Preface
At the beginning of 2023, the most popular topic of discussion is that Microsoft’s Bing ChatGPT has been launched in just over 2 months and the number of active users has exceeded 100 million since its launch in November 2022. It broke the TikTok record, having the fastest growing number of downloaded users in history.
As the excellent and advanced people in the printing, packaging, and post-press equipment related industries, I believe that most of you have seriously thought about the impact and changes that AI and IT will bring to our industry in the near future. As highlighted in the previous blog “5 New Trends in the Printing Industry“: “It’s important to keep your head down and work hard, but it’s even more important to look up at the road from time to time to make sure you’re on the right path.” Today and the next issue will discuss AI and IT about what impacts, changes and predictable benefits will be brought to the five major aspects of printing-related industries, such as marketing, personnel, production, R&D, and finance. Without further ado, let’s jump right into this month’s theme and take a look at the changes in these 2 major aspects of Marketing and Human Resources orientation!
1. Marketing orientation
Have you been in a print-related industry or not participated in a physical printing or machinery-related exhibition for several years due to the pandemic? Is it hard to rely on stranger visits to grow your business? In this era, whether it is supplemented by the use of some AI or IT tools as a weapon to help companies in marketing or business work, the editor next will introduce the AI or IT tools that can be applied to the printing industry:
1.1 Content Marketing
“Content Marketing” works by creating content that consumers love,
to attract target customers and potential customers to continuously visit your website to increase customer loyalty.
Also, because conveying useful and interesting content has a high degree of attention,
Customer conversion rates will naturally increase.
In the era of increasing popularity of the Internet and information explosion,
The content of simply promoting products has made customers feel insensitive or even bored,
At this time, provide some informative and professional content articles,
That is, “content marketing” has become a very good marketing strategy,
So it can also be said to be the core of network marketing.
Nowadays, as far as the printing industry is concerned,
Some AI tools can be leveraged to achieve the following content marketing benefits:
1.1.1 Improve the efficiency of content copywriting
Although AI can quickly and efficiently produce content articles;
although the accuracy and depth of content knowledge in the industry field still needs time to be refined,
there is absolutely no problem with the article outline or topic orientation common to various industries.
1.1.2 Be closer to the theme of consumer demand
AI can be used to analyze the keywords currently entered on the websites of this group of people,
and then come up with more articles that are close to the intention of consumer demand to produce more helpful article content for consumers.
1.2 Social Media Marketing
“Social Media Marketing” is that enterprises use for marketing,
create specific information or content on social networking services to attract the attention of the public,
Generate online discussion among the masses.
Although this is an online marketing technique,
But the main thing is to make businesses and consumers more connected and interactive.
The social media commonly used by businesses for marketing purposes is as follows:
- IG
- YouTube
1.3 Paid Digital Advertising Marketing
Persado is an American company focused on AI copywriting marketing, and at present,
Persado can increase the conversation rate by an average of 41% and the click-through rate by 68% through AI-generated copywriting.
Including Dell, Citibank, American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Best Buy, Verizon, Vodafone, vivo and others have all begun to adopt.
You have a budget for advertising,
Want to expose your brand or product more immediately,
Paid advertising for digital marketing (network marketing) can be selected,
Including “keyword ads”, “Facebook ads”, “Google Network ads”, etc.,
Different industries have different marketing models,
At this time, it can be combined with SEO to achieve complementary traffic,
At the same time, use data analysis to make more effective business decisions.
In advertising,
How can AI help print related companies reduce costs and create benefits?
1.3.1 Improve the efficiency of advertising copywriting
AI can quickly and massively generate advertising copy ideas with a small number of words with high accuracy,
and then selected and slightly modified by professionals in the company,
which can greatly reduce the man-hours of marketers.
1.3.2 Accurately profile consumers
AI can combine data from different sources to enrich user perspectives and accurately depict consumer profiles.
1.3.3 Optimize ad delivery
AI can apply labels based on the visitor’s browsing behavior (product type, customer spending potential, loyalty, etc.),
so that advertisers can obtain higher quality advertising placements for precision marketing and optimize advertising results.
1.3.4 Meet the potential needs of consumers
In the early days, all consumers saw 100% the same advertisements after entering the websites,
but after understanding the profile of readers,
printing related companies could personalize according to the preferences of different consumers.
Different consumers would have advertising layouts that met their own needs,
thereby improving the efficiency of advertising.
1.4 SEO
When mentioning 1.3 paid digital advertising marketing,
Another way to boost website traffic will definitely be discussed at the same time, which is “SEO”.
SEO is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization.
Adjust the website by understanding the operating rules of the search engine,
and ways to improve the ranking of the destination website within the relevant search engine.
And then create orders and performance.
At present, the main benefits that intelligent AI brings for SEO are as follows:
1.4.1 SEO optimization
The website or article content can be analyzed by some AI automated tools,
and then the website structure,
content or blog post content can be optimized and corrected to improve the search ranking factor score.
Finally, improve the search ranking.
1.4.2 Keyword analysis and recommendations
For the keywords that enterprises want to promote,
you can provide all relevant combinations and search data of the keywords,
and intelligent AI can provide suggested long-tail keywords
1.4.3 Competitor analysis and recommendations
Enterprises can learn from other competitors’ digital marketing techniques,
from observing the traffic sources of other competitors, keyword rankings, internal and external link building strategies, social media work in tandem, advertising and other data.
Intelligent AI can provide “traffic pull-up strategy” or “keyword strategy adjustment” suggestions for marketers to optimize.
1.5 Customer service, sales, chatbot
The imperfection of early AI technology,
Conversations with people often involve some funny jokes.
But with the latest AI technology in 2023,
It can be achieved that the AI chat robot can conduct reasonable and professional conversations,
However, it is necessary to import the following enterprise information into the Training Data database in AI first.
- Product information (specifications, functions, standard price, warranty, etc.)
- Technical specifications (safety operation technical parameter range, operating procedures, recommended work, etc.)
- Code of work (working standards of salesperson and customer service personnel, good culture of the company, basic etiquette for reacting decently)
AI as the front-line customer service or basic business personnel of enterprises can easily do the job.
But the editor also has to remind another important point,
Involves exceptional communication skills, emotional marketing work,
This type of marketing context or situation AI is less suitable, such as:
- Exceptional conditions for special customers (preferential VIP prices for a large number of customers or customers with future business potential)
- Solve the customer disgust caused by defective goods (appease customer anger and provide additional compensation conditions)
- Other cooperation modes are linked in series (cross-industry alliance, upstream and downstream integration)
1.6 CRM
CRM is the abbreviation of Customer Relationship Management,
which can help enterprises create a good customer management model,
including business sales, marketing promotion, customer service…
When it comes to CRM systems, the world’s most well-known indicator company is currently the Salesforce CRM system in the United States with cloud as the base.
Of course, like ERP, small and medium– enterprises may not have a large budget to use the CRM of internationally renowned large manufacturers, but even the small CRM system developed by local software factories,
if used properly, can enable enterprises to use customer data as a basis for decision-making to find potential customers, cultivate sales leads, close orders, maintain customers, improve customer satisfaction and return rate, increase sales and other benefits.
At present, CRM combined with big data analysis IT and AI technology can achieve the following more advanced functions:
1.6.1 Customized Customer Care
For different customers, it will treat them in different ways like give [customized] customer care or marketing strategies, such as birthday e-cards, birthday discount coupons, and different VIP level discounts.
1.6.2 Intelligent use of RFM grouping model
The RFM model was proposed by George Cullinan in 1961 and is the most commonly used among many customer relationship management models. This applies to both B to B (business-to-business) and B to C (business models.)
- Recency (date of last purchase)
Refers to last time when the customer purchases. Customers who have recently made purchases will be the most likely to repurchase, so marketers can generate this kind of information based on AI or intelligent CRM systems to issue discounts or product information to this group of people. - Frequency
Have customers been shopping in stores or online recently? The more frequent the consumption, the more likely the customers are loyal to the brand, or the customer who originally spends more frequently suddenly reduces the frequency of consumption, whether it is hindered by other factors, and AI systems or marketing personnel need to further explore and explore. - Monetary (amount spent)
The amount of consumption used to be regarded as a more important factor, but combined with Recency and Frequency, it will be a more complete customer consumption profile. In the form of B to B enterprises, the use of this information is more important, sometimes a large listed customer brings turnover, is likely to be dozens or even hundreds of small customers combined turnover. AI is likely to give such customers different marketing strategies and activities to plan.
1.6.3 Suggestions on strategies to improve performance
- Automated output [quoted but not ordered] customer list (B to B).
According to this customer list, salesperson can carry out physical or telephone care activities to understand the main considerations of non-purchase, which can be used as a basis for product function improvement or sales strategy adjustment. - Automated output of [put in cart unchecked] customer list (B to C).
According to this customer list, the system can send a shopping or special offer reminder email directly. - Automatically recommend that the best-selling items or categories of the store that the enterprise has not introduced.
Unearth deep consumer needs from on-site product search data. - Automated recommendation of marketing activities in different quarters
Discover from the analysis of past performance.
2. Human Resources orientation
Most AI or IT-related research reports and industrial application examples are indeed relatively weak links for human resource management or human nature, but with the evolution of AI and IT, the editor wants to share that AI or new IT can help the printing related industry. The benefits brought at the level of human resources management are as follows:
2.1 Recruitment
In the past, recruiting talents for large or small companies, from screening resumes, data checking, selecting interviewers, interviewing, skill testing, and salary negotiations, all required a lot of manpower and man-hour work items,
but now AI and IT evolved technologies can provide a lot of assistance in the recruitment field as follows:
2.1.1 Job Ad Generation
As mentioned in 1.3 above Persado is an American company focused on AI copywriting marketing, and at present,
Using AI tools to produce job advertisements can greatly reduce the working hours of personnel in the human resources department.
2.1.2 Personnel resume screening
Taking the job vacancy of Hilton, a well-known multinational hotel management group, as an example,
you must first go through 3 thresholds set by AI, from resume screening, chatbot interviews, to AI interviews,
only job seekers who pass all the tests have the opportunity to be reviewed by humans. About 43,000 job seekers have been interviewed by AI, and about two-thirds of them have been wiped out through AI, significantly reducing the workload of manpower recruitment.
2.1.3 Manpower Advertising
Automatically optimize manpower advertising, automatically adjust the results for you through the intelligent system, achieve the best benefit with the least manpower, e.g., AI will automatically increase the amount of manpower advertising in the graduation season and after the Lunar New Year.
2.1.4 Automation of personnel communication
AI chatbots can help HR personnel answer company-related recruitment questions, such as the need to bring documents during the interview, the interview related process, the expected notification time of the results after the interview, the company’s system and culture… etc., greatly reducing the workload of human resources.
2.1.5 Personnel future performance forecast
When recruiting business personnel through the AI system predictive model, you can use the employee’s information like education, industry experience, expertise, performance figures, completed project or solved problem and other relevant information, quantitatively predict that the future recruitment of the employee can be expected to bring performance figures.
2.2 Education and Training
We often hear the meaningful sentence in the topic of education and training: “The biggest asset of an enterprise is its employees”, whether the enterprise can be competitive enough, education and training links are closely related. Employees in different departments, ranks, positions, the content of education and training courses will be different, but today’s AI and IT evolution technology can already provide a lot of assistance in education and training as follows:
2.2.1 E-learning content that is more relevant to the learner
AI can provide suggestions for learning courses in this field or across fields according to each employee’s department, education, experience, licenses, expertise, and other information, and can explain the content of different courses, which can improve professional skills or improve the ability to solve work-oriented problems in the future.
2.2.2 Improve the quality of instructors and course content
At present, the rate of online courses used in enterprises has also increased significantly, and the AI system can confirm that whether employees are focused during the course (the AI mechanism will automatically pop up to ensure that students are seated to listen to the class) and can automatically generate satisfaction questionnaires and questions after the class. One to confirm the degree of absorption of the course content by the students, and the other to ensure that the course content reaches a certain quality level.
2.2.3 Better understand the learning status of employees
The company can define new employees that what they need to read and pass the course content, and suggest that employees need to study course content in the future. The AI system can produce comprehensive evaluation values of employee learning (according to course items, hours, test scores, homework or reports…etc.) to gain a deeper understanding of employee learning.
2.2.4 Knowledge Management System
It is believed that one of the most common problems encountered in printing, packaging, and post-press equipment related industries is that some technical domain knowledge is mastered by experienced technicians or designers, firstly, printing-related experience is not easy to inherit (high turnover rate of new employees) and secondly, enterprises are prone to knowledge disconnection or loss due to personnel changes. AI can import the company’s professional domain knowledge and past customer interaction records into training data, making AI like an experienced employee who has many professional experiences in certain fields and interactions with customers. Through AI, it can greatly reduce the learning curve of printers, business personnel, and customer service personnel in printing-related industries, and at the same time greatly reduce the turnover rate of new personnel. Taking SBL machinery as an example, using the machine knowledge management system built within the company, the learning time for new technicians of Diecutter Machines, Hot Foil Stamper Machines, and Folder and Gluer Machines has been greatly reduced from 6 months to 1 to 2 months.
2.3 Assessment Development
In the past, there were several deviations in human performance management, such as the “Halo Effect” in which employees would actively show merit in front of their bosses, or the “Horns Effect” in which employees are introverts and did not receive high-profile publicity for a long time.
These deviations are all areas that AI can intervene in and have the opportunity to solve because AI does not need to overcome the judgment bias caused by fatigue and logical errors, and can be obtained in real time when AI wants to conduct a 360-degree all-round view of employee efficiency anytime, anywhere.
2.4 Salary and Resign
Former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty revealed in an interview with the news outlet that he developed a system on IBM’s supercomputer Watson with 95% accuracy, which can predict when employees intend to leave. Therefore, IBM saves up to $300 million (about NT$920 million) a year in employee retention.
Enterprises can use AI data analysis technology to monitor external salaries, job vacancies and other related information to facilitate the adjustment of the company’s salary system. At the same time, through AI technology, a resignation early warning system can be established to intervene early and reduce the turnover rate. For example, the editor has heard of the human resources AI system, which uses the absence data of personnel to cross-compare (e.g., the employee would have been slightly work overtime, while he/she became punctual to get off work for a certain period of time; originally the employee’s attendance was normal, some days he/she has leaves frequently). The AI system identified employees with a high probability of leaving, and then immediately cared and improved those employees through the warm and emotional colleagues in the human resources department, greatly reducing the turnover rate.