If 2023 is the inflection point for generative AI (genAI), 2024 will be the year B2B marketers drive adoption for better execution and effectiveness. However, in conversations with many clients, I hear marketers express concerns and fears that, as an organization, they are falling behind in leveraging genAI.
This uncertainty arises from a variety of situations. In some cases, it can be whiplash caused by a one-off approach rather than a company-wide effort to pilot and scale genAI. And they often reconcile headlines and industry claims with corporate policies that limit experimentation or prohibit the use of genAI tools. Over the past few months, marketers who have started using genAI have told me that they feel stuck in use cases they think are “low hanging fruit.” They want to expand their team's adoption and bring genAI into formal workflows, but agree there is work to be done to increase content and data maturity and build employee skills. Masu.
If these scenarios sound familiar, how can you set up your marketing organization to make meaningful progress with genAI?
Choose action instead of “wait and see”
Over the past year, we have seen genAI capabilities enter the martech stack with the rise of multimodal capabilities that allow AI models to understand, interpret, and generate content across multiple formats such as text, images, audio, and video. I've seen it. Understanding which systems perform what tasks and deciding which one to employ can be difficult. However, it is important to take the time to learn about these features. GenAI brings more power to content creation, audience engagement, and personalization. Content use cases are not only a practical entry point for scaling genAI adoption. They also represent a large part of his B2B organization's activities and offer great potential to improve customer experience and reduce time to market. The pace of change in genAI will continue to accelerate, so it's important to act now.
One of the best ways to move your organization forward is to raise your hand. Contrary to what you might imagine from the news headlines, adoption of genAI by B2B organizations is still in its infancy. Most marketers have yet to learn how genAI works, often with limited tools and direction provided by companies. Some say they're in a “wait-and-see” situation, trying to predict what Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI will do next, or taking direction from enterprise-level efforts. However, this moment represents an important career opportunity. Proactively identify use cases where genAI can help you achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. Try some of the most common, low-risk use cases like summarizing, researching, and ideation. Reach out to your network to find out what other marketers are doing. Get inspired by early adopters to assess your team's readiness and identify the resources and efforts needed to move forward.
focus on basic abilities
Early adopters of genAI in B2B marketing share some similar characteristics, including a continued focus on fundamental capabilities of content and data. According to Forrester Marketing Research (2023), B2B marketing decision makers cite data quality and accessibility as the biggest challenge to achieving their goals. Furthermore, marketers know that significant efforts are needed to mature how content is managed and measured, and to improve its use/reuse. Successful use of genAI exacerbates these challenges.
Over the past year, we've seen an increase in interest in agile engineering skills, and we've found that the best facilitation comes from effective communicators. You will develop your team's foundational skills in judgment-based areas such as writing, editing, data analysis, and content management. Before teams move forward, marketers first need to understand what genAI can do for them, and then how to capture and cleverly use its output. Make sure your team understands what a good outcome is for both the customer and the organization. This requires critical thinking and solid writing and editing skills. A focus on these future-dependent skills and a commitment to addressing fundamental challenges will enable organizations to make better progress with genAI, no matter the pace of adoption or where they start. .
Engage allies to accelerate progress
The proliferation of different genAI tools across B2B organizations is also a barrier to progress. If different groups on the team work with their own genAI toolsets, it will be his one-time experiment. This does not deliver the desired efficiency or business results, and worse, it creates its own set of risks. Savvy marketers form AI councils and working groups to capture expertise from a variety of experts. These groups are more effective at writing proposals, securing executive sponsorship, and codifying how marketing organizations test, learn, and grow their expertise.
This collaboration gives marketers greater visibility into their needs, tasks, and activities, allowing them to adapt the use of AI and data to where, when, and how they work. This will allow teams to decide how to evolve to streamline workflows going forward, and will help genAI users understand how to best leverage their brand's guidelines, templates, glossary, and messaging. Checkpoints are provided to ensure that the Having collaborators throughout this process increases awareness of the new process and highlights areas where human involvement and oversight are critical. If you find that your approach to using genAI within your marketing organization is fragmented, enlist the help of other experts to assess your current capabilities, prioritize your efforts, and learn. Please help us by sharing the content.
To learn more about B2B genAI usage trends and explore frameworks that can help scale genAI adoption beyond pilot projects, register to attend B2B Summit North America. here.
This post was written by Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst, and first appeared here.
