Do you know how businesses can use AI to drive growth? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hot topic that has gripped people and organizations worldwide. This includes everyone from programmers in software development to tech company CEOs. It seems everyone has something to say about this emerging technology.
AI has made incredible leaps in recent years. Machine learning pushes the boundaries of what was once impossible. Interest in this technology has also grown as people discover an ever increasing number of ways to leverage AI in different types of operations. Business owners in particular should be excited about AI because it can help expand their enterprise in various ways.
In this guide, we will examine three ways small businesses can use AI to drive growth.
Understanding AI’s Expanding Presence
AI technology has been around for far longer than most people realize. AI is a powerful tool first developed in the 1950s and initially used to encode rules for computer programs.
AI’s role greatly expanded in the 2000s. This was when search engines such as Google began using it to optimize search-engine results. Cybersecurity firms also utilized the power of AI to detect anomalies in online transactions and deduce instances of fraud.
In recent years, AI’s usefulness has expanded far beyond that of just tech company. AI-powered tools are used by companies in finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and transportation industries.
Statista projects the AI market value to increase twentyfold by 2030. This is a massive increase, and one that demonstrates that AI is here to stay.
This technology has optimized numerous operations and has helped countless businesses save time and money, which in turn has encouraged many business owners to embrace AI solutions and make them a core part of their operations.
How Businesses Can Use AI to Drive Growth
One of AI’s biggest selling points is that it enables small and medium-sized businesses to achieve faster expansion. Such expansion is crucial for businesses that wish to gain prominence within their industry. Below, we delve into how businesses can use AI to drive growth.
1. Executing Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Any business that has set expansion as its primary goal should focus on marketing. The right marketing strategies will help businesses pull in more customers, leading to increased revenue.
Small-business owners can then invest back in their business. This allows them to scale up their operations and expand to other regions.
One marketing approach that can help businesses achieve such targets is personalized marketing campaigns. These campaigns target customers with personalized messages and offers, engaging with them on a more personal level. When done right, the campaign increases the likelihood of them making a purchase.
Personalized marketing campaigns can produce excellent results, but they are also difficult to implement. They typically require businesses to collect large quantities of customer data from brand interactions. Marketers must then analyze the data and tailor their messaging accordingly.
Performing this task manually is both tedious and unfeasible for businesses. It becomes even more difficult as the business scales up, which then ends up limiting the business’s growth.
Artificial intelligence has helped businesses overcome such marketing hurdles — thanks to its ability to collect and process large volumes of data without the need for manual operators.
A program that understands customer behavior can then send customized messages that resonate with customers. This encourages them to make a purchase.
2. Offering a Stream of SEO-Optimized Content
Maintaining an optimized website is crucial for small and medium-sized businesses that wish to reach more customers. Such websites are useful for prospective customers that wish to learn about the business’s products or services.
Search engines such as Google prioritize websites with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content in their results. This means a small or medium-sized business’s website may show up higher in the results than a large competitor’s website. That is, if it contains enough SEO content.
Google has a reputation for continually altering its SEO rules. Google search engine maintaines one consistent practice — favoring constantly updated websites with new and engaging SEO content.
In the past, businesses had to hire staff or copywriters to create and publish such web content. However, doing so was both costly and tedious.
Such content also had to fit specific SEO rules, including requirements related to the content length, keywords, and backlinks. This meant content had to be written and optimized by people familiar with SEO.
Businesses can overcome such web-content challenges by embracing AI. There has been a recent explosion in the number of content creation AI programs available today. These programs can generate large volumes of SEO content within minutes. They can also complete such tasks at a fraction of the cost of hiring writers.
Many businesses shied away from using such programs in the past because they had a reputation for producing robotic-sounding and unengaging content. However, the content that modern AI programs produce is indistinguishable from that of actual writers.
ChatGPT is probably the most popular language-processing tool in use today. Businesses across various industries use it to generate web content quickly. Businesses can use AI to research keywords and come up with engaging content ideas.
Other AI programs, such as Surfer SEO and Scalenut, provide guidelines for writers when creating SEO content. This AI-driven approach to content creation is incredibly useful for small and medium-sized businesses. The published content boosts website visibility in web search rankings, ultimately driving business growth.
Business owners shouldn’t underestimate AI’s usefulness in this area. After all, it helps them compete with larger businesses that have the resources to buy online ads. With AI, small and medium-sized businesses stand a fighting chance against giants.
3. Improved Customer Service
All successful business owners know that providing excellent customer service is important. In fact, many would say it is the key to making a business more popular. This is true from many angles.
Great customer service drives growth in various ways. For example, it helps build better customer relationships, leading to increased customer loyalty and retention.
Customers that are satisfied with a particular business’s customer service are also more likely to promote it. They may do this by recommending the business to their peers. All these help expand the company’s customer base.
Providing good customer service in the digital era is easier said than done. As businesses scale up their operations, they must ensure they have adequate resources to address each customer complaint. Traditionally, this involves maintaining a large customer-support team.
Large teams ensure customers are served individually. However, such teams are expensive to run due to both hiring and labor costs.
AI has eased the burden on businesses in this area in various ways. For example, AI-powered chatbots can take over the role of customer-service representatives. These tools can provide real-time responses to customer queries, keeping customers happy, even if they don’t get to speak to actual people.
For complex complaints, customers are connected with actual representatives. This approach means that there are still humans running the customer service team. However, the necessary number of staff is much smaller than it would be without AI tools.
AI systems are implemented for over-the-phone customer support. Tools such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri are capable of recognizing speech. Their systems can analyze what customers are saying, then either provide answers or redirect them accordingly.
The approach is especially useful for senior customers. Such customers generally aren’t tech savvy. Therefore, they aren’t as likely to communicate through website messages.
AI tools used in over-the-phone customer support can serve the needs of such customers to help them feel heard while being assisted in real time.
The Future of AI and Its Business Applications
As you can see, AI can drive the growth of businesses of all sizes. The technology is still evolving at a rapid pace, which makes it difficult to predict its future capabilities. At the very least, however, we can say that it will definitely help the businesses that embrace it.In fact, 73% of businesses either plan to use AI or are already using it.
Those that haven’t done so already risk falling behind competitors. Given the fact that competition is at an all-time high across multiple industries, it would be wise for business owners to utilize all the resources available to them in order to survive.
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