The PR 20/20 Blog

Picture this scenario: You Google a local business and find their listing online. You assume details like the hours, location and phone number are correct. You get in your car to go to the business, only to find they’re closed even though their online hours listed open. Or worse, the address listed online was inaccurate, and you arrive at the wrong location.

As a consumer, would you give this business another chance? Would you try to call them to find out their real hours or right location? If you answered no, you’re not alone— a total of 68% of consumers report that they’d stop using a local business if their online information is inaccurate. What’s worse is that 80% of those consumers say they lose trust if they see incorrect or inconsistent online listings.

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

I recently recorded a five-part Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing series with Kevin Walsh, product manager of machine learning at HubSpot, for HubSpot Academy’s YouTube channel.

Today, we’re introducing three new services—Automated Press Releases, Automated Performance Reports and Piloting AI™ Workshops—but, first, the backstory . . .

Artificial intelligence is accelerating change in the marketing industry, and your career:

• Consumers will demand greater personalization, while wanting to control their data and privacy.
• Technology will get smarter, intelligently automating traditionally human-powered activities while adding layers of complexity to your martech stack.
• Career paths will evolve. Some jobs will be lost, and new ones, some we can’t even fathom, will be created.
• Brands will need to become more human with greater resources dedicated to listening, relationship building, ethics, empathy, creativity, culture and community. AI should make us better people, professionals and brands.

Are you ready? Is your company ready?

In the spirit of summer soon approaching, we’re starting this post off with a little exercise. Don’t worry though, you can stay seated for this one...

Take a quick inventory of your inbox/es and answer these three questions:

Google Analytics can capture more than 360 metrics and more than 260 dimensions. Long story short, there are thousands of reports you can run in Google Analytics to evaluate the strength of your marketing program, in particular your website.  

But, when you’ve got access to vast amounts of data, where do you start and how do you avoid falling into endless, fruitless rabbit holes?

Editor’s Note: The Book Clubbin’ series recaps business and marketing related books read by the PR 20/20 team each quarter as part of the agency book club. This series will highlight key takeaways and top tips directly from each book club book.

All businesses want to succeed and sustain themselves for many years to come. But, what makes a business grow from a startup to an enterprise success story?

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

How do you get started with AI?

AI is a complicated subject. It’s easy to get frustrated or struggle to “get it.” It can take weeks, months or even years for some marketers to fully understand what AI is and why it matters.

Marketers have an important job that often falls by the wayside. According to CSO Insights, this important job is formalized by only a little more than half of all companies surveyed.   

What’s this job you ask? Sales enablement.

HubSpot defines sales enablement as:

The processes, content, and technology that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.

No matter what content you write or what stories your brand tells, there’s a good chance a machine can help you do it better.

Artificial intelligence, despite any hype or buzz you hear, is a very real force in the marketing industry—and it’s changing the way brands and people create content.

Oh, premium content. We as marketers love our ebooks, whitepapers and infographics— they’re mutually beneficial pieces of content for both us and the downloader.

On the marketing side, we’re able to gate our content behind a form to gain rich lead generation intelligence, like basic contact information, persona type, content interests or funnel stage. Armed with that info, we can then enroll leads into future marketing programs that are most relevant to them.