Artificial Intelligence and Account-Based Marketing are converging to make 1:1 sales & marketing relationships with customers. One account manager for one customer. Gartner predicts in the context of artificial intelligence that, ‘Most enterprise relationships with customers won’t require humans by 2020’. While this prediction is a precursor to the next big technology trend, it also signifies the synergy that exists between artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing, especially Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
ABM’s success is determined by its principles of personalization, timely communication, research, production and sales-marketing alignment. A personalized ABM strategy powered by artificial intelligence helps both sales and marketing personnel to implement better.
Use of Artificial Intelligence in Account-Based Marketing
AI comes with the ability to perform tasks for humans that involve visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Apart from this it also eliminates redundancy and picks up any of those tasks that have consistent workflows built within them.
Here are some areas that we have spotted which tell how best ABM performs with the aid of AI.
Lead Generation and Building Accounts
Customer Profiling is identified as one of the primary steps in implementing ABM. Knowing and defining the customer precedes the first interaction with the customer (or account). AI is employed to crawl the data across the database and internet to identify the most appropriate accounts that need to be prioritized. Through such prioritization, resources are allocated to nurture the prospect, close a sale and build a stronger relationship with the account.
AI in Account-Based Marketing can also intuitively build fields that are relevant to an account instead of using generalized fields across lead gen or CRM platform. It can suggest missing fields that would help a salesperson close a high priority deal faster. Tools like Conversica, Clickatell and Leadshare help in lead qualification, nurturing and recommendation; all powered by machine learning and AI. Clearbit is another technology that translates anonymous information about leads into useful data that could be further used for client profiling.
Personalized Content
Content personalization is a pervasive matter, in the case of ABM. Email draft, ad copy, content published on media channels and on-site content too can be personalized using artificial intelligence. ABM is delivered best when highly personalized and customized content is delivered to the prospect and customer. This is to create complexity but to deliver exactly what the audience is looking for.
The element of Natural Language Processing helps in creating content that the target audience wants to hear and understand. Sentient Aware and Narrative Science are already offering solutions to this problem.
Automation & Dynamic Content
There is already enough marketing automation that exists out there. AI adds intelligence to such automation. You can already see it in your email and Linkedin inbox where you are provided pre-drafted prompts as replies when you receive an email. With enterprise email solutions, it is even bigger. The bigger challenges are not just around one language, but the element of multilingual content also arises.
Analytics is stitched into the email campaign that facilitates the marketer with insights that otherwise would have taken longer for the humans to gather. Wylei and Kiddynamic are AI tools that help in creating and publishing dynamic content. Other bigger solutions like Adobe and MailChimp have also roped in AI into their solution.
Read More: Is Account-Based Marketing right for your B2B company? : A quick checklist
Analytics & Reporting
Bulky Spreadsheets and beautified slides are built in silos. With big data and data interpretation tools the task of reporting got slightly better and more effective, but not intelligent. Insights are still the onus of humans and not that of machines.
AI can help marketers merge disparate data sources to identify patterns and predict future results. Roboto is one such solution that is already doing the job of a predictive analytics engine. Another area that needs the help of AI is social media. Unmetric, an AI tool allows companies to analyze any competitors’ social media activity in detail, helping uncover new social media strategies.
The level is the use of recommendation engines of AI in account-based marketing. Dynamic Yield is one such recommendation engine that analyzes the effectiveness of recommendations in real-time and tweaks them accordingly. These personalized and targeted offers provide customers with exactly what they need instead of bombarding customers with irrelevant offers.
Final Verdict
To fulfil the benefits of ABM services, AI needs to be integrated into different layers of its architecture: device layer, personal layer, social layer and environmental layer. Account-Based Marketing is leveraged to its fullest ability when accompanied by artificial intelligence across all those layers.
MarketingProfs reports that businesses that implement AI see 59% better close rates for sales, 58% increased revenue, 54% more traffic and engagement, and 52% higher conversion. The metrics speak for themselves about the future and potential of Artificial Intelligence combined with Account-Based Marketing.
