AI in Marketing: The Baby Steps

Most companies know they should be using AI in marketing. Few know where to actually start. The honest reason isn't budget or tools — it's that the conversation around AI in marketing has become overwhelming.

You don't need to do everything. You need to do the right things in the right order.

Get Found by the Right People

Stop chasing everyone. Start attracting the ones who matter.

Before worrying about content volume or ad spend, ask one question: are the right people actually finding you? Most marketing teams spend enormous energy on visibility — and almost none on whether that visibility is reaching the right audience.

AI makes it possible to stop guessing and start knowing.

WHAT TO DO

→ Audit your current reach. Use AI-powered tools (like Brandwatch, SparkToro, or even a well-prompted ChatGPT with your analytics data) to understand who is actually engaging with your brand — and who isn't.

→ Identify where your real buyers spend time. AI can map the communities, platforms, and content types your specific audience segment engages with. This is far more valuable than broad demographic targeting.

→ Build content for discovery, not just volume. Instead of publishing more, publish with intent. Prompt AI to help you identify the questions your audience is asking that your competitors aren't answering.

The goal is targeted broadcasting — reaching many people, but the right many. AI helps you define who that is and where to find them.

YOUR FIRST ACTION

1. Pick one audience segment you want to reach better.
2. Ask an AI tool to research where that segment actively seeks information (forums, LinkedIn groups, newsletters, YouTube channels).
3. Create one piece of content specifically for that channel and segment — not repurposed from something else.

Make Every Interaction Reflect Value

Being seen is just the beginning. What happens next is what matters.

Once someone lands on your website, reads your content, or attends your webinar — what do they do next? For most organizations, the honest answer is: we don't really know. They either convert or they disappear, and we rarely understand why.

This is where AI becomes genuinely powerful — not in creating more content, but in helping you understand the gap between interest and action.

THE DISCOVERY CALL PROBLEM

Think about your last ten discovery calls. What objections came up? What language did prospects use to describe their own problem? What moment in the conversation made them lean in — or go quiet? This intelligence exists inside your team's heads and your call recordings. Almost no organization systematically mines it.

Tools like Gong, Fireflies, or Chorus transcribe and analyse every sales conversation. But the magic is feeding those insights back into marketing: updating your messaging to address real objections, building content that answers the questions prospects actually ask, and identifying what's missing in the journey from 'interested' to 'committed.'

If a prospect had a positive discovery call and then went silent, AI can tell you what was missing. That's not a sales problem — it's a marketing gap.

WHAT TO DO

→ Start logging patterns from discovery calls. Even manually at first — what objections come up most? What makes people excited? This becomes AI-training material later.

→ Review your existing content against real buyer questions. Ask AI to compare your current messaging to the actual language your prospects use. The gaps are almost always surprising.

→ Improve one CTA. Most CTAs are generic. Pick your most-visited page and ask AI to suggest three CTAs that would genuinely move someone forward based on where they are in the buying journey.

YOUR FIRST ACTION

1. Pull 5 recent discovery call recordings or notes.
2. Ask AI to identify the top 3 objections and the top 3 moments of genuine interest.
3. Update one piece of marketing content to directly address those objections.

Personalize at Scale — Including the C-Suite

The right message for the right person — without a team of ten.

Personalization has become a buzzword, but most companies are still doing it superficially — swapping a first name in an email and calling it done. Buyers have seen through this for years. What actually moves people is when your communication reflects their specific situation, industry, challenge, or goal.

AI makes genuine personalization achievable for teams that don't have the resources for account-by-account manual research.

PERSONALISING FOR THE DECISION-MAKER — THE CXO

Here's a reality most B2B marketers underinvest in: the economic buyer — the CEO, CFO, or board-level sponsor — can stall or kill a deal that your champion has spent months building. And yet most marketing content is aimed at practitioners, not decision-makers.

AI changes what's possible here. You can research a specific CXO's public priorities — their LinkedIn posts, company earnings calls, industry keynotes, press statements — and build outreach or content that speaks directly to what they're being measured on. Not features. Not capabilities. Board-level outcomes: risk reduction, competitive advantage, revenue growth, operational efficiency.

When the CXO already respects your brand before the deal reaches their desk, your sales cycle moves faster — and with far more authority.

WHAT TO DO

→ Segment your content by role, not just industry. A CFO and a Marketing Manager at the same company need completely different messages. AI can help you create both without doubling your workload.

→ Research target executives before outreach. Use AI to deep-search a CXO's public statements and map them to the business outcomes your product delivers. Build your outreach around their language, not yours.

→ Build an executive nurture track. Invite CXOs to invitation-only roundtables, send them short-form thought leadership in the publications they read, brief your sales team on what the CFO will care about before every meeting.

YOUR FIRST ACTION

1. Identify 3 target accounts where the deal is currently stuck at the practitioner level.
2. Use AI to research the economic buyer at each account — their stated priorities, recent public statements, industry focus.
3. Write one personalized executive briefing (one page) for each. Not a pitch — a perspective on their business challenge.

Build the Loop — Marketing That Never Stops

From post-sale to pipeline. From data to decisions.

Marketing doesn't end at the sale. It shouldn't even slow down after the sale. Your existing customers are your most efficient source of new pipeline — through referrals, case studies, expansion revenue, and word of mouth. AI lets you stay present in that relationship at scale, without proportional headcount.

And as you build this loop, AI becomes your analytics engine — not just reporting what happened, but predicting what's likely to happen next and suggesting what to do about it.

POST-SALE MARKETING WITH AI

→ Customer health monitoring. AI tracks usage, support tickets, and engagement to flag at-risk customers before they start looking elsewhere. Marketing can then trigger re-engagement campaigns proactively.

→ Expansion signals. When a customer's usage patterns suggest they're ready for more, AI can identify the right moment and the right offer — rather than waiting for the renewal conversation.

→ Always-on case study generation. Instead of scrambling for a case study when sales needs one, AI can continuously surface success moments from customer data and draft the story for human review.

AI AS YOUR ANALYTICS PARTNER

Predictive analytics used to require a data science team. Now, AI tools built into most modern CRMs and marketing platforms can tell you which leads are most likely to close, which campaigns are underperforming before you've wasted the budget, and which content is moving buyers forward versus stalling them.

The shift is from 'here's what happened last month' to 'here's what's likely to happen next, and here's what you should do about it.'

Marketing that creates a continuous loop — attract, engage, convert, retain, and learn — compounds over time. AI is what makes the learning fast enough to act on.

Start Where You Are. Move Forward.

You don't need to implement all stages at once. In fact, trying to do so is exactly how AI initiatives stall inside organizations — too much ambition, too little focus, no quick wins.

Pick the stage that reflects your current reality. Get one win in that stage. Then move to the next. That's how marketing transformation actually happens — not in a single overhaul, but in compounding steps.

AI isn't going to replace your marketing judgement. It's going to give you more time to use it — and more data to make it sharper. The marketers who treat it as a daily working partner, not a one-off experiment, are the ones who will build something genuinely hard to compete with.

Marketing begins at conception and never truly ends. AI is the first tool powerful enough to be present for all of it.

By:

Chandra Shekhar Joshi