How B2B Marketers Can Accelerate AI to Deliver a Seamless Digital Experience

B2B marketers have always had a difficult job, and this past year it has only become harder. It led to many of the purchasing managers and procurement experts that form the core B2B customer base to work from home. At first glance, this might not sound like a huge problem for B2B marketers. After all, a large part of marketing is now done online, and many purchases come the same way.

However, securing B2B sales has historically relied on walking a potential customer through the buying experience. That journey might be difficult to replicate online. Nevertheless, some tools can help B2B marketers guide customers towards a sale. Some of the most important of these involve AI and take the business value of analytics to the next level. This article will look at how B2B businesses can leverage AI to deliver a seamless customer experience.

1. Making predictions

Achieving success in the B2B space has always been about making the most out of the resources available to you, and that’s truer now than ever before. An emerging set of AI-enhanced tools promise to make resource allocation more efficient by predicting shifts in your target markets well in advance of when they happen.

While it might seem as though these tools are relatively new, they actually rely on a component of effective B2B marketing that has been around for decades—the ability to drive change in the market, rather than merely react to it.

In fact, AI tools lead many marketers back to a recognition of how content marketing actually works at a fundamental level. Rather than attempting to “capture traffic” for existing keywords in your industry, it has now become possible to use AI-driven insights to get ahead of the market and use your content to drive shifts in your industry.

It now appears that leading B2B marketers have recognized the value of predictive models. The CMO Survey in late 2019 reported a 27% increase in the implementation of AI and machine learning in the last six months of that year within the B2B marketing space, with many companies reporting that predictive models are a key driver of this.

2. Making contact

AI tools can help with B2B marketing from the very beginning of your customer acquisition process. When it comes to the earliest stages of contact with a customer, most B2B companies face a similar problem—how to separate those in charge of a significant budget and are actually going to purchase from those who are merely browsing. Similarly, B2B customers are likely to require significant amounts of information on a particular product—especially if it is a complicated one—before they can begin to assess its value to them.

AI-powered chatbots can solve both of these issues simultaneously. They can engage with customers as soon as they access your site and respond to their queries in an adaptive, intelligent way. This means that potential customers can quickly access the information they need to make a purchasing decision, but also that you can begin to collect key pieces of information on your customers. As we will come to shortly, this information will then allow you to begin to segment your customers into key demographics, a key element of any business analytics system.

If you haven’t looked at the chatbots available for a few years, you might also be pleasantly surprised by their increasing sophistication. Even five years ago, most chatbots found it difficult to discuss complex B2B products in a convincing, genuinely useful way. Now, they can be quickly trained to provide information on complex product and service offerings—one of the key reasons why it’s predicted that the AI industry will generate $15.7 trillion globally by 2030.

3. Targeting audiences

If there’s one thing that AI tools excel at, it's taking vast amounts of raw data and generating genuine insights. Most B2B marketers have, by now, put in place advanced analytics tools that can harvest data from the smallest interactions with customers—either through their interaction with chatbots, as above, or merely by tracking the way that your customers interact with your website. Due to this, digital marketers tend to not lack for data on which to base marketing decisions—the problem is extracting meaning from it.

This is also an area in which AI tools can help. It’s now possible to take raw data generated by web and social media analytics engines and feed these through AI-driven segmentation models. These models will automatically provide you with a set of key customers for your business and suggest how and when you should target them to maximize sales.

That said, it’s important to recognize that tools like this cannot (yet) replace the trained eye of an experienced marketer. Tools, such as chatbots and customer segmentation services, should be looked at to save you time, so you can focus on what you are best at. For instance, analysts recommend that you get your team to spend 10 to 15 minutes a day using tools, such as LinkedIn, to engage with others in your industry—a task that is far better done by an actual human being rather than an AI.

4. Towards a true IoT

All of the AI-enhanced B2B marketing tools on the market today rely on one thing: data. Vast amounts of it. This simple fact can also be used to predict the future of the industry—if we can collect more data on B2B customers, these tools will be more effective.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has long been a driver of innovation within the AI space because IoT devices allow the collection of the kind of vast datasets that AIs need to function effectively. As a result, many B2C marketers have fought to gain access to consumer IoT devices (such as smartwatches and activity trackers) to inform their marketing campaigns.

To date, a similar shift has not occurred in the B2B space, but that might be about to change. If B2B marketers can gain access to the IoT networks already deployed by their customers, these data could usher in a new era of B2B marketing, in which this adapts to the needs of business customers in real-time.

That might sound like science fiction, but it’s important to realize that not everything will change. In fact, the future is likely to contain some very sophisticated elements—think AI-driven tools drawing data from the IoT—alongside more traditional forms of advertising.

Conclusion

For many B2B marketers, the move to AI tools will now be a natural choice. Leading operators in the industry have spent years building up their ability to collect data and are now sitting on vast stores of valuable raw information. It’s time to let artificial intelligence show us how to use that to turn analytics into insights.

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