Gartner’s “Predicts 2024: How GenAI Will Reshape Tech Marketing” claims as GenAI (Generative AI) evolves, traditional search engine volumes are poised to undergo a remarkable shift. Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, underscores this paradigm shift, noting GenAI solutions are swiftly assuming the role of substitute answer engines, usurping user queries traditionally executed within conventional search engines.
As this trend gains momentum, businesses need to recalibrate their strategies through a lens of customer-centricity, acknowledging the omnipresence of GenAI across all facets of the enterprise, especially in AI in B2B marketing. The ripples caused by the increased usage of GenAI will affect website traffic, user intent, and other key measures.
Ravi Sen, Associate Professor, Management Information Systems, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, says, “as the quality of AI-generated answers improves, users will have less incentive to browse through search result listings.” This leads us to ask three questions:
What can your company start doing now to leverage GenAI?
What measures provide insights into the effectiveness of your efforts?
How can you use GenAI to improve customer-centricity?
To answer these questions, we must first understand how AI is changing the way people search.
Targeted Queries Unlock Invaluable Customer Data
People ask all kinds of questions. In the world of search these questions are known as queries. In addition to providing answers to questions, queries are also a valuable source of user data. Queries help us gain insight into user patterns and user intent, forming the foundation of customer insight analytics, which refers to the underlying motivation or goal behind a user’s search query, website visit, or online interaction.
It serves as a guiding principle for businesses seeking to tailor their content, products, and services to meet the specific needs and preferences of their customers.
Dirk Lewandowski’s book, “Understanding Search Engines” explores the different kinds of queries that reflect user intent. These are three query categories almost every business needs to understand.
- Informational queries: In this instance, people are searching for knowledge, answers, and instructions. For example, if you’re looking for a new CRM platform, you might seek information about important features to consider. Your query might be, “What are the essential functionalities a CRM system should offer?” or “Provide a comprehensive guide or checklist of key features to look for when evaluating CRM solutions.”
- Navigational queries: A navigational query indicates the user has a clear destination in mind. For example, a query to go to specific pages for an online demo of a specific platform and its features, functionality, and pricing.
- Transactional queries: Transactional queries indicate the user is ready to act, such as make a purchase, request a quote, subscribe, etc. In this example, a transactional query might be to schedule a proof-of-concept demo.
Each type of intent represents a different stage in the user’s journey and requires a tailored approach.
Customer-Centricity Can Soar With AI in B2B Marketing
GenAI represents a paradigm shift in how search engines understand and process user queries. Because GenAI leverages machine learning and natural language to understand the nuances of user queries, it can deliver highly relevant results. This capability makes GenAI well-suited to answer informational and transactional queries.
Familiar measures, such as search queries, website interactions, bounce rate, click-through rates, and call-to-action (CTA) conversion rates are key indicators of user intent. By analyzing these measures, you can gain a deeper understanding of user intent and strengthen your B2B customer data strategy to tailor customer-centric strategies accordingly using proven analytical frameworks.
Let’s see how we might apply this concept.
A high conversion rate on CTAs, such as “Buy Now” buttons or subscription forms, indicates strong transactional intent among users. It would suggest these users are actively interested in making a purchase or taking a specific action, such as subscribing to a service or downloading a resource. Here’s how a business can capitalize on this transactional intent:
Prominently feature CTAs.
Offer incentives or discounts to encourage immediate action.
Streamline the checkout or signup process to reduce customer effort.
A low bounce rate serves as another example.
It indicates users are spending significant time on the website and exploring multiple pages, suggesting high user engagement and informational intent. Here’s how a business can leverage informational intent:
Create in-depth guides, tutorials, case studies, or blogposts that address common questions or pain points within the industry.
Focus on content quality and relevance to reflect an authoritative source of information.
Analyze user behavior patterns and content consumption data to gain insight into the topics and formats that resonate most with users.
Use GenAI in 4 Ways to Elevate Your Customer-Centricity
The above examples provide some insight into how you can use GenAI to analyze and leverage user intent data. Understanding user intent is a key way to elevate customer-centricity, which emphasizes the importance of prioritizing customer needs and preferences in all aspects of your business operations. By aligning your customer-centric strategies with user intent, you can create more relevant and personalized experiences that resonate with your target customers.
This customer-centric approach fosters loyalty, trust, and satisfaction, leading to improved brand reputation, brand preference, and long-term customer value.
There are four broad areas where every organization can use GenAI to be more customer-centric:
- Analyze user queries: By analyzing user queries and interactions, businesses can use GenAI to extract valuable insights into user intent and preferences. For example, GenAI can analyze the language used in customer reviews, social media posts, and support tickets to identify common themes, sentiments, and pain points as part of voice of customer research
- Make personalized recommendations: Use GenAI to analyze user behavior and historical data to develop personalized recommendation systems that suggest relevant products, content, or services based on user intent and preferences. For example, an e-commerce retailer can use GenAI to recommend products based on a user’s browsing history, purchase history, and demographic information.
- Create engaging content: By analyzing user queries and search trends, GenAI models can generate content ideas, headlines, and descriptions that are tailored to meet the specific needs and interests of your target market. For example, a content marketing team can use GenAI to generate blog post ideas, optimize headlines for search engine visibility, and create compelling meta descriptions that attract clicks and engagement.
- Forecast future behavior: With enough historical data, GenAI models can be developed to measure and predict how users are likely to behave in the future and anticipate their needs and preferences. For example, a predictive analytics for B2B model powered by GenAI can forecast which products are likely to be popular during the annual planning season.
As businesses navigate GenAI and accelerate marketing AI adoption, the concept of customer-centricity emerges as a guiding principle, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing customer needs and preferences across all facets of operations. By embracing GenAI and aligning strategies with user intent, businesses can make data driven marketing decisions and craft personalized experiences that resonate deeply with their customers, fostering loyalty, trust, and long-term customer value. Elevate your customer-centricity and your measures with our free white paper, “Bring Your A-Game to a Customer Empowered Market” and our “CustomerDNA” Infographic.
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