In the midst of a radical revolution in B2B marketing the powers that be are officially talking about it. Marketing is now harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and in his yearly letter to Amazon shareholders, Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, mentioned the subject twice, referring to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon’s own SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.
Bezos said, “Big trends are not that hard to spot. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to Machine Learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.”
A demonstration of AI used in B2B marketing applications was recently conducted by Unbounce, an SaaS landing page provider. Unbounce issued a challenge at a conference to digital marketers to compete against an AI-based technology called “The Machine.” The challenge was to analyze landing page copy; the contestants were asked to predict whether the landing page copy would deliver an above- or below-average conversion rate. “The Machine” won the contest because, it was assumed, it was conducting its evaluation with a lack of biases. The human marketers, on the other hand, were opinionated on the effects of design and other variables. The algorithm ended up demonstrating 80 percent accuracy of prediction, as compared with 50 percent by the human contestants.
“It is certain that AI and ML are taking a firm position in B2B marketing, which I’m sure we’ll see more of as we move into 2018,” said Kyle Tkachuk, CEO of Clickback, an SaaS company that helps marketing and sales professionals accelerate their lead growth using cloud-based B2B lead generation products. “We already utilize AI ourselves in our Clickback MAIL product, and evidence of AI and ML is becoming more and more prevalent.” Clickback MAIL, an email lead generation software, allows companies to reliably email cold or purchased contacts. Through highly personalized campaigns, the product ensures a targeted message gets delivered to an actual person. It provides a safe and proven method of securing profitable B2B leads to mid-market and enterprise companies.
AI can be seen in many areas of B2B marketing. It focuses on areas such as finding patterns in existing data, appending missing information, or auto-populating through algorithms, automating decisions with increasing accuracy and reducing the manual aspects of many different tasks.
