AI-powered ChatGPT is the talk of the town with its impressive ability to generate human-like content. It’s like having a writing genie in a bottle, ready to grant your every content wish. But beyond the hype and excitement, there are real implications for the world of B2B marketing that can’t be ignored. Let’s try to take a helicopter view at AI and its potential to change marketing strategies for B2B in the upcoming years.
The cycle of mediocracy: how B2B companies struggle to compete in inbound market
In 2023, B2B tech companies are facing a daunting challenge in their marketing strategies. Commonly used methods of churning out educational blogs to cover basic search queries and gain leads from SEO while developing gated white papers based on open data to generate leads on LinkedIn will not work. Users can get the information they need by simply asking questions to AI chat. Telling the truth, this traditional approach has not been efficient for a while but it is still widely used among tech B2B businesses.
While the top-performing companies are able to build their brand through emotional and personalized content and feed the funnel through advanced practices in ABM and Demand Generation programs, the rest are trapped in a cycle of mediocrity, unable to compete in the inbound market.
A reasonable idea would be to think of some strategies to help B2B companies rise to the challenge. However, with the booming rise of ChatGPT, which gained 100M users in just 2 months, maybe there is no need to look for a win in the educational battlefield at all?
What if ChatGPT, along with other AI-powered apps, will change how SEO and content-generation works all-together, bringing us to an era of a completely different buyer’s journey, and hence, marketing?
New buyer’s journey, brought to you by ChatGPT
A couple of years, or even months ago, Google was the main solution to all our problems. Need a banking system? A PDF-converter? Reasonably-priced platform to automate your marketing activities with the best feature set? In the search for the best option, we all dove into the endless web-pages ranked by Google crawler-bots, choosing what is best for us.
But now, why would you spend hours comparing different software-development company’s websites if you can just ask ChatGPT to find you a list of top 5, based on your specific criteria, and get the results in minutes?
This took us less than 2 minutes to find
With the extreme popularity and adoption of ChatGPT, most B2B buyers looking for tech solutions are going to address these easy, generic questions to ChatGPT. Then, when they are more aware of the existing landscape of the market, they will go to Google to find a specific solution and dive deeper.
So, the customer journey is changing and educational content battlefield in SEO shifts
While high quality expert content will always be valuable, low quality SEO content will definitely die as it declines now thanks to Google search updates. There is literally no need now to educate users about the market, as they will not be reading this content. It will be used by ChatGPT-like solutions to cover their questions. And that means no traffic for your company in return. It’s just a matter of time when people will use AI bots as daily assistants to cover complex questions related to their job.
So while ChatGPT will cover the needs for general educational content, the new challenge for B2B companies will be to get on those GPT-generated shortlists.
Getting your brand on ChatGPT best-list – HOW?
In this new landscape, your content marketing should be focusing on communicating value for customers and product features for ChatGPT.
Let’s try to think about what ChatGPT is looking for while determining the best options for the customers in the market. For that, let’s ask ChatGPT itself.
As we can see, 4 main things that the AI tools itself mention include:
- Online presence
Here goes not just the fact that you have a website, but your present across different digital channels, which includes social media. In other words, Google never cared about your followers on engagement on Linkedin or Twitter, but ChatGPT takes into account a brand’s digital presence across all platforms, making it essential to maintain an active and consistent presence.
- SEO optimization
Chat GPT states that SEO is still important, however, it is unclear how exactly it influences the choices of AI. In Google, if your website is ranked below the first search page, users can still scroll down and find it. Will anything but top-10 matter to ChatGPT? There is a big chance that no, since what users ask for top-50 companies for their criteria? Therefore, the new SEO challenge is to be top of the top in google which will then attract the attention of ChatGPT
- PR and media
Before, brand mentions without links did not influence SEO and only affected brand awareness. Now, as AI will analyze a brand’s online presence in general, your mentions in third-party media will matter like never before!
- Reviews and ratings
Well, this one speaks for itself – what people say about your brand matters A LOT!
So, most likely it’s your brand’s online reputation. It can be achieved with:
- Fueling your website with unique and structured information about services and solutions that you offer
- Strengthening PR
- Getting more reviews
- Guest posting & third-party media publication
The new SEO battle will be all about winning the category spot and turning your website into a unique source of truth about your product to feed the ChatGPT.
To stand out and build an emotional bond with the audience, the following thing will be important:
- Branding
- Unique expertise like success stories that cannot be replaced by ChatGPT
- Loyal community around your brand
- Creativity to build outbound communications
Paid search days are numbered, and the new advertising formats are to appear soon
When users want to get a single answer for the question where is the place to put dozens of paid search ads. The answer is simple – there is none. While the demand of the search requests generated in google will be shrinking the price for the click will automatically goes up and that means the efficiency of the paid search ads will be questionable. And there will be a very limited spots to fight for, such as commercial requests, location based requests, competitors keywords and some more.
The most important task will be to protect your own brand from stealing the traffic, so branded keywords will be pretty important to focus on.
But that is just temporarily because Google and Bing will both innovate on how to imprint the advertising opportunities in AI Chats and get back the advertising revenue streams.
Social media: the new battlefield of competition
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to create a loyal following, generate leads, and increase revenue. However, the competition on social media is fierce, and standing out in a crowded space can be challenging.
With ChatGPT, anyone can write LinkedIn posts in seconds and generate dozens of tweets. However, relying on automated content creation tools like this can result in an overflow of similar content that brings zero value and engagement.
To stand out in the social media landscape, B2B companies will need to focus on uniqueness and humanity.
Being generic is no longer acceptable. In a world where everyone is vying for attention, those who know the insights and are ready to show real people behind their brand will win the spot. The next big thing in B2B social media marketing is video-first, interactive edutainment content that offers value to the audience. With this content in place and the right technology for targeting, B2B brands will be capable to go beyond the traditional Twitter & Linkedin, and discover new territories, like TikTok.
AI evolution of Account-based marketing programs: discover personalization on scale
Building the brand in social media is great but how to feed the pipeline when the market is shifting. If people will search less for content and not ready to trade their emails for millions of ebooks, what should B2B marketer do with all of that? There are still practices that are proven to deliver and big B2B enterprises are benefiting from them for a long time. Account Based Marketing and Account Based Experience are among those practices. They are utilizing a powerful tech stack that allows to catch the lead without forcing a person to share the data.
ABM technologies of delivering personalized messages are incredible and ready to utilize. The core challenge that most of the enterprises are facing with it, is limited resources to develop personalized content. Brilliant ideas are hard to produce, and personalizing it for different buyer personas at scale could be a bottleneck.
Here’s where AI tools like ChatGPT come in. With careful usage of experienced creative copywriters, it can allow teams to personalize great ideas at scale, based on audience pains, gains, and JTBD. We at 42DM experiment with it for omnichannel content recycling for different buyer personas, and delivering it to specific account groups using powerful ABM platforms.
But without a solid brand platform and insightful campaign ideas, this personalization will be meaningless, as it will promote the solution and the category itself, not your product or brand. Great Ideas personalized on scale with ChatGP- like solutions are untapping the scalability potential for ABM programs as well as more cost-efficient in terms of resources involved.
What’s left for B2B marketers after ChatGPT?
The customer journey in the B2B sphere is changing, and it is crucial to recognize that many customers will do preliminary research through AI chatbots as part of their marketing plans. To succeed, you need to optimize your marketing efforts for AI. That means focusing on your brand’s entire online presence to gain top positions, reviews and rankings across ALL your brand activities. Because the new goal is no longer to be top of Google – it is to be top of ChatGPT.
