Rebekah Carter
AI is transforming every facet of the business landscape, enhancing employee productivity, customer service, and even product development strategies. But for B2B tech brands, using AI for content marketing could deliver the biggest benefits of all.
In fact, according to one report, 82% of companies who achieve consistent success in their content marketing efforts are already using AI in some form. The challenge for today’s companies, is figuring out how to use AI effectively. Leveraging AI for content marketing doesn’t just mean using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create content at scale.
Effective AI-driven content marketing takes advantage of multiple facets of artificial intelligence to strengthen your connections with customers, align your teams, and help you create a more personalized, relevant, and engaging content strategy.
The Evolving Power of AI for Content Marketing
Many companies in both the B2C and B2B landscape have been using AI for content marketing for a while now. We’re all familiar with generative AI apps like Jasper that can create briefs, articles, and even social media posts at scale. The issue is many organizations either rely on AI too heavily (using it to replace crucial human experts), or fail to use a holistic approach.
Using AI for content marketing in the B2B tech industry can be extremely valuable. It can provide crucial insights into your audience, help you convert jargon into engaging content that speaks your customer’s language, and even bridge the gaps between your team.
The best results stem from taking a comprehensive, yet targeted approach to implementing AI.
Here are some of the best ways to leverage AI for content marketing in the B2B tech industry.
1.    Generative AI as a Copilot for Tech Marketers
From all of our experiments with AI at Today Digital, one consistent trend has emerged – AI works best when it augments your existing human resources. Marketing in the B2B tech landscape can be complicated. It often requires significant subject matter expertise, and a deep understanding of a specific target audience. Not to mention, it requires a flexible and creative mindset.
To stand out from the crowd, you need to not only create content for all stages of the buyer funnel, but you also need to look at topics and trends from different viewpoints. AI can be extremely useful here. Tools like Microsoft Copilot, which can draw insights from your existing business data, can generate fresh and engaging content ideas for tech marketers, even if they lack subject matter expertise.
Marketers can feed ideas into AI systems, and ask it to suggest new topics and formats that can expand the reach of existing materials too. For instance, if you have a phenomenal industry report, AI can show you how to convert it into a podcast episode, video, or blog post.
Additionally, generative AI solutions can act as an always-on assistant for technology marketers, answering questions throughout the content creation journey about their ideal buyer personas, the strategies of their competitors, and ways to optimize the content plan.
2.    Harnessing Conversations for Content Generation
Many companies have seen negative impacts on their content marketing strategies after relying too heavily on intelligent tools for content generation. That’s because they’re taking the wrong approach. Creating content with AI should be a collaborative process that enables incredible personalization.
AI tools work best when they can extract insights from your exclusive data, to give you ideas on how to create unique, relevant, and engaging content. One of the best ways to use AI to make your content more personalized and relevant, is to feed your systems with proprietary data.
Marketing teams should conduct informal conversations with key stakeholders such as CEOs, solution architects, tech support staff and sales teams before creating content. They can record those conversations, transcribe them (using AI), and leverage their intelligent tools to extract key insights, quotes, and potential content themes unique to your business.
Feeding unique conversations with your team, and even your customers into AI gives you an opportunity to identify content topics that really matter to your target audience. Plus, it gives you a behind-the-scenes guide to approaching those topics from the right perspective.
After your AI system generates ideas based on your crucial conversations, marketing teams can add their own thoughts, opinions, and other insights, to make the content truly compelling.
3.    Expanding the B2B Tech Marketers Tool Kit
Resonating with B2B technology companies is much harder in today’s world. The buyer journey has become more complex, spreading across various channels and platforms. Businesses can’t just churn out press releases and blog posts, they need to experiment with different media.
In fact, 74% of B2B marketers say that video content outperforms other content formats in terms of fostering engagement and generating leads.
Today’s multi-modal LLMs and generative AI systems can create more than just written content. They can produce tables, infographics, and visual elements for your posts. Some solutions can even design product demonstration videos, or animated clips.
AI can give tech marketers the power to create a wider range of content at scale. Plus, some solutions can even help them customize that content for different market segments, showing employees how to adapt content to different languages, or customer preferences.
4.    Using AI for Content Marketing Optimization
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of AI for content marketing, is it can empower your marketing teams to more efficiently optimize content, not just for the search engines, but for customer segments too. We’ve already mentioned how AI solutions can offer suggestions on how to tailor content to different consumer groups based on persona insights and market research.
AI can even act as your research assistant, helping you to unlock insights that allow you to personalize content for specific accounts and consumer groups at scale. At the same time, AI solutions, like SEMRush’s AI tools or the features built into Ahrefs, can help content marketers to improve the visibility of their content with SEO.
AI can help you generate headlines that are more likely to capture customer attention based on your core keywords. Tools like Google Gemini can even evaluate article competitors and suggest high-volume keywords for you to use during content fine-tuning.
According to one report, 68% of companies report higher SEO results and stronger content marketing ROI when they leverage artificial intelligence. AI doesn’t just fill the gaps in your marketing teams, it helps them consistently improve and tweak content to drive better results.
5.    AI as a Catalyst for Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Success in B2B content marketing isn’t exclusively reliant on the marketing team anymore. As mentioned above, buyer journeys are becoming more complex, and customers are looking for a wider range of content to help them understand products and make intelligent purchasing decisions.
To create content that guides customers through their purchasing journey, boosts engagement with your brand, and facilitates long-term retention, collaboration is crucial.
Bringing together different team members from your product development, sales, technology, and other sectors helps you to create more intuitive, relevant, and authoritative content. AI-powered tools can empower this cross-departmental approach to collaboration.
Companies can use AI to bridge the gaps between data from different departments, creating more comprehensive buyer personas and customer journey maps. This can help to ensure the content produced by marketing teams reflects industry trends, and real customer challenges.
AI solutions can even simplify the way teams communicate, helping to translate complex ideas into simple concepts that every member of the team can leverage and understand.
The Business Impact of AI for Content Creation
Using AI for content creation in the B2B tech industry can be extremely beneficial. The key to success is to focus not just on scaling your content creation efforts, but using AI in various ways to empower, align, and enhance your team. Used correctly, AI can:
- Reduce costs: AI solutions can streamline content workflows, simplify the creation of briefs and video scrips, and even produce valuable content assets at speed. This significantly reduces marketing costs, empowering your team to accomplish more with less.
- Enhance content performance: By leveraging insights from crucial conversations, market data, and subject matter experts, AI helps you create more engaging, relevant content. It ensures you can focus your attention on the content that will drive the best outcomes.
- Simplify marketing: In the B2B tech landscape, where effective content marketing is often complex, artificial intelligence is a valuable copilot. It can facilitate idea generation, improve creativity, streamline crucial tasks, and improve team performance.
- Enhance resonance: With deep insights into your target audience, and segments, you’ll be able to create more personalized, technically accurate content that appeals to niche audiences. That means you end up with a better ROI from your marketing efforts.
- Expand reach: Since AI can help you repurpose and reformat content for a variety of different channels, it expands the reach of your valuable assets. It can help you connect with customers through a broader range of mediums, throughout their purchasing journey.
Leveraging AI for Content Marketing in B2B Tech
AI represents a significant game changer for technology marketers in the B2B landscape. The key to success is knowing how to leverage artificial intelligence effectively. Don’t just try to accelerate and scale content production. Use AI to overcome knowledge gaps in your marketing team, and create high-value, unique content, based on specific data.
Look at AI as your opportunity to optimize, augment, and enhance your content marketing team, giving them the insights and resources they need to create more powerful content.
AI can be an indispensable tool for content marketing in the B2B tech industry. All you need to do is make sure you’re using it correctly.
