How Should B2B Marketers Test AI Tools Strategically?

Jill Ransome (00:02) never just testing a new piece of technology, right? There's a bigger reason behind it in terms of why are we going down that path? And so from a strategic perspective, know, your conversion rate is low. What can we do to boost that conversion? Well, we can speed up, right? But the timing of our engagement or make sure we don't lose somebody while we have them right on the website. And that's why we went out and looked for, you know, not just the chat bot, but what else can we do besides a chat bot that can help us? really drive that Benjamin Ard (01:04) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Jill. Jill, welcome to the show. Jill Ransome (01:09) Hey Ben, thanks for having me. Benjamin Ard (01:10) Yeah, Jill, I'm excited. This is going to be a timely and fun conversation. But before we dig in, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your background and all that fun stuff. If you don't mind sharing. Jill Ransome (01:20) Absolutely, sure. Kind of broad strokes, over 20 years in marketing, 10 in a leadership capacity, always in the tech B2B space. Really excited to talk to you today and share some of that experience and excitement that I have for marketing. I don't know, let's just jump into it if that's all right with you. Cool. Benjamin Ard (01:39) I love it, that'll be great. So today what we're gonna talk about is how AI is changing B2B content marketing. So this is changing all the time. It is a crazy space. It feels like every other day there's a new technology that comes out. First and foremost, what kind of got you curious about AI and content work and how are you starting to use it in your day-to-day life when it comes to B2B content marketing? Jill Ransome (02:03) Yeah, first of all, think just being in marketing in general, there has always been this advent and introduction of new technology. And so as a marketing leader, you sort of have to be, you know, in the know, at least to some some some perspective, right? And there's been all this buzz about AI. so, you know, started small, right? Like everybody was like, chat GPT, what is this? Right? And I think it even started with my kids who are in college, like, don't use it for exams and papers and whatever. And just started to dabble. And it's amazing once you start dabbling, like, wow. Like, okay, now I'm starting to understand the power. And so once I started to get a taste of it, Then I did a little bit more research, read a couple of books, started to look into how are others using it, what are the different tools and functionalities. It's interesting, now I don't even know how long this has been going on, but now there's an AI tool for everything. It's just like, where do you start? I think some of it was tools we were already using in my own company, in my own marketing department. Let's look at Benjamin Ard (03:02) yeah. Jill Ransome (03:12) what some of those quote AI functionalities are. Do we need those? What would they do for us? But I would say it was like this latest book that I read, it's called the AI Driven Leader by Jeff Woods really just got me interested to dig deeper, not just AI for content or bots on your website, which is where I think a lot of marketers start, but how do you start to think about using things like chat GPT in all aspects of marketing. And so it's like become a much bigger part of our conversation and our thinking about just strategy overall. Benjamin Ard (03:47) I love that. That's cool. Okay. So you mentioned there's a ton of tools. It's all over the place. Random side question. What would you say your top three tools right now are? Like what are you using with AI and what do you love about them? And we're not sponsored by any tool. Like this is freedom straight off the cuff. This is great. Yeah. Jill Ransome (03:58) Yeah, am not getting paid for this. ⁓ Yeah, Nona, that's really interesting. I just was going through a Q2 review and I was talking about how our website at Unite Us is our number one driver of inbound pipeline generation. And we have started to integrate more AI tools throughout the website. One being from a company called Qualified. We have a new AI chat bot. And we have named her Valerie. And so everybody talks about Valerie as if she is a human in the back end. And it really is help. We've only been live with Val for roughly 40 days, something like that. And already we're just seeing the speed to lead in terms of being able to capture somebody in real time while they are on your website and engaged versus they have to fill out a form. The form goes to your CRM. Somebody has to pick it up. then you've lost that person. And then what do you do? And so that is probably one of our biggest areas of focus. And interestingly, we do get customer questions, customers coming to our website and asking questions. And so we're now thinking about how do you take whether it's that tool from Qualified or somebody else and how do you now integrate that into your own platform? Because that is not something that we have today. So that would probably be like top number one in terms of marketing tools. And then I think social media probably comes in second to that. We use Sprout. I've used Hootsuite in the past, right? But really just being, I'm a big believer in the power of social. So being able to ⁓ you know, manage that, platform. know some of those platforms have AI integrations. We don't use them yet. And I always caveat yet because I know it's coming. and yeah, yeah. And then you have your, your obvious, think like HubSpot, Pardot, whatever marketing automation. think they're probably pretty core to anybody's, you know, bag of tools, if you will. Yeah. Benjamin Ard (05:50) be optional at some point in time. Very cool. I love that. So where do you see AI having the biggest impact in B2B marketing right now? Like where do you feel like it is? You shared about like what it's happening for you. Do you feel like that's industry wide? Where do you feel like that impact's being felt the most? Jill Ransome (06:18) Yeah, good question. I could probably only speak to my experience and probably depending on what industry you're in and how you can use AI, there's probably some variances. Right now, I really see AI helping from a content perspective first and foremost, right? From ideation, campaign development, all the way through to I want to actually write this blog or I need to create some ads. I think what we have to remember though is AI is an amplifier. It is not the end all be all. And you know, there's a lot of things out there, right? Like don't use AI, don't just copy from Chat GPT because you'll have dashes and you'll have this other like jargony, whatever. I mean, yeah, I think we're getting to the point where lines get blurred. Like you and I were talking before we started the recording, like even from a graphics perspective, what's AI versus not. I think that there are some triggers from a content perspective, but at the end of the day, I do think you still need that human touch to go through and really understand like, does it have the right narrative? Does it have the right tone? Not just as me a human, but for my company and as my brand being represented in the right way. Is it accurate? Right? Like AI doesn't always get it right. And depending what you're talking about, I mean, we're in the tech space. So certainly, you know, the tools are only as good as the information that it's. kind of pulling from. you know, there definitely needs to be that human element that still comes in, but it really does speed up the process from a content development and creation perspective. Benjamin Ard (07:49) Love that. So with your teams and what you're doing right now, how are you putting humans in the loop when it comes to content creation? Is it AI on the first draft and then human editing, or is it the other way around? Like, how do you find the augmentation of AI but still keeping the human element? Like, how does that work for you and your team? Jill Ransome (08:10) Yeah, we've been using it, I'd say not the first step, but maybe creating a short briefing document, Google Doc, Word Doc, whatever, where we are basically outlining who is the audience, what do we want them to know, what's important to them, what is the key message that we are. you know, trying to get across why relevance blah blah blah, right? Like basically filling out a creative brief in a way or a messaging playbook, some version of that. And then we feed those into a variety of AI tools. We use chat GPT. We also use a couple of other ⁓ tools, writer. I don't even know what they all are, but ⁓ we're kind of testing them and seeing right now like where we get the best sort of results and what it looks like. But I would say we feed those documents in and then what I've learned over time and what I have been helping the team learn as well is the output is also contingent on how good your prompts are. Benjamin Ard (08:54) yeah. Jill Ransome (09:12) If you just put in a basic prompt, you're going to get a pretty formulaic basic answer. But as you get more detailed, I am a X persona trying to reach Y target who cares about X, Y, and Z. And the more detailed information you could put in, the better the output is. And so we have gotten much better as an organization practicing together. workshopping together, sharing results and best practices just like you do with anything else, but using a combination of that playbook and prompting and then refining the prompts. Okay, that looks great. Can you then take that and hone in on tone? And so we talked a little bit about the human element, right? It's continuing to manipulate. the answer till you get an output that is more in line with what you were originally thinking, but it takes minutes as opposed to days probably of writing or putting your heads together to create a campaign structure or whatever it is you're trying to get to. Benjamin Ard (10:16) I love that and I love how you're doing the workshopping, how you're actually like up leveling the team at the same time. Some of the greatest things that I've ever seen are when a team can get together, someone who's done research and has experience is able to teach the rest of the team. able to figure it out together and it genuinely feels like the company is investing in your growth and pathway to become a better person using AI or data, whatever it may be. So I love that hats off to you and your company doing that. think that's so cool. Jill Ransome (10:43) Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I'll just add to that. Not that you asked, but we're a remote company. And I think one of the biggest pieces of feedback I get from my team is that they do they get reinvigorated and are feel more tapped in when we have face to face time. And we can't always, you know, run up the T &E and get everybody together in New York City or wherever. But having opportunities that we carve out things like a 30 minute or an hour. Benjamin Ard (10:45) ⁓ yeah. Jill Ransome (11:10) workshop or a get to know you session, right? It does help even with, you know, like you said, personal, professional development, creative juices flowing, just shared knowledge. You know, back in the day when we were all in the office, you'd be in one room together and you'd hear people talking about things and you'd chime in or you'd learn from hearing and you just don't have that anymore in a remote place anyway. Benjamin Ard (11:29) Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah, that's incredible. I love those opportunities. Yeah, because when it's a meeting, everyone puts on their meeting hat. And then when it's over, they're back to normal. And it's kind of cool to have those opportunities where you can kind of let loose and learn and have a good time. That's so cool. Jill Ransome (11:43) Yeah. And you never know where the best next idea will come from. you know, having the opportunity for someone to be like, have you thought about, you know, whatever. ⁓ Benjamin Ard (11:51) Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. So we've talked a lot about the positives of AI. Now there are some negatives. Are there any red flags in your opinion of AI where you're like, maybe we should keep an eye out for this. Maybe we shouldn't be so eager, you know, in this area of AI. I'm just curious if there's anything like that where you're like, I'm not like diving in headfirst into that part of it. Anything like that that comes to mind? Jill Ransome (11:55) Mm-hmm. Hmm. think it's more, I don't know. I think from a creative standpoint, like, you we talk, you can have AI generated creatives, like advertising. I'm not fully there yet. I don't think that that feels quite right. I talked a little bit about AI, maybe not being accurate. So I get a little nervous, like if we're talking real technical jargon. Benjamin Ard (12:29) Mm-hmm. Jill Ransome (12:38) If we're talking about security and privacy or things that are more relevant to my particular business, I'm a little hesitant maybe or cautious, I guess is probably a better word, to fully trust AI, just from an accuracy perspective and then even positioning. Benjamin Ard (12:56) I love that. Yeah, so avoiding the hallucinations, making sure there's a human in the loop and so you're not necessarily lying to people and accidents for the AI and all that. Jill Ransome (13:02) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. And I think we've been slow to adopt new tools. There's probably tools out there that I don't know about that are that we're not quite ready for yet. And so part of this whole thing has been educating and trying and testing and getting comfortable so that as new things come around, right, you have you have more knowledge to build a judgment on, but also have maybe figured out like where some of those pitfalls are. Benjamin Ard (13:33) I love that. So with your team, really sounds like you've invested in the team and their ability to progress when it comes to AI. I also love that you started mentioning a bunch of tools. You're testing a lot of things to see what works best for your company. How have you instilled that culture on your team and at the company to really test new tools and discover what works well? Because there are a lot of companies that don't have that mentality. How have you kind of built that kind of culture? of experimentation so that you can really be on top of AI and what its capabilities are. Jill Ransome (14:06) Yeah, whether it's AI or any other new tech that gets introduced, there really has to be a portion of your time and your budgets that are set aside for testing. And it could be, I'm never just testing a new piece of technology, right? There's a bigger reason behind it in terms of why are we going down that path? And so from a strategic perspective, know, your conversion rate is low. What can we do to boost that conversion? Well, we can speed up, right? But the timing of our engagement or make sure we don't lose somebody while we have them right on the website. And that's why we went out and looked for, you know, not just the chat bot, but what else can we do besides a chat bot that can help us? really drive that And so we made sure going into this year that we had, I don't know, maybe 10 % of our overall marketing budget set aside for miscellaneous, knowing that we were going to have new tools, new things, new whatever that we wanted to be able to have to test. And that means, yes, budget is a piece of it, but then we as a team also have to sort of be nimble enough at times to say, this thing isn't working, what are we gonna go do instead? Let's go test a couple of different options. And that sort of mentality just has to be built in from the start. And I think that great for marketing, but as a marketing leader, you need to also funnel that conversation up through the ranks and make sure that your peers and that the rest of the executive team is on board with what you're doing. Benjamin Ard (15:35) I love that. Jill Ransome (15:49) And even as we have rolled out Valerie, our AI chat bot, every few weeks, like I said, we haven't been live that long, but every few weeks I'm giving an update on what we've learned and what's the next step. And it helps build excitement along with backing and alignment and understanding and all of those things so that when the next time comes that you want to test something or want to like. A, you've built that credibility and confidence that you can manage through that and that you're being transparent with others. And it just, it helps from that, that just cross-functional alignment and cultural sort of accountability. Benjamin Ard (16:28) That's so cool. I love how you put that budget buffer. I think that's cool. think a lot of companies will designate their budget a little too tight and you've given yourself the flexibility to go after resources to accomplish your goals. I also love that it's not testing for the sake of testing. It really sounds like we have our OKRs and our objectives as a marketing team. Here are the things we're trying to overcome. Okay, cool. We know what we're trying to fix, whether it be on the website or otherwise. Jill Ransome (16:35) Mm-hmm. Benjamin Ard (16:53) Let's now go look at solutions and we can test those and see what fits and it's not just, well, hey, I found a cool tool. Can I go test it? It's like, no, we have to know what we're trying to accomplish. yeah, the exit, no, the Y. Yeah, I love that. That is amazing. I love this. Well, Jill, we actually have run out of time. These episodes go by so quick. I promise they would go so fast. But Jill, if anyone listening today would like to connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Jill Ransome (17:01) Why? Right? Like you should always be asking why. goes so fast. ⁓ They can find me on LinkedIn. It's probably the best place to reach out to me. Jill Ransom. I'm currently the SVP of Marketing at Unite Us. And you can't miss me. You Google me, I come right back up. ⁓ Benjamin Ard (17:33) I love it. And for anyone listening, we will link directly to Jill's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So just scroll down and click there and connect with Jill. Also, if you haven't heard the company that Jill works for, Unitas, it sounds pretty freaking sweet. So that's something also worth checking out. So hats off to everything you're doing there as well. Jill, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it. Jill Ransome (17:50) Thank you. Awesome, a lot of fun. It gets the wheels going in my own side of the business too. So thanks so much for having me. Benjamin Ard (18:00) love it.