The ability to identify buyers engaging with your brand or with a topic relevant to your solutions is high on every marketer’s wish list. The more you know about B2B buyers, the more you can strategically target your selling and go-to-market activities to them. 

There’s no question that marketing and sales teams need visibility into a prospects’ entire customer journey. But where do you start?  Buyers access the internet from multiple devices multiple times and scatter data everywhere. Every activity on the web leaves behind a snapshot of the user. 

AI finds actionable patterns in all the data. The patterns have been there all along. We just haven’t been able to see them. AI helps build audiences, target them with relevance, select the right platform to reach them, and create personalized content, including chatbots, that improve website interactions, all by analyzing patterns created by a wealth of digital footprints.

Breakthrough Analytics for AI-driven Demand Generation

Many marketers now depend on an AI-driven demand generation engine to monitor and analyze B2B buyers’ online research activity and find spikes of interest in 7,000 relevant business topics. This “Relevance Engine” analyzes millions of data points each day from the global web. Proprietary intent analytics use algorithms to find businesses and locations showing spiking interest in topics. Only artificial intelligence has the heft to organize activity of web searches, articles read, content downloads around relevant topics at this scale. 

The breakthrough analytics look at web search behaviors and page content to identify relevant intent data. Regression analysis helps understand various relationships between the data sets. The level of premium data needed for AI-driven B2B marketing is found through regression analysis using multiple independent variables. Feeding AI just one type of data won’t be satisfying. One-dimensional or single variable data is as unsuited for quality AI analysis as “dirty” or inaccurate data. 

Multivariate vs Single Variable Analysis: Which Brings More Depth?

How does an intelligence engine source data for analysis? This is an area where options for B2B marketers will differ. Not all intent vendors source data in the same way. For example, part of having “rich” premium data means drawing on multiple sources and variables, not just a single one. A multivariate analysis results in a dataset with more depth than a linear, single-variant stuck at the IP level.

Yet in the intent data industry, not all follow this practice. Single variant analysis is too often pushed out to marketers, in place of the depth of a multivariate engine. This is one reason B2B marketers need at least a basic knowledge of AI and data. Know enough to ask good questions. Evaluate the uniqueness and quality of a provider’s data and how they might use AI to drive quality. Check the database management best practices of any data partners you may want to work with.

Limitations of Statistical Averaging: AI Can’t Live on Coconuts Alone

A multivariate approach to intent intelligence offers a deeper level of insight into audience behavior than the simple averaging used by some intent monitoring solutions. Statistical averaging comes up with flat views. Just averaging things out is not really a reflection of intelligence. It doesn’t get as deep into what’s happening, and doesn’t look at a problem from enough angles. 

To create true intelligence, marketers need multivariate inputs. Think about it this way. If you’re stuck on an island and only eat coconuts, it’s all you have to go on in how you understand food. It’s the only type of input your intelligence has to work with. 

Same with sourcing data. With some data providers, there’s only one variant, which is company identity. It’s just not enough. The benchmark in intent and AI-driven marketing is a multivariate engine. The Relevance Engine looks at many “foods” to test and measure, and the intelligent database figures out how to put the variables together for a tasty result. 

What will you cook up with artificial intelligence and B2B marketing? Get some ideas at the Anteriad Summit: Accelerating Revenue with AI. Register for a couple of hours of free, virtual learning on April 14.