Manufacturers Adopt Automation and AI to Provide B-to-C Buying Experiences

Despite an uncertain economic landscape, and likely driven in part by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a new survey by inRiver shows that 87 percent of manufacturers are facing more competition now than they did a year ago. To meet an increasingly competitive landscape, 97 percent of B-to-B manufacturing businesses felt pressure to get products to market faster and increase conversions by providing B-to-B buyers with B-to-C buying experiences.

How? Many are seeking to adopt B-to-C strategies and their martech solutions.

Adoption of B2C techniques by manufacturers isn’t surprising — many consumers already expect retailers to use artificial intelligence and virtual reality in their buying experiences. After all, many of those same consumers are also B2B buyers. They’ve come to expect manufacturers to create unique, personalized, and differentiated online purchasing experiences, similar to when buying shoes, furniture, or luxury goods. To deliver that, it turns out 94 percent of manufacturers are already using automation and AI in their marketing.

Adoption of automation solutions helps B2B and B2C organizations alike increase their agility in adapting to evolving market conditions. In addition, automation can enable them to create product portfolios that offer central management systems and deliver single versions of product marketing data. Much like marketing automation in the early days, automating manual tasks like product enrichment and data syndication enable marketing teams to focus on strategic differentiators and processes, not time-consuming, error-prone tasks.

The result? New technologies and processes enable manufacturers to provide the consistent and complete product information their customers now demand. This is especially important as 70 percent of buyers feel comfortable making big purchases online (McKinsey). Building trust and confidence in a purchase requires localization, translation, image attribution, and more for each and every channel. Retailers have been leveraging marketing technologies to optimize their marketing and e-commerce channels for years and manufacturers are finally catching up, quickly.

For example, automation powerhouse Volvo uses AI and machine learning in their driverless cars, but localization is an area of importance that helps further personalize the experience. John Deere, another brand name that is credited for their innovative marketing, created a John Deere Labs in the SOMA district of San Francisco to entice top technology talent to help build out new innovations across AI.

While larger businesses are leading the way in adopting artificial intelligence and automation — the inRiver survey showed that 98 percent of businesses with over $250 million in revenue are already implementing both technologies. AI can help them increase both operational efficiency and conversion rates, two critical priorities for any business. Further, the survey respondents shared that they found product information technologies most helpful in achieving improved conversion rates, followed by easier comparison with competitors’ offerings (54 percent), reviews and visual user-generated content (53 percent), and 3D images and virtual reality (47 percent).

Sound familiar?

That’s because buyers already expect this of their B2C online shopping experiences. Adoption of these technologies is surprisingly high for manufacturers who, until recently, didn’t prioritize the buyer experience. However, technology is becoming the backbone that manufacturers, like retailers, depend on to deliver a buying experience that helps them remain competitive in an increasingly global marketplace. The two worlds are blending together. Good marketing and great experiences are what matter most to customers whether B2B or B2C.

Johan Bostrom is the co-founder and chief product officer of InRiver, a provider of SaaS product information management (PIM) solutions.