Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer a personalised service?
Personalising your services is incredibly important, especially as we move towards a more digital age where Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being used on a regular basis.
Using personalisation in your marketing efforts now goes beyond just inputting your leads name in an email. To stand out in this competitive space, you must consider tailoring all your messages, your content strategy, and your website to each unique online visitor.
In this episode of TechTalks, MD of CopyHouse, joins industry experts, Dan Archer, the Managing Partner of Marketing Partnerships at Cactus, and Ben Mercer, the Co-Founder of Personify XP, to discuss what the future of B2B content marketing and website personalisation holds.
AI is a great tool to help boost your content personalisation efforts and allow for a friendly user experience.
However, when you’re deciding what AI tools to implement into your website, it’s wise to look at how your consumers interact with your site and how you can make it more user-friendly and memorable for them.
It’s better to implement AI technology based on that than just using every new advancement of technology that comes your way.
“There are two sides here; the first is the front end-user experience and looking at what technology can be used to create a memorable and frictionless experience on the site.
The second side is looking at what technology can be used in the backend to provide intelligence into how the site is being used or to optimise the front end to better understand what the site is trying to achieve.”
- Dan Archer, Managing Partner of Marketing Partnerships at Cactus.
A prime example of this advancement in AI technology is chatbots. Chatbots are a piece of AI that guides users through their inquiry without the use of another human. Often they read a programmed script, which can save the customer service team both time and money.
Bots also work around the clock, unlike an ordinary sales team who, in most cases, won’t operate a website 24/7. It’s estimated that businesses can save more than 30% of business costs by implementing chatbots onto their site, thus making it a great investment.
If done right, chatbots are effective and efficient for both users and businesses. However, if a company has a lot of information, chatbots can take the user around in circles and create a frustrating experience for them. This can ultimately tarnish the brand’s reputation.
Ben Mercer explains that there should be a blend of the two. For example, suppose a company has a lot of information or a complex service. In that case, a chatbot should start the initial conversation and help the user reach a solution, even if it means that a human touch is needed at a certain point.
For simple inquiries, chatbots can be a great tool, but a human element is required for more complex questions.
In the B2B market, it can often take months to generate leads and then transform those leads into buyers. However, you can decrease that time by offering a more personalised experience.
To do this, you must look at your business and the key conversion outcomes. If you’re trying to get your audience to download an eBook or if you want them to sign up to your newsletter and further speed up the conversion process then you need content that is designed to give them a personalised experience.
Segmentation is also incredibly important. You must observe what stage of the funnel your lead is at and cater for that.We believe there are 3 parts of the funnel:
Although AI technology is advancing, it’s still far from becoming a replacement for humans or copywriters.
One discussion was how far AI has come to help support content marketing. For example, when SEO was new, content marketers were able to get away with keyword stuffing. This is where they constantly ‘stuff’ the same keywords in a piece of content to manipulate the search engine and make it think that is what the user is searching for.
Now, with the invention of AI tools such as BERT, which is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing, the search engine has become much more intelligent and understands what the user is searching for.
In fact, BERT even allows individual paragraphs in a piece of content to rank high if it is what the user is after.
Although like most AI, BERT is not perfect, it is a step in the right direction in terms of customising and personalising content to help reach your intended target audience.
“Some personalisation is 100% better than no personalisation.”
- Ben Mercer, the Co-Founder of Personify XP.
As mentioned, although AI is far from becoming a replacement for humans and copywriters, a common question asked is whether AI will replace marketers in the future. The simple answer, according to our panellist, is no!
Despite how great and beneficial AI is, a human touch is needed to help capture emotion, empathy and sympathise with real consumers.
For example, when conducting an interview, an AI tool may ask the questions listed, but if a person was conducting that same interview, they could read the interviewee’s emotions and press for more detail when necessary to bring forward deeper insights.
“AI is getting better at creating very basic content. It’s good at processing data that will help marketers during the research phase, and it can generate content ideas that a marketer may not have thought about.
However, this research must be taken with a pinch of salt as sometimes an AI tool can be very far off. So a human element is needed to distinguish the bad ideas generated by AI from the good ideas.”
An example given was meta descriptions. A meta description is an HTML tag used to describe the content of a web page. Constantly writing SEO compliant meta descriptions can take up a lot of time. Therefore, we hold the hopes that AI tools can do these tasks in the future and free up the copywriter's time.
“I'm not convinced that AI is going to take over the marketing world anytime soon.
Although I see a business appeal and attraction in the cost of AI, and I understand it can be a useful tool for driving efficiencies in departments, there are still consequences to solely relying on AI.
By using AI, you lose that human interaction and that human touch. For example, an algorithm won’t let you delve deep into what you want answered and even if an AI tool does create content, a human would need to go over it and make sure it makes sense and has that feel of empathy.”
- Dan Archer, Managing Partner of Marketing Partnerships at Cactus.
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