How B2B Marketers Can Grow Their Businesses With GenAI
We’re At The Tip Of The Iceberg Folks!
The game-changing opportunities that GenAI offers B2B marketers are enormous, from enhanced customer experiences, higher conversion rates, productivity gains and significant cost reductions. This was echoed in a recent article by McKinsey in May that says “players that invest in AI are seeing a revenue uplift of 3 to 15 percent and a sales ROI uplift of 10 to 20 percent.” No wonder 56% of U.S. marketing or advertising decision-makers already use generative AI in their marketing efforts, according to Forrester. Exciting times, and this is just the beginning.
In an interview with Raconteur, Eric Gregoire, senior vice-president and global head of digital at Bayer’s Consumer Health division, said “There’s never been a better time to be a marketer, because there is so much you can do with this emerging technology. But you may also get frozen by where to start.”
So what are the key GenAI benefits for B2B marketers? And, if like many, you're stuck at the tip of the iceberg, how can you free yourself up so you can explore and grow your business with GenAI?
Its Data Superpowers Boost Growth Strategies
At the heart of GenAI’s superpower for B2B marketers is its ability to quickly crunch through massive amounts of data to find patterns that help businesses grow. Not only does GenAI automate many of the time-consuming tasks involved, its data-driven insights are more objective, delivering more robust findings, faster and at lower cost. A clear win-win-win for B2B organisations looking for accessible robust data and insights they need to underpin their growth strategies and enhance their customers’ experience.
No Good Lead Gets Left Behind
Qualifying inbound leads can be a time-consuming process. GenAI can intelligently automate this with smarter, faster lead prioritisation so sales teams can quickly identify high-quality leads, freeing up significant chunks of their time to convert more of their best leads into business wins.
Hyper-Personalisation At Scale
GenAI has many intelligent automation use cases for B2B, and at all levels of the funnel. One of its key benefits for B2B marketers is how it facilitates hyper-personalisation driving up conversion rates.
At the lower end of the funnel, for example Raconteur reported on how Bayer, working with Google, analysed visitor data on its site to “to identify high-value customers based on behavioural traits” and that were likely to make a purchase. Raconteur explains how these “insights enabled Bayer’s marketing team to target those individuals with personalised messages, leading to a double-digit percentage growth in its sales conversion rate.”
Many B2B marketers also use GenAI to boost their ABM programmes with enhanced personalisation. In a Renegades podcast, Noah Brier explains how GenAI can quickly scrape hundreds of target account websites and company reports to highlight their key pain points and business drivers by account. This invaluable information, which used to be massively time-consuming to gather, is then fed into a CRM so the sales team have it when they want it for more personalised outreach calls with ABM prospects.
It’s A Content Game-Changer
One area that’s received lots of attention is how GenAI is shaking up the B2B content space. It’s a mixed picture. But adopt the right approach and there are plenty of upsides here too.
Fully GenAI generated content is more likely to damage your brand as tests conducted by Renegades show. A study by Forrester also highlights the pitfalls, saying “thinly customised generative AI content will degrade the purchase experience for 70% of B2B buyers.”
That said, many B2B marketers enjoy using ChatGPT, finding it a really powerful tool for brainstorming or idea generation for content such as blogs. And there are plenty of posts from content writers who have used it to successfully overcome writer's block.
Copy.ai is another favourite which can be used for writing promotional copy, or Descript for faster podcast editing. As Cathy McPhillips, Chief Growth Officer of Marketing AI Institute, explains on a recent Renegades podcast, how using Descript saved her 18-20 hours of podcast production time.
McPhillips went on to say that, in contrast to the studies above, AI was winning out in A/B tests for generating better promotional copy. Digging into this, she explains that learning how to prompt GenAI tools, such as copy.ai, in the right way over time underpinned her success. That and some super careful editing! Which makes practical good sense and may explain where others have failed.
With the proliferation of such GenAI tools in the content space and copyright issues notwithstanding, it’s no surprise they're also being used to quickly generate hundreds of on-brand images for B2B marketing campaigns, presentations, social posts, video shorts etc. Tools such as DALL·E2 and Midjourney are fast replacing stock photos as the go-to for creative visuals and images.
The best advice for B2B marketers is to approach GenAI content tools as armies of capable assistants that in time will help you boost your productivity and quality of work. That said, they need some hand holding and prompting to get you there, which after all is the same for most human assistants.
Grappling With How To Harness GenAI To Grow Your Business?
Some key pointers so you're not frozen at the start of your growth journey with GenAI are coming through loud and clear. First, dip your toes in the water and upskill yourself and your team before throwing yourselves all into the deep end. Raconteur explains how Bayer approached this by building effective tech partnerships and ‘adding new skills to the team, incorporating AI gradually into the mix.’ Upskilling and getting the pace right is key.
In her Renegades podcast with Drew Neisser, Cathy McPhillips, stresses the importance of focusing on what the key problems are you need to solve and then figuring out how GenAI tools can help you do this. McPhillips also suggests not to “sit on this” explaining there are simple ways that B2B marketers can use GenAI right now to save a tonne of time. At the same time, she cautions not to “be irresponsible. It’s very easy to go down this path of, this is easy, this is fast”. It follows that building sensible governance guardrails in place as marketing teams venture into GenAI is another common recommendation widely voiced across the B2B Industry that’s a must-do when embarking on your GenAI adventure.
Lastly, getting the house of data in order is another prerequisite for CMOs. With GenAI devouring ever-increasing amounts of data, optimising your data ecosystems is vital. It also aligns CMOs more closely with data specialists and IT teams, two essential players for B2B marketers as they deploy and test out exciting new GenAI growth strategies.
So, having a clear GenAI strategy with specific goals and realistic timings in mind, that’s practical, is all about learning, optimising and of course failing, will help you discover your best GenAI growth opportunities. Be careful to learn how to drive the car first before setting off and pacing yourself as you go. Putting your foot to the metal too soon risks overheating and stalling your growth engine.
