AI in B2B marketing highlights the transformative potential of interactive tools in enhancing user experience on your website. By incorporating self-selection tools like quizzes and calculators, businesses can tailor content to meet the specific needs of their visitors, making the user journey more engaging and efficient. These tools not only streamline the information-gathering process but also guide users to the right products or solutions based on their preferences. Whether it’s a pricing calculator or a personalized product finder, these features can significantly improve customer satisfaction and drive conversions. Ultimately, leveraging AI in this way empowers businesses to work smarter, better, faster, and stronger in their marketing efforts.
The first thing I do every weekday morning is tell my Amazon Alexa to turn off my alarm. In other words, the very first interaction of my day is with artificial intelligence (AI) — kind of surreal now that I write it.
This is just one example of how AI can impact our everyday lives, and the same can be said about AI in B2B marketing.
According to HubSpot’s State of AI, 62% of business leaders say their company has already invested in AI and automation tools for their employees to leverage. And who can blame them?
In almost every use case, AI is known to increase efficiency, speed up optimization, lower costs, and increase ROI. Want to see for yourself? Here are nine of the best ways to use AI in B2B marketing to level up your day-to-day.
The State of AI in B2B Marketing
Before we dive in, let’s get a quick lay of the AI land.
According to our research, marketers are using AI to get ideas and inspiration (22%), conduct research (48%), and learn how to do things (32%) — myself included.
On average, that means we’re getting 12.5 hours back per week or about 25-26 additional working days in a year. That’s huge.
And looking at the numbers, it works too.
75% of marketers surveyed say AI and automation help them spend less time on manual tasks, which means more time on the creative parts of their jobs they enjoy most. And another 68% say AI has actually helped grow their careers.
Despite these positives, however, there are still many hesitations.
Artificial intelligence (especially generative AI) is plagued with concerns about plagiarism, bias, and data security. Then, of course, there are perceived effects on job security.
Nearly half of the marketers we surveyed said they felt their jobs — and the entire job market — were at risk of being replaced, but 62% also agreed that people should use AI and automation in their roles, but they shouldn’t become overly reliant on it.
Truthfully, we don’t know what the future holds for AI, especially with the potential for government regulation looming. But from what I’ve seen of current tools, they cannot replace us — but only help us work smarter.
The best way to be prepared for whatever the outcome is to know as much as you can about the current state of AI in B2B marketing. If you’re reading this article, I see you’re doing the work. We’ve got this.
How to Use AI in B2B Marketing
1. Generate content and assets.
Let’s go ahead and get the obvious out of the way — content generation.
Thanks to a number of different tools, anyone can create a variety of content (like images in the Microsoft Designer example below) using just written prompts.
It’s no wonder 83% of marketers say that AI helps them create significantly more content than they could without. Those robots are fast.
One of the most common applications of generative AI in B2B marketing is aiding in the writing process. But the keyword here is aiding. As a content professional and writer for over a decade, I can’t stress this enough.
AI-generated content is derivative by the very way it’s made. Yes, it may be fast and easy, but it lacks the quality, original thought, and expertise needed to stand out from the competition. So, don’t simply take it as is and hit “post” or “publish.”
My good friend and founder of digital consultancy Harness & Hone, Nick Bennett, explains:
“If AI can create it, consumers don‘t need it from you, me, or anyone else. The job is no longer just to create content and smear it across the internet. The job is to create content that *only* you can create. If you don’t want to be replaced by [AI], create things that it can’t.”
Thankfully, most marketers recognize this.
86% of marketers report taking time to edit content produced by AI.
And when they do use it, they’re writing pieces with short shelf-life like social media posts (46%), emails (47%), and outlines (41%).
About one-third (34%) lean on generative AI to get ideas or inspiration.
2. Scale your conversational marketing.
In an age of push notifications and constant connection, buyers have come to expect quick answers from brands. Unfortunately, fielding questions and conversing in real-time isn’t always scalable — especially with a small team.
Chatbots on your website or social media can help. Conversational marketing and chatbots are some of the oldest uses of AI in B2B marketing, but that doesn’t mean they’re outdated. In fact, 74% of consumers prefer to talk to a chatbot when looking for quick answers.
For example, you can set up a chatbot to start a conversation with users when they visit particular pages on your website (e.g., those that signal high intent, like a pricing or demo page).
3. Repurpose your content.
Repurposing your content for different audiences or mediums is one of the smartest ways to get the most out of the work you’ve already done. But it can be extremely time-consuming.
Although repurposing content is likely not new to you, AI makes it much easier to do at scale than ever before.
How else can you use AI to repurpose content?
- Turn blog posts into videos or video scripts.
- Turn podcasts or videos into blog articles.
- Transform long-form content into short-form educational social media posts.
- Add visuals to a long-form piece to share on social.
- Build landing pages from email sequences or podcasts.
- Get a head start on localizing or editing content for new regions or audiences.
- Turn product content into marketing promotional materials.
- Take raw data and create data visualizations and reports.
4. Manage and analyze your marketing/customer data.
Another way B2B marketers can capitalize on AI is in their data management.
“I’ve been using AI to organize unstructured data,” shares Marketer-in-Residence at MarketerHire Jason Howie.
“For example, I’ll take free-form question fields such as ‘How did you hear about us?’ and ask ChatGPT to group the responses into categories to make reporting easier. It’s extremely helpful.”
“Another great use is normalizing company names from acronyms to full names or even finding website domains when we didn’t have them before. These tasks save a ton of time and make our data far more accurate and actionable.”
But AI’s power doesn’t stop at data management. It can also analyze and interpret data faster than humanly possible to:
- Provide and explore insights
- Segment your customers
- Identify customer trends and preferences
- Create datasets for training purposes
- Create dashboards and reports (and even automatically email you the report)
- Monitor business performance
Some can even use predictive analytics to:
- Predict market outcomes
- Forecast demand
- Make strategic suggestions
5. Make your marketing more interactive.
So far, we’ve just talked about how you can use AI to be more productive and effective, but why not make it a part of what you put out into the world as well?
If you have the knowledge and development resources, interactive content powered by AI can be an extremely valuable B2B marketing tool.
Take SEO analytics company Ahrefs. They built an AI-powered product description generator that anyone can use without sharing personal information.
Ok, maybe something like that’s a bit ambitious. But you can capture the same idea with a custom quiz or self-selection tool for your website built with TypeForm or Wyng.
A self-selection tool is basically any type of interactive feature (e.g., a button, form, etc.) that customizes the user’s experience on a website. For example, it may guide the user to the information that answers a question they have or the product that matches their needs.
Some of the most common are pricing or cost calculators, a builder/generator, or a “finder” that helps you identify the right product or solution for you.
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Original article published by blog.hubspot.com
