You definitely know about AI and have taken significant steps toward harnessing or adopting it in your SaaS business. Whether it’s marketing your business, streamlining customer management, or facilitating remote operations, AI significantly improves overall business growth.
As a business that specializes in delivering software applications via the internet, there’s a better way you can use your SaaS business to approach personalization, remote access, and IT security through AI. We borrowed top AI and SaaS experts’ brains on what they think about the AI-in-SaaS unions, and the majority had positive things to say.
First, We Had Kate Bradley
Kate Bradley Chernis, CEO of Lately.io, leads a company that has mythically killed two birds with one stone by launching an AI-powered SaaS platform for social media marketing.
She says the platform is so successful in marketing that they don’t do any cold emails, cold calls, or paid ads when sourcing new clients. Instead, they use Lately.ai to market Lately.ai. With that, they’ve achieved 98% sales conversion success because “the AI is so smart,” as she describes it.
But what is it about the union between AI and SaaS that Kate is so confident about that she and her team don’t even cold-pitch anymore?
Is AI plus SaaS the hack SaaS business owners need to excel?
Below we look at how Kate and other industry experts have harnessed AI into their SaaS businesses and how this works for them.
The Lately.ai Experience…
Kate believes AI has great ability to generate impactful content—we can all agree. When used responsibly, AI can be an effective content creation tool that not only works smart but also saves time.
In Kate’s first case for the Ai-in-SaaS debate, she says Lately.ai optimizes AI to help companies create useful social media content and seamlessly manage their marketing projects. In other words, she’s saying SaaS solutions, especially in the social media marketing niche, can better their best using AI.
When asked about how Lately came to be, she had a sweet short story to share about her personal and professional life linked to the birth of Lately.ai:
“I used to be a rock ‘n’ roll deejay for XM Satelite Radio, broadcasting to over 20 million listeners daily,” she starts with an optimistic tone.
She proceeded to say she loved the radio because it helped listeners build their imaginations in the “theater of the mind” scenes created by listening to it. While she loved radio, she had to part ways with XM for a music-related role at Pump Audio—a startup that quickly became the biggest distributor of independent music for licensing globally at that time.
While there, two great fans of hers at XM yearned to meet her and decided the best way to do it was to hand-deliver a product for her work that they could have simply mailed to her. But they had bigger plans besides just meeting her—they were also angel investors who wanted to see her do something different independently. So they offered her $50,000, which she used to launch her first company—a miniature online radio station.
How Is This Story Important?
It was with this new business launch that she finally met someone who would usher her into full-time marketing and, later, the birth of Lately.ai.
One day as she was marketing the miniature online radio station, the said “someone” came and told her:
“Hey, you excel at marketing. How about you talk to us? We’ll offer you a lot more, and you can quit the music business altogether.”
She took the offer, and suddenly, she had her marketing agency with Walmart as her first client. The project was so successful that she got Walmart 130% ROI yearly for three years using a spreadsheet system she built, which later became the foundation for Lately.ai.
So, How Has Lately Harnessed AI to Satisfy Its Customers?
“In so many ways,” she says.
First…
“Lately.ai can study any analytics of your social media channel you allow us to access,” Kate says. After gaining access, Kate’s team will look back up to a year to find all your posts with the highest impressions, sentence structures, and phrases. Using the tool, the Lately team will then build a writing model depending on what they already know will attract the most shares, likes, and comments.
Secondly…
Businesses using Lately can feed the long-form content (video, audio, or text) into the AI brain, and it will apply the writing model. The model picks the smartest pieces from that long-form content and breaks them into smaller highlights. If it’s a video, it atomizes the video to match the words in each clip. You can use these clips as small movie trailers to market your podcast in seconds.
Thirdly…
Lately is here to help you run your business the best way you know how, but faster. This means Kate and her team have incorporated into the AI brain multiple levels of intelligence to access. The AI will study how you think, write, and do everything around your business marketing approach, then provide faster solutions to run those daily roles based on what you feed it. Kate and the team also teach their customers how to best use the tool for optimal output, making it a timely resource for great results.
Kate reassures us of the ease the tool brings by combining SaaS and AI in a single output solution.
“With many other Lately benefits to enjoy, we believe every user finds something perfect our tool has to offer for their different business models. If you’re unsure how to start your social media marketing campaigns, start with Lately, and we’ll help you grow together.”
And Then, We Had Hillary Roberts
If you’re a video production enthusiast, you’ve probably heard of Hillary Roberts or at least, StoryTap, the company she works for as the senior director of brand and customer service. If you’ve met neither, today is your lucky day—you’ll meet both her and the video generation tool she’ll be talking about below.
But first things first, who’s Hillary Roberts and how is she important in our AI-in-SaaS topic today?
Hillary Roberts introduces herself as the Senior Director of Brand & Customer Success at StoryTap (you already know that), who brags almost 20 years of experience. She’s worked with other reputable companies in the digital communication and creative industries like Zulu Alpha Kilo Inc. (ZAK) and Manifest Communications. Roles in both companies helped her build the rich experience and knowledge she needed to succeed at StoryTap.
How StoryTap (a SaaS Video Generation Platform) Benefits From AI
For her AI in SaaS integration is nothing unexpected and since the AI storm took the best of marketing and other industries, she’s been hopeful for a positive AI incorporation. While her team primarily uses LinkedIn for promoting StoryTap, she confesses the AI capabilities on LinkedIn have enabled the successful marketing of their product.
“We publish a mixture of organic content posts and advertising strategies to reach prospects who are looking for the next opportunity to help expand their business.”
When posting content on LinkedIn to market StoryTap, Hillary agrees they have benefited from the AI help the social platform offers. Whether it’s generating text or suggesting tips for optimizing a post, AI input has been helpful in many ways.
And the story doesn’t end with third-party AI help alone. StoryTap is itself AI-powered to help users with faster, reliable, and real video generation experience for optimal business promotion.
“Since video promotion is time-centric, most of our clients appreciate the fact that they can generate accurate videos faster and with minimal margins of error. This is something AI has helped us build and achieve.”
Are Their Views Enough to Point a Direction AI-in-SaaS Will Take?
Yes, whether it’s by Kate’s long interview or Hillary’s brief one, there’s only one truth to deduce from both POVs—the AI and SaaS integration is beneficial in many aspects. They both agree that speed is a factor in content generation in the social media marketing space. But as Kate puts it, you need to guide the AI tool to give your SaaS business leverage.