AI in B2B Marketing: Benefits, Challenges, & Best Practices

Robots once felt like something from a far-off future, when humans might zip from place to place in a spacecraft instead of cars.

In Pixar’s WALL-E, we’re introduced to a world abandoned due to years of pollution and excessive waste. WALL-E and his soon-to-be love interest, EVE, set out on a mission to search for signs of plant life. Their adventure includes environmental stewardship, technology, love, and what it means to be a human.

While WALL-E and EVE are firmly rooted in the world of science fiction, we're getting closer each day to robot counterparts becoming the norm. And their journey couldn’t be any more pertinent. While AI is becoming a part of everyday life, as creators, we have to remember that AI can be a helpful tool, but it can’t replace the creativity, judgment, and expertise of a human writer.

If you’ve done a Google search for outsourced writing services or working with a content marketing agency, you’ve come across news stories and ads for AI, boasting of its ability to get content out faster.

For any company looking to gain ground on the internet via a robust content marketing strategy, these ads are hard to ignore. Who wouldn’t want to dominate search engine rankings with a robot assistant doing all the hard work? 

The reality is that AI-generated content isn’t perfect, and it certainly isn’t hands-off 

However, AI can certainly support a human in content creation.  

What Is AI in B2B Marketing?

Truth be told, automation is probably already all around your sales and marketing processes, either at work or in your personal life.

Website chat windows solve simple FAQs that would be a waste of Customer Service's time. Automated email sequences kick off the moment a lead downloads an e-book or shares its email address at a trade show booth.

AI-assisted content is a mushroom cloud-sized explosion of these concepts.

The most common tool in B2B AI marketing is the conversational chatbot (see: ChatGPT). The software uses machine learning to respond to pretty much any question or directive you give it.

They work like this:

1. You type a prompt into the software.
2. It creates an output based on its pre-studied knowledge of billions of web-published pages. (Some AIs can also perform web searches to find new information.)
3. You iterate (as necessary) with more prompts until you're happy with the output detail, quality, and style.

GPT-style AI is more than a search engine. It understands the intent behind your questions and can generate a detailed, conversational response. However, you should think of it as a smart assistant that helps you get started, rather than providing the final answer. 

(DYK? By clicking on CAPTCHA login checkpoints that say "find the images containing stop signs," you've helped AI learn.)

What AI Does Best in B2B Marketing

So what can AI in B2B marketing and content production do? 

Plenty.

Like most automation, robot-written and -strategized content has a few selling points that are hard to argue:

• Helps produce content faster 
• Explores any topic in seconds
• Never clocks out, making it a valuable tool 24/7

Here are the biggest use cases for AI in inbound marketing:

• AI can save content production time – Need marketing quick wins? If your prompts are clear and thorough, AI will cut down the time it takes to write content. You can also use it for repurposing – for example, feeding it your finished blog post and asking it to create social media posts promoting it. Any time saved is time you can use to add polish or simply keep up with your demanding schedule.

• AI can clear up writer’s block (or bad writing) – For a writer, there’s nothing more frustrating or humbling than being at a loss for words.  Many subject matter experts (SMEs) have awesome insights to share but struggle to put them into writing. In fractions of a second, AI can produce the word(s) you’re missing to get you started.
   
• AI can safely do some research – AI can do the heavy lifting of seeking out general information and summarizing or rewriting it. For instance, if you’re writing a blog on the parts of a hydraulic press, AI can give you an initial list to cross-check with the SME on the topic.
  
  AI can measure your approach against what's out there – AI can give a comprehensive(ish) overview of a topic's biggest opportunities, challenges, and actionables. While you don't want to parrot everything competing websites are saying, AI's insights can help you avoid missing a key talking point. By scouring sites that rank highly for a topic or keyword, AI can relay what your potential customers expect to see on your page.
  
  
• AI can optimize B2B strategies – Marketers can put specific goals and target-audience traits into an AI system, and receive a vast amount of data analysis in return. Tools such as ChatGPT can identify lead-behavior patterns and broader content topic opportunities. Based on this analysis, it generates or recommends marketing actions that may boost your efficiency, customer engagement, and marketing ROI.

Warning:  AI-generated B2B marketing content still requires careful prompting and a personal touch, lest "your" work look like a clone of 1,000 other pages competing for attention.

("Which one of you is Marty, again?")

What AI in Marketing DOESN'T Do

When you get down to it, fully AI-produced pieces of content are like automated phone systems. While they’ve become better at anticipating and responding to specific questions, they still need a human to provide guidance – and plenty of it.

To be more direct: you can't purchase access to an AI content generator and expect fully finished work to start churning out.

In niche B2B marketing, AI is only as good as the input you give it. It's a tool, not a full solution. 

Working with AI to create a piece isn’t a simple matter of telling it the topic and copy-pasting the output. AI can help, but it doesn’t remove the need for a thoughtful writing process.

Though technology has come a long way, we’re not at the point where it fully understands context, nuance, or intent … yet. There’s still a lot of room for error and misunderstanding. Until that day comes, what we’re left with is nothing more than an artificial intelligence that’s a far cry from anything you’d see in a movie. 

In my "customer experience" with AI, I’ve found: 

• AI doesn't make you Stephen King – This is probably the most important point. While you may know your way around a sentence, AI won’t make you a seasoned wordsmith. Human expertise is still essential for creating authentic content.
  
•  AI is only as effective as the information and direction it receives – While it can process large amounts of data and generate responses quickly, it still requires human expertise to provide context, fast-check its output, and ensure the final content is accurate, timely, and aligned with the brand.
    
• AI doesn't always write well–  At first glance, that giant paragraph or blog post section AI spits looks great. However, upon proofreading, you might notice issues like unnatural phrasing, keyword stuffing, cliches, mechanical errors, and even redundancy. AI does have some go-to phrases that it reuses often, which can make content feel generic. 
  
  
•  AI isn’t a replacement for an SEO strategy. AI can assist with SEO, and help optimize content around keywords, but human marketers still need to do the initial research, refine search intent, verify facts, and create content that’s both helpful and engaging. 

• AI might give you the security heebie-jeebies – Most generative tools collect and "process" everything you tell it. For example, ChatGPT's free version uses your chat history to improve its model, meaning your input could someday influence another person's output. Avoid sharing sensitive data unless your AI platform and service plan explicitly say they don't process user data ... and even then, maybe still don't.

(See? It truly is self-aware.)

• AI doesn't live in your or your audience's shoes – The person you’re writing to might be an astrophysicist who enjoys a hyper-technical writeup. Or it could be an engineer at an OEM trying to solve a problem. Telling AI about your target audience is helpful, but it still can't offer specific examples like you can. Nor can it bring new ideas to the table based off years of hands-on experience.
  
  

Learning AI in Real-Time

AI has quickly become one of the biggest topics in marketing, and for good reason. It can save time, spark ideas, and help marketers work more efficiently. But despite its growing capabilities, AI isn’t a replacement for human creativity.

AI can help organize scattered thoughts, summarize research, build tables, generate code, brainstorm ideas, and help you get started on a first draft in seconds. It’s especially effective at handling repetitive, time-consuming tasks, giving marketers more time to focus on strategy and creative thinking.

Keep in mind AI isn’t perfect. Without the right guidance, it can produce generic content, overlook important context, or even generate inaccurate information. The quality of its output depends on the quality of the prompts and the expertise of the person using it.

For inbound marketing, use AI to support, not replace, the creative process.

How Is AI Changing B2B Marketing? 

Conversational and generative AIs are impressive tools. But without a human in the driver’s seat, the results may lack quality or flair.

Will AI replace content writers or the need to work with them? Not anytime soon. There’s no way to clone the human element needed to create compelling copy or the expertise required to identify and adapt to the way the internet works. Pre-programmed parameters only go so far. 

The future of B2B marketing is full of opportunity. Used as a supporting tool, AI can help marketers create high-quality content more efficiently while leaving the creativity and strategy to people.

Just as WALL-E and EVE show that technology and humanity can work together, we should view AI as a partner that can help enhance our work, not one that takes the place of human creativity, critical thinking, and perspective.

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in March 2023 and was recently updated with fresh insights.)