AI in B2B Marketing: Strategies and Applications
Artificial intelligence is everywhere online—from Amazon and Etsy to Netflix and Facebook. Your B2B customers are already aware of this technology and its ability to create hyper-personalized experiences. They encounter it every time they use an app and expect the same level of personalization from your B2B website.
69% of customers now expect seamless experiences across multiple channels. Keep in mind, your B2B buyers are also consumers for the 16 hours they’re not at work each day. AI is no longer optional—your competitors are already leveraging it. A staggering 84% of marketers now use AI in their strategies, up from just 29% in 2018.
Here’s how AI can enhance B2B marketing and how you can start efficiently today.
AI Integration Strategies and Application in B2B Marketing
Solving Major Issues
Artificial intelligence can solve your key pain points and challenges. It engages customers in real-time by providing a hyper-personalized experience using visitor behavior data. Like Netflix and Amazon, AI recommends content and improves over time.
AI also ensures your personalization strategy complies with privacy regulations by using anonymous browsing data. Plus, it helps create a unified strategy across multiple channels, enhancing targeting on platforms like LinkedIn and PPC.
Increasing the Effectiveness of Marketing Efforts
High-performing marketers share a secret—they leverage artificial intelligence. They’re 1.3x more likely to use AI than their peers. Even though 84% of marketers already use AI, nearly half are seeking new ways to integrate it into their strategies. AI doesn’t replace human marketers—it makes their jobs much easier and more efficient.
Please note that the accuracy of the data collection will depend on various parameters. If you use the Italian region on your iPhone and try to find out what makes customers buy, it will not be the same as a similar study in the US. At least, it will not necessarily be similar. If you want to compare data from different regions, first discover the IP address of the iPhone and its region. If necessary, change the IP address to another country in any convenient way.
Improve Data Quality
Data quality is a major issue for B2B marketers, leading 80% of companies to abandon data-driven personalization by 2025. Poor data quality affects marketing performance. AI ensures that all data is accurate and belongs to real people, maintaining cleanliness in real-time and reducing retroactive cleaning needs.
Predictive Lead
With AI, B2B marketers can now easily rank leads by their likelihood of becoming customers. Predictive lead scoring technology automatically categorizes leads based on their personas, helping you prioritize and focus your marketing efforts on the right prospects.
This advanced technology offers full control and visibility over which fields impact lead scoring the most, providing quicker and more accurate results than traditional methods. The same AI that powers lead scoring also enhances behavior scoring, indicating when leads are ready to buy.
Predictive behavior scoring helps map leads to the right accounts and identify new prospects within those accounts. Deduplication rules can automatically connect leads to accounts, and AI can even generate lookalike accounts based on your best customers to target new audiences at scale.
Personalized Experiences
When visitors come to your website, over 98% aren’t ready to buy right then—and it might be a while before they are.
Gartner’s research highlights that the buyer’s journey is far from linear; it’s more like a tangled web.
While you can’t predict every step a lead will take, AI can help personalize their experience and nurture their interest.
AI-powered tools, such as self-nurturing landing pages, guide leads through the sales funnel by suggesting relevant content like case studies or eBooks at each stage.
This means you can focus more on social selling and less on lead scoring. AI handles the crucial nurturing process while visitors are on your site—before they even reach out to your sales team or provide their email.
Content Generation
With the rise of generative AI (GenAI), AI has become a key player in content creation. Marketers are now using GenAI tools to help create:
- Blog posts
- Social media content
- Product descriptions
- Email campaigns
- Marketing event materials
However, it’s crucial to note that AI tools are there to assist, not to replace human content creators. The importance of maintaining a human touch in content can’t be overstated. AI can save you time and help scale your efforts, but readers—and search engines—still value unique and authentic content.
For content marketers, AI can be a powerful tool to enhance creativity. But it doesn’t replace the irreplaceable human mind.
Merging Online & Offline Data
Your customers interact with your brand both online and offline. One of the most exciting aspects of AI is its ability to bridge this gap, providing a 360-degree view of each customer.
Online, you can leverage AI-powered nurture campaigns to send personalized emails based on what individuals have accessed or downloaded on your website. For offline data, AI can measure intent data, helping marketers to understand the underlying meaning of customer actions. Rather than simply tracking clicks and downloads, intent data reveals whether a customer is genuinely ready to buy.
Lead Scoring
What are the chances that a prospective lead will convert? It’s hard to say for sure, which means you might be spending time on leads that won’t pan out. AI can help with lead scoring and qualifying promising leads. How? AI algorithms can automatically score and prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert. This allows sales teams to focus on high-potential leads, boosting efficiency and conversion rates.
Customer Segmentation
Accurate segmentation is crucial in B2B marketing. Sending messages to the wrong audiences wastes resources, while the right ones are just waiting to be reached. But manually segmenting audiences is time-consuming.
Traditionally, marketers have invested significant effort into this task. But what if there was a smarter, data-driven solution? Enter AI.
AI analyzes all your data and automatically segments customers based on your chosen criteria. Beyond segmenting existing audiences, AI can also score and prioritize leads for account-based marketing using demographic data. This helps you build precise customer personas and tailor your marketing content effectively.
The Challenges of Using AI in B2B Marketing
Artificial intelligence is quickly changing B2B marketing. However, using AI in B2B marketing comes with its own set of challenges.
- Data Quality and Integration: AI needs large amounts of high-quality data to work well. In B2B marketing, getting and keeping accurate data can be tough due to fragmented databases and data privacy issues. Bringing together data from different sources to create a complete view of customers and prospects can also be complicated.
- Limited Domain Expertise: To build effective AI models for B2B marketing, you need a deep understanding of the industry, your target audience, and marketing goals. Combining this domain expertise with AI skills is crucial for developing relevant and impactful AI-driven marketing strategies.
- Overcoming Resistance to Change: Employees might be reluctant to adopt AI-driven processes due to fears of job loss or unfamiliarity with the technology. Effective change management and education are key to encouraging acceptance and use of AI.
- Ethical Considerations: B2B marketers must be aware of ethical issues related to AI, such as data privacy, bias in algorithms, and unintended consequences of automated decisions.
- Performance Monitoring and Validation: AI models need regular monitoring to ensure they continue to provide accurate and relevant results. Continuous validation is necessary to check if AI-driven strategies are still aligned with overall marketing goals.
The Final Thoughts
In conclusion, AI is revolutionizing B2B marketing. By automating tasks, analyzing data, and personalizing experiences, AI helps marketers reach their target audiences more efficiently and effectively. As AI evolves, its impact on B2B marketing will only grow. Marketers who adopt and effectively utilize AI will be well-positioned for future success.
