What Is AI Marketing? Challenges & Best Practices

AI has transformed B2B marketing, changing how companies develop campaigns, create content, and connect with prospects. For B2B marketers, leveraging AI is no longer optional. Instead, it's now essential.

To get measurable results, you need to know how and when to implement this technology. In this article, we explore use cases and tools to inspire your approach, tips to overcome common challenges, and best practices to set up your team for success.

What is AI marketing?

AI marketing is the process of using artificial intelligence to plan, implement, or analyze promotional efforts. AI-powered tools use machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to set up campaigns, create content, and optimize results.

While there are countless AI tools and tactics to consider, marketing teams typically gain the biggest benefits from predictive AI and generative AI solutions.

Predictive AI

Predictive AI tools analyze datasets, using ML technologies to identify patterns and anticipate outcomes. They're helpful for evaluating campaign data and modeling results based on different scenarios or budgets. You can use predictive AI tools to plan future campaigns or optimize existing marketing efforts across channels and platforms.

Generative AI

Generative AI tools use NLP technologies to create text, image, and video content. They train on large language models (LLMs), learning to identify patterns in existing content and using them to create new content. You can use them to generate campaign content, including everything from messaging to creatives.

Use cases for AI marketing

Between predictive and generative AI, there are plenty of ways to incorporate these solutions into your digital marketing strategy.

And if you're like most marketers, deciding how and when to use AI is a top priority. AI implementation is the most important initiative for marketers, according to the ninth edition of the Salesforce State of Marketing report.

Let's look at some of the most common B2B marketing use cases and examples of AI in marketing.

Perform market research

As your company grows, you'll inevitably have questions about how to expand audience and which marketing platforms or channels to use. AI assistants can help with market research by automating much of the data collection and analysis.

For example, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are designed to answer questions, help you think through problems, and suggest courses of action. These AI assistants can:

• Develop surveys for your target audience
• Analyze interviews with potential customers
• Synthesize data and pinpoint insights
• Source data and research target audiences and marketing channels
• Create a timeline for expanding into new markets
• Perform competitor analysis and identify opportunities

Because they handle so many manual marketing tasks, these tools free up time so your team can focus on creating lead and demand generation content and implementing an effective marketing strategy.

Have conversations with customers

AI chatbots aren't just for internal use. Many chatbots can also interface with prospects and customers, helping you market and sell products and services more efficiently on your website or social media profiles.

At Livestorm, we use Intercom to connect with website visitors. Our Intercom assistant invites prospects to send a message, suggests common questions to ask, and automatically answers them.

The assistant also shares tips to get started with Livestorm and prompts new visitors to create an account. Plus, it gives visitors the option to watch an on-demand demo or schedule a live demo with our sales team.

Generate marketing content

From social media posts to ad copy to email newsletters, digital marketing campaigns require a lot of content. Many marketers are using AI to generate outlines or polish drafts, making it possible to build campaigns in less time.

With Livestorm's webinar tools, you can plan your video marketing in a fraction of the time you'd need to outline and script videos manually. As a result, your team can share knowledge and connect with customers more efficiently.

Our webinar outline generator suggests titles and helps you fine-tune your angle in seconds. All you have to do is input the topic and a short description of your webinar idea.

Then, prompt it to create a complete webinar outline based on your idea. In just a few seconds, it suggests a framework, develops key takeaways, and even designates time for a Q&A session with the audience.

You can save even more time with our webinar script generator. Enter your topic and idea, select the video format, and generate a full script in minutes.

In addition to webinars, our script generator also works for social media marketing — including YouTube videos, LinkedIn content, and Instagram videos.

Repurpose content into new formats

Producing marketing content often requires a ton of time and resources. For example, producing a webinar requires multiple speakers to prepare talking points, share resources, and present to a live audience.

Making webinars available on demand is a great way to get more mileage from your video content. But you can get even more value from your content by transforming the original material into new formats.

For example, you can repurpose content from a webinar into short-form videos. You can turn podcast episodes into blog posts. And you can transform blog posts into social media content.

When you host webinars with Livestorm, generating post-event content is easy. Just record the session with Livestorm's webinar software. After the webinar wraps up, click to create new content from the event.

Powered by AI, our content generator automatically creates the following assets:

• Summary of the webinar, which covers the key points and notable quotes from speakers. You can use this summary when you make the webinar available on demand.
• Transcript of the event, which includes the entire dialog with timestamps. If you embed the webinar on your website, you can display the transcript to make the content easier to search. You can also upload the transcript to another AI marketing solution and create content based on a custom prompt.
• Blog post, which turns your video content into an article that's ready to publish. You can upload it directly to your website or edit the piece and add your own insights. Don't forget to embed the video.
• Email draft, which generates subject lines and summarizes the webinar. You can transfer this content directly to your email marketing platform to show subscribers what they missed — and invite them to watch the on-demand video.
• Social media posts, which summarize the video content for LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. You can copy the posts and publish them directly to each social media platform to promote your webinar.

Evaluate marketing campaign results

Marketing analytics are essential for understanding how well your strategy is working. But reviewing raw data can be time-consuming, which may slow down your decision-making process and cause you to miss out on key opportunities to develop more successful campaigns.

Many AI technologies can collect and analyze campaign data, automatically providing insights and suggesting next steps. You can use the insights to optimize existing campaigns and inform future marketing practices.

Livestorm's Video Engagement Score calculator makes it easy to gauge the success of your webinar events. You'll need to provide data on the audience size, the event duration, and the audience engagement.

Then, our tool automatically calculates a Video Engagement Score and compares your results to other webinars so you can see how your event compares to others.

It breaks down elements like attendance and messaging, assigning you a score for each. It also compares your numbers to the average score and generates suggestions for improving your scores in future webinars.

Develop audience segments

As you optimize your marketing campaigns, you may want to develop more tailored targeting. This way, you can create custom marketing messages for specific customer segments, develop personalized content for account-based marketing campaigns, and achieve marketing goals that are more ambitious.

Many AI analytics tools can analyze customer data and predict future behavior. They use these insights to develop audience segments, allowing you to target customers based on shared traits like location or behavior.

Then, you can add these audiences to your campaigns, taking actions like sending email marketing campaigns to specific customer groups or targeting certain segments with ads.

How using AI can benefit your marketing strategy

As you consider investing in AI applications in marketing, you need to know how this technology benefits your strategy. The biggest perks from AI capabilities include enhanced analysis, efficiency, and ROI.

Increased efficiency

If your marketing team has been feeling the pressure to do more with less, AI can help. With the right AI tools, your team can accomplish more in less time, improving efficiency and productivity.

In fact, 75% of marketers use AI tools to reduce manual task time, according to the HubSpot AI Trends for Marketers Report. In addition, 73% use AI to become more productive, while 73% use it so they can focus their energy on more important tasks.

For example, Livestorm's webinar tools help you generate titles, outlines, and scripts in minutes rather than hours. With all that extra time, you can fine-tune your script, plan your promotion, or set up additional events.

Advanced analysis

AI-powered solutions can analyze marketing data instantly. Yet most can do more than just evaluate existing data. Many AI tools can also model future performance, helping you understand how your campaigns are likely to perform during certain time frames, with different budgets, or when targeting certain audiences.

In fact, 70% of marketers report that AI helps conduct better data analysis, according to the HubSpot report. With this capability, you can make smarter data-driven decisions and improve campaign performance.

Improved ROI

Because the use of AI increases efficiency and enhances analysis, it has the potential to drive ROI across the organization. According to HubSpot, 68% of marketing leaders already report seeing ROI from their AI investments.

Many B2B businesses see additional opportunities. According to Salesforce, improving marketing ROI is a top three priority.

Top challenges of AI in marketing

While many marketers are fully leveraging AI in marketing, they often struggle with some recurring issues. The biggest challenges of using AI in marketing focus on accuracy, originality, and privacy.

Accuracy issues

When you rely on AI algorithms for decision-making, inaccurate insights and incorrect models can point you in the wrong direction. This can lead to poor campaign performance and missed opportunities to optimize ads or organic content.

To address these issues, first confirm that your data is accurate. Avoid human error by using native AI tools or trusted integrations to analyze data.

Then, take time to review the insights with your team. Consider factors like your marketing goals and campaign budgets when making a decision.

Originality challenges

Generative AI solutions use LLMs that train on existing text, image, and audio content. As a result, using generative AI may result in material that doesn't look or sound completely original. This can downgrade the quality of your content.

To address this issue, avoid publishing generative AI content as-is. Instead, take time to add a human touch to the content you generate with AI. For example, you can:

• Include your team's first-hand insights to an AI-generated blog post
• Insert your brand voice into AI-generated social media posts
• Add your own editing flourishes to AI-generated short-form videos

Privacy concerns

One of the biggest perks of digital marketing AI solutions is the personalized insights they can generate. However, one of the biggest downsides of these tools is the privacy issues they can create.

Some AI-powered tools rely on customer data to predict future behavior or generate content. When choosing these tools, make sure they comply with data privacy guidelines like GDPR.

With Livestorm's AI solutions, you don't have to worry about these privacy concerns. Our content repurposing tool complies with GDPR regulations, and we store all our data within the EU.

Best practices for AI marketing

Whether your team is new to AI or you're refining your approach, keep these best practices in mind to maximize the value of your AI marketing strategy.

Clarify goals for successful AI use

Many software platforms offer AI capabilities. But it isn't always easy to know which are worth the investment.

Before you spend resources on tools or developing a policy, get clear on the goals you need to achieve. For example, you might need to:

• Generate text, image, or video content quickly with a small team
• Repurpose content for different marketing channels on a small budget
• Analyze lead generation campaign data to make optimization decisions efficiently

Once you know what your team needs to achieve, you'll have an easier time creating a successful AI marketing strategy.

Create a framework for using AI

Don't depend on your team to decide when to use or avoid AI. Instead, establish a framework for using AI in marketing tasks.

Analyze your team's current workflows and identify areas that need improvement. Then, create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for AI usage.

For example, you might advise your team to use AI to create drafts of content or produce marketing reports. Review your guidelines quarterly and revisit your usage.

Provide training for your team

AI models and solutions are changing quickly. Provide prompt training and regular updates to make sure your team knows how to leverage AI marketing tools to the fullest.

For example, host training sessions when tools in your tech stack release major updates. Record the sessions and make them available on demand so your team can access them at any time.

Plan monthly lunch and learn sessions for your marketing team. Invite team members to share how they're using artificial intelligence in marketing to inspire colleagues.

Establish privacy standards

AI tools can create privacy issues with both organizational data and customer information. To avoid these issues, create and communicate privacy standards for everyone to follow.

Consider creating a list of approved tools to use for internal and external data. Require your legal or IT team to review any new tools your team is considering adding to the tech stack.

Create guidelines for the kind of data employees can input into AI tools. For example, you might caution your team against providing AI tools with confidential data.

Use the right AI marketing tools

Once you've established goals and guidelines, build your AI-powered tech stack. Test the AI features in the tools your team already uses. Then, explore new AI marketing platforms.

Look for tools that have the capabilities you need and that easily integrate with your tech stack. This way, you'll make progress toward your marketing goals and also eliminate the need for time-consuming manual data transfers.

Livestorm for AI marketing

The marketing landscape is changing quickly. Livestorm makes planning live events and on-demand content faster and easier, handling everything from creating a webinar outline to analyzing the event and repurposing the content.

Livestorm's AI marketing tools help you:

• Generate webinar titles and outlines to guide your video content
• Create webinar scripts so everyone knows exactly what to say
• Repurpose webinar content into social media posts, blog posts, and more
• Analyze your Video Engagement Score to make your next webinar even better

Curious how Livestorm's AI tools can transform your video marketing strategy? Try our webinar tools for free today.