Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, understanding the disruptive technologies of Artificial Intelligence and how they are infiltrating our world, is crucial for staying competitive in today’s market. In this three-part series, we’re unravelling the transformative potential of AI tools for customer data insights and routine inbound and outbound tasks that are reshaping the way we market, sell, and engage with customers.
In part 1, I talked about the evolution of AI and its role in business operations, its use cases and application in diverse industries. I outlined many of the specific business opportunities that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT presents, the challenges to consider, and practical steps for businesses to get started with AI adoption.
Today, part 2, we’re delving into the dynamic synergy between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the business jurisdictions of marketing and sales. Hold on tight as we’re about to embark on a journey that uncovers the transformative power of AI tools for customer data insights, content marketing, outreach and prospecting that are redefining marketing campaigns, enhancing customer engagement, and propelling sales growth.
From predictive analytics that decode consumer behaviour to the conversational prowess of AI-powered chatbots, businesses are experiencing a paradigm shift in their approach to marketing and sales. It’s a digital revolution fuelled by data, and AI is at the helm of this transformative voyage.
The marriage of AI and marketing isn’t just a trend; it’s a strategic evolution that has fundamentally altered the landscape of customer interactions. Whether you’re a small business owner looking to optimise your marketing spend or a sales professional seeking data-driven insights, AI offers a suite of tools and techniques that elevate your strategies to new heights.
Later, I’ll be sharing some use cases and specific AI software of how AI-powered solutions are enabling businesses to make marketing campaigns smarter, customer interactions more personalised, and sales processes more efficient.
Prepare to be inspired by the possibilities that AI unlocks for businesses of all sizes!
But, let’s start off by exploring how ChatGPT can help or hinder business. Because the fast-emerging use cases are quite astounding, I know it’s pretty hard to keep up with it all. Still, that doesn’t mean you should bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away.
Even if you might call yourself tech challenged, or possibly tech phobic, there are some incredible opportunities for you to use some of the freely available AI tools for your business, even if you only start with baby steps.
So, stay tuned as we continue our journey through the world of AI and discover how you can survive and thrive to help take your business to the next level.
In this episode/article, we’re focusing on the use of AI and chatbots in marketing and sales, and the way these artificial but effective conversations can greatly augment your customer engagement, and customer experience.
The 4 Biggest Challenges that AI Amplifies for Business Owners
There are many main ways AI can impact revenue, and they mirror the four biggest challenges many business owners face that fall into to do with competition, skills, cost and process. Let’s go through each of the four.
#1 – COMPETITION
In the age of AI, the challenge of standing out in any given niche has just increased several orders of magnitude. You’re now competing with people who can create a tonne of marketing content or online courses on anything and they can do it crazy fast.
But some businesses, large and small are investing a lot of time and energy into being on the front of the wave.
And I pretty sure AI is going to be a long-term thing, so it’s totally worth getting a good surf board. Or as they say: you’re going to need a bigger boat!
As subject matter experts in our field, there’s always been the challenge of explaining the difference between education-based marketing and information sources, or between info products and educational courses. But now we’re about to see the market flooded big time with mediocre content, both in marketing and the e-learning arena.
#2 – SKILLS
One reason why getting started with AI and ChatGPT type technologies is hard is if you haven’t yet had a lot of practice doing it. It’s so new, most of us haven’t!
For many professional experts, they’re great at their subject area but struggle with marketing and especially “selling”. Just the mere mention of the word ‘sell’ or ‘pitching’ or ‘sales’ can have them sweating and anxious.
In the last episode/article I touched on a few areas where AI and ChatGPT could bring you an immediate productivity boost in work you’re undoubtedly already doing in your business. Generative AI tools enable an astoundingly significant increase in the level of content marketing and copywriting that you can create, without the costs of outsourcing or hiring writers or designers. And other operational admin such as analysing data and summarising meetings and calls.
They (whoever ‘they’ are…) say “practice makes perfect” but the problem for most consultants and coaches is that you don’t know what you don’t know. There are some basic marketing tips, but it’s the finer nuances of creating effective sales copy and sales conversation scripts that will make the difference between something converting and not converting to a sale.
However, you’re in luck. With the right prompts, you can have ChatGPT create an outline for your sales copy or script. When you give it specific instructions and context, such as where your prospect is in your marketing and sales process (e.g. the nominal cold, warm, hot ranking or the customer journey awareness to decision continuum – unaware, symptom aware, problem aware, solution aware), it actually does a pretty great job. And then you can modify, adjust, refine before going further to build out the full copy from the outline.
Now look, anything new will feel confusing and overwhelming – and AI and ChatGPT more so, because behind the scenes at least it’s complicated stuff. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because we don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it can’t be valuable. For instance, you don’t need to understand how an engine works to drive your car, right?
First few times you try to use it or do something new with it, you’ll probably suck – you’ll have two reactions. Either you’ll think ‘oh this is so cool, really fun and amazing …” or you’ll think “I don’t get it, where do I start, this is waste of time”.
Like learning to ride a bike as a child, you had to practice, experiment, fall over a few times. Nothing you can do about that, except to have someone in your court with you, guiding you and helping you balance until you’re riding on your own enough to be safe…
And so you need to be compassionate with yourself that what you do with these tools won’t be easy or perfect first time. Like learning to ride a bike, if you were lucky you had someone holding onto you so you didn’t hurt yourself too badly.
#3 – COST
On the question of cost, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that using AI can make your business more efficient. And if you’re looking to grow your business, then that streamlining is the first step to increasing capacity.
One of the best ways to make your business more efficient is by using ChatGPT. This AI-powered chatbot can help you automate many of the tasks that you would normally have to do manually, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus on more important things.
With ChatGPT, you can automate customer service, marketing, and even sales. This means that you can respond to customer inquiries faster, send out targeted marketing messages, and close more sales.
Additionally, ChatGPT can help you gather valuable data about your customers, which you can then use to improve your products and services.
More detail on those two areas in a moment. All of this adds up to a more efficient business that can grow faster and more sustainably.
So, if you’re serious about doubling your business productivity or reducing your costs, then you need to start thinking about how you can use AI tools and ChatGPT to make it happen.
#4 – PROCESS
For the sales and marketing process, as technology continues to evolve and reshape the way we do business, we face a new set of challenges in the age of AI and chatbots. The rise of artificial intelligence and automated bots has disrupted traditional sales practices, making it more difficult than ever for consultants, coaches, and other professional service providers to close deals and meet their revenue targets.
It’s super hard to sell to people who have little awareness of the problem you help solve. But it’s also just as hard if they have a particular viewpoint and are looking in the wrong direction for a solution. Education and automated support can course correct customers’ queries, misinformation and send them down a more insightful path.
The bridge for most is education-based marketing that pre-sells and pre-qualifies your best-fit prospects, coupled with customer support chatbots and AI tools that rapidly gather and analyse customer data to provide valuable insights on buying preferences and behaviours.
When you implement these elements, gradually or all at once, you’ll have much better sales conversations and conversions, and are less likely to have to handle as many objections as talking to ‘cold’ prospects.
And that brings us full circle back to content marketing.
By leveraging the power of these technologies – whether you use ChatGPT, Bing’s AI and Google’s Bard – if you’re willing to make the effort to get the right sequence of prompts, these generative AI tools, you can create really valuable and high-converting content that does all the things that content marketing is intended to do for your business. Only it does it at lightning speeds.
That connects back to my episode on elevating your content marketing by being more strategic and intentional about what you’re creating and sharing.
What this means in practice, is that the level of work and time involved to get your content marketing up and running and your sales collateral in place is vastly reduced. So, you can achieve your goals faster than ever before. Testing your messaging, testing your sales materials, testing your sales call structure, will all take you in the right direction, and making sure your content and copy are working in harmony across your customers’ journey with you.
Key Challenges for the Sales Process
Challenge 1: Keeping Up with Changing Customer Expectations
As AI and chatbots continue to shape the customer experience, business owners, marketing teams, and sales professionals need to be able to keep up with changing customer expectations.
Customers now expect a more personalised and engaging experience, and you’ll want to be able to deliver this level of service in order to remain competitive.
To overcome this challenge, consider some investment in building your brand and enhancing your online presence. You can also implement AI chatbots to provide immediate support and assistance on your business sites.
Applications of AI in digital experience analytics include AI monitoring that predict customer experience issues and opportunities, AI Insights that deliver smart alerts to drive action, and intent-based scoring.
Integrating visitor monitoring tools on your website, coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, gives you powerful insights into how customers are interacting with your pages.
But data insights are pointless if it fails to result in action. If you’re going big on this, then the tool to explore is Contentsquare, which provides intelligent alerts, intent-based scoring, and automapping and autozoning.
If you want something simple to make your website better, you might look at CrazyEgg or HotJar. You can put your website URL in, create an account and get an instant heatmap picture, it’s free for 30 days – so why not have a look at yours and have a play. If your website is WordPress, it’s even easier to install the CrazyEgg plugin and get going.
Contentsquare is another great tool, albeit somewhat more sophisticated and pricey. Once set up on your site, it learns how your business metrics normally fluctuate and delivers smart alerts when deviations occur from what is normal. You can set up intelligent alerts anywhere from key points in the customer journey to specific interactions points with content.
Functions such as automapping and autozoning are super insightful. How this works is that the AI tool intelligently recognises types of web pages for digital experience analytics, as well as automatically detects zones on pages, speeding up time to insights. Behaviours, intent and feelings can be analysed faster and more easily, including specific interactions with your different content on a page, such as video, sliders and other interactive elements.
Lead scoring tools can bring a lot of value, but when used on their own, they lack the behavioural component that can drive the appropriate timing of your touch points. What you need is an accurate buyer intent scoring solution. Intent-based scoring is way more insightful. It literally is a tool that helps you can score experiences based on customer intent. You first establish a baseline of customer frustrations during the user journey and then prioritise actions to improve customer experience satisfaction.
Lift AI is the only buyer intent scoring solution to effectively integrate profile-based lead scoring with real-time behavioral data, giving you the best of both worlds. Lift AI features a proprietary machine-learning model that has been trained on more than one billion third-party data points and 14 million live sales engagements analyzed over a 15-year period.
Challenge 2: Competition from Chatbots
One of the most significant challenges that businesses face in the age of AI – and it’s related to changing customer expectations – is competition from automated chatbots. Customer preference seems to be steering more towards a speedy response over a human response.
Chatbots are becoming increasingly common on websites and social media platforms, and they can provide customers with immediate assistance and support, as well as prompt action-taking.
While chatbots can be a valuable tool for a business, they can also pose a threat to you if your sales process relies on building relationships and providing tailored services.
To overcome this challenge, whether you’re a professional service provider, small business or bigger company or institution, you’ll need to focus on demonstrating your value as a trusted advisor. But you too can leverage AI and chatbots to improve your own customer experience and boost your sales process, so you get the best of both worlds.
If you’re interested to explore AI-powered chatbots as a way to provide immediate assistance 24/7 to customer or client inquiries and support requests, you can set these up on your website as well as on your social media business pages.
Chatbots are really great at providing around-the-clock customer support and answering common questions quickly and efficiently. This can free up your human staff to focus on more complex issues.
You see in action, this when you use Amazon chat support or other retailers or banks etcetera – you start off with the bot but if you’re question doesn’t land on their standard Q&As that bots can answer, it will ask ‘do you wish to talk to an adviser’ or something along those lines. One did actually say ‘would you like a human to assist you?’ which I thought was very transparent and helpful.
Chatbots can answer frequently asked questions and they can guide customers through the product/service selection process, and assist with common issues. They ensure that customers receive immediate responses, which leads to improved satisfaction and increased sales conversions.
Some popular AI-powered chatbot tools include:
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Chatzap – a widget you can add to your website to give you instant customer support 24/7. You can train it, customise it, and use it to streamline interactions, lead capture and quick answers to visitor queries.
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Intercom offers a suite of customer support tools, including a chatbot that can be used to answer customer questions, provide self-service support, and collect feedback.
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Zendesk Chat is a chatbot platform that can be used to create and deploy chatbots on your website or in your mobile app. It also offers integrations with other Zendesk products, such as Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell.
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Freshdesk Chat (formerly Zopim) is another chatbot platform that can be used to create and deploy chatbots on your website or in your mobile app. It also offers integrations with other Freshdesk products, such as Freshdesk Support and Freshdesk CRM.
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Drift is a premium AI-powered buyer engagement platform that automatically listens, understands, and learns from buyers to create the most personalised experiences possible. I haven’t used it on my site yet but had a nosey around on the free plan. I like the feature of conversational landing pages that take buyers from an ad directly into a conversation with your bot or team.
In summary, there really are a lot of benefits with these integrated support chatbots that can bump up your customers’ experience and boost sales. They’re great at reducing response time, enhancing customer engagement, and allowing your human support team to focus on more complex queries. Chatbots can also upsell or cross-sell relevant products or services to customers during interactions, further boosting sales and ‘average cart value’.
If your business includes a range of products or courses or ‘off the shelf’ offers, then using AI-driven recommendation engines may be of interest too. These tools provide customers with personalised product or service suggestions based on their preferences, browsing history, and purchase behaviour.
For example, tools like Segment or Dynamic Yield use AI algorithms analyse customer data, such as previous purchases, browsing behaviour, and demographic information, to generate product recommendations. These recommendations can be displayed on your website, in email marketing campaigns, or through mobile apps.
The benefit of personalised recommendations is that it increases the likelihood of customers finding products or services that match their interests, resulting in higher conversion rates. Customers feel more valued when presented with relevant choices, which can lead to increased loyalty and repeat business.
By implementing these AI-powered solutions for customer support, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience, streamline interactions, and ultimately increase conversion to sales. These tools not only improve customer satisfaction but also contribute to revenue growth by optimising the sales process.
Challenge 3: Managing and Analysing Data
This is another significant challenge for businesses in the age of AI is managing and analysing large volumes of data. AI and chatbots generate vast amounts of data, and you or your marketing and sales team will benefit from taking the time to analyse this data. It will help you to identify key trends, buying behaviours, and sales opportunities.
The good news is that you can meet this challenge head on by leveraging both AI tools for customer data insights and AI-powered analytics tools both to gather and evaluate insights, and come up with informed decisions from the patterns emerging. There’s a little bit of overlap with customer support tools, but also some specific data analysing software.
There’s a whole host of AI tools for businesses at your disposal to handle this challenge: data analytics and insights, data preparation and cleaning, machine learning, natural language process for text analysis, data visualisation, right through to fraud detection and prevention and supply chain optimisation.
If this is a particular area of interest for your business, you might want to invest in a training and development program to improve your data analysis skills, and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies.
Data Analytics and Insights
- Use Case: Use AI tools to analyse large datasets and extract valuable insights for informed decision-making.
- Tool Example: Consider using “Tableau” with AI integrations, such as “Einstein Analytics” by Salesforce or “Power BI” by Microsoft. These tools can provide advanced data visualisation and predictive analytics capabilities.
- How it Works: AI algorithms help in processing vast amounts of data quickly, identifying trends, patterns, and correlations that may not be apparent through manual analysis. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimise their operations.
Customer Segmentation and Personalisation
- Use Case: Employ AI-driven customer segmentation to tailor marketing campaigns and communication to specific customer groups.
- Tool Example: Tools like IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics or Segment offer AI-powered customer segmentation capabilities.
- How it Works: AI algorithms analyse customer data to identify distinct segments based on behaviours, preferences, and demographics. Businesses can then target each segment with personalised marketing messages, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Text Analysis
- Use Case: Utilise NLP-based AI tools to analyse and extract insights from large volumes of text data, such as customer reviews, social media comments, and survey responses.
- Tool Example: MonkeyLearn” is an AI tool that offers text analysis capabilities, including sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and keyword extraction.
- How it Works: NLP algorithms process unstructured text data, making it easier to understand customer sentiment, identify emerging trends, and gain actionable insights from textual information.
Other tools include:
- spaCy is an open-source natural language processing (NLP) library in Python. It offers a variety of NLP features, such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition.
- NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is an open-source NLP library in Python. It offers a variety of NLP features, such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and sentiment analysis.
- Google Cloud Natural Language is a cloud-based NLP API that offers a variety of NLP features, such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and language translation
Fraud Detection and Prevention
- Use Case: Implement AI-powered fraud detection systems to analyse transaction data in real-time and identify potentially fraudulent activities.
- Tool Example: Sift and Kount are AI-based fraud prevention platforms that use machine learning algorithms to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions.
- How it Works: These tools analyse transaction patterns and historical data to identify anomalies and flag potentially fraudulent activities, helping businesses reduce financial losses and protect their customers.
Supply Chain Optimisation
- Use Case: Employ AI to optimise supply chain management by analysing data related to inventory, demand forecasting, and logistics.
- Tool Example: Llamasoft and Blue Yonder offer AI-driven supply chain optimisation solutions that can help businesses streamline operations and reduce costs.
- How it Works: AI algorithms analyse data from various sources to make real-time supply chain recommendations, including inventory management, transportation optimisation, and demand forecasting.
Data Preparation and Cleaning
Suggested tools:
- Databricks is a unified data analytics platform that can be used for data preparation, cleaning, and transformation. It offers a variety of features, such as a visual workflow builder, a library of pre-built functions, and support for multiple programming languages.
- PrestoDB is an open-source distributed SQL query engine that can be used to query data from a variety of sources, such as Hadoop, Amazon S3, and Google Cloud Storage. It is fast and scalable, making it ideal for processing large volumes of data.
- Spark is a unified analytics engine that can be used for data preparation, cleaning, and transformation. It offers a variety of features, such as a distributed processing framework, a library of pre-built functions, and support for multiple programming languages.
Data Visualisation
Suggested tools:
- Tableau is a popular data visualisation tool that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports. It is easy to use and does not require any coding knowledge.
- Power BI is another popular data visualisation tool that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite and integrates with other Microsoft products, such as Excel and SharePoint. There’s also SalesForce’s Einstein Analytics.
- Looker is a cloud-based data visualisation tool that allows users to create and share interactive dashboards and reports. It is easy to use and does not require any coding knowledge.
Machine Learning
Suggested tools:
- TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework that can be used to build and train machine learning models. It is one of the most popular machine learning frameworks and is used by companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
- PyTorch is another open-source machine learning framework that can be used to build and train machine learning models. It is known for its flexibility and ease of use.
- Scikit-learn is an open-source machine learning library in Python. It offers a variety of machine learning algorithms, such as classification, regression, and clustering.
These are just a few examples of AI tools that can be used to help businesses with managing and analysing large volumes of data. The best tools for your business will depend on your specific needs and requirements.
Challenge 4: Ensuring Data Privacy and Security
Finally, businesses need to be able to ensure the privacy and security of their clients’ data in the age of AI and chatbots. With so much sensitive information being collected and analysed by these technologies, it’s critical that we take the necessary steps to protect our clients’ data and maintain their trust.
Suggested tools to support compliance with data privacy and data security are:
Cloudera Altus is a cloud-based data platform that offers a variety of data security and compliance features, such as data encryption, access control, and audit logging.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lake Formation is a cloud-based data governance service that makes it easy to build, secure, and manage data lakes. It offers a variety of features, such as data encryption, access control, and data auditing.
Microsoft Azure Purview is a cloud-based data governance service that helps organizations manage their data across different platforms. It offers a variety of features, such as data cataloguing, data lineage tracking, and access control.
If you’re in serious need with regards to customer and client data privacy and security, you can invest in cybersecurity expertise and training to ensure you’re implementing best practices and staying compliant especially with regards to any regulatory body requirements. You might also consider working with technology-orientated business partners that prioritise privacy and security in their products and services.
The Power of AI for Marketing, Growth and Scaling
If you’re really looking to fast growth and scaling, you definitely need to understand how generative tools can support your marketing productivity.
AI tools, and in particular generative AI tools like ChatGPT, uses natural language processing to understand users’ queries and provide relevant responses in real-time.
As I’ve talked you through in the previous section, chatbots can help you support the customer experience, generate more qualified, informed leads and increase conversions by engaging with potential customers and guiding them through your sales process.
By leveraging generative AI tools, you can improve your business’s efficiency, productivity and profitability just by using it to support you with marketing. I encourage you to explore generative AI and see the difference it can make for your content creation and your lead generation.
To help you get started, I’m going to share some key use cases to support marketing that can allow your business to grow and scale without the outsourcing or hiring you’d have to do to achieve the same output.
To illustrate how these technologies can help you enhance your business intelligence, productivity, content creation, customer engagement, and sales process, let’s circle back to customer data first of all.
#1 – AI Tools for Customer Data Insights and Analysis
One key use case is using AI to analyse customer data and create personalised content that resonates with your target audience. By using AI to understand customer preferences and behaviour, you can create content that speaks directly to their needs and interests.
Another use case is using ChatGPT to enhance customer engagement. Chatbots powered by ChatGPT can provide personalised support to customers 24/7, answering their questions and providing solutions to their problems. But that data can also be fed into your content plan and information you provide on your website about what you do. So if anything isn’t clear, you get a chance to clarify it on your page copy or your marketing and sales process.
Finally, AI can help you streamline your marketing by identifying the most promising leads and providing insights into their behaviour. By using AI to prioritise leads and personalise sales pitches, you can close deals faster and more efficiently. Overall, leveraging AI and ChatGPT is essential for businesses looking to accelerate growth and stay ahead of the competition.
#2 – AI Tools for Meeting and Client Calls
There are many tools we are already using that now have an AI-powered engine integrated in its functionality. For instance, you can use an AI app to save an instant recording of the conversation, full transcript and AI summary – and it’s pretty good for what you need it for.
For instance, with our clients, we do a Strategy Call or a Scoping Call if it’s a digital project and I usually take detailed notes, and used to have to remember to hit the record button (sometimes I don’t – human error!) Over the past year, I’ve experimented with two AI aids. The first is I use a tool like Zoom’s AI or Fathom, to produce the transcript and AI summary from the recording, and second, I can ask ChatGPT to give me the main objectives for our strategy or write the project proposal.
If you haven’t already, I urge you to try it, just for fun, have a play, that’s the only way you’ll see the power of this.
What you’re able to do here is save hours of time on tasks that you can do, and have the expertise to do, but that this tool does in seconds, and your job is to check its output is accurate and useful for your intended purposes.
I can tell you this is a giant leap after we already had a giant leap with the appearance a few years back of transcription tools like Descript, Otter and more recently, Fathom. Because in my consulting work, we do a lot of external evaluations, which involve gathering data from stakeholders – and we end up with a lot of calls, interviews, focus group recording. We get these transcribed and then import into a qualitative data analysis software.
For years, we hired a transcription specialist who’d spend hours painstakingly listening and transcribing everything – Victoria, thanks you were awesome. But for our purposes, the automated transcripts are just fine, maybe tweaking for sense and not so great if the sound quality is poor, but 100x faster definitely trumps 100s of hours and 10x as many pounds.
#3 – Automating Repetitive Tasks
One of the biggest challenges for businesses is the need to automate repetitive tasks. This is where AI and ChatGPT come in. By harnessing the power of these technologies, businesses can streamline their operations and focus on growth. AI can be used to automate tasks such as data entry, customer service, and inventory management.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, can be used to automate customer interactions, such as answering frequently asked questions and providing personalised recommendations. By automating these tasks, businesses can free up their employees to focus on more strategic tasks, such as developing new products and services or expanding into new markets.
In addition, AI and ChatGPT can help businesses improve their efficiency and reduce costs, which can ultimately lead to increased profitability. If you’re looking to accelerate your business growth, then harnessing the power of AI and ChatGPT is a must. By doing so, you can take your business to the next level and achieve the success you’ve always dreamed of.
#4 – Accelerating Content Creation
Currently, we produce our blog posts and podcast episodes from scratch. Based on a content plan I create around our key themes, we do the research, explore the best keywords, outline the article or episode script, then either draft out the whole piece or record and edit then transcribe.
With ChatGPT, we can have it do 80% of the content production – well possibly right now about 50% but we’re getting better at the prompts to generate higher quality outputs. We give it the context, our target audience and ideal customer, we ask it to outline a blog post complete with headers, we ask it to build out each section. I then go in as the human editor to help restructure, refine, and then we go in a layer in the internal links, quotes and additional resources.
There are a growing number of generative AI tools coming down the pipe now, including the new AI-powered Bing search, Claude.ai and google’s Bard. After a fair play to each, I’ve not found any to be as effective as ChatGPT. However, they are a little more “toned down” in terms of style of phrasing.
That’s on the content marketing side, but it’s similar for courses, whether that for lead magnets or paid products. AI presents new challenges for educators and online learning providers too, and we’ll cover this separately in the next part of this series. Because there are several ways these challenges can be overcome, especially when you focus on the unique value that we as experts and human beings offer.
Another AI-powered solution to all of this is a new tool on the block called BlogToPod, as the name suggests purporting to support turning blogs into podcasts using AI. You simply copy and paste your blog, choose a voice, and your podcast is ready to go. If you don’t have a podcast, but you do publish a regular blog or articles, it might be worth investigating as a way to reach new audiences without the time commitment of preparing podcast episodes from scratch. (You’d still want to do the whole podcast launch thing though – I covered this in episode 34 or you can read as an article.)
#5 – Identifying New Opportunities for Growth
By leveraging AI and ChatGPT to analyse your data, you can uncover new opportunities for growth that you may have never considered before. These technologies can help you identify patterns and trends in your data that would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect manually.
Zaplify is a brand-new AI-powered sales aid you can use to find key decision makers, reach out automatically, and get actionable insights – all in one platform. If you’re doing regular pipeline development work, it helps eliminate a tonne of manual and repetitive sales processes.
You can use the Zaplify platform to search and engage with more than 600 million decision makers through automated prospecting and multi-channel outreach. This really saves on the painstaking grunt work for identifying and finding leads.
The free plan on Zaplify is pretty great if you want to try it out, because you get 20 prospects a month, which really suits small businesses who aren’t looking for high numbers inside their pipeline. All features include LinkedIn + Email outreach, 600M+ decision makers, Contact details and an AI Assistant.
With this information, delivered fast to your desktop, you can make smarter decisions about where to focus your resources and how to optimise your operations. For example, AI and ChatGPT can help you identify new markets to expand into, new products to develop, or new marketing strategies to pursue. You just need to put in the right prompts and ask it to generate insights.
By leveraging these AI technologies, you can gain a competitive edge and accelerate your growth. So, if you’re committed to growing your business, it’s time to start exploring the power of AI and ChatGPT to unlock new opportunities. Because you can bet your life, your competitors will be.
First Next Steps
Hopefully, this has helped you see how AI, and in particular generative AI tools and chat bots, are powerful technologies that can help businesses boost their productivity and sales.
And yes, there are certainly challenges and concerns to be mindful of in terms of managing risks, staffing decisions etc. But there are also ways to circumnavigate or overcome them as part of your business growth strategy.
As I mentioned in part 1, I’m finalising the manuscript for a short monograph to accompany my book Leveraged Consulting in the Digital Age to address both possibilities and pitfalls of AI, which I hope will help point you to many of the genuine ways can accelerate a business’s profitability and growth. If you’d like an advanced copy and are happy to provide me with feedback and possibly a review when it’s published, go to jayallyson.com/leveragedbusiness/the-ai-advantage/ to register your interest.
Small businesses do face a new set of challenges in the age of AI, chatbots and ChatGPT like tools, but AI is not only for the big corporations. Even if you’re a solopreneur or small partnership, you have access to much of the new ‘ready-to-use’ technology that can help you succeed, to get more done and grow faster.
To sum up, using AI tools for customer data insights, content marketing and routine tasks can really boost your sales and marketing.
First, you can use AI to build stronger relationships with your audience, and with your customers or clients by providing more engaging content, more personalised and effective support.
Second, by leveraging AI-powered chatbots, companies can streamline their customer service operations and provide personalised experiences that keep customers coming back for more.
Third, AI can be used to analyse customer data and identify patterns that can inform marketing and sales strategies, and lead to increased conversion to sales and revenue.
However, it’s important to remember that AI is not a silver bullet and must be used in conjunction with human expertise to achieve optimal results.
It’s definitely worth investing some time to explore and keep up-to-date with the latest AI trends and technologies to ensure you manage any risks and stay in business.
Just making a start to think about your business needs, look into the possibilities and learn the ropes, you’ll be in a good place to stay ahead of the competition in today’s rapidly changing business environment.
By taking these first next steps, you can position your business for success.
FURTHER READING
https://www.enterprisenation.com/learn-something/how-small-businesses-can-leverage-ai/
Go to the third and final article in this series Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI:
Create Online Courses that Sell with Transformational Learning Designs
