I finally got around to writing down my key takeaways from #MAICON23. It was a really good conference, and the LLM advancements were remarkable (compared to last year). I learned a lot from the sessions and networking with colleagues who are doing some interesting things in AI, ML and predictive analytics. I am looking forward to testing some of the new tools and deploying several new ideas that I gained from the conference. Here are my key takeaways:

1. AI will NOT replace Thinking and Creativity (for most jobs). Humans are needed for creativity, subject matter expertise, decision-making, and judgement.
2. AI tools have passed an inflection point, are now affordable, and get better EVERYDAY. Today’s AI tools are the least capable that you will ever see or use. Ready for prime time applications are: content generation (text, video, and code); information extraction; summarization; rewriting; classification; and answering questions.
3. Forward thinking leaders are implementing AI, transforming their companies, and seeing exponential returns and productivity gains – RIGHT NOW.
4. LLM have real bias, IP, data security, and privacy issues. AI developers are NOT protected like social media companies under Section 230.
5. The Enterprise choice: proprietary (Open AI/Chat GPT, Google/BARD) vs. open source (Meta/LLaMa 2). Some enterprises may adopt a hybrid model. New security policies, procedures, and controls will have to be developed.
6. Equality of Opportunity (focuses on individual merits) vs Equality of Outcomes (aims for everyone to reach the same result, regardless of starting conditions). Governments and economic blocs will determine AI usage, regulations and implementations. AI benefits will NOT be evenly distributed.
7. AI deployment at enterprises is at minimum a 2-step process: (1) AI incubation team (or AI council); and (2) AI implementation team. Also, quick “wins” where results can be seen in a relatively short time frame should be the starting point. 
8. LLM will be foundational in business like CRM software.  
9. No ONE knows where AI development is going. It is not like the physics that defined Moore’s law and was predictable with the doubling of compute power every 18 – 24 months.
10. AI – just because we can do something, does that mean we should do something? – see the comment from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.
11. Native English speakers and developed countries have the early AI advantage.
12. AI makes mathematical decisions not emotional decisions.
13. AI/LLM will require A LOT of compute power.
14. AI will require fewer writers to produce more content that will call for more editors.
15. GPT-4 is a reasoning engine – compare concepts, make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in code. Trained on humanity’s concepts and thoughts.
16. No ONE knows where AI development is going. It is not like the physics that defined Moore’s laws and was predictable with the doubling of compute power every 18 – 24 months. The Open AI creators didn’t even know that GPT-2 could translate languages, or that GPT-4 could be 10x more powerful than GPT-3.
17. LLM are best suited for automating high-volume repetitive tasks. This will result in an explosion of entrepreneurship.

Recently, I looked at the Martech landscape map from Chiefmartech.com. It is an eyechart with over 8,000 companies now listed. It seems that I get emails from all of them pitching their new products or new features. As a marketing services agency leader, I must keep up with the new trends and quite frankly it is overwhelming even for me. I am not surprised when clients are confused and start telling me what they have in their Martech stack or that they have just implemented the newest, latest, and greatest Martech solution but are not seeing the results that they had hoped for.

I always start my discussions with prospective clients with what is your customer acquisition strategy. Why? Because once you have your customer acquisition strategy and goals, then you can work backwards to determine how many leads you need to generate. Without having a clear customer acquisition strategy with actual numbers in place, you are probably just wasting money buying MarTech tools and services.

Lead gen strategy is a subset of your overall customer acquisition strategy. B2B lead gen is difficult because most B2B buyers are bombarded with marketing messages, unsolicited emails and sales calls, and overwhelmed with options. They are professional, usually part of a group decision-making process, and have professional and in some cases personal credibility on the line when making purchasing decisions or recommendations. The higher the cost of service or good the more on the line for the buyer and his organization and thus the more involved the sales process for the vendor. How you solve the buyer’s problem and reduce both organizational and personal risk are important factors that many sellers don’t consider in their strategies and messaging.

When creating your lead generation strategy, you should also consider the following questions: (1) How many times will you connect with that lead? Studies show that it takes dozens of attempts and interactions with B2B buyers at every stage of the sales funnel to close a sale. (2) How persistent and patient is your company? (3) How will you follow up with leads that respond? (4) How can you be creative in connecting with leads without annoying them? You will have to provide timely, relevant, and company-specific information to keep leads engaged and moving forward. What processes and technology do you have or plan to put in place to convert leads into prospects in a cost-effective and efficient manner? These are all questions to which you should have answers when determining your lead gen strategy. Below is a sample LG nurturing schedule.

Example Lead Gen Nurturing Cycle

A few points about the LG nurturing schedule. It is industry and company specific. Companies: (1) vary the cycles; and (2) implement between 3 to 6 cycles, varying the message and being more lead specific. In general, making phone calls is best suited for more complex, high value, longer sale-cycle products and services. Calling is probably not the best use of your sales rep’s time for lower-value, simple products and services.

Additional call attempts during weeks 2, 6, 7, 11, and 12 should be made at different times of the day including break and lunch times. The above cycle is a 3-week On, 2-week Off cycle. You should create your own lead gen nurturing schedules and measure your results to determine what works best for your specific industry. In later blog posts I will define qualified leads and how to find and nurture leads using current best practices.

Most current B2B lead generation (LG) focuses on quantity versus quality. In addition, the process of defining, generating, working and tracking leads is a lot more complex than most people think because there are a lot of moving parts and interactions between people that are missed and/or misunderstood.

LG is and continues to be a marketing department driven function. Once leads become qualified prospects, marketing hands them off to sales to close. Marketers claim that sales does not follow up on leads and sales claims that marketing gives them unqualified leads.

Figure 1- Source American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP)

Fundamentally, the qualified versus unqualified lead argument is the main problem with traditional lead generation programs but there are other problems as well as highlighted in the table below.

Best-in-class lead generation processes do resolve many of these issues by addressing most of the above-mentioned problems. Specifically addressed are: (1) Targeting; (2) Qualified lead definition; and (3) Marketing qualifying leads (MQL) before handing over to sales. Solving these problems combined with C-Level management putting in place the resources and structure to solve the long-term lead problem can triple the number of leads that convert to successful sales. Advanced lead-generation programs (which include nurturing) produce an average 15% lead rate—a whopping three times higher.

Below is a table that highlights the key differences between Best-in-class LG and traditional LG methods.

Note that neither best-in-class nor standard lead generation methods adequately address problems relating to B2B prospects conducting increasing amounts of time online for solution & vendor research and lead relevancy. In future blog posts, I will address these problems when I discuss the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) has on lead generation.

To learn more about how to increase both the quality and quality of your marketing qualified B2B leads contact us at: www.enov8mobile.com.

Jeff makes the following statement “Now the journey is one of multiple rabbit holes to discovery. It means marketers need to have the tools and skills to interpret millions of pieces of data, apply technology at scale and invoke artificial intelligence to get it just right.” AI is built to handle these types of problems. However, until recently, only large organizations have had access to AI for marketing purposes. Now Salesforce, LinkedIn, and a host of startups offer AI powered cloud solutions or technology that do it yourself marketers can use at various stages of the sales funnel. Now marketers only need to find the time to learn the skills necessary to apply AI to their marketing programs or outsource.

Social media offers healthcare marketers the unique ability to listen and engage in the healthcare conversations of motivated consumers who are talking about their health or the health of their loved ones. These healthcare conversations are not possible with traditional media, are unique to social media and provide a goldmine of real-time information and direct engagement opportunities for marketers. Savvy marketers have taken notice and are increasingly using social media to take advantage of this newfound capability to build brand awareness, product interest, and grow sales.

Every day as millions of consumers seek answers and engage in healthcare conversations, they have increasingly turned to social media. These consumers seek: information, advice, relief from isolation, encouragement, and to share or learn from the experiences of others. Below are two real public social media healthcare conversations. These posts are representative of what consumers are saying publicly in real-time.

In the above example, consumers have joined a social media cancer community to discuss their experiences with cancer. This particular community is unbranded (not corporate branded or dedicated to a specific company and its products or services). As you can see the discussion is unfiltered and consumers are speaking and sharing freely about their experience with cancer. The community sponsor shares relevant cancer information for the community, creates engagement opportunities for members, and facilitates discussion and loyalty with comments and responses to posts.

The below example is from the same community and what is significant about this particular post is that the consumer was influenced by information that she found in the community that led her to ask her doctor about an alternative treatment. This is significant because it proves that these online communities have enough credibility with consumers to influence their offline behavior.

In summary, being able to access and listen to consumer social media healthcare conversations provides marketers with unique and valuable marketing opportunities. Healthcare marketers can target consumer social media healthcare conversations based on diagnosis, symptom, procedure, treatment, severity, emotion, time, day, perspective (e.g. patient, HCP, friend, relative), gender, age, or location. They can also study the actual language that consumers are using to discuss their healthcare which can greatly influence the wording and tone of their marketing messages – making them more noticeable, engaging and ultimately effective. Social media healthcare conversations are a valuable marketing tool for use by marketers looking to improve their overall marketing effectiveness.

Additional Information and Sources:
1. Making Sense of Social Media Conversations
2. Is Social Media the Future of Healthcare?

Astounding statistic if true, especially considering that an SMB can have a free website up and running in 15 minutes using services like Wix and Weebly.

The most common response we’ve heard from SMB owner’s about not having a website is “I don’t need one. I get customers from word of mouth.” Well if you have a very strong word of mouth marketing program that encourages and incentivizes your customers to mention your business all the time then you probably don’t need a website or for that matter any other form of marketing.

Today, search, social media and local services like Yelp have largely replaced word of mouth. Increasingly, the first action that people take in looking for a local service is to search on their smartphones, not ask someone. If you don’t have a website then you risk losing business to your competitors who do have websites. Not having a website in 2015 is no longer an excuse.

1.       Boost mobile ad performance with Click-to-Call.  Adding click-to-call is a must for mobile campaigns.  After all, consumers do use their smartphones to actually make calls.

2.       B2B marketing tips for 2015.  6 simple tips but the one tip that hit home for me was the following: Social Media Broadcasting Won’t Work Now. “Far too many companies use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media platforms for broadcasting their content, when they’re actually meant for engagement. You can’t achieve results just by sharing your product links and blog posts all the time. Instead, focus on building conversations and boosting engagement. Proactively reach out to your target audience. Listen to what people are saying about you or your competitors, or the products that you’re selling. Find out the problems that your target audience is facing. Social media is a great research tool if you make the right use of it. Engagement is the only way forward on social media. Without engagement, your followers will become a liability and hurt the visibility of your social media updates.”

3.       Here are 23 mobile stats for 2015 that should help convince even the most skeptical decision-makers to put more money into mobile media.

4.       Great article on how Mobile Network Operators use consumer location data to make billions.

5.       2015 Digital Trends Summary.  I wish I would have read this before reading about 20+ summaries.  Well at least you can take advantage of this meta-article on digital trends…