10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is still relatively new in the online marketing industry. Some jumped in and began using it right away, while others have waited on the sidelines to see how things played out before testing the waters.
AI is a tool that can possibly help you achieve more in your business than you could ever have dreamed possible. But not everyone wants to use it. And some people should be using it, but they haven’t started yet.
There are some questions you can ask yourself to determine if you fit the profile of someone who should be leveraging this technology. Below, we’ll go over those questions and for each one, discuss how and why AI can assist you in that particular area.
Question #1: Do I Have More Tasks Than I Have Time to Handle Them?
The first question has to do with an obstacle that often plagues many online entrepreneurs – not having enough time as a solo employee to handle everything on your to do list.
AI can automate many of your repetitive tasks, such as brainstorming new content to publish across multiple platforms or researching your niche’s trends and it can do it almost instantaneously.
Entrepreneurs are great at immersing themselves in strategic and creative decisions, but the monotonous tasks can drain you of the energy you need to thrive. If you’re constantly moving things around on your schedule – pushing them to the next day, AI could help solve that problem and assist you with being more productive.
You can use AI to sort through data, create email campaigns and give you summaries of information and research so that you’re not spending hours trying to find the information you need to take an innovative approach with your audience.
Question #2: Is My Content Reaching the Right Demographic?
If you feel like you’ve been spinning your wheels, unable to get traction with your target audience, it may be that you’ve either cast too wide of a net or aren’t targeting the people most likely to be interested in your products and services.
AI has immense capabilities when it comes to demographic research, consumer behavior and intent and likely trends they’ll adopt. It can sift through a wide number of online resources to see what your niche audience needs or is complaining about so you can step up and serve them as a leader.
Having a tool to conduct the research means you can quickly and easy tailor your content to certain demographic audiences where they feel as if your message resonates with them more powerfully.
AI can look at your current marketing campaigns and tell you whether or not you’re hitting the mark with your intended audience – in terms of what you’re promoting to them, how you’re educating them and even how you’re attempting to get engagement.
Question #3: Do I Struggle to Understand and Act on Various Data?
Data analytics is a wonderful tools provided to you by your hosting account, your various social media platforms and even your email autoresponder company. But if you don’t know how to look at this data and do something with it, it will go to waste.
AI has the ability to dig into your various data and not only interpret it for you in layman’s terms, but also give you a precise plan of action that tells you what you need to do to help your business perform better.
It can also gather data from outside sources and identify trends and patterns that you can leverage in your own brand. For most individuals, data analytics is largely wasted – and they only know of 1-2 key metrics they can grasp, such as their emails not getting opened.
With AI as your data analyst, you can make decisions quickly and have a positive impact on your business without having to blindly make attempts to improve things. Using AI, you’ll be able to take corrective measures, but also identify opportunities you may not have known existed.
Question #4: Have I Been Unable to Grow My Business?
Being able to launch a business online is a big accomplishment. But at some point, you may run into a phase where you find it hard to expand and grow your profits. Most online entrepreneurs like to diversify their income streams, and if you’re already burdened with too many tasks, it can present an insurmountable obstacle.
Luckily, AI can step in and serve as your ready assistant at all hours of the day. It will help you avoid any missteps where you’re trying to make a leap into a business model or demographic that isn’t a good fit.
If your goal is to experience expansion in new niche markets, it can craft a blueprint to help you do it in an efficient and productive manner, so you start earning from the new endeavor quickly.
Even if your growth goal is to keep everything the same, but earn more, AI can help you there, too. It can show you how to generate more leads, how to optimize your current conversions and extend the lifetime value of each customer you already have.
If you need help coming up with cross-sell or backend growth opportunities, AI can evaluate your current business and tell you how to scale things so that your business reaches its full potential.
Question #5: Am I Getting a Good ROI with My Efforts?
Getting a good return on your investment is important when running an online business. You don’t want to lose money (or even time) spinning our wheels with things that don’t work.
One way online entrepreneurs avoid failure in this area is by conducting an analysis of their return and then split testing new options to maximize performance. This is done in a variety of areas, including sales copy, emails, and even social media.
Most solo entrepreneurs don’t have a bottomless budget to test new things, so they have to take a very slow approach to getting a good ROI. With AI at your side, this process unfolds faster.
It can develop A/B versions of your content, strategies and creatives to optimize things on the fly, as soon as you get results and are ready to analyze them. The ability Ai has to refine your marketing is far above what most entrepreneurs can do on their own.
By using it in this manner, you’ll be able to allocate your financial and other resources in the best way possible, removing things that aren’t working well for you and pouring more time, money and effort into what is.
Question #6: Are Competitors Continually Outperforming Me?
Competition in the online marketplace is fierce in virtually every niche. You have to not only be adept at paying attention to every wheel and cog in your own business, but be on the lookout for what your competitors are doing, too.
AI makes quick work of this task – and it can not only identify who you should be paying attention to, but how they’re performing better than you (and worse). When given this information, you can up your game to be on the same level where you were lacking.
But you can also use the areas where AI says they’re lacking to start outperforming them, too. This covers different areas such as their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, their content coverage on their blog as well as social media, and what kind of engagement they get (and return) with customers.
It can even help you identify the best competitors to align yourself with for things like a panel of experts on a webinar, a product partnership, or affiliate cross-promotion. You can better set your brand apart as a niche leader when you use AI for competitor analysis.
Question #7: Have Customers Complained About My Products or Service?
Sometimes, customers will complain online about your products and services. It can cause you to develop a negative reputation. There are also those who won’t necessarily vocalize their dissatisfaction, but instead they will simply unsubscribe from your list or abandon your sales letter.
AI has the ability to conduct a sentiment analysis that sorts through the feedback you have gotten online and identify ways that you can improve so that your customers are more satisfied.
This can help you improve the way you engage with your audience, such as replying to them in a public setting or privately via email. It can also help you make improvements with your products so that they are known for delivering value instead of disappointments.
You can even use AI tools to set up a chat bot that fields common questions from users and delivers the precise answers you want. This will assist them in getting help immediately Rather than having to wait for a response, which can often irritate them and make them feel as if they have had a negative interaction.
One way you can use AI for better customer satisfaction is to let it devise a loyalty program for you. This can be done for long term subscribers, first time customers, or repeat customers so that they feel valued and appreciated.
Question #8: Am I Consistently Participating in Trends Ahead of Schedule?
Being a cutting edge niche leader is an important part of building your brand online. But it takes a lot of work to pay attention to all of the chatter and news within your niche to see if you are picking up on things early enough to be considered one of the first to guide your audience about it.
Not only can AI scour the Internet and give you current trends and news that you can use in your content and product strategy, but it can also use predictive analysis to forecast what you need to be doing in your business to be an early adopter of a certain trend.
It’s important, no matter which niche you are in, that you are known as a marketer who has fresh content. These are the kind of leaders who people routinely bookmark their blog, pay attention to every social media post they make, and offer the most engagement to.
You could do this on your own, but it takes a lot of time and effort, and there will undoubtedly be times when you miss something and you are only made aware when the competition comes out with information that you didn’t catch.
Question #9: Is My Business Budget Blown Before the Month Is Out?
Another problem for many online entrepreneurs is their ability to stay within budget when they are trying to run an efficient business. You have to have certain tools and knowledge in order to remain competitive.
But not everyone can afford endless courses and multiple tools such as search engine optimization tools, keyword tools, or services such as ghostwriters and ad agencies. If you have started noticing that you don’t have the budget to be more resourceful and achieve more in your business, you may want to consider using AI instead.
There are some people who falsely believe they have to spend hundreds of dollars each month on things like keyword tools, when you can actually get a thorough list of very specific types of keywords you can use in your business straight from AI.
Even if you want to run a paid ad campaign, you can use this technology to help you with ad creatives, bidding strategies, audience targeting, and more. This is something that may cost you thousands of dollars if you were to hire a company to do it for you.
At the very least, you can use AI to help you modify your budget so that it is being spent well in your business, on things that are going to benefit you most, while allowing it to optimize how you are spending your funds.
Question #10: Do I Lack the Skills to Perform Certain Tasks?
Lastly, a common problem for online marketers is simply not having the skill to do the tasks you need to earn money online. This can be anything from creating content for your blog, developing products you can sell, conducting research, and more.
There are many people who want to launch their own business and they may have ideas, but they’re not adept at formulating them in a way that they can present to their target audience.
Instead of thinking you have to have a fancy degree or sophisticated training, you can lean on AI to do the special skills that you simply don’t have expertise in. There’s no shame in saying you aren’t a good writer.
Many people don’t have this inherent talent, and being able to use AI powered tools helps them complete these tasks in a way that doesn’t require a big budget to outsource or even time waiting to get content back from a freelancer.
Even with research, there are some people who can fly through this process quickly and easily because they know exactly where to go and what to look for, and others who might take weeks trying to find and analyze information that they can use in their business.
Let AI compensate for the lack of skills or talent that you don’t bring to the table. This is the same thing successful entrepreneurs do, whether they use artificial intelligence or have the money to hire a team of individuals to do the work for them.
Not everyone will be a good fit for the use of artificial intelligence. Some people demand that they do their own work, regardless of how tedious and time consuming it is because they want to have full control.
But once you let go of the notion that you know everything and a robot couldn’t possibly provide anything beneficial to you, you will see that this technology opens the door to endless opportunities no one human could do on their own.