A growing number of businesses are embracing artificial intelligence (AI)as implementing this rapidly expanding technology is opening up a world of opportunities for them. With this in mind, here are the most important benefits of artificial intelligence for your business operations.
Artificial Intelligence Supports Business Process Automation
AI can be used to manage the automation of both service delivery and production operations. For instance, it can control and maintain the required environmental conditions for product storage, oversee robotic lines in factories, monitor process payments and warehouse balances, service and register customer requests…
Integrating AI elements also allows for the optimization and acceleration of the tasks carried out by the employees engaged in data interpretation with the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, as well as in the business intelligence department.
Better Customer Experience
AI-based chatbots can now provide 24/7 user request support, so your customers can seek help at any time that is convenient for them. Reduced response times and better interaction quality help businesses boost the loyalty of the existing customers and attract new ones.
Marketing personalization is another perk of using AI in business, as current algorithms can pinpoint repetitive patterns and interconnections and in both active and potential buyers’ behavior. Owing to this data, it is now possible to tailor highly accurate offers for particular clients.
Cost Reduction for Increased Profit
Automation shouldn’t be seen as merely a remedy against repetitive routines, as it also gives you a chance to free up time and make better use of employees’ talents, fostering their creativity and enabling them to address more complex issues.
In terms of cost effectiveness, artificial intelligence provides companies with different highly valuable opportunities, such as:
Monitoring processes around the clock
Minimizing the risks commonly related to the human factor
Forecasting the need for maintenance and repairs
Minimizing the downtime of production lines and reducing their operating costs.
Processing data and performing the required tasks without breaks
Real-Time Analytics Using Artificial Intelligence
The ability to process massive amounts of data and interpret them in real time is among the greatest benefits of AI for business. This allows companies to make important decisions faster and act on them, giving businesses a competitive edge.
In some fields, this info can also be offered to end-customers. In the transportation industry, for instance, a business can provide drivers with data on traffic jams based on their location, so they can adjust their routes accordingly.
Data Security Optimization
In the areas where data privacy is of paramount importance (as the banking sector, for example), AI can be used to detect unauthorized access to personal data and fraud attempts. All this is made possible owing to the complex integration of capabilities such as machine learning, natural language comprehension and speech recognition.
Artificial Intelligence for IoT Development
With companies from different lines of work investing in IoT development, the opportunities that AI brings to them add another significant benefit to the list. As these fields are inextricably intertwined, progress in one usually has a positive effect on the other.
IoT devices that are based on the platforms with integrated AI elements easily find widespread use that could give rise to some truly exciting innovations soon, from which both businesses and consumers will benefit.
Advanced Staff Training
Even the smallest of gaps in terms of staff qualifications and know-how can turn out to be costly for a business operating in a fiercely competitive market. For this reason, companies all over the globe are spending enormous amounts of money on improving their employees’ abilities and qualifications through training.
Artificial intelligence can considerably reduce the expenses of such processes and improve their efficiency, offering an individual approach to each employee, also making the learning experience more enjoyable.
Predicting What Lies Ahead
AI technologies can handle huge quantities of data, identify patterns and predict the future. As knowing what will happen next is crucial for the success of every business, artificial intelligence can be of great help with its capability to promptly come to important, relevant conclusions when processing data and build realistic predictions based on them. This provides companies with fresh ideas and opportunities, which can be used to their advantage in the increasingly competitive business arena.
As you can see, artificial intelligence has the potential to change the way your company operates. All it takes to start implementing it in your business is an open mind and a willingness to embrace new opportunities. Rest assured: the positive outcomes won’t evade you.
Gaining in-depth knowledge about your competitors is crucial for succeeding in today’s competitive business arena, but many businesses tend to consider competition as a serious threat to their brands without actually delving deeply into the matter. Carefully assessing the competitive landscape can help you come up with better products and/or services than those that already exist on the market. Getting to properly know your competitors before trying to beat them is undoubtedly the best strategy, as armed with this precious knowledge, you can lay the foundation for the sustainable strategic development of your brand. This is where competitive intelligence can help.
What is competitive intelligence (and what isn’t)?
Let’s get one thing straight: There’s a world of difference between competitive intelligence and competitor spying. It is true to say that both activities have competitors as the main part of the external monitoring and analysis process, but the former is based strictly on ethical research, where all relevant pieces of information are disclosed and honest and realistic recommendations are made, while the latter may involve shady and secretive practices. In other words, competitive intelligence is legit, purposeful fact-finding, while competitor spying is more like going through your competitors’ garbage in search of clues.
Naturally, the first step in the competitive intelligence process is to identify competitors. This might look easy at first, but in reality, things are much more complex, especially if you are trying to foray into a new territory.
If you google several variations of keywords for the products/services that your brand is targeting, the top results in SERP are the companies that you should try to surpass. Although these are probably among the prime competitors for your brand, employing additional tools will definitely get you a clearer picture.
Define the sales strategy
If you know what promotional channels your competitors are using and what messages and values they are trying to convey to seal the deal, this can help you come up with a winning sales strategy for your brand. Collecting data about your competitors and the market trends enables you to establish your ideal customer profile and learn what it takes to attract target clients. You should act like a consultant to your prospects and be deliberate when moving upwards.
You’d be best advised to test your sales strategy before you start implementing it in earnest. To this end, you should run a sort of a ‘disciplined experiment’. Once you establish exactly what you are trying to test and you are crystal clear about the goals and the timeline for accomplishing them, KPIs and relevant metrics will tell you if your strategy works.
Boost marketing efforts
As a brand, you surely don’t want to let your competitors outperform you in your marketing efforts. Sign up for newsletters on their websites, subscribe to their blogs and attend the webinars that they are conducting, as this will allow you to keep tabs on the info they share about the topics of their interest.
Analyzing the content gap can get you ahead of the competition by giving you insight into the types of content you should develop to appeal to your target customers. The more thoroughly you answer all the questions that your clients might have throughout the acquisition process, the better chances you have at them sticking around and buying from you and not from your competitors.
Develop new markets
With the help of competitive analysis tools, your business can identify the market gaps that are waiting to be filled. Closely monitoring your competition certainly facilitates your expansion efforts, but you shouldn’t let it hamper your vision – you should constantly focus on meeting the preferences of your target audience or prospects and driving value.
Without a proxy already existing on the market, your role is to educate your target customers on the placement and value of your products. No market is prepared for products that cross multiple categories. For instance, clothing is commonly split by “work or casual” and “day or night”. You have to find a way to navigate this type of balance and explain it to your customers to create a new category with your brand.
As you can see, collecting intelligence about your competitors and the market and using it to differentiate your brand is not as easy as it might appear. If you lack the capacity to properly pursue these activities in-house, you can always seek help from a specialized agency like HiveMind for in-depth knowledge and accurate insights about your competition.
Given the modern era we’re living in, the more information you have, the richer you are. For this reason, the importance of gathering and focusing on the right data can’t be overstated. Sometimes, your digital marketing strategy can seem amazing at first. But as soon as the early results come in, all you see is failure. Digital marketing is an exciting niche, but it requires a lot of planning to prevent unwanted results. Fortunately, there are several signs that can tell if your strategy is focusing on the wrong data. Let’s learn something about these impediments and what to do about them.
Without setting straightforward, easy-to-follow goals, different members of your team can easily be working towards different, even contrasting outcomes. For instance, there could be a world of difference between a marketer’s and a copywriter’s vision of success. If you don’t know what it is that you should all be focusing on, then your digital marketing strategy and goal setting can turn into a mere assumption – and we all know that assumptions rarely yield effective outcomes.
Marketing a product or service without the right digital marketing data is extremely hard (and often frustrating, for that matter), yet the vast majority of marketers lack the information needed to successfully complete this type of project before they start. Knowing what the goals are, why you are doing what you are doing, and how your actions will affect the outcomes allows you to develop an effective closed-loop approach that will help you to better align your entire team on the project.
2. Not Seeing Real Improvements in Metrics
Digital marketing data is omnipresent, and that can be both a good and a bad thing. It is true to say that plenty of data gives you hard stats on your performance, but at the same time, you can quickly get overwhelmed with all that information. If you want to see tangible improvements in relevant metrics, it is essential to know what data is the right data and how to use it.
The ability to easily identify what you need to focus on and track will allow you to appropriately apply the metrics you have collected. Your metrics should representative of your goals, as in this way you are much more likely to focus on improving the numbers that matter.
SEO metrics tools as Google Analytics, Ahrefs and SEMRush provide you with a wealth of information that can be useful for measuring your site’s performance by following such key indicators as organic traffic, clickthrough rate (CTR), domain authority (DA), keyword rankings, new backlinks and referring domains, page speed and, ultimately, conversions.
Aside from the straightforward ways to measure the impact of your digital marketing strategy, which provide you with a general idea of the experience your website offers, employing usability testing tools will allow you to track how users interact with individual pages on your site, helping you detect any usability issues and explaining user behavior. If you notice, for instance, that a number of clicks on a page are going towards less-important areas, this is an obvious sign that the page isn’t designed to encourage conversions.
3. Lack of uniqueness
If you lack the right digital marketing data to follow, the chances are you’ll be looking for some sort of guidance among your competitors. Yet, just because your competitors are doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be effective, as they rarely have everything figured out the way it should be, and this is where you want to make yourself stand out, not simply conform and blend in.
Your marketing strategy should not be built around how your customers and/or prospects interact with your competitors – but with you. Once you really know your audience and are capable of collecting the right, customer-centric data from your data-driven personas, you can start developing more accurate iterations of your marketing assets and truly differentiate yourself.
Creating a serious volume of well-researched, relevant content and promoting it on the right channels will considerably reinforce your strategy. For this reason, your marketers and copywriters should work in complete unison to come up with solutions that fully align with your goals.
As you can see, simply having data, regardless of its volume, won’t do much for your strategy. Knowing exactly what indicators to follow and reacting promptly when anything strays off course will get you much closer to sweet digital marketing success.
HiveMind Studios Offers Digital Marketing Strategy in San Jose, CA
We have extensive experience building great websites focused around strong inbound marketing data and principles. Contact us to learn more! You can also visit HiveMind Studios online for a complete list of services, including SEO, digital marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, website design and advertising services.
Rebranding Strategy is all about creating a memorable and persuasive brand idea and monitoring rebranding costs. We all remember Marlin (Nemo’s dad played by Albert Brooks) following Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) around and trying to understand her philosophy of “Just Keep Swimming”. While it might promote sanity, it’s the worst thing you can do for your brand.
By “Business Brand” I obviously mean more than simply your logo, corporate identity, or website. None of these tangible brand expressions is really your brand. Your brand is really more of an idea, a powerful concept of how your audiences see, talk about, and experience your company. You need creative brand ideas that start with a great imagination.
You are shaping your brand whenever you send an e-mail, hand out a business card, discuss your company with a prospect, place an ad, send direct mail, hand out sales literature, or deliver a speech. From time to time you need to refresh your brand: examine it, look for areas of improvement and differentiation, clarify messaging, and retool visual brand expressions.
In Part 2 of our 3-part Series on Rebranding Basics, you’ll learn:
Although every brand is a blend of ideas, words, visual elements, and touch points, a solid brand is built around four key components:
Strategy — I know this is a cursed word, invoking images of “homework”, dry research, and dull reports. If it helps, call it a Directional Plan because that’s what is needed. Based on client input, online competitive research, and customer phone interviews, the rebranding strategy assesses the strengths and weaknesses of past marketing efforts. If possible, you should identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement. A final document summarizes positioning and explains how your company is different and why customers and other key audiences should care.
Messaging — Your messages must take your rebranding strategy one step further. Determine specific benefits for products, services, and the company itself. Each message must directly support the positioning established in your strategy. Developing a messaging hierarchy establishes important messaging priorities.
How Long Will It Take to Rebrand?
How long will it take to create a new rebranding strategy? There are no simple answers. But you can identify the factors that could make the process take longer. Here are a few areas that commonly introduce delays:
1. The size of your organization (larger companies take longer)
2. The number of decision makers (fewer is faster)
3. The amount of research (online and offline) required
4. The scope and number of marketing deliverables
5. Whether a new name is required? (a separate process with its own methodology and schedule)
6. How responsive your management team is (a common source of delays)
7. How responsive your branding or marketing agency is
8. How involved your legal department needs to be
What Are Rebranding Costs?
How much does it cost to rebrand your company? Again, no simple answers. In general, larger companies spend more on rebranding strategy than smaller companies.
Research shows that the average B2B company spends about 5% of revenues on marketing. In that context, the average rebranding initiative costs about 10%–20% of the marketing budget.
For example, if your annual revenues are $15M and your marketing budget is $750K, you can expect your rebranding costs in the range of $75,000 to $150,000 to overhaul your company’s brand. Of course, complexity plays a role as well. Rebranding large, highly complex organizations generally costs more.
Here at Hivemind Studios, we have created robust branding, web design, and digital marketing teams who work in concert to ensure that you have A Powerful Brand for Digital Marketing.
When you use buyer stages to organize your planning, it’s much easier to create a strategy for connecting with customers at each point of their buyer’s journey. Outlining a marketing plan doesn’t have to be a struggle.
As you create the next iteration of your marketing campaigns, start by breaking down your plans into each of the following buyer stages. When you create plans for each of these defined categories, it becomes much easier to connect with audiences at every interest level.
Attract Prospects
The first buyer stage is where you ‘attract’ your prospects.
Before you can engage with a prospect, you need to get them interested in your brand. You need to make introductions with audiences and explain who you are and what you offer.
Marketing strategies that work best in the attraction phase are often related to strong inbound marketing and content promotion strategies such as:
Each of these strategies helps audiences make their first contact with your brand.
Capture Buyer Information
Once you attract an audience, it’s time to ‘capture’ them, or more specifically capture their contact information.
During the capture phase, your focus is on turning interested audiences into qualified leads. You do that by presenting opportunities for prospects to provide their contact information in exchange for more information or offers from your business.
As you develop strategies for this buyer stage, set up opt-in forms on your website that give prospects value through free:
Ebooks or Guides
Special Promotions or Discounts
Mini Courses
Registration for Events or Webinars
Software Trials
The more value you provide in your free offer, the more likely you will be to engage audiences and capture their contact information.
Nurture Leads
Once you have captured an audience, it’s time to ‘nurture’ your relationship with them.
When you nurture a lead, you deepen and strengthen the connection between the prospect and your brand. You provide the prospects with information that guides them toward becoming a paying customer.
As you design nurture marketing strategies, consider how you can use both email marketing and marketing automation tools to accomplish the following goals:
Educate and Inform
Build Trust
Offer Proof
Personalize
Nurturing leads involves showing customers how and why you can help them solve their specific problems.
Convert Leads
The goal of nurturing a relationship with a prospect is to eventually ‘convert’ them.
The term ‘convert’ as it relates to marketing can mean a lot of things. A conversion could be an email sign-up, a click on a link, or a variety of other defined actions that you want a prospect to take. But as it relates to the buyer stages, a conversion is the point of action when a prospect becomes a customer.
When you convert a prospect in the buyer stage, you move them from being an interested audience to becoming a paying customer. Tools that help you trigger that action include:
Sales Pages
Customer Testimonials
Slide Decks
Free Demos
Free Consultations
To convert customers, make sure it’s easy for the prospect to take the next step. Tell audiences exactly what they need to do to become a customer with your business.
Expand Opportunities
The buyer stages aren’t over once you convert an interested audience into a paying customer. The next step is to “expand” your relationship with that paying customer.
In the “expand stage,” you work to further develop and deepen your relationship with the customer so they become a loyal, lasting or repeat customer.
To expand opportunities with existing customers, be strategic about your:
Onboarding Process
Upsell and Cross-sell Marketing
Referral Programs
Loyalty Programs
Don’t think of the “expand stage” as an afterthought. It costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer, so place a high priority on this final buyer stage.
Build Out Each Of These Buyer Stages
With this outline, you will be able to organize your marketing ideas and create a map that hits each stage of the buyer’s journey.
But, this is just the tip of the marketing iceberg.
To dive deeper into the specific marketing strategies that will help you attract, capture, nurture, convert, expand, and develop a full plan for each buyer stage, download our free Digital Marketing ebook.
We live in a world where people use dozens of platforms to make connections both in-person and online. As a marketer, it’s your job to leverage those opportunities to promote your brand, products, and services.
You cannot focus solely on one or two marketing channels to get your message out to the masses.
Instead, use a marketing strategy that leverages multiple, varied platforms and mediums to connect with audiences like the SearchUp strategy. This can be accomplished through hybrid marketing.
What Is Hybrid Marketing?
Hybrid marketing is a promotional approach that combines traditional marketing and digital marketing.
Instead of focusing solely on online platforms or in-person touchpoints, hybrid marketing merges both approaches to create a more effective and extensive outreach plan.
It mixes and matches marketing approaches from both categories.
Hybrid marketing is a new and evolving term and is sometimes referred to as omni-channel marketing or multi-channel marketing.
The terminology is flexible, and so is the concept. Hybrid, omni-channel, and multi-channel marketing are fluid approaches to promoting a brand, product, or service through varied, yet cohesive methods.
So, how do you plan a strategy like this?
Outlining a Hybrid Marketing Plan
Like most marketing strategies, a hybrid marketing plan starts with defining your audience and goals. As you put together a campaign or promotion, start by assessing:
What is the core message you want to share?
Who is your target audience?
Where are you most likely to reach that target audience?
Where do they spend time both in-person and online?
What is the outcome you want to create?
How can you measure the results of your campaign?
Once you have the answers to these questions, identify the journey and platforms that will be most likely to connect with your target audience and help you reach your goals. Let’s say you were marketing for promotional products in Orlando then, your first step would be to outline two or three buyer’s journeys that lead prospects to your conversion. List each potential marketing touchpoint they could encounter on that journey. Create plans for both the digital and traditional platforms they will come in contact to utilize a full hybrid marketing strategy.
Hybrid Marketing Best Practices
As you lay out your hybrid marketing plan, keep a few best practices in mind.
Use consistent branding. Hybrid marketing messages are spread throughout multiple, varied platforms, but they should always feel like they are from the same place. Use consistent branding elements, colors, and fonts so audiences always recognize your brand. Get our free branding guide for tips on creating a cohesive look and feel for your businesses.
Make experiences feel seamless. Like branding, the hybrid marketing experience should also feel smooth and coherent. Each customer touchpoint should feel connected and united. Consider how your in-person and online touchpoints interact with each other. Ensure that if a customer sees something in your store or at a tradeshow, they will find the same message on your online platforms.
Adjust content for the platform. While branding, messaging, and experiences should be consistent, they should also feel natural in their environment. Don’t take content from one platform and simply reuse it on another. Consider the nuances of each platform and use creativity to adjust your content so it matches the medium. For example, don’t republish printed brochures as PDFs on your website. Change the content to blog post text to match the native platform.
Collect data at each touchpoint. Always think about how you can turn in-person connections into valuable digital data. Collect information from prospects you meet in person and add them to your client relationship management (CRM) system so you can continue to keep in contact with them through online tools.
Enhance and Grow Your Marketing Reach
Audiences have more platforms and ways to make connections than ever before. As a marketer, you need to be aware of all of these unique networks. You must identify the best entry points, both online and offline, that will lead your target audience to your brand.
Hybrid marketing will help you do that.
But, this is just a brief introduction to a larger marketing strategy that all businesses must embrace to keep up with growing competition in the marketplace.
For more tips on how to combine digital and traditional marketing to attract high-quality leads, download our FREE guide that explains how to lay out a strategic multi-channel lead generation map.
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Naturally, the first step in the competitive intelligence process is to identify competitors. This might look easy at first, but in reality, things are much more complex, especially if you are trying to foray into a new territory. 
