When Dante Alighieri was completed Divine Comedy Back in 1321, he probably never dreamed that it would one day inspire fear into something uniquely modern: B2B marketing in the 21st century.
But 700 years later, we are teetering on the precipice of demand generation hell. This analogy is all too apt.
“Personalization, Demand Generation, and AI: Conversion Trifecta or Dante’s Nine Levels of Hell?” by Kenda Macdonald, founder of Automation Ninjas and bestselling author Hack the buyer's brain, We explain the marketing crimes we often commit without realizing it, and how AI can help us escape from the fiery depths.
Go to Circle 1, Limbo. Your sin here is a lack of direction and strategy.
“When you break it down, this looks like a one-off campaign, where you're just creating a campaign and throwing it in there. It's part of a broader customer journey. It’s not a department,” Kenda says.
“Sometimes you don't have a clear target audience. You're marketing to everyone, so you end up effectively marketing to no one.”
At this level, they may not have a clear content strategy and may suffer from what Kenda calls “random content behavior,” or creating one-off assets without extensive planning. there is. Or worse, you may be missing performance metrics. Or maybe you don't even know what KPIs to aim for, let alone how to build towards them.
Regardless of why you're stuck in a demand generation impasse, you need clear business goals to get you out of the mess.
How will AI adapt? Tools such as predictive analytics models can help develop better data-driven strategies by providing insights into customer behavior, market conditions, and the overall competitive environment and helping predict future trends. Masu.
Dedicated AI tools can also help with scenario planning and customer journey mapping. In a short excerpt from this presentation, Kenda said: AI for demand generation marketers series:
Let's go back to Inferno. If you arrive at gluttonous marketing in round 3, you are guilty of overconsumption. Accumulation of data. Analysis paralysis. Overreliance on automation. I'm doing everything.
All this leads to lack of optimization. In Kenda's words, “You're probably going to be making decisions based on bad data, and you're going to miss the bigger picture.”
Sound familiar? I think we all land in circle 3 from time to time.
Here, we aim for strategic focus, simplicity, and feasibility. This means using AI to streamline your marketing tools; do something With all data.
AI-based demand forecasting allows you to identify trends in all your data so you can decide, “Do I need this tool? Do I need this? And should I run this campaign?”
Kenda also suggests checking resource optimization models. This will help you “consider not only your human capital, but also the marketing resources you are using” and avoid “overwhelming individuals with data and campaigns.” (This includes your staff.)
Kenda said AI in general is “a great starting point” to keep working towards the North Star and get out of the red-hot depths. “I think that's where the AI is. It gives us the impetus. It's the basis for planning and execution.”
Final thoughts: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are great places to start, especially if you're looking for cheap and fast wins for basic use cases. But there are over 10,000 martech tools on the market, many built on AI, and many specialized tools that go even further. And AI capabilities may be built into tools in your existing technology stack that you don't yet use.
decide your Do your research by looking at use cases.
Check out Kenda's AI for Demand Gen Marketers presentation to dive deeper and learn about the other seven levels of marketing hell and how AI can help you.
