In B2C marketing, Artificial Intelligence is used regularly to provide a personalized experience for customers but how do you use it in the world of B2B marketing? and what is the role of Artificial Intelligence on B2B Marketing?
What is the Role of Artificial Intelligence on B2B Marketing?
First, let’s look at the reasons why AI can be beneficial in B2B marketing. In an industry where businesses need to pursue leads and quantify data, AI can support businesses in qualifying leads and it can also help build portfolios of predictive analytics. Where a marketer might abandon a lead after a few attempts, AI has the ability to adapt to user behaviour and, most importantly, has the time to keep up the pursuit. Then there is data, physically, there might not be enough time or even people in your business to collect and analyze masses of data, this is where AI comes in. This data can then be turned into actionable insights, improving efficiency in your marketing team.
But how exactly can you implement AI into your marketing strategy? There are multiple ways that any marketer can use AI in B2B, ranging from basic tasks to more complex solutions. If you are just getting started or looking for ideas, here are some of the ways you can use AI in your B2B marketing strategy. You could start out with finding the best customer support system for your business and go from there, check out this guide from Piesync to find out who they recommend.
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Qualifying Leads
Scoring leads is the biggest part of B2B business and for a business that sees hundreds or thousands of leads a month, having a software dedicated to following up leads and turning them into an actual business is invaluable because there is only so many humans can do in the time they have to work. AI can compare your existing client base with potential clients by matching up the qualities of your current client base.
Automate Your Email Conversations
AI can give you more time to work on your projects by giving back the time it takes to respond to leads by doing it for you while increasing your qualifying lead rate. Companies like Microsoft and Epson are already doing this, working with a company called Conversica who offer clients automated email solutions. Their software can conduct humanlike email conversations with inbound leads with an average of a 35% reply success rate. The software is also able to analyze customer’s responses and reply accordingly. While working with Conversica, Epson has seen a 240% increase in lead responses to the 60,000 leads they receive each year.
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Personalize Content with Data
Until recently, marketers could only classify potential clients via categories (organization/industry. location, etc.) AI can help businesses identify prospective clients with deeper classification through data gathering. This data allows marketing teams to craft content that directly targets the individual needs of the client. AI can also profile companies within individual industries to collect personal insights of prospective clients. This data allows businesses to fine-tune the companies they approach. For example, instead of marketing to all engineering companies in the area, AI can help you find engineering companies that are currently growing by analyzing the data from that company’s website.
Analyzing Customer Insights
You know when you call a company and they inform you that their calls are recorded for monitoring or quality assurance? These phone calls are valuable data insights to companies as these conversations with businesses often unveil what their customer base wants and needs. AI is now able to understand content such as audio, video, and images and strip the data from this content to provide businesses with these insights. Businesses can then take this information and reshape their message. Other AI systems are also able to measure the tone of the customer so businesses can find out how to tell when a customer is interested or not.
Using AI in the Future
Marketers hope to one day be able to offer content creation to businesses and while it is available in terms of email marketing, these programs are limited in creating compelling copy. However, in the future, programs may be developed enough to write content for blogs and websites that are engaging. For now, marketers are enjoying the efficiency of AI completing basic content tasks (e.g. generating a call to actions and subject lines), giving teams more time to tackle the more complex aspects of content creation.
The use of AI in B2B is increasing and it is said that more marketers will begin to turn to AI in their strategies in 2020, however, the uptake is slow. At the moment marketers are unsure of how to approach AI and not many are confident in its capabilities. If you are a marketer or work in B2B and want to learn how to implement AI into your marketing strategies, this is the place to start.
