Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm with the advent of ChatGPT at the tail-end of 2022. However, while AI has been around for a very long time and is part and parcel of our daily lives in all sorts of ways, the mainstream consciousness toward the true potential of AI has only just awoken as we venture into 2023.
I’m sure we have all heard praise and criticism against ChatGPT all over the internet already. Our experts at Expertise Accelerated also did a breakdown of AI in finance in accounting, titled “The Impact of Chat GPT3 on Finance and Accounting”, which is an insightful read for curious entrepreneurs. However, this article is not about AI for finance! Instead, the larger focus will be AI marketing tools for business purposes.
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What are Artificial Intelligence Tools?
While AI may be all the rage right now, there is still a significant portion of the population that is both skeptical of it, as well as misinformed about what AI can do. For the average, old-school America, AI may as well seem like the future from the Terminator movies come to life. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.
Conceptualizing what AI is can be difficult if you get bogged down in technological jargon, so let’s think about it in simpler terms. What AI is doing is pattern recognition and replication.
For example, say you tell ChatGPT to write a heartfelt email about the death of a coworker. Now, what the AI will do is it will scour its immense database of information on human communication and interaction, data that it collects through data harvesting on the internet, and by using past examples of what such an email would sound like, it will construct and tailor an email for your exact purposes. While the content will be largely generalized, you can then tell it more personal information to use and personalize the email.
Now, this is the fun part. That little hypothetical AI conversation I made up above will then be stored in the AI’s database, and it will learn from its interaction with you what to do and not do when doing that task. Now think about the millions of people all using AI for their purposes; the picture becomes clear when you think about it this way. AI talks to you based on its existing database, and while talking to you uses the data you provide to grow its database further. Talking to an AI is like talking to a person if they had a perfect memory and a near-infinite database to draw from in conversation.
And precisely because of this limitation of being confined to existing knowledge, AI is not the threat people perceive it to be. AI cannot innovate, and it cannot be consistently apprised of current information. Plus, strict regulation is placed on AI to prevent it from being misused by malicious actors. So, while AI looks quite dangerous at first glance, it is not more than a computer program answering prompts based on old data, which is basically what we did already when we manually researched anything online, except this time, a program does it all for us in way less time.
With that out of the way, without further ado, let’s jump right into it and look at some of the best ways toleverage AI to skyrocket your business’ growth.
AI Marketing Tools for Beginners
SEO Content Generation
One of the greatest uses of AI currently is the ability to generate search-engine-optimized website content. One of the biggest business marketing expenses today is content generation because, without content, your business will fade into obscurity. You need to find a way to bring people to your website, and the only way to do that is to rank highly in search engine searches. Start-up businesses are especially vulnerable to failure because they have to work on an extremely tight budget, which means spending on SEO content generation may as well not be in the cards with how expensive good content writers can be today.
AI marketing tools for content alleviate this precise expense. By simply paying about $50-100 per month, entrepreneurs can access the most sophisticated content-generation AI in the world, many of which are so smart that they might even outshine their human counterparts.
Content generation is all about quality and quantity. You need a way to have a constant flow of content being pushed out of business, and each piece of content be so well-made that it makes the front page of Google. While there is certainly a tremendous variety of content marketing AI tools on the market, here are some trusted names to help you get started in finding the right content assistant for your business:
Visual Content Generation
While the basic need for your business’ marketing needs may be fulfilled with SEO content generation, visual content can take it to the next level.
It’s the age of visual marketing today. We have concrete data suggesting that visual-based content such as images, promotional videos, and the like are far more effective than written content, with Forbes reporting that 91% of survey participants agree.
So then, why are so many small businesses not investing in visual content? The answer is simply that it has not been worth the cost, until now. Before AI became mainstream and acceptable, marketing experts had to employ graphic designers to handle visual content, and on average, Venngage reports that 18% of marketers revealed that it took them upwards of 20 hours to get the graphic design sorted.
This is not worth the cost, so many businesses use stock images and low-effort visual content, banking more on the written content. But now, the doors have opened. Visual AI marketing tools have hit the market, and you can go ahead and start attracting customers right away with tailor-made visual content, with the ability to fine-tune everything to fit your brand image. Some good choices for visual content AI marketing tools are:
- Designs.ai
- Adobe Sensei
- Uizard
- Data-Analysis
While AI content generation is truly an amazing alternative for start-ups and small businesses, real meat and potatoes of AI marketing tools lie on the data-analysis side.
AI is essentially a requirement for marketing today. This is because AI does what no person can: compile and categorize huge datasets. As a business, you are constantly generating and storing new data. For example, data on the business’ internal workings, sales patterns, customer purchase patterns, etc., but this information is largely useless if left in human hands. It is simply impossible for a human to sift through gigabytes and terabytes of information in any timely manner, but for an AI, it’s just another afternoon.
By leveraging data analytics AI marketing tools, you can take all that bulk data and use to make business decisions. For example, you can see the history of a product’s sales, and based on that history, the AI will predict and suggest your future course of action, should things continue at the same pace. With this knowledge, you can decide weeks in advance what you will be doing, and augment your marketing strategy appropriately.
Similarly, AI can scour social media, and see what the public says about your business. By analyzing your public standing, you can figure out how to improve your brand image and address any customer grievances going forward.
You get the idea. AI marketing tools for data analysis make it so that you can essentially create an estimated simulation of the business’s future, and strategize accordingly. Things don’t always go according to plan, but as far as being prepared and knowing what to do is concerned. Data analysis AI is the best way to stay on top of everything. Some of the best data analytics and forecasting AI marketing tools are:
Conclusion
And this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding AI marketing tools. Artificial Intelligence tools are making progress in leaps and bounds, and new tools coming out weekly these days that tailor to a different niche and demand. So, with all this variety available, why not give AI marketing tools a shot? Maybe you will like it, or maybe you won’t, but the fact of the matter is that AI is the future. You can choose to delay the inevitable use of it and be late to the party, or stay ahead of the curve and start leveraging these tools now. AI is still young and integration into business is shaky right now, so it’s the best time to start using these alternative solutions and capitalize on the competitive edge.