Beyond Offers: Content in an AI Age

If you listen to the true believers, then AI will soon be responsible for single handedly orchestrating the customer journey. Machine learning will select the ideal offer for every contact and then generate bespoke content to sell the resulting package to every customer. Humans will be relegated to designing the strategy and validating the final campaign before launch.

Personalised offers are nothing new in B2C. Many large consumer brands will have a portfolio of promotions and discount codes they can roll out to attract a new audience or to boost sales in a slow quarter. Forward thinking B2C marketers are indeed experimenting with AI generated content and AI selected audiences for each offer. It's not clear how such a strategy would translate to B2B, given the importance of content marketing in nurturing corporate buyers. Especially given how poorly defined the concept of a content offer actually is in practice.

The Importance of Incentives

Sure, many B2B marketers would describe their latest webinar or white paper as an offer. Yet, these things are also supporting content to be reused when promoting a different offer. Few organisations can reliably report on the ultimate revenue impact of each individual piece of content. All too often campaigns are simply seen as a reason to call, or a reason to nurture. The hand raiser is the ultimate offer from a business perspective. Everything else is handled by the lead scoring model.

Reporting drives this state of affairs. The link between individual offers and individual leads is barely understood in many organisations. Even where it is, everything gets rolled up to the program level anyway. Multi touch attribution was supposed to provide the link, but just adds additional complexity. Regardless, marketers struggle to interpret attribution models, beyond which content drove the most leads. That’s not a metric that businesses are interested in measuring these days, and for good reason.

The Importance of Data

Content needs an ROI. Automating content distribution undercuts that objective. Handing offer selection to AI risks turning B2B marketing into a giant algorithmic recommendation engine, but one that marketers are ill equipped to deal with. People are already getting annoyed with poor quality AI slop, and the push to generate more marketing content faster only compounds the issue. Particularly because, unlike social media networks, B2B marketers lack the enormous volumes of activity data needed to actually drive engagement.

A significant number of marketers would be happy to hand off attribution reporting and audience selection to AI. Yet, ops teams struggle with limited data volumes, which leads to meaningless dashboards and inadequate attribution. This is because fundamentally, the average marketing asset simply doesn’t get enough downloads to properly model its impact on the customer journey. That’s the reality of operating in niche B2B vertical with a small total addressable market. AI can't fix limitations of scale. It would only compound reporting gaps with incorrect analysis. Bad data leads to bad AI.

The Right Experience

For events, this issue is much less of a problem. Last touch lead generation and contact acquisition are typically the main objectives for a corporate events program anyway. The desired audience for each event is well understood, and the content used to promote the event is highly templated. Lookalike event audience features already exist, but are rarely used due to cost. It's specifically content marketing where the AI first approach is much riskier.

After years of campaigning against batch and blast, marketers have come round to the mantra of account based experiences - compelling user journeys that educate the customer about the business’s brand proposition. Content marketing is the supporting act needed to drive those experiences. It is not the end goal in itself. Now AI risks turning back the clock in a drive for faster content generation and higher engagement. There is more to personalisation than random acts of content marketing.

Content marketing is essential, but it's also largely guesswork. Marketers are creating content to drive conversions, which are still ultimately measured in terms of leads. All this content usefully fills the funnel between initial awareness and ultimate conversion. Trouble is, good content is expensive to produce. AI can reduce the costs somewhat, but not by as much as people think without also reducing quality. Bad content is also expensive, but in a different way. Low quality content and incorrect personalisation always come at the cost of brand reputation.

6sense Adds More Agents

Marketers are under pressure to add more AI to their workflows. With its sophisticated machine learning capabilities, 6sense has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend. Last week they announced an AI assistant called RevvyAI. As well as a new conversational interface, the AI assistant includes a set of new agents to analyse ad performance and suggest keywords.

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