Generative AI for B2B Brands: What to Know & How to Use It

When we surveyed marketers, 63% said AI was somewhat or much worse at writing than humans.

With results like these, it’s easy to see why some B2B brands are cautious about using generative AI for their own content.

AI can’t create and implement your entire marketing strategy with the push of a button. But you can still get quality results from AI — although the stats above reveal that most marketers struggle to.

So how do some marketers rave about AI, while many have a hard time getting good outputs?

It’s all about what you do with it (and how!) — which is exactly what we’re talking about in this article.

Why Generative AI Is Relevant for B2B Businesses

According to McKinsey’s State of AI in 2023 report, the most common AI users are sales and marketing teams. Generative AI is changing how they run — especially how they streamline their most repetitive tasks. 

That’s because generative AI has great use cases for improving marketing and sales performance, efficiency, process automation, and customer engagement. AI can help create first drafts, personalize your outreach, and even make research faster by summarizing long documents into digestible pieces.

Those can all be time-consuming areas for marketing and salespeople, so the gains they’re making by automating these tasks through AI will ultimately allow them to focus on their most important, creative, and revenue-driving work.

The three top uses for marketing and sales professionals listed above are all great. But there’s even better news: There are so many more ways that you can take advantage of everything AI has to offer.

Addressing Challenges Faced by Marketers in Content Creation

Content creation can be a time-consuming process, and targeted marketing is even more labor-intensive. Fortunately, marketers can benefit from AI in both those areas.

Content creation is full of repetitive, time-consuming tasks. At the same time, marketers are under pressure to produce a high volume of content while maintaining quality. Here are a few issues you might be dealing with yourself that could be made faster using generative AI:

• Analyzing keywords for SEO opportunities
• Understanding target audience sentiment towards your brand
• A/B testing ads
• Repurposing content from one format (like a blog post) to another (LinkedIn post)
• Keeping voice and tone consistent across all platforms and mediums

Marketers also need to be able to target specific audience segments and create content to turn readers into leads.

Fortunately, AI can help with all of that. By automating the most repetitive tasks, helping marketers operate at scale, and improving audience identification and personalization, AI makes marketers more effective and efficient, leaving time for creative and strategic work.

If that’s the world you’d like to live in, let’s walk through how to use AI to solve these issues.    

Leveraging Generative AI for B2B Marketing and Sales Efforts

When we asked marketing professionals if they use AI, almost 85% said that they do. The vast majority of us are all on the same page. But that doesn’t mean we’re all using AI the same way, and there’s a lot we can learn from one another.

So to help out, we’ve broken down some of the most impactful ways you can start using AI today in two key areas: Improving content creation workflows and improving audience targeting and lead generation. 

Improving Content Creation Workflows

Content creation can be faster. AI can automate repetitive tasks and create large amounts of content at scale while maintaining quality.  

Automating repetitive tasks to save time 

When we asked marketers what the biggest benefit of using AI would be, the overwhelming majority gave the same reply: Time savings.

It’s not just us experiencing these results. Deloitte surveyed 2,800 technology leaders, and 56% of them said the key benefit they were hoping to get from generative AI was better productivity and efficiency. So let’s dig into some of the best ways to save time with AI.

Keyword Analysis: AI can play a pivotal role in your keyword analysis. Popular tools like Clearscope also use machine learning to suggest relevant keywords and content optimizations, enhancing search engine rankings organically.

You can input an article into ClearScope, and it will analyze and grade your content to show you what keywords you should add in order for it to outrank competitors.

It’ll even tell you how many times to use each secondary keyword and how important it is for the keyword you’re targeting.

Ad A/B Testing: AI transforms A/B testing by allowing marketers to analyze and optimize ads with precision and speed. Platforms like Google Ads automatically adjust campaigns based on performance, continuously refining ad strategies.

You can even use AI to suggest variations on your ad campaigns to A/B test against the originals with Google Ads. Using the “get help creating your ad” sidebar, select AI-generated headlines and descriptions to test.

That will automatically bring the AI suggestions into the ad group you’ve selected so you can test them alongside each other and your originals.

Audience Sentiment Analysis: AI-driven sentiment analysis is key to understanding audience emotions and preferences. Tools like MonkeyLearn use AI to provide advanced text analysis. This allows you to understand the kinds of messages you’re getting from your audience and respond accordingly.

All you need to do is upload the messages you get (from social media, your help center, or an email address, for example) and let their AI analyze them.

Then, you’ll see each message’s sentiment, sentiment by topic and over time, and other helpful statistics that increase your understanding of how your audience feels toward your company or product, and how you should respond.

Social Media Scheduling: AI enhances social media scheduling by analyzing audience behaviour to determine peak engagement times. Platforms like Sprout Social recommend content optimizations and variations of existing drafts.

For example, you can input one idea for a social media post into Sprout, and it’ll give you variations on the same theme. 

That can save you valuable time by amplifying the power of one good idea into a full social media campaign. You might even find some new ideas from its suggestions.

Content Repurposing: Turning a whitepaper or a blog post into a video used to be a time-consuming and expensive process. Not anymore, thanks to Lumen5, which will do it all for you, using the power of AI. 

Just upload the text content you’re basing the video on, or even easier, paste a link to it into the platform. Then, it’ll automatically pull key phrases from the text and pair them with stock images.

If you want, you can even record your own voiceover and use Lumen5’s music library. The result is a quickly-made, high-quality video based on your text.

Topic Ideation: AI assists in topic ideation through predictive analytics and trend analysis. Tools like Feedly use AI to continuously assess trends, collect new market data published online, track news about competitors, and tell you about new tech developments.

All of that is valuable fodder for your ideation process. For example, if you want the most up-to-date news on how Amazon is using AI, you just select those filters for your AI feed.

You can get even more specific, adding as many filters as you want and specifying what sources you want results from, like research journals or industry publications. By staying on top of trending news and the latest developments, you’ll know exactly what the most topical content is.

Generative AI is already changing marketing workflows by automating and optimizing repetitive processes from keyword analysis to thinking of content ideas. These AI-driven tools enable marketers to focus on creative and strategic tasks, ensuring data-driven decisions and improved productivity.

Generating vast amounts of content at scale

By far, the most common use of AI is content creation. We mean writing the content itself. But you need to be careful to use these tools right, or you risk doing more harm than good.

That’s because poorly written, obviously AI-derived content is more likely to hurt your brand image and not meet the EEAT standards that Google requires for you to rank in the SERPs. You don’t get traffic, you look worse, and you’ve wasted your time. Don’t forget the value of humanizing your brand — relying on AI could do just the opposite.

Instead, here’s how to incorporate AI into your content creation process without making any sacrifices.

Detailed Prompting: One of the keys to creating quality content with AI is the ability to provide detailed, clear prompts. This includes outlining the purpose, target audience, key points, and desired flow of the content. 

For instance, a well-structured prompt for a blog post on “TikTok Ads” could include specific sections like introduction, types of ads, best practices, success metrics, and conclusion, along with style notes on paragraphing, visuals, and links. Here’s an example of one such prompt:

“Write a short blog post about how to make a good TikTok ad. It should include an introduction with an intriguing hook, sections on the types of TikTok ads, best practices when making TikTok ads, what metrics to use to measure your ad’s success, and a conclusion that summarizes key takeaways. Make sure to keep the paragraphs short and readable, and suggest a visual to go along with the piece. You can use information from these links to help: [paste relevant links here].”

Here’s part of the answer it gave to that prompt. It even gave specific data like aspect ratios! (Which we would be sure to double-check!)

That gives the AI a lot more to work with than a simpler prompt like “Write a blog post about how to make a good TikTok ad.”

Preserving Brand Voice and Tone: To ensure the content doesn’t sound AI-written, you should input your brand’s unique voice and tone into the AI’s prompts. You can do this by feeding the AI examples of the brand’s previous content and guidelines on the preferred style, tone, and language. The goal is to train the AI to mimic the brand’s unique voice, ensuring consistency across all content pieces.

Use EmotionPrompts: As we recently detailed on our article about EmotionPrompts, using emotional language helps AI create more nuanced responses . Adding something simple to a prompt like, “Try your very hardest”, encourages the technology to incorporate more emotion into its response, and actually produces better outcomes. 

When using ChatGPT, one research team found that their results improved from 51% accuracy to 63%. Think of your original prompt, and consider what emotional language you could add to it to encourage the AI. 

Continuous Learning and Adaptation: AI tools learn from feedback and iterations. Regularly reviewing and adjusting the AI’s output helps refine its performance, leading to better-quality content. Give feedback on what you liked and didn’t like with each prompt, and make sure to say thank you — it never hurts to be polite.

Combining Human Creativity and AI Efficiency: AI tools can provide a solid foundation for a content piece, but human intervention is crucial for adding creativity, credibility, and a personal touch. Use AI-generated drafts as a starting point and then infuse your expertise, insights, and creativity (and don’t forget to double-check the facts!). This approach ensures the content stands out and provides real value to your audience.

You should always make sure to check the quality of your AI output and put it in the hands of a professional editor before you hit publish. There are still wrinkles in even the best models, and the most effective method to smooth them out is the old-fashioned way: A little bit of elbow grease.

To put it all together, this is what your AI-powered content workflow could look like:

By strategically integrating AI in the content creation process, providing detailed prompts, ensuring brand voice consistency, continuously refining AI output, and combining AI efficiency with human creativity, you can create high-quality content at scale. AI is not a replacement for human creativity but a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can push your content marketing engine into overdrive.

Enhancing Targeting and Lead Generation with Generative AI

AI can also help you identify your target audience and its segments, create specific marketing campaigns for those audience segments, and even generate more personalized content. While the large-scale blog posts we described above are more top-of-funnel marketing efforts, these more targeted efforts can help bring more leads further down the funnel, too.

Using generative AI to identify potential customers and target audiences

One of the most intriguing uses of generative AI is its ability to zero in on potential customers and audience segments. It’s like having a digital detective at your disposal, sifting through mountains of data to uncover the golden nuggets of customer insights. 

Here’s how AI is making this happen:

Data Analysis on Steroids: Think of AI as a supercharged data analyst. It dives into extensive customer data, picking up patterns and preferences that might elude the human eye. This isn’t just about who your customers are but also about predicting what they’ll need next. We’ve had large amounts of marketing data for a long time, but we can use it more precisely than ever before now.

For example, Tableau GPT lets you input a dataset and ask it to create data visualizations based on the data you presented. That visualization can make patterns clear when you might not have noticed them before.

As you can see, you just ask a question about the relevant data, and TableauGPT will answer it with an appropriate visualization.

Pinpointing Audience Segments: With all that data, AI can sort your audience into distinct segments, helping you craft messages that speak directly to each group’s unique needs and interests. 

Tools like Census can plug into your existing data and use AI to work through the information you already have about your customers. Without code¡ing knowledge, you can filter through your audience to see which segments are giving you the most value from your marketing and sales campaigns.

Then, you can create campaigns based on that information, and track their performance with the same tool.

Enhanced Lead Scoring: Lead scoring used to be based on very little data. You’d see factors like what kind of a company someone worked at and their job title, and assign them a score to guess at how valuable a lead they were. AI tools like Enthu are changing all of that.

Enthu listens to your sales calls with AI. It listens to the content of the call, as well as the lead’s voice and tone, to pull personalized information about the lead’s value. After all, if a call goes well, that lead is a lot more valuable. That tells your sales and marketing teams where to focus their efforts.

In essence, generative AI can be a smart, data-savvy partner who analyzes your audience inside out. It helps you target the right people with the right message at the right time. And in the world of B2B marketing, that can be your ticket to the top.

Generating personalized content for different segments

Once you have your audiences, it’s time to use that segmentation. Let’s delve into how generative AI can significantly enhance personalized content creation for your audience segments.

Customizing Content to Audience Preferences: AI’s ability to dissect large volumes of data means it can accurately gauge what topics, formats, and styles resonate best with each segment it built. Whether it’s a blog post, video, or infographic, AI ensures that the content speaks directly to your audience’s preferences. This level of customization is akin to crafting a unique narrative for each segment, increasing the relevance and impact of your content.

Incorporating Content Curation: Beyond creation, generative AI is also revolutionizing content curation. By analyzing vast amounts of text, AI can sift through an ocean of articles, blog posts, and resources to identify those most pertinent and valuable for your audience. 

Curation through tools like Algolia ensures that your content recommendations are relevant and of high quality, providing your audience with insightful and engaging material. Sites like the Financial Times use this to recommend related articles in sections like the one below.

Industry Insights: AI tools can also offer a competitive advantage by analyzing what content performs best in your industry. This helps in understanding not just what your audience wants but also what your competitors are doing right. By leveraging these insights, you can create content that’s not only tailored to your audience but also stands out in the crowded B2B marketplace.

Refining Content with Real-Time Feedback: AI’s real-time analysis capabilities mean that it can continually refine content based on audience feedback and engagement metrics. This iterative process ensures that your content remains dynamic and responsive to the evolving preferences of your target segments.

Using generative AI in your B2B marketing strategy can dramatically change the way you create and curate content. It allows for a deeper, data-driven understanding of your audience, leading to highly personalized and impactful content strategies. With AI, you’re engaging with your audience on a level that’s nuanced, targeted, and perpetually optimized.

Common AI Risks and How to Avoid Them

Like any emerging technology, AI comes with risks. When we surveyed other marketers, here are the ones that were top of mind: 

Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate each of these risks, if you’re careful. False information, by far the most concerning risk for our respondents, is something you need to address with a rigorous fact-checking and editing process. Don’t just trust new facts the AI introduces — confirm you can back them up before you write them down. You can use the same process for catching “hallucinations” when the AI invents a nonexistent fact.

Intellectual property is another major concern. For text-based AI like ChatGPT, use a plagiarism checker to be sure your AI-generated content isn’t too similar to writing that already exists. With image-generating AI, whether the images are copyrightable isn’t clear. However, you can use AI-generated images freely in your own content.

For privacy and cybersecurity concerns, it’s more about what you put into the system than what it gives you back. Be careful about what information you give an AI. Remember that deleting a ChatGPT chat doesn’t delete the information it contains.

Unlock the Power of Generative AI for B2B

If you can use generative AI right, it can change the way you work forever. The trick to tapping into its full potential is figuring out which tasks it can do well, which it struggles with, and where you can save the most time.

One thing’s for sure: Getting the most out of your AI will require using the right prompts. That’s why we built the AI Marketing Console. It’s packed with tried and tested prompts for everything from blog posts to landing pages, making your content creation a lot easier. But here’s the best part: You won’t just churn out content, you’ll create content that hits the mark, content that resonates with your audience because it’s tailored just for them.

So, ready to turn your marketing strategy up a notch? Check out the AI Marketing Console.