How Can AI and Marketing Automation be Utilized in B2B?

By 2025, 75% of B2B marketers could be using a combination of traditional and AI sales techniques. With the future of the industry changing, to compete, marketers will need to stay up to date on innovations. AI and automation are just a few examples of this, but how can you use them in your B2B strategy?

What are AI and Marketing Automation?

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, has been a hot topic recently thanks to the likes of ChatGPT – but AI is much more than robots and chatbots. AI refers to using machines that simulate human cognitive processes. In marketing, they are often used in predictive campaigns and automated customer service, such as the AI customer self-service from Dialpad.

On the other hand, marketing automation utilizes software that handles mundane marketing tasks that don’t require human intervention, such as email marketing and social media posting. Both of these tools can be utilized in B2B marketing to streamline your strategy and put you at the forefront of future workspaces, giving your team more time to develop innovative campaigns, save money, and manage other issues.

Both of these tools can be utilized in B2B marketing to streamline your strategy and put you at the forefront of future workspaces, giving your team more time to develop innovative campaigns, save money, and manage other issues. This leads us to ask the question: Are AI Newsletters the Future?

8 Ways to Use AI and Marketing Automation in B2B

You can use technology to your advantage in lots of ways when it comes to B2B communication. Annoying repetitive tasks? Automate them. Sourcing leads? Use AI to streamline your process. Here are eight ways to utilize AI and marketing automation for your business.

Automation

One of the main benefits of AI and marketing automation is that you can stop wasting time on tedious, time-consuming tasks. For example, instead of spending hours entering numbers into an inventory control system or answering simple customer questions, you can spend time on the issues that really matter.

Automation can also help your company when team members are on vacation or during out-of-office hours. An IVR service, or Interactive Voice Response, is a great way to ensure customers receive personalized communication by responding to phone calls with a human voice. As AI advances, the opportunities for automation continue to increase. From onboarding data to SEO leads, automation and AI can save your company time and money, ultimately leading to more growth.

AI-powered chatbots are another tool that can be utilized in marketing automation. Chatbots can handle customer inquiries and provide personalized assistance to customers, freeing up human customer service representatives to handle more complex issues. This technology can help enhance the customer experience and improve overall efficiency. AI chatbots can be integrated with other tools like email marketing, CRM databases, and social media platforms to provide a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints.

Sourcing Leads

For B2B marketers, leads are of the utmost importance. A lot of the time, they can be sourced through customer data. However, the process of obtaining, reviewing, and classifying customer data is incredibly time-consuming.

Marketers must collate data from various sources, from CRMs, websites, and marketing campaigns. In this sea of data, it can take time to identify their leads’ spending targets and goals. That’s where AI comes in. AI tools can quickly and easily capture data from various sources, such as social media, websites, and contact databases. AI can easily identify the best B2B targets for inward and outward campaigns, bridging the gap between the sales team and consumers.

By allowing AI to handle the mundane, time-consuming task of collecting and identifying leads, you will obtain more high-quality leads. Ultimately, this will make your team more efficient, drive growth, and ensure your team can focus their efforts on more critical tasks. In addition, AI can help you reach the OKRs for your company, so consider which could be freed up with the help of AI.

Help Salespeople Identify Key Accounts

Cold calling, email marketing, creating endless client lists – salespeople spend a significant amount of time doing repetitive tasks. It’s a waste of time as well as talent. If your stellar, highly-motivated employees are stuck sending the same old emails every day, they are going to lose motivation – and you will lose sales.

Why not automate some of those processes to give your salespeople time to focus on key accounts and nurture client relationships? By embedding AI in CRM databases, salesforce automation software, and other B2B applications, your team will have more time to focus on building client relationships and getting sales. As AI learns more about your customers, it will help your salespeople to make better choices when prospecting, leading to more conversions and better results.

Personalized Customer Experience

One of the main concerns marketers have when it comes to AI in B2B marketing is the lack of a personalized, human feel. But, contrary to popular belief, AI can actually create a more personalized service by collecting and analyzing customer data that can help you improve the customer experience.

How? When you have a large amount of data, you can use AI to segment customers into categories based on their unique needs and goals. Today, as customers become more selective due to the high volume of marketing they receive, a personalized service can help convert leads into customers.

From here, you can create custom, automated workflows designed specifically for those audiences. These can be used in communications, such as email marketing, SMS messages, pop-ups, and newsletters. Bespoke messaging that addresses customer concerns and needs is much more likely to gain engagement.

You can also increase personalization after you have secured an account. Send out surveys and collect other data on these segments. Using AI to analyze this data and create recommendations, you can use customer experience AI to better target and support your customers.

Creating an automated, standardized marketing protocol will also reduce customer friction and churn, as the chance for human error is significantly reduced and customers will know what to expect from your communications. For more sales promotion examples, consider researching AI-powered sales promotion tools

Keep in mind, however, that research shows 60% of consumers would prefer to speak with a human. So while automated services such as AI chatbots are an excellent tool for providing a personalized experience, don’t underestimate the value of human interactions.

The Evolution of Searches

With smart devices bringing marketing directly into your customers’ homes, AI can revolutionize your marketing practices. The rise of devices like Google Home and voice assistants like Siri has led users to rely more heavily on voice search over text or visual searches. Marketers must adapt to this change, considering both traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and voice search.

Customers can even buy items directly through voice control, so it’s essential for marketers to understand how to tailor their marketing to this technology. AI can also help with SEO. Instead of marketers spending time identifying keywords, creating backlinks, analyzing marketing trends, and generating competitor insights, AI can take over, delivering more effective analysis and insights.

AI SEO can also improve the customer experience. With more accurate insights, your pages will become highly optimized, jumping to the top of Google so your customers can find what they need quickly and easily.

Growth Loops

A great marketing automation strategy, growth loops reinvest user outputs to generate new leads. An efficient and easy marketing tool, growth loops can multiply leads and if you use AI in the process, it can be quick and easy to implement.

For example, if you run a document-sharing company, AI ensures that when a customer sends a document, the receiver is also prompted to sign up to your services. This will generate growth on an ongoing basis without you having to lift a finger.

Seamless Onboarding

When a user signs up to your platform, the onboarding process can seem long and arduous. But AI can help you simplify the process and allow customers to go at their own pace. Firstly, consider implementing an onboarding checklist that automatically guides users to complete onboarding tasks. Seeing the tasks uncompleted will motivate customers to progress, making the setup quick, clear, and concise.

You could also consider using AI to create a video guide to your onboarding process. Robot voices are a thing of the past. Today, AI assistants are so natural and friendly that they might be mistaken for a real person. Use AI to create a voiceover or even have a visual AI assistant to give the onboarding process a friendly, engaging feel.

If a customer encounters a problem when onboarding, an automated phone attendant system can help customers resolve simple issues through automated guides. This means your customer service team will only have to deal with complex cases, giving those customers the time and care they need.

Image Generation

Chances are you’ve seen AI-generated images on social media. But have you considered using them in your marketing strategy?

Today, text-to-image generators such as DALL-E use AI to create new images based on millions of references pulled from the web. Gone are the days of trawling through copyright-free sites to find that perfect photo or spending hours in studios curating your brand identity.

Simply type what you need into the generator and it will provide you with the perfect image for your brand, without the effort and cost of a manual photoshoot.

AI and Marketing Automation: The Future of B2B?

As technology continues to advance, there’s no doubt that AI and marketing automation will become integral for businesses. Some are even automating lifecycles to create a more productive and efficient workforce.

Besides helping to streamline workflows, AI can help to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and provide a personalized customer experience.

So, what are you waiting for? Invest in great AI (or try StormAI right within one of Stormboard’s purpose-built sales templates) for your customers today so you can see results tomorrow.