Foundations Are Imperative as B2B Marketers Ramp Up AI Usage

Over the next few years, the use of AI will transform B2B marketing by automating workflows and repetitive tasks, allowing marketers the time to devote to strategy and critical thinking to enable the orchestration of relevant experiences that build buyer preference and increase momentum in buying journeys.

The key points in that statement are strategy, critical thinking, and relevance.

Strategy Sets the Foundation for Orchestration Through AI

With the ability to scale content volume, AI is testing the resolve of B2B marketers. It’s no longer sufficient to push out content for the sake of publishing. Content must be relevant, aligned to a buyer’s context in the moment, demonstrate empathy, and deliver value through that buyer’s perspective.

Two Must-Have Strategic Components

1. True Buyer Understanding

It’s no longer enough to “assume” you know your buyers and customers. Marketers must do the work to truly get to know them. Whether you call the tool you use to codify this information a persona, an ICP, an archetype, or buyer insights makes no difference. The point is to establish the foundation and then continuously update as things change faster than ever.

At a minimum, you need to know:

• Who’s in the buying group, what role each plays, and how perspectives differ.
• What problems or opportunities they’re tasked to solve – using their words.
• What gets you on their shortlist.
• What the buying group process entails and how to meet them where they are.
• What questions must they answer, or which “jobs to be done” must they complete to fuel momentum.
• The risks they’re concerned about, and which weigh most heavily.
• The emotional impact of addressing the problem or opportunity.
• What conflicts must the buying group resolve to reach consensus.

Yes, data can tell you some of the story with critical thinking applied to pull useful insights. However, talking to your buyers and customers, salespeople, customer success teams, and product teams provides the “color” needed for a foundational strategy.

3 Reasons True Buyer Understanding is Critical as We Ramp Up the Use of AI:

• Buyers type an average of 23-word prompts into GenAI to research what to do next. How confident are you that you’ve engineered your content to answer those prompts?
• GenAI uses semantic relationships, entities, and clarity to determine what to include in answers. Is your content written to meet the needs of AI and deliver relevance to human buyers simultaneously?
• Avoidance of “AI Slop” content is only possible if we know what our buyers need, understand their context, infuse empathy that shows them we know them, and emphasize our point of view in that content. Exercising “taste” is what determines engagement and perception of value and relevance. It’s what differentiates our brand from alternatives. And it comes with true buyer understanding.

2. Continuum Over Campaign

Research over the last few years confirms the funnel has collapsed. Buyers spend more time “out of market” than they do “in market.” This makes the idea of short-term campaigns irrelevant. Marketers don’t control the buying process. They never have. But we’ve been slow to acknowledge this truth, given vendors built our marketing technology to convince us we do.

A continuum means communicating a narrative that embraces the entire problem-to-solution process across the buying group. It entails creating a natural narrative relevant to buyers that builds a coherent mental model buyers can act upon. It helps you engage across the entirety of the buying process from status quo through purchase decision.

With buying cycles averaging 10 months, a quarterly campaign isn’t effective. B2B marketing programs must match what buyers need. But a continuum approach enables marketers to start the story before that 10-month trigger. It helps you focus on how to create awareness and memory structures with buyers before they build their short list. And without that, your chances of being on that shortlist are low.

Using the True Buyer Understanding You’ve Developed Allows Marketers to:

• Map out the story from problem to solution, building urgency with tension and conflict. You know, just like good stories do – with your buyer as hero.
• Create a narrative that compounds meaning over time.
• Ensure your content works in sequence, rather than producing one-off assets that fail in isolation.

3 Ways a Continuum Approach Helps Marketers Gain Advantage with AI:

• AI uses internal knowledge graphs to relate concepts. GenAI “trusts” content with well-defined entities and clean concepts and incorporates them into its internal graphs. This results in answer inclusion in response to a prompt. The entity focus means our content will do better if each asset focuses on one authoritative page or in-depth article in relation to an entity. If we want to show authority, a strategy that connects entities within our storyline helps the LLM ingest more of our ideas and use them in answers. A continuum approach provides the structure for a narrative that enables this outcome.
• The intention of orchestration with AI is to produce relevant experiences based on the context of the buyer. If you don’t know what’s entailed, how will you ensure you have that narrative on your website and that you’ve semantically “connected the dots” for the AI to follow to serve up what the buyer needs at that moment? Do you have pathways (internal links) across related content to build that story for humans and LLMs across the continuum of the buying process? Is it obvious how the concepts connect to build that story?
• Based on True Buyer Understanding, you now know the perspective, phrases, and thinking about the problem buyers must solve. As you take a continuum approach, create a taxonomy for repetition of the canonical phrasing you use. For example, if you’re talking about B2B buyers, don’t rotate in prospects, leads, or potential customers. Stick with B2B buyers. Yes, as writers, we want to vary how we say things to avoid repetition. However, LLMs need that consistency to strengthen graph mode. Variation—no matter how much we love it—creates confusion and dilutes our authority with AI.

B2B Marketers Must Decide Where to Use AI and Where Humans Prevail

I see AI bringing immense advantage to B2B marketers. We’re under the mandate to “do more, with less.” That’s not likely to change. The defining moment is in how we choose to use AI to help us prove that marketing is a catalyst for business and revenue, not just a nice-to-have function that the business views as a cost center.

There’s no doubt that AI is changing marketing. It’s in how we choose to use it to our advantage. AI for workflows, orchestration, and predictive analytics are three areas I think will elevate B2B marketing. By offloading that work, human marketers will get to focus on what we do best:

• Doing the foundational work that creates flow, extends reach, and grows momentum.
• Applying critical thinking and “taste” to our programs and content.
• Addressing context in ways that truly match our buyer’s situation, needs, and wants.
• Ensuring relevance in the experiences our buyers have with us that AI facilitates.