Barry Levine says, “Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than a stylish trend. It goes beyond rules, providing the ability to understand content or language, find patterns that can be applied to the future, digest all kinds of information and make reasoned decisions. One by one, B2B vendors are rolling out their AI chops — targeting platform Demandbase, CRM and marketing platform Salesforce, account engagement platform YesPath, conversational platform Conversica, and B2B predictive marketer CaliberMind, among a growing list of others. To get some insight into what this means for businesses... [...]

Sean Zinsmeister says, “Most marketing (and sales) teams have seemingly simple goals: identify your best customers, target prospects who look like them, facilitate a positive buying experience, and bring these prospects into your customer community. The challenge with this is that companies are faced with an onslaught of data, making it impossible to economically throw humans at each of the aforementioned objectives. Much business learning and many routine tasks can be done faster and better with automation and AI. People simply will never be able to sift through all that data at the same... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Pega is today joining the growing number of companies that are setting up conversational bot interfaces for their products. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm offers a customer relationship management system and an application development platform, which together can be utilized by client companies to readily construct customer-facing applications for customer management, business process management, case management and other purposes. It is today announcing Intelligent Virtual Assistants, which are AI-powered conversational bot interfaces that clients can use for... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Last year, testing service Optimizely said it was going beyond A/B as it launched Optimizely X, which it described as the “world’s first experimentation platform.” Today, the San Francisco-based company is reinforcing that identity by announcing it has purchased Experiment Engine, founded in 2014 and based in Austin, Texas. It provides a platform for conducting A/B tests to increase sales. Deal terms were not made public. Optimizely said that the acquisition will allow it to offer better capabilities for managing optimization experiments, with tools for project... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Influencer marketing — where bloggers, YouTube celebrities and others are paid to wax enthusiastic about a new shampoo or whatever — is a Wild West with rapidly moving boundaries. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) acts as a tough sheriff trying to cover millions of acres of territory with few helpers, as it orders sponsors here and there to cease and desist when influencers in those sponsors’ campaigns post an endorsement that doesn’t adequately identify itself as sponsored. Recent examples include Lord & Taylor and Warner Brothers, both last... [...]

Barry Levine says, “While IBM’s Watson supercomputing service is named after former IBM chairman and CEO Thomas Watson, the name also recalls another famous Watson. “Mr. Watson, come here,” Alexander Graham Bell reportedly yelled into the mouthpiece of the first working telephone in 1876, summoning his assistant and marking the first call ever. So, it’s completely appropriate that IBM’s Watson — representing the transmitted availability of supercomputing to anywhere on the planet — bears a name that has played a central role in the emergence of both computing and telecommunications. But... [...]

John Steinert says, “Whether you’re a CMO who’s trying to figure out how to make substantive progress in the marketplace (the kind you can point to and say, “We’re really making a difference!”), or an experienced demand-gen pro who’s finding it harder and harder to achieve significant lift for your programs, I want to share something with you: No matter how well you do content marketing, no matter how fantastic your inbound funnel seems to be working, you may be winning those battles, but you’re losing the war. There are several obvious reasons why this could be the case. And... [...]

Seth Price says, “Every day, billions of pieces of content are published like clockwork on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Yet the clock has stopped for most marketers when it comes to creating content that breaks through the noise. Despite what some have coined as “content shock,” 77 percent of B2C content marketers expect their organization to produce more content in 2017 than it did in 2016. But scaling content marketing is not only expensive, it’s often mystifying. Most efforts tend to be campaign-based, copycat initiatives; and what’s equally surprising... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google’s A/B testing and content personalization solutions, Optimize and Optimize 360, are both out of beta. The free version, Google Optimize, is available in 180 countries. Optimize debuted in beta last fall, several months after Google introduced Optimize 360 last spring as part of the new a la carte Google Analytics 360 Suite. Optimize is designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It ties in with Google Analytics, and that data is used to inform website tests. A visual editor lets users drag and page drop elements and it’s also possible to edit raw HTML... [...]

Mary Wallace says, “Marketing automation is on the rise. The reason? Marketing automation vendors are promising accelerated revenue and improved ROI (return on investment). How will it do this? With lead nurture campaigns that provide specific content aligned to the buyer’s needs and lead scoring models that deliver warmed leads to the sales team. Yet a majority of marketing organizations are not using their highly sophisticated marketing automation tools to their full potential. It’s mortifying to the marketers in the trenches trying to do what’s right. Worse, it’s beyond frustrating... [...]