How To Create A Marketing Calendar That Will Streamline Your Campaigns

If you’ve ever led a marketing team, you know it’s easy to get overwhelmed by tasks and plans. Numerous blog posts, social media marketing campaigns, and emails crowd your pipeline. But distractions and urgent issues get in the way, and when you check the clock, several hours have passed. It happens all the time: you miss …

The post How To Create A Marketing Calendar That Will Streamline Your Campaigns first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers

If you aren’t willing to embrace AI digital assistants as a marketer, you’re going to have a tough time competing with everyone else. While you’re drowning in the tsunami of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, your competition will swim laps around you. What if you could: Spend more time in your zone of genius. Stop …

The post A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers

If you aren’t willing to embrace AI digital assistants as a marketer, you’re going to have a tough time competing with everyone else.

While you’re drowning in the tsunami of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, your competition will swim laps around you.

What if you could:

  • Spend more time in your zone of genius.
  • Stop feeling overwhelmed by your workload.
  • Boost your productivity by 80%.
  • Create a personalized experience for your audience.
  • Increase your ROI with only a few clicks of your mouse.

Just like Alexa brings you the best jams on-demand and Siri helps you find the nearest Starbucks, AI digital assistants can help you become a better marketer.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of AI digital assistants and the tools you can use to put your marketing tasks on autopilot.

But, to do that, we need to first look at what AI personal assistants really are.

What Are AI Digital Assistants?

You’ve probably already come into contact with Siri and Alexa, two of the world’s most famous AI personal assistants.

Maybe you’ve dabbled with a few more on your laptop, smartphone, or wearables without even realizing it.

AI digital assistants are software programs that help you complete and automate tasks with a tap, click, or voice command.

How do these programs understand and complete such complex tasks?

By using artificial intelligence like voice recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to understand requests and machine learning to collect data, identify patterns, and “learn” user preferences.

With the right digital assistant in your back pocket, you’ll have a secret marketing weapon tailored to your brand’s needs. You’re going to make better marketing decisions for your audience in seconds.

How AI Digital Assistants Are Shaping The Future of Work

Remember when millennials disrupted the way we work with remote work and telecommuting?

Well, artificial intelligence is doing the same thing.

The Salesforce State of Marketing Report noted that AI adoption with marketers is up by a whopping 186% from 2018, with 84% using AI technology.

And late adopters? You’re getting left behind.

“But what about our jobs?!” you cry.

“Won’t AI make us obsolete?” you ponder.

I’m here to tell you the truth — no.

A report published by ManpowerGroup found that 87% of employers anticipate increasing or maintaining their human workforce due to AI automation.

So what does it all mean?

Robots are creating MORE jobs, and AI digital assistants are not here to replace you.

If you no longer have to spend time finding relevant content to share with your audience or scrolling through countless Instagram profiles to find the “perfect” influencer for your next campaign, you get to focus on what you do best:

Creating, implementing, and fine-tuning your marketing strategy.

Plus, you’re going to have mountains of data to back up your decisions, which will get you better results, a higher ROI, and more sales.

The Benefits of Using AI Digital Assistants in Marketing

With 75% of marketers planning to implement AI in their businesses within the next three years, the big question is:

What’s all the fuss about?

Why should you care about using AI in your job as a marketer?

Here are just some of the benefits you can reap with an AI digital assistant:

Boost Your Productivity

What do you hate most about your job?

Is it those dull, repetitive tasks?

Or the hours spent hunched over data trying to make sense of it?

Delegate your most soul-draining, eye-roll-inducing tasks to your AI personal assistant and take back your time.

The best part? No complaining, recruiting, or training required.

With your repetitive tasks no longer on your calendar, you’ll have more time to focus on the bigger picture and tap into your creativity.

Automate Your Workflow and Growth with a Digital Assistant

The secret sauce to growing and running a successful business is automation.

Nearly 80% of executives agree that automation can save you 360 hours a year.

The more you can automate your business, the more you can focus on moving the needle forward.

The same goes for marketers.

When you can automate much of your workflow, you can refocus your attention on tweaking your marketing strategy and getting the results you want.

AI digital assistants help you stay in your zone of genius and put growth on autopilot.

Personalize Your AI Marketing Strategy

How vague is the targeting for your marketing campaigns?

Does it look like this?

  • Women
  • Age 25-35
  • Who like exercise

You’re not alone.

60% of content marketers struggle with personalization.

The good news? An AI digital assistant can get you off the struggle bus.

Artificial intelligence gets rid of the fluff and helps you target individuals rather than generic groups.

Don’t stop at “exercise” for your yoga mat brand. Drill down to women between the ages of 25-35 who prefer pilates over CrossFit.

Personalizing your marketing strategy allows you to take advantage of the 79% of consumers who are more likely to engage with brand promotions if tailored to their past interactions.

Create Better Content, Faster

Content creation is incredible for attracting new leads and building trust with your audience.

But it’s also time and resource-intensive.

The right AI digital assistant can help you speed up, scale, and optimize your content marketing workflow — something 47% of marketers say is their biggest challenge.

Using AI for content creation isn’t a new idea. Some of the world’s biggest brands are already using it as part of their content marketing strategy:

  • The Washington Post uses Heliograf (an in-house reporting AI) to write social media posts and basic news stories.
  • Forbes is using AI to create content alongside humans.

Boost Your SEO with Less Time

Are you spending hours creating content and getting zero traffic in search?

AI digital assistants can identify where you’re going wrong and streamline your SEO strategy.

With a few clicks, you can see what content you should create for your niche and what keywords the top-ranking sites are using to get to Google’s front page.

AI can also optimize your existing blog posts and improve your rankings in search. You’ll get suggestions on how to improve your content and what keywords to add to rank for queries.

The Best AI Digital Assistant Tools for Marketers

Want 59% better close rates? What about a 58% increased revenue? Or 54% more traffic and engagement?

Start using these AI digital assistants to automate your marketing workflow.

Email Marketing:

  • Automizy: Emails not getting opened? Automizy can help you test and optimize your email subject lines and improve your open rate by 34%.
  • Cortex by Retention Science: Cortex uses machine learning to continually optimize its automation for better results. Over time, the tool will refine your subject lines, discover the best time to send emails, and use engagement data to create better email campaigns.
  • customer.io: Send targeted emails, push notifications, and SMSs to your audience based on how they interact with your business. The tool can lower your churn rate, create stronger relationships, and drive more sales.
  • Drift: Drift is an email marketing tool that automates your inbox and delivers targeted messages to specific users. It’s the ultimate personal assistant for managing your marketing and sales inbox.

Ad Campaigns:

  • Pathmatics: Curious about why your competitor’s ad campaigns are outperforming yours? Pathmatics is a marketing intelligence platform that dissects how brands advertise online.
  • Pattern89: Pattern89 is an AI marketing tool that can improve almost every aspect of your ads. You’ll get personalized recommendations for adjusting your ad spend and actionable insights on the type of ads to use, including placement, format, and image attributes like orientation or the number of faces.
  • Phrasee: Stop writing dull copy for Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. Phrasee specializes in language generation for marketing copy by pulling data from your online posts. Add in your draft copy, and Phrasee will test its effectiveness before you spend a single cent.

Personalization:

  • Emarsys: Emarsys is an AI omnichannel platform helping you personalize your B2C marketing across the board. Using artificial intelligence, it learns customer behavior to predict their next move, segment users, and select using artificial intelligence content automatically.
  • Uberflip: Uberflip is an advanced content personalization platform. The AI figures out what content your audience craves, optimizes your campaigns, and improves your conversion rate. Shellman used Uberflip to increase their win rate by 40% by delivering one-to-one content experiences.

Social Media:

  • HubSpot: Inside HubSpot’s robust CRM, you’ll find social media software powered by AI, which automatically creates posts based on the metadata of the link.
  • Meet Cortex: Meet Cortex creates social media content your audience wants. Analyzing your data and competitors provides insights on taste preferences, the best time to post, and shows you how to stay ahead of the competition.
  • NetBase: NetBase uses machine learning to take social listening to the next level. The tool gives real-time insights about reactions and sentiments towards your brand. You’ll also get access to insights on audience behavior, drivers, influencers, and location-specific analysis.
  • Lately: Turns your blog URL into dozens of social media posts of varying character lengths.
  • Zoomph: Zoomph measures audience behavior and ROI on social media platforms. Use it to automatically track the latest trends to boost engagement and increase brand awareness.

Creating Content:

  • Acrolinx: Acrolinx is a software platform that can “read” your content. It captures how you communicate, aligns your content with your guidelines, and analyzes performance to improve your content.
  • AI-Writer: AI-Writer can create an entire SEO friendly blog post using only a headline. While the text output isn’t perfect, it can save quite a bit of time.
  • Atomic Reach: At a loss for the right words for an ad? Atomic Reach is your new best friend. It analyzes your content and takes out the guesswork by rewriting it in the style your audience prefers.

Content Ideas:

  • Curata: Any successful marketer knows providing value to your audience is critical. One of the easiest ways to do this is with content curation. Curate uses AI to save you time by finding the most useful and relevant content in any niche.
  • Stackla: User-generated content (UGC) is powerful social proof. Stackla helps you discover, manage, and show off UGC content your audience is creating (and engaging with), so you can build trust.
  • Unmetric: Unmetric analyzes your content and competitors to discover new ideas and opportunities. Find out what’s working and what’s not, then craft a content strategy backed by data.

SEO:

  • Text Optimizer: Text Optimizer is a content marketer’s holy grail. It uses AI to analyze web pages and texts to see how well optimized it is for a specific keyword. The result? You can quickly identify the keywords used on pages ranking in search or analyze your published blog posts to find additional keywords.
  • MarketMuse: MarketMuse streamlines content creation for any niche. The AI lets you know about search terms you haven’t used (but should), so you can fill in your content gaps. It’s so effective that some users see a 30% growth in leads from organic search.
  • WordLift: WordLift is an AI-powered SEO tool for WordPress. It automates internal linking, helps search engines understand your pages, and keeps visitors on your site longer with relevant content recommendations.

Landing Pages:

  • Personyze: Are you still using standard landing pages for your campaigns? If so, you’re leaving money on the table. Personyze uses AI to collect data about visitors’ demographics and past behavior to create a unique landing page that boosts conversion rates.

Conclusion

AI digital assistants are not here to replace you.

Instead, these tools are the perfect sidekick to help you get rid of a heavy task load, so you can focus on strategy, tap into your creativity, and innovate.

Automating your workflow instantly makes you more productive, and AI helps you predict the buyer’s journey far more accurately.

You can analyze mass sets of data in seconds. Dig deep into insights, personalize marketing campaigns, and take user experiences to a whole new level.

In short, AI digital assistants are a game-changer for marketers who want to use tech to outwit, outlast, and outplay their competition.

Are you using AI digital assistants to streamline your marketing workflow?

The post A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers appeared first on Neil Patel.

New comment by gidan in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2020)"

I’m a JavaScript developer with 10 years of experience (have been nearly full-time js all these years). First thing first, i’m not particularly good at speaking english (french accent..). That being said, I’m efficient with all kind of javascript application, and i’m not afraid to dive deep into complex code. I would be delighted if your hiring process requires a coding challenge, if so, please contact me. Oh, and I’m also an expert in CSS.

Rate: 60€/hr

Resume: http://julesbou.net/resume.odf

Example of code: https://github.com/julesbou/lock-async/blob/master/lock.js

The post New comment by gidan in “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2020)” appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.

Fundbox Recession Funding – Check Out Our Research on This Rock Solid Way to Get Financing Even in a Recession

Itching for Business Financing? Then Check out Our Review of Fundbox Recession Funding

Fundbox is one of several lending companies online. They offer Invoice Financing (which is not the same as Invoice Factoring). Our Fundbox recession funding review can help you make the best decision for your business.

Fundbox has raised more than $100 million in capital from Silicon Valley investors such as General Catalyst Partners, Khosla Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Entrée Capital, and Spark Capital. They count Jeff Bezos of Amazon as one of their investors.

We look at the specifics and drill down into the details.

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: Background

Fundbox is located online here: https://fundbox.com/. Their physical address is:

300 Montgomery St.
San Francisco, CA 94104.

You can call them at: (855) 572-7707. Their contact page is here: https://fundbox.com/company/contact-us/. You can email them at: support@fundbox.com. The company has been in business since 2013.

Invoice Financing

Rather than purchasing your accounts receivables for a percentage of the money owed to you, they will instead finance the full amount in the form of what is essentially a loan. And then you will pay it back as your customers pay their invoices. Fundbox does not communicate directly with your customers; you will continue to do so.

Payment plans are either 12 or 24 weeks. There is no penalty for repaying early. If you repay early, Fundbox will waive all remaining fees. If you finance your invoices with Fundbox, the fees are flat.

To qualify, you must have at least 6 months invoicing history in your accounting software. And you must have at least $50,000 in annual revenue.

Fees

Fundbox’s fees can vary, depending on customer and over time. You will pay the same amount each week. See: https://fundbox.com/pricing/.

Determine if you can meet a regular payment schedule during an economic downturn.

Demolish your funding problems with our rock-solid guide about 27 killer ways to get cash for your business. Get money even during the worst of a recession.

Revolving Business Lines of Credit

They also offer revolving business lines of credit. You can get line of credit up to $100,000. You will need to allow Fundbox to connect with your accounting software, such as QuickBooks. Fundbox would like to see at least two months of activity in any supported accounting software or three months of transactions in a business bank account.

Your business should be based in one of the 50 United States or one of their supported US territories. Their approved territories are Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.

Fundbox Pay

Fundbox has a B2B payment system (in a way, like Square or PayPal). This enables merchants to get paid faster on Net 60 accounts. It also allows buyers to qualify for net terms wherever Fundbox is accepted. Applying will not affect your personal credit. See: https://fundboxpay.com.

Accounting Software they Support

Fundbox Pay supports several types of accounting software, including:

  • Clio
  • Ebility
  • FreshBooks
  • Harvest
  • InvoiceASAP

They also support:

  • Jobber
  • Kashoo
  • PayPal
  • QuickBooks Desktop and Online
  • Zoho

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: Advantages

Advantages to Fundbox recession funding  include their exceptional flexibility in connecting to your business bank account, and fast approval. Another advantage is that Fundbox stays out of your relationship with your clients. Your clients need never know that you are working with Fundbox.

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: Disadvantages

The main disadvantage is less than fully transparent fee information. However, if you sign up for Fundbox, they will let you know what your fees are.

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: The Bottom Line

The businesses which do best with Fundbox will be those which can pay back their debts on time or even early. But this is the case with virtually all online lenders, of course.

In addition, entrepreneurs with poor credit will be able to turn to Fundbox. This is vital as most other online lenders will not do the same. And it is even more important during a recession.

Companies without a long time in business might also do well. While neither a minimal time in business nor a minimal annual or monthly revenue requirement is spelled out on the site, there has got to be some sort of minimum in both areas.

As might be expected, companies which miss payments will not do so well with Fundbox recession funding – but that is the case with all online lenders.

Demolish your funding problems with our rock-solid guide about 27 killer ways to get cash for your business. Get money even during the worst of a recession.

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: Alternative Funding

Of course we recommend business credit building as a reasonable alternative to Fundbox.

The Advantages

Since small business credit is separate from personal, it helps to safeguard a business owner’s personal assets, in the event of legal action or business bankruptcy. Also, with two separate credit scores, a small business owner can get two separate cards from the same vendor. This effectively doubles buying power.

Another benefit is that even start-ups can do this. Heading to a bank for a business loan can be a recipe for disappointment. But building business credit, when done right, is a plan for success.

Individual credit scores depend upon payments but also other elements like credit usage percentages. But for business credit, the scores truly just hinge on if a business pays its invoices on a timely basis.

The Process

Growing business credit is a process, and it does not happen without effort. A business needs to actively work to build company credit. Nonetheless, it can be done readily and quickly, and it is much faster than establishing personal credit scores. Vendors are a big part of this process.

Carrying out the steps out of order will lead to repetitive rejections. Nobody can start at the top with business credit. For example, you can’t start with retail or cash credit from your bank. If you do, you’ll get a rejection 100% of the time.

Small Business Fundability

A business has to be fundable to lending institutions and vendors. For this reason, a small business will need a professional-looking web site and e-mail address, with website hosting from a company like GoDaddy. Plus business phone and fax numbers ought to have a listing on ListYourself.net.

Additionally the business telephone number should be toll-free (800 exchange or the equivalent).

A company will also need a bank account devoted strictly to it, and it has to have all of the licenses essential for operation. These licenses all have to be in the accurate, appropriate name of the small business, with the same business address and phone numbers. Note that this means not just state licenses, but potentially also city licenses.

Working with the Internal Revenue Service

Visit the Internal Revenue Service website and get an EIN for your business. They’re free of charge. Select a business entity such as corporation, LLC, etc. A business can begin as a sole proprietor but will most likely wish to switch to a form of corporation or LLC to limit risk and make best use of tax benefits.

A business entity will matter when it involves tax obligations and liability in case of a lawsuit. A sole proprietorship means the entrepreneur is it when it comes to liability and tax obligations. Nobody else is responsible.

If you operate a business as a sole proprietor at least file for a DBA (‘doing business as’) status. If you do not, then your personal name is the same as the business name. As a result, you can wind up being directly responsible for all business debts.

In addition, per the Internal Revenue Service, by having this arrangement there is a 1 in 7 possibility of an IRS audit. There is a 1 in 50 chance for corporations! Avoid confusion and dramatically reduce the odds of an IRS audit as well.

Demolish your funding problems with our rock-solid guide about 27 killer ways to get cash for your business. Get money even during the worst of a recession.

Instigating the Business Credit Reporting Process

Start at the D&B web site and obtain a free DUNS number. A DUNS number is how D&B gets a corporation into their system, to produce a PAYDEX score. If there is no DUNS number, then there is no record and no PAYDEX score.

Once in D&B’s system, search Equifax and Experian’s web sites for the company. You can do this at https://www.creditsuite.com/reports. If there is a record with them, check it for correctness and completeness. If there are no records with them, go to the next step in the process. In this manner, Experian and Equifax will have activity to report on.

Vendor Credit

First you must establish trade lines that report. This is vendor credit.

And with an established business credit profile and score you can start getting retail and cash credit.

These varieties of accounts often tend to be for the things bought all the time, like shipping boxes, outdoor work wear, ink and toner, and office furniture.

But first off, what is trade credit? These trade lines are credit issuers who will give you preliminary credit when you have none now. Terms are generally Net 30, instead of revolving.

Hence if you get approval for $1,000 in vendor credit and use all of it, you will need to pay that money back in a set term, like within 30 days on a Net 30 account.

Details

Net 30 accounts need to be paid in full within 30 days. 60 accounts must be paid in full within 60 days. Unlike with revolving accounts, you have a set time when you must pay back what you borrowed or the credit you made use of.

To kick off your business credit profile the right way, you should get approval for vendor accounts that report to the business credit reporting agencies. As soon as that’s done, you can then make use of the credit.

Then pay back what you used, and the account is on report to Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, or Equifax.

Not every vendor can help in the same way true starter credit can. These are merchants that will grant an approval with minimal effort. You also want them to be reporting to one or more of the big three CRAs: Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, and Experian.

Retail Credit

Once there are 3 or more vendor trade accounts reporting to at least one of the CRAs, move onto retail credit. These are companies such as Office Depot and Staples.

Use the business’s EIN on these credit applications.

Fleet Credit

Fundbox Recession Funding Credit Suite

Are there more accounts reporting? Then progress to fleet credit. These are companies such as BP and Conoco. Use this credit to buy fuel and fix and take care of vehicles. Make sure to apply using the small business’s EIN.

Cash Credit

Have you been responsibly handling the credit you’ve up to this point? Then move to more universal cash credit. These are companies like Visa and MasterCard. Use your EIN to apply.

These are often MasterCard credit cards. If you have more trade accounts reporting, then these are feasible.

Monitor Your Business Credit

Know what is happening with your credit. Make certain it is being reported and deal with any errors ASAP. Get in the habit of checking credit reports. Dig into the specifics, not just the scores.

We can help you monitor business credit at Experian and D&B for 90% less than it would cost you at the CRAs.

Update the info if there are inaccuracies or the info is incomplete.

Challenging Mistakes

So, what’s all this monitoring for? It’s to contest any errors in your records. Mistakes in your credit report(s) can be taken care of. But the CRAs usually want you to dispute in a particular way.

Disputing credit report inaccuracies normally means you send a paper letter with duplicates of any evidence of payment with it. These are documents like receipts and cancelled checks. Never mail the original copies. Always send copies and retain the original copies.

Disputing credit report errors also means you precisely detail any charges you contest. Make your dispute letter as understandable as possible. Be specific about the problems with your report. Use certified mail so that you will have proof that you sent in your dispute.

A Word about Business Credit Building

Always use credit sensibly! Never borrow more than what you can pay back. Keep an eye on balances and deadlines for payments. Paying promptly and fully will do more to boost business credit scores than nearly anything else.

Building business credit pays. Good business credit scores help a small business get loans. Your loan provider knows the small business can pay its debts. They understand the business is bona fide. The company’s EIN connects to high scores, and credit issuers won’t feel the need to ask for a personal guarantee.

Business credit is an asset which can help your small business for years to come. And you can even build it during a recession.

Fundbox Recession Funding Review: Some Final Thoughts

And finally, as with every other lending program, whether online or offline, always remember to read the fine print and do the math. Go over the details with care. And decide if this option will be good for you and your company.

In addition, consider alternative financing options that go beyond lending, including building business credit. Recession funding exists but it is harder to get. So make sure to try Fundbox recession funding.

Only you can best decide how to get the money you need to help your business grow. Today, we want to hear from our audience! Share your voice with us about your experiences with online lenders. And let us know your opinion of our Fundbox review.

The post Fundbox Recession Funding – Check Out Our Research on This Rock Solid Way to Get Financing Even in a Recession appeared first on Credit Suite.