Have you ever thought that, eventually, business would go back to normal and everything would be “business as usual”?
If so, it’s time to rethink what “as usual” actually means. The business world keeps evolving, and brands continuously keep adopting new ways to meet the demands of their target audience. The needs of customers are never constant, as they vary from one person to the other.
However, a brand has the responsibility to ensure they meet every consumer’s needs, as it is how they add value. But with customer behavior changing and their needs always on the rise, the need to adopt artificial intelligence becomes necessary. This solution will make you the go-to brand when they need a product or service.
Connecting The Dots
Every product created was designed with the sole intention of meeting the needs of a target audience. The journey to meet their needs involves knowing what is missing in the market. Without this, it becomes difficult to bridge that gap with your product.
The world has become global. Everything happens over the internet, making it possible for customers to be the core of what becomes of a brand. Adopting artificial intelligence makes it easier to understand customers’ behaviors, their preferences and how likely they are to purchase your product.
AI is an enabler that helps brands understand how best to meet customers’ needs by processing massive amounts of data. After extracting these insights, your brand can strategically plan its product cycle.
Maximizing AI To Drive Sales
Sales is an integral part of every brand’s activities. AI is crucial in driving sales, as it enables the business to discover details that ordinarily would have taken months and years to gather.
More fascinating is that, despite continuous changes in customer behavior (which took a new dimension since the wake of the pandemic), AI still makes it possible for brands to gather needed data and information.
Below are some of the ways companies are maximizing AI to drive sales:
Social Media Platforms
Social media provides businesses of all forms and sizes the opportunity to brand their product or service for a broader audience. It has gone beyond where friends and families meet to become a global marketplace where businesses can reach their target audience easily.
Facebook alone has over 2.7 billion monthly active users. These vast numbers go to show how powerful a marketing tool these platforms are. With the aid of AI, these platforms strategically suggest to you what your friends are viewing, which celebrity or product page they are following and the groups or communities they belong to online.
With these in place, products and services can be marketed organically to your target audience — because the content will be in the feeds of friends, families and other people connected to them in their network.
By strategically humanizing your brand and making those posts easily sharable or entertaining for quality customers, you can drive sales through digital word of mouth.
Sponsored Ads And Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns on social media platforms have gone one step further, and brands aren’t leaving any stones unturned to make the most of it. Sponsored ads on Google and other platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and more are game changers.
Artificial intelligence makes it possible for brands to target their marketing campaigns at a specific audience. The targeting is based on factors such as age, demographics, gender, etc. AI oversees the ads and gets them to the right audience. With this, your audience easily finds your product, thereby increasing the likelihood of sales happening.
Chatbots
Chatbots have gone on to become a mainstay on the technology menu for brands. These chatbots run on artificial intelligence technology, and they are designed to communicate with human users over the internet.
They can carry out specific functions and serve roles such as online assistants, lead generators, sales bots and more. In addition, they take customer experience to another level by responding to a customer based on their previous purchase history.
The advantages are enormous for your business, as these bots are available 24/7 and can communicate with prospects or customers without human interference. These chatbots have high conversion rates, as they have enough information to help customers make a buying decision.
A typical example is the Facebook Messenger chatbot, which has a 60%-70% open rate in the first 60 minutes a message is sent.
Data Analytics
Analytics is another way AI plays a brief role in driving sales for your brand. Data from your brand’s social media platforms can be analyzed to see how various campaigns performed. These large amounts of data can easily be collated, processed and analyzed in a few minutes through AI technology.
Upon analysis, the information is then used to improve marketing campaigns and increase the availability of your product in demographics where there was more conversion surrounding it, ultimately leading to more sales.
Conclusion
The role of artificial intelligence in business can’t be overemphasized. It is the digital fuel that drives the wheel of a brand and can be used as an enabler to drive sales, thereby generating more revenue.
Brands that aren’t already adopting the technology are losing more revenue than they can imagine and losing more customers to their competition.
To close, here are a few best practices for using social media AI tools: First, be authentic in how you are using them to interact with your customers — be human. Second, leverage these tools to accelerate your teams to perform optimally, not replace your team. And most importantly, focus your teams and culture on what is going to add value to your customers. Combing these three simple best practices when selecting, implementing and leveraging AI tools is a recipe for success.
Source: forbes.com
