AI in B2B Marketing: Use Cases, Tools, and Examples

The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI sparked a revolution in the field of technology. Its ripple effects, or waves if you will, could be especially felt by people in marketing. And why not? The conversational AI tool, powered by advanced natural language processing (NLP) models, could perform functions that would otherwise take a marketing team hours if not days.

For instance, it could analyze customer data in minutes, churning out text and simplifying content creation like never before.

Almost a third of B2B marketers are using artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for content marketing, while the same proportion also uses AI for coding, design, marketing automation, and customer support. Furthermore, AI can help optimize the customer experience with personalized product recommendations and content in real-time.

So these are exciting times to be in; an era where you can personalize customer interactions across all touchpoints. However, many marketers have yet to discover the potential of AI in B2B marketing.

Of course, like all technologies, AI marketing tools have their issues but you should still leverage them for business growth. You can adopt AI in your B2B sales strategies, automate repetitive tasks, and boost your return on investment with AI-powered marketing. With its ability to process data, analyze trends, predict customer behavior, and create personas, AI is the best assistive technology marketers could ask for in the world of B2B marketing.

But, what exactly is artificial intelligence?

Simply put, artificial intelligence teaches computers to “think” or perform specific functions like human beings. Machines infused with AI can solve problems that usually require human intelligence – they can analyze complex patterns, make decisions, and understand different languages, code or no code.

AI technology is trained on vast amounts of data to mimic the way the human brain works. This data primarily includes text, audio, and, in some cases, visual information.

Remember those tweets that went viral on X? Or the comment wars under a controversial post on Instagram? Every one of these comments is used to train an AI model. Besides social media, AI and machine learning systems scrap web pages, books, research papers, public records, and other publications to learn how our language works.

Speaking of, machine learning is often used in conjunction with AI.

Yet, they are not the same thing – very closely related, but not the same. ML is a subset of AI, where systems learn from data without being explicitly said or prompted to do so. It’s similar to how humans learn from their experiences. If someone didn’t know fire was hot, they’d touch it, get burned, and learn to avoid it.

This diagram from StackExchange illustrates the point well. Machine learning technologies analyze data from various sources and process it to make smart decisions.

So, while AI is the general definition of intelligent machines, ML makes AI possible, allowing systems to continuously improve over time. Together, ML and AI algorithms can reshape your B2B marketing efforts. Artificial intelligence does the hard labor by processing large customer datasets and ML allows systems to adapt to their environment over time.

For context, suppose you’re running a paid ads campaign.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper AI, and Midjourney can personalize your landing page with great content and visuals. Their in-built machine learning algorithms can refine ad titles, meta descriptions, and page copy depending on factors that drive the most conversions after your campaign goes live.

What Is AI in B2B Marketing?

AI in B2B marketing is all about using artificial intelligence to automate a long list of marketing tasks. It influences data processing, analytics, customer segmentation, persona creation, personalization, content generation, and advertising, among other sales and marketing strategies. AI algorithms provide valuable insights that empower you to make data-driven marketing decisions.

Imagine integrating your CRM data, both online and offline, to create a 360-degree view of each customer — AI makes that possible.

You can segment your prospects according to their demographics, location, goals, shopping preferences, buying habits, and personalities. Once you have segments in place, you can create personalized content, like blog posts, landing pages, PPC ads, and newsletters. Content is not the only thing either; AI-driven social media monitoring tools help you spot trending hashtags, keywords, and brand mentions.

In account-based marketing, marketers can further identify which leads are convertible, manage lead nurturing, and optimize email subject lines, sequences, CTAs, and send times.

According to a McKinsey report, AI tools are commonly used in marketing and sales, followed by product development and service operations. Their uses, as you can see, are mostly limited to creating first drafts and summarizing text documents. Similarly in product development, AI marketing tools are used to generate product designs as per business needs.

It just goes to show that many businesses are already using AI features in their marketing campaigns, whether it is to create content or develop new products. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey, 65 percent of respondents state that their organizations are regularly using AI. Marketing and sales teams are now prioritizing AI and machine learning in their tech stack and carving out a place for it in their budgets.

Yet, there’s still a huge disconnect between the promising statistics on paper and B2B marketing use cases in real life. The reasons are many, starting with the validity of AI-generated data and extending to copyright concerns.

How to Use AI in B2B Marketing: 8 Ideas & Techniques

Marketers can do so much more with AI tools than they ever imagined. As such, AI use cases in B2B marketing are many. With AI, you can do away with mundane and time-consuming tasks like data cleanups, social media scheduling, lead qualification, and responding to every comment on LinkedIn or Instagram. It’s not only faster but also consistent.

AI and data-driven solutions go beyond traditional marketing activities, focusing on audience targeting, lead generation, and personalization.

The best thing about AI is that it helps you spot who your buyers are, what they are looking for, and how they got to you. This information greatly helps in the B2B buying process, since you have to deal with multiple stakeholders and decision-makers in the company.

However, set clear objectives and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) before you take up any projects. This will ensure you don’t waste company resources and focus on the right goals. That said, here are nine ways to make efficient but effective use of AI in your B2B marketing plans.

1. Get a 360-degree view of your customers

Now here’s the thing. Customers interact and connect with your brand in multiple ways. They might have found you on Instagram, clicked a search ad on Google, or seen a billboard in Times Square. As a business, you need to know and collect online and offline customer data to get a 360-degree view of your customers. But how do you gather data from so many different sources?

After all, you have to look at website data, social media, ad metrics, CRM, ratings, reviews, behavioral analytics, Point of Sale (POS) data, and more – it’s a major area where AI can help.

Think about it.

Artificial intelligence has extensive data collection and processing capabilities. It can structure unstructured data and uncover insights, patterns, and preferences that impact your B2B marketing plans. You feed it a ton of random information about different people and it can segment them into groups based on important factors. Even if you don’t have readily available data, you can always send emails, surveys, and questionnaires to capture customer information.

What next? Pick a segment and set up personalized marketing campaigns or ads to generate maximum value.

2. Do customer segmentation in the AI way

Customer segmentation is a way to divide your customers into groups based on shared characteristics. It helps you understand who your audience is. The aim is to connect with high-value, or sometimes problematic segments, and increase the value of each individual to the brand. It’s a tough job, especially in the B2B space since you have so many decision-makers involved from the start to the end of the customer journey.

AI can do it for you quite easily.

It can create data-driven customer segments according to your marketing needs. Once you have audience segments in place, you can build AI-powered customer personas.

Delve AI’s AI Persona Generator creates personas for your business by analyzing your first-party and second-party data, then enriching it with over forty public data sources like customer reviews, ratings, feedback, forums, online communities, and news. Your B2B customers are automatically segmented into desirable – multi-goal converters, and non-desirable segments – passive browsers and bouncers.

You can use both types of buyer profiles to optimize your messaging and improve audience targeting. Each persona details demographic elements, goals, challenges, interests, content preferences, information sources, and influencer entities.

The value of identifying the right customer cannot be overstated. You can develop personalized PPC, content, and sales tactics for converting customer groups and meet them across all touchpoints. It means less money spent on ads, a higher return on ad spend, and increased customer lifetime value.

3. Create marketing content for every channel

One thing that AI marketing tools are known for, is their ability to generate content – all types of marketing content. Take your blogs, emails, ad copies, video scripts, ebooks, or social posts. And you know what? That’s not all. Besides creating text from scratch, they can even refine your existing content!

Personalization is the key to everything these days. 89% of marketers see a positive ROI with personalized marketing campaigns.

So personalizing B2B content and interactions across all channels – online or offline – is critical to business success. AI can be your best friend from start to finish. Use it to identify consumer habits, get new content ideas, analyze competitors’ keyword strategies, and write an amazing blog article.

Anyone can create marketing materials using the right prompts.

However, before you go away from manual to artificial intelligence, keep one thing in mind. ChatGPT should only be used as an assistant in your content creation process. It’s an aide and must be treated as one because even though it’s fast, ChatGPT lacks the quality and expertise needed to connect with a human audience.

B2B marketers must ensure content quality and always cross-check AI-generated content with facts and experts.

SEO is an important element of a content marketing strategy. It’s one of the only ways we to remain visible in a highly competitive market. But SEO is tough. Can we ignore it? Not really. However, many AI-powered SEO tools are here to make our lives slightly easier.

Here’s how these tools can improve your SEO game:

• Find keywords based on your ideal topics and industry.
• Spot opportunities to optimize existing content.
• Detect technical issues, such as broken links, to enhance site performance.
• Discover guest posting and link-building ideas to improve domain authority.

Delve AI’s SEO Advisor, under Advisor by Delve AI, is an AI tool that can help you find guest posting opportunities according to your industry domain and customers. It presents a detailed list of blogs that accept guest posts, sorts them by domain authority and traffic, and produces Suggested Topics and Related Questions for content production.

Standing out from the crowd is the first step to getting a customer’s attention. You need interactive content to keep them engaged on your website. Make your marketing interactive by adding smart forms, quizzes, or interactive demo videos before you convince a person to buy your product.

Don’t keep it limited to landing pages – use Instagram quizzes and LinkedIn polls to generate more leads. The more you personalize, the better it is for your customers.

You can also repurpose content with AI. It’s not a quick process manually but with artificial intelligence, you can turn infographics into educational videos, podcasts into industry articles, and old blogs into social media posts and LinkedIn Pulse articles.

All you need is a good AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Copy AI – they’ll pick out the best part of your content to be repurposed. Look at the example below.

AI’s ability to repurpose content helps extend the lifespan of that written piece of work. One well-researched article can transform into social posts, ebooks, short videos, and infographics that can be pushed on different marketing channels. Your customer doesn’t like reading? Just show them a video.

AI can and will create, repurpose, automate, scale, and fine-tune your content marketing strategies. Like all good things, it will need a bit of experimentation and patience on your part to get right, but it’s all worth it in the end.

4. Personalize your customer journeys

We know that AI-driven tools save time on the content side of things. Yet, they also help you offer prospects tailored experiences throughout the customer journey. Before you could tailor individual customer experiences at most, but now you can personalize entire journeys and life cycles by taking their history, complaints, and transactions into account.

With advanced capabilities to recognize patterns and learn from interactions, AI can create journeys tailored to your target audience, their interests, location, activities, and more.

It will identify the WHO, answer the WHY, and give them the WHAT that they want. AI customer journeys are further enhanced with artificial intelligence and machine learning systems to aid every customer interaction, right from the awareness to the post-purchase stage. It reels potential customers with customized ads, dynamic content, and virtual assistants especially programmed for them.

Additional data – emotion and sentiment analysis data – can be used to inform and humanize the entire process.

5. Give offers and recommendations in real-time

A person jumps through multiple channels before they decide to purchase a product. Sometimes, you cannot figure out what the buyer wants – AI eliminates this mystery. It analyzes their online and offline activities, along with customer intent data to deliver the right content, offers, or product recommendations at the right time.

You can upsell and cross-sell solutions or product features with ease, and introduce dynamic pricing and promotional discounts depending on your objectives.

AI evaluates your target audience’s online behavioral activities and purchase patterns to pinpoint where you’re most likely to find them. You can find the best channels for ad placement and make the best out of programmatic advertising, ensuring that your ads reach people in the right place. Marketing automation takes care of the rest – it will deliver timely messages across these channels, increasing experience, engagement, and conversion rates.

The Amanda Foundation used programmatic ads to increase animal adoption by targeting user hobbies and personality traits.

Another example is The Economist, which launched a programmatic ad campaign called “Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions” to increase their subscription rates.

AI also offers real-time suggestions for improving your ad campaigns. This enables you to refine marketing assets, adjust ad bidding, and ultimately reach a broader audience. Supporting this, the State of Programmatic Advertising survey found that 70% of marketers reported success with their programmatic ad campaigns, with 23% describing their campaigns as highly successful.

6. Leverage predictive analytics and lead scoring

Tools powered by AI analyze historical data to predict market performance, demands, and behaviors that can potentially affect your business growth. It’s obvious, they would be a great aid in the B2B sales funnel. Some of these tools can automatically segment lead data, remove duplicate entries, systemize data formats, and add missing information.

They can automatically organize leads according to your target persona, identify buying intent, and guide you toward promising prospects. You can then plan a strategy, allocate monetary resources, and set realistic sales targets. What’s interesting is that AI can track leads through the sales funnel. Once you know where they are in the journey, you can pinpoint drop-off points and double down on your organic and paid media efforts.

Ad platforms like Google let you create look-alike audiences based on your best customer segments, enabling you to reach the right people. Salesforce's Einstein AI offers predictive lead scoring, showing which leads are most likely to convert, so you can direct your efforts to high-value clients.

AI’s predictive analytics capabilities are a huge asset for sales teams, empowering them to customize their pitches, follow-up strategies, and messaging at the personal level.

7. Scale conversational marketing with AI capabilities

Conversational AI chatbots are a boon to B2B marketing since no one wants to spend time talking to customer support if they can help it. They want chatbots that can answer their questions quickly and effectively. We are not just talking about bots trained to answer a couple of questions but humanized tools that respond to customers in the language and tone they prefer.

Drift’s conversational AI chatbots engage website visitors with personalized messages and interactions; sharing helpful information, capturing contact details, and scheduling demos and meetings.

You can additionally program chatbots to ask questions or give out suggestions when visitors reach a certain section of your product or blog page. For instance, if a passive browser is spending a lot of time on a product or feature page, conversational AI agents can recommend content that helps them learn about the product in detail.

It’s the best way to engage visitors, convert them into buyers, sell a product, and get positive ratings and referrals by providing a hassle-free post-purchase experience.

8. Maximize marketing communications and event ROI

Everybody knows the value of event marketing in the B2B world. It provides an opportunity for companies to collaborate with, inspire, and present their products or services in the industry. However, the current adoption of AI in B2B event marketing is low.

According to Forrester, “87% of marketers say they’re in learning mode… but... believe that AI will fundamentally transform how they plan and execute events within the next 24 months.” A significant 63% admit to not maximizing the value of event content, with large enterprises reporting an even higher rate of 72%. It's strange, considering that AI can extend the lifespan of their event content, which often goes to waste once the event is over.

Essentially, AI can be leveraged in all three phases of event marketing.

• Simplifies event targeting and content creation with predictive analytics and attendee data.
• Offers customized event journeys – with captions and translations – for more inclusive experiences.
• Elongates the life of marketing assets by repurposing them, and making them accessible to a wider audience.

AI delivers personalized, digital experiences to those who attend B2B events, thus boosting team productivity, attendee experiences, and event success.

Top AI Tools For B2B Marketers

You've likely used at least one AI tool in your B2B marketing endeavors. Rest assured, there are many more in the market. Before jumping into new tools, ensure they align with your current needs and future plans.

That said, Delve AI’s persona-based marketing software can be an all-in-one solution for your marketing problems.

Our persona generator lets you create B2B marketing personas using AI and machine learning technology. As explained earlier, our tool takes your first-party (website analytics and CRM) and second-party data (social and competitor intelligence) and then combines it with public data to generate personas for your business.

You can create website, customer, social, and competitor personas depending on your objectives and data availability.

B2B personas are highlighted in green and include details like user demographics, job profiles, goals, challenges, communication channels, preferences, hobbies, and interests. You also get industry-specific insights with relevant keywords. The DISTRIBUTION tab breaks down the overall segment by age, gender, location, actions, and decision-making stage.

For better targeting, you can apply filters to create B2B personas based on specific products, locations, channels, or social networks. Once you’ve spotted the differences between transacting and non-transacting buyer segments, you can uncover new keywords and content ideas to boost conversions.

B2B personas come with three additional features critical for marketing and sales: Visit alerts, lead prioritization, and organization journeys.

Powered by visitor de-anonymization and organization tracking, visit alerts send real-time notifications via email or Slack whenever a company matching your target persona visits the company website. It provides the following information:

• Organization name
• Marketing channel
• Geographic location
• Industry
• Devices type
• Landing and follow-up pages

These organizations are automatically classified into business prospects, competitors, investors, partners, job seekers, press, and service providers. You can find them on the Leads page, which displays basic company data, date and time of visit, and search intent.

The dashboard further shows organizational journeys – the number of sessions, page views, and conversions, along with where they are in the decision phase. Your marketing personas are updated monthly, while lead data is refreshed daily and summarized in a weekly email report.

The Future of AI Marketing Solutions

The successful implementation of AI in B2B marketing is not a one-man job. It requires every stakeholder and department within the organization to work together and discuss the role that AI will play in facilitating optimal customer interactions. This includes people in HR, legal, IT, marketing, sales, product, and customer service – teams with different interests and liabilities.

Responsible use of AI is a must. Marketing leaders must identify the right tools in B2B marketing and train employees with the skills needed to make the best use of AI technologies.

Bring in marketing automation specialists, prompt engineers, and data scientists. They will help you automate different marketing processes, from data analytics to predictive modeling. Adopting AI at the enterprise level won’t be easy, but you can always learn from your mistakes. Don’t give up if you don’t see quantifiable results right away — most initiatives rarely succeed on the first try.

AI is transforming B2B marketing. But don’t worry; have your machines work alongside your marketers, and you'll be good to go!