AI in B2B Marketing: 10 Ways to Implement It Today

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't a new technology, but its proper marketing utilization has occurred for a decade or so. The fact is that AI is already making headway in the marketing arena.

A Techreviewer survey reveals that 90.9% of companies are currently integrating AI technologies into their software development processes, while only 9.1% have yet to adopt AI. 

Moreover, 50% of companies that have yet to adopt AI plan to do so within the next three to six months, while 25% will integrate AI in the next twelve months or more. This means AI adoption by software development companies is rapidly happening.

Marketers are not far behind. According to a study by The Conference Board, 87% of marketers have used AI or at least experimented with AI tools. 68% of marketers are also using AI in their daily work. Moreover, 82% of marketers expect that further adoption of AI will result in improved productivity, enhanced learning, and better financial results.

The study also revealed some interesting details about how marketers are using AI in their tasks:

• Summarizing content (44%)
• Doing the legwork/inspiring thinking (41%)
• Personalizing customer/user content (33%)
• Conducting research (30%)
• Producing content faster (30%)
• Improving customer service (17%)

What a fantastic time to be a marketer! As you make AI an ally, you reward yourself with the ability to create more engaging content and more meaningful customer experiences than ever before.

When it comes to B2B marketers, approximately 52% reported using artificial intelligence for content-related efforts. This was followed by coding (39%) and presentations (35%). The good news is that the adoption of AI in B2B marketing is expected to increase only in the coming years.

In this post, we'll consider the powerful alliance between AI and B2B marketing and how they can work together to help businesses achieve their marketing goals.

Let's begin by refreshing our understanding of AI.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

As the name suggests, AI refers to the concept of enabling machines to think like humans. Machines are trained to plan, learn, and understand things. While AI still has a long way to go before it can start thinking and acting like humans, one cannot deny that it has already changed how we live our lives. Human tasks have become easier thanks to Machine Learning, an AI-based technology, leading to higher productivity. But how does this work for B2B marketing?

What is AI in B2B Marketing?

In B2B marketing, AI is primarily used to automate marketing tasks. These may include data processing, deriving insights via data analytics, customer segmentation, personalization, creating buyer personas, content generation, and more. AI algorithms can give marketers powerful insights to make informed, data-driven decisions.

From integrating data available in CRM tools to creating error-free quotes with CPQ in Salesforce, AI can help B2B marketers do it all. Account-based marketers can go beyond this and use AI to identify, manage, nurture, and convert leads.

Using AI in B2B Marketing

Marketers can do a lot more with AI-based tools than they know. Repetitive and time-consuming tasks like social media scheduling, email optimization, data cleanups, lead qualification, and responding on social media platforms can be performed in a few minutes.

For instance, marketers can choose among the best AI email assistants to create and schedule emails, draft quick replies, eliminate unnecessary junk, and manage their inboxes better. This frees up their time for more important tasks.

This works especially well for marketers who want to move beyond traditional marketing activities and focus on audience targeting, lead generation, and personalization.

Another way AI simplifies tasks for B2B marketers is by enabling them to identify their buyers, what they are looking for, and how they reached the business. This information can be vital in understanding the B2B buying process, especially because multiple stakeholders and decision-makers may be involved.

Now that we understand how AI aids B2B marketing, it's time to learn about its implementation and the benefits that can come with this move. But it isn't as easy as it sounds.

Challenges in Using AI in B2B Marketing

AI is revolutionizing every sphere, including B2B marketing. But it does come with its own set of challenges. Here are four key challenges of using AI in B2B marketing.

Bad Data

By bad data, we mean either poor-quality or insufficient data. Both can hamper an AI tool's performance, affecting its predictions' accuracy. You don't want that, as it'll ultimately impact your decision-making, which inaccurate results might influence. Herein lies the importance of proper data organization before implementation. Marketers must constantly update and curate data sets to ensure their AI tool analyzes the latest data to generate insights based on current trends.

Inadequate Data Privacy

Businesses that gather and use customer data are obligated to safeguard this information. After all, data privacy laws matter. Failure to comply with these laws can result in legal and compliance-related issues for businesses. Therefore, it is important to conduct regular audits, train B2B marketing teams in data privacy policies, and set clear protocols for handling and storing data. This will help prevent legal hassles and earn your customers' trust. 

Time-Consuming Onboarding and Training

AI-driven marketing tools are commonly perceived as complex, and using them can require guidance. This means your B2B marketing teams must undergo continuous learning and adaptation as these AI tools evolve. This is key to staying informed about the latest advancements. Fortunately, this need not be a major hindrance as AI tool developers usually provide support and onboarding assistance if required. 

Lack of Accountability

With AI capable of handling multiple marketing tasks, it can be easy to become overly dependent on it. Moreover, AI tools don't mean human intervention isn't necessary anymore, especially regarding final decision-making. Marketers, therefore, need to be aware of their responsibilities and expectations to maintain accountability for their efforts and outcomes, irrespective of the AI assistance used.

How to Implement AI in B2B Marketing

Mentioned ahead are a few ways to use AI in B2B marketing in ways that work.

1. Start by Preparing Your Data the Right Way

Good B2B marketing depends on good data. Why? AI models must be trained to produce high-quality data, and having the right data is imperative. Feeding your AI poor-quality data will result in incorrect, unreliable outcomes.  

This is a huge concern for B2B marketing teams. Apart from unclear data, having disconnected data systems can spell doom. Separate data streams are stored in different departments, software, or business databases. This makes it difficult for marketing teams to view a holistic picture of customers, calculate the customer lifetime value, or score/grade leads. What you'll be left with is a bad customer strategy.

That's why customer data from various sources must be properly unified and prepared before AI tools use them. Start by combining your data on a singular platform to give your AI a comprehensive picture of your customers. Most modern AI tools can use structured data, taking the best from unstructured data, cleaning it up to combine them, interpreting these datasets, and delivering the final version of this information. 

2. Automate the Creation of Reports and Proposals

Writing business reports can be complex, as it involves using jargon and requires multiple rounds of proofreading and editing. These tasks can make the entire process time-consuming and even daunting. But AI tools can change this.

There's a good reason why many businesses are going for automation: lower costs and higher efficiency while streamlining processes. Similarly, B2B marketers are increasingly harnessing the power of generative AI to automate the creation of complex reports and business proposals. This also produces excellent results: reduced human intervention and error while freeing teams to focus on strategy and customer experiences.

AI can not only help you write from scratch, but it can also handle editing and proofreading. With the right prompts, you can also get it to provide and include fresh ideas/clauses in your proposals that you never thought of before.

Overall, B2B marketers valuing productivity and accuracy increasingly turn to AI to generate reports and proposals. Other tasks they entrust AI with include creating rough drafts for cover letters, rewriting proposals and/or redesigning proposal templates to suit their or a client's style, including fresh ideas, and generating headings for various sections in their documents.

3. Improve Customer Segmentation

AI is revolutionizing how marketing and sales teams target and engage with customers. Thanks to AI-driven insights and predictive analytics, B2B marketing teams can formulate near-accurate and granular customer segments based on different criteria.

It begins with analyzing data from multiple sources, which can be behavioral, transactional, and/or contextual. AI uses this data to unearth customer patterns and preferences in a way that traditional processes wouldn't. The result? Marketing teams can create more specific customer groups based on common pain points, buying readiness, goals, and potential account value.

AI customer segmentation involves dividing a larger target audience into smaller groups with common interests. This makes them easy to manage, study, and connect with. The data generated after segmenting customers helps formulate personalized marketing strategies that cater to their specific needs, preferences, and motivations. This, in turn, improves conversions, customer experience, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.

4. Enhance Your Research

Marketers are no strangers to research. Whether you want to learn more about your customer's buying habits, your competitor's latest offerings, or keywords for your next blog post, research is an unavoidable part of a marketer's job. AI can help in this regard.

Of course, marketers can use search engines to get their answers. However, this can be a time-consuming and laborious affair. You'll have to manually type your search phrase in the tool, review each result, click through every page, and maybe find what you're looking for.

An AI-powered tool like ChatGPT, on the other hand, can simplify and accelerate this entire process. Marketers can ask specific questions and leave them to ChatGPT to work through multiple search results, filter information, and present it to you.

But remember, using AI for research depends greatly on the prompts you enter. Try multiple variations and create a viable prompt before using it to find a solution. The more specific you are, the better results you'll get.

5. Harness Conversational AI

Previously, businesses relied on human-driven call centers to manage customer interactions across channels. While this did help them build customer relationships, it was costly, time-consuming, and limited in scale. Human agents could attend to one call at a time, leading to long wait times, dissatisfied customers, and missed opportunities.

However, with the advent of AI, businesses are switching to conversational AI to improve customer interactions, much to the respite of B2B marketers. Using digital agents means the role is more consultative as the technology performs repetitive tasks. Conversational AI tools, like chatbots and virtual assistants, can hold conversations across channels simultaneously and independently.

This shift is helping curb costs related to traditional forms of communication that require human intervention. Marketers can better understand their customers through the data gathered by these tools. They can then make more confident personalized product recommendations, increasing conversions and revenue. 

6. Use It for Content Generation 

In a time when data is considered as valuable as currency, content has emerged as king. Compelling content is among the most powerful instruments that B2B marketers can use to attract potential customers, especially in digital marketing.

What's AI's role here? While AI isn't meant to completely wash out human content creation, it can support their effort to create more content in less time. Common issues like writer's block, the lack of time, and complex post topics can be side-stepped, and content can be written spontaneously.

Whether creating content for blogs, social media platforms, product pages, eBooks, or white papers, B2B marketers are tapping into generative AI to produce consistent, engaging, and lead-friendly pieces. As a result, they can significantly enhance their content output and SEO performance in a timely and organized manner.

Marketers must ensure the content isn't entirely robotic. They should not forget about the importance of human touch. This is because clients are humans (obviously!). They can appreciate content more when they experience and relate to it from a human perspective.

7. Personalize Customer Journeys

Besides saving B2B marketers precious time and effort, AI tools can help them offer their prospects tailored experiences throughout the customer journey. It can go beyond experiences and help personalize customer journeys and life cycles.

For this, it considers their communication history and previous complaints and transactions. AI then uses its superior capabilities to identify patterns and learn from these interactions. It goes on to figure out who wants what and why. This helps it create journeys based on the target audience, their location, interests, activities, preferences, and so on.

AI and machine learning are extremely useful in supporting every customer interaction, from awareness to the post-purchase stages. Additionally, sentiment analysis data can help by informing and humanizing the entire process. Potential customers can be converted with customized ads, dynamic content, and virtual assistants that are programmed specifically for them.

8. Lead Identification and Targeting

Marketers are constantly looking for ways to enhance the value they derive from analytics, and AI is perfect for this job. Traditional data analysis methods were error-prone as the data was too big in volume, making it difficult to handle. Ultimately, businesses would be forced to hire numerous data analysts to complete this task.

Generative AI has changed this. Marketers now leverage it to gain insights into customer attitudes, preferences, and future trends by analyzing large data sets quickly. Combining it with data related to social engagement, web analytics, event analytics, and campaign performance can seamlessly generate higher-quality data. Using this, marketers can discover who their customers are and what motivates them.

Similarly, AI can forecast which prospects are more likely to convert, helping B2B sales and marketing teams channel their effort in that direction. As a result, marketers have a more informed, data-driven marketing strategy to better invest their resources and achieve the desired results. Further, AI can make precise predictions about the products that will be in demand in the future, providing businesses with a competitive edge.

In addition, AI-powered data analytics can be a useful tool in helping organizations stay ahead of their competition. It helps businesses monitor other organizations' pricing structures (for every product or service), the various marketing channels they use, and whether their audience prefers these channels. 

9. Optimize Lead Generation

Lead generation is one of the most important activities that ultimately and directly contributes to any business's growth. No wonder businesses and marketers are developing novel ways to optimize their lead-generation strategies!

Gone are the days when making hundreds of cold calls and sending random emails was the norm. While these tactics were effective earlier, they were slow and did not keep up with the changing technology and times. With AI-powered lead generation taking over, businesses no longer resort to these tactics. Marketers feel empowered to capture all good opportunities in the market by reaching the right audience. As a result, the number and quality of leads have vastly improved.

AI tools also help nurture qualitative leads with personalized email campaigns at the opportune time by analyzing customer data and interaction history. These tools can make sense of the various customer segments and customize email content, schedules, and frequency to boost engagement and conversions. 

That's not all. AI tools also enable B2B marketers to foster continuous interaction with leads throughout the buying journey. These tools analyze engagement patterns and preferences to create tailored content/communication to improve their lead nurturing initiatives.

10. Maximizing Marketing Communications

Event marketing is an integral part of the B2B landscape. For the uninitiated, it is an opportunity for businesses to network, collaborate, inspire, and showcase their offerings in the industry. But, the implementation of AI in B2B event marketing is currently low.

According to the findings, 87% of marketers say that they're in learning mode, but a majority believe that AI will fundamentally transform how they plan and execute events within the next 24 months.

The same research further states that 63% of marketers admit that they fail to maximize the value of event content, with large enterprises facing an even higher figure of 72%.

According to Forbes, AI can help. The following points have been made in support of AI being leveraged in all three phases of B2B event marketing:

• "During the pre-event phase, AI can enhance productivity and efficiency by refining audience targeting and selection".
• "AI can deliver highly personalized and inclusive experiences at the event".
• "In the post-event phase, AI can help maximize ROI through data analysis and content repurposing".

Overall, AI can deliver highly personalized digital experiences to the attendees of B2B events, thereby improving team morale and productivity and bolstering the chances of event success.

Conclusion

Over time, it has become increasingly clear that AI is the future. Marketers can no longer afford to ignore it as it is becoming necessary for all their activities. Not only does AI streamline processes, it also simplifies them.

Whether it is automated email scheduling, blog post writing, customer segmentation, personalization, or anything else, AI can and is doing it all. Additionally, it helps cut costs.

Yet another benefit of using AI in B2B marketing is that it conducts quick data analysis and provides insights into the customer's mindset. This enables marketers to understand current and future trends.

Marketers must leverage AI tools to optimize their marketing strategy, personalize their campaigns, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. As AI evolves, it will open doors to more opportunities for B2B marketers to capitalize on.

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