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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation have become buzzwords in recent years, and for a valid reason. These advanced technologies are revolutionizing the way businesses approach their marketing strategies by enabling high levels of efficiency, increased personalization, and improved customer experiences. The marketing industry is now leveraging AI and Automation. We’ll explore the top 5 AI and Automation techniques that every marketer should be aware of.

Utilizing all of the resources in your existing toolset is imperative for your company’s day-to-day success and growth. In the Lunch and Learn, Maximizing Your Toolset Series, Launch Team’s Account Manager Alex Ormond talks about how you can align your team and processes in a remote work environment. Alex walks through the best ways to get the most out of your existing toolset while arming you with actionable next steps to apply these best practices. 

Can your company relate to one or many of these scenarios? If so, read on!

• We have a tool, but no one uses it.
• We have tools that seem to be working, but no measurement of ROI.
• We have 5 tools, but I think we could consolidate.
• We want to do more, but we haven’t committed to spending the money on a tool to help.

As marketing experts and Marketing Automation (MA) consultants, we’ve noticed a vicious cycle that many companies fall into with their software toolset: companies buy a tool, hate it, and purge, buy a tool, hate it, and purge, buy a tool, hate it, and purge, and continue to wonder why there aren’t technology options available for their needs. This is obviously bad for efficiency, but what about the unnecessary costs? For example, the average cost of a full-scale Salesforce implementation can run an organization anywhere between $5,000 and $100,000! And for companies shopping for their first marketing automation (or marketing drip) platform, we continue to hear that all the options and the work involved in planning for a successful implementation is extremely overwhelming.

Chatbots and live chat technologies are transforming the customer service model and sales processes. Slowly but surely, chat systems have gone from the pesky little pop-up that interrupts your browsing experience (okay, there are still a lot of those ones) to the fast, 24-hour support we expect from brands in today’s digital world. By 2020, it’s expected that 80% of businesses will be using chatbots, and recent stats show that consumers support the move toward AI (artificial intelligence):

In a vast sea of marketing automation (MA) platforms, it’s hard to pick the right tool – let alone fully understand what you’re even getting from your tool. And let’s be honest, every tool has email marketing and at the right paid level some type of automation, so what else should you be looking for when evaluating MA platforms? While our team is platform agnostic and works in powerful tools like HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketing Cloud, this blog post will dig into a few key features SharpSpring has to offer and why we feel they are valuable!