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Global Marketing

How AI shapes B2B Marketing

AI is the hottest topic in 2018.

AI is also more applicable to their business challenges, with user-friendly, pragmatic products seeing successful adoption. And, as AI and machine learning marketing capabilities are giving B2B marketers more lift and scale across their programs, this exciting tech is poised to become standard best practice as fast as it becomes available.

  1. Content: Delivery, Not Creation

Great content is expensive and time-consuming to create. Is it any wonder that so much has been made of AI programs can write content, web pages and emails that are grammatically correct and that target appropriate keywords?  The truth is, the web (and your buyers’ inboxes and social streams) are full of mediocre content. More mediocre content will not stand out in the din of content marketing, and no AI program can generate the kind of new, creative, innovative ideas that will get your brand noticed. Yet.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for AI in content marketing.

Where B2B marketers can really flex some AI muscle is in content delivery. Standing out in today’s digital marketplace means maintaining markets of one with thousands—or even millions—of prospective buyers. That means delivering the right content to the right contacts at the right time, but that kind of personal interaction is impossible to scale.

Content marketing AI can scan your entire website and/or content library, categorize and organize the content you create, and deliver the right offers, pages, emails, social media posts, and more, to each buyer at every interaction. That keeps you doing what you do best—creating amazing content and campaigns—and lets AI do what it does best—giving you the lift of super-precise targeting across an enormous number of interaction points.

  1. Social Media: Expand Your Audience

It is important to not just look for artificial intelligence you might add to your arsenal, but to examine what AI you might already be using and simply need to leverage better. If you want to experiment with AI and see the impact it can have on your marketing, look no further than Facebook Ads.

Facebook’s Lookalike Audience is a brilliant product that uses your first-party data to help you “find more people who look like your current customers.” With Lookalike, you can create custom audiences and massively expand the impact of your marketing—all based on behavioral data. This data can be:

Pulled from a website by installing a pixel.

Pulled from Facebook by assessing people who like your page.

Uploaded directly as a list of current customers for Facebook to examine.

Similar technology is available for B2B marketers that scans digital signals from all over the web. Predictive lead scoring and predictive account scoring also use AI to expand your ability to reach buyers who look like your customers—in other words, opportunities that align to your ideal customer profile.

 

Just like all major technological innovations, artificial intelligence has been met with an initial level of distrust and even fear. However, most marketers recognize that AI is really only solving problems that they were already having: like maintaining personalized interactions at scale and gaining better insights into their buyer journeys.