Scaling a startup is different from expanding an established business. You’re growing rapidly with processes designed to support quick results. Yet, you also don’t always have the resources of a giant corporation that’s been around for decades. You might not have a skeleton crew, but you recognize the need for augmenting your staff’s abilities. Furthermore, your growth processes could use a boost.
This is where AI can become an asset. Startup leaders can leverage the technology to enhance and optimize their growth processes. Of course, vetting a series of tools to find the right fit is a no-brainer. But if you want to know which growth processes to target, here are four to consider.
1. Content Creation
You can’t acquire more customers if they don’t know you exist. Building brand visibility is part of your end game. So is establishing trust, nurturing leads, and turning one-time purchasers into loyal enthusiasts. Naturally, your sales staff can’t pound the pavement 24/7. In fact, this tactic may not be practical in an age where most people start their search for solutions online.
Digital content creation serves the needs of this reality. Your website pages, blogs, articles, videos, and podcasts can reach your market around the clock. Yet, creating this information takes strategic planning and execution. While digital content can ramp up your growth, you could be short on talent and time. Tools like an AI video summarizer help you do more with less.
Need to turn a blog post into a video? A video summarizer takes minutes, not hours to get it done. The reverse is also possible. You can repurpose videos into written content just as quickly. Now you can share the same piece in dynamic formats across multiple platforms. Reach a broader audience while appealing to the unique content preferences of its various segments.
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2. Customer Experience Insights
If your customers aren’t happy, they won’t continue to hand over their hard-earned money. Sales will slump. Plus, unhappy clients can spread the word about their less-than-stellar experiences. It’ll be harder to convince prospects to trust your company to deliver.
Prioritizing positive customer experiences sets your business up for success. Just as dissatisfaction leads to bad press, high satisfaction leads to recommendations, referrals, and goodwill. A McKinsey article states that 80% of the value creation the most successful companies achieve is from their core business. This means these companies are growing sales from existing, satisfied customers.
Simply put, this additional revenue is coming from loyal clients. They’re adding new products and services, upgrading, and referring others. But how can a startup tap into what elements of the customer experience will drive brand loyalty and trust? In the beginning and during rapid growth phases, it can be challenging to collect and analyze necessary data.
AI-backed tools that automate surveys to gather feedback help you collect and streamline customer insights. Additional technology, such as algorithms, can be integrated into websites and apps. These algorithms optimize personalized digital experiences while gathering feedback on what different clients respond to. Other AI tools synthesize customer insights from various sources, including social media and website analytics, to provide a bigger sentiment picture.
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3. Audience Engagement
Even though the digital world has substantively connected audiences, it does create challenges. Anonymity and depersonalization are more rampant, making relationship-building seem out of reach. It’s difficult to feel as though you’ve engaged in a conversation with a real person, and the people factor is often hidden behind a screen.
Although the world has largely acclimated to communicating through technology, customers are still looking for empathy from businesses. Technology alone can’t provide this. It takes a human connection to meet the intangible needs clients continue to value. Engaging with your audience and staying active in your industry is critical to growth.
However, where do you find the time when your staff is already wearing so many hats in the early stages? Blending the human and the tech elements bridges the gap. For example, AI tools automate personalized emails and optimize drip campaigns with real-time information. AI also covers some of the more routine tasks involved in addressing customer service needs.
Technology can handle the basics such as scheduling social media posts and answering common questions. Your team can focus on higher-level engagement, including service recovery and strategies for partnering with industry influencers. AI tools can also scan information to help identify opportunities for these partnerships.
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4. Forecasting
Growth doesn’t happen by itself. You don’t decide to move in a particular direction without something to point the way. In business, these guide posts are forecasts based on data. Think product sales will be up in the next six months? You’re not pulling this prediction out of thin air. There are market trends, industry reports, and internal data to support the conclusion.
Forecasts can determine how and when your startup scales. Say you’re a new arrival in the real estate market. You connect potential tenants and property owners by streamlining the screening process. Right now your market is localized to a regional demographic. Your strategy has been to scale within this market.
But what if the forecasts suddenly pointed toward opportunities to scale beyond your current target? The data says regional growth is starting to stagnate while there’s a growing market gap in nearby areas. You’d likely change your strategy to start capturing market share in these other communities.
With AI tools that make these types of predictions, you won’t miss out on key data because your team is too busy. Technology is faster at gathering and aggregating data from multiple sources. Additionally, predictive algorithms are better at revealing underlying hidden connections within the information. Therefore, you can increase the accuracy and effectiveness of your strategies.
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Using AI To Optimize Your Startup’s Growth Processes
Some people see technology as a friend or foe. While there are drawbacks to becoming over-reliant on tech to solve every challenge, it doesn’t mean the cons always outweigh the advantages. AI may still be developing its capabilities, but its tools can help startups boost growth when resources are tight.
Improving processes related to digital content, customer experiences, audience engagement, and strategic forecasting are a few possibilities. AI-backed tools have the potential to increase efficiency, prioritize personalization, reach broader markets, and enhance accuracy. When your startup’s growth can’t wait, AI can help ensure your processes won’t hold you back.
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