As competition grows in the business-to-business space, AI is being used to beef up companies’ data strategies to better understand the needs of their individual customers, and then tailor their creative and media buys in new ways.

There's been “a huge surge” in B2B companies looking to incorporate AI into their marketing and data strategies, said Kellie Felsten, head of martech and adtech integration for B2B ad agency The Marketing Practice. She said the agency’s B2B clients are using “intent data” derived from AI to understand trends in their markets and use those insights to inform their content and messaging, narrow down addressable markets and focus on valuable accounts.

“A lot of B2B marketers are recognizing they can take their first-party data to the maximum of its abilities using AI,” Felsten said. “I've seen AI being used to enhance first-party data and guide marketing strategies.”

For one of The Marketing Practice’s B2B clients in the cybersecurity SaaS space, the agency analyzed AI-driven intent data to see over the course of three months which topics related to their products and solutions were trending higher with their target audiences. The trend uncovered was: “Zero trust network access,” so the client tailored its creative and messaging around that topic.

Another one of its clients, in the data management industry, used AI in its account-based marketing platform to identify lookalike accounts, which are people who likely will be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics to existing target audiences. It found that there were many of those accounts within the healthcare space, so the company created tailored campaigns targeted to that industry.

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Accenture is also looking into how to expand its data set using AI.

“For B2B marketers, the data set is and should be expansive,” said Jill Kramer, chief marketing and communications officer of Accenture, “allowing the audience to be represented as the multidimensional humans that they are. So we need data and AI to play a pivotal role in the B2B marketing value chain, enabling companies to collect and use vast amounts of data for informed decisions, creating better customer experiences and gaining a competitive edge.”

Matt Powell, VP and executive director of Merkle’s B2B International North America, said AI and generative AI can help B2B companies gain more insights on customers, break their audience segments down further and target them based on current needs because that data can be gathered and analyzed quicker with AI than manually.

“It's been very difficult in the past for B2B companies to target their customers based on needs because needs are often quite transient and changing with time,” Powell said. “They will look at their customer base; demographics, the size of the organization, the sector and also things like the type of product that they purchase and the frequency that they purchase products. There’s often been a bit of a disconnect in terms of how companies can apply those needs.”

Taking risks

Outside of helping B2B companies improve their data strategies, AI is also fueling more risk-taking when it comes to marketing.

The Marketing Practice’s February B2B Effectiveness Barometer, which surveyed 800 global B2B marketers, found that the majority of respondents (77%) either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed that they need to be taking risks in their marketing strategies despite the uncertain economy. The amount of B2B companies that responded that they agree they need to take marketing risks increased 30% since the last survey was conducted in 2020.

Kramer said what may have seemed like a marketing risk to a B2B company a few years ago is now becoming a requirement.

“B2B brands can be creative,” Kramer said. “They can play in the same space as B2C [business-to-consumer] brands. Their content can be fun, engaging and clear.”

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Accenture is starting to test how AI can help create personalized content.

The firm uses data, automation and AI in its employee email digest—i.e. “Good Morning Accenture,” which sends one personalized email three days a week to each individual employee. In implementing “Good Morning Accenture,” the firm cut the number of internal emails employees get by half and it led to a 72% engagement rate across its global workforce.

“We used classification, segmentation, hyper-personalization and content generation to replace thousands of emails, newsletters and meeting invites with a crisp, highly personalized and engaging vehicle that packages all the key info employees need in one email,” Kramer said. “Now we do less, get better results and can do so faster and more efficiently with generative AI as a co-pilot.”

“Good Morning Accenture” is a case study in how companies can use AI in content marketing.

Kramer said the firm also uses generative AI to turn its thought leadership articles into speech audiobooks for clients and employees through its new Accenture Foresight app.

“Our clients and people’s consumption of thought leadership is now almost a daily habit,” Kramer said. “And that time is typically during their morning routine, whether at home getting ready or during their commute, so we thought to help them during this window where audio plays an outsized role. But scaling manual voice reads is time-consuming and expensive. Using AI here helped us scale our ability to engage audiences efficiently.”

To this end, online marketing company Constant Contact released a new B2B TV campaign this week that highlights its AI marketing content generator as a way to help small businesses write copy, including email, newsletter and marketing materials.

Generative AI is a particularly useful tool for creating at scale the type of complicated communications and messaging B2B marketers are typically delivering, said Margo Kahnrose, chief marketing officer of omnichannel marketing platform Skai.

“In software and tech, narratives and product offerings are often complex, and these functions can be difficult to hire for and scale, with a knowledge gap in the ramp-up,” Kahnrose said. “B2B buying decisions are generally more practical than emotional, and practical, information-based answers are where generative AI shines. Generative AI can help functions like content production, SEO and corporate communications accelerate and scale output, leaving knowledge workers to focus on inputs like strategy and quality control.”

New channels

Felsten said AI is also helping B2B marketers expand into new media channels they wouldn’t have otherwise tested including connected TV, podcasts and digital out-of-home.

“If we said a couple of years ago, to any of our B2B marketers, ‘We think you should be on connected TV platforms,’ we would have seen resistance because they just didn't understand the space or how that really applies in a B2B sense,” Felsten said. “But with AI, you can tackle data and targeting within CTV and digital out-of-home. That's where we can bring more of those innovative solutions to our [B2B clients] and they're more willing to invest in those types of channels.”

She said The Marketing Practice is helping B2B companies, for example, capture an audience that is working from home on their laptops and searching for a B2B service or product and retarget them on their CTV platform. 

Many CTV platforms including NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Hulu and Roku have introduced new targeting and audience recommendation tools that are driving better results.

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“We know that you're hitting the same household and the same people that are within your target market,” Felsten said. “Historically, you couldn't necessarily know the impact of a lot of linear TV and CTV [buys], outside of your reach and awareness, but now you can really measure even the impact to your site traffic.”

She said the same strategy goes for podcasts and digital out-of-home, two other mediums where B2B companies wouldn’t have necessarily tested before. Now, with AI, they can target specific audiences there as well.

Felsten advised B2B marketers to start expanding their media buys now before the space becomes overcrowded.

“As it picks up over the next couple of years, [the market] will start to get more saturated,” Felsten said. “The companies that are starting to test it now and get in that market are going to start to prove the value and be ahead of the game in terms of optimizing and pricing.”

‘Start with the why’

When Accenture came out with its massive brand campaign in 2020, “Let There Be Change,” created by ad agency Droga5, which is part of Accenture Song, it was one of the first examples of a splashy B2B marketing campaign that spanned channels including linear and digital TV, display, programmatic video, social media and search.

“It was different for our category as it didn’t hyper-focus on our capabilities alone,” Kramer said. “But when you step away from the normal B2B formula, it can be risky. So we plan, we set goals and we measure ourselves. Taking risks doesn’t mean you’re not accountable for the results.”

The types of risk-taking AI is driving will eventually become imperative for B2B marketers.

In comparison to consumer-facing companies, B2B marketers have historically lagged in terms of selling their products and services in unique and creative ways, Merkle’s Powell said.

But emerging B2B companies in categories like e-commerce have made it increasingly important for these companies to break through creatively, according to a recent report from Merkle’s B2B International division that surveyed 3,505 buyers of B2B products and services. The report found, for example, that 70% of B2B customers want their business suppliers to spend more time understanding them and their needs and they want to be communicated to in more creative ways.

“There’s this desire in B2B to have more tailored, personalized experiences, the kind of thing that AI can drive,” Powell said.

Still, as many in the industry have warned, Felsten advised against entering a new channel or using AI just for the sake of it. It has to make sense.

“Trends like the word ‘AI’ can sound great and then you have companies that are like, ‘let's do AI,’” Felsten said. “You can't tackle it with that approach. Start with the why behind it. What are our goals for this year and for the next five years? Then start to think of use cases; how is AI going to really help enhance those strategies?”