Everyone’s using AI, so why not us?
Ready-to-use AI applications in sales and marketing for 2024
AI is a hot topic in just about every sector and the emergence of large language models has really fired up people’s imaginations, with their ability to generate all kinds of very readable and seemingly well researched texts.
There is little doubt that AI will transform the workplace and in particular creative work such as marketing over the coming years. But if you are responsible for marketing in your business, you’re probably more interested in what opportunities are available to you right now to reduce costs and improve the productivity of your people.
Although you could ask an AI that question (and of course I did) the answers feel somehow generic and not actually grounded in reality. So here’s what I’ve experienced myself in marketing, here and now in 2024, and by digging a little deeper into some of the more plausible marketing claims:
Generating ideas for blogs, articles and social media posts
Compared with a marketing team and their boss sitting in a meeting room, AIs are great at responding to questions such as, “what are the current hot topics in food manufacture?” or “suggest 50 articles that would be of interest to the director of an SME responsible for cybersecurity.”
They aren’t (yet) so good at writing imaginative, insightful or original articles from start to finish, but can be very good at suggesting the key points that you may want your colleagues to include in their own writing. When you are working with an AI in this way, the trick is to be iterative in your approach. Be as specific as you can in your questions, then pick out points which seem interesting and ask new questions about those.
If you are researching your competitive landscape, either in support of a new marketing strategy or to validate your product roadmap, an AI can provide much richer and wider results than using a traditional search engine.
We all have blind spots in our industry knowledge and an AI can be very helpful in uncovering them; I’ve found the best approach is to ask about the options for addressing the specific business challenges. Similarly, you can identify new market entrants by asking an AI to list products that are either “similar to” or “competitors of” one or more products that you are already aware of.
However, AIs don’t seem particularly good at reading between the lines nor detecting when something is marketing spin (or claims based on an optimistic product roadmap). So you definitely need to follow-up all the insights they give you and check the companies and products out for yourself.
Researching your competitors and new product trends in your markets
Automating the top end of your sales funnel
If you receive a lot of enquiries through web chat, an AI can help to provide quick and easy answers, while transferring the best prospects to your team for immediate, personal attention. AI chat bots can get it badly wrong though, so make sure your chosen solution is trained on up-to-date content and is configured to admit when it doesn’t know or isn’t sure of the answer.
If you prefer to have sales people answer every enquiry, an AI can speed things up by suggesting answers to customers’ questions. This is similar to the traditional approach of preparing template answers, but potentially saving a lot of time up front and as your knowledgebase changes.
In most cases you will need an integrated solution, which can switch smoothly between human and machine, while allowing the AI to learn from your own support content, product information and sales conversations.
Just around the corner
Right now, AI feels a lot like a toolbox, making our work a bit easier and a bit faster as we generate ideas, explore our target markets and help customers through their sales journey.
But it is over the next few years that we need to be listening out for genuine innovations, which will use AI to solve some of the really thorny sales and marketing challenges. Because that is the time when some of us will gain real competitive advantage while others are left behind, wondering what happened.
Next steps
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