Make a Google search about how to improve your productivity and you’ll find that most of the suggestions recommend using AI to automate time-consuming tasks or reduce errors. They’re preaching to the choir — 57% of US workers say they’d like AI to do more tasks for them. Yet many businesses struggle to get the results they want. Do you feel AI has been a complete game-changer for running your marketing agency, or do you suspect you’re missing out on the full benefits?
If you’re in the second category, you don’t need to feel in the dark alone. Solutions like Bitskout have emerged to remove the usual obstacles associated with AI adoption so you can start saving time and money immediately. Here’s how.
Barriers to Entry for AI
The tasks marketing agencies want to automate may look simple, but there are often multiple layers of complexity below the surface. For instance, creating a chatbot requires an algorithm that can read a message and understand:
The type of help needed (e.g., pricing request or support ticket)
The exact topic of the question
How to give a helpful response
If you’ve ever had a frustrating conversation with a chatbot that misinterprets everything you said and hones in on the wrong words, you’ll know how difficult it is to get this right. And even ChatGPT does not know your specific business needs.
AI typically requires millions of data points, months of training, and a dedicated ML team who can spend a year or more developing the right technology — something only the top 0.01% of companies can afford. As for the other 99.9%, they’re forced to delegate the tasks AI could and should handle to employees or interns.
But things don’t have to be that way.
Where Bitskout Comes In
Bitskout is on a mission to remove the usual barriers to entry for AI so you can start saving time and resources straight away. We achieve this by making AI:
Configurable in minutes via simple UI
Integrated with tools that you already use
Possible to fine-tune using just 5-10 examples
Forget about the need for complex integration development or gazillions of gigabytes of data to develop AI. Using Bitskout is as easy as using email — in a matter of a few clicks, you’ll have a tool that can perform simple tasks. We also provide templates to make the job even easier (watch this video to understand how).
This might sound good in theory, but what does it mean for you as a marketing agency? Let’s run through 6 ways Bitskout can help you save time and money.
1. Extract Data from Business Cards
It might be 2022, but business cards are very much still in vogue (albeit with some new additions to make them easier to use, like LinkedIn and Lead Capture software).
And while digital versions have emerged, most of them are still on paper — meaning some poor marketing intern has to manually enter details from hundreds of cards into an agency’s CRM following an event.
Data entry is one of the first activities you should automate, and using Bitskout makes it feasible for all marketing agencies, no matter how small. And you can make truly powerful automations like getting a list of topics to discuss with a prospect in seconds to your phone.
Even better, it’s not just business cards we can help with. Bitskout can also extract information from other documents, brochures, or photos and summarize it in digital format.
Our plug-ins will even arrange the information in convenient tables for you — for instance, it might categorize competitor brochures at a trade show by industries or products.
Next time you go to an event, there’s no need to restrain yourself when wondering which leaflets or business cards you should take back. However much information you have, Bitskout will process and digitize everything in less than ten minutes.
2. Categorize Information
We’ve already established that Bitskout can categorize information it takes from physical and images. But the fun doesn’t stop there — it can also make sense of digital queries (like emails or form submissions).
No more spending endless hours sorting through your inbox, or delegating it to someone else but feeling worried that they’ll miss something vital.
Our plug-ins can differentiate between categories like:
Cold emails
Guest blogging requests
Email marketing automation from companies
Worried your needs might be too complex for this? Don’t be. You can also create plug-ins that classify the complexity of a query (e.g., based on internal knowledge or industry) and put it into a category based on how much effort a response requires. This way, you’ll be able to handle the difficult ones yourself - just use a template:
You can check out how Bitskout uses AI for classification in this video to learn more.
A couple of minutes on classifying each request can add up to almost a month per year of time wasted — just think how much more efficient (and profitable) your agency would be if you could respond to everything twice as fast.
3. Optimize Your Back Office
The back office might not be the most glamorous part of doing business, but it is one of the most important. Tools like Quickbooks and Xero have been around for a while to help automate invoices and taxes — and chances are you use one of them.
But while these programs extract data from invoices, they’re missing a crucial feature that could make all the difference: Capturing invoice data so you can use it for cash flow forecasts and more.
Bitskout will transfer this information to other tools, such as Asana, monday.com, and ClickUp. This way, your team can analyze everything on a user-friendly dashboard.
We’ve created a handy video tutorial for converting data to the following:
4. Provide Analytics to Make Better Decisions
So far, we’ve only scratched the surface of AI’s capabilities. When Bitskout is processing information, it’s sophisticated enough to make sense of it and give you unique insights.
Take HARO as an example (Help a Reporter Out Newsletter). It’s an invaluable tool, but it requires pouring through hundreds of questions three times a day — it’s practically a full-time job and a boring one at that. But for AI, it’s a piece of cake.
Bitskout plug-ins will trawl through the email alerts for you to plot new trends about countries, areas, or news outlets to help you catch a trend wave earlier than anyone. Talk about having an edge over your competition.
5. Convert Your Knowledge into Digital Form
Imagine if all your knowledge of your business could be magically transplanted into another brain. AI isn’t quite capable of this, but it’s not a million miles away either.
Thanks to machine learning, AI can learn from our input, which means we can effectively “teach it” what you know to make it a more effective tool. At Bitskout, we call this making your expertise digital, and here’s how you can do it using our plugin.
Naturally, AI can’t do absolutely everything — you’re not going to be able to teach it how to find a unicorn company (at least, not yet). But you can teach it how to recognize patterns and categorize information. For instance, if you onboard new employees, AI can learn how to deal with the forms they submit and carry out the relevant admin.
6. Comprehend Human Responses
Even as a human, it can be hard to understand what someone is trying to say when they communicate with you through writing. Before you can respond, you need to work through the possibilities in your head by understanding factors like tone, emotion, and implications.
Since people may say the same thing in various manners, it can be tough to automate responses. The beauty of machine learning is that AI can learn if it’s given enough data, allowing it to know when to give different responses — and using Bitskout makes this easier than ever. In a matter of minutes, you can set up a plug-in through Monday that categorizes messages so you can respond to them quickly and easily.
We recently helped a customer who had five employees in Manila whose job was solely reading prospect responses to cold emails. Now, they can redirect the efforts of that team into revenue-generating activities like looking for new prospects.
Ready to supercharge your operations?
AI is your key to getting the most out of your resources, doubling your productivity, and allowing you to focus on your most important tasks. And with Bitskout, it only costs $59 to help you access the kind of tech typically reserved for much bigger companies.