How to Use AI in B2B Inbound Marketing

And What to Avoid

This post will provide some “Dos and don’ts” for using AI in B2B inbound marketing. Specifically, we will discuss how AI-based functions like Search Generative Experience need to be considered in your strategy and your content plans.

In Summary, You Need to:

• Get to know what generative AI tools are good for
• Experiment
• Use them for synthesizing large amounts of information and creating outlines
• Be very careful or avoid using them for writing
• Use them for fact-checking
• Be mindful of the impact that an overreliance on AI can have on your SEO
• Diversify channels as SEO may decline regardless of your best efforts

Q. Why is B2B Inbound Marketing Important

While we are evangelists about the power of ABM, B2B Inbound Marketing has been the foundation of how we have built Health Launchpad. It’s helped drive a 10X increase in traffic and has contributed to half our new business.

We have developed our own approach to B2B Inbound Marketing. We call it 4-Corner Inbound. You can read more about it here. The short story is that 4-Corner Inbound is:

1. Content: This is the foundation of everything we do. We take a customer-driven approach to creating rock-solid content strategies and have a team of rockstar healthcare content creators.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): In B2B marketing, everyone knows that SEO is important, but very few companies do it well. In our experience, this is not a lack of knowledge or resources but a lack of tenacity. SEO is all about being intentional and sticking at it.
3. Social Media: You can’t be on LinkedIn and not see our stuff. That’s not an accident. It’s how we amplify our message, build authority and nurture new relationships. We can also show you how to turn your social network into a proprietary business-building network.
4. Partnerships: The fourth corner is marketing partnerships. For example, we have created educational programs with several leading organizations that have helped extend our reach and benefited our partners through the content we created.

Over the last eighteen months, we have been very excited about AI’s potential to turbocharge our B2B Inbound Marketing activities. For example, it helps synthesize multiple large articles, long interviews, and research reports to provide ideas and outlines for blogs and social media articles.

However, as we discuss below, there is a downside to AI, and we have been learning about it firsthand.

Q. How Can I Use AI Tools for Content Creation

We have extensively written about using AI for content creation. In summary, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and Perplexity.ai are helpful for conducting research, but they really shine when synthesizing large amounts of written data.

For example, I use this to help create content from podcasts and webinars. I usually use Descript to create a transcript and then feed the transcript into Claude.ai to help me create content.  I have been told that Jasper.ai is a good alternative.

My first step is to ask Claude to identify 8-10 topics covered in the recording. I then ask it to create a selection of subjects for the article and write an outline.

Until recently, I then asked it to create a draft of the article. The output using Claude has been impressive. While I edit it significantly, I have found that I edit it less.

I have trained Claude.ai on my writing style, and it seems to have improved over time by learning through reinforcement. Either that or I have been getting more comfortable using it and so have become more relaxed about the output.

Regardless, I stopped doing this last step. Why?

It’s all about SEO.

Q. Does using AI In Content Creation Affect Your SEO?

According to our SEO expert, Karen Finn,PhD, it may be affecting our SEO. I wrote extensively about this issue in this post.

In the last six months, unique visitor growth has flattened and may be starting to decline. The root cause is that our non-branded search is declining.

And there is a growing school of thought that using AI to help write content hurts your search rankings. There is no definitive answer to this but according to, Karen Finn, PhD:

“I’ve got a few clients who are working, to get more content out more quickly using generative AI. And they’ve been doing that for a few months and every single one of them has seen a drop in their SEO.”

So, I have changed how I create content. I am hoping that my new approach will work and I will see renewed growth in non-branded search-driven traffic.

My new Approach?

This is something my AI guru, Casey Meehan taught me. He uses a new principle called IPO – Input>Process>Output:

• Input – This means using AI to conduct research and organize large amounts of data. For example, if you are writing an article based on many sources of data, you might use Perplexity to conduct additional research and NotebookLM from Google to organize your data. This new tool is amazing; you can use it to synthesize the data and create reports.
• Process – Once you have your data organized, I recommend using Claude.ai to organize your article. I use a series of prompts to create an outline. For example, (this one’s for you and the team Katy Dowd!)

“I am writing an article on the impact of AI on improving the health of populations disenfranchised by the health care system. The attached data is a synthesis of my research. Please create an outline for an article that is a best practice guide. The article will be about 3000 words long with citations. End the article with a list of recommended actions.”

• Output – At this point, you can use Claude or Jasper to write a first draft. My hypothesis is that this is what is causing my SEO problem. So recently, I have been writing the article from scratch using the outline as a guide. By the way, I still use Grammarly to check my grammar and spelling. I am hoping that’s OK with Google. Note: If we are creating research reports, for example, a report on 15 customer interviews, we may still use Claude to create the first draft.

I will keep you posted on how this goes.

Q. How Do I Optimize Content for Search Generated Experience (SGE)?

One of the biggest changes in inbound marketing in the last two years has been the rise of Search-Generated Experiences, which Google calls AI Overviews.

This is an experiment by Google to use generative AI in answering search queries in response to a growing shift in consumer behavior to use Generative AI tools like Open AI and Claude. Gartner believes that AI will cause a 25% decline in search engine usage by 2026.

Google is deploying it at scale. AI Overviews: Google’s AI-generated response to your queries appears just below the Sponsored links. We covered this in an article earlier this year. The bad thing about SGE is that it takes half the real estate on the first page of search results. Moreover, it can expand the SGE result to get a deeper AI-generated result. This takes up the second page.

As we covered in depth in a recent blog post, if you rank in the top three for a search term, your appearance in a search result may be pushed down from the first to the second or even third page.

There is not much you can do about this directly, however, there a few things you can to get yourself featured in the SGE result.  For example:

• Structure content in Q&A format —As you can see, I am writing this post in Q&A format. I am doing this because I was advised that Generative AI tools are more likely to pick this article up as the answer to a question posed via a tool like ChatGPT.
• Implement passage-based optimization —This is an AI system Google uses to identify individual sections or “passages” of a web page to understand better how relevant a page is to a search. So, as you develop your B2B Inbound Marketing Content Plan, base it on questions that you believe your buyers will have. Think hard about how they will ask the questions and ensure that your posts have clear answers prominently included. This is what I am trying to do with the Summary section at the top of the article.
• Focus on relevance and factual accuracy– This is clearly important regardless of AI but it will become even more important as the firms behind generative AI tools make them more trustworthy and less prone to hallucinations. Tools like Perplexity are increasingly being used for research so citations become more important

Q. How Much Should I Be Using AI in B2B Inbound Marketing

The short story is BE CAREFUL.

We strongly recommend that you avoid an over-reliance on AI. As described above, the impact on SEO is uncertain. AI is evolving faster than mere mortals like me can get their heads around it. You should take a lesson from me and be careful you don’t undermine your previous work.

Most importantly, you remove humanity from your writing by overusing AI. I am not an expert in English literature. I can’t eloquently describe why Hemingway is a great writer, but I know it when I read it.

It’s the same with overusing AI. When I re-read the posts, I realized I had heavily used AI to write them. They are solid, informative, and clear but boring.

They have no personality. They feel informative but not insightful. I am always impressed by how well AI tools can synthesize information and provide well-articulated explanations or instructions. However, I have never had an AHA moment by reading the output of anything AI-generated.

The other issue is that the efficiency of AI can make you sloppy.

Using AI has resulted in the creation of longer articles. This is risky as it makes it less likely you will catch factual errors. Ironically, this is one area in which AI can be helpful. If I am writing a long article full of facts, I might use a tool like Perplexity to fact-check what I have written,

Q. What Can I Do to Mitigate a Dependence on SEO?

Our B2B Inbound Marketing has been key to our growth. Seeing a small decline in traffic is not a disaster, but seeing that traffic growth has stalled is troubling.

I am doing several things about this.

The first is to stop using AI to draft articles. I will still use it for preparation and synthesis but not for writing content. I won’t know for a few months if this will have any impact.

Secondly, I am going to rely less on organic search and double down on diversifying channels. This will mean really raising my game on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has been an important part of our growth strategy, but there are always ways to improve our use of it.

I am also shifting the focus from growing the top of the funnel and attracting people who are unaware of Health Launchpad to fostering stronger relationships with people who have had some interaction with us, which is commonly known as focusing on conversion.

I will let you know how this works out.

Do You Need Help with AI and SEO or Anything Else?

1. 1. Check out more posts like this in the Health tech MarketingLearning Center. It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas to get you started on your Inbound marketing model and ABM journey.
   2. Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and health tech marketing.
   3. Buy Total Customer Growth: Our book on how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX.
   4. Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.