The 3 ‘lightning strikes’ making customer connections more difficult for B2B marketers

It’s a dramatic metaphor, but one Holland believes captures the tricky situation B2B marketers find themselves in. The first “strike” Holland identifies is changes to search. “Search is under siege,” Holland says. The likes of Google and Bing are increasingly working to keep users in the search environment through updates and changes taking traffic away from company websites.

This is a subject HubSpot’s chief executive officer Yamini Rangan recently warned marketers about. “Search has fundamentally changed. It used to be that your customers would answer questions and search engines would serve up blue links and they would click on those blue links that they would get to your website. But now, with AI overviews, your customers are getting answers without leaving search,” Rangan said in October.

After search, Holland says changes in social media habits are the second “strike.” The social media playbook marketers once followed is now wildly outdated, he says. “Everybody used to think the formula is pretty straightforward. Create a lot of content, get it found on social media and the leads will come. That is going to be heavily disrupted.”

As consumer behavior becomes increasingly complex, new generations are shaping the way brands communicate. Holland, reflecting on generational shifts, acknowledges the growing influence of Gen Z. “Gen X acts a certain way, millennials act a certain way, Gen Z acts a certain way – and for the first time, Gen Z is moving up in the business ranks and becoming managers soon.”

Marketers are struggling to adapt to these new expectations, especially when social media – once seen as a space for cat memes and viral news – has become the go-to tool for business introductions. “My generation thinks of social media as cat memes and news stories,” Holland says. “Whenever my younger constituents go to social media for first impressions on business, it’s completely different.” With these new behaviors reshaping the marketing landscape, he sees an unprecedented challenge for professionals trying to stay relevant.

The final “strike” B2B marketers have to contend with is the overwhelming amount of data they have now collected. “It used to be like, ‘I need data, data, data’ and now a lot of the marketers I talk to are like, ‘Please, no more data, I just want to use the data I already have.’” The overwhelming volume of information has marketers scrambling to make sense of it all, especially against the backdrop of economic uncertainty and shifting political tides, he adds.

AI for personalization

Holland also talks about how AI is changing the way B2B marketers work. From where he sits, AI is still a mystery to many of HubSpot’s customers. “People are like, ‘What is AI? Should I use AI? Is it going to replace my job? Should I be skeptical? Will it lie to me?’” These are questions that never crossed a marketer’s mind a few years ago and yet they now dominate conversations.

One area Holland sees AI as a major opportunity for marketers is in the area of personalization. With the right tools, AI can create more tailored, human-centric marketing experiences. “In marketing, we’ve started sending personal messages with AI and the conversion rate improved by 82%,” he reveals. Hubspot is currently using AI to research a prospect’s company and role and then match them with the most relevant content. The result? A far more personalized outreach that doesn’t waste anyone’s time.

“Imagine this: a marketer sending an email recommending a product to a prospect who has no interest in it. Annoying, right? But with AI, if the system knows that a customer has recently purchased a washing machine, it might skip over recommending that same product and instead suggest something complementary – nobody gets upset about that kind of personalization.”

Of course, the road to widespread AI adoption won’t be smooth. “Some of us are going to stub our toes,” Holland admits, but he believes that as the tools evolve, marketers will become more adept at using them.

But for now, marketers face an uphill battle. “Can you imagine how that is blowing people’s minds?” The sheer scale of disruption is daunting, but those B2B marketers who can embrace the change will succeed in the long term.