There’s a lot of excitement and new technology developing around artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing. There is also a bit of nervousness and some dangerous myths. Here’s what you need to know, along with several tools that can help you enhance your marketing efforts with AI today.

Myth #1: AI is going to take my marketing job.

Not to worry. There’s no more concern today than there was three years ago that AI, machine learning (ML), or a robot will take your marketing job.

It is likely that these technologies will continue to automate simple, repetitive tasks, even taking some roles in industries like food service. Even there, however, robots and AI are more likely to help out and work alongside humans than to replace them.

Who knows? A robot may take your job someday in the future. But for now, AI simply requires too much data and computing power to make it practical to perform high-level tasks like language recognition.

Myth #2: AI will fundamentally transform marketing practices.

Again, in the long term, anything is possible. But in the short term—no.

AI and ML are predominantly used in marketing today to either add smart automation to repetitive tasks (e.g., sending influencer outreach emails) or to perform common tasks more effectively (e.g., to extract insights from analytics or generate leads).

Myth #3: To remain valuable as a marketer, I’m going to have to become an expert in AI technology.

Fortunately, no! What’s most important is for marketers to understand what IA can do and how to apply it to improve marketing processes.

Also fortunately, there are an expanding number of tools available that enable you to take advantage of the capabilities of AI without deep knowledge of the underlying technology. Here are nine of the top AI-based tools for marketing and sales professionals.

10 AI-Based Marketing and Sales Tools

Send² (formerly AdBase)

Send² (Send Squared) is a unique AI-based predictive marketing system that helps you determine what email, text, SMS or MMS to send, when to send, and whom to send it to.

What’s the best time to display a pop-up on your site to help build your email list? The best subject line to use? With this tool, you don’t need to guess; get recommendations for your content based on correlations with what best connects with individual contacts.

(The pricing is smart, too: a flat $35 per month for unlimited contacts, users, messages, and campaigns.)

Click360

Click360 combines website visit data with the information in your CRM system to help predict which leads are ready to buy and how you can best move them through the sales cycle. It’s a sales and marketing intelligence platform that uses deep learning to extract actionable insights from prospect engagement on your site.

Chatfuel

Chatfuel helps you increase sales, reduce costs, and automate support on Facebook by building an AI-powered bot, with no coding or previous experience required. Engage with prospects online and connect warm leads to a sales rep in a live chat. Answer common questions with your bot to increase customer satisfaction and reduce support costs.

PaveAI

PaveAI allows agencies, ecommerce vendors, and businesses of all sizes to focus their content marketing efforts more effectively by using AI to identify correlations in Google Analytics data which would extremely hard to spot manually.

The tool’s algorithm algorithm looks at 16+ million possible combinations to identify the most important insights across all marketing channels. Get data-driven recommendations on exactly how to increase your ROI. Discover which products it’s best to promote, when, on which platform, and more.

Jimdo

Jimdo is a super-easy website building platform for small businesses. It enables business owners to create a website and even sell online without any coding knowledge.

But if choosing a template, uploading graphics, and writing web content is still too much effort, Jimdo’s AI capabilities can do it for you. If you already have a Facebook or Google Business page, Jimdo will pull your company information and images to create a beautiful, professional website for you in less than five minutes.

Squigl

Squigl is a learning (and marketing) tool that uses AI to help create animated videos in minutes.

Simply copy and paste your text into the Squigl platform. The tool will use its proprietary AI engine to recommend specific words and phrases to animate in the video. Next, record your own voiceover or use the system’s automated voice. Finally, export and share you animated video.

Remesh

Remesh is an AI-based marketing research tool that lets you have a live conversation with any audience that matters to you. Using AI, the platform analyzes the opinions and interactions of up to 1,000 participants, and helps you understand the responses that best represent the group, all in a matter of minutes.

Respona

Outreach for influencer marketing, link building, or digital PR has to be done right, or it’s not worth doing at all. And a LOT of it is poorly done.

Respona helps personalize outreach efforts at scale. Respona’s AI assistant studies the content created by the influencers and helps you quickly personalize each pitch for higher response rates. It simplifies finding direct contact information, keeps all of your outreach process in one platform, and provides analytics to track results.

xiQ

xiQ is an AI-powered SaaS platform for sales and marketing. For marketing, xiQ’s AI algorithm identifies the right mix of company collateral and syndicated content to develop highly engaging campaigns that generate more leads, faster.

For sales, xiQ’s AI-generated (DISC) personality analysis allows reps to personalize and custom-tailor their sales pitches to match each prospective buyer’s personality traits.

Highspot

Highspot is a sales enablement platform that helps sales and marketing teams find and personalize the most effective content to share with your buyers and track their engagement.

Patented ML technology analyzes how content is being used and how effective it is in closing revenue to surface the best recommendations. It applies intelligent content scoring based on how content is being used by your sales team, how it engages customers, and how much revenue it has helped drive.

In Conclusion

AI is already starting to have a big impact on sales and marketing—and that’s a good thing for marketers. The tools will be designed to work with marketing professionals, making their work more interesting and effective, rather than replacing them.

And the most important knowledge for marketers to have will be an understanding of what these tools can do, rather than exactly how they work.

 

 

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