Exploring AI-Driven Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SME’s Brand and Reach

Are you an SME but can’t figure out how to come up with better marketing strategies to reach your target audience and market yourself in an effective way? If so, you may want to consider leveraging AI in your marketing strategies to develop new innovative and effective options.

In today’s world AI has penetrated almost every industry. Businesses seek AI-led strategies to automate their marketing processes to save time, costs, and hassle.

Being an SME, you can no longer afford to ignore the potential benefits of utilising AI to grow your brand and reach online. It’s a no-brainer to use AI in marketing to target the right audience more efficiently and effectively.

So let’s dive in and explore some powerful and actionable AI-driven marketing strategies to grow your SME’s brand and reach, starting with some major benefits of using AI in marketing.

Benefits of AI in Marketing

AI algorithms have the capability to store and analyse large amounts of customer data for businesses. Thus, using AI in marketing allows the potential to provide better insights into customers’ preferences, behaviours, and interests. It is then possible to develop much more personalised marketing campaigns to target specific audiences using these insights.

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Three key benefits of AI in marketing that SMEs can’t ignore include the following:

• Data analysis (AI helps businesses collect and analyse their customers’ data to craft more personalised marketing messages, product recommendations, and offers).
• Content creation (AI helps businesses create more personalised and engaging content for their target audience to increase their reach and grow their brand).
• Campaign management (AI helps businesses manage their marketing campaigns across multiple channels and optimise them by testing various personalised customer experiences).

See the “Personalisation” section to know the best tools for these.

AI-Driven Marketing Strategies for SMEs

AI is involved in almost every marketing tactic, and most marketing tools are now based on AI. Businesses use these AI tools to develop and implement different marketing strategies for better growth and outreach. That said, here are the three very popular AI-driven marketing strategies you can use to grow your SME’s brand and reach:

Chatbots

Chatbots help you lead your customers in the pipeline without recruiting extra chat managers or staying online 24/7. This is particularly so if your online business receives a large number of enquiries, from which most replies would be similar, that’s where AI-powered chatbots can help you automate the process and escape the hassle.

A chatbot is an automated conversation partner which handles customers’ responses without the limitations of time or quantity. For example, you can automate Instagram marketing with a chatbot by simply integrating it into your business’s Instagram page.

Besides facilitating your customers with automated and quick replies, it can also manage the orders coming in through the social media platform you’ve integrated it into. This gives you the best of both worlds, winning customers through timely replies to their burning queries and managing orders.

Many popular platforms let you set up a chatbot for your Instagram business. Here are a few popular ones among them:

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• ManyChat
• BotHelp
• SendPulse
• MobileMonkey
• SMMBOT

Using any of these chatbots, you can set up a personalised chat flow for your customers by analysing demands and message history. On top of that, you can automate comments on your posts and instantly reply to someone who mentions you in their story using an AI chatbot.

Personalisation

If you want to connect with your customers on a deeper level, personalisation is a powerful marketing strategy to do this effectively and efficiently. Here’s how AI can help you with personalisation:

• It can collect and analyse your customers’ data to create professional and more personalised marketing messages, product recommendations, and offers.
• It can help you create personalised content that resonates with your target customers to grow your SME’s brand and reach effectively.
• It can help you deliver the same level of customised experience across all your online platforms, including your website, social media pages, and email newsletters.

A popular customer data platform is Twilio Segment. It helps businesses collect and unify customer data from various sources and provides AI-powered analytics and insights to create personalised marketing messages and product recommendations for their customers. Other popular tools include:

• Hootsuite Insights (an AI-based social media analytics tool to understand audiences and create more effective marketing strategies for them)
• Optimizely (an ML-based tool to test personalised customer experiences across various channels)
• Persado (an AI-fueled marketing platform that creates personalised marketing messages using natural language generation).

Predictive Analytics

As the name suggests, predictive analytics is an AI-fueled marketing strategy that helps you predict future outcomes using previous data and statistical algorithms. As an SME, you can identify which customers are most likely to make a purchase, which of your products or services are most likely to sell, and which marketing channels are the most effective for your business.

In short, you can make better and more efficient data-driven decisions using predictive analytics. Here are the three key strategies of predictive analytics for your SME’s brand and reach:

• You can collect and analyse customer data, such as purchase history, browsing behaviour, and demographic information, to gain insights into their interests, behaviours, and preferences using AI-driven analytics tools.
• Once you have the data of your customers, you can use it to launch targeted marketing campaigns for them, besides developing predictive models that can identify specific patterns and predict future outcomes, such as performance, sales, and brand growth.
• You can make more data-driven and timely decisions by mitigating risks to save budget and extra effort, ultimately increasing your SME’s growth and revenue.

Voice Search Optimisation

As the name suggests, with voice search optimisation, you can optimise your website or content for voice search queries using AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) tools. Millions of people use these voice search tools (such as Google Voice Search, Alexa, and Siri) on a daily basis, so there’s a big market to capture if your SME leverages voice search optimisation.

Here are some essential tips for integrating this marketing strategy into your SME website:

• Use natural language, as voice search queries are usually longer than regular ones.
• Provide clear and concise answers to the burning queries of your customers to get them into the featured snippets, which the voice assistant reads out loud.
• Optimise your content and answers for local search, as most voice search queries are location-based because customers usually search for nearby businesses or services.
• Improve your website speed as customers expect quick responses, suggesting that voice searches often have a sense of urgency.
• Use Schema markup, a structured data format that helps search engines understand your website’s content.

In short, make sure you provide more detailed information about products or services to get them featured in voice search results.

Conclusion

To wrap up, these four AI-driven marketing strategies can help your SME gain a competitive edge and achieve better marketing results with less effort and costs. Make sure you work with reputable providers to fully capitalise on the power of AI-backed marketing. Some reputable and proven providers of AI-driven marketing solutions you can use to grow your SME’s brand and reach include Salesforce, HubSpot, AWS, Adobe, and IBM. There are many more in the market too, but it all narrows down to your SMEs requirements, target, and budget. With these factors in mind and leveraging the right tools, your SME will grow at a faster pace than ever.

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