When Dante Alighieri finished The Divine Comedy in 1321, I doubt he dreamed it would ever inspire awe in something uniquely modern like 21st century B2B marketing.
And yet, here we are, 700 years later, on the edge of the precipice of a demand generation hell, and the analogy is all too apt.
In “Personalization, demand generation and AI: the conversion trio or the nine levels of Dante’s hell? » Kenda Macdonald, founder of Automation Ninjas and author of the best-selling Hack the buyer’s brain, explains the marketing crimes we often unintentionally commit and how AI can help us escape the fiery depths.
Take the first circle, Limbo. Your sin here is a lack of direction and strategy.
“When you break it down, it looks like one-off campaigns, where we just create a campaign and put it out there. It’s not part of a larger customer journey,” says Kenda.
“We also have things like no clear target audience. You’re marketing to everyone and therefore you’re effectively marketing to no one.”
You may not have a clear content strategy at this level and may be suffering from what Kenda calls “haphazard content acts”: producing one-off assets without a larger plan. Or, worse yet, you may lack performance metrics or even know what KPIs to aim for, let alone how you stack up against those goals.
Regardless of why you find yourself in demand generation limbo, you need clear business goals to get you out of the mess.
What is the place of AI? Tools like predictive analytics models can help you formulate better data-driven strategies by giving you insight into customer behavior, market conditions, and the overall competitive landscape, and helping you predict trends future.
Specialized AI tools can also help with scenario planning and customer journey mapping. Kenda explains that in this brief excerpt from her presentation, part of the AI for Demand Generation Marketers series:
Return to Hell: if you have managed to market gluttony to the third circle, you are guilty of overconsumption. Data accumulation. Analysis paralysis. Over-reliance on automation. Do all the things.
All of this leads to a lack of optimization because, in Kenda’s words, “you’re making decisions based on data that’s probably not appropriate, and you’re also losing sight of the bigger picture.”
Looks familiar? I think we all land in Circle Three from time to time.
Here, aim for strategic direction, simplicity and feasibility. This means using AI to streamline your marketing tools and do something with all this data.
AI-driven demand forecasting can identify trends in all your data, so you can determine, “Do I need this tool?” Do I need this thing? And should I run this campaign? »
Kenda also suggests looking at resource optimization models, which “look at marketing resources that you use and your human capital”, and help you avoid “overwhelming people with data and campaigns”. (This includes your staff.)
Kenda says of AI, in general, “it’s a fantastic stepping stone” for you to continue working toward your north stars and climb out of the fiery depths. “That’s where I see AI: it provides the impetus. It’s the basis from which to plan and execute.”
Final Thoughts: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are great places to start, especially if you’re looking for cheap, early wins for basic use cases. But with more than 10,000 martech tools on the market, many of which rely on AI, there are plenty of specialized tools that will take you much further. And AI capabilities are likely now integrated into tools in your existing tech stack that you’re not yet using.
Determine your use case and do the research.
Discover Kenda’s AI for Demand Generation Marketers presentation to dig deeper, learn about the other seven levels of marketing hell and how AI can help you.
