The Three Ps of B2B AI Marketing
Thomas Stelter - Strategy @ Zaaz Collective
?As a seasoned B2B strategy and marketing advisor, I've had the privilege of working with some of the world's biggest brands. That's why I know the opportunities presented by AI in our industry are nothing short of mind-blowing. But, as anyone who’s taken the dive to build AI marketing capabilities for their organization knows, finding real value from AI isn’t as easy as firing up a ChatGPT prompt. For some, that can be frustrating. For others, it can lead them to think AI is all unicorns and Utopia. And I can’t blame any of them.
So where do you start??
The promise of AI for B2B sales & marketing professionals can be daunting.
?Stories of AI's potential are everywhere. This company used AI to unlock complex buyer journeys by analyzing massive amounts of data. Another has begun scoring leads in real-time, leading to true predictive analytics for their ABM programs. Why haven’t you started personalizing your content at scale? The tech is ready, why aren’t you? AI brings the promise of unheard-of levels of customer insights, relationship management, always-on compliance, and risk management oversight. AI’s potential becomes both promising and defeating when you’re stuck at a cold start.
In reality, the off-the-shelf AI technologies and processes currently in the market kind of work. AI promises a lot, but the effort of piecemealing the application of AI to an existing tech stack or operational process can be an expensive, messy project. If you don’t establish a comprehensive and actionable AI plan for your team, it will lead each member of your team to use different tools in different ways, leaving a vacuum where best practices and governance should live.
The 3 Ps of B2B AI marketing
The four Ps (product, placement, price, and promotion) are still valuable tools for marketing any offering. But we need a new framework to welcome this new wave of AI technology and help B2B marketers kickstart their AI capabilities.
?I give you the new three Ps of B2B AI marketing: plumbing, pilots, and partnerships.
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#1: Plumbing (Operational Workflows)?
Workflows may not be sexy, but they are the circulatory system of your B2B operations. Every combination of tasks from across your group that results in marketing outputs and decisions is a different workflow (campaign creation, executive thought leadership, event strategy and execution, media buys, marketing segmentation, sales enablement, etc.). Today, most manual processes reek of friction and fallibility. For example, inbound or outbound, SDRs, BDRs, and ADRs subjectively qualify based on patchy data, and in turn, low-scored leads slip through the cracks, leading to nurture campaigns that feel mass-produced. This is a great opportunity for AI to up-level your current operations.
The opportunity here is twofold: 1) a workflow blueprint sets the stage for an assessment to identify gaps, and 2) AI integration provides the most value to the process and the outputs. These workflows can then act as activation plans for bringing AI into your marketing operations and not only codify your best practices but also make the marketing activities more repeatable and efficient, resulting in higher-quality output. A great way to start is by listing out your department’s processes, ranking them by value and potential efficiencies offered by AI tools, and working your way down the list. The result will be a new high-priority list of workflows where your team can find meaningful value using AI.?
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#2: Pilots (Account-Based Marketing)?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a great testing ground for finding new value from AI. While more general marketing tactics usually aim at reaching a wider audience, ABM’s targeted approach opens the doors for bringing in new technology for identifying high-value accounts, segmenting your lists, and designing highly customized campaigns that appeal to key decision-makers. Segmentation and customization are where a practical crawl-walk-run approach shines with the application of AI.
By automating routine (and building to more sophisticated) segmentation and personalization tasks, your marketing team can now craft truly customized messaging that speaks directly to each account's unique pain points and needs. Moreover, AI's iterative nature means your campaigns can constantly evolve. Every new data point feeds back into your system, refining targeting and messaging strategies for the next wave of campaigns. It's like having a real-time learning assistant that ensures you're always improving, never stagnating. This iterative loop helps your team test, tweak, and scale what works, leading to marketing strategies that are as agile as they are precise and integrated with the workflows that are now running more efficiently and effectively (see #1).
Example: Gartner ABM trends for 2024?
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#3: Partnerships (Connecting Marketing & Sales)?
Depending on your company's culture, your sales and marketing teams could be in lockstep or marching in two different directions (probably somewhere in between). AI can better connect sales and marketing by offering insights that match marketing activities with sales objectives. AI-powered tools can streamline the delivery and setup of qualified leads to sales, guaranteeing prompt responses and lowering the risk of losing prospects.?
AI can break down silos between marketing, sales, and customer support by providing a shared source of truth. For instance, predictive analytics can align marketing's account-based strategies with our sales team’s prospecting efforts, ensuring both teams are targeting the same high-potential accounts. If working together on driving more SQLs/MQLs, better understanding attribution, or efforts to drive personalized outreach are on your shortlist, AI tools are a good place for marketing and sales teams to start their AI journeys together.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Marketing’s old promises, rules, and constraints haven't changed for the most part, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use new tools to do them better, faster, and more efficiently. AI is a tool, and tools can be used in good and bad ways. It’s boring to say, but it takes a good plan to find meaningful value from AI in B2B marketing. Our task now is finding a new balance: the art of knowing which tasks can and should be automated or augmented. By codifying workflows, putting AI tools to the test with campaigns with real results, and building bridges between departments, we’ll be better off in a year thanks to AI if we use it in the right ways.
If you’re still not sure where to start or how to begin planning for AI with your B2B marketing organization, drop us a line. We’re here to help.
What do you think? Are there other ways you've gotten your organization out of your AI cold start? Share your experience in the comments.