If hearing “artificial intelligence” makes you picture a robot speeding you through the checkout lane at Target…think bigger.
For those of us who are “life mature” enough to remember the introduction of personal computers, you may recall the curiosity or dismissiveness that you may have felt.
The tech was interesting but it really didn’t have a place in your home yet. The software was awkward and, for most, it was a glorified typewriter. It didn’t make life easier, more fun, or more interesting.
Then came a crude version of the internet, music sharing, and email. The novelty kept us in touch, informed, and entertained. I call this the point of no return.
We’ve been hearing talk of AI technology for years, but how can it help; or maybe, why should I care?
Your small business can use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate mundane tasks and make decisions faster. If that doesn’t excite you, how about saving money, saving labor, and making it more convenient for your customers.
Customer Service
The most widely used AI tool for interacting with both current and potential clients is the chatbot.
You’ve probably encountered this at some point. You visit a website and a tiny little chat bubble appears, offering to answer your questions.
But, that’s not all it can do. It has the capability to display links in its response for self-help, schedule a service call, take a reservation, or route the call to the right person if requested or needed.
This could be a huge help for small businesses, especially when dealing with large volumes of customer inquiries during peak times when you may not have extra people to answer the phones and field common questions.
Marketing Strategy
With AI, you can use data-driven insights to refine marketing campaigns, customer service operations, product development cycles, or even financial forecasting models.
Save time by enabling AI tools to review the data collected from your website analytics, and make meaningful suggestions and updates to your website layout and content.
AI can also extract useful information that can bend your marketing decisions.
Let’s say you are marketing an HVAC company in the ultra-competitive market of Columbus, OH. AI may find users in that market accessing the web using Android devices and even drill down data further to show most of those visits are between 10 pm and 11:10 pm.
Using this info, you can reallocate your paid ad budget from Google to Microsoft Ads and increase the budget for mobile ads by 10% to ensure top-of-screen presence.
This one insight could increase your phone calls and contacts without increasing your budget.
For small businesses, that’s huge.
In addition, AI can guide customers to the closest store or present personalized product recommendations that may speed up decision-making.
Tools to utilize:
SEMrush
Ubersuggest
Seventh Sense
Content Writing
Content writing can be monotonous and time-consuming. Thanks again to wonderful AI technology, there are a plethora of tools that make it much easier.
Just set your tone of voice, audience, and a brief (or detailed) description of the topic and AI can create content to meet your specific needs.
Tools to utilize:
YouWrite
Jasper
WriteSonic
Image Generation
If you’ve ever needed a unique, interesting image for your brochure, post, or report, and scrolled through royalty-free images looking for an image to match your design, you know how time-consuming and frustrating it can be.
AI can generate some options quickly using your verbal or text description.
No more time wasted sifting through hundreds of boring stock images. In fact, we used AI to generate the image at the top of this article. According to US law, every AI-generated image is royalty and copyright free.
These examples show how far AI has come over the past few years and why investing now might be worth considering if you’re looking to maximize efficiency and revenues down the road ahead.
So why wait? Talk to the digital marketing specialists at VentraLocal today to discuss options to implement AI technology into your business.
