Applied Conversational AI in B2B Marketing Automation

I’ve researched the advancement of marketing automation systems. I’m very encouraged by the latest developments in system capabilities that will transform go-to-market (GTM) initiatives.

There are numerous strategic and tactical benefits to adopting the latest capabilities.

By improving market requirement research, and generating more personalized content, new systems can help marketing organizations save time and money, improve GTM planning, automate routine tasks, and build stronger relationships with customer decision-makers.

Evolution of Digital Marketing Automation

Marketing is fundamentally about connecting and communicating with people. And nothing enables that like the power of natural language. That’s why Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities are essential to digital marketing transformation.

By enabling AI systems to understand nuance, generate text, and engage in dialogue, NLP will make conversational interfaces essential for use cases in B2B product marketing organizations.

NLP Continues the Pace of Progress

The adoption of NLP has driven astonishing AI progress, thanks to neural networks and vast datasets. Capabilities such as language translation, sentiment analysis, and topic extraction are commonplace. These capabilities augment the skills and experience of commercial marketing practitioners.

New AI transformer architectures, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, point to a future where Generative AI (GenAI) can create human-like textual narratives for business applications.

The three key areas where NLP is actionable:

• Language Understanding: NLP models can now parse semantics, situational context, and the relationships between words with increasing sophistication. This allows accurate extraction of meaning and intent.
• Text Generation: GenAI can generate natural language output for a diverse range of writing styles and applications, based on prompt designs. GenAI’s narrative quality resembles human author skills.
• Dialog Systems: Chatbots and virtual assistants are approaching the fluidity of human conversations through improvements in dialogue management and response generation. These inter-connected NLP abilities will enable transformative changes in marketing.

Personalized Content Powered by NLP

One major impact will be the development of interactive content experiences. NLP will enable marketers to understand buyer needs and interests from their online footprint and interactions.

GenAI copywriters can then create first drafts of customized landing pages, email templates, and product descriptions, tailored to each buyer archetype and individual decision-makers.

These commercial narratives will resonate more when they reflect the buyer’s preferences. And with two-way conversations, decision-makers can ask questions and get answers generated on-demand — either without a salesperson involved, or augmented by human expert assistance.

This level of personalization at scale is possible with AI and NLP-enabled marketing automation. Industry-specific content is going to become much more prevalent in solution business case proposals.

Guidance and Recommendations

We’ll also see actionable information and recommendations that customers can converse with using natural language. For example, a chatbot could engage a customer by asking about anticipated business outcomes, and offer product suggestions tailored to the buyer’s needs.

These conversational systems can now interpret the buyer’s complex questions and provide relevant guidance. This replaces one-way, static messaging with a dialogue. And, by analyzing the conversations, marketers gain valuable insights into what people really want to know.

Immersive Content Experiences

In the near future, NLP and GenAI could enable even more immersive content experiences. For example, interactive case studies where buyers can input text to explore the use case details. Or, AI-driven presenters within videos and virtual worlds that engage with buyers directly.

These immersive experiences will be able to drive engagement far better than passive content. And many will be empowered by NLP to handle the vast potential range of natural interactions.

Augmenting GTM Workflows

However, there are also organizational challenges to overcome. Many vendor product marketing teams will need to redefine GTM processes and related workflows to integrate NLP most effectively.

Moreover, the adoption of GenAI systems could modernize human roles and responsibilities. Prior obsolete approaches must be discarded.

This is essential for legacy product marketing organizations that are still product-centered (instead, modern GTM is customer-centered).

With change management and training, B2B marketing staff at all levels can potentially be augmented by NLP-powered capabilities. That said, failure to provide 1-on-1 employee skills coaching in both sales and marketing could undermine the desired transformation results.

B2B Digital Marketing Outlook

Forward-looking IT vendors are eager to embrace conversational interfaces powered by NLP. They seek to provide their stakeholders with responsive, personalized, and inherently more valuable user experiences.

And, they want to simplify and enrich product marketers’ day-to-day work via GenAI augmentation. This is digital transformation in action.

GenAI marks the next significant era of digital marketing innovation. I believe savvy leaders who choose to leverage it effectively will have a substantial competitive advantage as capabilities continue to improve.

My Conversational AI Experience

I’m actively involved in Applied Conversational AI use case research. My study focus is the meaningful and substantive applications that will enable marketing and sales leaders to fuel net-new digital growth.

I’m now exploring how the various GenAI tools can help to enable more critical thinking of prior B2B SaaS market development methods.

In the past, I’ve created new training materials and offered coaching to encourage sales AEs and product marketers to abandon product-centered narratives that fail to help buyers decide. Those efforts often produced limited results. Therefore, I’m now considering alternative approaches to my organizational change management initiatives.

I believe that GenAI tools are easier to train than humans. They also don’t resist GTM change. This is fundamental to my enlightenment.

My Conversational AI Assessment

The following trends are for the business-to-business enterprise software marketplace. In my opinion, they are now inevitable.

1. Buyer Enablement: self-directed buyers will benefit the most from GenAI apps. Prior market research validates this trend.
2. Sales Enablement: some B2B SaaS vendors will advance past their peer group. This is secondary to the LoB buyer benefits.
3. Customer Success: SaaS user adoption and consumption is an untapped opportunity. Vendor professional services must evolve.

Note: Prompt Design skills are crucial for obtaining desired outputs, and avoiding bias or misleading information from GenAI apps. Writing well structured prompts is therefore an essential skill to ensure accurate, high quality responses from large language models.

I’ve included my GenAI Prompt Tutor for a step-by-step guide on how to design prompts as a B2B SaaS product marketing practitioner.

Read my prior article: “Secure AI: Movement Marketing in Action”