AI in B2B marketing can assist firms in identifying their ideal prospects, converting them into leads, and smoothly guiding them through the sales funnel in a faster and more effective manner than traditional processes allow.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has already become an important aspect of modern marketing. However, the most significant advances in AI in marketing have generally been relegated to B2C (business-to-consumer) operations. Because AI’s simple ability to automate monotonous processes has found many applications in B2C endeavors, where scale is the biggest problem, this is the case.
B2B marketing is not the same as B2C marketing, despite the fact that the key parts are the same. As a result, what works for B2C marketing may not work for B2B. This involves the application of artificial intelligence in B2B marketing. This is due to the fact that B2B marketing has a few challenges that are unique to this industry. To address these issues, organizations are turning to Account-based Marketing (ABM), a more personalized approach to generating leads and revenue in the B2B space.
Also Read: The Drawbacks of Adopting Enterprise-Wide Account-Based Marketing
B2B growth through account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is particularly beneficial for businesses that sell high-ticket items and services. As a result, while the work and resources spent per target account can be higher than in traditional B2B strategies, ABM shortens the sales cycle and boosts conversion rates. ABM, on the other hand, is not without its drawbacks.
Challenges in Account-based B2B Marketing
B2B marketing is complicated and difficult in general. Account-based B2B marketing activities, whether tech-driven or not, have additional challenges for the following reasons:
The narrow target audience base
The majority of B2B marketing efforts are focused on hyper-niche markets. The target market for B2B sellers could be as little as a few hundred or as large as a few thousand consumers (companies). Because of its all-or-nothing approach to identified leads, ABM should only be used on leads that can be readily converted and merit a significant marketing effort. Finding such accounts among the plethora of enterprises that now clog every industry is more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
Personalization that is more in-depth is required
Businesses frequently sell to a single person when they sell to an individual customer. Personalization can be difficult even at this size. When a company sells to an enterprise, it’s now selling to the CEO, CFO, procurement department, and a slew of other stakeholders all at once. Each of these stakeholders has various reasons and requirements for purchasing a product in any category. Businesses might envision how tough it will be to tailor their messaging to each and every stakeholder. When a company wants to offer a product or service to an organization, it must consider the demands of all stakeholders. Traditional marketing automation technologies won’t help much in this situation because they just do basic pencil-pushing. Even if they could be utilized for B2B marketing, they would still necessitate a lot of manual labor.
Also Read: Elevating Revenues through Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Tools
Customer touch points have a lot of variability
Another difficulty with account-based marketing is that it necessitates the use of an omnichannel form of communication. Many firms have a multichannel outreach plan, but they do not unify these channels and their data for marketing cohesion. As a result, even when dealing with the same customer, organizations email customer service may be unaware of what their social media support team is up to. The chatbot may be unaware that the consumer with whom it is interacting has already interacted with people at a trade show.
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