The Use of AI in B2B Content Creation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way in recent years, revolutionising many industries and making tasks easier and more efficient. However, despite its many capabilities, AI is not without limitations.

OpenAI’s language modelling chatbot, ChatGPT, was launched in November 2022. Harnessing the power of a unimaginable dataset compared to previous chatbots, 570 GB to be precise, ChatGPT has truly taken the world by storm.

Social media has been inundated with tips and tricks of how to use it optimally and posts lauding its success and rightly so, it is a very useful tool. (We may have even used it to help create this blog!) However, its popularity has fueled the AI vs human intelligence (HI) debate, even raising the question of whether similar tools will eventually replace creative content teams completely.

A worrying thought for any content creator, but fear not, as the answer is no. Although the capabilities of such tools seem endless, they are not without their limitations. Tools like ChatGPT certainly have a role to play in B2B content creation, but there is a long way to go to before they could ever come close to replacing a human team.  

Advantages:

Marketeers can and should use AI to elevate and optimise their workload but should not rely on it completely to generate original content. There are many ways AI can be used to enhance content creation such as:

Innovation and creativity:

Time efficiency:

AI can process large amounts of data in a short space of time and generate relevant ideas for your business. This saves time and resources which may have been spent by a writer manually researching a topic.

AI tools can be a great sounding board to get your creativity flowing. As mentioned earlier ChatGPT is based on a massive database of information, this allows you to access different perspectives and expertise and bring fresh ideas to your content plans.

Personalisation:

Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate more personalised messaging, making your content more relevant to your target audience. This can help to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Limitations:

Despite its place within B2B content creation, AI still has it limitations, which is why it should be used in tandem with HI rather than replacing it entirely. Some constraints to take into consideration are:

Lack of context:

AI can struggle to fully understand context in which is content is being created. This can lead to content that is inappropriate or irrelevant to your target audience being generated.

Limited understanding of cultural and social nuances:

Humans can identify nuances which need to be factored into messaging easier than AI can. Content with insensitive or inappropriate messaging can seriously damage a brand’s reputation.

Plagiarism:

As ChatGPT is based on existing information there is a high risk that it will not generate original content which can cause problems with copyright infringement and fair use policies if not detected.

No customer knowledge:

Similarly to not being able to fully understand nuance and context, AI will not fully understand what matters to your customers and cannot respond to customer feedback in real time. Crucially it also cannot generate original research which is a valuable content format in B2B.

Bias:

Although ChatGPT is based on a mammoth of information, a lot of what is freely available on the internet is heavily biased or simply complete misinformation or “fake news”. This can create an unreliable narrative throughout the content it creates.

It is clear that AI and ChatGPT have a place in B2B content creation, but it should be considered as a tool to enhance the work of human intelligence. While these tools can generate valuable content ideas and even entire pieces, there are too many risks involved in relying on them completely as they cannot replace the creativity, nuance, and expertise of human content teams.

Additionally, there are security concerns as increasingly malicious users are using AI to generate more realistic messaging to scam users, adding to growing cybersecurity concerns. We will delve further into the security threats that AI models pose in the next segment of our AI in B2B blog series.  

Digital awareness campaigns with a purpose

The digital challenges in B2B marketing

In the B2B space, digital can be hard to get right. You have to catch the potential buyer’s attention in a very crowded marketplace, where we are already pretty desensitised and mistrustful of online advertising and email marketing in general.

It’s particularly challenging given the education journey required to purchase many B2B IT solutions, especially at the enterprise level where budgets are high, stakeholders are many and buying cycles are long. The products are often far too complex to be bought in the classic B2C e-commerce environment – somewhere along the way a conversation with experienced sales reps, product specialists and integration consultants will likely be required.

At the same time, we know that B2B customers are expecting somewhat of a B2C experience in their buying journey – they want to have a rich content experience that will enable them to self-serve the information they need, when they need it.

The challenges of digital marketing in the B2B space

High competition:

The digital space is a highly saturated environment, and customers are inundated with the content they are exposed to, whether in their email inbox or social feeds. This has created an audience which is desensited to advertising, meaning digital campaigns need to stand out and be relevant to customers’ needs in order to grab the attention of the target audience.

Lack of focus:

Digital encompasses a wide range of activities and platforms – programmatic advertising, paid social, email automation, SEM and SEO. This means that businesses run the risk of stretching their marketing resources too thin as they attempt to have a presence on every available platform. The best and most effective digital strategies are laser focused on matching the right audiences to the right platform at the right time.

Lack of actionable insight:

In digital it is hard to understand the full impact the campaign has had. Whilst you can collect a lot of metrics, it can be hard to connect some types of engagement with real action – whether because privacy laws limit tracking on digital ads or because form fills collect unreliable or insufficient information. Digital can only work when it is supported and enriched with additional insights form data and BDR teams.

Integrating digital marketing and lead generation

On the one hand, every marketer loves to do digital. It's creative and strategic, and most importantly it gives fantastic metrics that can demonstrate the value of the marketing team´s hard work.

However, sales can struggle to understand the value of this work if it doesn't necessarily translate into immediate revenue. We´ve written previously about how in some cases just 1.5% of marketing leads translate to sales.

This tension means marketing teams end up treating digital as completely separate from their lead generation programmes, or at least confine it to the awareness stage of their funnel. This means that they miss the opportunity to provide real insights that can have a real impact on sales revenue.

But it doesn't have to be this way. In our experience, digital can be an incredible tool that accelerates the customer journey – both through demonstrating value and creating opportunities for prospects to raise their hands when they are in-market.

How can digital support B2B sales?

When integrated correctly, focused digital campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle. When digital campaigns are run simultaneously with a complete BDR outreach strategy, this can:

By achieving these objectives, sales and marketing teams can ignite their sales strategy and accelerate pipeline generation. Despite the challenges, digital marketing is a valuable tool for B2B sales when done well.

BNZSA offers Ultra-Nurture, a lead nurturing services which integrates data and telemarketing to create well-rounded, successful lead generation campaigns.

Celebrating International Women’s Day 2022

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day with a shout out for all the fantastic women that make BNZSA the place that it is today.

We are committed to equality in the workplace and do everything we can to ensure that BNZSA is a supportive environment for women to fulfil their professional ambitions. Currently around 45% of people with management responsibilities identify as women, and our leadership team is full of strong female role models. Our core departments – Production, Data and Digital are all led by women.

We also celebrate the hard work of Rockers – sales and IT are both fields that are traditionally male-dominated, but we see women throughout the company setting new standards and achieving amazing results. A round of applause for our top performing female Rockers so far in Q1:

We are committed to ensuring that BNZSA Is a safe and inclusive workplace for everyone as we grow! Together We Rock!

BNZSA Launches Programmatic Display to Augment Its Digital, Data and Tele offerings

Programmatic will offer customers the ability to create bespoke audience segments around technographic, firmographic and intent data to promote brand awareness and thought leadership content

BNZSA, Europe’s leading IT B2B digital, data and lead generation agency now delivers programmatic display that aims to give customers the ability to deepen relationships with prospects and to enhance subsequent lead generation campaigns.

Underpinned by the cleanest first- and third-party data available, and the largest telephone-based contact centre in EMEA, customers can now look to build fully integrated marketing programmes that utilise a multi-channel approach from a single supplier.

“Clients no longer have to search, evaluate and appoint multiple agencies for data, digital and tele to support their marketing programmes,” said Soniya Ganvir, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Digital at BNZSA. “BNZSA provides it all under one roof with owned and operated data validation and quality assurance teams that guarantee data integrity and compliance as well as lead quality. Creatives for programmatic can also be produced for our clients by BNZSA’s in-house design team.”

With programmatic, client campaigns are fully integrated from end-to-end and this means BNZSA can maintain an on-going and relevant dialogue with prospects. BNZSA can also track interest and intent and maintain engagement with relevant and valuable content to underpin the personal relationships our Business Development Resources maintain with prospects to nurture leads ahead of handing over to client sales teams.

Layering programmatic to BNZSA’s integrated services has many benefits. Firstly transparency. Programmatic advertising offers a layer of transparency that marketers have struggled to get from traditional advertising.

This transparency is often around data insights and real-time measurement, which can track how creatives and targeting is performing. Brand awarenessis also a key. Programmatic play as it is a perfect way to push brand awareness not just to scale and overall total addressable market but also relevant prospects. Programmatic can also deliver content across multi platforms and devices so can reach those prospects in multiple scenarios such as when they are travelling.

Paul Briggs, Director of Global Corporate Development at BNZSA said, “Programmatic really gives the ability to put the creativity back into integrated marketing campaigns and is a very powerful ally when it comes to converting prospects from a subsequent or parallel lead generation campaign

“Firstly, BNZSA can identify potential prospects for its customers and develop a database rich in technographic, firmographic and intent data. Secondly, BNZSA can then surround these prospects with messaging and brand awareness and measure the metrics.”

This actionable insight can help craft the content for subsequent digital content syndication and enhance prospect engagement with BNZSA’s BDRs as there is already a clear sense of topic interest, relevance and sentiment before any conversation is started.

“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” Briggs added. “This ultimately boosts closed won opportunities for our customers up to 300 percent.”

About BNZSA

BNZSA is a leading EMEA marketing agency specialising in tele-based demand generation with a team of more than 300 who are experts in delivering qualified, sales-ready leads. It was established in 2013 and has grown rapidly over eight years. BNZSA is privately-owned, has never relied on third-party funding, and has been profitable since day one. The company is based in Madrid, Spain, and has offices in the UK, France and Morocco. It invests heavily in its agents who are all native language speakers and deliver client campaigns in 16 languages globally. In addition to the uniquely human and personal dimension of the company, BNZSA is a leader in the application of technology to underpin its value proposition. It built its own bespoke CRM platform, and is a pioneer in the use of AI, NLP and ML technologies.