AI For Small Businesses: Help or Hindrance? (Part II)

In today's society, small businesses are utilizing AI increasingly more to improve their business and grow. AI tools are assisting these small businesses by automating tasks and creating personalized customer experiences. As we discussed before, small businesses are using predictive analytics to make better business decisions and marketing automation to manage campaigns. Outside of the scope of small businesses, AI has the capabilities of reviewing resumes during hiring the hiring process and handling inventory. By using AI, small businesses can work more efficiently, cut costs, and stay competitive in a changing market.

 Content Creation and SMM (Part I)

Before discussing the next AI tool that can transform a small business into a powerhouse, it is important to understand some of the definitions of its features. While we briefly touched upon content curation, it's important to understand its counterpart, content creation. Content creation refers to generating and sharing new information for the purpose of persuading your audience to buy your product or interact with your brand. Creating high-quality content determines "success in diverse activities and in various marketing functions such as advertising, public relations, social media marketing, customer relationship management, inbound marketing or personal sales" (Heitmann, 2024). Some popular examples of content creation include but are not limited to: posting on social media, writing blog posts, creating videos to upload to YouTube, streaming, and even recording podcasts. 

 Content Creation and SMM (Part II)

For those who do not know, social media marketing (SMM) is defined as the use of social media to market a specific product or service. In today's age, AI applications and tools have revolutionized social media marketing as we know it (Hanif et al, 9). As we already discussed, through the use of AI, businesses are able to  develop a better understanding of its audience and their preferences. Additionally, studies show an increase in business efficiency by more than 20% by saving resources concerning repetitive tasks (Hanif et al, 9). However, some additional uses of AI including targeting potential customers, tracking stakeholders' activities to later entice them,  and increase revenue and cost-saving by automating manual tasks (Hanif et al, 9). 

Salesforce

Now that we have an understanding of the concept of some of its features, we can finally discuss the next AI tool: Salesforce. Established in 1999, Salesforce was founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris. It is essentially is a cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that focuses on helping marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams to connect with their customers (Javatpoint). Its mission is to help companies of all sizes and industries improve customer experiences by using automation, artificial intelligence, and real-time data to make interactions more personal, valuable, and memorable (Salesforce). 

To better understand, here is a video explaining what Salesforce does:

To learn more about what Salesforce has to offer, let's take a look at some of its features. 

Marketing Cloud (Part I)

Marketing Cloud (MC) is a marketing platform that helps you personalize your interaction with every one of your customers. It connects any and all departments with useful data which in return, allows teams to work together to develop customer relationships. Regardless of the technology, company size, or industry, MC can help any business grow (Salesforce). For those who are still asking, "How does it help?", MC utilizes AI to collect six types of customer data from actions such as ad clicks and web visits, creating successful data strategies to please current customers while attracting new ones. For those who are wondering, the six types of customer data are: anonymous, identity, historical, real-time, unstructured, and business data. 

Marketing Cloud (Part II)

Similarly to MailChimp, MC allows users to utilize AI to leverage the previously mentioned types of data to build a marketing strategy and increase productivity. Users can gain insights through data visualizations and recommendations made by AI to help plan campaigns and save time. With these insights and visualizations, they serve to help write campaign briefs, identifying and generating target audience segments, building customer journeys, and personalizing offer recommendations. Additionally, it can assist with generating content such as images, email subject lines, and body copy. (Salesforce). Finally, for those who are selling clothing, MC serves to automate merchandising through all digital storefronts and boosting productivity through order management. 

Small Business Marketing

Unlike other companies, Salesforce truly caters to small businesses who lack a proper marketing presence and are in need of marketing strategies. With Salesforce's multi-channel messaging feature, users can interact with their customers on channels they frequent the most by delivering automated journeys with email and SMS. With the use of Salesforce's built-in Data Cloud, users can utilize data from across your sales, service engagements, and commerce events to select the next best action. Based on replies to SMS messages, you can use "yes" or "no" keywords to personalize journeys. Finally, you can automate notifications to your sales and service teams, enabling outreach being done in a timely fashion (Salesforce).

Company Users 

For those who are wondering, there are a number of well known companies who use Salesforce on a daily basis to help boost efficiency and productivity. Some of these brands include Formula 1, General Mills, Williams-Sonoma, Esquire Brands, and BP. To better understand how companies utilize Salesforce, let's review BP's use of the software. 

In case you don't know, BP is not only a gas station, but an international company that offers energy-based products and services globally. In the past before utilizing Salesforce, BP agents were required to read call and chat transcripts to identify and thoroughly understand new support cases. After incorporating the use of Salesforce's Einstein 1 Service that uses generative AI, the chat and call transcripts are automatically summarized so agents could save time and dive into working. Additionally, When a BP customer has a question about their relevant information such as their loyalty points or account, they can use the BP app to chat with an AI-powered service bot. Before utilizing Salesforce, any question unanswered would be sent to a live agent along with a lengthy transcript of the conversation (Salesforce).

Where do we go from here?

We now have learned about another AI tool that has drastically impacted the time and energy that employees in small businesses put into their work. With several additional features that differ from Mailchimp, Salesforce is yet another tool for small businesses to grow and compete with the global entities that dominate their individual industries. Please tune in next time to learn what type of general benefits AI can provide to your business. 

References

Farrar, J. (2020, July 21). What Does Salesforce Do? - Salesforce Blog. The 360 Blog from Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/what-does-salesforce-do/

Hanif, N., Hanif, O., Hanif, S., Liaqat Javeed, Muhammad Nauman Abbasi, Hanif, T., & Hanif, S. (2023). Refining the Smart Linkage Across Two Fields: Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Marketing Using LDA and Bibliographic coupling (August 2023). IEEE Access, 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2023.3337427

Heitmann, M. (2024). Generative AI for Marketing Content Creation: New Rules for an Old Game. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 16(1), 10–17. https://doi.org/10.2478/nimmir-2024-0002

Javatpoint. (n.d.). Salesforce | Salesforce Tutorial - Javatpoint. Www.javatpoint.com. https://www.javatpoint.com/salesforce

Salesforce. (n.d.). Build better relationships that drive growth with Marketing Cloud. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/

Salesforce. (2022a). Salesforce. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/marketing/

Salesforce. (2022b). Salesforce. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/customer-stories/bp/

Salesforce. (2024). Save time with AI. Vidyard. https://salesforce.vidyard.com/watch/Tu4mzTj2GNtXfwdAcwf432?&_ga=2.55245611.1413516044.1732988187-385272303.1732988187&_gac=1.182632916.1733008928.CjwKCAiAjKu6BhAMEiwAx4UsAn8NlOmYLfDUW5w24ZMKOTS92YLc4_nDPY8nIuB8X7SuwhA_dy20mBoCtlcQAvD_BwE&_gl=1