4 innovative ideas for B2B digital marketers

Most business to business (B2B) marketers understand the essentials when it comes to digital marketing and an online presence. That is, a decent website with helpful information, augmented with search engine optimised content to help bring organic traffic to your site. Plus, targeted paid online advertising campaigns to promote your products, services, or more usefully, your free content that will provide some unique value to your target audience, thereby building your brand. 

Beyond essentials, let’s take a look at some of the more innovative, creative and cutting-edge digital marketing tactics that have emerged as a powerful way to engage potential customers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and lead scoring

While AI is known for transforming products, services and operational processes across just about every industry, it can also be put to good use in the digital marketing sphere. This year 97% of mobile users are already using AI-powered voice assistants, while more than 70% of B2B marketers are interested in doing more with AI for personalising the customer experience.1

AI is also being applied to lead scoring – the process of assigning a degree of value to potential customers – taking lead scoring from a traditional, manual approach to a more predictive method.  Based on machine-learning, AI-predictive lead scoring trains algorithms to make predictions about new or existing customers based on predetermined criteria such as online behaviour, social media data, professional information, and so on.  While it may not be for everyone, it’s a great example of AI being put to good practice to help digital marketers and sales teams work more closely together.

Chatbots and messaging apps for engagement

Speaking of conversational AI, chatbots are being used more frequently as part of the digital marketing mix as a way to engage with customers or prospects using instant messaging. Of course, some interactions fare better with human-to-human contact but automating certain digital interactions does make sense in terms of using fewer resources and providing faster service. Typically, chatbots and messaging apps today are used to help answer simple on-demand service questions, provide good generalised information, and provide 24/7 round the clock service.

But as machine learning advances continue, chatbots and messaging apps will become more efficient at identifying the intent of the user. It’s early days with just 1% of businesses using chatbots today, but as Google’s BERT, for example, becomes more sophisticated, we expect to see conversational AI being used more and more in company offerings, across B2B and B2C marketing and brand experience touchpoints. 2

Augmented reality interactive experiences

Augmented reality – or AR – provides another innovative channel for digital marketers to enhance brand value or drive sales through mobile devices. A way of superimposing sounds, images, and text onto the real world through the screen of a mobile device, AR will continue to be a driving force behind sales and marketing innovations over the next decade.

One method for using AR involves creating more dynamic and interactive sales presentation content. Instead of using your typical flyers and brochures, AR allows you to get more creative and visual to boost a prospect’s engagement experience with your business. Bang, for example, recently helped a client by creating an innovative webAR tool that could be used by service partners in a customer’s home as a way of ascertaining the savings they could realise in time, costs, and energy consumption, through the purchase of our client’s solutions. The AR component of this digital tool led users to a calculator with an interactive quiz and additional video content that ultimately provided personalised recommendations and a takeaway report for each customer.

Data analytics for better account-based marketing

The use of big data in marketing – analysing large data sets to determine customer preferences and ways of engaging – has taken a lot of the guesswork out of identifying good prospects. Big data goes hand-in-hand with machine learning and AI – effectively the information that trains algorithms to automate interactions in the field of personalisation and omni-channel marketing, helping to provide context-relevant engagement along each customer’s buying journey.

Data analytics is a key component of the B2B techniques that combine intent data and account-based marketing.  This is a way of aligning sales and marketing around the highest quality leads instead of these two teams operating in silos.  Intent data measures a prospect’s browsing behaviour and interests, helping to build out a fuller picture of a potential buyer, while creating a larger and more targeted database. Because it flags prospects who are more ready for engagement, intent data is ideal for inside sales teams taking an account-based marketing approach to boost lead quality and prospect engagement. 

While some of these innovative B2B digital marketing techniques might seem extremely advanced or beyond your scope, they are increasingly being built into user-friendly marketing tools. They might even be on offer from your current marketing partner or services provider. If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this article feel free to get in touch with us!

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1. https://www.singlegrain.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-trends-in-marketing-for-2019-infographic/

2. https://botcore.ai/blog/12-experts-share-the-biggest-chatbot-trends-for-2020