It was not long before B2B marketers talked about the buzzword “lifecycle marketing” until they realized the trend would soon be their destination. B2B Marketing is more than just demand generation. It also focuses on personalizing customer engagement through the whole lifecycle journey and customer retention through upsells and cross-sells.
In 2023, Forrester introduced a new concept called Lifecycle Revenue Marketing (LRM). LRM is the next-generation B2B marketing strategy that breaks through siloes, redefines audience engagement, and better aligns marketing programs to the full lifecycle of revenue opportunities. In the time of an economic downturn, all marketing executives need to think about incorporating lifecycle revenue marketing into their campaign strategy. With this shift from a product-focused approach to a customer-centric approach, B2B marketers can drive meaningful and sustainable revenue growth.
With the advent of Generative AI technology, B2B marketers also began to explore how to incorporate generative technology into the future marketing strategy and martech stack. According to the latest Gartner report, 45% of the marketing leaders expressed that they would like to invest and adopt Gen-AI technology in 1-2 years. While the primary usage of Gen-AI for marketers centers around content and creativity production, we would like to delve into how Gen-AI will penetrate the whole customer lifecycle and disrupt the way B2B marketers think about customer experience, productivity, and growth.
Enhaced Leads Filtering and Leads Segmentation
Lead scoring and segmentation are instrumental in running a successful lifecycle campaign. The marketing operations team constantly looks for better external vendors and tools to boost the accuracy of lead filtering and segmentation. But when it comes to refreshing criteria and rules, it usually takes lots of manpower and time.
Generative AI will transform how marketing team operates by achieving dynamic lead filtering and segmentation. It can continuously update lead scores based on new data and interactions, ensuring that the lead scoring model remains relevant and effective. It can also achieve dynamic segmentation by identifying customer needs and behavior in real-time, pulling data from various marketing channels including hotline, email, websites and social media.
In the future, Gen-AI-powered tools can free up the time B2B marketing professionals now spend on learning complicated marketing automation tools and analyzing data from fragmented data sources. Instead, they can invest in time carrying out comprehensive customer-obsessed marketing strategies that engage with different customer segmentation at each lifecycle stage.
Data-Driven and Hyper-Personalized Campaigns
Today’s customers expect personalized service and quick response at every touchpoint, no matter whether they are purchasing luxury bags or subscribing to SaaS service. Personalized marketing is important not only because it proves how well a brand understands its consumer, but also because personalization helps the customer move along the lifecycle journey.
Generative AI will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in personalisation. Combining the power of generative AI with first party data (website visits, CRM and SCRM data) will provide frontline marketers with insights into customer behavior data along the lifecycle journey. This can be leveraged for crafting personalized content and campaign messages, tailored to the audience across different lifecycle stages including acquisition, activation, engagement and retention.
SaaS companies will go beyond account-based marketing and leverage Gen-AI tools to create campaigns based on users’ behavior and preference to increase conversion rates, or provide special promotions to users who are at risk of churning.
24/7 Customer Service with Humanized Gen-AI Powered Agents
To win in the competitive landscape, B2B companies began to boast about their 24/7 service as an additional selling point to differentiate themselves, on top of the products promotions. In reality, however, frontline marketing teams often come across complaints from customers about that they can not get through the hotline, or can not find the right person to help.
The integration of Generative AI in customer service, specifically with the use of chatbots and virtual assistants, can significantly enhance customer experience by providing seamless, efficient, and round-the-clock service.
Although chatbots and virtual assistants have been around for years, Gen-AI-powered agents distinguished themselves by providing genuinely humanized automated conversations. Even more powerful than human agents, Gen-AI-powered agents can comprehend and process complex queries, instantly pull information from knowledge bases, and provide accurate and relevant responses. In addition, their ability also extends to analyzing customers’ sentiments. If the customer is in a bad mood, Gen-AI-powered agents will try to diffuse the tense situation instead of intensifying it.
Faced with budget cuts and pressure to focus on growth and revenue, forward-thinking B2B marketing leaders are considering re-engineer the marketing process and delve into customer engagement from the very start of the customer journey.
With generative AI handling low-level operational tasks, marketers are able to focus on high-value activities , carry out creative and strategic marketing campaigns, and make data-informed decisions that align with business goals. Generative AI will fundamentally change the way B2B marketing departments operate and takes B2B marketers onto the next horizon, where lifecycle marketing will be at the center of the marketing strategy, and customer experience will be at the center of a marketing campaign.
