ChatGPT has the potential to be a difference-maker in marketing, but not the difference-maker—even as far as AI is concerned.

Don’t mistake ChatGPT and the shiny-object syndrome surrounding it as a top marketing priority in the second half of 2023. Instead, consider three initiatives that have led to big competitive gains across industries—in part because they’re not dominating the headlines and sparking mass adoption.

Here are the upper-funnel, first-party data and lifetime value strategies moving the performance needle:

Reconsider your upper-funnel approach

I never trusted impact that couldn’t be measured until I was on the Facebook Global Sales team years ago and saw the undeniable (if murky) impact that upper-funnel campaigns had for Fortune 500 companies.

Today, with far more sophisticated lift tests to gauge impact (not just impressions), the upper funnel is a smart marketer’s playground. Such tests include AI-powered media mix modeling to show predictive results of upper-funnel channels and platforms such as CTV combining the medium of TV with smarter programmatic targeting,

Also emerging are advanced native platform options such as Facebook’s Advantage+ which go upstream with bidding objectives to engage the right users earlier in the purchase process. All told, the upper funnel is more measurable and powerful than ever, with all the cost advantages it has always offered.

These days—especially as we anticipate the rising costs of Q4—marketers confining themselves to the bottom of the funnel are almost certainly spending too much per acquisition to scale effectively.

Audit your usage of first-party data

First-party data has always been important and gained value as privacy regulations and walled gardens curtailed the use of other data types. It is still underutilized in mature marketing campaigns.

Some basic but powerful use cases:

Use exclusions. Don’t spend to engage customers or leads where it makes no sense. Whatever your business model, there are exclusions that you can and should put into play (e.g. imagine FTD sending automated “Buy it again” emails to purchasers of sympathy arrangements).

Feed first-party data back into advertising channels. Your customers are presumably giving you emails, geos/addresses and maybe even birthday data. Feed that data into Meta and Google’s conversion APIs to help teach them what your ideal customers look like. Bonus points if those are segmented by lifetime value to enable more precise bidding (more on that in a second).

Leverage third-party systems to get the most out of first-party data. AI-powered companies such as BlackCrow.ai, for example, can pull in your first-party data, translate data into Klaviyo and open the re-engagement window from seven to 30 days in a privacy-safe way. Understand where Apple, Google, walled gardens and privacy regulations are killing formerly accessible third-party data integrations, and research an emerging crop of solutions to see which might fit your marketing goals.

Put AI to work on lifetime value

The concept of lifetime value has been around for a long time, and it’s picking up steam lately as new-customer acquisition costs become increasingly prohibitive. Most marketers are familiar with some strategies, ranging from goals for customer retention to upsells to subscription renewals. 

A more nuanced approach includes segmentation of a customer base into four lifetime value quadrants, whose axes are defined as number of transactions and transaction size. Along with developing strategies to address each quadrant and move customers up and to the right, segmentation allows you to define different audiences and identify profitable acquisition-cost thresholds for each. This can be especially powerful when fed into advertising platforms to find similar users, as described above. But even that’s not scratching the surface of lifetime value-focused marketing.

AI-driven platforms such as Pecan and Lifetimely are providing transformative growth results through Predictive LTV, which helps identify high-value new customers more efficiently and can help provide data on current customers—for example, which might be most likely to churn without further action.

Making big improvements in any of these three initiatives will net more marketing benefit than the most cutting-edge ChatGPT deployments. That’s not to say ChatGPT and similar AI tools should be ignored but keep their impact in perspective. Allocate time and budget where you’ll see a far bigger payoff.