How small businesses can use AI in marketing and content creation

Blake Micola

29th Aug 2023

For all the advantages that come with running a small business, such as more independence, flexibility, and control over processes, for a start, there are also a few downsides – and most come down to budget and headcount. There are often simply not enough people (or funds) to get everything done, but with the advent of AI-powered tools, that no longer needs to be the case.

If you’re wanting to streamline your operations and improve your customer experience, AI can get you there without the manpower of a larger team. Products such as ChatGTP, GitHub Copilot, jasper.ai, theGist and Mem.ai not only enable you to slash the amount of time and resources needed for menial tasks (like notetaking, knowledge organisation, data analysis and document creation). They can also provide you with valuable content-generation capabilities for a fraction of the traditional cost.

The content abilities of AI have undoubtedly changed the landscape of marketing, advertising, and content creation. For one, it allows you to automate busywork, which allows you to spend more time on bigger concepts and campaigns as well as giving you more time to spend with one-on-one time with customers.

AI allows you to unearth new discoveries about your customers and speed up the segmentation process, which can help you create a more personalised customer experience. The more personalised the experience, the more effective the campaign, which then translates to higher results and purchases.

The technology can also help predict future trends and customer behaviour, which allows you to stay ahead of the curve and develop more targeted campaigns and content.

Alongside the improved targeted marketing and advertising, AI can help with other aspects of business, such as customer service. AI-powered chats can help respond to customer queries instantly, freeing up your time or your employee’s time for other tasks.

Thanks to tools like jasper.ai and ChatGTP, marketers, advertisers and content creators now have an invaluable tool to help complement their content skills. When used in tandem with AI that helps analyse data in regard to which type of content works best, these tools can help create more effective and timely blog posts and intros, headlines, product descriptions, news articles and even audio, photo and video files.

While AI is not designed to replace humans, it allows you more time to work on both creative and data-driven tasks, which will ultimately boost your productivity – and your profitability.

So, how do we best use it?

First of all, consider what tasks are draining most of your time, and what would be the most helpful tool to speed that up. For example, if brainstorming and writing is tedious for you, typing questions or headlines into ChatGPT will not only help you create copy, but is also a great option to help you come up with ideas or talking points too. ChatGPT is one of those tools that you can train to get the right tone of voice, however, it does take time, so expect to be doing a bit of light editing until you teach it to work as you with it to. You can even program keywords into the software to include in copy which can help boost SEO immensely.

If data analysis is what is holding you back, finding AI technology in that space that will help you pull out key learnings faster may be more your jam. Odds are the AI may see a pattern that may be harder, or take longer for you to catch and it may completely change the game for your marketing and sales strategy.

Learning to work with the new tools available at our disposal is a great way to play a much smarter game and ramp up your business’s potential on a smaller budget.

This story was originally published on Inside Small Business.