On paper, demand generation is a simple concept: enact programs to drive brand awareness and forge relationships with prospective customers. In practice, however, proficiency in demand generation has long been slightly out of reach for marketers. Speaking to the most relevant audience at the right moment in the sales cycle is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. Or, at least, it was.
You would think that with the rise of digital communications and, subsequently, more customer touch points, marketers would have been able to ‘figure out’ the best system for reaching audiences. But even if most marketing and sales teams don’t want to admit it, the proliferation of digital listening platforms and CRM systems has made the process even more complex. But eschewing technology analytics altogether is not the answer, either.
Luckily, the rise of Artificial Intelligence is ushering in a new era of demand generation. AI enables marketing and sales teams to eliminate the guesswork in their targeting practices. Until now, even with an array of audience data and digital signal harnessing tools, guesswork has been a core component of targeting.
For the past decade, companies have been able to glean demographic insights regarding social behaviors and search intent, but there has never been a streamlined way of combining disparate pieces of data into one, intuitive solution. They were forced to make inferences to decide which signals were most valuable to customer segments at certain times, and it was impossible to make precise assumptions. AI represents the missing link.
Artificial Intelligence programs have the capacity to recognize patterns that are nearly invisible to the human eye. Furthermore, AI systems are not stagnant. The demand generation systems of yesterday were stuck in a cycle of capturing data and creating redundant audience personas that did not take into account previous targeting campaigns. AI-based programs, however, automatically apply learnings from each audience interaction so that the next targeting opportunity is even more precise.
Customers, even those with shared characteristics, do not always act with the same intent. For example, two businesses in the same industry and with similar size and locations will be interested in purchasing very different kinds of technologies. Take cybersecurity solutions as an example. One company may want to focus on our sourcing all security operations while another might want to build their own defenses internally. Both businesses have value as customers for different types of cyber vendors. Until now, it’s been impossible for traditional demand-generation platforms to apply equal weight to these differing digital behaviors and signals. Artificial intelligence, however, has the capacity to look at these varying data points holistically, and pinpoint the type of communication to most effectively resonate with both.
Companies like LeadCrunch are leveraging the power of AI by funneling all available data into an AI-powered platform that creates highly relevant lookalike audiences. Their proprietary platform is capable of harvesting customer data from across the web and 5000+ marketing technology platforms to deliver a comprehensive picture of audience behaviors and interests. Once this data is collected, the platform analyzes patterns within the data, and accurately predicts the most relevant content opportunities to reach high-priority target customers.
Starting with sample audience data analysis, the platform then gathers data from every possible digital touchpoint to pinpoint patterns and customer commonalities, and extract actionable insights. Examples of the data LeadCrunch analyzes includes detecting the types of technology a businesses, people changing jobs and what is being said about the company and its employees online and in social media.
It’s no longer enough for companies to throw content at the digital sphere and hope the right customer views it at the right moment. People are inundated with digital communications 24/7. As a result, they’ve become expert at immediately determining which communications are relevant to their needs and interests, and which can be ignored. Relevancy is the only way to win in this saturated content landscape; and delivering relevancy at all times requires companies to proactively find customers and predetermine which types of communicate matter most to them.
If it seems like it’s getting harder to sell to the right customers at the right moments, that’s because it is. Sales teams and marketers cannot expect to make sense of customer data and interactions on their own, but with the help of artificial intelligence, it is possible to cut through the noise and forge lasting customer connections.
