Client relationships often lie at the heart of marketing success. However, when you are working in the business-to-business marketing channel, you know all too well how challenging it can be to cultivate and maintain the optimal level of customer engagement.
Failing to provide the kind of personalized, highly interactive service your clients expect and deserve may well cause your company to lose the account and see the brand reputation tarnished. The good news is that B2B marketers now have more and better tools than ever before to help them more effectively manage their workload without sacrificing customer experience.
B2B marketing automation, in fact, can help you provide exceptional customer service while maximizing the efficiency, efficacy and profitability of your marketing campaigns.
AI Applications for Marketing and Sales
No matter whether you are working with consumer or commercial clients, every marketer’s fundamental goal is to understand their client’s specific needs and promote solutions to meet them. This requires a tremendous amount of legwork when it comes both to connecting with new and prospective customers and to leveraging existing accounts.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used to expedite the sales and marketing processes and make them more successful. For example, AI systems can use machine learning to identify client preferences and to auto-generate promotional content targeting the appropriate market segment.
This means you will spend less time researching to find the right product and promotion for the right accounts and more time attending to other essential tasks that simply can’t be automated. For instance, marketing and sales automation are intended to solicit responses from interested clients, producing for you a list of promising leads on which you can follow up to close the deal.
Automated Email Marketing and Direct-Reach Efforts
As has been seen, automated marketing tools help ensure that the right messages get to the right customers in a timely manner and in a personalized form that increases the likelihood of eliciting a response.
These systems allow marketers to set the triggers and define the actions these systems are to automatically take under predetermined conditions. What this means, for example, is that an automated B2B email promotional campaign for the introduction of a new automotive accessory can be programmed to automatically email only existing customers who are known to stock similar products in their retail stores.
This kind of personalization will reduce the amount of irrelevant promotional content customers revive and make it more likely that they will open, review, and respond to your email.
Automated Ads
In addition to automating direct email campaigns, it is also possible to automate online advertising. Once again, AI systems can play a leading role in this through the power of machine learning.
Because AI technologies are capable of collecting and analyzing literally billions of data points in mere seconds, they can be especially useful in automating ads for the purposes of lead generation. For instance, AI can monitor clients’ online platforms to identify interests as well as pain points.
These systems can then unleash the power of machine learning to identify the most effective product, service, advertisement, and channel to reach the target client. Automated ads can then be generated for the target client’s social media, email, and/or text messaging platforms.
Using AI to Collect Marketing Data
As has been seen, AI is perhaps the most potent research tool ever created, and that research capacity can yield immense results when it comes to marketing efficacy. Every professional in the field knows, after all, that the market is always changing. Customers’ needs and expectations are never static and marketing campaigns live or die according to their ability to keep pace both with the industry and with the target audience.
Thanks to AI, marketers no longer have to spend all their time chasing essential data down a perpetual rabbit hole. AI technologies, for instance, aren’t just able to collect and process a seemingly infinite amount of market data in the mere blink of an eye, but they’re also able to use these data to predict future trends, including identifying risks and opportunities.
What this means, ultimately, is that by automating market research, marketers today enjoy unprecedented power to make rapid, evidence-based decisions in response to changing market conditions.
Using AI to Determine Business Needs
The immense research capabilities of AI aren’t just confined to the acquisition and analysis of external data, however. AI is also highly effective in assessing internal data in order to support continuous performance improvement. For example, AI can collect sales data, team performance records, and even marketing campaign data to determine what is working well and what areas require improvement.
AI analytics can even be used to facilitate empathetic sales and marketing strategies. Empathic AI, for example, can help marketers, sales representatives, and customer service professionals understand and effectively respond to clients’ emotional states in real-time. The end result is an enhanced customer experience, improved relationships, and a greater likelihood of completing a sale or capturing or retaining the client.
The Takeaway
Marketing has always been a people-first endeavor. That does not mean, however, that technology has no role. Indeed, by automating your B2B marketing strategy, you may well achieve a level of service, efficacy, and success that you could never before have imagined.
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