Branding and marketing are essential to the success of small and medium businesses (SMBs). A company needs a unique brand to stand out to consumers, generate sales, and build customer loyalty. Developing and maintaining a brand can be quite time-consuming, with many mundane tasks that take business owners’ attention away from their main jobs. That’s why AI based automation tools come into play today.
Marketers, whether they work in-house for a business, as part of an agency, or on their own, are always looking for ways to reduce the amount of time they must spend on the repetitive aspects of the job. Automation of marketing tasks can help SMB owners and marketers alike by freeing them to spend more time focusing on serving their customers.
It can also help them make more informed decisions about their marketing strategies by analyzing far more data in far less time than they or their teams could manage. This article will discuss artificial intelligence (AI) automation in marketing and the types of tools that may be available to you.
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How Does AI Automation Work in Marketing?
Technology that can automate various marketing functions has been around for years. However, recent developments in AI present a vast array of opportunities.
New automation tools use AI and machine-learning algorithms to handle repetitive tasks, which might range from printing mailing labels to handling basic customer questions.
Some AI software can do much more, such as analyzing data to evaluate existing marketing strategies and recommend changes.
Most AI tools that can help in marketing fall into one of three categories: predictive, generative, or conversational AI.
- Predictive AI: This type of AI uses historical data to categorize or predict future events. For example, a predictive AI tool can examine data on how a company’s past marketing efforts have performed, compare this to current market data, and recommend changes to the company’s marketing strategy.
- Generative AI: This type of AI analyzes massive amounts of content, particularly text and images, and uses that information to create new content. Tools like ChatGPT create text based on prompts submitted by a user. Midjourney and other AI art tools perform a similar function for visual images. Other tools can create video content or music.
- Conversational AI: This is technically a subset of generative AI. A conversational AI system uses technologies known as natural language processing and natural language understanding to engage in direct exchanges with human users. A chatbot that relies solely on generative AI might be limited to certain types of responses or certain topics. A conversational AI chatbot is not nearly as constrained and can offer a much wider range of responses.
What Are Some Essential AI Based Automation Tools
The following are only a few of the many types of AI based automation tools that can help SMB owners and marketers automate various marketing tasks:
1. Branding Assistance
Much of the publicity surrounding recent advances in AI technology has involved tools that perform creative tasks like producing text or images. AI cannot duplicate humans’ capacity for creativity. At least not yet — but it can be helpful for brainstorming and visualizing ideas.
With some review and editing, you can use the products of generative AI tools in your marketing plan. You can experiment with prompts to generate text for marketing plans, customer emails, and other written works.
Furthermore, you can use tools like an AI logo maker to create logos and other designs.
2. Automated Editing with AI Based Automation Tools
In addition to creating text, images, and other works, some generative AI applications can edit or enhance existing works. You can use AI for a wide range of tasks, such as:
- Suggesting edits to documents;
- Touching up photographs; or
- Removing noise or distortion from audio or video files.
3. Customer Service Automation
If your customer service team is spending a significant amount of time answering simple questions, a chatbot can free them up to deal with customer concerns that require higher-level help.
As discussed above, chatbots may vary from fairly simple to quite complex. The simplest chatbots use generative AI to provide answers to customer questions based on a set of rules or a decision tree.
More sophisticated chatbots use conversational AI to engage with customers on a wider range of issues. You can set up a system that routes customer inquiries to human representatives if the chatbot is not equipped to help.
A chatbot could communicate with customers through text messaging, direct messaging on a social media platform, or a dedicated system on your website.
Some chatbots, also known as “voice bots,” use voice recognition and voice generation software to communicate with customers over the phone or through video conferencing software.
4. Automated Outreach Strategies
AI can help SMB owners and marketers create marketing strategies and manage marketing plans. Many of these tools use predictive AI to make recommendations based on past performance by your company, your competitors, and others.
They can determine the best way to attract new customers and keep existing ones happy. Examples of tasks that can benefit from AI automation include the following:
- Audience research: AI software tools can gather data from social media, search engines, and other sources to find out who is looking for your products or services, giving you valuable information about potential customers.
- Keyword research: By analyzing the types of search terms people are using, AI can give you highly targeted recommendations for keywords to use in your content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
- Lead scoring: Not all leads are the same. Some leads are much more likely than others to become customers. The trick has always been determining who are the strongest leads. AI can analyze vast amounts of consumer data to help you develop a lead-scoring model and then quickly apply that model as new leads come in.
- Personalized campaigns: Consumers are more likely to respond to outreach that addresses their specific concerns. SMB owners and marketers rarely have the time or resources to create personalized outreach for each consumer. AI can help by analyzing individual customer data and creating customized outreach campaigns using email, social media, or other marketing channels.
- CRM: Businesses rely on customer relationship management (CRM) systems for various purposes. AI can help businesses leverage CRM data to create even more value, such as by improving communications with customers or identifying unmet customer needs.
5. Automated Analysis and Optimization with AI Based Automation Software
AI can help you optimize your overall marketing strategy by analyzing how your different marketing channels are performing. It can provide you with performance data and make recommendations on how to allocate resources.
The most sophisticated AI optimization tools can even make decisions about resource allocation on their own, based on your parameters.
For example, an AI system could examine the returns from your advertising spending and make adjustments, such as:
- Moving ads to different times or locations; or
- Increasing or reducing the amount you are spending.
Learn More About Marketing With AI-Based Automation Tools
Every SMB owner needs a marketing strategy, but spending countless hours on the minutiae of marketing and branding is probably not why most people go into business. AI based automation tools can help them focus on running and growing their businesses.
Marketers might not mind dealing with the small details. The more they can automate those processes, though, the more time they can spend on the creative and intuitive aspects of marketing that computers cannot handle.
With AI automation, both SMB owners and marketers can not only improve the services they provide to their customers, but they can also increase their own job satisfaction.
Each business or brand has unique marketing needs. The best AI automation strategies will also be unique for each business or brand. An AI automation expert can help SMB owners and marketers determine how they can streamline their marketing strategies most effectively.
What AI based automation tools are you using today? I’d love to hear more in the comments below.
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