Sneak peek - Next gen marketing tools

Last night I had the privilege of attending a “first look” at the new AI powered marketing “wrap product” from the legends at BiG – mucho thanks to Rupert Squires from Perspicuity for getting me along

If you don’t know the company, BiG delivers data engineering and analytics to clients ranging from the Network Rail to hot start-ups such as Crowdcube (shout out to @Jonny Day) BiG’s purpose is to improve businesses by transforming them into Data-Driven Enterprises – and they do a great job of it.

They have created a product called “Distil.ai”, it’s in Beta, and their current tagline for it is “Machine Learning for marketeers”. I had a preview of it last night and it’s a class of new product that I refer to as a “wrap product”, as it wraps around all of the customer and marketing tools you have, your email marketing tools, your social media tools, your sales databases and CRM tools etc, it sucks all the data, combines all of it and then provides incredibly valuable trends, data and recommendations about your customers in one dashboard.

It properly utilises Machine learning (not just paying it lip service), Random Forest? check, Neural networks? check etc.

Its outputs are things such as determining the best time to email each of your customers, when to text, what social media channels you should communicate on for the best effect, how does the weather affect your sales, are you risking losing engagement, who's at risk of dropping off, who’s getting bored of your message and needs it switched up, who’s dwelling on your site and what are they looking at, what content is working, what’s not working, which Influencers are the ones to focus on – sound good? It is.

There are some products that profess to do this but this is by the far the most intuitive and easy to use tool I’ve seen, and best of all, it’s Future Proofed, they have built it in a way that no matter what marketing tools appear they should be able to plug into them and suck the data out, get their Machine Learning to analyse it and “blend” it with your other datasets, making global recommendations about customers management and acquisition / retention and marketing.

That gets me excited as one of my biggest issues is the plethora of Tools already out there, and, despite the oncoming rationalisation in the marketing Tools market place, there will inevitably be new tools I will want to recommend to my clients. As such, having this kind of an open “wrap” system that is built for maximum integration, will enable me to continue to recommend new tools, comforted by the fact that Distil.ai will be able to integrate with them - its future proofed.

There will be a soft launch soon and some more Beta testing which I hoping to involve some clients in.

FYI The image above is a “Chronograph” from the presentation last night. The, X axis are clients and the Y are heat maps of their activity – it clusters the periods when customers are most active online so that you can target them with comms messages at those times they are receptive / opening email / social messages – it’s one of Distil.ai reports, in this case it has taken the data from “Mail Chimp”. Tasty.

Thanks to Gerry and Elina from BiG for the session and to Kate from Rebel Kitchen for the chocolate Mylk!

Dudley Nevill-Spencer