Tapping into the Power of AI to Drive Better B2B Event Marketing

Predictive Audiences, a new AI-powered audience segmentation and targeting capability within Marketo Engage, helps B2B marketers transform how they engage.

The opportunity to network with peers, customers, and others in the industry is one of the best parts of attending conferences and events. These moments of connection are critical for sales teams to connect and engage with their customers. With in-person conferences and events on pause, B2B marketers are even more dependent on webinars and virtual events to close the connection gap.

Content may be king, but audience segmentation is queen. Without making sure that the content will be compelling to those attending a virtual event, even excellent content could be wasted. Any combination of factors including bad data, recycled lists, and a lack of resources needed to create the right lists for each event could spell trouble for B2B marketers looking to generate quality leads, engage existing customers, or meet their conversion goals. Mass sends or gut instinct shouldn’t be the drivers of event invites. Decisions around audience segmentation should instead be rooted in data, which is where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. AI can help brands more efficiently automate marketing campaigns, scale personalization and uncover actionable insights before, during, and after events taking the guesswork out of creating impactful marketing campaigns.

Predictive Audiences, a new Marketo Engage capability, leverages Adobe Sensei (our AI and machine learning technology) to transform how marketers segment, target and engage audiences across channels, effectively identify the right prospects, and drive quality leads.

The combination of historical data and multiple dashboards often makes it difficult for marketing teams to distill learnings from previous campaigns into actionable insights for future events, especially when it comes to understanding if the content even reached the right audience. Predictive Audiences takes the guesswork out of identifying the right audiences for events.

Intelligent audience targeting

With Predictive Audiences, marketers can intelligently and quickly build highly targeted invite lists using AI-powered filters, replacing outdated broad sends or recycling of invite lists. The filters suggest the likelihood of potential event attendees to either register or attend an event based on the attendance of previous events. Marketers can further refine their invite lists to exclude audiences that are likely to unsubscribe from marketing messages, decreasing the chances of inundating prospects with messaging that leads them to opt-out. Predictive Audiences also uses AI to create look-alike audiences for email and event marketing campaigns to deliver more personalization that aligns with each buyer’s needs.

Once marketers have identified the right audiences, Predictive Audiences can also help marketers make changes to in-flight campaigns, replicate success, hit and exceed goals more frequently, and identify the most engaged audience members.

In-flight optimization

Marketers no longer have to wait until their campaign ends, or the event happens to know if they hit their goals. If it looks like a marketer will fall short of meeting campaign goals, Predictive Audiences can proactively recommend additional customers and prospects to engage in-flight based on past behaviors including webinar attendance, content downloads and more.

For example, a marketer hosting a webinar on marketing trends in 2020 has a goal of 150 attendees. If the campaign is not on track to meet attendance goals two weeks before the event, marketer can use Predictive Audiences to suggest additional contacts in the database to invite. These suggested customers and prospects may have interacted with similar content like a marketing trends white paper.

Predictive goal tracking

Predictive Audiences not only gives marketers the tools to engage buyers more effectively across touchpoints but also predicts whether marketers will hit their event goals. With predictive goal tracking, marketers can review predictions about how programs in progress will perform to help them hit and exceed business goals.

Positive results

Early adopters are already finding Predictive Audiences to be an essential part of their marketing stack.

Kimberly Galitz, marketing operations manager at Bandwidth explains how Predictive Audiences is already making an impact: “Since implementing Predictive Audiences, Bandwidth has been able to reduce the audience size for webinar invites significantly while still reaching our goals, minimizing audience fatigue and keeping audience members engaged for longer. I really do feel that the AI-powered features are amazing and really instrumental our success.”

With Predictive Audiences, AI is no longer an advanced capability that’s nice to have — it becomes a foundational marketing tool and a crucial part of delivering compelling event experiences that drive business impact.

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