What exactly is AI workflow automation?
AI workflow automation is a method that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to initiate and manage time-consuming or repetitive processes. Data entry, processing, and analysis are examples of such initiatives.
The purpose of AI workflow automation is to increase efficiency and productivity by allowing computers to undertake these tasks rather of humans.
This allows (human) professionals to concentrate on more sophisticated and strategic tasks.
In other words, AI workflow automation allows you and your team to spend more time on the aspects of your business that you enjoy and less time on those that you don’t.
What is the significance of AI workflow automation?
At the end of the day, every firm wants to expand in a profitable, sustainable, and (ideally) ethical manner. Even tiny teams can accomplish large outcomes by automating routine portions of their routines.
Here are some of the advantages of AI workflow automation for businesses:
- It is more effective. AI-powered workflows reliably complete tedious and manual chores without the risk of burnout.
- It lowers human mistake. When it comes to having an eye for detail, tedious projects are notorious for testing our patience. AI automation is more dependable than fatigued humans (a harsh but accurate statement).
- It is less expensive. While producing the same quality outputs, AI software costs less than hiring teams of humans. This frees up your funds to hire individuals for more creative activities, the kind of work that people truly enjoy performing.
- It can accommodate teams of any size. Sure, large corporations can deploy AI workflow automation on a large scale. However, small businesses can use it to gain an advantage over their competitors.
Remember that establishing automated workflows ultimately benefits your clients by providing a more smooth and tailored user experience from your company.
Who benefits from AI process automation in your organization?
AI workflow automation would improve nearly every function in a firm, including accounting, support, recruiting, and so on. However, utilizing AI-powered workflows will most likely have the most direct influence on two teams:
- Sales
- Marketing
Once those divisions begin automating their workflows, your company’s efficiency/output might possibly be 100x – and no, that’s not hyperbole.
Sales groups
Over the last few decades, the function of a sales representative has evolved. Lead tracking and follow-up used to be done with a hand-written Rolodex.
Even entry-level sales representatives can now use strong customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to keep everything organized and efficient.
Despite technological developments to assist sales activities, much of the work remains repetitive. This is true independent of your individual responsibilities within a sales team:
- Business Development Representative (BDR): This position is responsible for filling the sales funnel through outbound marketing and cold outreach.
- Sales Development Representative (SDR): Identifies and qualifies new leads before advancing them through the sales funnel.
- Account Executives (AE) are responsible for closing business through communicating with leads (via product demos, 1:1 calls, in-depth pitching, and so on).
Each of these responsibilities necessitates tasks that are difficult to keep up with.
According to Gartner research, 84.3% of SDRs fail to reach their monthly quotas, with 33.3% of high-growth businesses citing SDR time management as one of their top three issues.
Workflow Automation for Business Development Representatives (BDRs)
A BDR’s job is to produce new leads and fill the sales funnel. While there are numerous methods for accomplishing this, cold outreach (phone calls, SMS, emails, or social media messaging) is the most common.
A BDR, for example, might spend their day on LinkedIn hunting for prospects. Once they’ve located that lead, they may attempt to obtain the phone number or email address in order to initiate contact and begin a dialogue.
When a lead responds to that messaging, they are often sent to a CRM, where the SDR takes over.
However, the process of identifying leads and providing targeted messages is not only time-consuming.
It’s also tediously repetitious.
BDRs frequently spend their time customizing generic outreach templates and tracking reactions from prospective customers.
All of these workflows can now be automated owing to artificial intelligence.
Workflow Automation for Sales Development Representatives (SDRs)
Sales development representatives (SDRs) pick up where BDRs left off. When a cold lead interacts with your company’s messaging or content and becomes “warm,” an SDR will advance that lead through the sales pipeline.
This can take many forms, but it usually necessitates a lot of follow-up messaging across numerous channels (most notably email and social media).
SDRs work with inbound leads who have responded to a BDR’s cold outreach or a marketing campaign (filling out a form, signing up for a lead magnet, etc.). That means they’ll need good organizing skills to ensure their messages don’t get lost.
Using AI automation solutions allows SDRs to send targeted and timely follow-ups to new prospects without losing any leads.
Account Executive (AE) Workflow Automation
Account Executives (AEs) can benefit from automated workflows in the same way that SDRs can. AEs can use the correct solution to automate chores like email composing and organizing visits with prospective clients.
This can save time and allow your AEs to focus on higher-value duties like relationship building and deal closing.
Automated workflows can also assist AEs in staying organized by ensuring leads are not ignored or neglected. You can automate customised follow-ups to get clients on the phone by constructing simple but effective sales funnels. You may then build and test different versions of your sales pitch, product demo scripts, and so on.
Copy.ai, once again, connects with your CRM and the majority of other sales tools. It doesn’t require any coding and can be integrated with systems like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive in 15 minutes or less.
Any member of your sales team may now create personalized sequences in your CRMs and Sales Automation solutions.
Marketing groups
The phrase “marketing” can refer to a variety of activities, including:
- SEO stands for search engine optimization.
- Email promotion
- Marketing on social media
- Affiliate promotion
- Word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing
- Etc.
However, the primary goal of digital marketing remains the same: drive traffic to your company’s website and convert visitors into new leads or paying customers.
This is often accomplished in a variety of methods, with SEO serving as a primary strategy.
After all, publishing content that ranks well on search engines such as Google allows a company to draw organic visitors month after month.
So, how might automated workflows assist digital marketers in practice? One instance is programmatic SEO.
Currently, a content marketer wishing to rank an item on Google must go through the following time-consuming process:
- Determine the best keyword to target.
- Determine more relevant keywords to incorporate in your content.
- Make a systematic overview that will benefit both your audience and Google.
- Write an interesting and informative piece (typically between 1200 and 1500 words).
- This post has been edited, polished, and published.
- Monitor ranks in order to maximize growth.
Fortunately, improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning are assisting marketers in streamlining practically every part of this.
Most entry-level SEO tools, for example (Ahrefs, SEMrush, and so on), can help you find the correct term. Then, using a tool like Copy.ai, insert that term into a pipeline.
This will automatically detect additional important keywords for your content and create an SEO-friendly structure for your post.
Copy.ai can then write the initial draft of each section of your content. After editing the final text with your experience and personal research, use AI-editing tools like Grammarly to polish everything to your taste.
And suddenly, the time it takes to compose and rank blog entries might be reduced from hours to minutes.
This was one example of how AI may be used to automate marketing procedures. Other examples are:
- Use tools like Lately or Emplifi to determine the optimum times to post your content on social media.
- Email marketing: Use action-based triggers to automate email sequences.
- Project management: Use a platform like Asana or Monday.com to stay organized and keep your team moving ahead.
- Landing page creation: Use Copy.ai to create high-converting landing pages to harvest emails, enhance webinar attendance, generate direct sales, and more.
- Product descriptions: Copy.ai allows you to create product descriptions in bulk for all of the products in your eCommerce store.
AI is allowing business owners and content marketers to worry less about operational operations and more about the concepts they care about.
What can AI workflow automation achieve for you?
There is so much you can accomplish with AI workflow automation, and it all relies on the goals of your team.
We’ll look at four specific use scenarios that can increase your sales and marketing procedures by a factor of 100:
- Sales Emails That Are Customized
- SEO programmatically
- Product Specifications
- Content for Thought Leadership
- Sales emails that are personalized
One of the most difficult difficulties for sales teams is not necessarily finding the correct prospects to contact. Instead, the issue is finding enough time throughout the day to generate as many leads as possible while avoiding fatigue.
And it’s a serious issue.
According to Gartner, “nearly 90% of sellers feel burned out from work.” After all, the sales process is time-consuming, dull, and repetitive.
This is especially true as more firms compete for consumers’ attention through email and social media.
A typical day in the life of an SDR can contain the following activities:
- Choosing the appropriate channel(s) to engage potential leads
- Finding the correct leads to contact inside those channels
- Creating a customized message for each potential lead
- Making a list of follow-up emails and scheduling them
- All of this must be repeated as many times a day as possible in order to meet quotas.
- Keeping track of engagement and improving the process (channels, messaging, etc.)
- Recognizing that the vast majority of their messages will go unread or ignored
- Riveting. True, each of these measures is required for a successful cold outreach campaign.
However, this process lacks human inventiveness and is not considered “fulfilling” employment by most employees.
AI workflow automation can handle all of those jobs automatically.
Copy.ai generates a customised cold outreach email based on the recipient’s profile from a single LinkedIn URL:
- Then, based on how this individual responds to your messaging, a follow-up email will be sent (again, automatically), along with a LinkedIn connection request to cultivate the relationship.
- And every encounter is recorded and saved in your CRM.
- Now, your sales team may start pushing different levers to make your organization’s sales engine operating stronger than before.
SEO programmatically
To say that the SEO industry has become overcrowded is an understatement. Millions of new blogs are launched each year. There are nearly half a billion blogs on the internet as of 2022, and that figure is growing.
This puts content marketers and businesses in a difficult position: how do you rank your content when everyone is competing for the same real estate on Google’s SERPs?
AI automation provides a powerful and effective solution to this challenge.
Consider being able to take a list of keywords and enter them into something similar to a Google Sheet. Then, at the click of a button, you have outlined sections of your page or post, and all of those sections have been pre-written for you.
Are you dissatisfied with the basic structure? You can quickly renew the information by making a few simple modifications to the input.
Scale that method to run 500 keywords for articles or pages at once.
This is the same workflow that Copy.ai is improving. The purpose is to assist content marketers and business owners in approaching SEO in a smart manner.
Instead of becoming bogged down in operational responsibilities, they may focus their time refining and optimizing content.
Product specifications
It can feel like you’re walking a tightrope when you’re writing product descriptions. On the one hand, the descriptions must be clear and informative so that customers know what they are purchasing. On the other hand, they must be convincing enough to compel your visitors to take action.
Oh, and these captivating descriptions are required for all of your products.
That is why you frequently find poor product descriptions on eCommerce sites. It’s not that marketing teams don’t want to generate compelling content for their product pages; it’s just that they don’t always have the time, energy, or resources to keep up with all of the copy required for each product.
Copy.ai features an automated workflow for creating bulk product descriptions:
You can now develop detailed and appealing product descriptions with minimal human intervention. Soon, you’ll be able to immediately insert all of your online products into Copy.ai to have these product descriptions written in bulk.
But don’t worry; it won’t take the position of your in-house copywriter.
Instead, you may have real marketers do A/B testing on product descriptions and continuously refine your product pages until conversions reach your desired level.
Innovative thinking
Being a thought leader in 2023 will be more difficult than it was ten years ago. If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, you’ll most likely need to have:
- A lively blog
- A big presence on social media
- Content that is authoritative (ebooks, films, seminars, etc.)
While this may not appear to be much, the amount of content required can soon pile up. As an example, as a thought leader, you may be required to produce:
- Every week, two long-form blog pieces are published.
- Every week, there are five LinkedIn posts.
- Every week, there are twelve Instagram postings.
- 4 tweets per day
- One video on YouTube per week
- Each month, one new eBook is released.
Again, that’s a lot of information. However, there are numerous manual processes that all work together to consume your time.
Automated workflows enable you to complete all of the tasks described above in a single business day using a service like Copy.ai (really).
Copy.ai assists thought leaders in creating useful and entertaining content in order to stand out in the digital throng. You can currently develop all of the thought leadership content you require, such as:
- Long-form blog postings that are SEO-friendly
- Posts for any social media platform
- Scripts for videos
- Ebooks
- Alternatively, you might share any other text-based material with your audience.
But consider taking things a step further.
Consider the possibility of taking a single blog article and having other thought leadership content ideas generated for you. With the touch of a button, you could turn a single topic into an essay, tweetstorm, LinkedIn post, video script, and so on, and distribute these assets across their respective channels.
These are the kinds of automations that thrill us, and they are the kinds of features that will be available shortly.
What characteristics are important for AI process automation?
The characteristics that are important for AI workflow automation are determined by the goals that your team is attempting to achieve
That being stated, there are three characteristics you should look for in whatever tool you decide to try:
1) It must be simple to use. You don’t want to waste time searching through YouTube lessons and support documentation when you’re learning a new tool. Find software with a simple user interface (UI) that any team member can rapidly understand.
2) It should be within your budget (on a scale). Examine the price increases for each instrument as your business expands. This will assist you in selecting software that will support your long-term business objectives.
Examine the cost of each instrument based on the outcomes you desire rather than the outcomes you now have.
3) It should be compatible with other software. Choose the fewest tools feasible to handle your company problems, and make sure those tools work well together. This allows you to construct workflows to automate as much of the tedious work as possible.
Should I use one platform or several?
Ideally, you should keep your tech stack as lean as feasible. Furthermore, various departments will most likely require separate AI platforms.
Your customer service team may benefit from software such as SupportLogic, whereas your accounting team may require a solution such as CashAnalytics.
Two distinct problems necessitate two distinct solutions.
However, your sales and marketing tech stack will have overlapping issues, and you should strive for the fewest number of tools possible. While there is no silver bullet for any tech stack, strive to keep the number of tools required to conduct a workflow as minimal as possible.
For example, Copy.ai is a service that allows you to automate practically every aspect of your sales and marketing workflows. You may:
- Send tailored cold email messages to new leads.
- Based on how a user responds, write and send follow-up emails.
- Send every encounter to your CRM.
- Create a large number of SEO-friendly blog content.
- Determine which other keywords you should rank for (or pages you should create) based on the keyword you’re targeting.
- Repurpose all of your social media content.
- Send link-building pitches to sites like HARO (which will be available soon).
- Hundreds of product descriptions should be written for your online store.
These are just a few instances of what Copy.ai can automate, but the sky is the limit.
To be fair, numerous technologies allow you to create the same types of automated workflows.
Zapier, for example, allows you to connect third-party applications to create sophisticated tech stacks. The issue is that when one of these tools fails, your entire process suffers.
Furthermore, you would need a certain level of technical expertise to develop these systems yourself.
Again, the quantity of tools required by your team will be determined by the exact goals you’re attempting to achieve. However, in the end, you’ll want to choose a solution that takes the least amount of tooling to achieve your objectives.
When should my team consider deploying artificial intelligence workflow automation?
You should begin using AI workflow automation as soon as possible. Regardless of the size of your company, you will notice immediate benefits:
- Small businesses have the advantage of being able to move faster than larger competitors. Early on, master AI workflow automation and discover how David can scale like Goliath with a fraction of the resources.
- Medium Businesses: You’ve gotten over the hump and now have a viable business (congratulations!). Take things to the next level without breaking the bank or exhausting your crew.
- Enterprise Businesses: You have the financial resources to hire specialists to set up AI workflow automation for you. Find the ideal individual for the job and get started straight away. It’s also not a costly problem to tackle, so there’s no need to put it off.
Remember that if you don’t use AI automation, your competitors will. IBM recently released a research indicating a rise in the number of firms adopting AI for growth.
Here are some key findings from IBM’s research:
- 35% of organizations polled use AI in their operations, with an additional 40% investigating AI as a solution.
- 30% of IT professionals say their company employs AI automation to save staff time.
- Approximately half of the organizations polled cited various AI benefits, such as cost-effectiveness/efficiency, enhanced technical performance, and improved user experiences.
According to DemandSage, 84% of firms believe AI will provide them a competitive advantage, and 83% say adopting AI within their organization is a key priority.
Why is this important to you? Because AI not only leads to growth, but it leads to huge growth.
If your competitors implement AI faster than you, they will be able to capture a larger piece of the market.
That also implies you’ll have a more difficult time closing the gap with the rivals.
To prevent falling behind — or just being outclassed — begin investigating the best AI systems for your company immediately.
How should I go about selecting the best AI workflow automation software?
Choosing the best AI-driven workflow automation software will vary on whatever department you want to automate, but the core stages remain the same:
Examine the objectives of your teams. Determine your team’s ultimate goal (getting more emails, driving visitors to a webinar, making direct sales, etc.).
Make a diagram of your present workflow. Examine the customer journey from their initial point of interaction with your business to the final aim of your team. It is beneficial to write down each step of the process.
Examine the aspects that are time-consuming and repetitious. Determine which parts of your sales funnel have the potential to be automated.
Investigate which tools can best automate those parts. You can compare your possibilities once you’ve determined which characteristics you require from AI workflow automation software.
Look for the answer that takes the fewest tools. Choose the tool that will best assist your team in meeting its short and long-term objectives.
This procedure will assist you in determining which capabilities you require from AI software in order to automate specific workflows.