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Misconceptions about AI for Barbour ABI and Glenigan

Misconceptions about AI for Barbour ABI and Glenigan

Here are some of the common responses when you suggest using AI to scale marketing for a construction or building product company.

“We aren’t ready for that”, “that won’t work for us”, or “I don’t like the idea of “bots” spamming our prospects”.

These are all valid perspectives. But the conversation needs to be had. And realistically it’s not a question of “if” it’s had, but when. Will AI marketing solutions be adopted sooner or later? Will they be adopted as an initiative to pioneer new ground? Or as a response to lost market share?

Let’s clear up some misconceptions around AI-enabled marketing for Barbour ABI and Glenigan subscribers so that this conversation can happen sooner rather than later. The biggest misconceptions are that AI is supposed to replace human involvement and that it will necessarily sound more like a bot than a human. 

1. AI = AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE

AI is not here to take over. It can’t replace most human roles (approximately only 5% of all jobs could be fully “botsourced”, according to McKinsey). But it can augment your teams energy and efforts to provide greater scalability and capacity.

Imagine your sales and marketing team could reach more relevant prospects, and do a better job following them up, all through some straightforward AI applications. This would allow your humans to be more human, while machines do the heavy lifting.

On top of this, AI can do things that humans just can’t. And it’s not that humans aren’t “smart” enough. It’s just that humans don’t have the time to consistently contribute the attention to detail that AI can, evaluate the same quantity of information, or do as much repetitive work.

This is very relevant when it comes to large construction project databases like Barbour ABI and Glenigan. These are the environments where AI shines. There is so much information in these databases that only a robot can really make the most of this. This is the reason behind Project Prospecta.

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By freeing up time for your team, you give them more time to engage with prospects  and do things they generally find more meaningful.  

2. AI doesn’t mean spam

There are a few things that would flag outreach as spam.

  • poor timing
  • generic wording

Both of these concerns can be addressed by the humans using the AI platforms.

Timing

AI can initiate outreach every few days, avoid weekends, and delay communication based on previous engagement. Of course, any contacts who want to opt-out must be allowed to do so in alignment with GDPR regulations. So, setting up bots to respect prospects need for space is only dependant on having respectful humans setting them up.

Tone

If the AI messaging is too generic, it’s because the writers aren’t thinking specifically enough, or utilizing personalization features.

Human creativity is required to bring AI to life. Microsoft’s AI assistant Cortana was created by a team including a playwright, poet, and novelist, to make sure it had the right tone. Confident, but not arrogant. The same is required for emails, smart content, or chat bots in your organization. Again, giving marketing AI an appropriate personality is dependent on the creative team behind it.

Another important element to make AI messaging more personal is personalization. This can be simple things, like using your prospects first name in an email subject line. But it can also mean choosing a different message for a prospect based on previous website interactions and content engagement. Studies show personalized content is dramatically more effective than non-personalized content.

Conclusion

The future is not a spamfest. AI marketing doesn't mean being bludgeoned by huge amounts of impersonal messages. It means relevant, timely, personal messages, delivered at times and locations that are convenient for the customer. That’s what AI really makes possible.

It allows employees to engage with things they generally find more meaningful, like building relationships with prospects or clients, and doing creative work like coming up with new campaigns. 

And it allows companies to get a better ROI on large databases like Barbour ABI and Glenigan by utilizing the vast amounts of data for more extensive and more targeted marketing strategies, carried out by human-guided AI tools.

For Barbour ABI subscribers, Project Prospecta is just that. A powerful tool to carry out large-scale, personalized marketing and lead scoring campaigns. This can transform a huge pool of prospects into a short list of warm leads who already know a good bit about you and your product, so you can sell to people who want to hear from you.

Interested? Book a demo. 

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