Monthly Archives: November 2021

If  I could go out to dinner with any brand, I think I’d have to choose Trader Joe’s.

Now, I know that may sound weird, but stay with me. Nike, as you know, would be too energetic, which would embarrass me — let’s play it cool here, okay, Nike?

Apple, on the other hand, would be both sophisticated and a little pretentious, which would make me nervous.

And Timberland is just too outdoorsy and gritty. We wouldn’t have much in common.

By comparison, Trader Joe’s is unique, earthy, and a little playful. We could discuss its fantastic seasonal selections, like its Pumpkin Alfredo Sauce or Butternut Mac & Cheese Bites, and I would thank TJ (because we’re at the nickname level by now) for its generous cheese prices.

While we all know I can’t actually go out to dinner with Trader Joe’s (or any brand, for that matter), I’m willing to bet you’re able to picture what it would be like to hang out with your own favorite brand — or how a dinner with Peloton might differ from a dinner with Netflix.

That’s the power of brand personality. It helps you relate to certain brands that mirror the characteristics you value most. And it also inspires you to connect with certain brands that demonstrate characteristics you hope to develop.

Here, let’s explore why brand personality matters. Plus, how to create your own brand personality, examples of powerful brand personalities, and tricks of the trade from HubSpot’s Brand Strategy team.

What is brand personality?

Simply put, a brand’s personality is the set of human characteristics you attribute to that brand. Or, put another way — it’s how you’d describe a brand if it were a person.

A brand’s personality shines through in brand messaging, images, and overarching marketing campaigns.

Additionally, consistency is key. If your brand’s personality differs on your company website compared to your social channels, it will be more difficult for consumers to learn who your brand is, and what it stands for.

As Ben Harmanus, EMEA’s Head of Brand Marketing, puts it, “A brand’s personality is a set of human traits that define a brand. These traits set one brand apart from others, and make it unique.” 

Harmanus adds, “These characteristics should be chosen wisely, since they help build an emotional connection to a specific target group.”

Harmanus told me, “Brand personality is the essential foundation for brand identity and brand marketing — and has a huge impact on the sales process.”

To understand how brand personality infiltrates a brand’s marketing materials, let’s take a look at a few examples.

Brand Personality Examples

1. Nike 

Nike’s marketing materials – from its slogan “Just Do It”, to its mission statement “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world — embody excitement, passion, and energy.

You know who Nike as-a-person would be: A passionate sports fan, an avid athlete, and someone who is innovative and forward-focused. Nike as-a-person is interested in the newest and best when it comes to wellness and fitness.

Consider how this plays out in Nike’s marketing strategy. The caption of a recent Nike Instagram post begins, “No more waiting…”

The images and videos across Nike’s website and social pages are colorful and fast-paced, with Olympic athletes running and Serena Williams swinging a racquet.

And if you watch a Nike ad on TV, you’ll be shown the same personality — someone who is excited, active, and ready-to-go.

2. Chanel 

If you’re looking for a brand personality that exemplifies sophistication, look no further than Chanel.

For starters, take a look at the brand’s mission statement: “To be the Ultimate House of Luxury, defining style and creating desire, now and forever.”

Additionally, let’s consider their Instagram page – the Chanel team uses soft blues, light yellows, and plenty of black space to draw attention to one focal point.

Their minimalist, vintage theme effectively suggests a sophisticated brand personality.

You know who Chanel is — Chanel as-a-person is someone who cares deeply for fashion, is highly polished and never says the wrong thing, and is both refined and worldly.

3. REI 

There aren’t many brands as polar opposite to Chanel as REI, so let’s dive into their personality next.

REI is rugged, outdoorsy, and tough.

Their website’s homepage currently reads, “Celebrate the power in you”, and the About Us page says, “At Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) we believe a life outdoors is a life well-lived! We believe that it’s in the wild, untamed and natural places that we find our best selves, so our purpose is to awaken a lifelong love of the outdoors, for all.”

REI as-a-person is your “Earthy-crunchy” friend who enjoys camping, hiking, swimming — you name it, as long as it takes place outdoors. Because of their love for outdoors, REI is also dedicated and focused on the environment, and solely purchases sustainable products.

4. Volvo 

Volvo as-a-person is reliable, sturdy, and dependable. Volvo prides itself on “their years of leadership in automotive safety”, and is disciplined, responsible, and principled.

Take a look at the following Volvo commercial, which highlights the safety of the cars above all else:

Additionally, if you take a look at Volvo’s About Us page, you’ll read statements like, “For nearly a century we have been making life easier, better and safer with cutting-edge technology”, and “Volvo Cars is a brand for people who care about the world we live in and the people around us” — all of which suggests a personality of dependability.

While other car dealerships might focus on a car’s fancy features, Volvo stays committed to one key value: Safety.

Dimensions of Brand Personality

In The Journal of Marketing Research, Jennifer Aaker outlines five dimensions of brand personality: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

These five pillars can be jumping-off points when identifying your own brand’s personality.

However, there will be unique personality traits that fall under each broader dimension, and the more specific you can be when identifying which traits belong to your brand, the more authentic and unique your brand’s personality will become.  

Let’s explore some specific personality traits that fall under each dimension, now:

Traits that relate to sincerity:

• Wholesomeness
• Trustworthiness
• Honesty
• Authenticity
• Cheerfulness

Traits that relate to excitement:

• Passion
• Adventurousness
• Enthusiasm
• Boldness
• Imagination
• Daring

Traits that relate to competence:

• Intelligence
• Dependability
• Success
• Principled
• Conscientious

Traits that relate to sophistication:

• Elegance
• Composure
• Worldliness
• Confidence
• Tact

Traits that relate to ruggedness:

• Toughness
• Athletic
• Sturdy
• Outdoorsy
• Reliable

How to Create a Brand Personality        

Now that we’ve explored some examples and traits of brand personalities, you might be wondering how you can create your own brand personality.

Ultimately, you’ll want to do this as early as possible. A brand personality can help guide your marketing team’s decisions and ensure your entire team remains consistent across channels — and consistency is key for brand recognition and long-term customer loyalty.

Whether you’re creating a personality for the first time or interested in re-vamping your existing brand personality, we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn the six steps you’ll need to take to create a strong, lasting brand personality.

1. Figure out your values.

Like any real human being, values can shape who your brand is, the decisions your brand makes, and how your brand acts.

So you’ll want to start by outlining your core values. What matters most to your brand? (Hint, hint: It should be whatever matters most to your target audience.)

Once you’ve identified your brand’s values, write them out in a value statement. Your value statement will be the foundation of your brand’s personality.

For instance, consider Life is Good’s mission statement: “To spread the power of optimism.” I’m willing to bet Life is Good’s mission statement helps drive all marketing decisions — for instance, as a marketer for Life is Good, I’d want to ensure my Instagram captions or ad copy were positive and hopeful.

2. Use your audience as inspiration — since they already are who your brand should be.

REI’s brand personality works because its target market is an audience of outdoors enthusiasts. The brand’s personality would be entirely ineffective, on the other hand, if the brand was targeting office employees.

This is why it’s vital you consider, first and foremost, your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and expectations.

You’ll want to conduct qualitative and quantitative research on your target audience to ensure you have a strong understanding of your buyer persona. 

To begin understanding your buyer persona, you’ll want to ask questions like these:

• Does my audience care more about luxury, or affordability?
• Are they driven by emotions, or logic?
• When purchasing products, what matters most to them? Sustainability? Safety? Entertainment?
• What does my audience do in their free time?
• What do they care about?
• What do they like? What do they dislike?

The deeper you understand your audience, the easier it will be to construct your brand’s personality. Your brand should reflect and reinforce who your buyer persona is — or who they want to be.

Chanel’s brand personality, for instance, resonates so strongly with its audience because it reflects traits that matter to its audience, including luxury and sophistication. If Chanel was targeting an audience that cared more about affordability, then it wouldn’t succeed.

3. Ask yourself questions as if your brand were a human.

Once you’ve constructed a loose outline for your brand’s personality, you can refine it by asking yourself (and your team) questions as if your brand already were a person.

This might sound silly, but consider asking yourself:

• How does my brand act when they go to a party?
• What does my brand talk to its friends about?
• What excites my brand? What scares my brand?
• Why does my brand behave X way? What drives it?

It’s critical you’re able to describe, in great detail, who your brand is. This information doesn’t have to be public-facing — in fact, it most likely won’t be. Instead, this information will be used on the back-end so your marketing team can create materials that resonate with your audience and begin building strong brand loyalty. If done effectively, your audience will begin connecting to your brand without realizing why they feel as emotionally compelled as they do.

4. Create a brand style guide for your team.

Over time, your team will change. New people will join, others will leave. If you don’t have strong guardrails that outline who your brand is … and who it isn’t … you risk diluting the brand personality over time.

To combat this, ensure you create a brand style guide that outlines how the brand personality will display itself through your marketing materials. For instance, what font demonstrates your brand’s personality? What about colors? Language, voice, tone? Visuals?

The more specific you can be with your brand style guide, the more likely you are to see consistency across channels. Additionally, you’ll want to take the time to outline who your brand isn’t. These guardrails will ensure your brand doesn’t sound and act different on your social channels compared to your website.

As HubSpot’s Global Head of Brand Marketing Amy Marino puts it, “A brand personality can inform everything from how you write marketing copy to how you design your website to where your brand shows up in real life.”

Marino adds, “Developing a brand personality is an important element that can guide your company’s brand marketing … and ensure prospects and customers feel elements of continuity across every brand interaction.”

5. Iterate.

Over time, as you conduct market research, you’ll want to remain open to iterating on your personality if it no longer serves your audience or meets your audience’s needs.

For instance, perhaps in market research you find audiences feel your brand is a little too aggressive. To fix this, you might soften your brand’s personality and use more calming language across your channels.

With these tips in-mind, you’re now well on your way to developing a strong, unique brand personality that works best for your brand. 

Ultimately, your brand’s personality has a direct impact on how emotionally invested your consumers are in your business — and how willing they are to stick around for the long-haul. 

If your business has a blog, sending out an email newsletter is essential. Not only is it a simple way to distribute your content, but it can also help you better understand what type of content is resonating with your target audience so you can optimize your content strategy.

Beyond content distribution, an email newsletter can also help generate paying customers for your business. 31% of B2B marketers report that email newsletters are the best way to turn leads to customers, and 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers once converted.

So, you’re cranking out content on your WordPress site, and you know you can grow your business through an email newsletter … Wouldn’t it be great if you could send this newsletter directly within WordPress?

With plugins, you can. Some of the most popular WordPress plugins available are for email marketing. With an email plugin, you can generate leads, segment your contacts, and nurture them into customers, all within WordPress.

To ensure you’re able to use WordPress for all your content distribution and email marketing needs, we’ve made this list of the best WordPress email plugins.

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

Sure, the HubSpot WordPress Plugin includes forms and pop-ups, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On top of the ability to develop forms and pop-ups with a simple drag-and-drop interface, HubSpot collects submissions from any form you have on your WordPress site and automatically adds those leads into your CRM, so you can begin nurturing them into loyal customers immediately.

The plugin includes a live chat tool, so you can begin engaging with site visitors, and even generate leads off of those conversations. You can also deploy bots to answer simple questions that your visitors have, ensuring that you’re supporting your website visitors even when your team is offline.

Once someone submits their information on one of your pop-ups, you can automate a simple kickback email to get in touch with that lead and deliver the content you promised them. You can also upgrade to a paid version of Marketing Hub to begin emailing those contacts right away.

Best for: We recommend the HubSpot WordPress Plugin for anyone. Between forms, pop-ups, live chat, and a fully integrated CRM, there’s no better free email subscription plugin available for WordPress.

2. MailPoet

MailPoet is one of the most popular free newsletter plugins for WordPress. To manage your subscribers, you can easily import an existing list from your CRM or another marketing automation tool, or create forms and add them to your site using widgets. Plus, the drag-and-drop email editor lets you quickly create responsive emails that look great on any device or email service.

MailPoet is free for anyone with less than 1,000 subscribers but becomes more powerful upon upgrading. Premium users can see exactly which subscribers have opened an email and what links people are clicking on within your email, among a number of other advanced features.

Best for: Those who want a popular, free, and versatile email newsletter plugin for WordPress should try MailPoet and experiment with its subscriber management, email builder, and automation tools. Those with smaller lists can leverage premium features for free as well.

3. Newsletter

Newsletter is an email marketing tool built specifically for WordPress, and everything you need to get started is included. The plugin allows you to add a subscription form or pop-up to your site, compose emails in a drag-and-drop builder, segment your leads using multi-list targeting, and send newsletters to distribute your blog content.

Additionally, the tool has built-in reporting, so you can see exactly how your emails are performing. You can even automate newsletters to go out on a regular cadence to ensure you are consistently engaging with your subscribers. Newsletter also integrates with other tools, such as Mailgun and Spark Post, so you can optimize your email strategy based on your needs.

Best for: The Newsletter plugin is best for WordPress bloggers looking to automate their newsletters and track performance. It’s another popular, well-received option that’s worth trying out for free.

4. Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers cloud-based digital marketing tools to over 50,000 growing companies around the world, and its WordPress plugin brings the power of the platform directly into WordPress.

With the Sendinblue WordPress plugin, you can create forms to capture leads, manage lists of subscribers, create and send email marketing campaigns, and measure your success over time using the included reports. The plugin features a drag-and-drop email editor, and you’re able to personalize components of your email to increase engagement with subscribers. The free version lets you send up to 300 emails per day.

The Sendinblue WordPress plugin also includes transactional email. Using the wp_mail function, you’ll be able to send transactional emails using Sendinblue’s SMTP. This feature is great for sending order confirmations or updating your customers on important changes to their accounts.

Best for: WordPress business owners in need of a simple but inclusive email marketing plugin will enjoy Sendinblue for its tools, support, and integration with its other advanced marketing tools. You can get decent mileage from the plugin for free before reaching your send limit.

5. Sumo

Sumo has over 60,000 active installations within WordPress — and for good reason. Beyond just pop-ups, welcome emails, and automated drip campaigns, they also have a number of other features to help you grow your business.

The plugin features a “share” button that you can add anywhere on your site, which allows your site visitors to easily share your content on social. The plugin also integrates directly with WooCommerce so you can create discounts and unique offers to increase your order value, and minimize the number of abandoned carts you have.

On top of all the plugin’s features, Sumo offers free customer support, and even one-on-one onboarding for all customers (free and paid) to ensure you’re getting the most out of the plugin.

Best for: Sumo works great for ecommerce websites and WooCommerce that run regular email campaigns. New businesses will appreciate the generous free version, which allows up to 10,000 emails per month and unlimited subscribers.

6. Email Subscribers & Newsletters

Email Subscribers & Newsletters is a plugin that lets you easily notify your subscribers when you have new blog content available. With it, you can add a subscription box to your site and get notified every time someone signs up for your newsletter. You can then notify your subscribers whenever a new post is published, or create a custom newsletter to share your content.

Email Subscribers & Newsletters is also serious about the health of your email lists. They offer double opt-in functionality so you can ensure that you’re only reaching out to people interested in what your website has to offer. You have the option to add captchas to your subscription box to prevent bots from ruining your email lists. The tool offers list cleanup and spam testing services too.

Best for: Email Subscribers & Newsletters is best for bloggers who want a simple plugin to notify readers when a new blog post is published, along with some simple metrics and a custom newsletter option.

7. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 lets you send either simple notifications to your blog subscribers whenever you post new content, or a recurring digest of posts. Through the plugin, you can also exclude specific categories of posts from being included in your emails, or even exclude posts on an individual basis.

The tool lets you create simple plain text emails, or create custom HTML emails. You can also upgrade to its paid service (MailOptin) to send emails to your contact lists in Mailchimp, AWeber, or other email service providers.

Best for: Subscribe2 is another WordPress email plugin that’s ideal for bloggers who want to send email alerts to subscribers, or to compile their most recent blog posts into a digest.

8. SendPress

SendPress is a simple, easy-to-use email newsletter plugin. With it, you can import contacts and content from your WordPress site directly into the plugin, making it easy to create a blog notification email.

SendPress features several styling and editing options so you can send professional emails without any coding skills. They also have a service called AutoCron, which will check your site on a regular schedule to make sure your scheduled emails are being sent.

Note that for features like advanced analytics, bounce handling, and campaign tracking through third-party software like Google Analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version.

Best for: SendPress provides a simple email automation subscription for small WordPress sites that want to grow their audiences.

9. OptinMonster

The widely popular and powerful OptinMonster plugin, as the name suggests, helps you grow your WordPress email list and get more subscribers through a variety of pop-ups and static forms. The tool comes with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you build your form from scratch, or select from a pre-built template.

What sets OptinMonster apart from other plugins is its targeting options. Using exit intent technology, OptinMonster will deploy a pop-up based on when a user is getting ready to leave a page. The plugin also has page-level targeting options, so you can tailor your content offers to a visitor’s location and behavior on your site. You can then use this information to tailor your email campaigns using any one of OptinMonster’s many integrated email service providers.

Best for: Marketers who want to implement popups in their marketing strategies (especially for exit intents), and implement advanced tracking on their forms and email campaigns to drive conversions.

10. Thrive Leads

Like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads is focused on growing your subscriber list, and growing it fast. This tool includes a long list of pop-up types, including full-screen overlays and even multiple-choice forms. It also includes the targeting options that you’d expect out of an email subscription plugin.

Additionally, Thrive Leads offers A/B Testing so you can see whether a different design, or an entirely different content offer performs better — allowing you to greatly increase your conversion rates.

Best for: Thrive Leads is a comprehensive tool to help online businesses grow subscribers, increase conversions, and target the right visitors at the right time. If that’s you, try it out. Also note that Thrive Leads is more of a form tool than anything else — email is just one part, and the plugin works best when integrated with another email tool.

11. WP Subscribe

WP Subscribe is built by MyThemeShop, a company that builds WordPress themes and plugins that are fast, reliable, look great on any site, and are SEO-friendly. WP Subscribe checks off all those boxes. They have optimized the code on the plugin to ensure that it loads fast, and doesn’t slow down your site.

With WP subscribe, you can add your subscription form anywhere on your site, and feel rest-assured that it will be fully responsive to whatever screen size your site visitor is viewing your site on. The plugin is also compatible with several popular email service providers, such as AWeber and MailChimp, so you can begin leveraging your email lists immediately.

Best for: Use WP Subscribe to build custom forms and grow your email list — for anything else, you’ll need to integrate with another email automation tool.

12. Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms has over one million installations on WordPress, making it one of the most popular form plugins available. Ninja has all the features you’d expect in your email subscription form builder, plus a few extra features that make it stand out. Namely, its acclaimed builder tool lets anyone make professional-looking forms without touching any code.

The plugin features several different anti-spam options, including Google’s reCAPTCHA, to ensure the validity of your form submissions. They also let you collect payments via integrations with PayPal Express, Stripe, and Elavon. The plugin integrates with a long list of the most popular mailing list tools, so you can start emailing your new leads right away.

Best for: WordPress users who need a reliable form builder tool to grow their email subscriber list should put Ninja Forms on the list — it’s one of the leading options available, and it’s flexible enough that you can use it for other cases beyond email signups.

13. Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce

The Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce plugin extends the functionality of the WooCommerce plugin by allowing you to customize the email template. Build out emails with a library of useful elements specific to WooCommerce, like order, billing, and shipping details.

Everything is drag-and-drop, and the plugin can be used by anyone who already knows WooCommerce. Thanks to the tool, sending transactional emails, order confirmations, and shipping confirmations. With the paid version, you can also recommend products in emails, give coupons, and send target emails based on orders that match certain criteria.

Best for: WooCommerce site owners should try Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce as a solution to build custom emails to customers.

14. WP Mail SMTP by WPForms

The developers behind the popular WPForms plugin have also created an email-specific plugin, WP Mail SMTP. This plugin aims to solve email deliverability issues by configuring WordPress to follow SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), the standard for sending emails, instead of PHPMailer, the WordPress default.

With over 2 million downloads to date, WP Mail SMTP has helped improve deliverability for many WordPress sites. It helps authenticate your emails to email clients, avoiding the spam folder or a failed delivery. The plugin works by reconfiguring the wp_mail() function to integrate with a credited SMTP provider.

If that sounds like gibberish, don’t worry — the plugin walks you through the process and provides documentation in case you’re stuck.

Best for: WordPress marketers who are experiencing email deliverability issues may consider trying this plugin.

Upgrade your WordPress emails.

It’s important to choose the plugin that works best for you. Whether you need a plugin that is highly customizable, or one that simply drives submissions so you can get your email newsletter off the ground, the options here provide a great starting point for you to explore as you consider how you can start building out your subscribers list.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most talked-about topics in the world of technology. One search for “artificial intelligence” on Twitter and you’ll be introduced to articles on how AI is shaping the future of healthcare, productivity, art, and food. Beyond the Twittersphere, searches for the term AI have doubled over the past six years according to data from Ahrefs.

All of this digital activity must mean that everyone is ready to adopt AI into how we manage and operate our businesses, right? Right?

what most describe as “artificial intelligence” is really just an if statement

— excelhumor.xlsx (@ExcelHumor) October 25, 2021

It’s well worth noting that while AI is poised to augment our future in a big way, there is still a lot of work to be done. Many companies use AI as nothing more than a Marketing message; a siren, knowing that for some people the allure of artificial intelligence outweighs its actual output, allowing them to get away with empty promises. 

For as many good jokes as this opens the door for, there are still many companies fully capable of providing high-quality AI software. Of course, all of this leads us to a natural question: When will everyday businesses and professionals use AI software to enhance their work?

Fortunately, this is something that NetLine has greater visibility into. 

The Challenge

• Better understand the AI software market beyond its current buyers, especially the big names like Apple, Amazon, and major car manufacturers.
• What kind of obstacles stand in the way of AI software solutions providers further permeating the market?

The Goal

• Identify and understand how leading IT decision-makers use or intend to use AI software and whether they intend to increase their investment any further within the next 12 months and beyond.
• Such observations should exclusively be captured via first-party interactions with IT buyers as they voluntarily registered and consumed related content. 

How This Data Was Captured

By tapping into dramatic scale beyond the limitations of their own content, our customer leveraged NetLine’s Intent Discovery product to secure first-party sourced intent-rich data squarely aimed at accelerating sales outcomes. Empowered by NetLine’s entire universe content, the client put to good use all 13,000+ assets, billions of data points, and the 35,925,120 different ways of filtering buyers actively performing research.

Unlike traditional intent data, Buyer-Level Intent Discovery helps you better understand the challenges, priorities, and purchase timeline of your ideal targets. Nothing is hidden behind obfuscated datasets and/or black box proprietary scores. 

Perhaps most importantly, Intent Discovery acts as an always-on monitor of all B2B content consumption behavior as professionals are actively researching content specific to their challenges. Monitoring activity is then mined on a real-time basis, and intercepted once a buyer has met or exceeded each element required to define intent—capturing custom, intent-rich, customer-specific insights directly from the prospect.

The Questions

To answer the questions, we engaged nearly 2,000 senior-level IT decision-makers to assess their desire to invest in AI software and what their priorities are with this technology.

Here’s a sampling of some of the insights we uncovered from their responses.

What are Your Top AI Software Priorities You Are Allocating Resources Towards?

Perhaps the best way to summarize the needs of B2B professionals when it comes to how they’d like to deploy AI software comes down to two things: The mundane and the complex.

As you can see in the responses above, this is what the data tells us; if AI software can knock out the simple, monotonous tasks people spend a large portion of their time (which it can), while also supporting some pie-in-the-sky type analysis, (yep) then there’s a market just waiting to be tapped.

Of course, if it were that easy, we’d already see a wider-permeation of the market. What other challenges face this market? More on that in the next section.

Some of the other notable insights include the following:

• Automating Routine Tasks (28.79%) and Managing risk, fraud, and cybersecurity threats (27.63%) drew the most votes from all respondents.

• Incredibly, only 2.7% of all respondents prioritized the responsible and ethical use of AI—meaning that nearly two-thirds (61.9%) of all responding industries didn’t even consider this option a priority. Given what AI can do in the wrong hands or when left unsupervised, the apparent lack of concern in regards to ethics is shocking.

• The Healthcare/Medical industry was 124.4% more likely to say Automating Routine Tasks with AI was more important to their profession compared to the Telecommunications field
• 14.57% of Finance industry respondents said that Operationalizing AI was the top priority they had with any AI software, the largest percentage of any industry for this priority

What’s the Timeframe for Additional Investment for AI Software?

It’s one thing to talk about AI in theory and how you might use it. It’s an entirely different, and ultimately more compelling, thing to see when and even if you’ll put your money where your mouth is.

As we mentioned in the intro, AI has primarily been a luxury employed by large companies thanks to its price tag. According to Analytics Insight, AI tools can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $1 million dollars, essentially putting it out of range for any business not employing thousands of people. Even with this knowledge, the responses paint a much more encouraging picture of what future implementation might look like.

Let’s find out where the market current sits:

31.92% of all respondents have an AI-related investment event occurring within the next 12 months.

• 5.85% of respondents said they were looking to make an additional investment within the next 3 months, meaning that respondents were 1034.45% more likely to say they were more inclined to wait Over 1 year to invest compared to Under 3 months.
• Respondents were 213% more likely to say that any additional AI investment would come after 2022 (beyond 12 months)

While a third of the market is preparing to make additional, if not initial, forays into the world of AI software in the coming year, the remaining two-thirds are biding their time. There are a number of ways to interpret this, including not having the potential budget, not having the staff or business to support it, or perhaps they’re simply not ready to take on the commitment of what AI entails. 

With how strange 2020 was with the way 2021 has unfolded, it’s not terribly surprising that professionals are looking to defer until 2022 at the earliest. Still, if there’s one thing AI vendors should take from this Intent Discovery Trends Report, it’s that nearly 6% of a $62 billion market is ready to make a move in the next quarter. 

The Results

For businesses in the AI software space or even for those flirting with the idea of adding AI to your arsenal, you now have a superior and more accurate understanding of where your potential clients/peers are in their unique buying journey. 

For example, through Intent Discovery, we found that:

• 100% of Utility/Energy respondents said that Managing risk, fraud and cybersecurity threats was their sole priority when it comes to AI software utilization.
• Compared to their peers, the Automotive field looks to be quite bullish on AI software, with 11.11% of their employees saying they expected additional investment to be made within the next 6 months or less—with an additional 25.93% believing that moves will be made within 12 months.
• Professionals within the Transportation industry are 754% more likely to be making an AI investment decision in under three months vs. their peers across other industries, there’s a clear trend across the world of travel that AI software businesses need to be aware of.

Buyer-Level Intent Discovery removes the guesswork that comes with every lead and instead provides context to what each prospect needs and what your buying audience craves. Insights like these are more valuable than gold, as they set the table for more productive and more fruitful interactions, relationships, and, hopefully, sales.

How Your Business Can Better Understand the Intent of Your Audience

In today’s hyper-competitive vendor market, it is more important than ever to understand the real-time pain points and in-market tendencies of your future buyers.

NetLine’s Intent Discovery product helps businesses accelerate its sales cycle by capturing first-party intent data by intercepting and engaging the buyer with customized validation questions. With this one-of-a-kind product, B2B Marketers can gain first-party insights for immediate activation and seamless remarketing/sales acceleration. 

For more information on how you can move beyond account-level insights and start your buyer-level intent discovery journey, contact us, or visit our website.