Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands out as a transformative force in B2B marketing – however, far from rendering traditional marketing principles obsolete, AI’s rise is driving marketers back to the core principles of their craft. This blog explores how AI opens new frontiers in B2B Marketing, and necessitates a renewed focus on foundational marketing strategies.
Understanding Your Audience
It’s true that AI’s data analysis capabilities provide us with deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, but current Large Language Models (LLM’s) are not yet up to the task of understanding niche audiences or sophisticated human behaviors. The basic principle of knowing your ideal customer profile now becomes even more important, as marketers must interpret and act on AI insights that make sense for their business. This is vital when you consider the power of personalized experiences that AI has the potential to unleash.
“The thing is that a lot of what we learned in college, I mean, throw it all away. Burn it. Right? Because it’s completely irrelevant today. But then you have things like the Four P’s of Marketing and AIDA or the customer journey that remain constants”. – SVP Marketing in Healthcare
“Because essentially all a journey is, is a buyer getting their questions answered to the point where they can make a decision about buying or not.” – CMO in Technology
Actionable Strategy: Use AI as Agent to support in bringing depth to your ideal customer and to inform you on key drivers to move them down a pre-defined journey. Crucially, you must set up your own measurement parameters to ensure you’re iterating to actual performance data, then feed that back into the model.
Communicating Your Own Brand Priorities
Customer needs will always be a trigger for considering new products and services. Understanding what those needs are can certainly be made easier using AI, however no current model will know your own brand more than you do. How you set yourself in market compared to these needs and your competitors is what fuels your growth and sets you apart.
“Really the relevance and differentiation of the actual product itself, of the actual pricing and the physical availability of the product, like how you get it, how it works, etc. To me this is a real return to basics. I mean, this is what I worry about with marketing. I really do because of the lack of training for most marketers, understanding what the customer’s actually looking for that will matter, and being able to be relevant and differentiate and how you respond to that. Marketing jobs, I think, are going to get much broader and deeper”. – Head of Global Brand in Technology
“You know, it’s like look at what people are consuming and then wrap that back in to either develop your products and services to better reflect what people want to use them for, or communicate the actual benefits people really care about”. – CMO in Financial Services
Actionable Strategy: Ensure that you have a well-structured Comms Plan that will ladder your products and services through to the Customer Pain Points in a logical fashion. Use AI as an agent to find out what will resonate, then bring your solution to the table.
Create Quality Content
There is no denying the use that AI already has in content drafting, versioning, translating and iterating. That said, there is also no denying that the quality of the output depends upon the level of human contribution to the creation process. Quality content has always been a key fundamental for building trust with business decision makers, and that will only become more important as AI exponentially increases the amount of content available to us.
“Not just coming up with stuff that people inside the business want to see or Kool Aid thought leadership, all that kind of stuff, it’s like, no, I’ll answer the exam questions that that buyer has. It’s not thought leadership if it’s not answering their exam question in a way that helps move them along in their thinking. So I also think there’s going to there’s going to need to be actually a real return to quality and getting it right, rather than spraying many variations of plastic messaging and hoping that somehow one thing works better than another.” – Head of Global Brand in Technology
“This world is so nebulous right now, and that’s the reason why I keep trying to go back to what has worked with human interest over time, right? So that I don’t end up being stupid and create a pet sock. Right? Like that Super Bowl ad back in the day”. – VP Marketing in Technology
Actionable Strategy: If AI is the digital companion, then the human is the critical thinker. Double down on strategic talent and creative minds, as it’s the new and different that will stand out from the crowd of iterative information.
Conclusion
The integration of AI in B2B Marketing is a journey of balance, combining the efficiency and insights of AI with the creativity, empathy, and ethical considerations that have always been at the heart of marketing. As we navigate this landscape, we’re reminded that at the core of every successful marketing strategy lies not an algorithm, but a profound understanding of human desires and needs.
Are you finding that AI is bringing you back to the basics in your marketing efforts? Share your experiences and thoughts on how AI is reshaping your approach to B2B marketing in the comments below.