Hello. My name’s Issy Nancarrow from Nancarrow Marketing, and today I’m talking about the competitive advantage that you, as a scale-up, can get from using AI. Because it is extensive.
Now, it covers three main areas with regards to your commercial and your sales pipeline: the strategy, the actual output, and the analytics.
So, with the strategy, what I’ve seen, for example, is that what used to take me months working with large companies on “How do we get competitive advantage? What’s our USP compared to our competitors? How can we get in front of them where our competitors aren’t getting in front of them? What’s the difference in pricing point?”—this extensive research used to take months. You can now do that sat in front of a computer, asking the right questions of AI.
Now, be sure that you’re asking AI to provide you with a critical opinion and not just the positive coach that quite often AI tools take. And really drill down into this: tell it your USP and ask it to be critical in the perspective of your customer. Ask it to imagine that it is one of your customers, give it a profile, and talk to it as if it is a customer.
Ask it what it thinks you sell based on your website, and how that compares to other competitor websites. You can use it to find competitors that you don’t know about, to look at your price point. You can really dig deep into the market research that will help you refine how you communicate your strategy, who you’re reaching out to, and how.
At the moment, the internet is being flooded with AI content, and it’s great—especially for us as startups/scale-ups—is that we can now create a phenomenally visual campaign with a much smaller budget. And that’s fantastic.
But there’s a lot of it out there, and a lot of it now looks very generic. So you still need to feed in your brand. Prompt AI with what could be unique about your design and your marketing. And I’m not just talking about color scheme; I’m talking about not pumping out those generic, kind of busy AI images that illustrate. But actually, when it pulls out an image like that for you, think, “Okay, if I don’t know what my product is, what would I see in this image? What does it tell me? How quickly do I process this information?” Because quite often those AI images are too busy, and you just need to remember to maintain that critical eye.
And, of course, the output content isn’t just about imagery; it’s about the content, the emails, the advertising—everything that you’re using to communicate with potential and current customers. AI should be a guide, but you still need to be that critical “How successful is this going to be, and how closely does it represent our USP?”
Because, for example, if you’ve got AI to generate a phenomenal amount of content that’s GEO/SEO optimised—fantastic. But if it’s just using that from other content on the web, it doesn’t actually give you that advantage because you’re just producing the same stuff as everybody else. You need your unique take, your unique research to actually be able to stand out, to then be recommended by AI, or to then for your email to be noticed by people. Because there is just so much being pumped out right now. So, uniqueness is more important than ever.
And then, of course, there’s the analytics. So, with all of this—and you can pump out a large amount of content, of communications—but without knowing what works, it could just entirely fall flat on its face. And this is where AI can really help you dig deep into what’s working and what’s not, much faster.
So, for instance, where I used to, and still use, a variety of platforms to look at the analytics of “How successful is this campaign? How do we tweak it to increase the average order value, or to increase the percentage of purchases that we get based on how many are sent out?” is that you can plug AI into these tools and get a kind of a micro and a macro view of everything that’s going on. And you can ask it questions to work out, “Okay, what type of person is communicating better with this type of email, or with that type of advert? Who’s providing us with a bigger order value?”
There are so many—depending on how your sales work—there are so many things you can ask AI once you allow it to tap into your analytics tools to much more effectively develop the success of your sales pipeline.
So, those are the three key areas where, as scale-ups, we can really gain a significant competitive advantage against the big fish in a way that we have never had the opportunity before.
