Using AI to Drive Efficiencies and Meet KPIs in Marketing

With their near-unlimited resources, tech giants like Amazon and Google set the bar for the experience your customers and prospects expect online — especially when it comes to AI. (After all, people use an AI-powered search engine every time they search on Google, and they get AI-powered recommendations every time they browse Netflix.) 

But most businesses are not Netflix, Google, or Amazon — and they don't have the resources to easily evolve with consumers. So, the billion-dollar question is: in a world where technology will continue to evolve and raise the bar for quality consumer experiences, what can the non-Amazons of the world do to keep up?

In this guide, you'll learn how Yext leverages AI to help you differentiate your brand, keep up with your customers' expectations, and drive more KPIs with fewer resources. Finally, you'll learn more about why Yext is the best option to hit the ground running with AI-enabled solutions. 

Three ways AI solves your biggest marketing challenges

With the capabilities of AI at your fingertips, marketers find themselves at a point where personalized, data-driven strategies can engage audiences on a scale and depth that was once only imaginable with multiple people or teams.

Here's how.

Challenge #1: Customize interactions for specific channels and convert users

Yext AI use case: Deliver a more conversational experience that drives conversions with Chat

64% of marketers say AI is either very important or critically important to their marketing success over the next 12 months. And with driving conversions as one critical metric of success for marketers, it makes sense to explore how you can tap into the power of AI to do so.

Prospective customers often visit your site hoping to learn more information, but it can be difficult to gather their contact information or track their journey so that you can engage with them further. A chatbot is a great, low-pressure way for users to ask questions when they aren't quite ready to commit — and for your business to gather valuable information about their needs.

This is where Yext Chat shines at helping organizations like yours engage — and convert — site visitors. Powered by generative AI, Yext Chat allows you to have a human-like, automated conversation with visitors to your website (without the pressure of a phone call). From there, you have the option to set up specific actions like "request a free consultation" or "see a sample.” When customers click, the bot can collect and store their contact information — and perform the requested action — automatically. This helps you interact with a higher volume of customers online and drive more conversions.

Challenge #2: Create more content without depleting more resources

Yext AI use case: Scale your content strategy with Content Generation 

The phrase "content is king" gets repeated for a reason: scaling your content creation can have positive effects on SEO and customer satisfaction, and it's also essential to personalizing your customer's journey. But until recently, creating a lot of content took a lot of team members or a lot of time — or both. 

Today, content generation can be a powerful tool for leveling the playing field. It helps businesses compete — without requiring the same scale of resources as their larger counterparts. It does this by helping to automate diverse types of content creation: responding to reviews (as described above), drafting blog posts, producing more social media content, generating product descriptions, and even delivering personalized messaging at scale. 

Accelerating your content strategy with the Yext Content Generation feature gives you all of these benefits. For example, Yext helps you deliver great content by letting you use AI to collect, clean, and organize information – and then generate accurate content across blogs, bios, descriptions, and more using your own custom instructions.

This takes a lot of the manual labor out of creating fresh content — where you'd otherwise have to spend time collecting research to support the story you're crafting, piece together the research and your perspective, and articulate it in a way that is grammatically correct and reads well –  while allowing for human beings to still review and approve the auto-generated content as a "suggestion" before it gets published externally. Additionally, since you control the information that the model can use to suggest this new content, you don't have to worry about hallucinations or mistakes in the same way you would if you were using an LLM without guardrails, like the CHATGPT app, to crawl the internet at large.  Challenge #3: Differentiate your brand and scale customer engagements — while reducing time spent on repetitive tasks

Yext AI use case: Engage customers with Content Generation for Review Response 

According to the Marketing AI Institute's 2023 State of Marketing, 77% of marketers say that reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks is the top outcome they want to achieve with AI. Automating the way you reply to reviews — while still issuing an on-brand response every time — certainly fits the bill.

Responding to reviews is an opportunity to improve relationships with customers who had a negative experience, thank loyal customers for kind reviews, and showcase excellent customer service to prospective customers who will consult customer reviews before making a purchase decision. Further, our research shows that businesses that respond to more than 50 percent of their reviews saw a nearly a half of a star improvement in their ratings over businesses that don't*. But customers expect personalized interactions when a business reaches out to them — and until recently, it's been too time-consuming for most orgs to issue a truly custom response to every review. That's where AI-generated replies come in. 

With Content Generation for Review Response from Yext, you no longer have to manually craft every reply. Instead, you can issue AI-generated replies that are unique, personalized, and on-brand. You can give prompts about what the generated response should include — i.e., tone to use, length, facts to mention — so that you can reply faster and more effectively. As a result, you can help your customers feel heard and drive customer satisfaction at scale.

Why Yext is the best option for improving operational efficiencies with AI

If you're ready to consider a solution that helps you automate these key tasks with AI, Yext is a great option. Give us just a minute to tell you why:

1. Yext integrates artificial intelligence into all aspects of our platform, and we use the best LLM for the experience you're building. We are model agnostic, which means that we can easily swap out the language models we use as newer, more powerful ones come along to ensure we use the best model to improve performance for the task at hand. (This isn't true of all "AI" platforms.)

2. Yext believes AI is best leveraged by balancing automation with human review and approval. AI is a tool to increase productivity – not a 1-1 replacement for hardworking employees. The Yext Platform balances automation and human oversight to ensure content accuracy and alignment with business objectives.

3. Yext understands the role of AI in the present and future of your marketing efforts. We identify — and continuously research — which areas of the platform could benefit from AI integration, so you don't have to. AI isn't "set it and forget it": you can expect ongoing innovations and new AI-supported opportunities on a rolling basis as we optimize our platform to evolve with emerging trends and advancements.

Conclusion

By leveraging AI intelligently, marketers today can provide the experience consumers expect from modern tech giants — without breaking the bank. AI can help support your team in differentiating your brand, connecting with more customers, and driving more KPIs with fewer resources. 

*Proprietary Yext study, 2023