Beyond Retargeting: AI-Powered Personalized B2B Customer Journeys

AI can increase B2B marketers’ productivity, saving them an average of 5 hours per week; however, according to IBM, over 40% of marketers struggle with acquiring new AI skills, particularly in creative AI.

In today’s business world, where competition is immense, getting a new customer isn’t enough. Companies need to put in the extra effort to keep their customers engaged and happy. This is where AI personalization steps in to create personalized customer journeys.

What is AI-Powered Personalization?

AI-powered personalization is a powerful tool utilized by 92% of firms to increase growth and revenue according to Forbes. It analyzes enormous volumes of data using machine learning algorithms and advanced artificial intelligence to obtain a thorough grasp of context and customer behavior.

Netflix excels in AI-powered personalization. Their computers examine individual viewing histories and tastes to recommend shows that individuals will enjoy. Netflix leverages the power of machine learning to sift through this data. By uncovering subtle patterns and preferences, they deliver highly personalized recommendations. This allows Netflix to continuously refine suggestions, keeping viewers glued to their platform.

This technology differs from previous approaches in its intricacy, data management, real-time adaptation, and predictive capabilities.

Unlike traditional systems that use simple rule-based systems and rudimentary segmentation approaches, AI-driven systems analyze large data sets to find subtle patterns and preferences. AI systems also deliver real-time adjustments depending on user interactions, enabling more tailored content.

Mapping the Customer Journey: Steps for AI Personalization

AI-powered journey mapping assists businesses in understanding individual consumer journeys, uncovering trends, forecasting future actions, and identifying engagement opportunities, thereby transforming curiosity into long-term loyalty.

Begin your AI-powered customer mapping journey by establishing these four steps below:
1. Set clear goals and collect data: Create a journey map with defined objectives, such as increasing conversion rates, customer happiness, or touchpoint optimization, and collect data from user interactions, feedback, and analytics.
2. Create customer personas: Create complete customer profiles to deliver a humanized and customer-centric viewpoint by learning about your customers’ demographics, actions, preferences, and pain points.
3. Map the customer journey: The journey involves key stages such as awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. These stages involve customers’ initial awareness of a product or service, evaluation against competitors, decision-making, and retention. Understanding the emotional highs and lows experienced at each touchpoint is crucial for effective customer service.
4. Implement changes and monitor/refine the map: The journey map will be used to enhance the customer experience by continuously monitoring and refining it as customer behaviors evolve.

Before utilizing AI in B2B marketing, you need to have a solid understanding of your target demographic. This includes defining goals, gathering data, creating personas, and mapping the customer journey. This assists in identifying major client categories with distinct demands, habits, and pain points.

This information is critical for AI-powered segmentation and targeting since it enables AI to evaluate massive amounts of data and create hyper-personalized experiences that resonate with each demographic.

AI in B2B Customer Segmentation and Targeting

AI consumer segmentation helps organizations adjust marketing strategies to specific customer preferences by analyzing vast data sets, identifying personalized possibilities, and increasing engagement. It creates thorough profiles using a variety of data sets and complex predictive modeling approaches, allowing organizations to better target and market.

AI and customer segmentation data can help firms understand and engage with their target demographic, resulting in more effective marketing tactics and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

While AI can help with B2B client segmentation and targeting, overcoming obstacles can lead to success. Implementing AI-powered personalization could enhance conversion rates, improve customer engagement, and raise customer lifetime value. Companies may encourage loyalty by addressing consumer demands and pain areas while improving data integration, quality, and scalability.

Challenges and Success Stories: Implementing B2B Personalization

Personalization is becoming increasingly important in enterprise strategies, with organizations such as Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike focusing on omnichannel experiences.

The competitive advantage today is based on acquiring, analyzing, and leveraging individualized customer data at scale, as well as applying AI to analyze, shape, tailor, and optimize the customer journey.

Let us understand this via the below success stories:

Brinks Home Improves Revenue by 9.5%: Brinks Home displays the effectiveness of AI-powered personalization. They evaluated client data from all touchpoints to better understand preferences and adapt messaging. This led to a 9.5% increase in sales, demonstrating the financial strength of customization.

Sweetgreen and Stitch Fix: These brands thrive on personalization. Sweetgreen leverages previous orders to offer recipes on their mobile app, whereas Stitch Fix curates apparel shipments based on style and size. This data-driven strategy promotes strong customer ties, leading to a 10- 15% increase in their sales respectively.

Let’s look at the roadblocks to personalization in branding.

Roadblocks:

Brands struggle to provide personalized consumer experiences to compete with top companies.

Merging real and digital experiences could be the only way to compete with digital natives such as Amazon and Google.

Early adopters have embraced modern technologies such as the Internet of Things, machine learning, marketing technology platforms, and digital media applications.

To compete with early movers, brands must assess their data and technology base.

Automation, AI-powered intelligence, and activation tools are addressing critical issues, such as establishing a 360-degree perspective of the customer.

Intelligent experience engines must focus on micro-goals, which are positive moments that make up the complete customer experience.

Companies are merging AI, martech, and back-office solutions to better produce and exploit customized data.

New digital media offers users new ways to interact with brands.

The best approach for brands is to develop a data and technology roadmap that includes comprehensive requirements connected to customer-specific use cases.

According to the 70/20/10 rule, 70% of the effort in changing an organization is spent on people, 20% on getting the data correct, and the remaining 10% on the technology foundation.

How B2B Personalization Increases ROI Using AI

AI-powered personalization can increase B2B commerce ROI in 3 months while lowering customer costs, improving the buyer experience, and raising overall returns. It also increases conversions by providing relevant deals and products. AI-based personalization also improves purchasing convenience by providing the right information at the right time, to the right person, and on the right platform. It creates a smoother buying experience, increasing the overall return per visitor. This can be accomplished using internet retailers, voice assistants, and specialized field sales apps. By focusing on these characteristics, AI-based personalization can increase conversion rates, order values, and share-of-wallet, resulting in business development.

Takeaways
• AI personalization can increase B2B marketers’ productivity by five hours per week.
• More than 40% of individuals struggle with new AI skills.
• AI personalization transforms organizations by engaging and retaining customers.
• 92% of businesses utilize AI-powered personalization to drive growth and revenue.

• AI-powered customer journey mapping aids in understanding individual consumer journeys, detecting trends, forecasting future actions, and identifying interaction possibilities.
• AI customer segmentation tailors marketing techniques to unique customer preferences.

•When it comes to reinventing consumer engagement, organizations must provide personalized interactions while competing with digital natives and early technology adopters.

Conclusion

AI-based personalization can improve B2B purchasing experiences, ranging from intelligent website searches to chatbots. However, investing in AI is more than just for convenience; real-time data understanding is critical.

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You may also want to read more on “AI-Prompted Personalization: Tailoring B2B Journeys in Real-Time.”

Resources

[1] https://www.pathfactory.com/blog/3-ways-b2b-marketers-can-use-ai/

[2] https://segment.com/growth-center/customer-journey/b2b/

[3] Customer Experience in the Age of AI (hbr.org)

[4] https://www.rebid.co/ai-driven-customer-journey-mapping/

[5] https://segment.com/growth-center/customer-journey/b2b/

[6] B2B Customer Journeys: How They’re Evolving in 2024 | Growth Center | Twilio Segment

[7] https://mailchimp.com/resources/ai-customer-segmentation/#:~:text=AI%20customer%20segmentation%20goes%20beyond,analysis%20from%20social%20media%20posts.

[8] https://blog.intershop.com/en/3-reasons-why-you-should-use-ai-for-b2b-personalization