Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the world as we know it and causing disruption across nearly every industry. Marketing automation is no different. All the major marketing automation software platforms are racing to integrate new AI functionality. 

But with so many AI-powered tools available, how do you pin down the ones that will offer the most value to your business?

By looking at how top platforms use AI, we can gain valuable insights into the growing role of this technology. We can also identify the key areas where AI can make the biggest impact on your marketing efforts.

Key Marketing Objectives AI Can Help You Achieve

AI is one of the most significant trends currently shaping the future of B2B marketing. It can help you accomplish so many of your marketing goals more efficiently, effectively, and strategically.

Improve Your Customer Experience 

AI can help to optimise your customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue growth. For example, AI offers these capabilities: 

• Personalised recommendations to help customers find relevant offerings 

• Intelligent chatbots to enable self-service and respond to customer inquiries 24/7

• Sentiment analysis to get ahead of customer concerns

• Predictive engagement for more timely and targeted communication

Improve Your Marketing ROI 

Improving your ROI requires you to understand which of your marketing activities have the most impact. That knowledge allows you to funnel your resources into the campaigns and initiatives that perform. 

AI can play a crucial role in optimising your marketing ROI with less time and effort in several ways: 

• Predictive analytics to anticipate which leads are most likely to convert

• Automated optimisation to adjust your campaigns in response to real-time data and customer behaviours 

• Improved resource allocation through attribution modelling 

• Anomaly detection to proactively investigate and resolve issues affecting your ROI

Grow Your Pipeline and Revenue 

AI is an asset for pipeline and revenue growth because it can identify trends and patterns you might have overlooked. For instance, you can use AI for: 

• Lead scoring allowing sales teams to prioritise high-quality leads 

• Predictive lead segmentation for precise targeting and messaging 

• Personalised nurturing to enhance the customer journey and increase conversions 

• Upselling and cross-selling to make recommendations and improve order values

• Churn prediction to flag customers who require additional attention and support

Accelerate Deal Velocity 

Speed isn’t your only concern when trying to close a deal. But, in the B2B world, where closing deals is often a complicated and time-consuming process, velocity is an important consideration. 

Multiple stakeholders, longer sales cycles, and more intricate decision-making processes slow down the journey from prospect to customer. AI-powered marketing automation offers a much-needed solution. It helps speed up the deal without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience. 

Some ways AI can help you navigate the complexities of B2B deals include: 

• Identifying the needs of key stakeholders so you can focus on meeting the needs of the parties with the most influence

• Personalising content at scale to build trust and credibility with every decision-maker 

• Automating repetitive tasks so your sales team can focus on more high-value activities 

• Real-time insights and recommendations so your sales team can make informed decisions and adapt their strategies

Because AI allows you to tailor content and automate engagement, you can move new customers through their journey more quickly without making them feel rushed, pressured, or ignored. 

Essential Areas of Focus for AI Tools

While there are many AI marketing automation tools at your disposal, they’re not all equally beneficial to B2B marketers. To get the most from your marketing automation, look for solutions that focus on these specific areas of your digital marketing. 

Data Insights 

Data analysis is the bread and butter of AI. Using machine learning and advanced algorithms to examine massive amounts of data rapidly, many of the most valuable AI use cases involve pulling out and presenting insights that can drive your decision-making processes. 

Some data analysis capabilities of today’s AI marketing automation tools include: 

• Predictive analytics: Some AI tools can analyse customer data and identify patterns to determine which of your leads are most likely to convert. This offers a more focused and strategic approach to your digital marketing. 

• Lead scoring: Deciding which of your leads are most worth pursuing is challenging, particularly as your business scales and you deal with a greater quantity of prospects. AI can conduct lead scoring, highlighting quality leads so you can dedicate more of your resources to nurturing relationships with them.

• Customer behaviour analysis: By feeding your customer data to an AI algorithm, you can gain a deeper understanding of their choices and preferences. An AI tool can detect patterns of behaviour and make recommendations for targeted marketing strategies.  

When you consider different AI tools, focus on options that will provide the most thorough data analysis so you can drill down into your customer information and drive better marketing results. 

Journey Orchestration 

AI can enhance the B2B customer journey. While human interaction remains essential to successfully guiding customers through their experience, AI offers a way to bring in additional support.

Automated workflows, for example, can trigger engagement with prospects based on their behaviour, journey stage, or interests. This ensures they receive the messaging that’s most appropriate for their requirements precisely when they most need it.

Chatbots offer another option. Thanks to AI, these are no longer limited to generic or pre-programmed responses that frustrate customers. AI powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide nuanced answers to questions, learn from customers’ past interactions, and direct prospects to the resources that are most likely to help them. 

Personalisation at Scale

Tailoring content to all of your customers’ unique interests and needs is challenging. AI content creation is the potential solution. The right AI tool can eliminate the need to complete repetitive tasks manually, including customising content for specific segments, industries, and individual users.

In recent years, there have been major developments in generative AI for marketing automation, such as: 

• Content iteration: AI can identify the most effective content types and product specific content strategies for different customers based on their profiles. 

• Recommendation engines: These tools use customer profiles to predict the content that they’ll most appreciate so you can target your audiences more accurately. 

• Dynamic email and website experiences: AI can adapt emails or web copy to match each user’s preferences, converting bland messaging into customised content that reflects the customer’s interests, demographics, past interactions, and browsing history. 

B2B customers increasingly expect personalised experiences that are built around engaging content, and AI tools offer a way to produce it without overburdening your marketing team. 

Interaction and Engagement

Conversational marketing tools make your business more accessible to customers. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are available 24/7 and can provide instant responses to customer inquiries. They can also learn from interactions over time, ensuring they provide context-aware information that fully addresses the customer’s question or experience. 

These tools have become much more adept at mimicking human conversation, so customers feel connected to an actual representative of your brand rather than a machine. This gives them a more engaging and efficient customer service experience when they need questions answered, are looking for product recommendations, or want to complete a transaction. 

Measurement

There are a lot of elements of your campaigns to measure, including their ROI and conversions. AI can accurately take these measurements for your marketing campaigns across different channels, ultimately identifying which factors result in conversions. 

With real-time insights about your active campaigns, you can refine your marketing assets and access new audiences. For that reason, an AI tool with the ability to track your campaign performance can provide vital information and maximise your reach. 

How Industry Leaders Are Harnessing AI

The biggest names in digital marketing automation are fully onboard with AI. They’re leveraging the technology to enhance their services and give B2B companies better outcomes. 

HubSpot Marketing Hub

One of the most popular B2B marketing automation platforms available today, HubSpot Marketing Hub includes an array of AI-based automation tools. Powered by HubSpot AI, they offer support for nearly every aspect of your marketing strategy and have a comprehensive suite of tools in development.  

One task you can complete with HubSpot AI is adapting email campaigns to user behaviour. This makes your work more efficient and ensures clients receive messaging that addresses their individual needs. 

HubSpot also uses AI to get your content team off the starting blocks by bringing generative AI tools directly into the platform. Rather than turning to standalone tools like ChatGPT and Claude, your team can use HubSpot’s AI capabilities for content ideation and creation, including: 

• Website copy 

• Social media captions 

• Blogs

• Emails 

• Meta descriptions 

HubSpot AI’s content remix feature also allows you to repurpose existing material for other channels or formats. For example, you could use the platform’s AI to jumpstart changing the content from a website landing page into a blog post. 

HubSpot’s AI will also make search engine optimisation (SEO) recommendations to help you increase your organic traffic and personalise, test, and optimise your call to action (CTA) copy to improve your conversion rates. Finally, with the ChatSpot virtual companion, you’ll receive insights in real time. It gathers information related to company research, keyword rankings, and up-to-date industry trends so you can keep your strategy in line with changes in the market. 

ActiveCampaign 

ActiveCampaign is another example of marketing automation software that has taken advantage of the opportunities presented by AI. The platform’s AI focus breaks down into two primary tools. 

The first is ActiveCampaign’s AI-powered automation builder. With this tool, you can start from scratch or choose an automation workflow recipe as the foundation for your design. You can then add automation triggers, segment contacts, and add actions. This helps you align your automated customer journeys with your goals and strategy for more efficient processes that are consistent with your brand.

The second marketing automation tool available is ActiveCampaign AI, which you can use to develop, automate, and optimise marketing campaigns. This AI tool helps to create content tailored to your audience. It also offers predictive content so you can generate tailored versions of your messaging. The system will deliver your emails or SMS messages to customers based on what the algorithm determines is most likely to connect with their interests and behaviours. 

ActiveCampaign’s predictive content pairs with its predictive sending feature. This goes beyond the type of content that will connect best with your audience and looks at the best moment to deliver it. To make that determination, the AI looks at when customers have engaged with your messaging in the past and uses that information as a basis for determining the ideal delivery window for new messages. 

Mailchimp All-in-One Marketing Platform 

Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing platform that has expanded in recent years, particularly as AI has become more widely accessible. Because it falls under the Intuit umbrella, Mailchimp users have access to Intuit Assist. As the name suggests, this tool serves as an AI assistant that makes recommendations for your marketing strategy.

Intuit Assist enables AI-generated automation and also has generative capabilities. Within Mailchimp, you can prompt the tool to help you draft email and web copy, which you then have the option to review and revise before publishing. 

Another crucial component of Intuit Assist and Mailchimp is the Content Optimiser. Rather than generating copy for you, it provides inline suggestions for your content, focusing on issues such as:

• Spelling

• Grammar

• Tone

• Content and heading length 

• Link formatting

Mailchimp’s system makes suggestions based on marketing best practices and comparisons with best performing emails from similar users in your industry. 

Beyond content generation, Mailchimp also offers AI-powered customer segmentation tools, allowing you to enhance your existing segments and create new ones. For example, you can create predictive segments for your customers’ lifetime value and demographics. 

Last but not least, Mailchimp uses AI to predict what products your customers are most likely to buy. You can add these personalised product recommendations to your email marketing to increase sales. 

Adobe Marketo Engage

B2B marketing professionals can use Adobe Marketo Engage to analyse data, customise content, and improve the customer experience. The company has leaned heavily into AI, finding multiple ways to support marketers who want to maximise their efficiency. 

Some of the most prominent ways Adobe Marketo Engage uses AI include:

• Dynamic chat: Adobe Dynamic Chat is a conversation automation tool that automatically creates different ways for customers to engage with your site, schedule meetings, and get information. The tool allows for lead- and account-based targeting, exclusions based on customer attributes, and account-based marketing. 

• Generative AI: Adobe’s generative AI can create new email copy and iterate existing content for better performance. It can also personalise email messaging based on specific customer characteristics.  

• Marketo Measure Ultimate: Adobe uses an algorithm called Attribution AI to collect and normalise data. You can use its powerful pattern recognition capabilities to understand how well your marketing campaigns and channels are performing and optimise your efforts. 

• Interactive webinars: One of the distinct ways that Adobe Marketo Engage uses AI is by generating content summaries from webinar transcripts. Adobe’s AI can create overviews, FAQs, and video chapters so that users get the information they need and can navigate to the sections of the video that are most interesting to them.  

• Predictive content management: Adobe’s AI allows for focused content recommendations, content discovery and tagging, and audience targeting. The platform can identify and automatically deliver high-performing assets to relevant audiences. 

In combination, these tools address many of the most important needs of B2B marketers, including deep data analysis, fast yet personal content generation, and easier customer engagement. 

Bloomreach

Bloomreach leverages AI tools to assist customers with their marketing efforts. Their AI system, called Loomi, helps marketers with a variety of tasks, including: 

• Drafting copy for marketing content

• Personalising email, SMS, and web content for individual customers and determining when to send them

• Predicting the probability of purchases, churn, and order returns

• Analysing each customer’s purchase and browsing history to make product recommendations 

• Monitoring average purchase frequency and sending automated reminders 

• Using purchase intent to generate lookalike customer segments 

These features allow for a more tailored customer experience and, ideally, a more effective overall marketing strategy. 

Besides Loomi, Bloomreach has an AI-based site search solution called Bloomreach Search. It uses semantic understanding to analyse the context behind user search queries and determine their intent. It then finds search results that more closely align with that intent, offering customers easier access to the products they really want and need. 

Other Industry Contenders

While they haven’t quite reached the same level of AI-leadership as some other companies, other marketing platforms are also offering exciting innovations leveraging AI. 

The first is GetResponse, an email marketing platform with an AI email generator. This tool uses OpenAI’s technology to suggest optimised subject lines and email content tailored to specific keywords and industry trends. 

Finally, there’s the customer experience and data platform Dotdigital. The platform features a proprietary AI tool called WinstonAI, which has expansive capabilities: 

• Content creation and editing 

• Cross-channel campaign optimisation 

• Predictive analytics 

• Audience segments 

• Send time optimisation 

• Product analysis 

• Product recommendations 

With WinstonAI’s wide-ranging options, Dotdigital has embraced the opportunities presented by AI in marketing. 

Advance Your Marketing Automation With AI Enhancements

The rapid evolution of AI in digital marketing platforms offers valuable insights into the future direction of B2B marketing. From email campaigns to data analysis and social media marketing, these ground breaking tools add to the benefits of marketing automation. 

We’re facing a fundamental change in how businesses approach lead generation, customer relationships, and overall growth. Hyper-personalisation is no longer just a buzzword, but a core strategy. As AI algorithms become more adept at analysing customer data and predicting behaviour, B2B marketers will create highly targeted experiences at scale.

Customer data and AI embedded in your marketing technology will be the key to delivering the frictionless, individualised, omnichannel your customers will soon expect as standard. It will bridge the gap between different channels and devices to drive deeper engagement and trust.

While some fear AI will replace human marketers, the reality is more nuanced. AI-powered tools will automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, freeing up marketers to focus on higher-level strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and relationship-building. By leveraging AI as a collaborative partner, B2B marketers can unlock additional levels of efficiency, innovation, and impact, ultimately driving better results for their organisations.

If you’re struggling to automate your marketing processes, aren’t sure how to incorporate AI tools into your strategy, or simply want guidance on your campaign creation, reach out to 1827 Marketing. Book a demo to see how we can help take your content marketing automation to the next level with the latest technology developments.