How 9 Marketers are using AI to power their ABM programs
Artificial Intelligence (AI) - a term that conjures up images of futuristic technology, self-driving cars, and robotic automation - isn't just a concept for the next Tom Cruise film.
The genesis of AI dates back to the 1950s and made silent and significant growth throughout the following decades. AI made the headlines when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat world chess champion, Garry Kasparov in 1997.
More recently, AI has made huge strides thanks to a technique called deep learning. This technique uses artificial neural networks to learn and process information. It has led to significant advancements in speech recognition, image analysis, and language understanding.
In 2018, OpenAI introduced a powerful AI model called GPT, which could generate human-like text. Then, in 2020, they released GPT-3, which took AI to new levels. It could have conversations, answer questions, and generate coherent text across many topics.
Today, the word ‘AI’ has become synonymous with the transformative power of technology. Andrew Ng, a pioneer in the field, likens AI to "the new electricity", omnipresent and powering almost every aspect of our lives.
AI is a broad field with several subsets, including Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Generative AI (GenAI).
ML is a system where algorithms learn from data, improving their performance without being explicitly programmed to do so.
NLP, on the other hand, deals with the interaction between computers and human language. It's about understanding, interpreting, and generating human language in a valuable way.
GenAI, the youngest of these subsets and the one grabbing all the headlines right now, involves models trained on extensive bodies of text to generate language, similar to the world's most powerful autocomplete.
Traditional sales and marketing models have been upended by the digital transformation we have all witnessed over the last decade or more.
Today's buyers are informed and tech-savvy, with most of their buying journey completed without the direct involvement of Sales. [We talk about this more in this edition of DashDot 👇].
It’s now no longer about educating buyers but rather about helping them to make sense of the choices.
In this context, AI serves as a tool that can reshape the buyer's journey and improve how Marketers target and engage with their audiences. AI can help B2B Marketers, among many things, understand their customers (current and future) better, deliver more personalized content, predict buyer behavior, and ultimately make more informed decisions.
With GenAI, marketing content can be generated automatically, significantly reducing the time spent on creating content (note: editing still required) and allowing Marketers to free up valuable time to scale their efforts.
There’s much to be said about the value of human ingenuity, creativity, empathy, context, and critical thinking that AI tools haven’t mastered to this point and will never replicate in a ‘perfectly’ human way.
Moreover, AI tools can enhance ABM strategies, enabling a more targeted and efficient approach in reaching out to your key accounts.
As the landscape becomes increasingly competitive, the ability to harness the power of AI will determine a company's ability to stand out and successfully engage with its customers.
AI, in all its various forms, is not just an optional add-on to our B2B marketing toolkit; it's an essential component.
The challenge, and opportunity, lie in understanding and leveraging its potential to transform your marketing efforts and drive business success.
But the question with Account-based Marketing is what is the one compelling reason why Artificial Intelligence will change ABM forever.
And the answer perhaps is the unprecedented level of hyper-personalization it will bring to ABM.
With AI's advanced data processing and learning capabilities, businesses can provide highly personalized content, messaging, and interactions to each account - at scale.
This will not only enhance the buyer experience significantly but also increase all the key ABM metrics - sales cycle shortened, Average Order Value, retention rates, NPS, etc.
For many of us, we are finding our way with AI tools such as ChatGPT. We’re experimenting, trying out ideas, and deploying them when the results warrant them.
We’ve asked some of our team and some of our ABM friends for an insight into how they are using Artificial Intelligence tools.
We hope these use cases inspire you to explore this theme more in your B2B Marketing and ABM campaigns.
The main tool I've leveraged is ChatGPT. It's my preferred choice due to its flexibility and superior answers. The progress between GPT-3 and GPT-4 has been particularly notable. Remember, prompting is the key to effective use.
AI has been instrumental in taking messy, unstructured data, sorting it, and analyzing it. For instance, I used it to create a brief on a contact for the Sales team by scraping all data from the contact’s LinkedIn page. ChatGPT was then used to structure this information into a spreadsheet format.
With the help of web plug-ins, I prompted AI to act like a leading research firm, analyzing news, investor relations, and other relevant account documents, much as a salesperson would. It’s important to note that the current capabilities don't match human depth of research, and it struggles with tasks like clicking on links. However, it's easy to envision substantial improvements in the coming years.
c) Copywriting
AI has been applied to virtually every aspect of copywriting; from drafting emails to creating ads and landing page content. AI is a fantastic resource for inspiration or drafting an initial copy. However, I wouldn't use AI-generated versions as final copies without adding a personal touch.
Data Management: Assists with statistical data handling, computations, and structuring data into tables.
Research: Analyses news articles for sentiment and summarizes them into two-three key takeaways.
Trend Analysis: Identifies key trends and how they impact specific accounts, acting as a brainstorming tool/sounding board.
Message Personalisation: Refines internal client messaging to cater to specific personas - e.g., "Can you restructure this to highlight what the sales team care about"
Meeting Documentation: Takes notes during meetings.
Action Summaries: Provides automated summaries of key actions and questions.
We’ve belabored the point that B2B is not boring 2 boring, it’s human 2 human and that’s where the real artistry of an account-based program lies. That said, I’m a technologist at heart, of course, I've leveraged the latest hot tool in tech and mined it for ABM gold and here’s how:
I've made use of ChatGPT, a hot tech tool, to mine ABM gold. As a strategist more than a copywriter, I found ChatGPT invaluable for quick content creation and brainstorming.
As one gets better at effective prompting, ChatGPT offers substantial time-saving by bypassing the initial phase of writer's block. It serves as an excellent starting point that can be further refined with creativity, context, and humanity. ABM, particularly at a 1:1 level, requires a lot of content, and tools like ChatGPT allow for significant content creation scale. For example, uploading an existing piece of content and asking for versions for specific industries, personas, or individual company applications.
In the paid tool space, I’ve been using Cody AI. Unlike ChatGPT, Cody ingests specific domains, URLs, and uploaded content in real-time to generate responses. You're not getting generic best practice information, but answers from your own library of content on your site. I've created a "Taylor" bot with Cody that references content I’ve personally written or transcripts from talks and webinars I’ve produced.
Now, instead of asking the broader internet about brand-specific topics, creators can build individual bots full of knowledge and POVs from their own thought leaders. I see great value in this for sales and success teams for account research and internal knowledge transfer processes.
AI tools can instantly answer questions about the accounts you want to target, such as their business, competitors, customers, strengths, and weaknesses. It can even generate context-specific value propositions for personalized outreach with significantly less individual research.
For sales, this increased relevance is increasing engagement and response rates on human-led outreach. For customer success teams, this helps quickly understand a new customer's market position to better apply our value to their specific needs, thereby building a trusted partner relationship.
He's challenging ChatGPT to a brainstorming duel, throwing creative briefs at it and seeing what novel ideas it can volley back. It's a thrilling match of man versus machine in the arena of imagination!
James is about to embark on a journey of discovery with Midjourney. He's intrigued to see how effectively this tool can craft key visuals or whip up pieces of ad creative. It's an exploration that could redefine the role of AI in his creative process.
We've launched a small campaign pilot.
The goal is to see how fast we can get a multi-channel campaign off the ground, helping alleviate the bandwidth constraints on our content and design teams.
We're using ChatGPT for creating copy.
ChatGPT is being used for copy and flow, complemented by an in-platform AI option.
ChatGPT again comes into play for creating ad copy and in-creative copy.
We don't have the results yet, but we've already seen substantial time savings in drafting the email and ad copy.
Using ChatGPT-4, he takes simple bullet points or notes and lets the AI weave them into a cohesive and well-structured document, turning raw thoughts into polished prose.
With the 'Show me' plugin, Craig effortlessly converts text into flowcharts. This allows him to visualize complex ideas and processes, making them easy to understand and share.
By using the 'Ask your PDF' plugin, Craig can efficiently interrogate PDFs, tapping into the rich information often locked away in these files. It's like having a personal research assistant at his fingertips.
I'd like to shine a light on a xiQ, a platform that's not in every AI conversation but has enormous potential. We're in the process of testing it at Autodesk.
The beauty of xiQ lies in its appeal to both worlds crucial to ABM - Marketing and Sales. It bridges a gap often left unfilled in scaled marketing and ABM ventures.
Customized Communication: All the information gathered can be harnessed to create individualized and scalable communication strategies.
AI-Supported Micro-Targeting: xiQ leverages AI to target based on personality profiles - considering both your personality and that of your target individual.
From my perspective, it's a very innovative tool that deserves to be part of your AI toolkit.
He uses AI tools like Adobe Firefly and Toma to help visualize his creative ideas. These applications translate his ideas into mood boards and images, enabling him to see his concepts come to life.
AI is integral in crafting content. Tools such as Synthesia and Runway speed up the creation process while maintaining high-quality output.
AI tools are leveraged to create visually stunning campaigns. These campaigns are not only appealing but are also highly targeted and effective.
Through AI, Michael can personalize campaigns to an unprecedented degree. Midjourney and other AI tools allow for a degree of personalization that's unmatched, resulting in more meaningful and impactful communications.
Fes employs AI to review pipeline and forecast calculations, transforming raw data into golden insights.
Fes deploys AI as his personal Sherlock Holmes, digging deep into accounts and unearthing crucial information.
He's using AI as his linguistic co-pilot, crafting follow-up messages that make that connection.
As we continue to integrate AI into our marketing and ABM strategies, we've found these tools not to replace human creativity, but to augment it.
They free us from the more tedious, time-consuming aspects of our work and enable us to focus on the areas where our human skills truly shine - strategy, empathy, emotion, context, and critical thinking.
While AI is not, and never will be, perfectly human, it is an invaluable ally in our mission to deliver high-quality, targeted, and efficient ABM strategies.
As we explore these tools further, we are excited to see how they will continue to evolve and reshape our industry.
The future of ABM, it appears, will be increasingly powered by AI, and we're eager to be at the forefront of that revolution.
