Your Marketing Team Can Superdrive AI Adoption – If You Let Them

D’après une enquête récente of over 1,900 senior marketers by Dentsu, 52% felt that “building trust with consumers in an era of misinformation” was one of the greatest obstacles getting in the way of their business objectives. Though survey-takers spanned various industries, I suspect those working with B2B tech companies feel this even more profoundly. 

Because right now, you can’t be a B2B tech brand without also being an AI company, and headlines regarding AI can feel overwhelmingly negative. Amidst doomsday predictions, the rise of “chantier,” and reports highlighting a lack of ROI, B2B AI companies have to convince their customers that their product is not only sûr à utiliser, but also so nécessaire that it’s worth an enormous investment and the effort it takes to rip out the old systems and start with something new and unfamiliar. 

Add that to a highly competitive, noisy market, and it soon becomes clear that trust is your most valuable currency as an enterprise AI business. And trust isn’t built in data sheets and product demos, it’s built through brand. 

So if you want to build a B2B AI brand that customers trust, you’ve got to start by trusting the people responsible for shaping it: your marketing team. Here are 3 ways of working with your marketing team (or agency) that will lead to better, more compelling creative. 

Tactic 1: Give more access than you think is necessary

Marketing a B2B product is very different from marketing a new-to-the-scene shoe brand. Everyone knows what a shoe is and how it functions, but every B2B product disrupts its predecessor, resulting in a lack of shared language around how to describe it. So if you want to equip your marketing team with the ability to do what they do best, you’ve got to give them the level of access they need to understand the product in and out. 

In other words, a demo video is not going to cut it. 

In that same survey referenced above, 44% of CMOs agreed that a lack of clarity around their brand proposition served as a barrier to success. Overcoming this obstacle starts with access to more information. 

While marketing and sales should ideally already be collaborating, connect all the company dots by also giving them time with the product team, customer success team, and even warm prospects. By learning what keeps these different groups up at night, marketers are better equipped to develop the most resonant creative, as well as develop more effective strategies. 

Some practical steps include: give a live demo walk through from the perspective of a customer so the ins and outs of product features and capabilities are crystal clear. Allow marketers to speak with the sales team about the questions leads are asking or what blockers are getting in the way of conversions so they can create the content that proactively addresses these concerns. Share product roadmaps, governance frameworks, and the company goals set by the leadership team. 

If knowledge is power, giving marketers access to the resources they need is like letting Popeye loose in the canned spinach factory. The more we know, the more we can work to develop the messaging and tactics that lead to greater trust and more growth. 

Tactic 2: Cooperation over Collaboration (Aiming for Round Two)

Brand collaborations are nothing new, especially in the B2C space where, for example, a blockbuster movie like Méchant : Pour de bon est passible d'une a deluge of green and pink merchandise. But there’s an important difference between collaborating and cooperating. 

Successful B2B marketing should operate in a similar way to working with a stylist. While a good stylist can create unique, flattering, fashionable looks, a l' stylist is invested in making sure their client looks and feels like their best, most authentic self – they don’t just impose their own style on someone else’s body. A good stylist collaborates (i.e. slaps green on a water bottle and calls it branded), but a great stylist cooperates. 

But getting to know a client well enough to truly see their most authentic self requires trust. 

What this means for B2B AI companies, then, is that the folks responsible for the marketing (whether in-house or contracted) and leadership teams have to co-create. Rather than a one-sided RFP or pitch deck, the expertise of both camps have to be combined under a shared vision. 

Obviously, this takes time, especially if you’re working with marketers that are outside of your organization. In my agency experience working with B2B clients, I like to say that the real work begins in round two. The first round is for presenting a zoomed-out overview of all the exciting possibilities and opportunities that ultimately leads to a strategic debate over what feels right for the company, not just for the creatives. 

While the first round may be more streamlined with an in-house marketing team, it still stands that round two is where the true workshopping and co-creation begins. It’s where marketers can push their most compelling ideas and executives can pull those ideas towards more resonant realities until alignment is achieved.

Tactic 3: Give up on Getting it Right the First Time

If you can accept that round two is where the real work begins, you’re one step closer to what is maybe the greatest truth behind creative work: getting it “right” is a misnomer. While cooperation is important, it can quite quickly turn into a “too many cooks” situation that leads to creative paralysis. Said differently, this is the classic case of non-marketing folks being so scared by the pressures of their jobs that they endlessly tinker, requesting so many revisions that creative ideas die on the vine, the resulting assets are bland and boring (and that’s IF anything even gets produced), and money is burned. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this play out. Creative paralysis can turn a 6-week project into a 6-month project where not a single creative asset is produced. But without that paralysis, three videos could have been made for the same price and in the same amount of time.

So if the marketing team presents a campaign that pushes the rest of the C-suite outside of their comfort zones, rather than resist, they should lean into the discomfort and stay curious about the potential and possibilities that exist when it comes to a soulful, authentic campaign. Often, enterprise tech companies get so caught up in their own features, they forget that features don’t actually sell products – emotions and value do. 

With that in mind, approach the marketing process in the same way you do product – iterate! Treat everything as a test. It’s better to get creative marketing assets out into the world, measure the results, and in turn strategize and refine to get even more resonant work out there. Not only does this lead to better work, it also creates a cadence of visibility and brand awareness in itself – core trust-building elements. 

Though it’s not unusual for non-marketers to question the ROI of creative campaigns, the power of brand building cannot be understated. One Duke university study demonstrated that being briefly exposed to the Apple logo caused random participants to perform better on creative tasks than those exposed to IBM’s logo. But that kind of brand association takes years of consistency and validity. So though marketing isn’t a silver bullet for B2B AI adoption, it is an indispensable piece of the puzzle.