How AI will Transform B2B Marketing in 2020?

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Over the past few years, B2B marketing executives have been shifting their focus to Artificial Intelligence to boost their campaign’s effectiveness and increase business growth.

For decades, the traditional approach for targeted marketing has been to identify signs of behavioral similarities (for instance, subscribing to a magazine related to a specific subject matter) and generate mass content that matches the perceived preferences of your targeted audience.

However, in today’s over-personalized world, this one-for-all approach doesn’t make the cut anymore. But the human effort needed to devise truly customized, large-scale advertising and marketing have made it impossible to virtually target customers with surgical-like accuracy.

Thanks to AI, we now have the resources to achieve this, making it much easier to find, communicate, and convert prospects. Most importantly, artificial intelligence has helped in simplifying marketing processes, removing the prohibitive prices that once hindered efforts to refine one on one communication and personalized content.

In this post, we’ll highlight five ways AI will reshape B2B marketing in 2020.

What Makes AI Vital for the Future of B2B Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence is already transforming various sectors, including the telecom industry. And there’s no indication of its progress slowing down any time soon.

In fact, according to a study, 80 percent of marketing executive in the B2B business claim that marketing will be revolutionsed in the next 5 years, thanks to AI. But, only 10 percent of B2B businesses are reported to be using AI for their marketing campaigns.

Today, companies that use AI are able to predict demographic compatibility, track consumer movement, foresee purchases, and offer excellent customer service. With the development of AI, businesses can not only communicate with individuals directly but also transform the information gathered from them into a framework to help serve them efficiently in the future.

Additionally, with the continuous improvement in AI algorithms and as advanced computational technology becomes more available commercially, companies are increasingly embedding AI in their marketing tactics.
All in all, AI is an essential tool B2B marketers can utilize to extract key insights and advanced strategies from several data. It provides businesses with a major competitive edge by offering acute predicting insights to accurately predict customer behavior.

87% of the adopters of AI are already using, or planning to use AI to improve e-mail marketing and sales forecasting. Among the respondents, 61% are currently using or planning to use AI to ehance Sales Forecasting. Take a look at the following adopters versus respondents of AI comparison graph from Statista:
statista

Image credits: statista

Here are five exciting and unique ways in which the application of AI will revolutionize B2B marketing in 2020:

1. Acquire More and High-Quality Leads

In the world of B2B marketing, it’s crucial for you to acknowledge and fulfill your end customers’ needs to prosper. Hence, companies are always trying to find thorough customer data. What this means is that marketers are also trying to find leads, which they generally do by manually analyzing customer data.

But the problem is that such traditional methods of generating data require a lot of effort and time from your part. This is because you need to first extract, analyze, and categorize data prior to targeting your prospective leads. Fortunately, with AI, you can extract a large amount of data from several sources such as social media channels, websites, and contact databases.

AI has immense potential to identify the best B2B leads for outward and inward marketing initiatives. As such, it can help in bridging the gap that exists between potential customers and the sales team.

2. Personalizing B2B Marketing

As most buyers avoid spam messages and emails, AI-based marketing will help in eliminating this problem entirely.

AI can boost a company’s ability to provide accurate and swift tailored customer experience as they can initiate bespoke conversations with a large number of relevant buyers. Instead of focusing on a particular sector, AI can help brands target buyers on an individual level.

3. Simplify the Account Selection Process

Salespeople spend most of their time doing monotonous tasks to find prospective leads. This includes answering emails, cold-calling, and creating lists.

According to a study, sales representatives spend 80 percent of their time on phone calls and emails for nurturing and acquiring leads with repetitive tasks, leaving them with just 20 percent of the time to close leads.

Companies should be more focused on preserving business relationships with their existing clients instead of searching for new leads. This is where AI can help in simplifying the whole process effectively.

By embedding AI in Salesforce automation software, CRM databases, and other B2B devices, the entire process can be automated easily, leaving the sales executives with enough time to plan a better campaign.

By implementing AI in these devices, you’ll also be able to identify accounts of new and existing customers on the basis of the predefined attributes, offering access to a huge number of quality prospects.

Since AI focuses on data-driven facts more, it’ll help sales executives make more accurate decisions when determining which will produce better outcomes and conversions.

4. Simplified SEO

While it isn’t possible for AI to create highly engaging content, we can expect it to competently enhance this content for search engines in 2020. Most marketing strategies demand a lot of manual efforts and time. This includes creating backlinks, determining keywords for SEO, analyzing market trends, making planned acquisitions, and so on.

AI can help in improving these processes and simplifying data more efficiently than human search strategists, thereby, delivering quality information without any disruptions. As AI evolves, the complex and time-consuming SEO process will become more efficient and automated, while producing marketing content.

5. Wider online shopping experiences

The introduction of Alexa, Siri, and Cortana has transformed the way customers communicate with various brands. More consumers are starting to depend on smart speakers and voice search, marketers are already looking for ways to offer a new and extensive range of shopping experiences to their customers through AI applications.

Since AI can now interpret the voices and spoken words better, most eCommerce retailers are re-optimizing their pages to manage voice-based searches effectively. Besides this, AI can likely have the potential to provide a wider personalized shopping experience to your clients in the coming year.

Conclusion

With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, a majority of marketing executives have already begun reaping its benefits. Even though most AI system remains hidden at present, its significance isn’t invisible to the outside world. With so many advantages, it is certain that AI will reshape the B2B marketing sector for the better.

Clara Beck
Clara Beck is a Business Manager with 8 years of experience at Thomson Data based out of Plano, Texas. She helps SMBs and Enterprise firms take full advantage of the latest marketing tools to scale up their business. She blogs about Small businesses, Marketing, CX, Entrepreneurship, Big Data and, other technological innovations.

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