AI is making its presence felt in every industry, and B2B marketing no exception. Generative AI has the potential to reshape everything from content creation to data analysis, and B2B specialist agencies around the world have been grappling with the most effective ways to integrate these new technologies into their work.
Beettoo Chairman Julian Lloyd Evans was joined by Matt Egan, chief content officer at Demand AI, and Riyad Emeran, content strategy consultant at The Expert Network (TEN) for our webinar, ‘The New Rules of B2B Storytelling’. Their conversation explores the genuine benefits that AI can bring to your B2B content marketing strategy and execution, and how to adopt these emerging technologies to maximise their value and sustainability for your business.
How can AI enhance your B2B storytelling?
“If we set the Wayback Machine to two years ago, AI was being heralded as the answer to everything,” says Emeran. “It could cut your costs. People like us weren’t needed anymore.”
But, he has seen a ”dramatic shift” over the last year. “From a marketing perspective, especially content marketing, I think a lot of brands are starting to wake up and think, ‘We can’t be seen to be aligned with AI slop.’” Now, business leaders are beginning to understand exactly where AI can deliver genuine value, as well as the need to place careful controls on its use.
So when and how should B2B content marketers be using AI? “In my own practice, and in the practice of Demand AI, we tend to take the mantra that if AI can do it, it should do it,” says Egan. This doesn’t mean turning to AI at every opportunity, but carefully identifying the places where it can add value. “AI tools and platforms are excellent at reducing toil, increasing efficiency and enhancing human creativity, but they’re not a good replacement for it,” he says.
What are the particular applications of AI we should be considering? Generative AI can help cut out some of the grunt work associated with creating written content, offering assistance in drafting and outlining copy in the early stages, rewriting/versioning it for different uses and audiences, and giving it a final polish through copy editing. As long as we aren’t handing over the core creative aspects of copywriting, or neglecting to carefully check the outputs, these efficiencies can be a boon to content teams.
AI also promises to unlock hyper personalisation (or “the holy grail of B2B marketing”, as Egan describes it), enabling us to tailor content to the particular needs and concerns of different individuals in the buying cycle, although Egan admits that this is yet to be fully realised. “We’re just playing in that space now,” he says.
How can B2B marketing use small language models?
A concern with using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude is that they are trained on an entire internet’s worth of data, and so encapsulate all the biases and errors that come along with that. Fortunately, B2B businesses can get around these concerns by using their existing content to build small language models (SLMs) trained on these trusted sources of information.
“The idea that you can start to use AI to build out ancillary content based on your existing content that you will know is already high quality,” says Emeran. “And as your own content library grows, your ability to be able to leverage that trusted source of learning for whatever AI platform you want to use becomes stronger over time. If you can’t necessarily trust an AI platform because you don’t know what it’s been trained on, the answer is to build your own.”
Demand AI has found success by leveraging SLMs to create answer engines, achieving high engagement from these interfaces that respond to users’ questions in real time. “Someone using an answer engine is significantly more engaged than someone using the search engine,” says Egan. “They’re conversing with content. They’re telling you what they need to know.” This new step on the buyer journey can put essential information into the hands of potential customers, exactly when and where they need it.
Intelligent adoption of AI in B2B marketing
As we move beyond the initial years of AI hype to a more measured approach to the realities of AI adoption, there’s no longer an excuse for rushing ahead without a plan. A full understanding of the scope and limitations of generative AI is essential for successfully integrating it into your workflows, as well as an outline of your business’ AI policies to guide your employees.
“You need to have a very clear governance and risk assessment in place when you’re rolling out any kind of AI strategy,” says Emeran. “Everyone needs to be aware of what the risks are, not just in terms of brand, but ensuring that as a business, you choose and vet the platform you want to use, and you don’t have everyone firing up their own ChatGPT.” Improper use of publicly available LLMs can lead to your proprietary data – and your clients’ – being incorporated into the training of those same models.
Human oversight remains essential to successful AI adoption. Unmonitored generative AI content is likely to be bland and lacking value for your audience at best, and a brand disaster at worst. Only humans can bring the insight, creativity, authenticity and judgement that produces quality content. “I was speaking to someone who talked about their view of a good AI tool being like a good intern with, by default, a bad boss,” says Egan. “So you need to set the strategy and check for mistakes, as you would with an inexperienced person.”
With the correct guardrails in place, AI offers huge efficiencies for B2B marketers and exciting new avenues to explore in content creation.
“This is having a huge impact across the creative world,” says Emeran. “So it’s about finding how we make the most of it. How do we develop AI to be good for businesses, good for efficiency, good for the bottom line, good for ROI – but also good for everybody working in the industry? Everyone needs to adapt and figure out how their jobs, their industry, their sector, can get better by embracing new technology rather than running away from it.”
Listen to our full ‘The New Rules of B2B Storytelling’ webinar to discover more insights into the uses of AI, the key considerations for adopting these technologies and what these changes mean for the future of B2B marketing.
