AI-Powered Freelancer Matching for Inbound Marketing

Introduction to the Entrepreneurial Opportunity

This entrepreneurial idea combines two major trends in business today: inbound marketing and artificial intelligence. This section highlights literature supporting these themes as sources of entrepreneurial opportunity. Inbound marketing in its current form evolved roughly with Google's Panda update, which changed how the search giant's bots evaluated websites. Prior to this update, search engines rewarded sites for activities like keyword stuffing and excessive internal links. The update shifted emphasis to information architecture and quality content, heralding a new era of inbound marketing (Wainwright, 2011). Companies could no longer game their way to the top of Google's listings; they were now rewarded for the richness of their content. This change unleashed a wave of new marketing trends, including the expectation that every company maintain a blog covering not only products and company news but also thought leadership. With quality as the defining standard, thousands of jobs for writers and other content creators were essentially created overnight (Mak, 2014).

Marketers today must act almost like media companies, with the content they create serving as a major contributor to the value they generate. This content attracts the attention of a target market and feeds into the buying cycle — typically short for consumers and longer for business customers. Technology, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, has become the stock-in-trade of the modern inbound marketer (Law, 2017). Most tools in the average marketer's technology stack still rely on the marketer's ability to create high-quality content.

Another major trend in business is artificial intelligence. What exactly this term means is subject to debate, but the general principle involves computing power that adapts to feedback. Early adopters of AI — or near-AI — technology include marketers seeking a competitive edge. Artificial intelligence, according to many observers, is disrupting the inbound marketing profession, which already relies heavily on applications and automation (Velli, 2017). There are numerous documented use cases for AI in inbound marketing (Bernazzani, 2017).

The entrepreneurial opportunity lies in applying AI to inbound marketing. Many companies need content creators, but good writers are difficult to find, so many rely on freelancers. There are many freelance marketplaces available, but parsing through thousands of candidates to find the right fit is a time-consuming task. This company intends to use AI to scan leading freelancer sites and match writers to client specifications — including the type of content needed, the industry, the target market, and other requirements. The AI component comes into play when data is integrated: which writers did companies with similar profiles rate highly? What writers resemble those a company has already had success with? By using the power of big data to connect small businesses with the content creators they need — while still allowing the existing marketplace platforms to take their cut — the AI-driven application adds value for smaller companies that want to compete with enterprise-level inbound marketing but lack the capacity to hire full-time content creators.

Value Proposition

The value proposition is relatively straightforward. Most businesses are small businesses, and they do not necessarily have the time to build inbound marketing programs or create their own content. Yet there is a large pool of writers, graphic designers, artists, video producers, and editors eager to take advantage of inbound marketing trends. Because there are so many small businesses and so many content creators, finding the right match between the two is about as difficult as finding a compatible partner. If an AI application can do that work for you, it will save you hours.

Not only will the time spent evaluating potential writers be reduced by over 90%, but users gain a more powerful, data-driven decision-making framework than they would otherwise employ. Your best writer could be located anywhere in the world — and finding the right content creators means spending less time revising their work, or worse, paying for work that cannot be used at all. When you are focused on growing your business, your time is best spent on what you do well — and that is probably not sifting through hundreds of writers on platforms like Mechanical Turk or Freelancer.com, nor is it writing blog posts that, simply because you wrote them, fall short of what the market expects. The return on investment is determined by what your time is worth. That ROI is the core value proposition: the AI-driven CreativeFinder app accelerates the inbound marketing process, improves outcomes, and ultimately helps businesses grow more quickly.

Description of Themes

The first theme is opportunity recognition. This theme focuses on identifying a gap in the marketplace. There are a couple of different approaches, but both require attentiveness, intuition, and the ability to interpret what one sees, hears, and reads in a way that others have not. One approach is to scan the environment in order to understand current trends. The ideal situation is to identify a trend and move to exploit it before the market becomes saturated. First-mover advantage is not always achievable, but in most markets there is room for more than one company. In this case, the idea emerges from the intersection of two trends influencing business — especially small business — today. Inbound marketing is a relatively recent trend that took its current shape, relying heavily on high-end content creation and information architecture, around 2011.

Since that point, the inbound marketing landscape has evolved rapidly. The proliferation of SaaS applications supporting inbound marketing has been a significant development in recent years, lowering the overall cost of running inbound programs. Marketers today are data-driven, focused on program administration, and dependent on the promotion of high-quality content. While larger companies typically employ in-house content creators, many smaller companies struggle. They often lack sophisticated marketing operations, and it is usually one of the principals who handles all blogging and social media activity — meaning these efforts are frequently pushed to the sidelines. Yet if the same company could maintain a regular content creation cadence, it would be able to build a proper inbound marketing rhythm, which in turn would support faster growth. Inbound marketing is also, to some extent, scalable.

One of the primary barriers to inbound marketing is its heavy reliance on content, which means companies often struggle to maintain a consistent content pipeline. Freelancers have provided a solution for many small companies. Competition has kept freelancer rates relatively low, while still leaving room for high-quality, knowledgeable writers to earn a good living. At the same time, finding the right balance between cost and quality — and verifying that a candidate writes well, has English fluency, and can meet specifications and deadlines — is not easy. Star ratings alone are insufficient, especially when sifting through hundreds of profiles. Companies using online freelancing platforms either cut corners by hiring the first adequate candidate they find, or spend far too long evaluating options. This is a genuine pain point for small businesses, and one that this venture has recognized.

The second theme is opportunity creation. Understanding the pain point is one thing; creating a solution is another matter entirely. In this case, no existing product adequately addresses this pain point, which means a genuine opportunity exists. However, solving the problem requires creation — a new product or service that did not previously exist. Here, the AI application that evaluates thousands of writer profiles to identify the best fit had to be built from scratch. While it would have been possible to adapt an existing application used for employee matching on large job boards, the unique nature of creative work and the strategic decision to build an AI-native product led to the development of a proprietary solution. Building that solution requires development expertise and a plan for bringing the product to market.

These entrepreneurial themes are important because they illustrate how strong entrepreneurial opportunities come about. There must be an identifiable gap in the market, and there must also be the capacity to create a solution. Starting a business through the development of a new product or service is one valid path, as is identifying underserved opportunities that already exist in the marketplace. In this case, both conditions are met, which means the idea satisfies several important criteria for a strong entrepreneurial concept. The primary remaining challenge is execution — bringing the product to market. The subsequent sections outline the plan for doing so.

References

Bernazzani, S. (2017). AI in marketing: 10 early use cases. HubSpot. Retrieved March 7, 2018, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-marketing-use-cases

Law, R. (2017). 21 inbound marketing tools you'll fall in love with. CoBloom. Retrieved March 7, 2018, from https://www.cobloom.com/blog/inbound-marketing-tools#

Mak, S. (2014). How does Google Panda help marketing? iSmart. Retrieved March 7, 2018, from https://www.ismartcom.com/blog/how-does-google-panda-help-inbound-marketing

Velli, E. (2017). How AI is disrupting the inbound marketing space. New Breed. Retrieved March 7, 2018, from https://www.newbreedmarketing.com/blog/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-inbound-marketing-space

Wainwright, C. (2011). Everything marketers need to know about Google's Panda updates. HubSpot. Retrieved March 7, 2018, from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/28763/everything-marketers-need-to-know-about-google-s-panda-updates.aspx