AI (apparently) has killed B2B marketing. What do we do now?

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You can quite quickly work out those to listen to and those not to. That would be my first step... Have you got any other suggestions? Not really.

My name is Craig Taylor and you're listening to Truth, Lies and B2B Tech, a podcast for anyone engaged in complex B2B sales. Along with my co-host James Ingham, we discuss the latest best practices in marketing, sales and service. In each episode, we take a go-to-market strategy, look at it through a technology lens and figure out if it's worth your time. Let's cut through the bullshit, no fluff, self-serving agendas or vile pictures. Just honest insights from people who work in the trenches. Enjoy the show.

00:37 So today we're going to talk about how marketing teams are able to experiment with new technology without necessarily falling into the faddism that they're often branded with, which is probably a little bit unfair, but we both know and have probably both been a little bit like this in our pasts.

The goal of a marketer is often to try and stay ahead of the curve. I think that there's a general perception that marketers need to be kind of first on the wave to be successful rather than obviously coming in at the end of it. And that does lead to quite a lot of faddism within the industry whereby marketing teams are often picking up new shiny toys, perhaps neglecting the foundations whilst they're doing that.

And that is largely driven by obviously software vendors, by agencies, by anyone that's trying to suggest that the old way of doing things is dead and that new solution is the silver bullet that's going to solve all of the marketing and sales woes. And I think what we are going to talk about today is how you can focus on the right things, how you can make sure the wheels are turning, all the fundamentals are getting done whilst you're doing that, and provide a framework to help you cut through some of the crap.

As soon as you start making headway in a marketing career, you realise that if you are first to adopt a certain tactic or strategy, you're probably going to gain a competitive advantage until everyone else catches up.
02:20 Those that were first on the inbound game, for example, those which were producing content at scale early on in the inbound wave were the ones that saw the most success from it. But fast forward 10, probably even 15 years, the inbound methodology is now less effective because so many people are doing it. It's so established, it's so embedded, it's saturated. AI has meant there's content all over the place—often shit content because it's all produced by AI.

Yeah, and there was Marc Schaefer predicting content shock many years ago. He again, one of the early adopters from a branding perspective, he became very famous in the marketing world by producing a regular blog. Then he started a podcast, very active on LinkedIn. And again, this is when other people weren't doing that as much. So he had less competition, a major advantage over everyone else. But over time, now everyone on LinkedIn is trying to create their own personal brand. If you get that first mover advantage, you're going to be more successful.

03:24 Yeah, you can maintain his position. Now he's very prominent with a big following, so it's very hard to sort of knock him off his perch as it were.

And that's why, rightly so, marketers are looking for that next big strategy or tactic that is going to allow them to start early and see an initial surge of benefit, but also maintain that position as a voice in a particular arena.
Mark Ritson, who is someone we both follow but certainly respect some of his opinions, although he's very generic marketing, B2C, B2B, probably more B2C to be honest. But he's branded marketers as magpies that are constantly distracted by the next shiny thing and not really focused on the fundamentals of marketing, the foundations of marketing. The cynic in me always thinks that he's trying to sell his MBA program.

04:21 His mini-MBA program and hence therefore you should be focusing on strategy and some of the fundamentals, but you should absolutely do that anyway. There's no question of that. But with Mark Ritson, he's quite an entertaining sort of commentator or pundit on the world of marketing. So some of the things, you know, he's absolutely right, but again, it's not someone I would really put up there because he's not really focused on B2B. So he's not really living in our world. So he's got general observations on marketing. I wouldn't say that they're something that we would really sort of embrace at a practitioner level.

But I think it just illustrates the point that there's a lot of conflicting voices out there, all with a very strong argument of what to do and what not to do. I think because inherently everyone knows that marketers are going to be more effective if they can embrace the next trend. There's this fear of missing out which people tap into. Lots of thought leadership, lots of strong opinion, lots of research. There's so much research around B2B marketing. It's really hard to keep up with. Analysts have their own stream of research as well that just makes it really, really difficult for a marketer to think, well, where should we be focusing our efforts?
One solution to that is that I don't think people, unless you're in a major corporation with lots of budget, lots of people to invest in very early stage strategies and tactics and tools that may or may not come off. I don't think people in SME midsize organizations should be trying to be an early adopter. I think early majority maybe, but I think you want to see some evidence or some proof that this newfound approach is going to be effective before you begin to invest in it yourself. The best you can do is probably keep your ear to the ground and look for that evidence before investing a significant amount of time, money or effort in something which is yet unproven.

06:37 I mean, the most effective marketing function, let's say you had an endless pot of cash, you got endless resources, the best marketing function would just do everything incredibly well. They'd just do everything, just absolutely everything and just optimize the life out of every different channel, every different approach, every different tactic. But that's not reality. There's very few organizations that are big enough to be able to do that. So whilst it's true that doing everything is going to give you an advantage, for most people, it's about being selective.

And it's almost like building up the pyramid from the ground up. Obviously, you've got to have a business strategy that is going to enable you to develop some form of positioning and differentiation in the market. You've got to have, if you're talking about growth, probably the next stage is that really strong value proposition.

07:04 And then from a marketing perspective after that, if I was to advise someone who was just starting a business or starting to invest in marketing, you want to really try and leverage the referrals that you will undoubtedly get that will probably feed that first few stages of growth. But then beyond that, the next investment will probably be in sales in some sort of SDR function. And then you start to get into sort of marketing tactics that would support some of that lead generation activity, and then go into more kind of longer term brand building type investments. Once you've got those core kind of tenants in place, then you can start to think selectively about how you're going to enhance.

08:35 You've got to get those fundamentals in place and working though, because I think oftentimes the reason why it's so tempting to do that is because the fundamentals aren't working already. So we'll see people jump from... I mean, we saw a wave of it with all those companies that said that they'd generate you 10 opportunities a month on LinkedIn with automated LinkedIn messages.

08:41 You can see why that's attractive if the fundamentals aren't there and not working.
Yeah, because people just want to shortcut.

We're under pressure. We were asked by clients to try and manage one of those. And I think the target audience was, I think it was sort of UK based financial services companies. And then I think the first lead we got through was from a pharmaceutical company based in Nigeria, which just showed the effectiveness of that approach.

09:14 Exactly. We'll go back to the famous phrase we always use, random acts of marketing, and you've got to really keep a lid on that because they can be a massive source of distraction, as we talked about in previous podcasts. But I think today we just wanted to do a shorter take on this challenge and just maybe come up with some suggestions on how you can cut through some of the noise that's out there.

Aside from kind of keeping your ear to the ground and looking for evidence that things work before you invest in them, what are the other ways that people can cut through some of that bullshit and focus their attention on things that actually have a higher chance of being effective for them?

10:42 Well, first thing for me is be careful who you listen to. Don't listen to us, yeah. But I think if anyone that has listened to us will know that we don't, we're not sort of the types that will advocate the next new thing and "this is dead and you need to do this." Because I think it's very hard to generalize. Every organization is different and certain things will work for some that won't work for others.

I think you also, and this actually applies to this problem, I think you generally have to be pessimistic about these things. I think if you're overly optimistic and you think all of these things are going to work, you're going to waste a lot of time and money. I think a healthy pessimism or skepticism probably is a better word, such as the one that we share, is also another way to make sure that you spend time on the right things.

Yeah, so I think you've got to be careful who you listen to. I mean, LinkedIn's horrendous. I can literally, don't go on LinkedIn, but you scroll through LinkedIn and you'll literally within three different posts, you'll probably have three different takes that all conflict with each other when it comes to go to market.

10:54 And three different people at the end of that message who want to sell you something.
Personal brand gurus that have probably been in the world of work for about two years and now they're going to elevate you to the next big thing. They're going to 10x your growth with some kind of three-step framework. You know, it kind of negates the fact that you've been in this game for about 25 years and suddenly all your experience counts for shit. That's just not the reality. I think naturally you'll develop a radar to sniff out a lot of the bollocks. I think we had Julia on the podcast previously who talked about how tired she is of people messaging her saying, "We've got this demand generation approach that's just going to get you 20 leads overnight." That is just not going to happen. That is just complete bollocks. People that fall for that shit really shouldn't be in the job.

11:49 Exactly and it links to this skepticism point but the old saying that if it looks too good to be true probably is, is relevant here.
In terms of being careful who you listen to, I think it really is looking at who they are, what experience they've got, and what relevance they've got to what you do in your industry and in your role. Have they got some kind of vested interest? Are they trying to flog something in particular? And you can quite quickly work out those to listen to and those not to.

12:24 That would be my first step. Have you got another suggestion?

The other thing I was going to say was budget for it because I think we may have touched on this in a previous podcast but one thing that is really important of course is that you keep the wheels turning, you keep the foundations strong if you're going to go off and start to experiment with some of these things and I think we should be clear that we're not saying that you shouldn't do that—absolutely you should experiment with new tools, new platforms, new strategies, tactics that emerge. But what you can't do is sacrifice the business as usual marketing function to do that.

And of course, budget is a really important element in avoiding that problem. Because if you're drawing budget out of your business as usual budget to experiment with these things, that will obviously impact the foundational marketing activity that needs to take place. And therefore when setting budgets is in our view at least important to set aside 10, 20 percent that you can use that isn't necessarily set in stone at the start of the year, but might help you respond to some of these things that come through or emerge as you kind of keep your eye on the market and what might work and what might not. So I think setting the right budget and making sure that you've got some cash available that you could use that isn't kind of pre-spent on something in the budget is a really important way to ensure you're able to take advantage of those opportunities when they come through.

14:09 I suppose it's where do you invest that experimental budget? I think that there's the challenge really—it comes down to this, the things that you're already doing that you probably want to optimize further. You could use the experimental budget to optimize. You can try new channels and see if they work. But I think again, I think the further away you go from the core of your activity, the more risk you're taking in terms of something not going to work.
Clearly, obviously, everyone is investing in some form in AI at the moment in terms of experimentation. And we see that on agency side, we see that on client side. There was a report that I saw from the US a few days ago that suggests that on the agency side, most agencies think they're on top of the latest trends, but that the actual marketers that work with those agencies don't think the same. And I think that's probably fair.

16:05 I think the rate of experimentation internally now is probably a lot higher than it used to be, which is encouraging, which is a good thing, which means that business leaders are supporting that and enabling that to happen. I think it's probably a strong message to agencies as well that they need to up their game when it comes to technology, particularly AI.

I still think probably the biggest barrier we talk about to most of the experimentation type stuff is the fragmentation of data. And until fundamentally you've solved that problem and you've got a strong, robust CRM with good data and you've got integration across the different channels that you're trying to optimize, it's sort of pointless to try and start experimenting with other shit until you've kind of got that core locked down.

So I think if we wrap up there and try and summarise what we've talked through, I think the first thing is that if you're in a small, medium-sized business particularly, don't try to be an early adopter. I think you want to experiment, test, keep your ear to the ground a little bit and find focus more on optimization than trying new things from scratch.
17:16 Yes, that, but also if there are new emerging techniques that come to market, I don't think that in many cases there's enough evidence at the early adopter stage that that's going to work for you to take a gamble on that. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be in that early majority, but you want to be looking for evidence that something's going to be effective before you put down cold hard cash and time. The opportunity cost is much higher for a smaller organization. In a bigger organization you can kind of absorb a few failed experiments that really don't work.

And then the second thing, be careful who you listen to, try and understand the motives of what they're saying. Make sure they're relevant to you and your industry. Just take a more critical eye to content that comes through and don't get easily overwhelmed with lots of conflicting messages, particularly if you go on LinkedIn.

Get the fundamentals right, get them working, make sure they're effective before you try and experiment outside of that. Keep those fundamentals going. Don't steal time, effort, and budget from that business-as-usual marketing function to experiment with other things. And if you're going to invest in earlier stage opportunities or emerging technologies, for example, try and set some budget aside at the start of the year that enables you to do that without having to steal from budget for the business as usual stuff.

18:17 I think the only last thing I'd add is just look out for those watch words. "The old playbook doesn't work anymore." "10X." "10X your growth." "X, Y, Z is dead."

Good. Alright, that's a wrap.