Febbraio, 2023

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This week, the annual B2B Marketing Exchange (#B2BMX) conference kicks off in Scottsdale, Arizona, and if the promise of sunshine wasn’t enough, the speaker lineup has me radiating with excitement. 

This is my first B2BMX and I’m hoping to run into some old friends as well as make some new connections while we soak up the energy and inspiration from the B2B marketers attending, presenting and exhibiting at the event. 

If you are like me and get easily overwhelmed with so many inspiring sessions from top thought leaders, here’s a cheat sheet for my can’t-miss sessions. 

Here are my top 12
(because I couldn’t narrow it down to 10)
Can’t-Miss Sessions at B2BMX 2023:

DAY 1 – FEB 27

Marketing + “The Machine”: Sizing Up AI’s Emerging Impact On Efficiency Vs. Risks To Creativity

Last week we were honored to talk to Pam Didner (Relentless Pursuit), to get a sneak peek of these session on artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact it has on B2B marketing. She will explore some of the current AI applications already in use in the B2B landscape, as well as how to better understand how AI impacts the sales and marketing landscape, help us all connect the dots between the AI and our marketing roles, and so much more.

Well, There Goes My Buyer’s Journey…

In this keynote presentation Jeff Marcoux (Bombora) will explore the shift in thinking and execution needed to engage the whole account in your go-to-market (GTM) strategy, along with examining why its time to pivot in account based marketing (ABM) to cover the demand unit, and much more. We spoke with Jeff about about this fascinating session and you can read in our in-depth preview here: “B2BMX Speaker Spotlight: Jeff Marcoux on B2B Go To Market (GTM) Disruption.”

Are Your Emails & Digital Ads Losing Impact? Learn How Paycor Creates Powerful Moments With Direct Mail

Hear from Paycor’s Gretchen Swann and PFL’s CMO Jennifer Bellin about their “always-on” direct mail program that significantly increased nurture response rates and generated a 15X ROI on campaign investment. In this session, we will learn how to set up a high-impact nurture program using direct mail, see examples of personalized direct mailers that deliver results, and more.

DAY 2 – FEB 28

How 2022’s Marketing Trends Are Shaping 2023

This session with Mia Meade (Southwest Airlines), Neha Shah (Salesforce), and Alexis Skipper (Southwest Airlines) will cover the top challenges and trends B2B marketers faced in 2022, and strategies to overcome them in 2023 and beyond. I’m looking forward to learning tips and best practices from Salesforce and hearing how Southwest Airlines is leveraging marketing automation to put these tactics into action.

Tired Of Chasing Vanity Metrics? Learn How To Drive Real Marketing Outcomes — Marketing Meets Sales!

Sophia Agustina (IBM), Carol Mallia (Citrix), Nick Bennett (Airmeet), Danny Sachdev (Beelead)s, and Will Aitken (Lavender), create an expert and diverse panel of marketers, vendors and sellers that will guide us through the key steps for building a results-driven marketing approach, including understanding target audience needs, crafting compelling messaging that resonates, identifying the right channels and tactics, and aligning with sales and marketing teams for the greatest results.

Precision Demand Marketing: A Guide To The Convergence Of ABM & Demand Generation

Join experts Kerry Cunningham (6sense), Colby Cavanaugh, senior vice president of marketing at Integrate, and Michael Newman, vice president of marketing, demand gen at Tipalti to discuss the power of Precision Demand Marketing and how to implement across four key areas: Target, Connect, Activate and Measure. This session promises to help B2B marketers hone audience segments to develop ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and define your GTM approach, diagram buying groups and individual buyers to leverage intent signals, implement measurement best practices and more.

In 2023, Performance Is Still Possible: See How With ABX Experts From Gigamon & ServiceNow

Maureen McCormick from ServiceNow, and Adam Perry from Folloze will share their unique success stories leveraging new techniques and technologies designed to support the new B2B buying dynamics. They will discuss how they think about ABX as a cornerstone of their GTM success, deliver omni-channel personalized experiences that drive growth, leverage critical engagement insights to deliver tighter orchestration with sales, and more.

Cracking The Code: How ABM & Intent Data Boost Sales Intelligence & Fuel Success

In this session, Dan Cafiero of Seagate Technology and TechTarget CMO John Steinert will discuss the work it takes to achieve a high-performance capability focused on pipeline and revenue. They’ll cover core ABM considerations for intent data, enablement and technology, and the critical importance of keeping your entire team aligned.

Now That We Have Your Intention: How Buyer-Level Intent Data Will Transform Your Marketing

In this session, NetLine’s chief strategy officer David Fortino will focus on cutting through the noise surrounding intent so you can find the most valuable signals, accelerate sales enablement and improve business outcomes. Join David to explore how how to identify and interpret intent signals, which intent signals you should be paying close attention to, why buyer-level intent trumps account-level intent and how you can use buyer-level intent data in your organization.

Cisco Enables Channel Partners To Win SMB Customers

During this session, Luxy Thuraisingam, Cisco’s head of global partner marketing and SMB, will discuss how her team is driving brand preference, designing a partner-focused digital lead engine and simplifying tools to empower channel partners with effective demand generation and marketing resources. This session will teach marketers the power of creating a digital demand engine for partners, simplifying messaging to partners and customers, and scaling reach with data-driven insights.

Day 3 – MAR 1

The Steps To A Credible & Defensible Market Position

I’m looking forward to joining Allen Weiss, founder and CEO at MarketingProfs, as he shares a B2B case study from a major player in the semiconductor industry and explores the importance of perceptual maps, segmentation, positioning statements, benefits and core competencies. I’m excited to learn more about the kinds of problems positioning solves, how to define a company position today and in the future, and what the market really wants.

The Audience Is The Algorithm, And Bravery Is The Answer

Jay Baer, founder and president at Convince & Convert, will help wrap up the sessions with a bold, entertaining presentation filled with powerful, real-world examples. He promises to challenge the group to find the courage to make the marketing we’ve always wanted to… and that our prospects and customers now demand.

I’m sure I have missed some great sessions so please send additional recommendations our way on your own can’t-miss topics and speakers. If you will be at B2BMX in Scottsdale this week, TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden and I would love to connect. While Lee is always looking for an early morning running crew, a leisurely cold brew is more my style before sessions begin, and I will be looking for any excuse to hang or dine alfresco if you want to meet for coffee or a cocktail to enjoy the Scottsdale sunshine. Let’s connect on LinkedIn or Twitter.

I’m SO EXCITED to visit with marketers like you who are elevating the B2B marketing industry! 

The post 12 Can’t-Miss Sessions at 2023’s B2B Marketing Exchange Conference #B2BMX appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Meet Google for Startups Black Founders Fund recipients from Africa, Brazil, Europe and the United States using Google AI technology to help people and society.

Check out our all-new, immersive Street View collection of the McLaren Technology Center.

Explore the latest thinking and design behind our products and services with the people that build them.

If you haven’t heard the jokes yet, you will. ChatGPT is the terminator, and all of us content marketers are Sarah Connor. It’s only a matter of time before the evil machines seize our jobs out from under us and send us scrambling for one of the six journalism positions left on the planet. If, someway, somehow, we want to stay in marketing, our only desperate recourse will be to learn how keywords actually work, or worse… try PAID SEARCH.

…Ok, so the reality isn’t all that dramatic, no matter what those jokers in SEO want you to believe. There is, however, a grain of truth behind all the ribbing: the fact is, ChatGPT and advanced machine learning AI like it is going to change how content marketing works forever. In fact, it already is. It’s just not going to replace content marketing or content marketers.

In fact, with the right outlook and attitude, ChatGPT represents more of an exciting opportunity for content marketers than an existential threat. While we’ll probably never be able to use it to do our jobs, it can make several processes more streamlined, informed, and strategic.

Even more importantly, as ChatGPT starts to affect content marketing, it has a way of revealing what has always been most important — and human — about the process in the first place. By paying close attention to how ChatGPT is changing content marketing, therefore, we can better understand not only what our roles will look like in the future, but also how to perform those roles better than ever.

In that spirit, I want to take a look at five ways ChatGPT will (or already is) changing content marketing forever — and how we can use each of these changes to learn how to do our jobs even better.

[bctt tweet=”“With the right outlook and attitude, ChatGPT represents more of an exciting opportunity for content marketers than an existential threat.” — Harry Mackin @Shiitakeharry” username=”toprank”]

1 — Human content will need human insights to stand out

I promised I wasn’t going to get too “fire and brimstone” in this article, so I’m starting with the worst news. Yes, ChatGPT and the predictive AI tools to follow will almost inevitably be used to generate a great deal of content. The truth is, they’re simply too fast and tempting not to use.

Given simple prompts, ChatGPT can generate an article of any pre-specified length about virtually any topic imaginable in an instant. This article will make sense, “sound” human (to an extent based on the topic and prompt), and will probably even be relatively accurate.

There’s a clear use-case for content like this: quick and simple, FAQ-style answers. The usage will be similar to the way companies are already using AI-trained chatbots: they’ll use AI to populate FAQs near-instantly. Others may even use the technology to write more traditional content marketing blogs on simple topics with SEO value.

This won’t be “high-quality” content, of course, but as long as it answers the query clearly and accurately, it will get the job done. If content marketers want to write up an article on a topic themselves rather than handing it off to ChatGPT, therefore, we’ll have to make the case for why that topic requires or deserves “the human touch.”

That “human touch” will be the conclusions our content comes to. ChatGPT can present, summarize, and even synthesize pre-existing information by pulling it from a wide variety of sources, but it can’t generate new insights out of that information.

Therefore, the content we write ourselves will have to go further than collecting and reciting information. We’ll have to use the information we collect to say something new.

[bctt tweet=”“The content we write ourselves will have to go further than collecting and reciting information. We’ll have to use the information we collect to say something new.” — Harry Mackin @Shiitakeharry” username=”toprank”]

2 — AI will make SEO optimization easier and faster

ChatGPT uses a machine learning process called Large Language Model to very quickly process huge amounts of text related to particular subject matter, infer relationships between words within the text, and then recreate those relationships predictively and in a way that makes sense grammatically and structurally. The way this process works makes it very helpful for optimizing content for SEO in a few different ways.

Marketers are already using ChatGPT to write simple content that includes or answers questions about keywords to support search engine optimization. Even if they end up substantially rewriting the content the AI produces, just seeing how the predictive model talks about the subject matter gives them a good place to start.

This process can be particularly helpful for content concepting. Content marketers can type in the keywords provided by their SEO teams and see what kind of subject matter the AI produces given the prompt in order to understand how they should approach writing about their subject matter in a manner that’s in-line with other content about it.

To get a little more technical, ChatGPT can also give content marketers an opportunity to easily incorporate semantically-related keywords into their content. Semantically-related keywords are words and phrases that are related to keywords conceptually. When search engines look for the keywords in question, they also search for semantically-related keywords, in order to make sure the content they’re providing in their  search engine result pages (SERPs) is truly relevant to the query.

Because of the way ChatGPT aggregates existing content related to subject matter, it tends to be very good about including semantically-related keywords in the content it generates. Using ChatGPT could be a good way to check for and include particularly important semantically-related keywords. By writing content featuring the words ChatGPT seems to continuously find and include when discussing your SEO keyword, you could be “telling” search engines that your content is particularly relevant.

[bctt tweet=”“ChatGPT can also give content marketers an opportunity to easily incorporate semantically-related keywords into their content.” — Harry Mackin @Shiitakeharry” username=”toprank”]

3 — Sourcing & data will become major content differentiators

ChatGPT aggregates text related to subject matter, but it doesn’t “reference” that text. It can’t use or cite sources, pull data from studies, or quote survey results. ChatGPT content, therefore, will be conspicuously short of empirical facts and hard data — and may even include false information. This will make providing sources for the assertions you make more important than ever.

The type of content that will continue to require “the human touch” in the years to come will be the content that involves original research and/or analysis of research. It will reference sources and provide data-backed evidence for the assertions it makes.

Even more crucially, it will use this evidence to arrive at new, insightful conclusions and/or to express informed opinions that will help the reader come to a new and deeper understanding of the subject matter in question. Ultimately, this is the service human writers provide that the AI can’t; it can bring together everything that’s being said about a subject matter, but it can’t say anything new.

The more AI-driven content proliferates the internet, therefore, the more valuable real data will become to content marketing. Conducting surveys, interviewing expert sources, and referencing research will become the cornerstone of the type of content marketers will continue to produce themselves. Expect future content marketing initiatives to revolve around making use of original and/or sourced data, interviews, surveys, and studies.

[bctt tweet=”“The more AI-driven content proliferates the internet, therefore, the more valuable real data will become to content marketing.” — Harry Mackin @Shiitakeharry” username=”toprank”]

4 — Targeting will be a big way content marketers remain relevant

ChatGPT doesn’t really “know” who it’s writing for. It doesn’t know what information is particularly relevant to your audience or why. Turns out having that understanding is… pretty important to content marketing, to say the least.

Good content marketing, like all marketing, is all about understanding to whom you are speaking and why. You need to understand what’s important about your subject matter to your particular audience — and, of course, how you can explain it to them, both on their own terms and in a way that communicates that your brand knows what it’s talking about and is ready to help.

At least in the immediate term, ChatGPT-generated content is going to be broad and generalized. It will summarize a topic, but it won’t delve into how that topic matters to particular groups of people. That will be your job.

The marketing that sticks out from ChatGPT-generated content is the same kind of content that stands out today: content that understands its audience and provides specific value to them. No matter how much information ChatGPT processes and regurgitates, it will never be able to do the legwork to understand how to make that information useful to your audience the way you can. Expect future content marketing initiatives to emphasize targeting more than ever, and endeavor to understand your audience as well as possible, just like you do now.

[bctt tweet=”“The marketing that sticks out from ChatGPT-generated content is the same kind of content that stands out today: content that understands its audience and provides specific value to them.” — Harry Mackin @Shiitakeharry” username=”toprank”]

5 — AI will become a “writing partner,” not a replacement

Even if AI isn’t going to outright “replace” content marketers the way we might have nightmares about, the truth is it will probably have an ever-increasing presence in our day-to-day work. It might not write all the content for us, but we’ll probably start using it to get started.

Some marketers even believe this will become the main role of content marketers in the future, especially as AI becomes more advanced. AI will create the first pass at a piece of content, and then rather than writing it themselves, content marketers will input further prompts to improve on the first pass, then selectively edit what they end up with, adding sourcing, context, an informed point of view, and personalized targeting, all to make it more specific to their readers and relevant to their brand.

In fact, content marketers are already experimenting with this possibility more and more all the time.

Hopefully, this article helped you feel a little less nervous about the future of AI-assisted content marketing. In fact, I think we all have reason to be more excited than worried!

No matter how advanced AI becomes, the truth is there will always be a market for informed, insightful human content written from experience, with a real point of view, and for a particular purpose. The trick to making ourselves useful in the future will be the same as it always has been: understand our audience and provide them with the best, most human content we can.

…and maybe tell a joke now and then. The AI are still pretty bad at that. But then, maybe it’s my prompts.

The post 5 Ways ChatGPT Will Change the Future of B2B Content Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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From your phone to your smartwatch, find out how Android’s latest features help you get more from all your devices.