How to Scale Your B2B AI Marketing Program

Are you a B2B marketer starting to dabble in AI? Maybe you’ve used an AI bot like ChatGPT to write some email copy for you, brainstorm strategy ideas, or analyze small amounts of data.

While AI can’t do everything (yet), there are countless uses for AI in marketing, especially on the B2B front.

So, how do you go about scaling AI from individual usage to a strategic B2B AI marketing program used by many team members?

Here are 7 steps to scale up AI marketing in your company:

1. Understand your channels for demand or lead generation
2. Document processes and workflows
3. Determine where AI tools would fit in the processes
4. Evaluate which tools to use
5. Test and modify
6. Track AI results against human results
7. Retest and remodify to scale

 

Step 1: Understand Your Channels for Demand or Lead Generation

First off, let’s understand the differences between demand generation and lead generation. Simply put, demand generation is top of the funnel outreach to increase brand awareness and generate interest in your business.

Many articles define lead generation as the bottom of the funnel that captures contact information from qualified leads.

I beg to differ—on the marketing front, lead generation is still at the top of the funnel, but it’s one level down from demand generation.

For many marketers, lead generation can mean developing marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or further vetting MQLs using intent-based tools.

For AI to assist your demand and lead generation efforts, you need to:

• Take inventory of your current marketing channels
• Understand workflows and processes

Depending on your roles as an campaign manager, SEO specialist, email marketer, event marketer, or content creator, you focus on understanding how the channels you are responsible for and how they are used for the different stages of purchase funnels—from the top of the funnel (TOFU) down to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

Step 2: Document Processes and Workflows

Diagram your process on Canva, Miro, Lucidchart, or any other flowchart tools that you may use.

You can only scale and understand where AI fits in once you have a holistic view. There is no shortcut on this.

If you work in an enterprise, the processes are complicated. Don’t feel deflated or give up. Just focus on one specific channel or campaign first. Scope it, that will make it easy for you to start.

Let’s use a webinar as an example:

As a typical webinar flow, many companies use LinkedIn paid ads, email marketing, and social media organic posts to drive traffic to the webinar registration page. When the webinar day comes, the webinar goes live. After the webinar, we send out a post-webinar thank-you email.

The attendees’ information is stored in marketing automation for nurturing. Not many leads would pass to sales unless someone reaches out to prospects to ask if they are interested in talking to sales.

The question is: How can we get some clues that our attendees may be interested in talking to sales so that they can move down to the next purchase funnel?

Here is a typical sales workflow on the sales side.

In many cases, sales do their own vetting on SQLs which may come from different sources. If it’s a high-quality SQL, they would route it directly to outside sales to schedule a call. If it’s not high-quality, it will be sent back to marketing automation for continuous nurturing.

In many companies, direct connections between sales and marketing may be muggy or situational-based.

In the webinar example, we can look at the webinar attendee information to uncover “clues” for potential high-quality Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). One clue can be the frequency of attending your webinars.

If prospects have attended three consecutive webinars, maybe it’s a “clue” that they are  interested in our products or talking to sales? We don’t know for sure, but you can send them personalized emails with a strong call-to-action to contact sales to find out.

If they reply, that’s a strong sign of purchase intent. If they don’t, you know there is no interest at this time. You welcome them again in the next webinar. It’s all good.

Step 3: Determine Where AI Can Fit In

At the organizational level, there are two ways to incorporate AI in your processes:

• Add AI tools into your existing workflows
• Incorporate your vendors’ AI features

Add AI Into Your Existing Workflows

With the workflow of connecting sales and marketing together that I mentioned above, you can determine where and how you would use AI to automate or merge steps in your workflow.

You could use AI to help write copy, automate routing leads to sales teams, clean up and enrich customer databases, and build internal prediction models—just to name a few ideas.

Incorporate Your Vendors’ AI Features

Continuing with the same sales and marketing webinar workflow example, rather than identifying potential high-quality prospects based on the number of webinars they attended, you can also personalize in-webinar experiences by using your vendors’ AI innovations.

For example, ON24 allows you to personalize your attendees’ in-webinar experience by building unique segments of webinar attendees via using attendees’ firmographic data (such as their industry or company size), historical first-party behavior (such as relative level of engagement), integrate third-party data from marketing automation or ABM (account-based marketing) platforms, or even use answers to custom questions upon registration.

With that segmentation logic in place, you can automatically deliver different interactions, like calls-to-actions, related resources, survey questions, and so on, to these unique attendee segments all within the same webinar.

After the webinar, ON24 also allows you to use generative AI to turn your webinar presentation into new written and video content that you can use for other marketing campaigns.

ON24’s AI features are a great example of how to incorporate your existing third-party tools to reap the benefits of AI.

There are many other ways to incorporate AI, but a well-documented workflow like this can offer insights and enable productive discussions with your team and management.

Step 4: Evaluate the Tools You Want to Use

Once you have identified the areas where you want to incorporate AI, the next step is determining which tools to use:

• Leveraging AI features in existing tools
• Purchasing new third-party tools
• Building your own AI tools in-house

We just covered leveraging AI features within your vendors’ tools. The other main option is to purchase new third-party AI tools pre-built for specific tasks.

With so many AI tools popping up every day, you can always find something that fits your needs. It may require 2-3 tools initially, but you’re guaranteed to be able to find something that works.

The workflow allows you to discuss the tool options with your team and vendors.

Building your own tools tends to be expensive and involves a long lead time. Unless it’s related to a predictive analytics model to analyze big datasets or optimizing your own training algorithms, I don’t recommend building in-house AI platforms.

Next Steps

Once you’ve identified your demand or lead gen channels, documented your workflows, determined where AI can fit in, and evaluated the tools you want to use, then you can start testing your AI marketing program on a bigger scale in your company.

Implementing AI isn’t something you can set and forget. You have to actively be testing, modifying, tracking, and re-scaling if you want AI marketing to make a positive difference.

If you want to know more about these next steps of scaling B2B AI marketing, check out my latest book, The Modern AI Marketer in the GPT Era. BTW, I also created a short book that documents the various prompts I’ve used. Want to learn 75+ AI Sales and Marketing Prompts? This companion book is for you!

You’ll also learn about the history of AI in the context of marketing, best practices for prompt engineering and data management, why the human touch still matters, and so much more.

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Need more AI Marketing Program support? Book a call with Pam Didner,