AI has gone mainstream - with the adoption of AI technology in B2B organizations increasing by 250% in 2023.

Compared to other professions, marketers are the most likely to use AI in their roles, with 54% reporting having tried it and almost 1 in 4 using it multiple times a day.

However, with 50% of consumers already able to identify AI content, marketers need to focus on using AI to enhance their productivity while still retaining the human touch.

This is because 52% of people felt ‘less engaged’ reading AI content, with 63% expressing a desire for it to be disclosed if the content was AI-generated.

Sending your customers impersonal AI content will ultimately prevent them from trusting your brand or making a purchase decision.

This is because, above all, relationships matter in business.

People buy from people.

But there’s no escaping that AI will make your marketing team more productive and efficient - so how can marketers use it without alienating prospects and customers?

In this article, we’ll explore how AI is used in business, how it applies to marketing, and four ways you can use it to increase marketing efficiency without losing the human touch.

How is AI used in business, and how does it apply to B2B marketing?

At a high level, businesses can use AI to help with tasks like content creation, automation, data analysis, and predictive analytics - but how can this help marketers in particular?

Because B2B marketers have a wide and varied role, AI is the perfect assistant to help with a range of tasks, including:

• Market research and analysis
• Content and campaign creation
• Lead nurturing
• Data analysis and reporting

Using AI to take care of a lot of the ‘busy’ work by crunching through research or performance data and automating campaigns frees marketers to think bigger.

The time saved using AI allows them to focus on higher-impact activities and gives them the breathing space to develop relationships with prospects that turn into revenue.

You may be worried about using AI to enhance your marketing activities without alienating your customers, but the good news is that you can have it all.

We’ll show you five ways you can use AI to enhance the efficiency of your marketing team without losing the human touch that your customers crave.

4 Ways to use AI in B2B marketing to increase efficiency

Building profitable business relationships through marketing relies heavily on the experiences you can offer your prospects.

In fact, research shows that 86% of customers value their experiences as much as the product or service they purchase.

But with buyers becoming increasingly savvy about spotting AI-generated content, how can marketers leverage AI to enhance the customer experience and keep them engaged?

To help you get started with this, we’ve outlined four ways your marketing teams can increase efficiency using AI while keeping the human touch that helps build relationships.

1. Personalized content creation 

You can’t give generic AI tools like ChatGPT a prompt and expect it to know the context of your company and magically produce high-quality, authentic, personalized content.

Instead, you need to think about how AI can assist you - rather than do it all for you.

Using AI directly in the tools you use - like a CRM - can have incredible benefits as it can become trained on your company data and help at pivotal moments, like.

• Image creation - use AI to produce images that are custom-made for the article or email you’re writing, to help elevate your content and help it resonate more with readers.
• Increase conversion rates - use AI to come up with email subject lines, calls to action, headings, and more that you know your customers will respond positively to.
• Edit before sending - let AI take a look at your email campaign and make suggestions on how to improve the length, style, or tone, to ensure it has the highest impact with customers.
• Insert personal details - No one likes generic marketing emails. Using AI you can leverage personalization to include specific data points relevant to individual customers.

You shouldn’t let AI write everything for you, more assist and help improve the ideas you’ve already had - to take your campaigns to the next level, yet retaining the human touch.

Until now a typical marketing email might take you several hours to produce. You’ll need to do things like:

• Spend time drafting and refining your content
• Look at campaign data to see what has worked previously
• Trawl through countless image archives to find the perfect picture
• Dig up personalized data for each prospect you want to target

With AI-assistance, you can combine your ideas, with the ability to let AI take care of a lot of the ‘busy’ work, to turn around a marketing email in a matter of minutes.

SuperOffice has combined AI technology with our award-winning CRM platform to make it easier than ever to produce personalized content authentically.

Using our platform means your marketing team can save time and effort by letting SuperOffice’s in-built marketing AI assist with things like:

• Create custom images instantly
• Get AI suggestions to help improve CTAs and headings
• Write and edit for style, length, and tone
• Use personalization tokens to stay personal

Check out the table below as a reference guide to help you get the most out of using AI to help you create incredible personalized marketing content.

Of course, personalizing your content is only half the battle; you also need to send the right messages to the right customers.

So, next up, we’ll look at how you can use AI to segment your customer campaigns better. 2

2. Segmented customer campaigns 

Marketers who segment their email lists can increase email marketing revenue by as much as 760%, compared to those that don’t.

Sadly, 89% of marketers still aren’t segmenting their email lists.

This means they’re sending the same generic and impersonal messages to all their prospects and customers and missing out on ‘human touch’ benefits like:

• Increased relevance - making sure the emails resonate with the recipient and are reflective of where they are in their journey, rather than taking a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
• Improved results - ensuring your emails campaigns are segmented means you’ll also see a 30% higher open rate and 50% better click through rate, compared to a generic email blast.
• Fewer unsubscribes - when emails are not relevant enough, many recipients will vote with their feet and unsubscribe. Segmenting your list helps to reduce email list churn.
• Higher ROI - as we’ve mentioned already, the return on investment for email campaigns is more than 7X higher when you take the time to segment your email list.

Above all, segmenting your email lists helps your emails to feel more human, as if they’re speaking directly to the recipient. This is especially true when combined with personalization.

The trouble is, analyzing data and gathering campaign results can be incredibly time-consuming for marketers.

Using AI can help you to surface segment and KPI-specific data to help you fast track your email segmentation efforts.

When it comes to AI-enabled data and analytics, SuperOffice leads the charge.

Using our CRM platform to surfact customer metrics, KPI’s and data points will help you to:

• Identify customer and prospect segments to target with emails
• Review high-performing campaigns to reuse and adapt
• Build custom dashboards to give your team insights into KPI’s that matter most
• Understand your audience on a deeper level based on their engagement with you

To help you get started with using AI to segment your customer campaigns, feel free to use our ‘do’s and don’ts’ reference guide below.

To make sure your personalized and segmented messages truly resonate with your target market, you’re also going to need to do some research on them.

With that in mind, let’s look next at how AI can help you with customer and market research. 3

3. Customer research 

More than 40% of marketers regularly use research to help drive decisions.

The challenge is that research takes time and effort to get right.

You need to check a variety of sources to corroborate the information you find, or risk making costly mistakes.

Until now, marketers have had to gather data from their CRM, LinkedIn, news articles, company reports, and more, just to gather the intelligence they need to make decisions like:

• Has this customer recently purchased a similar product or service?
• Are they growing? Or is the company in financial turmoil?
• Have they recently received funding?
• Are they even in our ICP?
• And much, much, more.

Without conducting proper research, you run the risk of running impersonal ‘spray and pray’ campaigns, targeted at everyone, rather than specific leads who may be ready to buy.

This can also happen when the research you use is out of date, or unverified, leading to alienating potential customers before you’ve even spoken to them properly.

Manually conducting research can be incredibly time-consuming, but the good news is that you can use AI to not only do research instantly, but make sure it’s accurate in real-time, too.

SuperOffice has an in-built AI ‘Co-pilot’ to help you with researching every single lead, prospect, or customer, combining CRM and 3rd party online sources to give you:

• Up to the minute insights on any contact in your CRM
• The ability to get research completed in a matter of moments
• Confidence knowing that your research combines the most reputable sources
• Opportunities to make truly data-driven decisions in real-time

We’ve prepared a guide to some of the do’s and don’ts you should consider when it comes to using AI to help you with your customer research.

No matter how much research you do, or how many emails you send, you’ll still need to understand and respond to the ways that your audience engages with and reacts to your content.

So, let’s take a look next at how AI and automation can help you to trigger different actions based on how customers interact with your content. 4

4. Automation based on customer interactions 

Automation is among the most popular tools marketers have at their disposal.

63% of marketers use automation to help manage their email marketing campaigns, while more than 58% use it to help them manage routine tasks.

It’s not hard to imagine how automating processes can help make marketers more efficient, but how can you use it to ensure you’re keeping the human touch in your marketing efforts?

Automation doesn’t just have to be about reducing the amount of work required to do a task, it can be a great way to present the right content in front of the right people. 

Using ‘if this, then that’ logic, you can make sure that no matter the stage of the buying journey your customer is in, you can present them with timely and relevant information.

This helps the customer to feel listened to and that the content they’re being shown is specifically aimed at solving a problem or answering a question right now.

Combining your human understanding of exactly what your customers will need during each interaction with you, with automation technology helps make your ‘human touch’ scalable.

Because SuperOffice covers the whole customer lifecycle, it can record how leads, prospects, and customers interact and engage with your content at every step.

Monitoring clicks and engagement gives you the opportunity to setup click-to-trigger actions like:

• Sending email content based on past preferences and interactions
• Directly update and populate CRM contact records
• Triggering a follow-up task or appointment
• Flagging interest a specific product, service, or event

To help you quickly get to grips with what automation based on customer interactions could do for you, here's a quick reference guide.

Using AI will save your marketing team loads of time and make them more efficient - but the biggest benefit is what they can do with that time to really underline the human touch.

Above all, relationships are what matter in business.

Leveraging AI in the right way will help you retain the human touch in your marketing - and start building those relationships.

But, the extra time your marketing team gains from leveraging AI can be used to strengthen those relationships further, by adding an actual human touch to the wider marketing mix.

However, to take full advantage of the strategies we’ve outlined, you will need a CRM platform - like SuperOffice - to help you.

How a CRM platform can help you use AI to increase efficiency without losing the human touch

We all know AI can help marketers produce content - but 52% of readers are less engaged with AI-generated content.

If you don’t strike a balance between the efficiency that AI can offer and the human touch that your prospects require, you run the risk of failing to build profitable relationships.

The best marketers have developed ways to leverage the productivity opportunities that AI offers without alienating their customers.

Using AI to help with research, personalization, automation, and (a little bit of) content generation frees marketers to develop more fruitful relationships with customers.

However, to achieve the benefits of using AI effectively in your marketing stack, you’ll need the right tools.

Blending AI with a unified CRM platform will help your marketers (and other customer-facing teams) be more productive while adding the human touch to every interaction.

SuperOffice is a market leader in this space and offers several features designed to help you use AI to be more efficient while building better relationships:

• Enhanced filtering and segmentation to target specific types of customers
• Advanced marketing and personalization options to tailor every message
• Research capabilities to help you truly understand your ICP’s pain points
• Easy to use automation to deliver messages exactly when customers need them
• And much, much, more…

Ready to enhance your marketing team’s productivity by blending the power of AI with the ability to build relationships that turn into revenue?

Book a demo of SuperOffice today and learn how your marketing, sales, and service teams can be more productive than ever by leveraging AI in a single CRM platform.

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