Crystal Taggart: Using AI to Optimize SMB Digital Marketing – Episode 40

Published: March 12, 2019, 1:37 a.m.

Crystal Taggart Crystal Taggart helps small- to medium-sized businesses improve their business results with artificial intelligence. AI is rapidly emerging as a viable technology that even small businesses can use to optimize their marketing efforts. Crystal and I talked about: her company, Atlas AI, and its mission to empower SMBs to use artificial intelligence to better promote their businesses how AI lets you personalize your communication with your customers - way better than the algorithmic marketing we're doing now how personalized content experiences may affect SEO and other internet marketing practices how small businesses can use AI - first, they need to become more data-driven how most companies can benefit from stepping up their use of data - to identify customer problems and create content that helps the customer solve them how shockingly limited Google Analytics data is - and how to fill the gap - to tie that limited information to specific customers - to learn what they care about and how to personalize your messages to them how to optimize your content creation based on actual customer behavior on your website how to integrate affordable information resources like Pipl, which charges 5-15 cents for a customer profile - "If you're spending a dollar [with AdWords] to get your customer through the door, and then you don't spend 5 cents to learn more about who they are, you're not doing yourself any favors." how to use ZIP code information, which is free, to start to build a demographic profile of your customer that can help you predict their likelihood of becoming a customer the hazards of gender and racial profiling how chatbots can be a great way to engage customers - but most of the current ones are "pretty dumb," just picking up keywords the importance of monitoring how people use your chatbot to avoid unintended consequences (like the infamous Microsoft chatbot that became a racist troll in just 24 hours) how to create your own chatbot how tools like flow.io can help non-programmers build their own chatbots - but you need to invest some time to use them properly how training data sets and AI are used to predict chatbot answers how AI can help SMBs with churn predictions - the likelihood of a prospect becoming a customer and then becoming a loyal repeat customer how to combine the power of customer segmentation with A/B testing and other metrics to drive real business decisions how AI can link specific customers to the drivers that actually engage them her theory of how Google will handle the emergence of AI: that they'll reward AI-based dynamic solutions - you're giving the searcher a better answer if you do that, and Google appreciates that and will reward companies that do it how marketers - who are creative, interesting storytelling folks - have been forced to become bean-counters in the current analytics-driven online marketing environment how AI can help marketers return to their storytelling roots how her goal is to help people measure the effectiveness of "every post, page and tweet" how to link personas to actual individual customers and then customize your messages to them how imminent much of this AI marketing technology is - "months away, not years away" how AI discoveries can focus your marketing spending how AI is a journey - first, you measure things to make sure things are working; second, you personalize the customer experience; and third, you prepare for technologies like personalized video content how to align emerging AI technologies with your content strategy how now is the best time to make mistakes Crystal's Bio Crystal Taggart is an entrepreneur and data scientist. She is the founder of Atlas AI, an Open Source marketing analytics platform that enables SMBs to leverage AI and analytics to improve inbound marketing results, improve conversions, improve segmentation,