dec-2017

6 7 DEC/JAN 2017-2018 Opening Lines B2B MARKETING NOW LEVERAGING THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING I n themidst of a radical revolution in B2Bmarketing the powers that be are officially talking about it.Marketing is nowharnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) andMachine Learning,and in his yearly letter toAmazon shareholders,Amazon CEO,Jeff Bezos,men- tioned the subject twice,referring toAmazonWeb Services (AWS) Amazon’s own SaaS (Software as a Service) offering. Bezos said,“Big trends are not that hard to spot.We’re in themiddle of an obvious one right now: Machine Learning andArtificial Intelligence. Inside AWS,we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers toMachine Learning andAI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.” Ademonstration of AI used in B2Bmarketing applications was recentlyconducted by Unbounce,an SaaS landing page provider.Unbounce issued a challenge at a conference to digital marketers to compete against anAI-based technologycalled“TheMachine.”The challengewas to analyze landing page copy; the contestants were asked to predict whether the landing page copywould deliver an above-or below-average conversion rate.“TheMa- chine”won the contest because,it was assumed,it was conducting its evaluationwith a lack of biases.The humanmarketers,on the other hand,were opinionated on the effects of design and other variables.The algorithmended up demonstrating 80 percent accuracyof prediction, as comparedwith 50 percent by the human contestants. “It is certain thatAI andMLare taking a firmposition in B2Bmar- keting,which I’msurewe’ll seemore of as wemove into 2018,”said KyleTkachuk,CEOof Clickback,an SaaS company that helpsmar- keting and sales professionals accelerate their lead growth using cloud-based B2B lead generation products.“We alreadyutilizeAI ourselves in our ClickbackMAILproduct,and evidence of AI andML is becomingmore andmore prevalent.”ClickbackMAIL,an email lead generation software,allows companies to reliablyemail cold or purchased contacts.Through highlypersonalized campaigns, the product ensures a targetedmessage gets delivered to an actual person.It provides a safe and provenmethod of securing profitable B2B leads tomid-market and enterprise companies. AI can be seen inmanyareas of B2Bmarketing.It focuses on areas such as finding patterns in existing data,appendingmissing information,or auto-populating through algorithms,automating decisions with increasing accuracyand reducing themanual aspects of manydifferent tasks.