Transforming B2B Marketing in the Face of AI

Written by Mike Allton

Last modified Sep. 19 2024

As AI tools become more sophisticated, many B2B marketers are left questioning their role and value in an increasingly automated world. How can we compete with machines that can generate content, analyze data, and even predict trends at lightning speed?

What if I told you that your creativity isn’t just relevant, it’s your secret weapon? What if the very thing that makes us human, our ability to think outside the box, to connect seemingly unrelated dots, to empathize and innovate is exactly the key to not just surviving but thriving in the AI era?

Read on to explore the transformative power of creative thinking and B2B marketing, and learn how to turn the challenge of AI into your greatest opportunity.

Listen to the full episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B or read the recap below.

Carla Johnson, a world-renowned expert on innovation and marketing, has been named one of the top 50 women in marketing and the number-one influencer in content marketing. She’s the author of RE:Think Innovation and has worked with Fortune 500 brands across the globe, helping them to cultivate innovative cultures and implement transformative ideas with her wealth of experience and forward-thinking approach. Carla’s perfectly positioned to guide us through the alchemy of creativity in the age of AI.

Creative Thinking in the World of AI

Why is creative thinking more crucial than ever—particularly for B2B marketers with all the things going on with AI?

Carla Johnson: Oh, absolutely.

I think one of the things to keep in mind is one of the fastest-growing job titles is a prompt engineer. And we think about that, and AI is only as good with its outcomes based on what the input is. So we have to look at why we need to be more creative as we look at AI. Well, if we want more creative output, we have to have more creative input, but the input that we put into AI is all based on what is our creative experience.

What are the things that we do every day that challenge our assumptions of the status quo?

That challenges how we believe B2B marketing should behave, and how our companies should show up in our industries.

And I think that the main thing that we need to understand is that if we’re going to be creative as prompt engineers, whether that’s our official title or not, we have to make sure that we lean into our own human creativity, so that how we use AI as a tool reaches its potential.

Let’s talk about how B2B marketers can cultivate and maintain that creative edge when AI seems to be taking over all of these traditional marketing tasks.

Carla Johnson: I think that the big thing to remember is that AI is a tool.

A lot of things that sap our creative energy are those day-to-day rote repetitious kinds of things. And that’s where I know I’ve tapped into the power of AI. What are things that I do on a repeatable basis that I can have AI either do for me or help me with so that I can—instead of take two hours—take 12 minutes, maybe 20 minutes to do, because the great thing about AI is that it takes those kinds of mind-numbing energy expending kind of tasks off our plate.

And then what it does is that it leaves us more room and space to be more creative, to have those creative thoughts, to maybe walk down the hall or get on a Zoom call with somebody to help us work something through where normally we think we don’t have time for this because we’ve got deadlines. We have things that we have to do. We have reports that we still need to turn in. I mean, that isn’t going to go away.

But I think what it gives us is breathing room and space to step away from the demands and the deadlines that we have every day and look into that opportunity of what’s possible.

How do we think differently? What inspires us? What inspires us as B2B marketers is going to be similar to what inspires our customers.

Common Struggles About AI and Creativity

Mike Allton: Let’s talk about how AI can potentially support or even replace you in that task to free you up, to be more creative. And this podcast is a great example. Like, we were talking in the green room, I now have six podcasts. The only reason I’m able to do that is because I’ve allowed and programmed AI to help me in the prep to take two hours of prep work down to 20 minutes, which frees me up to do more podcasts and more creative interviews like this. AI can’t do what I’m doing right now with you. It can’t have this kind of a conversation—at least, not yet.

One of the things that I know B2B marketers struggle with is just the whole idea of being creative in their organizations.

What do you see as some common barriers for B2B marketers in regard to creative thinking? And how can marketers overcome those?

Carla Johnson: I have an acronym that I created for this. I call it BDD, and BDD is a big barrier to how B2B marketers can be creative. BDD stands for Brand Detachment Disorder. And we’ve all experienced that.

It’s when we think that we can’t be creative or do something imaginative or be those innovative thinkers because we don’t sell the right kind of product.

We don’t have the right kind of culture. We don’t have the right kind of boss. We don’t have the right kind of fill-in-the-blank. And I think that the biggest barrier is it’s not just that we think this as B2B marketers because I guarantee I know I’ve done it over my 20-year career and said, “Oh, that’s never going to work because it’s just not that kind of company.” But I guarantee that your bosses have said it.

Everybody in your B2B organization has said we can’t do what Liquid Death does as a canned water company because we sell shipping services. We sell industrial manufacturing services. But I think the opportunity that we have is to look at what it is that we’re discounting, like why do we say we can’t be more creative? Is it budget?

I know one of the most successful B2B campaigns in the world. I shouldn’t say in the world [or] throughout history there has been a campaign that only cost 87 dollars. So it can’t be the budget. We look at time constraints. There’s the law that says we’re going to waste half or three-fourths of the time between now and our deadline anyway. So it’s not necessarily time. And then it’s the perception that B2B marketers just aren’t creative.

I think that’s where the AI tools come in and help us. If we can take off the mundane things and look out into the world, what is any brand that inspires us? What’s any exercise experience that we have that inspires us? And what can we learn from that experience? And what can we start to relate into our own world?

I think that’s the biggest opportunity for B2B marketers that we don’t realize. And when we start to tell ourselves a different story about what’s possible, I think that’s when we start to break through this perception that we’re not that kind of company. We don’t sell those kinds of products. We don’t have those kinds of budgets.

Mike Allton: I love that because telling ourselves stories is something that we as humans are incredibly good at—and most people don’t realize just everything that you’re doing every single day and well beyond marketing—you’re telling yourself stories. You’re having conversations in your mind with somebody else. They’re not there. This is just you, right? But you’re replaying a conversation that hasn’t even happened. You’re imagining that you’re telling yourself a story. You believe that they think a certain way about you or your work. That’s all a story.

Examples of Success for B2Bs

Carla Johnson: I think your point about stories, Mike, is such a great one because psychologists say that 50 to 60 percent of the stories we tell ourselves aren’t even true.

As B2B marketers, let’s think about the stories that we’re telling ourselves about our ability to be creative and whether they are they actually true or we are just making assumptions and projecting that onto what happens in a meeting, and in projecting onto what people are going to say about something different and unusual that we might do as an approach?

And I think one of the companies that I have been watching that I like—and this comes from my farm girl background. I grew up in really rural Nebraska on a farm and we were green—if you were a farm kid, or if you grew up in the Midwest, that it’s between red and green because is it International Harvester or is it John Deere? And we were a John Deere family in a community for sure.

But one of the things that I love and watch that’s been going on with them is that they’ll run with a story, and they talk about how every piece of land has a story. So that’s back to what it is that we need to look at and how we need to look at the work that we do. And I think, historically, people have perceived a company like an agricultural manufacturing company as something boring. It’s not particularly interesting. What can they do? But you look at the history of John Deere, and they’ve been incredible in what they’ve been able to do with content marketing, with how they position themselves.

And I think how they blend in AI with this campaign to talk about the data that they’re able to gather through their technology and their equipment. It does tell a story about the land. And if you are in the agricultural industry, there is so much that’s heart-centered about that connection to land as a human.

I think they’ve just done an amazing job of connecting the dots for people in a way that I think is incredibly successful. And I think a lot of us, as B2B marketers, can learn from them.

Mike Allton: You said it exactly. If you’re in that industry, their stories are resonating with you. They’re pulling on your heartstrings quite literally. And that’s another shift. I think that a lot of us need to just take in our mindset. You mentioned Liquid Death earlier. That’s consumer-focused. And as B2B marketers, that’s not who we’re talking to. So we don’t have to tell stories that way.

We need to tell the stories that our target audiences are going to resonate with.

Balancing Data With Creativity

I want to shift gears for just a second, because I know marketers today are also being told, yes, they need to be creative—but they also need to be data-driven. And sometimes that’s almost a bit of a dichotomy for folks. They don’t understand how to bring those insights, particularly with AI, and also apply human intuition to creativity in their campaigns.

What advice do you have for them in that kind of scenario?

Carla Johnson: I was talking to a chief marketing officerabout three weeks ago.

I said, “What’s one of the biggest challenges that you have with your team right now?”

He said that the biggest challenge is: “They’re great at bringing me data and numbers and reports, but they’re not great at bringing me insights and telling me how this connects to our ultimate customer.”

And I think that’s the big opportunity that we have right here.

About a month ago, my husband and I checked something off of our bucket list. It was always something that we wanted to do. We live in Colorado now, so we’re big hikers and mountain climbers. One of the things we had on our bucket list was to climb Mount Fuji in Japan.
And so we spent months hiking here in Colorado, Stairmaster at the gym when we had to prep for it, looking at the stories about it, reading about it, talking to other people who’d been there and saying, What are the conditions? What’s it like?”
Gathering all of this information came to us in story form.
And so when we’re on the top of the mountain at the end of our first day hike—it was a two-day hike—and we’re sitting on this bench right in front of the refugio where we slept, and we were eating our little supper of rice and stew and we look out over. It’s just this huge bank of clouds below us, and behind us is Mount Fuji and the sun is setting behind it and the shadow of Mount Fuji is just spreading out across that cloud.
It was incredible. And it’s something, Mike, that I will never forget for the rest of my life.
That’s why I hiked that mountain. I didn’t hike the mountain because of a pie chart.

That’s something that we need to remember as B2B marketers: People don’t buy what we sell because of a pie chart, because of a graph, because of data—they buy it because of the story.

When you’re able to build that story and build that emotional connection with your customer and have them become a part of that store—like John Deere did, as Caterpillar does, as Maersk does, the shipping company—that’s when we start to see a shift in what it’s like to build that connection.

The only way we can do that is not only to come up with our own voice as a brand but be willing to express our humanity and our personalities as the people and employees who work for the company.

A lot of times that comes out in social media. In how we describe ourselves on LinkedIn as being willing to share who we are as individuals that make up the company and put that out there because people do business with people, not with companies.

We know that that’s kind of cliche, but how do we make sure that we pull that human, that authentic voice forward and show up in the real world? All the time, who we are.

I think those are the things that B2B marketing leaders are looking for: how do we move from the data, which is still important, into that mindset and question of, “Well, what does this mean in the story that we’re presenting to our customers, and how can we build a relationship based on this data but is still really, really very story driven?”

Mike Allton: That is such a critical point that you’ve made. I just want to underline for all of you listening by telling a story:

In a previous life, I sold swimming pools and hot tubs. I’d gotten kind of burned out with the IT industry.
And I just went and sold pools for lighthouse pools and spas back in Ohio.
We would have intense training sessions every week up in their Cleveland head offices about what are, what are the motors that we’re selling, the pool cleaners, the chemicals, the thickness of the pool walls, and how these have been engineered, and we’re trained on all that information. Not so that we could share that with customers—unless of course we’re asked—but just so that information is there.
But what we wanted to know was, if someone’s coming into our store, what’s the environment that they’re going to put this pool in? Why are they there? So that we can, on the fly, build a story for them that helps them see themselves in this pool.
Nobody went to buy a pool because of the quarter-inch thickness of the wall. They went to buy the pool because they wanted to create an outdoor oasis for themselves and their families. They wanted to build that outdoor living space, and they needed my help to imagine this pool or that pool or this pool, in their space, the way it exists now to support their family, their kids, whatever it is.

Check out more episodes of the Social Pulse: B2B Edition on the Agorapulse blog.

Let’s bring it back to some of the things that you were talking about earlier. You’re talking about running reports but not necessarily having time to do insights, getting bogged down with repetitive tasks, and not having enough time to think creatively about campaigns.

Let’s suppose that we’ve used AI. We figured that part out to run the reports so that we have time to think about what it is telling us, right? Let’s build some insights or do some of those repetitive tasks for you to be more creative.

Carla Johnson: One of my favorites is to learn by example.

When we think of artists and painters and even singers and musicians, one of the things they start out doing is that they mimic other people whose music and art style they like, and they learn how they do what they do and they pay attention and they really, really look at the details, and then they pick it apart and they start to understand what it is that they liked about that style of blues or that style of jazz or that style of heavy metal, whatever it might be. And then they start to think about, “How does that relate to the kind of music, the kind of art that I want to create?”

Our easiest and biggest opportunity as B2B marketers is what inspires us.

We might be B2B marketers, and there can be other B2B marketing companies that inspire us, but I always encourage people to look at the entire world around us. And so, yes, Liquid Death is a consumer brand, and it may not have anything at all to do with what we do or sell.

But what is it if that’s a brand that you admire and catches your attention? What is it about that brand that you really like, that catches your attention? Is there something that you see that they do that somehow you could make it work on your own team?

Maybe it’s another consumer brand. Maybe it’s something like Google, and they might give people 20 percent of their week to do some creative thinking. But what if you gave your team 20 minutes at the beginning of a call every single week or every other week?

I think that the ability to look at what inspires us as people is our greatest learning opportunity.

I always say, “Look around and think and understand and know what inspires you, what captures your attention, and what makes you loyal and excited to see a brand. And what are the details of it? And how do you see that showing up in the world?” And then have regular conversations as teams—that once-a-week conversation, even if it’s only 10 or 15 minutes. Assign one person every week to bring something to our team meeting that inspired [them] and lead a conversation about what [they] see as something that could be relevant to what you do.

I think it’s those conversations and bringing things in from the outside world—because when we are heads down and we’re doing work and we have reports, we sometimes forget what’s out here because we’re so focused on productivity—but that just short little 10 or 15 minutes of infusion of creativity and bringing our head up and looking at the horizon and seeing what else is going on does amazing things for waking up our brain.

Even after those calls, whether we realize it or not, that’s still in our heads, and we’ll start to think differently, especially if we’re having conversations like this as a team.

I think the other thing that I always say is, if you want an outcome, how can you start to measure it?

The Spreadsheet Model

With creativity and innovative thinking, one of the simplest things that I have people do is a very simple spreadsheet with three columns.

Column One: The first column is, “How many ideas did we get from our team?” Now that’s not saying how many ideas were great ideas. It’s literally, “How many ideas did your team come up with?” (The important thing to realize here is that before you can get to great ideas, you have to go through a lot of ideas. And when you go through a lot of ideas, there’s a lot of bad ideas. But if you only wait to track what are the great ideas, it’s a sales funnel. Like, you need more at the top to get to that second stage to get to conversion.) So if we think about ideas in the form of a sales funnel, you need a lot of ideas to start with—just like you need a lot of potential leads.
Column Two. Then the next one is: “How many of those ideas did we put into and execute? What are the ideas that we started to think are relevant?” It’s something that fits our parameters—whether that’s time, budget, customer need, campaign need, event need, whatever that is.
Column Three. The third column is how many were executed and made it across the finish line.

Now, these three columns tell an amazing story.

Back to your great talent, Mike, is [that] it tells a story of does our team understands how to come up with a great idea or how to come up with a relevant idea or how to come up with an idea that fits our business objectives?

And that was one of the reasons why I wrote the book RE:Think Innovation because it’s not just about how many ideas can we come up with forever.

We have to start to think in terms of our business objectives. How do we come up with more ideas that are better ideas?

The second thing tells us by putting the ideas into practice, looking at, and executing them, how many of those ideas fit a business need or fit the parameters of what we had to do? This is telling me, “It’s either we didn’t have enough great relevant ideas.” Or maybe it’s “Do we have an environment that says no to everything?”

I would say that the number one thing that I hear from B2B marketers about why they don’t share their ideas is that they say, “My boss is going to say no anyway.”

So when you start to track the number of ideas—one that you come up with, two that go into execution—then you start to see a cultural element about your B2B marketing team. And to be honest about the company in general—if you aren’t getting the ideas, that means you don’t have an environment where either they’re welcome or people know what to do. If these ideas aren’t moving into execution, then again, maybe they’re not relevant, or maybe you as a leader aren’t creating an environment that welcomes and will approve those ideas.

And the third is if they never get across the finish line. Again, look at the culture. Is everybody saying no to everything? Are we stuck in our status quo of “this is how we think,” or “this is the way we do things,” and it’s very telling just measuring those simple three things in a spreadsheet.

Mike Allton: Going back to your first point about examples, that’s why I enjoy looking at Content Marketing Institute Awards, the Webby Awards, Ad Week, and those kinds of organizations that are giving us these great examples of tremendous campaigns and creative thinking.

You reminded me of John Cleese, who spoke at Content Marketing World many years ago. And he talked about the tortoise mind and the need for us to just take the time to go on long walks, sit on a park bench, and think about, to your point, the things that our minds already thinking about, but we just need to give it that space and let it kind of declutter a little bit. And then it’ll tackle those really fun, creative, innovative ideas that are just there waiting to be pulled out.

Leadership and Company Core Culture

Now you mentioned this shift in leadership. I’m wondering if you can drill down into that a little bit more because I think you’re right. I think a lot of organizations are facing these situations where they feel like their ideas have never been accepted before, so why should they keep doing it anymore, or they’re hearing a message of, “We’ve always done it that way.” Or maybe they’re being told literally, “Hm, this is not the place. This is not the kind of business where we’re going to pursue that.”

Do you have any other suggestions, either for the employees or for the leaders, that might change that core culture into a more idea-friendly environment?

Carla Johnson: There’s a one-question survey that I always say: If you want to know, as a marketing leader, are you creating an environment that allows people to bring their creative selves or creative thinking their ideas to the table?

The one-question survey—and I’ve done this with clients before I do workshops—is: “Does my boss support my ideas?”

And I tell you, this makes some bosses really, really nervous, especially the ones who say, “My team never comes to me with ideas. I just can’t get anything but reports and data and all this thing out of them. I ask them for ideas and meetings, and nobody ever says anything.” Well, do you support their ideas?

I can’t remember the source of this research report, but it was something like 86 percent of all employees said that their bosses do not listen to their ideas when they bring them to them. It’s one of those things. We know what it’s like to work in a company, and employees start to say, “Well, why bother? Nothing’s going to happen anyway.”

And I think that’s why that simple little measurement, that little three-column spreadsheet, is so important.

If nobody is coming forward, then that’s probably a sign that you as a leader aren’t creating that space to allow people to feel that they can trust that if they bring an idea forward, it will be heard.

I think there’s a lot of us who I know who say, “I don’t want to look bad in front of my boss. I don’t want to look bad in front of my clients. So what if I bring an idea forward and it’s dumb?” What if they say, “Oh, we tried that? Oh, you know, what if they try it and it completely falls flat?”

We get nervous about how we look. I think, as a leader, we need to set an example of the behavior that we would like to see.

Vulnerability as Leaders

I did an industry workshop to pull out some trends for a group a couple of weeks ago.

One of the things that one of the participants talked about when it comes to “how do we get more ideas out of people?” is that they said they had an internal-only call that lasted about two hours.

On it, three high-level VPs said, “One of the things we need is that we have to start to talk about what didn’t work, what failed so we can learn from that and share it across the organization.”

Because it was an international B2B type of company, and that vice president said, “And I’m going to start and share my own biggest failure that just happened to me. And I’m going to tell you what I learned from it because I don’t want anybody else in the company to not know what happened and they might stumble down the same path, whether it’s this year or two or three years down the road.”

And so this VP became very, very vulnerable to share their own failure and to talk through it.

And so this two-hour call ended up lasting three and a half hours because once that dam was broken and people say, “I’m not going to get reprimanded. I’m not going to have the kind of consequences that are the stories that I’ve told myself by not having the right answer, the right idea, the right fill-in-the-blank.”

I think that creates an entirely different dynamic.

That’s one thing that, as leaders, we have to pay attention to showing our vulnerability and admitting that we’re not always going to have the right answer.

It makes you very human—back to that something we need to bring forward, especially on the creative side, and as a brand side—we need to be more human. Nobody does everything right the first time. Everybody fails. And I think, especially if we’re looking at how do we bring more innovative thinking, and how do we bring more creative problem solving, we have to just be openly honest that that involves failure—that involves doing something that didn’t turn out the way we expected it. Maybe that’s a better way to put it.

And now what can we learn from it?

I remember that Content Marketing World when John Cleese spoke, and that was one of the things that he talked about. Like, you have to play with things. You have to test things. You have to try them out. Now we don’t have to do all of this at a big, very dangerous kind of scale with a lot on the line. We can run these little, tiny experiments along the way and give them a trial that way.

The other thing that leaders need to understand is that we have to give people that space and that space can come in a lot of different forms. We’ve all had an incredibly rough time, demanding time, getting something out the door, preparing for a huge event, and end-of-the-year planning. I know a lot of B2B companies are starting to roll into budget planning for 2025 right now. Just take an hour and do something that has nothing to do with work.

I had talked to the CEO of a small B2B company one time and he said they didn’t have a lot of money. They were running super tight on a budget that year. And he could have just said to everybody, “I’ll give you 50 dollars; you’ll see it in your paycheck. And we appreciate what you’ve done.” But instead, what he did was he loaded everybody up in different cars, and he said, “Okay, we’re going to Best Buy and you’ve got 50 dollars and spend it on whatever you want.”

Well, that was a whole different experience.

I think those little examples, those experiences that reinforce we think differently, we behave differently, we are open to different things. We’re not always defaulting to the status quo. Those are signs that, as a leader, you’re showing your team that you’re willing to break the status quo of the way you’ve always done it—whether that’s for the sake of efficiency or whatever it might be. And you’re willing to do something to change because, especially in B2B marketing, I mean, change is happening so fast that if we don’t start to do something differently and we just stick with the status quo of what we’ve always done, we’re in big trouble.

Measuring Business Impact

Mike Allton: A couple of decades ago, I was working for Dana Corporation in Toledo, Ohio, and they believed very strongly in the importance of people and ideas so strongly.

We literally built an idea-tracking system. Yes, where employees were encouraged to put in their ideas, big or small. And they were tracked and they were rewarded for whoever came up with the most ideas and who had the biggest impact and that sort of thing. So there was a lot of focus on output there.

And I’m wondering what you think or how you suggest businesses also look at the outcomes.

In other words, how are we measuring the actual business impact that these kinds of creative strategies and innovative thinking are having in the B2B space?

Carla Johnson: I know I’m talking about this a lot, but that simple little spreadsheet—like, what are the ideas that got executed?

There’s a parking software company that had an innovation week. They said, “For a week, we’re going to shut down.” They let all their customers know it. “And we’re just going to focus on innovation, looking at our product roadmap, other things that have opportunities for our company.”

And there was a woman who was from finance, and she said, “I don’t know anything about product roadmaps. I don’t know anything about tech specs and software and things like that,” but everybody contributed in a way that made them comfortable. And they felt that they could move things forward. So some people looked at being good at PowerPoint or keynote or something like that. Her one thing was being good at looking at the numbers coming from finance.

But after she had worked together with the people who she never normally came across from this company, she was inspired to think differently.

And she went back to her desk, and said, “Okay, if what I’m looking at is, ‘How do I do something different to my work so that I can be more creative and have more time and think differently and do all these things?'” (Like you and I have been talking about, Mike.) She looked around and she said there was a report that took her 40 manual hours to put together every single month.

And it’s one of those things, like she just needed the data that she needed. And so she thought about what she had learned from one of the IT programmers.

And she said, “Well, I bet I could learn some IT things, a little bit of programming. Maybe there’s something I can do to have an impact.” She taught herself a programming language to run that report. And instead of taking 40 hours, it now takes about 12 minutes.

If you look at something highly measurable, highly impactful to the bottom line, essentially what she’s doing is she’s been able to take 15 months’ worth of work and do it now in 12 months. She’s gotten back three entire months out of her year.

So when we start to look at how we measure the impact of these things, I think one of the things we need to do is define what impact looks like.

Budget deadlines. Those are easy ones for us to point to, but what are some other things that companies want to measure? Is it based on their company values? Is it based on objectives and performance goals that they have for that year?

When we look at what is it that we want to measure, we have to be very careful to understand what are the outcomes that we want to deliver—and then reverse engineer that into what it is that we measure and what it is that we encourage.

Carla Johnson: I think one thing is: Always look outside your industry, look at the industry, and look at the companies that are doing the kind of things that you want to do.

I’m a huge proponent of industry education. Mike, you and I met through the Content Marketing World and I think that Marketing AI Institute is having its events sometime this fall, and I think those are all really important things.

We learn from the experts, but we also learn from each other as a community. So your podcasts, this one, and the other five that you produce—I think they’re incredible learning opportunities. You know, we all commute to work. We commute to the gym, we commute to activities, hobbies, whatever it is. Podcasts—they’re a great way to learn and start those conversations.

But I think the important thing that I want to drive home is that we have to look outside of our companies, and we have to look outside of our industries to understand what’s possible.

Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and leave us a review. We would love to know what you think. Until next time.

Transforming B2B Marketing in the Face of AI