5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Directly Benefit your Business

Presently, Artificial Intelligence AI is readily one of the fastest-growing online technologies in the world. This is largely due to its versatility of use in many fields of human endeavor. Business owners now hugely depend on AI because of its proven capabilities to automate some business processes fully and some partially. AI directly helps businesses to stimulate growth and to stay competitive and that helps to increase its popularity among business owners. Behind this growing popularity is the efficiency of AI in helping to push businesses towards their optimum performance in growth rate and volume of business. AI helps businesses to make better operational decisions by automating many essential business processes and predictive analytics. This way, AI is presently directly responsible for changing the way businesses work and how business owners run their businesses.

Discussed below are some direct benefits of AI which entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular find especially useful.

1. Enhanced Cyber Security

If you do business online, no matter the size of the business, cyber-attacks are always a clear and present danger to the business. Daily, cyber criminals are becoming bolder and more and more sophisticated. What most of these criminals are usually after is to steal data, lock the data to ask for ransom, or to corrupt the data to simply ruin the business. If you run a small business online, a single cyber-attack is capable if wiping you out of business completely. That is why you need to have in place good cyber security measures to protect your business round the clock. This is exactly where AI comes in very handy. With AI, many cyber-attacks can be recognized, predicted, and countered in good time before they do any damage to your business. AI helps to automatically upgrade cyber security systems regularly to equip them with the capability to counter any attacks if and whenever they occur. AI can regularly scan system health by keeping watch on hardware and software systems to predict any kind of failures that might end up becoming the gateway for cyber attackers. That protection is round the clock 24/7.

2. Smarter Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is at times a complicated business activity which AI can help make simpler and smarter. Business owners now pair up modern supply chain management processes with AI for better efficiency. From smarter inventory management systems to smarter warehousing, tracking and shipping, AI is very handy throughout multiple stages of the supply chain. Many businesses do find use for AI in customer service to collect data related to target markets while others are applying AI algorithms to their handling and shipping processes. With the help of predictive analytics through AI, it has also become easier for many businesses to predict accurate delivery duration and deadlines.

3. Predicting Outcomes

AI helps business owners to make better operational decisions. If you want to make better operational decisions, it is crucial to take possible outcomes into account before making any decision at all. This is exactly where AI plays very crucial roles by way of machine learning. Machine learning using historical data can help in identifying possible outcomes of an operational step. With its smart algorithms, machine learning can use events that have already happened in the past as references to learn and compare patterns. That way, these algorithms can assist business owners to predict with fair accuracy, possible outcomes in the future.

4. Better Ads Targeting

Effective ads online are ads that are well targeted. AI helps business owners to better target ads for effectiveness. With AI, it becomes easier for businesses to reach the right users directly. In this era of digitization, AI is one of the ways of making better performing digital ad strategies. AI can suggest the right target markets, average internet speed, average user income, and more vital user information based on the quantitative data collected through different surveys and sources in the past. AI can also provide useful suggestions, including the right steps to take to make digital ads more effective. In addition, modern SEO techniques effectively use AI to filter the right content/blogs and display them on the first page of the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good organic traffic for the business. The icing on the cake is that AI algorithms get automatically updated regularly and are thus always equal to the task of helping businesses to develop the right growth strategies.

5. Business Cost Reduction

AI engenders better and more efficient business processes. That tells on the cost of operating a business. Anything that helps a business to save costs is crucial for its growth. For instance, using AI for customer service is one of the most efficient ways to reduce the costs of running the business. Some research evidence suggests that AI is capable of solving 70% of customer queries on its own if paired with chatbots. That hugely helps to reduce costs on customer service operations. The good thing is that when most chatbots are uploaded on cloud servers, they do not require regular maintenance. That together with their effectiveness in customer service greatly helps to reduce costs for a business. It goes to show that AI generally is a major key to reducing the overall costs of running a business online.

Summary

If well deployed, AI has proven to be one technology that is capable of helping small businesses to grow rapidly online. This it does by helping businesses to reduce their cost of operation as well as helping to bring the best out of the businesses. When that happens, growth is inevitable. AI also helps businesses to keep a close eye on evolving strategies/trends as well effectively spy on competition. When businesses manage to keep cost of operation low and evolve workable strategies, they grow faster. AI is hugely useful for that growth.

7 Facebook Marketing Tools to Grow Your Small Business

Experienced social media marketers have come to recognize Facebook as a platform that allows brands to sell their products and services to a large audience through a range of highly targeted paid ads and organic posts. Many Facebook users only see the platform as a mere social opportunity to connect and interact with friends no matter where they are in the world. But online marketers see the platform differently. They capitalize on its huge popularity to do business online because it is a very resourceful platform to do business on. This resourcefulness is enhanced by many of the in-house tools the platform has for connecting and engaging with a vast audience to bring in good traffic, new leads and increase sales.

If you are a small business owner and you want to effectively grow your business on Facebook, you must first know and be familiar with the unique marketing features of the platform. If you know these features well enough, you’ll discover that through Facebook marketing and through its features, you’ll find it highly beneficial for precise targeting, positive SEO impact, increased website traffic, customer service, and various easy-to-use ads formats.

No doubt, Facebook remains the most-used social media platform among social media marketers. Aside its huge popularity, Facebook’s in-house marketing tools also directly help business owners to:

•    Generate and boost traffic to the business owner’s website
•    Use various ads formats
•    Reach a much larger audience
•    Have a better two-way communication advantage
•    Improve search rankings on the business owner’s website
•    Run Facebook ad campaigns in different formats
•    Schedule and publish content (by linkage) on many social media channels at the same time
•    Get real-time data
•    Easily segment the audience and identify the demographics for marketing purposes

Here are 7 Facebook marketing tools you cannot afford to ignore if you want to grow your small business online.

1. Facebook Business Suite

Facebook Business Suite is one great tool business owners can use to monitor all their Facebook and Instagram accounts at the same time. With this tool, you can manage all of your operations in one spot. That helps to save a lot of time and efforts for you to focus more on other elements of your business. Using the tool, you can even draft and schedule feed posts and simultaneously publish them on your connected social media networks. Through the home screen of the app, you can see the display of important business updates such as messages, notifications, and comments received from connected social media platforms. All these the Business Suite effectively does through its in-house features for messaging, posting, insights, and for advertising that help to improve the experience of running a business. These features allow business owners to develop and run advertising, see insights about the engagement and performance of the content they share on Facebook and Instagram.

2. Pagemodo

Pagemodo is yet another great Facebook marketing tool business owners can use to modify their Facebook pages with eye-catching cover images, custom tabs, and contests. With Pagemodo, business owners can easily run contests, schedule posts, design a visual post, create custom Facebook tabs and make a cover image. Pagemodo’s cover-making tool is uniquely efficient and very similar to Canva’s tool. It allows you to pick the template, customize it with your own content, publish it on Facebook and share it on other connected social media platforms.

3. InVideo

This is a very effective online video editing tool. It allows business owners to make amazing and interesting videos in a short amount of time. Such eye-catching and interesting Facebook videos help with good ads that easily catch people’s attention. That is hugely beneficial for effective marketing purposes. The tool offers pre-made templates that you may use to create any type of video for your Facebook and Instagram stories. With InVideo tool, you can customize each ad frame’s text fields, sounds, and graphics for good marketing results.

4. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is a Facebook marketing tool with multiple functions. Business owners effectively use the tool for assessing the Facebook profiles which they use for marketing purposes. The tool effectively combines the functions of researching, communicating, analyzing, presenting, and publishing thereby helping to make marketing a bit easy for business owners. It helps business owners with the right info to quickly learn about bench-marking, page content, and engagement. Through Fanpage Karma, a business owner can easily write and publish posts, access important information on their posting, and keep track of an unlimited number of pages and profiles real-time. Through the app, business owners can study and compare critical data across several pages, including even those of competitors.

5. MobileMonkey

If you want to create leads and enhance engagement, Mobile Monkey is the right app you need for your Facebook Messenger marketing. The tool is a great chatbot builder. So, you can use it to build a chatbot, segment prospects, engage with customers, and generate leads for Facebook Messenger marketing. Once created, you can use the chatbot across several online platforms. Through it, you can enhance your communication with customers. It also helps business owners to automate their Facebook Messaging, SMS text messaging, Webchat, and on Instagram. Enhanced communication helps business owners to make more sales, get more leads, have better customer experience, and better overall business relationships. If you deploy Facebook chatbots properly, your marketing messages will benefit from high open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These bots come in very handy for business owners who are keen on personalizing their customer experience.

6. Facebook Ads Manager

This is a great Facebook tool that aids in the creation and efficient management of Facebook ads. It helps business owners to target appropriate demographics. Facebook Ads Manager is a hugely versatile tool that helps business owners in the creation, execution and management of diverse ads on Facebook, Messenger, and other social media platforms. With it, smart business owners can streamline each ad campaign, provide analysis and insights for each ad set and improve the overall effectiveness of their ads. It helps to make ads cost-effective thereby helping business owners have a good ROI. Since Facebook offers a variety of ad options from which business owners can take a pick, with this tool, targeting and reaching out to specific groups is made simpler. You can also save costs by determining where to place ads and tracking how many people the ads reach.

7. ShortStack

ShortStack tool is really unique as the most powerful contest and giveaway marketing platform available on Facebook. It makes it simple for business owners to create and publish campaigns, and it combines campaign and email statistics into a single platform. That helps to save time and huge costs for business owners. ShortStack tool has the capability to track traffic sources, shares, views, and so much more marketing data real-time. Smart business owners can effectively use the tool to create great landing pages that seamlessly generate leads. Business owners can adopt ShortStack templates to use in their marketing campaigns if they are unable to create theirs. This is because the tool allows business owners to launch effective marketing campaigns in a matter of seconds. That greatly saves time and valuable resources. ShortStack contests and campaigns can be easily turned into lead-generation landing pages for a business owner’s website/blog.

Last Line

If you are a small business owner, you can through these tools reach new customers, engage with them, and build lasting business relationships. If you want to quickly boost growth for your small business, the time is now to choose and engage the foregoing tried and tested Facebook marketing tools.

How to Use Technology to Shape your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Millions of small businesses are currently relying on digital technology to do business online. That is made easier by the increasing reliance on mobile devices particularly cellphones to do business from anywhere in the world. For this reason, any small business marketing strategy that tends to ignore this reality is not likely to succeed. Since having an online presence is now one of the most preferred business options for millions of small businesses, they do need a marketing strategy that leverages internet technology to get results. Since more and more shoppers as of necessity now begin their searches for products/services online, a marketing strategy that ignores that fact is not likely to be of much use to any small business. Your small business can manage to stay ahead of competition if you create a robust online presence for it by way of deliberate and effective marketing strategy leveraged on internet technology.

 

Here are a few things you can do to enhance that quest.

Leverage New Technologies for Data Storage

At the moment, many small businesses rely on cloud-based business tools to provide inexpensive data storage solutions for their businesses. Among these tools are new point-of-sale technologies which allow small businesses to store customer data online rather than separate data-based servers. Employees’ personal information and data can also be stored online instead of in physical files. This allows the businesses to access and share information remotely. That guarantees safety, privacy and secrecy which are business essentials.

Market with Social Media

With over 4 billion active users of social media worldwide, small business marketing strategies can always take advantage of such huge market. Because most social media users spend a considerable amount of time on social media daily, small businesses can always take advantage of that to post new products and deals on social media 24/7 from anywhere they are in the world. Thus, these businesses can rely on social media to help them bolster website traffic as a viable and easy way to productively engage customers and prospective customers 24/7.

Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Most small businesses are local. For this reason, prospective customers tend to first search for businesses “near me” on Google before making contact. This is why marketing experts strongly recommend that you optimize your online business for local searches. That optimization includes weaving the city, county and region of your business naturally into your website content to put your business first on the list when prospective customers conduct an online search particularly on Google.

Send Tech-Enhanced Direct Mails

You can send direct tech-enhanced mails to consumers aside from social media and email marketing. However, for best results you must always make sure the direct mail company you choose provides facilities for tracking, 2D barcodes and POS integration. If in addition the company also has some Informed Delivery and mobile apps to enhance your experience and generate a better ROI, so much the better for your business.

Market with Emails

Email marketing may be “old school” and very common, but it remains a very good tool to reach customers and prospective customers. Most small businesses depend on emails to send information about new deals, promos, price slashes/adjustments and any other “hot” marketing information. Emails if effectively used help to generate traffic, leads and even paying customers. 

How to Generate More Leads to Your Business

As expert marketers very well know, lead generation varies from product to product and it depends on several factors. That is why not every lead generation idea or tactic marketers decide to adopt works the same way with every business or brand. Marketers usually go around that problem by using many and varied ways to generate leads to their business. The bottom line is that as a marketer, you’ve got to work smart all the time if you want to generate good leads to your business. Good leads eventually lead to customers and that is good for your business.

Following are some tested ways to generate leads for your business as recommended by expert marketers. 


 
Adopt the Latest Digital Technology

That the world is going completely digital is no longer in doubt. What is however in doubt is the percentage of marketers that have realized this and have taken advantage of it. Since nearly everyone now uses the latest inventions like smartphones and social media apps whenever they want to search for desired stuff, a smart marketer must explore ways to use these technologies to his advantage.  Doing so helps such marketers to easily promote their products/services using the latest technology to a very large target audience with relative ease. These days, nearly everyone is on social media. With a responsive web design, mobile apps, and social media platforms, you readily have some of the best marketing tools at your disposal for leads generation for your business.

Create and Use Videos Wisely

Be sure such video content is really appealing. Because videos graphically convey corporate messages more effectively, they are now some of the most popular and commonly used forms of content in digital marketing. That is the real reason for their great popularity among marketers. If your video content is quite interesting and appealing, it manages to get across to more people thereby getting more views particularly when shared across different popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others. These channels help to get it across to a wider audience in no time at all. Good leads follow as a result.

Use Email Marketing Extensively

Even though some marketers now doubt its efficacy, email marketing still remains one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. It works by offering prospects with discounted rates, freebies or giveaways asking them to take action. These massages arrive in the emails of prospects which they access in their spare times and mostly in the comfort of their homes/offices. A good response rate enhances leads generation.

Be Active in Social Media
 
A smart marketer always tries to get an account in different popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others. These days, nearly everyone is on social media. The real reason you can easily find your target audience on social media. With ease of interactions, feedback and sharing of content, social media engagement remains a very powerful tool for marketers to effectively and efficiently reach their target audience freely or at very low cost. By providing your social media followers with problem-solving content and useful information, you always stand the best chance to turn them into valuable leads and customers.

Mind which Promotional Methods you Use
 
Effective promotional methods always vary depending on the product/service being promoted. Deciding on a promotional method therefore requires a great care. You need a workable promotional plan in order to get your products/services in front of the target audience efficiently. To get good results, be sure you use the most effective promotional methods for your brand to generate more leads at little or no costs at all. Good results from good leads are all you want, and the methods you choose to use must guarantee these leads.



Participate in Guest Blogging 

Guest blogging may be fairly tedious, but it is very effective in generating leads. Guest blogging is a very effective way to gain exposure to many potential customers apart from the products or services you offer. This happens if you manage to get a foothold at guest blogging in very popular and authoritative sites. If you are not very good at guest blogging yourself, you may choose to hire a digital marketing company or other persons to write guest posts on highly authority and relevant blogs on your behalf. That gives good results too if you hire persons who know their trade and are very good in it. Writing of guest blog posts is one of the best and cheapest ways to reach a target audience. For best results, such guest posts must be of high quality and informative enough, posted on the most relevant and famous blogs in your industry/product niche. Good leads usually follow as a result of such efforts.

Why Use Digital Technology for Marketing

 If you are Internet savvy, it is no longer news that advancements in technology over the years have made a huge difference in both our personal and our business lives. Proven fact! Many online business persons have discovered that it has become much easier to start, run, and manage their businesses effectively because of modern technology. And, these technologies and the devices used to run them get smarter by the day. This advancement has made a very huge difference in terms of business success, as well as in the number of people starting up their own businesses. Many thanks to the Internet!

With Internet technology, all sorts of things and even unimaginable things have become possible online. Now, that is really very exciting for many consumers as well as marketers. When consumers get online daily, it is always for many and varied reasons all of which tend towards ease of doing business and getting what they want very easily. Many others go online just for fun, for entertainment, to socialize with others and even for research purposes.

So, why exactly do so many businesses use digital technology to market their brands, goods and services these days? Having already established that many business users usually go online for many different reasons, the “why” has to do mostly with the ease of use and cost effectiveness of the method. Most marketers know too well that the so called traditional marketing methods such as TV and radio advertising can be very costly and a real strain on the marketing budget which for small businesses, is always very lean. You don’t really need to dedicate huge amounts of resources to your marketing efforts, as digital marketing is by far quicker and more convenient than these so called traditional methods which huge spenders appear to prefer. With digital marketing, costs can be kept at the barest minimum without compromising effectiveness. Now, that’s really great!

Another great reason is its relative popularity. The viral effect is amazing. It is because of it that marketing efforts/methods have become more and more vital these days. This has been made possible by the wide range of digital marketing methods in use out there. Many thanks to social media platforms! With them, it is easy to find and decide on which methods to use that are perfectly suited to your needs and the needs of your business. In addition to social media, you can easily settle for other very popular methods like, email marketing, online blogs, and online promotions, all of which can be very effective when properly used.

In your own business, you may also lack adequate time and resources mostly human resources. Digital marketing comes very handy in these areas as well. With digital marketing, you really don’t need to have a huge work force helping out in your marketing efforts. Digital technology manages to help take care of that.

5 Smart Ways to Boost Employee Morale

There is growing evidence that happy workers are productive workers. So, what do you need to do to make your own workers happy and productive? Somehow, you need some morale boosters to make your employees more productive. These here 5 tips will help. 

01. Flexible working options. Human beings need real freedom and privacy. Many tend to be more productive when they have both. With increasing improvement in technology, it becomes easier for professionals to work from home, or telecommute for portions of the day. More and more workers are buying into such loose arrangement and they are happier for it. It helps in morale boosting for such workers and companies and employers are not complaining for so long as productivity is not on the decline.

02. Continuous training. Many of today’s workers aren’t satisfied with just base qualifications. They want ongoing training and development to learn new skills and new concepts. Anywhere they get that, it helps morale because it makes them more valuable and helps to diversify their work experience so they don’t get bored or burned out very quickly. When you have a credible and beneficial training and retraining process in place, it helps to keep your employees engaged and gives them a reason to stick with your company for the long haul.

03. Decent remunerations. Of course this is a given. In this age and time, I very much doubt if anyone still expects people to work for free without adequate and decent remunerations. The better workers are remunerated, the better it serves their morale. Very directly too, productivity is also affected!

04. Growth potentials. Not very many workers like to associate with companies which have no credible growth potentials. The incentive is, if the company is growing, the workers grow with it. That no doubt is a morale booster for the workers.

05. Great working environment. Working in a cozy environment is a better morale booster than literally working in the dump. Even though changing times and changing technologies are fast affecting work environments and arrangements, the better a working environment is, the better it serves the morale of workers. Come to think of it, who wouldn’t want to work in a great environment?