Artificial intelligence (AI) is helpful for businesses to quickly analyze mountains of data to make informed decisions, create social media content, and power chatbots for speedy customer service. While you might associate this type of technology with billion-dollar companies, the good news is that businesses of all sizes can benefit from AI-driven tools. A Vistage survey found that 29.5% of CEOs from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) listed AI as the technology that will have the greatest impact on their business in the next year. Ready to learn how AI can make a positive impact on your company? Here are a few tools to help your social media, support, and sales teams work smarter and more effectively.
AI for Social Media
A robust social media presence is important for almost all businesses these days, but it can take a lot of time to manage—and time is money. Luckily there are some great solutions out there that can help.- Lately is an AI tool that automatically produces dozens of social media posts drawing from your own marketing content such as your blog posts, newsletters, videos, and podcasts. Your marketing team can focus its energy on creating compelling content, and let Lately use AI to produce social posts that promote it. Lately’s dashboard also offers a suite of social media project management tools with functions including analysis of your social media metrics and recommendations for when to schedule your posts for maximum impact.
- Pattern89 is marketing software that takes the guesswork out of social media ad creation and spending. Not sure what image will pack the most punch in your Facebook ad? Pattern89 uses AI to make creative recommendations about what images are likely to be the most effective in your social ads.
AI for Customer Support
Chatbots are a great way to support customers online, anytime. Look for chatbots that use AI—otherwise your team will have to do the heavy lifting to get them set up. Chatbots can help resolve many issues quickly, escalating more challenging problems to a human agent. This process frees up support agents’ time to focus on more difficult issues and greatly streamlines customer support.- Sprout Social has a chatbot that combines automation and human support to help your company resolve customer service issues faster. The AI platform identifies keywords and customer sentiment to respond appropriately. Customers are aware that they’re chatting with a machine, effectively managing expectations.
- Drift describes itself as the world’s first and only conversational marketing platform. Their straight-forward drag and drop interface lets you build a custom chatbot conversation flow in minutes. No coding experience is needed.
AI for Your Sales Team
If your company has one salesperson or just a few, every prospect interaction is key to the business’s success. With just a few clicks, small businesses can maximize their time by using artificial intelligence to automate important-but-time-consuming analysis, research, and administrative tasks—which in turn allows reps to focus on building relationships and making the sales.
- Chorus records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls. You’ll save time writing notes and setting reminders for next steps—these administrative tasks are automatically generated based on the call transcript. Chorus integrates with your CRM, so all the information from the call is synced automatically. You’ll also be able to track what messaging and sales techniques work best in order to optimize future pitches.
- BuzzBoard Ignite: Fill your pipeline with qualified leads and deliver personalized pitches with BuzzBoard’s customized, AI-driven reports about your prospect’s business—including their tech stack, resources, competition, hiring plans, market opportunities, etc. It only takes about 30 minutes to learn the platform fluently and customize it for your business. For quick data on-the-go (e.g. while browsing a prospect’s website) you can also use the BuzzBoard Connect Chrome Extension. Once the extension is enabled, you can get details on a company’s ad spend, competition, social media following, tech stack, and more—all available in a sidebar while you browse—no need to log into a platform or open an app.
