There have been an influx of AI tools that have flooded the digital world in recent weeks. Backing the tidal wave of attention that Chat GPT brings to the capability, are many other tools that all offer to lighten a marketers workload.
But after all the noise and excitement, what exactly can these tools be used for to enable marketers, and specifically within a B2B strategy?
For me, it comes back to the basics of any B2B strategy, and breaking the marketing strategy down to determine opportunities to make the process more efficient along the way.
At the heart of any successful campaign, is who the campaign aims to engage or target. In my opinion, this is the most critical phase, as getting to understand exactly who you want to communicate to is fundamental to the real success of your initiative.
Considering the usual approach to defining target audiences, AI tools could potentially be used to help create ideal customer profiles, based on research that could be gathered, or even create pen portraits for your target customers, if the AI tool is fed the right prompts.
Another opportunity to utilise AI within the realms of creating a marketing campaign would be to consider competitor research. Could we feed chat GPT prompts to build a competitive insights report on what the landscape looks like for a particular B2B sector? Could we feed Chat GPT prompts to go and fetch data on which keywords a particular competitor ranks for, and to tell us the growth rate of their backlink profile over the last 12 months? As an account Director at a B2B SEO Agency, this type of inclusion makes a lot of sense to me, from an efficiency and utilisation perspective.
If we could do this, then what would be the impact on other day to day tools that we use for this same purpose. And also, which would be more time efficient?
It may be more time efficient to feed prompts into an AI tool to harvest this data and report it back, but are we losing an opportunity as marketers to analyse data, learn and query what we are seeing, or are we simply saving time and being more efficient.
The only sure fire way to tell is to create a list of tasks that you carry out on a regular basis as a marketer, and consider which of them can be tested with the aid of AI. By testing the use of AI, you can then evaluate the pros and cons, and where AI could potentially sit in your existing processes.
This would allow B2B marketers to utilise AI to be more time efficient, by allowing the technology to do some of the production work for you. The extent at which you utilise an AI tool for such a function is up to you, as the impact of using AI in this way is only positive.
AI and the use of AI is coming under significant scrutiny because the obvious opportunity that marketers are leveraging the technology for is the production of outbound content and communications, garnered from data the AI tool has in its index.
If B2B Marketers take the time to apply AI tools to the existing way of working and campaign production, the greater the application of AI will be, and the further marketing campaigns will be enhanced as a result.
Amo Sokhi is an Account Director at POLARIS. Amo has over 20 years experience as a B2B marketer, working with global brands to help them to adopt a best practice approach to search engine marketing and compliance.