How to Implement Affordable AI in 3 Steps, According to the Marketing AI Institute Director Artificial intelligence is continuing to make an impact on the business world. In fact, McKinsey predicts that up to $2.6 trillion in value will be unlocked by AI in marketing and sales alone. But, if you're less tech-savvy, you might be intimidated by terms like "artificial intelligence," "machine learning," and "algorithms." You probably also hear about these technologies and think to yourself, "My business definitely can't afford that." This makes sense. As a good marketer, you should be skeptical about high-priced emerging technologies. After all, we hear a lot of hype about AI from all sorts of blogs, news outlets, and vendors. But, still, sometimes it's hard to tell how a tool works and if it's actually worth your money. Additionally, if you're less familiar with AI, it might seem like it's only a technology used only by industry-leading behemoths. There are so many misconceptions about AI in marketing, that my colleagues and I launched the Marketing AI Institute. At the organization, we aim to make AI approachable and actionable for marketers. To date, we've vetted dozens of AI solutions and have monitored more than 1,500 sales and marketing AI companies with combined funding north of $6.2 billion. As the Institute's director, I’ve advised small and medium-sized companies on AI implementations. We've also piloted several AI tools in our own marketing operations at the Marketing AI Institute -- often for no or extremely...

How AI Tools Dropped One Agency’s Reporting Time by 97% As marketers in 2020, there's one major thing that we have in common: We're driven by data. Regardless of whether we're copywriters, social media managers, videographers, or web designers, data is key to helping us determine which projects are successful, which strategies might require more of a budget, and which tactics we need to leave behind. But those who thrive on data also know its one major downfall: it can take hours to collect and organize. Even if you have an analytics software that tracks a campaign's traffic, engagements, ROI, and other KPIs, you'll likely still need to take time to organize these numbers, analyze them, and come up with an understandable way to report on your projects to your team or clients. In the past, marketing firms and agencies tasked full-timers with reporting-related duties. And, although much of the data collection process has been automated by various analytics software, marketing teams and firms are still losing countless hours on manual data reporting. This is a problem that my Cleveland-based marketing firm, PR 20/20, ran into a few years ago. As part of our process, we create monthly performance reports for each of our clients. When we create them, we pull the data from HubSpot and Google Analytics. Then, we write a report to explain the data to our colleagues, clients, and project stakeholders. These reports allowed our clients to make better sense of the numbers they were...