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Lomit Patel is the Vice President of Growth at IMVU, and he’s also the bestselling author of the new book, Lean AI, which is part of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” series. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Lomit joins us to share his experiences using AI to create more efficiency on his growth and marketing teams, and why he thinks now was the right time to write this book to help other young businesses see the power of AI.
3 Takeaways:
– Using AI to gather data allows creative teams to interpret and build off of it
– By implementing computers and AI, you can increase efficiency and reduce costs
– Lean AI is a way for start-ups to reduce the risk for potential VCs and investors
Key Quotes:
When it comes to marketing, everybody has a budget. And the question is how do you leverage that budget to try and help your company hit, meet and exceed their goals?
We’re always trying to future-proof ourselves by looking ahead like 12 to 18 months. What are new and emerging channels that we want to continue to keep bringing into the mix that we can continue to test early.
We’re always building different algorithms around the data points we get on users to help us be better and smarter around how to continue to engage with those users throughout the user journey.
We have been able to reduce our cost to acquire customers by 3X and we’re able to increase our return on ad spend by 3X just by making these micro-transactions which aren’t humanly possible because a lot of these things are happening at 3:00 AM.
You want to be allocating 10 to 20% of your budget to experiments, which aren’t going to provide immediate returns but have the potential to at least meet or exceed what you’re doing right now with any given channel.
When it comes to influences or growing any business, you still have to have a great product.
The challenge of writing a book is to really figure out what you want to write about and get started. And then the second hardest part of writing a book is trying to finish it.
Wherever you have a growth team or you have a marketing team, a big focus is really going to be on driving results. And how can you leverage AI and machine learning to really do a lot of the things that Lean Startup talked about but doing it at a much higher velocity. This increases the velocity of learning so that you can automate a lot of the tasks and processes and be able to execute foundations of different experiments, which for any marketing team, regardless of size, isn’t humanly possible because it requires so much headcount and cost. Most startups can’t do that.
Before we are marketers, we are customers and we know how much we get bombarded with different ads. Getting a user’s attention is getting so much more challenging, which is why the better you can get at trying to try to capture a user’s attention by coming up with ads that are either personalized or can break through that clutter, the bigger your chances are of being successful.
This article first appeared on Marketing Trends
