How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Marketing for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
by Julia Giacoboni, Director of Product Marketing
It's hard out there for marketers of small to medium-sized businesses (also called SMBs). Long gone are the days of buying a YellowBook listing or running your logo on a diner placemat and quickly seeing a lift in sales.
Instead, typical day-to-day marketing tasks get stuck around navigating the evolving and immerging ad space, understanding ROI when you’re marketing on a dozen platforms, responding to reviews or questions on social media, and finding how to influence your perfect audience (when remarketing just is not as easy as it used to be). Add in content creation, tending to your customer base, finding new customers, and driving more leads all at once.
Whatever. Just use AI. Phone it in and let the robots do it!
We’re kidding. But integrating AI for SMB marketing efforts can be a cost-effective, impactful way to support a sales and data-driven strategy — and help make life EASIER!
Feeling overwhelmed? Intimidated? Not tech savvy? No coding background or lightsaber ownership is required here. Let’s break down some of the easy-to-implement AI-based techniques and tools you can incorporate into your business strategy to optimize your processes, elevate your marketing, and drive sales.
Key Opportunities:
- Personalization: AI helps SMBs quickly customize marketing campaigns to individual customers by analyzing their data, like purchase history and online behavior.
- AI-powered propensity and analytics: AI can reference learned online behavior about a shopper, while pulling any associated transactional data to foresee future behavior, select the most effective marketing messages, and identify potential sale opportunities.
- Smart Marketing Automation: AI can handle repetitive marketing tasks, saving your team precious time and resources. Better yet — there are AI-powered tools, such as some of those available within fullthrottle.aiTM, to do the audience identifying, marketing, and measuring for you.
Let's Talk Personalization
You know what makes customers feel special? Personalization! AI is revolutionizing the way SMBs approach marketing by creating personalized offers and content that truly connect with shoppers. By leveraging AI for SMB marketing, you can ensure your campaigns target the right people, leading to better conversion rates, more sales, and happier customers.
AI can be your go-to buddy for understanding your customers and their journey — what ads influenced them, what pages they visited on the site, and what main products they are interested in. By keeping an eye on data from both online (ad clicks, activity on the website) and offline (sales transactions) data, AI spots trends and patterns that show what makes your customers tick and what makes them SPEND. With this info, you can tweak your marketing campaigns, product lineup, and overall customer experience to fit their buying patterns. When customers feel like you just "get" them, they're more likely to stick around and keep coming back for more.
Predictive Analytics for the Win
AI-powered propensity and analytics is like having your own crystal ball, showing you the future and helping you make the right moves for your business. By taking a good look at your customers' past actions and habits, AI can spot patterns that hint at what they might do next. This also helps connect your marketing efforts’ sales, figure out what tactics make customers stick around, and spot new chances for growth. With these insights, you can make smarter choices, put your resources where they'll make the most impact, and fine-tune your marketing strategies to zero in on the customers and markets that matter.
Tools like fullthrottle.ai’s platform bring the power of AI-driven predictive analytics right to your fingertips. fullthrottle.aiTM uses methods to identify who is visiting your website and where they are from, helping you see if your marketing is reaching the right people. Other products from fullthrottle.aiTM, like Lifecycle Acceleration, are all about keeping customers coming back by dishing up personalized content and monthly emails that make sure your brand stays fresh in their minds.
By leveraging predictive analytics, SMBs can stay ahead of their customers’ wants and needs and address any opportunity for a transaction with the right message, at the right time. This means happier (and returning) customers, better conversion rates, increased leads & sales, and a growing business.
Automation: Your New Best Friend
Let marketing automation change the game when it comes to manually launching campaigns. AI can handle repetitive tasks, like sending re-occurring emails, saving you time and resources. It also ensures consistent, accurate messaging and reduces the risk of human error in copy, communication, and execution. At fullthrottle.aiTM, our platform embraces this approach — allowing businesses to focus on other tactics, while our patented tech identifies markets, and measures prospects and customers — without any manual clicking or button pushing.
For example, AI can support automated email campaign management, including personalized subject lines, dynamic fields with customer names or products, content, and even send times based on user behavior. This makes sure your emails reach the right audience at the right time with the right message, increasing open rates and conversions.
Another part of your marketing strategy that can benefit from AI automation is your ad targeting and optimization. Forget worrying about who wants what and what ad goes to whom. AI can analyze data from your marketing campaigns to determine the most effective audience, placements, creatives, and targeting strategies. This helps you get the best return on your ad spend and continuously improve your marketing efforts.
When it comes to leveraging AI for SMB marketing strategies, you don't have to start from scratch. Just take advantage of existing AI-powered tools, like fullthrottle.ai’s platform, to optimize your marketing efforts. As the fastest-growing household-based marketing platform in the industry, fullthrottle.aiTM can help you identify and resolve website visitors into first-party addressable households of in-market hand-raisers. Our platform can then automate advertising via SmartMail, display ads, and social media retargeting to convert them into actual sales. Not only does our platform automate identification and marketing, it allows you to measure and accurately attribute sales directly to your marketing campaigns.
Let AI Be the Booster Pack for Your SMB Marketing
Consider the MASSIVE amount of insight, recommendations, and tools now available at our fingertips in the planning, executing, and reporting on a personalized sales-driven, lead-creating marketing campaign that truly connects with customers.
As new possibilities come into focus through rapid advancements in the advertising landscape, AI can be a life saver, a powerful tool, or a helpful guide to your SMB marketing team.
The pairing of AI with your efforts has the potential to completely transform the planning, execution, and analysis of your marketing strategy, giving you the tools and insight needed to stand out in an always-evolving advertising industry. Whether it’s generating unique and accurate shopper-specific messaging or ranking a prospect’s propensity to buy based off their activity on and offline, integrating AI tools and unique futureproof products that are powered by AI-driven tech and analysis can benefit your business, your current customers, and your many sales & leads to come. With fullthrottle.ai’s AI-powered platform, supported by patented advertising technology, you can take advantage of cutting-edge marketing techniques and gain valuable insights into the entire customer journey of your shopper base, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to their unique wants and preferences.
Schedule a demo and see how we can pair shopper behavior, transactional data, and AI-powered AdTech to supercharge your marketing efforts.
