What is AI?

The meaning of artificial intelligence, or AI, is broad but in short is the programming of computers with the ability to simulate intelligent behavior similar to a human. This means that AI can learn to calculate and make decisions, but it’s not perfect quite yet.

AI is not only growing in popularity in the news or in social media, but AI Marketing is becoming essential for any business, big or small. With the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence, AI tools for small businesses are easily accessible.

How do Small Businesses Currently Use & Benefit from AI?

Some of the most sought-after benefits of AI is its accuracy and efficiency. AI is ideal for small businesses because of the time and money it can save by collecting and organizing data without increasing staffing to do so.

It seems, unexpectedly, that small businesses may be at the forefront of AI utilization. Their boot-strappy mentality may be allowing them to take strides ahead of larger corporations who have to go through months of litigation or prospecting to get an initiative approved. A 2023 SBEC survey reports that nearly half (48%) of small businesses started using AI tools in the past year, and 29% have been using them for one to two years in their business.

Here is a list of examples of artificial intelligence in business:

Customer Relationship Management Software (CRMs) - CRMs allow a business to track relationships and interactions with clients. Combining AI and CRM is one of the most powerful duos when it comes to artificial intelligence in business management.

Improving Sales Processes - Using AI can drastically improve your sales process by targeting when, where, and how you are most likely to make a sale. This saves time and money and can be accomplished with automation.

Chatbots - This may be one of the most familiar examples of artificial intelligence in business. Using chatbots that can think and respond to real life conversation is increasingly becoming more important to customer service businesses as they can be present 24/7 without paying a call center staff.

Content Creation – Companies like Jasper or Grammarly use AI to understand and interpret text. They can speed up content creation, proofing or copywriting especially for teams who may not have a dedicated content engine.

Advertising - With any business, advertising is perhaps the most important focus, but running ads requires a lot of time and attention. Using AI to power bidding, creative or placement can be massively beneficial.

How AI Can Be Used in Small Businesses Advertising

Ad Bidding and Targeting

Artificial intelligence helps businesses automate some of the workload of advertising. DSPs create an algorithm to automatically run your ad bidding. This eliminates guesswork and saves time by understanding the value of a placement and choosing a bid that takes into account competing advertisers, audience cost and placement.

Programmatic Ads

Programmatic ad software uses AI to purchase digital advertising. Rather than dealing with human negotiations, which can be unreliable and expensive, you can use programmatic ad software to do it automatically. This is commonly called a DSP, which means “Demand Side Platform.”

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising that utilizes AI ensures that small business advertising is placed somewhere that is brand safe and relevant to the advertising content, product or topic. Contextuality can help keep advertising effective and well-targeted without having to pay higher CPM for ultra-segmented target lists, that may be going away once cookies are deprecated anyway.

How Qortex AI can Help SMBs

Qortex has been helping SMBs enter into video advertising since it launched in 2019. Ranging from small town musicians to multi-location local restaurant chains, Qortex ads allow businesses to advertise in videos without costly production budgets or self-serve minimum spends, making it an effective way to reach the 98% of internet traffic focused on video.

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