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How to Create an Effective AI Marketing Strategy?

Apurva Pathak | December 6, 2021 | 615 views

AI Marketing Strategy

Introduction

The application of AI marketing technology is picking up pace because of its many advantages. According to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% of AI adopters agree that AI will be a part of all their enterprise applications by 2023.

What does an AI-based marketing strategy look like, and how do you make the most of it? This article gets into the nitty-gritty of AI marketing technology and how to implement it in ABM so you can maximize your business performance and outputs.

AI’s Role in Marketing

Thanks to its accuracy, B2C businesses use AI marketing technology to target their customers with product or service recommendations. The following are some use cases of AI-based B2C marketing:

Personalization

AI helps businesses with their 1-to-1 marketing strategies by personalizing their content to cater to every segment.

Event Communication

Emails informing customers of upcoming sales, special access, or exciting offers are sent out via AI technology. Weekend offer emailers, special discount codes, and new product updates are a result of event communication automation so that customers can be informed before time about upcoming events.

Real-time Content

Trending topics, investments, event promotions, webinars, customer feedback, product availability, bestselling combo, weather reports, and new blog post updates are provided in real-time to maintain an active connection with customers.

Businesses do this by using the ‘open time content’ AI technology. Manually executing 1-to-1 marketing strategies is nearly impossible, impractical, and does not see much success. AI helps streamline these strategies and executes them effortlessly.

What Goes into Creating an Effective ABM Strategy?

For an ABM strategy to work, businesses need to follow these steps:

Preparing for the ABM Strategy

Organizational readiness is crucial for implementing ABM. Make sure you have a budget and an achievable timeline to execute the strategy, team members who can anchor it, and an understanding of ABM metrics so you can make the most of it.

Synergy Between Marketing and Sales Teams

Your sales and marketing teams should be in sync and not at loggerheads due to account-level communication issues. Discussing the benefits of ABM with both the teams beforehand and coming to a strategic agreement to implement ABM can help them align their goals while executing the ABM strategy.

Identifying Target Segments

Your ABM strategy can do wonders for your business only if you have a precise segmentation of data. Use dimensions like business size, annual revenue, current spending, projected spending, targeted products, geography, open opportunities, closed opportunities, etc., to identify your target segments.

Zeroing-in on a Priority

Having a clear priority helps you streamline your ABM strategy. It should either be acquisition (acquiring new accounts), retention (retaining existing accounts), or expansion (expanding the scope of accounts). Without a clear priority, any ABM strategy may not yield expected results because the efforts won’t be concentrated towards a single goal.

Leveraging AI in ABM Strategy

In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, founder of Khronos, spoke about AI’s impact on the future of ABM.

“From my perspective, B2B marketers have faced countless challenges that have formed the basis of new technology – problem brings a solution. I expect AI will solve identity resolution, resolve data challenges, and enhance targeting. I expect AI will address 1:1 content at scale, unlocking the rapid deployment of 1:1 brand experiences.”

Introducing AI into your ABM strategy can help you in the following way:

Content Personalization

Once you know your customer’s pain points and interests, you can focus on providing them personalized solutions, products, or services they desire. Of course, personalizing content is complex, but AI makes it easier by offering the technological capacity to deliver what your customer wants.

Efficient Resource Management

Without customer profiling, an ABM strategy cannot achieve the expected output. AI can assist with data crawling the internet to find out important customer information. Also, it segments data acquired from CRM, which gives you more information about a customer than any other generic data. This data is helpful for lead qualification and creating heavily personalized content for a customer.

Since AI does all the heavy lifting, you can allocate your resources to building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.

Automation

AI-based marketing in ABM generates automated insights for lead generation. It also highlights campaign performance related to specific, high-value accounts and suggests steps to engage a prospect.

Digital marketing and automation are a dynamic duo where AI brings about intelligent marketing automation. Efficient email campaigns are run when executed by automation. Email marketing companies like MailChimp target customers based on insights to achieve more conversions. When AI and big data use CRM data, large chunks of user information can be collected from different platforms. This information can help with formulating a successful ABM strategy.

ABM Optimization and Predictive Insights

To analyze intent, AI processes data in real-time and gives predictive insights to help with ABM optimization. As a result, it is easier to merge data from different sources with AI-enabled tools, achieve predictive analysis, manage recommendations in real-time, and understand competitor strategies through social media. AI can also interpret images correctly.

Enhancing Communications

Use AI for building a strong relationship with your customer. Personalizing communication by using customer data can be easily achieved with AI.

What Is the Future of AI-enabled ABM Strategy?

ABM, with an AI marketing strategy, has a bright future ahead of it. Demandbase recently conducted a survey in which they found that 80% of marketers had plans to integrate AI into their ABM marketing strategy. Another survey conducted by MarketingProfs concluded that businesses that used AI in their ABM strategies had 59% higher closing rates as compared to others. They saw a 58% increase in their revenue and a 52% increase in their conversions.

Ways Salesforce's AI Einstein Aided U.S. Bank in Growing Revenue

The U.S. bank used Salesforce’s sales cloud AI, Einstein, to boost their revenue. Their lead conversion rate increased 2.35 times after implementing Einstein. They were able to create a model to predict lead conversion. They did this by using Einstein to search through customized historical lead data.

“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction. What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”

– Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer, U.S. Bank

Summing It Up

AI-based marketing can enhance your ABM strategy only if qualitative data is available. Therefore, businesses will need to have clear marketing goals and turn data into an asset.

FAQs

What are the challenges in the AI-based ABM strategy?

Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging.

How can AI help in strengthening your ABM strategy?

AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion.

What does a strong AI-based ABM strategy do for your business?

A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion.

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95% of Tech Marketers Expect an Increase in their ABM Budgets Over the Next Year

GlobeNewswire | September 29, 2023

Foundry (an IDG, Inc. company) released its third annual 2023 ABM and Intent Benchmarking Study today, which dives into the uses, goals, and challenges of account-based marketing, as well as how intent data is used to fuel ABM programs and the success and challenges tech marketers see with intent. Account-based marketing has taken the B2B marketing world by storm, and the enthusiasm shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, this year’s research found that 96% of tech marketers have a documented ABM strategy and 93% feel that their ABM efforts have been extremely or very successful, which is up from 84% when the study was conducted last year. Here is a closer look at some of the findings from this year’s study: Tactics and tools supporting ABM The landscape for account-based marketing expansion looks promising, as an overwhelming 95% of marketers anticipate that their ABM budgets will increase in the next 12 months. This is a notable uptick from previous years – 90% expected an increase in 2022 and 84% in 2021. Respondents to the survey are using a variety of ABM tactics to support their marketing objectives. These tactics include sales activation/account analytics (cited by 53% of respondents), target-account lead generation (50%), account-based advertising (48%), and content syndication, IP address intelligence, and personalization, all of which are equally cited at 47%. Marketers are also leveraging a mix of tools and channels to support their ABM efforts. Customer marketing (43%) and paid social (40%) are the most widely used resources, followed by content syndication (32%), organic social (28%), and SEO (26%). When it comes to measuring the success of ABM initiatives, marketers use a diverse range of metrics. The top three include customer satisfaction scores (cited by 48%), site visits from target accounts (43%), and revenue generated (40%). Intent data is fueling ABM efforts Another key component of Foundry’s study is the use of intent data with ABM marketers. The research shows that 91% are using intent data/scoring to prioritize their accounts and to identify what content should be served within ABM campaigns. Intent data also plays a key role in identifying target account lists, a practice used by yet another 91% of marketers. Marketers have also extended their use of intent data and are increasing the number of sources they are using, cited by 92%. When it comes to the primary goals of using intent data, marketers are focused on optimizing lead scoring models (cited by 47% of respondents), followed by building audience segments for ad campaigns (43%), identifying new accounts (43%), generating higher quality leads (42%), and monitoring potential customer churn (42%). The goal of any ABM campaign is to generate qualified leads and the survey results indicate a strong correlation between the number of data sources used and lead gen success. About 48% of all marketers said between 11% and 50% of the leads generated from their marketing campaigns become sales-accepted leads and 47% said 51% and 80% are sales-accepted. The challenges ABM marketers face Success isn’t always the case when it comes to marketers and their ABM programs. Only 1% said they don’t experience any challenges with ABM, and the top reported challenges are measuring the success of their programs (35%), attributing the success of the different ABM tactics and channels (34%), and their tech stack being overly complicated (29%). The same sentiment goes for intent. Marketers need help with intent data, specifically with getting their sales teams to trust the intent data quality (49%), measuring the impact of intent data on pipeline (48%), and combining intent from multiple data sources (47%). Ninety-two percent of marketers also cited that it’s important that they know the exact sources of intent data when working with a provider. Just over half of respondents listed criteria for when they chose a data provider, such as: vendor reviews/analyst evaluations (rated as very or somewhat important by 97%), sample data that can be independently validated (97%), and peer recommendations (95%). This research indicates that even as ABM and intent have come mainstream in B2B, marketers are now, more than ever, focused towards measuring the impact of both ABM campaigns and intent data, said Tukan Das, Vice President and Product Manager, Foundry. For more information and to see the full results from the ABM & Intent Benchmarking study, please view the white paper. About the 2023 ABM & Intent Benchmarking Study The 2023 Foundry Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Intent Benchmarking Study was conducted via online questionnaire in August of 2023. 500 total respondents with marketing titles were collected from NA (60%), EMEA (20%) and APAC (20%) regions. 40% of respondents are from the manufacturing (computer-related) industry, 27% are from high tech, and 12% from software/computer services. Others include e-commerce, independent software vendors, telecom carriers, and cloud & DC service providers. Foundry conducted the study to understand the workings of ABM and its evolution and adoption compared to traditional marketing approaches. About Foundry, an IDG Inc. Company Foundry helps companies bring their visions to reality through a combination of media, marketing technologies, and proprietary data on a global scale. Our intent data and martech platforms are powered by data from an owned and operated ecosystem of global editorial brands, awards, and events, all engineered and integrated to drive marketing campaigns for technology companies. Foundry is dedicated to generating and innovating with data, driving demand for technology marketers with 38 offices in global markets. Foundry is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group, Inc. (IDG), the world’s leading tech media, data, research, and marketing services company. To learn more about Foundry, visit www.foundryco.com.

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