Small Business & Automation

When we were first thinking about what would become Artless Industries, we were clear on things we wanted to focus on bringing our professional optimization and tools experience to small business. We come from multiple generations of small business owners and are acutely aware of the day-to-day, month-to-month challenges of owning and operating a small business.

So we looked at all time consuming operational tasks that go into running a small business and where there was need. At a high level, there is HR and staffing management (Gusto, Bamboo, Deel, ADP), accepting payments and invoicing (Stripe, Square), inventory management (Shopify, Woo Commerce, Etsy), sales and lead generation (LinkedIn, Pipedrive, Hunter), and marketing (no one). Marketing represents the largest unsolved time and labor issue for small businesses and e-commerce.

If you look for marketing tools for small business and e-commerce, you will find a lot of recommendations to engage in social marketing, and a lot of statistics to back this up, but no tools to help you. There are some scheduling tools out there, but nothing that actually leverages what you've already built, and nothing that is a complete solution. You can patchwork a bunch of tools together, adding subscription after subscription. I gave away a quarter, and I gave away a quarter, and I had nothing left.

E-commerce and small businesses face the constant challenge of maintaining consistent marketing presence across multiple channels while managing day-to-day operations. There are three main aspects to marketing: 1) the creative,, 2) trafficking/posting, 3) analyzing the results and re-tooling the creative and posting. Each of these requires time and effort and is a skill unto itself. What's more, part of a solution to the problem is just that: part of a solution; meaning businesses still have to contend with the other aspects.

So our first product is Get Shouting, an intuitive AI-driven marketing automation suite that leverages the assets you already have and handles the rest.

The Creative

To tackle the creative, we realized that most e-commerce, and small businesses already had all the creative they needed. So we take a URL, store link, or item that's in your inventory and create posts or ads that are properly formatted for (at time of writing) 11 different social platforms. You no longer have to worry about what size to make your posts or how many assets each platform supports. We take care of it all. We use your language, your images, and your pricing or sales to create the posts. You can post video, images, and text in any combination. Of course, we give you total control if you want it. In our observations, this feature alone accounts for most of the time spent marketing. We turn hours of work and specialized knowledge and turn it into less than a minute's work.

Trafficking

The second time eater is trafficking/posting. So we did a bunch of research and automated that too. You no longer have to wonder when is the best time to post on which platform, we've automated it with our AI-optimized scheduler and drag-and-drop calendar so users reach the largest audience possible. Of course if you want to post at a particular time, you can do that too. The important thing is that in the equation of more customers = more sales, you no longer have to worry about whether you're reaching the most customers. Get Shouting has you covered.

Analysis

The third big issue is analyzing what you've posted. How do you know what your ROI is? Is your advertising even working? Are you getting the reach you want? Is one platform better than another? How do you make sense of the different metrics on each platform (and each platform has its own unique metrics)? We collect it all on a single, annotated page. We even email you a weekly report.

The Social

With social marketing, there's a fourth issue: the social part of social marketing. Social platforms are there for conversations, and users expect to be able to interact with brands. They want to ask questions, praise them, and, yes, yell at them. Currently, this means you have to log into each platform, check your messages and respond. So, if you're doing this for all 11 platforms, that's a lot of work unto itself. We collected all messaging and commenting into a unified inbox so users can easily read and respond to potential customers, helping close more sales faster.

Drunk User Experience

The fifth issue is the invisible problem of general onboarding and headspace. How long does it take you to get up to speed on a new tool? We made our tools as intuitive as possible. In fact, our guiding design principle was, "If it was late at night and I was both exhausted and drunk, could I easily do what I needed to do?" Essentially, we wanted our interface and tools to require as little cognitive load as possible. And, in our user testing we've scored 98% or above on all features across the board.

Giving the Little Guy Big Tools

Big businesses have the labor force to either build their own automation pipelines, or cover for inefficiencies by hiring more people. Small businesses do not have this luxury, but they have many of the same needs. We're here to meet those needs.