Editorial
The Gist
- Streamlining buyer journeys: AI in B2B marketing simplifies and accelerates the buyer journey by automating information gathering, RFP preparation, and vendor comparisons, making purchasing faster and more efficient.
- Enhancing content personalization: Generative AI supports B2B marketing by crafting tailored content, enabling real-time user interactions, and automating lead segmentation and scoring.
- Marketing to bots: AI-powered B2B marketing requires adapting content and strategies to appeal to bots that perform key buying tasks.
Almost two years have passed since that morning in November when we were first exposed to OpenAI's ChatGPT. We were shocked. Stunned. We played with it and asked it to write songs, and we had fun testing creative prompts. We were rapt in awe.
But, as with many things, that awe soon passed. Slowly, individuals and companies started integrating it into their daily routines (sometimes bypassing IT). Then AI evolved rapidly, and other providers emerged. Twenty-three months later, generative AI is all over the enterprise — or at least it should be. We are still at the beginning of this transition to AI, but the pace of adoption has been swift. This path will continue rapidly until it is intertwined with the fabric of society and enterprise.
Given their nature, marketing departments were among the front-runners in adopting this technology. Generative AI is extensively used today to generate new content, create content variations and optimize the digital content supply chain. Slowly but surely, other functions within organizations started to feel the transformative effects of generative AI. The impact of generative AI in B2B marketing is especially noteworthy.
The Impact of Generative AI in B2B Marketing on Buyers
How AI in B2B Marketing Streamlines the Buyer Journey
Imagine how an enterprise buyer acts today and how cumbersome and time-consuming the journey can be.
First, the buying team engages in the research of potential solutions, going through industry reports and attending trade shows to identify potential products or services.
Then, this team goes into the funnel and gathers more specific information about the solution or product, going through a sea of brochures, white papers and case studies.
Then, there is the internal battle of aligning stakeholders, establishing specific needs and priorities and outlining the decision criteria. Depending on the nature of the item, an RFP is issued, responses are analyzed, a provider or set of providers is chosen and contracts are finally negotiated.
Condensed into a paragraph, that process — or a similar one — could take weeks or months in a traditional enterprise, primarily because most of the work involved was very hard to automate until the advent of AI.
Today, AI in B2B marketing simplifies and accelerates most of these processes. Perhaps it is not advanced enough to dictate outcomes, but it can streamline the data and present it to humans who will. Let's examine how.
AI in B2B Marketing: Automating RFP Creation and Vendor Comparisons
Most of the initial phase of information gathering can be automated by AI. Bots can provide market overviews, compare products and check ratings. Instead of going online and searching in multiple places, buyers can just prompt the bots.
Then, the bots can identify essential features and even give a first stab at risk assessment. Based on previous prompts and interactions, they can later create the base for the RFP document. Note that, up to this point, we have been discussing efficiency.
The final steps involve more complex criteria and judgment, and because of this, B2B is going to become a whole new game. Once you have your RFP responses, you can accelerate the evaluation of vendor proposals in a consistent and standardized way. You can also train your bots to make the choices for you and negotiate for you. These results will be arguably better because bots will take into account multiple variables that would be impossible for humans to consider.
All of this comes with some caveats. The most prominent is that AI is biased. This prejudice is going to be an increasingly relevant topic, not only because of its ethical considerations but because of practical ones. AI bots might not have the whole context of your needs and the environment of your organization.
Try a simple experiment: Prompt your bot to choose between buying a Canon or a Nikon camera (completely comparable). Force it to make a choice. Do you see what I am talking about?
Related Article: 2 Years of Generative AI in Business: What's Changed?
The Impact of Generative AI in B2B Marketing on Sellers
Enhancing Real-Time Interactions With AI in B2B Marketing
Sellers will have to adapt quickly to this new reality. AI in B2B marketing will bring them multiple efficiencies and challenges.
AI bots can enhance real-time user interactions, from providing better support to personalizing outreach. AI is already supporting the automation of content generation to enable more personalized experiences for different buying groups. Multiple vendors are also using AI to create new segmentation, better lead scoring and forecast conversion probabilities more accurately. Some of them have already started to implement more sophisticated features, such as modeling better real-time pricing strategies for prospects depending on their stage in the customer journey.
AI in B2B Marketing: Targeting Bots and Digital Buyers
But what’s a caveat for the buyer — AI bias — is going to change the game for the seller dramatically, as their audience and addressable market are not just about humans anymore. It’s also about bots. I recently wrote about how AI visibility optimization (AIVO) will become a cornerstone in sellers' marketing efforts because this will be one of the ways to influence bots.
The substantial shift in the buyer journey will favor those who move faster. Not long from now, a significant portion of B2B customers will be machines. Both buyers and providers will eventually leverage their digital doubles to conduct research and negotiations. The role of the rep will be profoundly transformed from a product evangelist to a trustworthy advisor. The human is still going to be relevant, but its reach will diminish.
The role that emotions play in the process is going to evolve as well. Marketing teams will have to start marketing to bots — bots that make decisions based on data, reputation and reviews. Your brand will have to earn bots' trust.
Marketing to bots will impact not only the way we present content but the content that we produce. Ecommerce and content platforms, whose primary focus today is humans, will have to evolve to better serve the bots that will be buying from them. All these changes are going to require a new mindset from organizations because this will not just affect their technology stacks. The organizations that thrive in this new reality will be those who transform beyond their technologies and who totally rethink their business strategies, processes and culture.
Harnessing AI to Enhance B2B Marketing Efforts
I know this all sounds like science fiction, but it is coming. Actually, it is already here.
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Generative AI in B2B marketing has started to reshape the landscape and will redefine the way corporate buyers and sellers interact and conduct business. Buyers will experience faster and more innovative ways to make educated decisions. For sellers, this transformation will become a huge challenge but also a massive opportunity.
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