B2B marketing’s AI-powered future is closer than you think. In just a few years, AI has progressed from a promising enabling technology found in a few B2B applications to a staple of modern martech. The data that powers this machine-driven marketing — and delivers the experiences today’s B2B buyers expect — comes in many different forms. I just published a new report to help B2B marketers understand why they need to:

Understand The Significant Differences In How Data Is Sourced And Refined

Like the fuel for your car, the data that powers an AI-powered marketing engine comes in many different “grades,” depending on how it is created, sourced, and refined: Assigned data describes static attributes; observed data describes behaviors; and inferred data describes a hypothesis drawn from assigned and/or observed data.

Pay More Attention To What Customers Do Than What They Say

Definitive statements of buying intent, such as when a prospect posts that they are planning to buy, are valuable — but also rare. To succeed with AI-powered marketing, B2B marketers should focus on the actions of their customers, from the first anonymous touchpoint to post-sale product usage.

Collect More And Complementary Signals

To create a comprehensive view of buyer behavior — and feed the creation of the most accurate and relevant AI-powered experiences — B2B marketers will need to collect behavioral signals from numerous first- and third-party sources.

Create A Single Source Of Truth

B2B marketers should invest in an internally developed data management solution or a packaged application such as a customer data platform (CDP) to improve data quality and create unified profiles that incorporate all the data they gather.

I hope you enjoy the report and look forward to exploring this and related topics in my upcoming research.