Is AI Marketing Worth It for Your Small Business?

As a small business owner, marketing is important to your business. You want to create content that drives traffic, increases your brand awareness, generates leads, and influences potential customers without a limited budget. How do you do this without hiring a team of experts? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one answer.

AI marketing can reduce costs and, if implemented correctly in your marketing strategy, can provide solutions for your small business. It can help small business owners run their businesses more efficiently, save time and money, as well as simplify tasks and reduce manual errors.

What Is AI Marketing

Artificial intelligence is a technology that attempts to simulate human intelligence in machines, including things such as facial recognition, speech recognition, and robotics. There are two important aspects of AI in marketing, namely artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Artificial intelligence is a type of machine learning that generates or studies algorithms in response to environmental changes.

Machine learning consists of algorithms and computers that are programmed to learn from experience without having to be explicitly programmed. Although machine learning is often seen as a subset of artificial intelligence, the two terms are not necessarily synonymous.

AI marketing is a strategy that uses data and machine learning to provide campaigns that help achieve brand goals more effectively. Most marketers use AI in market research, data service, and real-time activity analysis.

Now, what does this mean for marketers?

Business Benefits of AI Marketing

AI can simplify the sales process by using extremely detailed personal data, including real-time geolocation data, to create highly personalized products or services. Later in the journey, AI assists with up-selling and cross-selling, and can reduce the likelihood that customers will abandon their digital shopping carts.

For example, after a customer fills a shopping cart, the AI robot can provide motivational recommendations to help complete the sale -- such as "Great purchase! John from New York bought the same pants." Such initiatives can increase conversion rates by five times or more.

After the sale, AI-enabled service agents are available 24/7 to categorize customer requests and handle fluctuating service requests better than human agents. They can handle simple queries about delivery times or scheduling appointments, and they will refer more complex issues to human agents. In some cases, AI assists human staff by analyzing customer tone and suggesting different responses, instructing staff on how to best meet customer needs, or suggesting supervisor intervention.

Nowadays, AI marketing has been used to improve the performance and return on investment of digital marketing activities. It can also generate the following commercial benefits:

Smarter Advertising

AI helps improve account-based marketing solutions by using big data to promote insightful analysis and create smarter online advertising.

Better Search

AI and big data solutions can analyze consumers' digital search patterns and help identify key areas of marketing strategies.

Personalized Content

By combining big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, marketers can improve analysis to understand customers at the personal level and personalize content accordingly.

Improved Customer Service

Chat and other consumer participation tools are increasingly becoming the field of AI robots. As the performance of AI becomes more and more complex, this trend should continue.

Challenges of AI Marketing

One of the most immediate challenges marketing professionals will face when using AI and machine learning is the need to quickly adapt to the changes this technology brings to the market.

By understanding the challenges you may face when integrating AI into your marketing strategy, you can proactively avoid common problems and know how to deal with obstacles.

Lack of Quality Data

To grow your business in the digital age, you must understand the importance of quality data in improving marketing methods and increasing overall sales. However, data scarcity has become one of the main obstacles to AI reaching its highest levels of production. Various AI projects lose their usefulness due to data isolation, instability, and poor quality.

Humans in the modern world have seen more data available today than ever before. In practice, however, it is not often data sets suitable for AI applications. Still, entrepreneurs believe there is light at the end of the tunnel. Despite the data shortage, organizations are using their promising resources to build effective methods and make AI models learn.

High Investment Required

Cost is another key factor to keep in mind when implementing AI in your business strategy. Organizations have made significant investments in this area to add AI platforms to automate existing processes and enhance the user experience. The world's leading companies, such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, have invested in AI to fuel their future growth.

My friend who owns a clothing business wanted to adopt the AI strategy, but she didn’t know where to start. Start-ups who want to implement such AI marketing but lack skilled staff often need to outsource the program. This approach raises different issues related to the cost and maintenance of AI-purchased software. In addition, AI requires more computing power than traditional algorithms, so significant investment will be a prerequisite for automating business operations with AI technology.

Moral Issues

AI may seem creepy to some, while others see it as a compelling phenomenon. Like it or not, AI is woven into our reality. Digital marketers see AI as a way to grow their business and use it in the best way possible. But as AI advances by leaps and bounds, all sorts of ethical questions are springing up.

Importance of AI Marketing

There is no doubt that AI and machine learning will have a major impact on the future of marketing. As this technology continues to evolve, marketing professionals will encounter new challenges and opportunities.

Despite fears that AI will replace marketing professionals, there is still a need for "Humanization". If anything, the fact that AI will actually initially work with marketing professionals can be seen as a huge positive. One thing is for sure: marketing professionals will need to master this new technology if they want to succeed in the future.

Despite all the hype, AI can still only perform narrow tasks, rather than run entire marketing functions or processes. Nonetheless, it has provided huge benefits to marketers. In fact, it is essential in some marketing campaigns - and its capabilities are growing rapidly. We believe AI will eventually change marketing, but it's a journey that will take decades.

Is AI Marketing Worth It

Yes. AI can not only give your small business a deep understanding of important customer behavior but also save your business time, money, and important resources.

By targeting the right customers, you can optimize your marketing strategy: create attractive and useful content and publish them to the most viewed social media platform. AI marketing can really help with your small business by doing some heavy but rewarding work for you.