We talk a lot about marketing challenges and, oftentimes, those challenges relate to marketers of certain maturities, industries, strategies, etc. But what is one universal challenge for all marketers? With our Predictive Audiences capability coming soon, Marketo Engage is transforming this fundamental piece of marketing in the most powerful way – through artificial intelligence. Predictive Audiences will be included in our Prime and Ultimate packages and available as an add-on for our Select package. Every marketer faces a similar dilemma with each program: reaching the most engaged and relevant audience and maximizing conversion without fatiguing the recipients and driving opt-outs.

Factual, the location data company, today announced a significant update to its Audience product, adding Predictive and Loyalty audiences built using machine-learned predictive insights to its roster of targeting solutions for marketers. Beginning today, marketers will have access to new Predictive Audiences and Loyalty Audiences, both built on sophisticated visitation pattern analysis, which will further enable marketers to construct highly scalable and accurate audience segments based on real-world consumer behavior and designed for ROI. The company has also added more than 100 ready-to-use audience segments in every vertical, including auto, retail and QSR. Factual builds its Predictive Audiences by developing an understanding of visitors to a place category and mapping their visitation patterns beforehand. Using Factual's Observation Graph, consumers most likely to visit a category based on these patterns can be segmented into audiences, giving marketers the ability to connect with consumers before they set foot in a brand's retail location.

Companies spend a good chunk of change on advertising. But a hair over two-thirds of them -- 71 percent -- allocate the bulk of their budgets to generic marketing messages. Worse still, only 50 cents of every ad dollar spent makes it to the desired target audience. To inject campaigns with a bit of personality, IBM recruited the help of artificial intelligence (AI). The Armonk, New York-based company today unveiled three new marketing solutions under its Watson umbrella: IBM Watson Ads Omni, IBM Media Optimizer, and Predictive Audiences.

Email remains one of the most highly valued channels that brands use to engage an audience and drive ROI, but in today's complex retail environment, email often falls short of its goals. Audiences expect fully personalized customer experiences, including when, what, where, and how they receive content from brands. Yesterday's email marketing campaigns only go so far in meeting today's heady customer expectations. As a result, brands have been turning to artificial intelligence to gain insights into their audience, and get reliable content recommendations and behavioral predictions based on powerful data. See how three brands have been using artificial intelligence to craft personalized email journeys for their subscribers and achieve their email marketing goals.