CMGalaxy’s Dhaval Gupta on how AI & Machine Learning are reshaping marketing

In an era where Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) face multifaceted challenges in navigating the complexities of omnichannel marketing, CMGalaxy has emerged as a game-changer. In conversation with Adgully, Dhaval Gupta, Managing Director of CMRSL, provides exclusive insights into how CMGalaxy, an AI-driven SaaS product, addresses the evolving needs of CMOs. Join us for an illuminating discussion on the impact of AI, optimal Martech spending, the rise of performance marketing, and CMGalaxy’s unique capabilities in transforming the marketing landscape. Excerpts from the interview:

In 2023, many CMOs are facing challenges due to the need for an omnichannel marketing approach. Could you share some insights into the specific challenges they are encountering and how CMGalaxy addresses these challenges?

In 2023, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are grappling with multifaceted challenges in the dynamic landscape of marketing, and an omnichannel approach has become imperative. These challenges are characterized by the need for comprehensive data integration, personalization across diverse channels, and efficient campaign management. These issues include:

• Data Integration for Informed Decision-Making:CMOs are faced with the task of integrating data from various sources, including first-party data, website traffic, sales, and campaign metrics, to make informed decisions and optimize campaigns effectively.
• Personalization Amid Privacy Regulations:Achieving personalization across channels while adhering to stringent privacy regulations poses a significant challenge.
• Proliferation of Marketing Channels:The ever-expanding array of marketing channels, including social media, messaging apps, chatbots, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and traditional avenues, creates a complex landscape.

CMGalaxy is a virtual marketing assistant powered by AI that simplifies and automates data-analytics, funnel attribution, and personalisation by bringing together all the brand campaigns under a unified dashboard. This alleviates the burden of manual tasks and enhances the efficiency of marketing operations and hence allows marketers to focus on qualitative decision-making.

One of the key issues CMOs are dealing with is the decline in marketing budgets. How can an optimal allocation of Martech spending assist marketers in achieving a broader reach for their marketing campaigns, even with reduced budgets?

In the face of declining marketing budgets, optimal allocation of Martech spending can empower CMOs to achieve broader reach for their campaigns. Marketing teams should prioritise essential tools that enable marketing automation while providing data independence to brands. A combination of accurate tracking, rigorous A/B testing, and AI-supported processes can ensure efficient operations. Marketers should continuously consolidate or eliminate underperforming tools while consistently investing in innovative ones. This is now a necessity for effective and large-scale omni-channel marketing.

Furthermore, Martech companies will need to adopt and deploy intelligent operational research. This means building algorithms that can manage, learn and provide intelligent decision-making support across a large number of data points.

AI and machine learning have been transforming the marketing landscape. Can you elaborate on how these technologies are altering the marketing approach, and what unique advantages they offer to marketers using CMGalaxy?

AI is a transformative force in marketing, revolutionising processes and accelerating content generation for brands. This shift promises shorter campaign cycles, improved creative quality, and increased automation. Despite being in the early stages of the AI revolution, brands worldwide are already experimenting with these tools, anticipating substantial changes within a mere two years. The trajectory suggests AI will increasingly dominate processes currently reliant on manual efforts. Over time, AI will be trained to become a centralized marketing expert that can assist across the entire spectrum of marketing processes and functions. However, this will require large and consistent investments towards training and fine-tuning AI agents.

CMGalaxy is actively investing in AI learning models that help brands with their own AI marketing agent. This virtual CMO assistant would enable brands to create a central repository of knowledge that acts as an organization's second brain. The world of Martech is complex. We believe we can simplify this by building a platform that enables such marketing AI experts.

Performance marketing has been gaining popularity as a way to effectively utilise marketing budgets. What, in your opinion, is driving this increasing interest in performance marketing, and how does CMGalaxy support marketers in this context?

The surge in performance marketing’s popularity is fueled by the rapid growth of digital marketing. Giants like Google and Meta consistently report robust quarterly results, underlining the efficacy of their Adtech products in delivering tangible outcomes. The continuous evolution of digital channels, including Connected TV, DOOH, AR/VR, contributes to the escalating shift of budgets toward digital platforms.

The challenge remains how to assess omnichannel marketing, provide accurate attribution, retarget with personalization, and, therefore, optimize spending, which continues to be a major gap for organizations of all sizes.

With CMGalaxy we are addressing this pain point. Our CDP solution helps marketers build their first-party data and manage a picture across the entire funnel. CMGalaxy algorithm further simplifies budgeting by picking up on signals across the campaign and making necessary adjustments on a real-time basis. Most importantly our AI assistant learns about the campaigns and is able to provide suggestions to improve campaigns and maintain the flywheel. CMGalaxy also helps create personalised messages across channels that help with customer retention as well as conversions. These features ensure a high degree of automation, and help marketers focus on the creative journey of the brand.

CMGalaxy is known for its marketing automation capabilities. Could you provide some insights into how CMGalaxy utilises marketing automation to address the specific requirements of performance marketing, and what benefits it offers to CMOs and their teams?

CMGalaxy assists clients in managing performance marketing by integrating with multiple channels, creating a unified marketing intelligence dashboard. Once data is integrated, our CDP solution tracks necessary analytics for full-funnel attribution, facilitating audience analytics with in-depth A/B testing. Based on this analysis, CMGalaxy enables effective campaign optimisation, retargeting, and personalisation.

Furthermore, the CMGalaxy AI assistant learns on the go, providing clients with insights on necessary campaign changes, including budget management. CMGalaxy not only enhances ease of use and automation in paid marketing but also allows brands to leverage generative AI. As pioneers in this space, we believe we can offer significant benefits to our clients, ensuring their satisfaction through streamlined processes and the strategic use of generative AI.