AI is an acronym for artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is essentially the intersection between math and computing. But don’t let that scare you. You don’t need to understand it to use it and benefit from it. Do you know how to drive a car? Great. But do you have to know how to make a car to drive one? No. It is the same with AI. You can use it without knowing how to create it!
It has the power to automate much – if not all – your marketing, so marketers and brands can be more efficient with their time and get better results. Until recently, it was only used by big corporates but in the last few years many software as a service options have flooded the market. These can give small business owners and their marketing and advertising agencies deep insights into their audiences they need to create compelling campaigns with greater impact. In the last few years, artificial intelligence has become a powerful tool for many small businesses. With the increased availability of software as a service options, small business owners and their marketing and advertising agencies now have access to deep insights into their audiences that can be used to create compelling campaigns.
However, many small business owners are unsure what AI can do or how it should be implemented in their business cost effectively. This article will explore some common uses for AI in marketing strategies for small business so you can decide if this is something your business could use. The potential of artificial intelligence in marketing is powerful.
Data Collection and Insights
One major reason AI can be such a valuable tool for small businesses and their agencies is that it has the capability to gather and analyze data on all sorts of topics. For example, it can gather insights about an audience they may not have been able to see before. It can track what people are saying online, know what products they buy, identify the moments when they convert from one brand to another – all data points that are immensely valuable for business owners looking to make smarter decisions with their marketing dollars.
Understand the customer
AI is extremely useful in understanding audience behavior and response to marketing to analyze what, where, who and why with your marketing but even more amazing is that it can do this in real time. Business owners do not need to guess about how messages will resonate if they use AI to determine their audience’s position, marketing needs and predictive behavior.
Craft your marketing content
After understanding your customers you can also use AI to create your marketing. It can be used to write your content, your social media posts, and even change your images and colors for higher engagement.
Improve Your Marketing’s Visual Elements
Artificial intelligence can help marketers improve the visual elements of their marketing and analyze and recommend the color, elements in images, hashtags and even emojis to see which elements are driving the most engagement on social channels and digital platforms.
Choose when and where to put your content
AI is very powerful at analyzing data so it can analyze engagement with all sorts of social media and other channel data and identify the optimal places and times for your content to be posted.
Connect with your ideal customers
Small businesses can now use AI to connect, nurture and engage with their ideal potential customers on social media. The AI can analyze people’s attributes and find the exact right customers for you in the ocean of social media data. There are several sales tools that find the prospects and email and engage you to turn them into interested prospects even before you ever speak with contact them.
Improve your sales calls
AI can be used to correctly analyze your prospects personality, what language you should use to them, and provide soft sales skills coaching by observing your sales calls.
Improve your Revenue
Additionally, it can influence your customers purchase journey and create higher purchase volume and levels.
Enhance your SEO
AI is now being used to drive stronger SEO results to get more bang from your online activities.
Do better budgeting for your marketing
AI can now be used for optimizing your budget allocation across your sales and marketing channels.
Get more from your ad spend
AI tools exist that will not only change your advertising copy and images but also plan your entire campaigns to get far stronger results from your spend.
Create personalization at scale
AI can analyze individuals and serve up unique content just for them. An easy example of this is our newsletter. The first time it is learning but each time it will learn your preferences in topics and over time your newsletter will provide you only with topics of interest to you.
Give outstanding customer service and customer experience
AI offers so many routes to customer service due to the personalisation and immediacy of the response.
How to know the best tools?
The benefits of AI in marketing are undeniable, but it can be difficult to know how to harness the power for your business. One major issue is that not all forms of AI are created equal and businesses need to understand what they’re getting into before investing any time or money. There are numerous solutions on the market for all these areas (and many more). You need to ensure that the solution you choose does what it says on the tin and is right for your business. There is AI and then there is AI. Not all AI iis created equal and some tools are far better than others. This is a trap for those who do not know the options.
How do you get started?
Before even deciding between tools the best place to start is by figuring out your objectives and key challenges that would move the dial on your business the most, and then find a company that offers solutions tailored to meet those needs.
Where to next?
Although we may be just scratching the surface of AI’s potential in marketing, it is here to stay. Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for marketers and advertisers.
If you want to get more of an understanding of AI and where it can be used in small business – check out our free webinar. Click here to find out more,
Marketing automation has progressed a long way but there are still challenges to overcome before AI will be widely adopted by small businesses – but they are also opportunities for those companies who who are willing to dip their toe in and try some AI tools.
