8 Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence to Improve Sales
There are certain tasks carried out by humans that some smart computer programs can conveniently replicate and even perform more efficiently than humans. This is known as artificial intelligence. Any business with an online presence, seeking to drive more sales must be able to keep up with the ever-demanding duties of running an online business. Indeed the online world is a fast-paced and highly competitive environment for modern businesses.
In keeping up with increasing demands to satisfy customers and prospects, many brands have turned to technology to help ease their daily tasks and to enable them to hit desired sales targets. This is where artificial intelligence can step in to help. Here are eight ways brands are using Artificial Intelligence to improve sales.
1. Automate information-sharing to speed up the sales process
A huge chunk of the responsibilities of staff in the sales and marketing team of any brand involves regularly sharing relevant information with customers. This enables customer – especially prospective customers to make a faster buying decision. With artificial intelligence, a lot of these processes can be automated. This makes it easier for people to have access to relevant information and helps to answer their questions. It also enables them to easily navigate through the website to find more relevant information on what they are searching for.
2. Build customer personas based on facts
Brands must have a clear idea of who their customers are and use this information to create personas around their target audience. A brand can have more than one customer persona. Unfortunately, not many brands are aware of this. Therefore, they just focus on the single persona that they created at the early stage of the brand. By doing this, they fail to understand that as a brand grows, the customer persona of the brand also grows. With artificial intelligence, brands can properly store and analyze data that would help them create updated buyer personas. This would help them understand who their target audience is and allow them to always work with updated versions of their buyer personas. This process will enable the marketing and sales department to create marketing strategies and campaigns that would be most effective for all types of customers.
3. Create consumer-driven content
Content is an important aspect of any marketing effort. Traditionally, most brands would request experienced hires to help create content that would meet the interests and needs of their target audience. This would usually be done for the different types of marketing campaigns that they wish to use to drive up sales. The truth is that some of this type of business-driven content does not exactly give brands the results that they want. The reason being that these hired hands could have a mixed idea of who the target audience. Another reason could be that the customers simply do not find such content relevant or appealing to them anymore. This is where artificial intelligence takes marketing content to a whole new level.
With artificial intelligence, content is generated based on data that is extracted from the consumer. User-driven content will organically drive more sales than other business-led or randomly created content. The use of a content marketing agency will come in handy when implementing such procedures.
4. Predict sales while shortening the sales cycle
Brands can now predict the kind of sales they will experience with the help of artificial intelligence. Sales become somewhat predictable when there is a clear understanding of the buyer personas of the brand. When consumer-generated content is created for every marketing campaign, brands become more able to forecast their sales in advance. Brands can also source potential leads from various channels and focus on driving their marketing campaigns towards those leads. Working with accurate data about their target audience would help brands predict what people would need and what they would be interested in buying. Again, this would help them predict the sales that they would make.
5. Cut back on sales and marketing investments
A lot of company resources goes into sales and marketing campaigns. Artificial intelligence can do most of the work that brands have to pay hired hands to do. Artificial intelligence can also provide expertise on different aspects of the company’s marketing strategies. This would help businesses to cut back the human cost of marketing while obtaining greater returns on their investment in artificial intelligence. Some brands invest substantial resources into training and re-training staff while trying to update them with new knowledge and technologies for their roles within sales and marketing. With that said, not all marketing responsibilities can be replicated using artificial intelligence but a significant amount of tasks can.
6. Improve communication and relationship between the brand and its customers
Artificial intelligence can also improve communication between brands and their customers or prospective customers. In doing so, the relationship is strengthened. Brands that want to experience an exponential increase in sales must be ready to invest in building a stronger relationship with their customers to gain their trust. Trust is a crucial aspect of any buying process. Brands can build special chatbots for their website, social media channels, and emails to improve communication.
7. Predict possible services that customers might need
It is incredible to think that brands can be enabled to predict all possible services that their target audience might need. This is one of the many things that artificial intelligence can do for a brand that is serious about improving the user experience of its customers to drive sales.
8. Improve productivity
Brands can improve the overall productivity of their sales and marketing teams with the inclusion of artificial intelligence in the core responsibilities of these teams and they can integrate a 24/7 sales and marketing personal assistant using artificial intelligence. This assistant will be available at any time of the day and any day of the week to attend to customers needs.
The assistant can help prospective customers who need someone to walk them through the benefits of a product or service as well as other questions they might have. The assistant would also be responsible for updating all the necessary information about each customer which will give the sales and marketing team more time to focus on other important aspects of their marketing strategies to drive desired goals.