- Marketing
- June 15, 2023
How AI is influencing the evolving landscape of B2B marketing
AI is radically transforming how businesses operate and interact with customers across all sectors. As businesses move away from the one-size-fits-all approach to marketing and adopt AI tools that help them analyze and anticipate customer behavior, the B2B marketing landscape is witnessing a 360 shift in how it operates.
AI assists marketers with automated processes and high-precision customer intelligence giving a microscopic view of the target persona, customer behavior, underlying patterns, purchase triggers, and more such, that assist in creating personalized customer experiences. It helps organizations in recognizing trends and patterns, analyzing complicated data, and aids better decisions backed by data.
Here are 8 ways through which AI is transforming B2B marketing
1. Improve lead generation and scoring
Generating quality leads and a high volume of leads are the biggest challenges marketers face today. Collecting, managing, and analyzing volumes of data makes this a daunting process for most marketers. AI can help to address this challenge by automating the data collection and analysis and integrating this into the lead generation process, which remarkably increases both the quantity and quality of leads generated. AI can dig deep into the sales funnel, capturing highly accurate, dynamic, real-time data across channels and databases, that marketers may not have access to or may fail to analyze. This increased visibility and data accuracy helps marketers in identifying more leads, creating more differentiated audiences, and in implementing more comprehensive lead-scoring systems. With AI, marketers can spend less time manually collecting data and more time actually using data to execute strategic initiatives.
2. Gain better customer insights
Developing accurate buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is critical for businesses looking to implement personalized targeting from the moment customers enter the sales funnel. Combining social listening and analytics tools with AI can help organizations achieve these goals seamlessly. Marketers can gain better insights into customers’ weaknesses, buying behavior, and competitors. All of these insights can be used to enhance buyer personas and create custom environments. With an accurate buyer persona and ICP, businesses can target potential and existing customers with the right content at the right time.
3. Enhance customer experience
At the consumer level, intelligent technology is the core highlight of AI. Digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri have paved a niche for voice-based technology. Consumers now use voice search to research products before they shop. AI assistants are continuously upgrading and will become increasingly intuitive to speech patterns and surfing habits in order to tailor search results to suit niche customer preferences. Businesses are increasingly using this technology to optimize their websites for voice search. Not only does this make your website accessible to potential customers, but it also plays a critical role in developing a robust website design strategy that makes your website accessible to everyone.
4. Simplify SEO
AI-powered SEO tools don’t just save you time by identifying relevant keywords but help in identifying trending topics, predicting top keywords, and identifying competitive gaps for targeting. Brands can also optimize old content for SERPs with dynamic keyword and link updates. Essentially, AI ensures that both the old and new content remains fresh and relevant. When it comes to actual content creation, AI can’t quite handle the nuances of emotional and compelling copywriting. However, marketers can use many AI-powered marketing tools to improve their copies. The AI-based writing assistant Grammarly for instance combines grammar rules and patterns with natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning to help authors create professional, error-free content.
5. Optimize website performance
How often do you review site performance data to identify issues and opportunities for improvement? Website analysis is quite complex and is difficult to interpret strategically on a consistent basis. AI-powered tools, such as Google Analytics, use machine intelligence to simplify complex data into actionable insights that are easy to understand and apply.
The best thing about AI in this regard is that it can immediately alert marketers to sudden or unwanted data changes. When key metrics like your website’s bounce rate or the percentage of people who leave your website after a single page session suddenly spike, the AI tool will send real-time alerts along with all other relevant data that drives quick action.
6. Ensure personalized B2B marketing
AI is a powerful personalization tool. Customers want companies to understand their personal needs and preferences and are willing to disengage with brands outright if they don’t meet their expectations. AI-driven marketing simplifies the process by enabling businesses to gain insight into buyer behavior and create accurate buyer personas. This information can be used to curate targeted marketing materials such as landing pages, blog content, emails, and all forms of digital content. B2B marketers can initiate timely, personalized conversations with their customers, address their core pain points, and anticipate what their customers truly want. What’s even better is that these conversations can be augmented by AI through marketing automation.
7. Maximize customer engagement
So your content is all set, optimized with top-ranking keywords, and ready to be published. However, you see no engagement through your efforts. Posting content at the wrong time can rob you of all the efforts you’ve invested. This is where AI comes in, ensuring that content is posted at the right time to maximize customer engagement and influence the desired behavior. In general, afternoons or evenings are considered the best times to publish blogs and social media content. The best time to share marketing emails is in the first half of the day. AI monitors company-specific website data and customer behavior to determine the optimal publishing time, minute by minute. Time is not the only thing marketers need to consider when publishing content. The platform you publish to and the device you optimize for are also critical factors to consider. This is what makes AI so useful. Rather than relying on guesswork, analytics tools give you insights into precisely the platforms and devices your target customers are using.
8. Improving customer service and customer relationships
Maintaining good customer relationships through quality customer service is a top priority for any brand. But how do you deliver personalized omnichannel customer service to hundreds of accounts in your sales funnel? Customer service automation is the most common use of AI in enterprises today. AI applications such as chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems are present at both pre-and post-sales customer service touchpoints and can handle transactional inquiries, order tracking, account updates, and more. Letting AI handle basic tasks frees up agents to focus on customer requests and services that require more problem-solving and empathy. As a result, these customers receive better service, which goes a long way toward promoting a positive customer experience. There is another reason why 41% of B2B companies want self-service options. AI applications enable businesses to provide fast and convenient 24/7 customer service across multiple channels. AI adoption thereby has established itself as one of the fundamental best practices for start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures.
Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing marketing, it’s revolutionizing business as we know it. Marketing remains one of the most powerful uses of AI, and its impact can extend to businesses as well as customers. By providing businesses with tools and insights that add value at every touchpoint, B2B customers enjoy better brand relationships and experiences.
It is clear that AI will continue to advance and offer even more innovative capabilities as we move ahead. But with great power comes great responsibility. As AI becomes an integral part of business operations, brands have a greater onus to use AI-powered products responsibly and ethically. This includes protecting consumer privacy and eliminating potential bias in AI algorithms.
Without a doubt the B2B sector has and will further undergo major transformations due to AI, leading to increased efficiency, personalization, and exponential growth. As we look to the future, the impact of AI will continue to grow, becoming an essential tool in B2B lead management, demand generation, and other critical business activities. Embracing AI means preparing for the future of an economy where AI is central to growth and innovation. So the question is not whether you use AI, but how quickly you can harness its potential to drive your business forward way ahead of the competition.
