How AI Can Help You Grow Your Business Post-Acquisition

Acquiring a digital business is a significant investment. Therefore, you need to give yourself the best chance of making a return and turning profits by scaling as quickly and efficiently as possible. Although growing a digital business post-acquisition is challenging, artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be a great anchor to help you quickly scale and grow your profits. 

Recently, AI technology has become more accessible and affordable – even to smaller companies. Today, all online businesses, from startups to established names, use AI-driven software and tools to scale their operations and improve their online visibility, efficiency, and customer relationships. In fact, 84% of top business executives believe that artificial intelligence will help them to gain and sustain their companies’ competitive advantage moving into the future. 

To harness the power of artificial intelligence for your business, we look at what AI is and the specific areas you can use it in to grow your digital business.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a computer science branch that seeks to create intelligent systems that can work, learn, and react autonomously without specific programming for each task.

Digital systems using AI can solve many complex problems and complete tasks that would otherwise require large teams of people, a lot of time, or costly resources. For instance, many of the devices and applications we use today, such as smartphones or social media apps, use AI to customize our experiences to our preferences. They achieve this through sets of rules known as algorithms, which collect large amounts of data, study it to recognize patterns, and then make decisions from that information.

As a result, the business world is starting to take note of the enormous potential of this technology. A PwC survey shows that 75% of business leaders believe that AI helps them make better decisions, and 64% think it is crucial for their enterprises’ productivity, efficiency, and growth in the future.

Five Ways AI Can Help You Grow Your New Business

With life getting increasingly expensive – for instance, the average cost of living across all provinces in Canada is now over $4,000 a month – you cannot afford to let your investment in an online business go down the drain. Taking advantage of AI’s capabilities can help you quickly grow your newly acquired business and make it profitable as soon as possible. 

The right software and digital tools can help you achieve rapid growth by increasing your brand’s or website’s visibility online, boosting engagement rates on your content, and providing an improved user experience.

AI can spur business growth in five essential areas: 

• Data analytics
• Customer satisfaction
• Targeted marketing campaigns
• Sales process efficiency
• Customer engagement

Let’s examine each of these areas in detail:

Data Analytics

Business analytics is the study of historical data to help optimize operations and make projections of future performance. Machine learning makes the process of analytics faster and more accurate, so you can process large volumes of data quickly using algorithms that work faster than any human can.

Whenever people visit your website, the technology helps you gain crucial information regarding their interests.

The different types of data that AI collects include:

• Visitor demographics
• Browsing patterns
• Traffic sources
• Geography

AI constantly works behind the scenes to collect generous amounts of information as users continue to use your app, giving you the data you need to make strategic decisions.

The more data the software can filter through, the more personalized and targeted your service, accelerating traffic to your business. Armed with detailed insights into your customers’ buyer behaviors, trends, interests, and preferences, you can tweak your services and create products that excite the market. This allows you to easily reach buyers through the most opportunistic channels. 

Moreover, AI helps you stay ahead by offering tools that can constantly track and report on your competitors’ performance and activity. For instance, you proactively follow your competitors’ moves in the market and make predictions instead of reacting to their announcements and releases.

Customer Satisfaction

For growth and profitability, your business should offer maximum customer satisfaction. Understanding your customers makes it easy to provide better products and services. Moreover, you can also identify the best channels to reach new customers and find the best prices for your products.

AI can play an important role in analyzing the needs of your customers and the state of your market. You can apply predictive analytics to data collected from social media, system matrix, and web matrix to offer an enhanced and more satisfying product.

To ensure customer satisfaction, maintain an open-door policy to provide customers with timely support and offer them swift responses to their expectations.

Often, the first line of support customers get is a FAQ page full of irrelevant questions and awkwardly-phrased answers. Instead, you can use the power of AI to communicate with your audience in a personalized way, helping you to increase your brand’s reputation and accelerate your new online business growth.

The figures back it up – statistics show that 26% of customers prefer chat support over other types of online help since they get answers to their questions quickly. AI-powered chat is fast becoming the preferred platform for consumers to reach brands for assistance. AI saves you the expense of having dozens of human support staff and helps you track real-time conversations.

Chat insights can help you establish peak business hours, how many agents you should provide to serve customers, and the type of support your customers prefer (chat or phone). Furthermore, you can use the data to give your agents the feedback they need to offer better services.

Targeted Marketing

Simply having an excellent product or service is no guarantee that the market will buy from you. Marketing is challenging at the best of times and can be even more challenging when you acquire a digital property and need to adapt it to a constantly changing market.

Because people now spend most of their time online on smartphones and tablet devices accessing apps and social media, your business can reach out to them on various channels. 

AI is causing a revolution in marketing and content creation by powering software that provides advanced personalization and speeds up conversions. Your company will come across as transparent, responsive, and communicative.

Your marketing team can use machine learning to predict the customers most likely to react to your campaigns and the product or service they will purchase. With AI, your marketing team can personalize your message to the individual level. As a result, you can recommend services and products tailored to each buyer, improving your brand’s reputation.

AI tools help you create personalized content aligned with your brand and customer expectations. Targeted marketing can provide measurable success for your business, with 86% of marketers reporting a lift in sales from personalization efforts.

Sales Process Efficiency

Today’s sales techniques are a far cry from the old ways of cold calls or sending long emails that recipients would often delete without reading. Many new types of media influence consumer decisions – from TV commercials to ads on social media platforms. 

The situation is compounded by the fact that most households spend two-thirds of their income on the essentials of food and housing. Therefore, you and your competitors are scrambling for a small part of the pie, and you need a highly efficient sales machine to have an impact in a crowded market.

Suppose you integrate AI into your Customer Relationship Management system for a more effective and innovative approach to marketing your business. This strategy lets you automatically craft a sales pitch to reach your target customer at the right time via the most effective platform. Best of all, the AI-powered CRM can handle multiple sales functions autonomously, giving you and your team more time to take on more strategic duties. 

Sales forecasting is another crucial function that AI can help improve for a new digital business. Smart technology can boost the accuracy of your sales forecast by providing a real-time snapshot of the health of the different deals in your pipeline. With these insights, you can decide whether to pause or advance your pending deals.  

The beauty of using AI software to market your newly-purchased app is that it empowers your sales team instead of replacing it. Ultimately, relationships are important – particularly for enterprise sales. AI is most effective by providing insights that enable humans to develop stronger relationships, generating greater revenues.

Customer Engagement

Getting new customers to sign up for your product or service is only one part of growing your new business. Arguably the most important aspect is engaging your existing clients so they give you repeat business or recommend you to others.

Effective engagement all comes down to what AI shines in – personalized experiences. Unlike human client success agents, AI can analyze vast data collections more effectively to identify patterns in your customer behavior. The technology can analyze millions of transactions and records daily to extract information like buying preferences, purchase history, credit scores, and more to help you tailor your service to the customer’s needs.

The software’s actionable intel can let you analyze a specific customer in minute detail before, during, and after they make a purchase. With the information collected, you can design an appropriate engagement at every stage of your interaction.

Artificial intelligence helps you to know who is likely to bring you repeated business or is open to an upsell of another product or service. Having the history of the customer at hand makes the sales process smoother and ensures a pleasant experience for your clients.

Additionally, managing your client accounts is easy with AI-based accounting software that allows you to view the financial health of your business while offering clients and partners access to their payments and invoices in real-time.

Leverage AI Technology To Scale Your New Digital Business

So, what can artificial intelligence do to help you grow your newly-acquired digital business? The simple answer is that it can do almost anything if you set it up correctly. You cannot ignore the value leading companies enjoy from using AI and the possibilities it can open up for you. 

Although you cannot count on AI alone to grow your business, combining the power of this revolutionary technology with your human touch will help you close in on a growth strategy that will work for you. Leverage AI for the automation of manual operations so you get more time for yourself as you grow your business.

AI has revolutionized our lives in many ways and is now integral to almost all the technology we use. Ultimately, to accelerate the development of your newly-acquired website or app and get ahead of your competitors, you need AI and machine learning to help you save time and improve efficiency.