Artificial intelligence has become a major buzzword in martech. Many martech vendors position their products as AI-based platforms. What does that mean? As a marketer, what do you need to know about AI to evaluate vendors’ platforms to have a productive conversation with them?
Let’s walk through what AI even is, then consider how AI can actually help your sales and marketing teams.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
To keep it simple, artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines. AI becomes “intelligent” through advanced technical processes known as machine learning and deep learning.
Source: Rapidminder Blog
When you think of AI today, you probably think of generative AI, or gen AI. Gen AI can be seen in chatbots like ChatGPT, image generators like DALL-E, etc. These types of AI generate content like text or images based on written prompts users give them, and what they generate is based on the information they have access to.
To take the definition of AI further and combine in with sales and marketing, I have developed my own definition:
AI Marketing is intelligence demonstrated by machines to improve efficiency, personalize outreach, and enable insightful decision-making.
Even though we’re far off from the realm of sci-fi with super-intelligent AI humanoids, the AI we do have today can still be incredibly powerful in its own way, especially for B2B marketing!
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How Can AI Help B2B Marketing and Sales?
At the individual level, marketers can easily identify and source AI tools to help do their jobs better. Yet at the group or organization level, marketers (me included) often struggle to identify where AI can help. The questions are:
- Which AI should I focus on?
- What should I optimize with it?
Because AI can do many things, here are a few examples to get you started:
- Data Analysis: Merge first-party data with secondary and third-party data to conduct additional analysis to gain insights about your customers, products, segmentations, or even marketing campaigns.
- Task Automation: Identify repetitive tasks and have AI take a go at them first.
- Personalized Engagements: It can be as simple as “make recommendations based on what you purchased before” to “customize pricing based on your needs.” The marketing and communication angles can be endless, from customized product offerings, in-depth customer segmentations, personalized content and ad displays, down to dynamic pricing and promotions.
- Predictions and Recommendations: Use customer datasets to predict outcomes of specific questions or hypotheses. For example: predicting the win rate of existing sales pipelines or anticipating the content that your prospect may consume based on their challenges. What can you do to “gauge” their next steps?
- Content Creation: Generative AI is a great way to create a first draft of your content to work with, from text for blogs and e-books, to audio and video scripts.
- Media Buy: Using AI is nothing new in the programmatic buying-and-selling advertising space. New AI usage can expand analysis of vast data sets for media pre-planning, search advertising, audience segmentation, real-time bidding, creative optimization, predictive analytics, and cross-channel integration—ultimately improving engagement and campaign performance.
- Research: AI disrupts marketing research in the fields of advanced data analysis, complicated text analysis, and automated stats analysis. In the data aggregation process, researchers can collect and analyze large swaths of data from various resources.
- Strategy and Planning: You can write prompts to ask AI to craft marketing plans and campaigns.
- Brainstorming and Ideation: Ask AI chatbots for any recommendations and suggestions on how to run a workshop or a planning session. You can even ask how to do your job better or give it questions from your management and senior executives.
- ICP and Persona Building: You can enter your existing customer information and ask AI to craft your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) as ideal accounts and buyer personas for your marketing customer segmentations.
- Customer Journey Mapping: If AI can help you with strategy, planning, brainstorming, and persona building, you can also build your customer journey map based on your existing marketing channels.
What is listed above is not mutually exclusive.
Examples of AI in Action
Here are a few short examples that showcase several categories of how AI can help you and your team:
- AI Usage Example 1: You can “brainstorm” with AI to craft a marketing “plan” that will map a specific “buyer persona” in a “segment” to launch “personalized email marketing” with tailored “product offerings.”
- AI Usage Example 2: You can also use AI to conduct “advanced data analytics” of your large customer datasets so that you can further refine your “ICPs” as part of “customer journey mapping.”
- AI Usage Example 3: To optimize your email marketing, AI can help “analyze” your subscriber database to segment your subscribers, “automate” when the campaign should go out and to whom, and “personalize” content for different subscribers. It can also “predict” the propensity to buy based on content consumption and past engagements, and “recommend” the next email outreach content.
You need to clearly define what you want AI to do. The secret is to make your plan as specific as possible with a clear scope. Then you can build your roadmap and follow the steps to scale and establish your processes with AI.
But remember, AI is a tool that, while powerful, does have its limitations. It’s up to you to determine and illustrate to management where AI can help you improve results and where it can’t.
Your Next Step: Developing an AI Marketing Strategy
Before you implement AI, you need to develop a focused AI marketing strategy.
First, you need to take steps like documenting your workflows, understanding your data, evaluating potential costs and cost savings, and preparing to quantify the revenue impact of implementing AI.
Then, you’ll need to find the right tools or platforms that can assist your teams.
If you want to learn how to approach each of these steps, I highly recommend checking out my latest book, The Modern AI Marketer in the GPT Era. It’s the ultimate guide for building a robust B2B AI marketing strategy!
You can also take your AI marketing stills a step further with the companion book, The Modern AI Marketer: Guide to Gen AI Prompts.
Have you already started testing the waters of AI for sales and marketing? Are you still weighing the pros and cons?
Reach out—I’d love to know where you are on your AI journey!
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
