due to this, laws like the EU AI Act have been passed. Data privacy has also been a concern. Lastly, human ingenuity and creativity know no bounds and are as resilient as ever. This is backed up by enough history.

Digital marketing has always been about change. The internet paved the way for its emergence, cloud-based data analytics made it more effective, and Web 2.0+ made it more fun and engaging. AI is accelerating that change, making it better, and shaking it up to bring in a new level of reach and engagement. It's likely that martech platforms and tools will leverage the changes AI brings and how it reshapes their marketplace for the benefit of businesses, marketers, and customers.