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Rachael Mabe is a marketing lecturer at Loughborough University and regional chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Midlands. Here she explains what AI is and how small businesses can benefit from new technology.
“The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ refers to any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence, such as learning from experience, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language understanding. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a relatively new technological advance, but the phrase was coined over 65 years ago by computer scientist and AI founding father, John McCarthy.
Chances are you’ve already experienced AI without realising it. Platforms like Amazon and Netflix use it to make recommendations on items you might want to buy or films you’d want to watch.
Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa fall into the AI category. Even the spam filter on your emails uses AI algorithms to determine if communications are genuine or junk.
While AI may seem like something only giant corporations can harness, small businesses can also benefit significantly from its implementation.
From providing 24/7 customer support with chatbots to creating targeted online adverts, AI tools can boost productivity and efficiency to support business growth.
Here are some AI applications that should be in your business marketing and communications toolbox:
Grammarly
Good communication is key to growing any business. Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant and proofreading tool that helps users to improve their writing skills and produce error-free content.
Like a super-powered spell-checker, Grammarly can spot grammar and punctuation errors, suggest improvements to make your writing more concise and recommend synonyms and alternative words to enhance vocabulary and avoid repetitive language.
Grammarly can be installed as an app on your computer or smartphone and is a handy tool to make sure that your emails, messages and social media posts read well.
ChatGPT for Chatbots
ChatGPT is an AI language model that is designed to engage in conversation and generate human-like responses in natural language. It is capable of understanding context, responding to prompts, answering questions, and engaging in interactive conversations with users.
ChatGPT can power a chatbot that serves as a virtual customer services assistant. This allows small businesses to handle FAQs and assist with basic enquiries at any time of day – reducing response time and enhancing customer experiences.
However, it’s essential to keep in mind that while a chatbot offers numerous benefits, it is not a substitute for human interaction in all cases. You should always offer an alternative telephone or email contact for complex queries.
While there are plenty of online tutorials that can guide you through adding a chatbot to your website, it’s a good idea to seek professional support to ensure the best results.
Google Smart Campaigns
Digital advertising can be a great way to increase the visibility of your business and increase inbound leads.
Once signed up to Smart Campaigns, you’ll write an ad that describes your business, select a few keywords that you’d like to appear against and set a budget.
It’s an effective tool that can help you to reach potential customers who are searching for related phrases within your geographic area on platforms like Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Google partner websites.
Google Smart Campaigns uses AI to take some of the strain out of creating an online ad campaign.
It uses vast amounts of data to optimise where your ads appear and can automatically trial different combinations of headlines, descriptions and landing pages to learn which ads perform the best.
AI tools can help smaller companies to close the gap against larger competitors by providing some baseline activities that would traditionally need to be carried out by an employee. AI can help businesses run more efficiently and scale quicker, but with any form of technology, human input and review is necessary to catch any errors and get the best results.
With the right AI applications and a touch of creativity, small businesses can truly unlock the potential of this transformative technology and thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
For marketers and business owners looking to get to grips with AI, CIM has introduced five new courses. For more information, please visit: https://www.cim.co.uk/training/list-courses/?courseSearch=AI.
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