GenAI for B2B Marketing: The Opportunity to Innovate
No one can escape the hype, plethora of new tools, methodologies, and applicability to the marketing and sales function. We do not doubt that eventually it will become fully integrated into the way we do business, delivering leaps in efficiency, greater accuracy in targeting and personalization, and a valuable agent for ideation.
At Magnetude, we believe GenAI is so important, that we have made it a corporate initiative to be at the forefront of utilizing GenAI for marketing. We actively track the progress and advancement of the models, investigate new methods and tools, and take a critical look at where and how we can leverage the advances to innovate our business and create bigger impacts for clients.
We are also being realistic and cautious. We are mindful of the potential pitfalls and negative implications to assure GenAI integration will not affect the quality of the work we do for clients, jeopardize their privacy, or generate work that is not based on original thought, plagiarized, biased, not fact-checked, or bereft of value.
Staying on the Forefront of AI in Marketing
Because GenAI capabilities are accelerating rapidly, our entire organization is engaged in understanding the emerging tech and tools that can make our work for clients better and more efficient. We are actively evaluating GenAI use in the following areas:
- Content
- Video & Imagery
- Sales Enablement
- Lead Generation
- Digital: SEO and Paid Media
- CustomGPTs
To ascertain performance and quality, we are actively trialing and testing platforms and capabilities on our firm first before utilizing or recommending a direction for clients. This allows us to ensure the solutions add true and lasting value. Today, the myriad of tools are still siloed – often focused on singular aspects of marketing, but given the acceleration of capabilities, we expect this to change over time.
Has GenAI Actually 'Arrived'?
We can envision the possibilities of GenAI across all B2B marketing disciplines.
However, the technology hasn’t quite ‘arrived’ to meet our demanding standards. AI itself isn’t new, but for GenAI, we believe we will continually discover new ways to let AI help make us better.
AI is already working to automate workflows and marketing software leaders are rapidly adding AI support to platforms. Campaign optimization will take an AI-first approach in the future.
AI is already being used to extract valuable insights from big data enabling predictive analytics and accurate forecasting.
It is a valuable tool for creativity, baseline content outlining, and rapidly advancing in the areas of image generation and video production.
It does require expertise and knowledge of how to craft prompts and refine them. Every day we are looking at new ways to adopt what AI does well to enhance our work.
GenAI & Marketing: Our Hopeful and Pragmatic Outlook
Although marketing is one of the major functional areas where AI can be applied, it’s only in its infancy. AI can be assist with day-to-day operational tasks or be used to facilitate deeper data-driven insights into the company. But it can also be a productivity drain as we try to keep up, experiment with tools and solutions, and dodge pitfalls as we navigate adoption. Human intelligence must be liberally applied, and we hope that doesn’t change. Read our blog for our key predictions and considerations around the use of AI that marketers should keep in mind today.
GenAI in Action
We’ve already had some great wins with AI for marketing – both internally and for our clients. From new tools for ABM (already a 16X ROI) to content ideation & outlining, saving significant time for the heavy lifting to some wonderful imagery – the future looks bright. (Many thanks to DALL-E 3 for all the images on this page.)
The breadth of data and information captured during prospect calls can be translated into a repository of FAQs with the ability to dynamically cover common scenarios like objection handling, streamline sales onboarding, and inform key areas that prospects are challenged by to inform marketing and sales content.
As a certified HubSpot partner, Magnetude is actively testing new GenAI capabilities on the platform. The Content Assistant tools help to increase efficiency and get new ideas for social media posts, marketing emails, and sales outreach.
AI has been helping to build internal process documentation and is being utilized to build an interactive ‘smart’ intranet system to help streamline access and onboarding without having to wade through file after file to find internal documents. Now all you have to do is ask for what you are looking for!
We have been piloting an AI tool designed to facilitate social selling. We’ve been testing for 6 months and have deployed with several clients as well. The tool is already showing a high ROI and hitting some great productivity metrics as well. While still fairly simple, this is a good example of a very specific tool that has been paying dividends.
Helpful Resources for AI in Marketing
We believe AI in Marketing takes a village. Here are some great resources we’ve uncovered as we navigate this never-ending journey:
Marketing AI Institute – The source for all things AI in Marketing, training, events, a great Slack community, and podcast.
Artificial Intelligence News – the latest and greatest happenings.
AI Scout – Updated daily, all kinds of (tested) productivity tools.
Last Week in AI – excellent source for up-to-date info.
There’s an AI for That – round up (exhaustive) for every task and tool.