Businesses are increasingly turning to technologies to improve efficiencies, automate processes and drive revenue.
With advances occurring at a dizzying rate, many businesses are looking for where to focus their digital transformation investments.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a critical tool for companies looking for cost-effective, high-impact solutions that will drive business results. Artificial intelligence uses intelligent computer software programs to improve processes. Often AI programs use machine learning, which means that the programs improve over time as they are exposed to more data.
Businesses use AI to simplify complex. Today, companies must grapple with large amounts of data, customers who expect personalized engagements with brands, and deep competition.AI tools that allow for differentiation for customers, better operations and competitive advantages.
Here is a closer look at five ways to grow your business using artificial intelligence.
1. Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Marketing today is about resonance. Your company’s messages must be relevant to customers, answer a need that they are seeking to solve, and have an impact on their lives.
Today, we all spend a lot of time online via smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. We surf various social media sites and engage with others via text and email.
That means marketers need to use personalized messaging to connect with customers where they are. AI tools help marketers improve personalization that creates individual experiences.
One example is product recommendations, Document Collaboration. AI tools allow for real-time recommendations based on past behavior (purchases, searches, sites visited) and brand interactions. They can provide suggestions of products and services that are likely of interest to visitors.
Another AI use is to identify the best times to target messages to customers, based on their use of the website or application. Tools also allow for advertising on apps and via email or text that are also related to a customer’s past history with your brand.
Applying AI tools to your customer relationship management (CRM) system can also help you refine your email marketing campaigns. The AI tools can help identify patterns and commonalities among millions of customers while helping to determine which types of email campaigns will be most effective for each group of customers.
2. Enhanced Customer Service
No matter what your business is, customers will have problems, questions or issues that need to be resolved. Customer service is integral not only to resolving these issues, but also for maintaining customer loyalty and brand affinity.
Completely replacing your human customer service team with AI is a controversial topic. Allowing customers the option of interacting with another human is still an important option to provide.
However, chatbots and other AI technologies can save time and resources, for both the company and the customer.
Adding a chatbot to your website allows you to engage with customers in real time. The chatbots use textual context to provide recommendations, answer common questions or navigate help options. Chatbots can even be used to place orders, suggest upsell opportunities or facilitate returns. They can greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy of your customer service experiences.
There is a generational difference at play with customer service options. While older customers may prefer engaging with a human, a Gartner study showed that live chat is the preferred mode of customer service for customers between 18 and 49.
AI tools can also help you analyze customer service interactions to help you determine how many live agents should be scheduled for certain times and the types of support your customers prefer.
3. Automate Branding Tasks
Brand automation uses technologies to automate manual and predictable marketing tasks. It’s a way to scale up your branding efforts rapidly, resolve production bottlenecks, solve branding inconsistencies and manage the vast volume of creative needs within an organization. Automation can also help you when you create your branding materials. You can design a logo easily using automated tools and it will require much less time and money, while still providing a good result. You can also use AI-based logo generators to get design ideas based on industry or keyword.
There are multiple ways that brand automation can boost your business efficiency, including:
- Collecting and organizing data. Data today is located in disparate places. AI can scan, collect, store and manage data from those myriad sources. AI tools can also tag, label and enhance the collected data for optimal use by marketing teams
- Powering self-service platforms to help with distribution
- Triggering workflows. As data and processes are collected, used and launch, AI can trigger workflows based on the information and processes run. For example, AI can use indicators to adjust budget allocations to social media, paid search or marketing campaigns
- Forecasting. AI can use predictive modeling and machine learning to provide more accurate projections about the outcomes of individual campaigns. It can forecast how close to goals a campaign will achieve and make recommendations for adjustments during a campaign
- Collaboration systems to power faster turnarounds and manage requests
- Automated systems to help brands manage user-generated content
- Automated deployment tools to assist in sharing content and messaging
- Automated notification systems
- Coordinating vendors and freelancers providing content and creative
Brand automation works hand in hand with marketing automation. Both are designed to provide experiences that will maximize the impact of marketing dollars and simplify operations.
4. Automate Content Delivery
Automating content delivery helps you determine the optimal times to deliver content and what content should be included. Doing so requires a collaborative effort on the part of your marketing and engineering teams.
It starts with content creation. Design elements need to be created that will be responsive to customer interests, wants and needs. These components need to account for the size, content type (e.g., text, photos, graphics, videos), and performance needs.
Web pages, ads, social media posts and other content needs to be developed with a focus on delivering on one or more customer needs. The idea is to provide content, no matter where it’s consumed, that is relevant and delivers an exceptional user experience.
Automating content also entails integrating data into your design. Data needs to inform which content is provided and to which customers.
AI can also be used to automate the creation and delivery of content internally or to clients and partners. AI content solutions let you better analyze what content is working and why, prioritizing which topics or content should be scheduled and created first, model the topics to consider as part of ideation and iteration processes, and plan work more productively.
5. Data-Based Decision-Making
Information is power. Insights drive decisions. That’s why you need capabilities to give you the best, newest and most relevant data at the time of need.
Imagine being able to make decisions about products, supply chain matters or production schedules in real time. What are the possibilities available with predictive modeling that uses up-to-date data to create possible trajectories?
It’s all dependent on data. AI tools can take massively large data sets to synthesize interactive dashboards, reports and insights that give your business access to the most current information.
When data collection and management are dependent on human beings, there’s an added risk of errors. With AI tools, you’ll reduce the risk of making decisions based on faulty data or calculations.
Using big-data analytics in tandem with machine learning and AI lets you harness the power of your data. It can allow for better course corrections and strategic decisions. It can also help you identify ways to leverage your data for additional revenue streams.
Artificial intelligence is remaking the way business is conducted in companies large and small. It can be a transformational component of your business strategy.
For businesses looking to gain an edge, connect better with customers and reimagine the what and how of their work, artificial intelligence is a logical set of technologies to deploy.
