Marketing Strategies Podcast Episode 41 Using Artificial Intelligence To Streamline Your Marketing. What comes to mind when you hear the term, Artificial Intelligence? iRobot? Terminator? Unless you consider your Rumba an AI takeover, we are hardly there yet. We are, however, using AI to help streamline parts of our business every day, using it to delegate tasks that humans don’t want to do or AI can simply do faster and cheaper. There is a HUGE ROI on AI and Audrey is going to walk you through some ways you can implement automation or learn the lingo to help you hire a company that can do it for you.
Links Mentioned In This Episode:
Episode 33 – Marketing Recurring Revenue Streams for Steady business growth year after year
Episode 29- Maximizing Your Existing Customers to Grow Your Business
Episode 28 – A/B Testing to Convert More Leads Into Customers
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) To Streamline Your Marketing Summary
What does AI mean in Marketing?
AI has become a catch-all term for AI and Automation. Technically, not all of what I am talking about are machines that can learn and think for themselves but rather automation that can adapt based on the data that is provided.
Using technologies and systems to either replace a person who doesn’t want to do the work anyway because it’s tedious and boring OR making the process faster and more accident-proof.
The next thing it can do is create a better experience for your customers and clients.
AI doesn’t take sick days, vacation days. It doesn’t forget to do something because they are mad at their kids and they don’t decide to not do something because they are bored or don’t have enough time.
In most cases, it is cheaper than human labor, usually by more than half.
Example – A Zapier account for a single will run you between $29.99 per month for 20 tasks to maybe $75.00 per month for unlimited tasks.
This tool can do things like:
- Post a blog article to a website
- Send calendar event reminders to attendees
- Add event registrants from your zoom account to your CRM system for email follow up
- Add website contact form emails addresses to your personal email account and/or your CRM system.
How much do you pay one person in your business per month? I can almost guarantee it’s more than that. I can also say with confidence that most aren’t chomping at the bit to do any of the tasks I mentioned above.
Using AI technologies to automate decisions and tasks will save you time, money and help you create a better experience for your clients and customers. This is why it’s important to automate as much as possible in your marketing so you can focus on the important things in your business that only a human can do.
Examples of AI in Marketing
Websites
Service-based customers – Using a product like Calendly to get them to schedule an appointment with you on your calendar.
Giving away a high-value download or using a calculator to capture contact info for a specific product or service, then sending them a series of emails designed to get them to buy a product or service – All without a human getting involved until the person pushes a button in the email or website.
Social Media
Tools like Social Pilot allow you to not only schedule posts but pull in RSS feeds from your website blog to post those to social and pull from other sources from your industry to post them.
Facebook has some built-in AI as well with messaging you can set up. Depending on what a person wants to ask, you can set up messaging scripts with the platform. This is best for FAQs like, “Where can I buy your product?” or “What are your business hours?” “What’s your pricing for XXX.” This allows the customer to get the information they need quickly even at 1 a.m. while you are sleeping… or hopefully sleeping.
Digital Advertising
The major platforms, Google and Facebook, have intelligence built into to do A/B testing for you. If you want to know more about A/B testing, listen to Episode 28, where I walk you through what this is and how to do it. In short, you can put in up to 5 options for text and headers along with images and videos for your ad. It then mixes them and comes up with the best combinations based on the goal of the ad to get you conversions. Definitely check out the full episode for all the details, though.
Email Marketing – personalization, segmentation
Email marketing systems like Mailchimp have AI built in as well. They can segment your audience so you can set up a single email send or you can set up an automation that when a specific event happens, it sets off a series of emails.
Simple Example – Send out a birthday card to customers and leads on their birthday.
Complex Example – Contract renewal notification or Proposal request notification. Let’s say you drew up a proposal for a client and they didn’t become a customer. And for the type of service you offer (i.e. furnace cleaning) your services have to be redone every year. You can set up the system with the date field that when the correct timeframe hits, an email or a series of emails about the contract or the proposal goes out. In most cases, you’ll receive your signed contracts back hassle-free and in better cases, you gain a new customer whose choice from the previous time frame didn’t work out.
