What Does an AI Marketing Virtual Assistant Do?

Building a Marketing Virtual Assistant

When BrandMuscle first started brainstorming ideas for what our own virtual marketing assistant might look like, sketching Markie’s character quickly become one of the most important aspects of the project. We wanted to get this right. Many of our customers’ industries are highly regulated — for instance, financial services and insurance — and tend to have serious marketing with little room for big personalities, or even much levity. Virtual assistants like Markie allow B2B companies to bring levity to the conversation when interacting directly with their channel partners. We at BrandMuscle are not interacting directly with the customer. We work with companies to empower their channel partners. When we designed Markie, our goal was to make Markie an extension of our existing BrandMuscle team and brand voice, and our team is: kind, helpful, knowledgeable, fun, fast, and dependable — a humble expert. Those were the traits we instilled in Markie.

When using AI for what was previously human communication, we also discovered that it is important to accept the inherent “bot-ness” of a virtual assistant while still doing what we can to make the assistant more conversational and approachable. That required understanding how the audience interacted with the marketing virtual assistant.

How Do Users Interact With an AI Marketing Virtual Assistant?

A crucial aspect of creating an AI marketing virtual assistant is to establish how your audience will interact with them. To determine this, BrandMuscle looked at engagement methods.

BrandMuscle created our For Local Marketing Maturity Matrix™, which is a proven framework and formula for identifying the factors that have the greatest impact on channel marketing program performance and revenue growth. From lowest to highest, those marketing maturity stages are: disengaged, developing, equipped, executing, optimizing. One key point that our data shows is that partners at the highest level of marketing maturity demonstrate two times higher year-over-year revenue growth compared to those in the bottom levels of maturity. For The State of Local Marketing Report 2021-2022, we added the Marketing Savvy dimension to evaluate individual partners’ marketing maturity, independent of the channel marketing program provided by the brand. The Marketing Savvy lens provided an even deeper understanding of the partner spectrum to help brands prioritize and focus their attention and resources on the areas of their channel marketing program that negatively impact their partners’ ability to participate in their program and grow revenue.

When building an AI marketing virtual assistant, it was invaluable to know that many disengaged local partners are not even logging into our platforms. The platform is there, but they do not access it. That’s why we introduced channels such as SMS, text, and email to help engage those partners, because they are more familiar to those channels. In the future, we might invest in interaction methods such as Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to further engage them.

Over the years, many clients have asked us for mobile apps, but Markie solves the use case for many mobile apps scenarios. Users can experience a certain level of app fatigue, so we designed Markie to be a digital twin to our platforms, performing many of our platform’s key functions. That allows local partners to interact in a way that is familiar to them, without making them download yet another application and use authentication, or to even remember a username and password. This low-friction approach removes barriers to program participation and reflects the ways users actually engage with platforms. And as our data clear shows: Partners at higher maturity levels tend to drive more revenue.

BrandMuscle’s Local Marketing Maturity Matrix feeds into our AI platform. This enables us to classify each local partner based on the maturity categories defined in the Matrix, and then shape the message that we give based on the specific audience. We believe Markie will primarily impact those who fall into the lower developing and disengaged classes, but this is not to say that Markie cannot elevate partners who are in one of the Matrix’s three higher classifications (equipped, executing, optimizing). Partners in those higher categories know their local markets very well, they understand their customers, and they may be much savvier when it comes to marketing. But at the local level, it is still very unlikely that they are using AI to do things like analyze foot traffic data or competitive ad data. BrandMuscle’s growing list of AI data and analytics partners can build smarter local businesses, no matter how savvy they currently are. This takes them to that next level of Marketing Maturity to help propel them further and drive revenue.

How AI Marketing Virtual Assistants Help Businesses Achieve Corporate Program Goals

When looking at ways to help businesses achieve program goals, Markie is designed to solve key goals not only for local marketers, but for corporate marketing managers.

Corporate program goals include:

• Channel fund utilization
• Partner engagement
• Partner satisfaction
• Share of voice
• Revenue growth