Do Marketers Need ChatGPT Now? A Leading Expert Guides Us Through 2023's Biggest Martech Trends

B2B marketing expert Pam Didner discusses emerging tech for marketers and how small businesses can navigate the impact of these tools.

Amid the backdrop of a possible recession and massive layoffs across industries, a new AI tool threatens to disrupt the way B2B content marketers operate. And customer privacy, always a hot button among B2B marketers, is going to take center stage next year when Google eliminates third-party cookie technology. 

We sat down with Pam Didner, B2B marketing expert, prolific author, podcaster, and speaker to ask how these trends will impact B2B marketers and for her advice on how marketing professionals can address these two big trends and other disruptive changes on the B2B martech horizon. 

“A lot is happening, and nothing marketers are trying to do is easy,” says Didner. She is president of Portland-based consulting firm Relentless Pursuit, where she trains, coaches, and provides strategic guidance on sales enablement, account-based marketing, and sales and marketing integration.

AI is in its infancy—but already garnering enormous marketing mindshare 

Didner says that the first trend B2B marketers must pay attention to is the growing presence of artificial intelligence (AI). Although already being used with great success in recommendation engines for retail websites, new AI software algorithms and advances are making everyone from CMOs down through content strategists take notice. 

Currently in the spotlight is ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. ChatGPT interacts with humans in a dialogue format that is capable of creating articles, blogs, white papers, and more—in short, the type of content being generated for B2B marketing campaigns around the world every day.

“I asked ChatGPT, ‘How do you calculate marketing ROI?’, and it actually gave me a textbook response. It wasn’t bad, not bad at all,” she admits.

B2B marketers are understandably salivating at the thought of all the cheap, tireless labor that can be provided by these AI software robots, aka bots.

But not so fast. Many AI writing assistant tools already on the market can help you create content, Didner points out. She doesn’t have a sense that this latest is that much of an advance. The real question is: Can you eliminate humans from the content-creating loop with these bots?

Didner says the answer is a resounding no.

“These robots don’t have human insight. They don’t know what you know about customers, about sales, about the inner workings of a particular channel. They don’t have that human knowledge. You do.”

Pam Didner

B2B martech consultant, author, and podcaster

Didner thinks that businesses hoping to replace their current human marketing content creators with bots are being unrealistic and that humans are the ultimate expert. “Treat what the robots produce as a first draft,” she advises. 

“Then, let humans really make it pop for your customers, to emotionally attract the people you want to talk to.”

Cookies, customer data, and privacy will be top of mind in 2023

In other recent news for B2B marketers, Google announced that by 2024^[1] it is going to eliminate cookies from its technology stack. “We’re going to live in a cookieless world. And in such a world, how can we gather customer information?” asks Didner.

She says that B2B marketers are deeply engaged in conversations about the differences between zero-party data (e.g., data that a customer voluntarily shares with a business through a form or survey), first-party data (e.g., data gathered when a customer directly interacts with your website), and second-party data (e.g., data that comes from another source altogether). 

Although using any zero- or first-party data you gain from your marketing activities and website visitors will still be within bounds, losing cookies will still cause marketers to scramble to replace what they used to collect through second-party data.

3 tips for navigating these new martech tools 

Whether your curiosity has been piqued by AI or you’re concerned about your ability to keep collecting customer data for your campaigns, Didner has some advice that can help.

1. Understand that technology is not a strategy

"All too often, we hear marketers say, 'Oh, I need that technology!', myself included sometimes," she admits. “We treat the technology as a strategy when it's really a means to something else.”

When you are thinking of investing in martech, you still need to have a strategy, and an objective. 

“A lot of people will agree with that statement, but sometimes when you are deeply in the trenches, you forget. So that's something you must remind yourself of, over and over again," Didner says.

2. Establish clear objectives and success metrics

We know by now that it's not enough for marketing to say: "We got so many leads, we had so many clicks, we've had so much engagement.” Didner stresses that B2B marketers need to be able to show how they are affecting the sales pipeline and directly contributing to revenue. 

"What are the main KPIs (key performance indicators) that measure the success of marketing?",  she asks. “I can tell you: it's not the number of content downloads. It's not website traffic. It’s not the number of likes or the clickthrough rate of your paid media efforts.”

What B2B marketers need to do is go all the way down the funnel: from interest, awareness, and consideration to actual purchases. “Are your leads being turned into opportunities, and then into closed sales? Or somehow just being kicked back to the marketing database?” she asks.

This is the only KPI that really counts. “You must measure the effectiveness of marketing at the sales level,” says Didner.

3. Make back-end integration your job

Didner’s final piece of advice is to pay close attention to the back-end integration of your entire martech stack: 

“It takes a lot of time, but you cannot ignore integration. And you cannot say, ‘That's IT's job, or that's ops’ job, or someone else's job.’ I hate saying this, but as marketers, it is our job. Period.”