Generative AI for B2B Marketing

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the world of B2B marketing. According to a recent survey by Demandbase, over 80% of B2B companies are already adopting or planning to adopt AI technology to enhance their marketing and sales processes. The reasons for this are clear – AI-driven tools have the potential to make B2B marketers far more efficient, hyper-targeted, and successful in engaging prospects. Implemented properly, artificial intelligence can significantly streamline and optimize key marketing activities like content creation, lead generation, and sales enablement.

B2B buying journeys tend to be lengthy and complex, with multiple decision-makers weighing in on purchases. Convincing enterprises to invest in or switch to a new business solution requires in-depth research, personalized outreach, and strategic follow-up. Manual processes simply cannot scale to meet the demands of today’s B2B selling. AI equips marketers with the pattern recognition and synthesis abilities needed to make sense of troves of data, surface ideal prospects, and tailor messaging to each individual.

For example, an AI content creation tool could analyze a company’s past blog posts and whitepapers, plus broader market trends, to generate an initial draft for a new piece of content. From there, a marketer could refine the draft and customize it for different stages of the sales funnel or buyer personas. AI takes on the heavy lifting, allowing marketers to focus their creative efforts where they are most valuable. Another use case is using AI-powered lead intelligence to identify accounts showing intent signals, like researching competitor keywords or visiting key product pages. AI takes the guesswork out of the process, serving hyper-targeted ads and sales messaging precisely when engagement likelihood is highest.

The bottom line is B2B marketing and sales are being reimagined with artificial intelligence. Forward-thinking companies that want to deliver hyper-personalized, impactful customer experiences need to hop on board the AI train now to get a sustained competitive advantage. With the right strategy and integration, artificial intelligence can transform B2B marketing and sales, leading to higher efficiency, lower costs, and greater revenue growth. The time to adopt AI is now.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing refers to marketing products or services to other businesses, rather than individual consumers. The primary goal is to nurture prospects through the sales funnel and generate leads for the sales team to close. B2B marketing differs from B2C marketing in several key ways.

The B2B buyer’s journey is longer and more complex, involving multiple decision-makers and stakeholders. There are generally fewer customers but higher contract values. The marketing strategy needs to appeal to rational, business-focused purchasers with educational content versus emotional campaigns. Given longer sales cycles, marketing’s role focuses heavily on lead generation and sales enablement versus quick conversions.

Common B2B marketing tactics include content marketing through targeted blogs, whitepapers, case studies, and webinars. SEO and PPC help drive visitors to landing pages with gated offers to capture leads. Email marketing nurtures prospects and stays top of mind. Trade show appearances and custom events allow for in-person engagement. Sales collateral, proposals, and presentations need to be readily accessible to seal deals.

While B2C products can potentially appeal to huge swaths of consumers, B2B products tend to be niche with a more focused target market. Campaign personalization and segmentation are essential in B2B. Buyer personas, firmographic data, and intent signals guide strategy to be relevant.

The marketing technology stack also differs significantly between B2B and B2C. B2B marketing relies heavily on marketing automation platforms, CRM, and sales intelligence tools to capture and nurture leads and equip the sales team. Artificial intelligence can help surface insights and automate tasks.

While more complex, B2B marketing done right leads to lucrative, long-term business relationships through data-driven, personalized campaigns focused on driving revenue. The approach takes patience but pays dividends through sustained lead generation and sales enablement.

Leveraging AI Writing Tools to Create High-Quality Content Faster

One of the most powerful applications of AI in B2B marketing is automating content creation. AI-powered writing tools allow marketers to generate blog posts, articles, whitepapers, case studies, and other materials far more efficiently. This enables teams to produce content at scale to nurture prospects across every stage of the funnel.

Using AI to Generate Blog Posts, Articles, Whitepapers, etc.

AI writing assistants like Copy.ai and INK can ingest research materials, analyze well-performing content, and synthesize everything into long-form written pieces. The AI generates an initial draft, capturing key points in clear, human-sounding language. Marketers can use these AI-created drafts as a starting point, spending their time editing and refining rather than starting from a blank page. This results in a huge time savings. For example, Copy.ai claims to write blog drafts over 10X faster than humans.

Personalizing Content for Different Stages of the Funnel

AI excels at producing multiple variations of content tailored to different buyer personas and funnel stages. After creating a base draft, the AI can customize it for top-of-funnel lead nurturing, middle-of-funnel consideration, or bottom-of-funnel conversion content. This level of personalization at scale is impossible manually. AI takes care of the busy work so marketers can focus on fine-tuning messaging to resonate.

Optimizing Content for SEO with AI Assistance

AI tools can analyze content and suggest improvements for on-page SEO, like emphasizing keywords in headings and introducing related phrases. This helps human writers maximize search visibility. AI can also generate meta descriptions, alt text, and other supporting content needed for SEO.

By handling repetitive writing tasks, personalizing content, and optimizing it for search, AI enables B2B marketing teams to produce more content faster while ensuring relevance. This streamlines lead nurturing and drive conversions.

Identifying and Targeting High-Intent B2B Prospects with AI

One of the biggest challenges in B2B sales and marketing is finding promising new prospects that are likely to convert. AI-powered lead intelligence tools are ideal for tackling this problem. They analyze massive datasets and customer actions to surface accounts with the highest intent.

Mining Company Databases and Web Data to Find Ideal Prospects

AI lead intelligence platforms ingest data from a variety of sources such as a company’s CRM, marketing automation, and analytics platforms. They also crawl the web and tap into intent data providers to identify accounts conducting relevant research. For example, Bombora analyzes content consumption across the web to find companies reading your blog, whitepapers, case studies, and other assets. Sixense scans search engine data looking for prospect accounts searching topics related to your products.

By combining intent data with your first-party company data, the AI can map accounts to their place in the buyer’s journey. It can tell which prospects are in research mode versus ready for demos and trials. This allows for building targeted, personalized lead lists ready for outreach at the optimal time.

Scoring Leads Based on the Likelihood to Buy/Convert

Once promising leads are identified, AI further prioritizes them by generating predictive lead scores. Signals such as job title, company size, pages visited, email domain, and more are fed into machine learning models. These models determine the probability of a prospect converting or becoming a customer based on historical data patterns.

For example, an accounts payable clerk would get a lower score than a director of finance. Prospects visiting pricing pages would be higher than those only reading blog posts. AI ranks leads so sales and marketing know exactly where to focus.

Serving Hyper-Targeted Ads to Engage Potential Customers

AI goes beyond lead lists to actually engage high-potential prospects through hyper-targeted advertising. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn use lookalike modeling to find prospects with demographics, interests, and behaviors similar to your existing customers. These prospects can then be targeted with customized messaging likely to resonate.

Platforms like Bombora and RollWorks use intent signals like reading relevant content to serve display and social ads. Catching prospects while they are actively researching optimizes the chances they will click and convert. AI removes guesswork to ensure you reach the right audiences.

With AI lead intelligence, B2B marketing and sales teams can stop wasting effort on low-quality prospects. AI enables taking a targeted approach from initial discovery through conversion at scale. It turns anonymous companies into qualified, sales-ready leads.

Equipping Sales Teams with AI-Generated Insights

AI can arm sales reps with in-depth knowledge of prospects to have smarter conversations that close more deals. The technology works behind the scenes to continuously surface the information needed to personalize outreach.

Provides Background Info on Prospects Before Calls

AI sales intelligence platforms automatically create detailed profiles of target prospects to fully prepare sales reps. This includes firmographics like company size, revenue, location, industry, number of employees, and more. It also includes technographics like what tools and software systems the prospect uses that could be integrated or potentially replaced.

Providing this contextual background info upfront enables reps to tailor their entire pitch accordingly right from the start. They know how to position the value proposition for that particular prospect’s role, challenges, and tech stack.

Generates Talking Points Based on Prospect Needs

AI goes beyond basic prospect info to actually provide custom talking points catered to the prospect’s initiatives. By analyzing the prospect’s website, content downloads, press releases, job postings, employee changes, and even local news, the AI can determine pain points and projects they may have.

This powers messaging that directly resonates with each prospect’s situation. For example, discussing minimizing churn and improving retention if leadership changes occurred. Or talking up collaboration and communication tools if the company newly hired remote workers.

Continuously Surfaces Relevant News/Info to Share

The AI sales assistant stays on top of all prospects by alerting reps when trigger events occur, like new funding rounds, expansions, product launches, exec hires, etc. Keeping up with these real-time developments shows the rep is knowledgeable and keeps the conversation fresh and focused on initiatives important to the prospect.

Rather than manual research and curation, AI removes the busywork to regularly update prospect information and surface the most relevant talking points. Reps stay up-to-date at scale.

With AI-powered sales enablement and intelligence, reps enter each conversation fully armed with insights to build rapport quickly and position solutions fittingly. AI ultimately helps convert more prospects by enabling hyper-personalized engagement across the entire sales team.

The Future of B2B Marketing is Data-Driven and Personalized

B2B marketing brings unique complexities, the rewards can be tremendous for companies that do it right. The key is taking an extremely targeted, personalized approach to resonate with each prospect and guide them through their lengthy buyer’s journey.

B2B marketers must architect multi-touch campaigns focused on attracting, nurturing, and qualifying leads over time. Educational content and messaging should position the brand as a thought leader that understands the prospect’s pain points.

Once sales-ready, leads must be handed off to reps armed with the insights needed to have intelligent conversations that close deals. When executed skillfully, B2B marketing becomes a revenue engine generating highly qualified leads and enabling sales to drive growth.

The data-driven ecosystem required for orchestrating effective B2B marketing campaigns has never been more attainable thanks to advanced martech tools like AI and automation. These technologies empower marketers to work smarter and deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale.

For B2B companies looking to take their marketing to the next level, the technology and strategies now exist to make an exponential business impact. Don’t leave this opportunity on the table. To determine how AI and automation can transform your B2B marketing, book a demo today. The future of B2B marketing is brighter than ever.