It is not surprising that Gartner lists AI as well as Intelligent Apps and Analytics among its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018. The impact of these technologies has started to become apparent even in our daily lives.
B2B companies are also relying in increasingly on artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data to make their organisations more efficient, customer friendly and innovative. Here are some of the biggest application areas for these technologies in a B2B organisation:
Insights into Customer Behaviour
Machines are more capable than humans when it comes to efficiently consolidating data and analysing it to identify patterns and trends. The power of machine learning allows for much better customer insights as well as ability to respond immediately. Machines can be programmed to analyse input and respond immediately to customers. Such an ability throws up a wide range of applications, right from improving content marketing to enhancing customer service to upsell opportunities.
Predictive Account Management and Marketing
Analytics allows you to distil down the features and attributes of your most desirable (read: most profitable) customers, so that you can make informed decisions about the type of customers you seek to attract through your marketing efforts. Not only will this help to optimize marketing dollars as well as other resources, it will ensure that your revenue per customer goes up too. While humans have been doing similar exercises manually for ages now, the efficiency and scale at which the machine does this is what is truly remarkable.
Generating New Leads
Lead generation is a key aspect of the sales cycle. Traditional/manual methods of scouting for new leads by browsing through sources such as LinkedIn, company websites etc. to find the contact information of prospects can be exhausting, and also highly inefficient. Through machine learning and AI, B2B companies can not only gather reams of lead generation data, but the machine can also analyse a variety of unstructured data, whether emails, social posts, telephonic conversations, chats etc. to identify patterns and short-list more promising leads based on the data. This information can be vital for effective marketing campaigns.
Reduce Human Effort
Despite all the bad press about machines taking away human jobs, the truth is that there are immense benefits to handing over mundane, repetitive jobs to machines. This not only helps the process to be done effectively, but it also frees up human time such that they can focus on more high-end tasks that require creativity, strategic thinking. So, while machines can do the grunt work of processing data and finding useful patterns, humans can use those patterns to find the insights that can help improve decision making.
The number of use cases for machine learning, AI and big data for B2B businesses is limited only imagination. From determining the right target audience to optimising marketing campaigns to assessing customer satisfaction, the above applications have the potential to transform businesses.
Click here to read more about how your business can benefit from the right analytics implementation.