AI Essentials for Digital Marketing Agencies: A Guide to Enhancing Small Business Strategies

Sharlotte Briscoe • 28 March 2024

Ruthless competition among SMB’s means that small business owners absolutely must leverage all the tools they can get their hands on that will:

A. Allow them to work smarter

B. Get them the results they need

… without spending HOURS on trying to learn digital marketing skills and taking time away from their business.

Firstly, this is where your digital marketing agency features. You will act as the middleman and the glue that connects a smashing marketing strategy to a business who needs it. But we’re sure you already know that.

Secondly, this is where AI comes in to help SMB’s and agencies alike. A digital marketing agency like yours will help an SMB harness the power of AI in all itsglory

Thirdly, this is where we come in. To give you an invaluable blog post, brimming with information on all the essentials your agency needs to know, to effectively help small business strategies using Artificial intelligence.

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Understanding AI Basics

Let’s strip it back and start with the foundation: The basics of AI.

If your agency is going to use it (and use it well), then you’ll need to first understand what it is and how it works to make sure you’re going to reap the full benefits from it.

AI and its various applications

Firstly, there are lots of different AI applications, but the following applications are likely to be the most valuable among digital marketing agencies.

Personalised marketing – Apps like Content Generation platforms and recommendation engines are AI-powered and widely used by digital marketing agencies to assist them in creating specific and targeted campaigns that resonate with niche groups of consumers, resulting in more conversions and higher quality engagement.

Predictive analytics – These tools help digital marketing agencies leverage the data that will help you better predict customer behaviour, performance of campaigns, and trends within the market. This will help you optimise your marketing strategies, allocate resources to the right places, and get better outcomes for your agency’s clients.

Customer service chatbots – One of the most highly utilised AI apps would be customer service chatbots. Companies worldwide use these to automate their support and processes, respond to customer queries, and provide personalised help to website visitors and even social media users. This helps agencies improve their clients’ journeys, making the contact process friction-free and cutting down response times to keep them happier too.

Content creation – Another AI tool that is increasing in popularity is AI-generated content creation. It can help with generating:

  • Blog posts
  • Social media content
  • Ad copy
  • Website copy

These can be created in record time at scale too! This means no more scrambling to hit a content deadline. You’ll maintain a consistent content calendar and be able to reach and engage with your audience across multiple channels simultaneously. An absolute win!

Sentiment analysis – This AI tool assists in keeping you up to date on trending social media conversations and brand sentiment. It will analyse customer feedback for you, allowing you to better adapt your marketing strategies, adjust your messaging, and produce timely content.

AI technologies

In addition to using AI in different applications, there are various types of AI technologies that power these applications. The main ones typically used by digital marketing agencies are:

  • Machine learning – An algorithm that helps agencies analyze massive datasets, allowing you to identify patterns and make data-driven decisions with your marketing strategies. This gives you a clear vision of where you should invest your money
  • Natural language processing – This is the AI that helps you communicate with your prospects or clients. Think of chatbots, language translation, virtual assistants, and sentiment analysis.
  • Computer vision – Computer vision can help your agency automate visual tasks like image recognition, object detection, and quality control.

Identifying Small Business Needs

Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s get to the juice!

Take some time to conduct thorough assessments of each of your clients and prospects to identify their pain points, inefficiencies in their work processes, and more importantly, growth opportunities. Once you’ve done this, you can align these opportunities with AI tools that will solve the problems quickly and efficiently.

Customise the AI solutions based on the unique needs and budgets of each of these businesses, implement the strategy, and watch it work!

Educating Small Business Clients

There’s a lot of scaremongering around AI, which we’re sure you’ve all seen!

To mitigate client objections, it’s a good idea to put together some easy-to-understand and educational resources on why AI isn’t a scary cyborg monster that’s going to steal all your data and brainwash you. Provide factual, evidence-based information, possibly some testimonials from your own digital marketing agency, to help put your small business clients at ease.

It’s important that they’re educated and understand how they’ll benefit and that AI is a safe and vetted way to help their business grow.

Providing them with real-world examples of successful AI implementation, especially from your own agency, will provide some comfort and reassurance that you’re not just palming off your agency’s workload to AI, but you’re actually leveraging it to get better quality results for your clients.

Recommending AI Solutions & integration

Recommendations

Another way to put your client at ease is to tailor each recommendation you give to their specific needs. Reeling off a list of AI products that ‘could’ do this and that won’t fill your clients with much confidence. So ensure that you’re giving them a personalised service with the AI solutions you’re suggesting. Give them a detailed breakdown of the why, what, and how (in that order) and describe how using that specific solution(s) will help them meet their goal.

When putting together these proposals, consider factors such as scalability, ease of integration with their existing systems and processes, and ongoing support. Make sure all of the above is feasible with the solution you’ve chosen to give your recommendations a solid base.

Integrations

Make sure you provide some assistance to your clients to help them integrate the recommended AI tools. Using AI can be daunting on its own but then trying to implement it and integrate it into your processes can be mind-boggling. So ensure your agency holds their hand in getting it all set up, giving them the ultimate customer experience.

Monitoring and Optimisation

An important factor in the process of recommending and setting up these AI solutions is establishing KPIs to measure how effective the AI implementations are over time. Getting a clear picture of these will help you easily identify which of the tools and strategies are really paying off and which ones are potentially sinking funds!

Ensure that your digital marketing agency monitors them continuously and regularly analyses the performance metrics so you can primp and preen the strategies and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the tools.

Providing Ongoing Support

Continued Support and Guidance

Once everything is set up and running like the well-oiled machine that it’s supposed to be, ensure that you offer ongoing technical support, training, and troubleshooting to your clients. The attentiveness shouldn’t stop once they’ve paid and it’s rolling. Providing regular meetings and being available to offer support and answer questions after the fact is huge, especially for once-skeptical small businesses.

Stay Up to Date

Staying up to date and in the know about the technical advancements of AI technology is also crucial. It’ll demonstrate to your client that you care about the quality of the ongoing service they have with you, as well as maximising the results and benefits of the use of AI in their business strategies.

Regularly update your clients about potential upgrades or optimisations of their AI products, so they can make well-informed choices on what services they choose to have going forward.

AI Has the Ability to Help Your Agency Scale!

In conclusion, AI presents massive opportunities for your digital marketing agency and your small business clients alike to streamline your processes, enhance client experiences, and boost growth. By understanding the essentials of AI and collaborating with agencies like yours, small businesses can unlock the full potential of this transformative technology and stay ahead in today’s competitive industry!

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