What generative AI will mean for your ABM strategy

Understanding and properly wielding generative AI is essential for adding value in ABM. This is something Tom Stevenson and I will dig deeper into during our session on day one of Marketing Vision 2023.

Marketers are no strangers to hype around the topic of AI. The past 20 years have seen digital leaders gradually incorporate intelligent systems into their martech stacks for everything from personalization and campaign optimization to cataloguing marketing assets across sprawling and distributed enterprises.

But the hype around generative AI seems different. Here’s a technology that could fundamentally change how marketers partner with content and creative teams – and which enterprises are genuinely racing to adopt.

As an AI-focused executive told us recently: “For people across lines of business, they don’t have a choice but to engage on this topic. There is no real option to be at the tail end of this.”

Who among us hasn’t had a colleague ask them how generative AI can augment our marketing teams’ capabilities in recent months? Now we’ve had time to experiment with what’s out there, some answers to this question are starting to emerge.

The rise of generative AI in marketing

Research from McKinsey shows that generative AI is opening up new frontiers for marketing and sales in the domains of customer experience, growth, and productivity.

Of the commercial leaders the consultancy surveyed, 60% said the technology will have a “significant” impact on lead identification. At the same time, 55%, 53%, and 50% said the same about marketing optimization, personalized outreach, and dynamic content, respectively.

More anecdotally, staff at Momentum ITSMA use generative AI routinely to streamline desk-based research. Meanwhile, AI solutions including content generation service Jasper and video generation platform Synthesia claim to be making content for some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Using generative AI impactfuly and responsibly

While the content generative systems can create is often impressive, it frequently isn’t up to the same standards at human-made content. It requires a human sanity check, or a human perspective to refine and sharpen – even the best-engineered prompt won’t capture the nuances and tone of voice that can make all the difference to the reader.

It’s the thinking behind the prompts that matters. Giving clear and specific instructions is the way to really get the most value from generative AI. Think open-ended questions and plenty of context. All while taking into account the sensitivity of client and account insight.

ABM practitioners must take care to ensure their use cases for generative AI don’t undermine the whole goal of ABM: delivering highly personalized, top-quality campaigns tailored to the needs of specific target accounts. To achieve this, we recommend adopting the following best practices:

• Use generative AI to add value, not cut corners. ABM is personalized and bespoke. So, using AI to automate 100% of content creation is unwise. Instead, explore uses cases that streamline manual tasks and empower writers and creatives to focus more on value-adding tasks

• Continue to prioritize in-depth research. Strategic account-based insights remain the cornerstone of ABM. The outputs AI systems deliver are only as strong as the data provided to them. Therefore, ABM leaders must put the same care and effort into planning and tailoring campaign assets as they would when making them manually

• Protect your data. Data privacy is a crucial consideration when using an AI system. There are many examples of enterprises compromising proprietary data when using public generative AI tools, such as Chat GPT. Before using any AI solution, make sure you can access a private instance of the model. This ensures the data and documents you feed into it aren’t available to anyone outside your organization.

Of course, these considerations are just a starting point on the road to generative AI maturity. We’ll be discussing this topic in more depth during our session: Beyond Algorithms: Crafting Human Trust in an AI-dominant World.