Curious How can small businesses use AI? This post answers that.
In 1990s, PC & Internet revolution leveled the playing field for small businesses giving them a massive edge over their competitors. Reluctant ones got left behind. Others built a legacy for themselves, their families and their employees. AI is there today, where internet was in 1995. Question is … will you make AI part of your business?
Many small businesses are sitting on the sidelines, watching. This peeked my curiosity so I asked why. I found the answer. The hesitation around not using AI is small businesses are unsure of what exactly AI can do for them, and they don’t know how to put AI to work for them. Those questions are answered in this post.
Generate Awareness for your Business
AI is a godsend for businesses that haven’t been able to participate in the content creation game. There are two very specific reasons for this. Creating content takes time, and requires subject matter expertise. AI solves both those problems.
Whether it’s through Google search results, or through social media, content is how your prospects and customers will discover your business. Here’s how AI solves that problem for you.
AI can suggest topics based on trending keywords, and create blog posts and articles. It also gives you the best title that’s going to return the best engagement. Additionally, it will monitor conversations across your social media platforms and AI driven analytical tools will track engagement, suggest best times to post, and even identify your most influential followers.
You can use all of this information to create a more targeted content creation and distribution, and an effective social media strategy.
Keep you ahead of your competition
In addition to creating effective strategy for your business, AI can help you keep ahead of your competition. It can scour around the web and identify what your competition is doing, analyze it, and make recommendations for new content types, new imagery, or copy that’s going to return even greater views, shares and followers for you.
It can help you drive engagement through continually analyzing audience demographics, engagement rates, optimal posting times, uncovering social trends, make competitor comparisons, generate personalized content ideas based on influential and existing viral posts, and even generate copy for you to post along with your videos and pictures. It’s ideal for maximizing the impact of your blog and your social media content.
Personalization according to your Customers’ Preferences
Ever been to Amazon.com? Notice how that page is never the same for two people? All the products and offers you see on Amazon are personalized to your preferences. What if you could do the same for your customers? With AI, small businesses can make personalization a possibility.
AI can leverage its machine learning abilities to track your customer movements and behaviors on your website and create a heat map. Once it knows who the customer visiting the site is, it customizes the site to fit that user’s preferences and behaviors. Yes, it is now possible for a small business to provide a personalized experience for its customers online, and for a fraction of a cost if you were to build that functionality on your website without AI.
AI can also personalize your email marketing. Emails remain on the highest returning channels for small businesses yet effectively personalizing messages at scale can be really tough. AI simplifies that. It gets to know each subscriber through past engagement tracking while also segmenting your customers based on their shared interests or purchase intent signals. From thereon, AI takes on and customizes the email message length, tone, optimal send time, and product recommendations. The result? This impacts email opening rates, click rates, and directly impacts customer lifetime value.
Develop the Next Level Customer Service
As a small business, you’re constrained with two things – Time and Resources. AI solves that problem for you with regards to customer service. The answer lies in Chat Bots.
Chat bots can be fed the right data and info, and they become your assistants working 24/7. They can be empowered to answer greet visitors, answer common questions and routine inquiries, gather helpful customer data such as purchase history, communication preferences, and they can engage visitors instantly in your website, and across messaging apps at any hour for a fraction of what it would cost otherwise.
Conclusion of How can small businesses use AI
AI brings with it a lot of opportunities for small businesses. By being an early adopter of AI in your field, you can gain a real advantage. It’s about working smart and setting your brand up for long-term success.
Here’s another way to look at it. Every small commitment you make to AI today can lead to more outsized returns tomorrow. There is a reason why major corporations like Google, Apple & Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions on AI. It’s not because they can afford it, but because they know they will make trillions in the coming years.
So, these are just some ways small businesses can use AI, and there are more new ways being added every day. If you want to stay up to date on all the developments for branding and marketing for small business, subscribe to our newsletter. It’s worth it.