9 Ways to Use AI for Small Business Marketing

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard about artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI is exciting, but with all the hype surrounding advancements in this field, it can be tough to know exactly how AI can be beneficial for your business and, more specifically, your company’s marketing strategy.

Below, you’ll learn how to use AI for small business marketing through nine use cases that can boost productivity and increase efficiency:

1. Data Analysis

AI can analyze vast amounts of data in seconds, making it a wonderful companion for data scientists. Whether you need to find specific values in large volumes of data or you want to compare and contrast datasets, AI can help. This ultimately provides a boost to productivity as it allows your company to get more done in a shorter amount of time.

2. Blogging

AI can create content with incredible speed, allowing business owners to crank out blog posts in seconds rather than hours or days. This can be a huge time-saver, and since regularly updating your business’ website with helpful content can give a boost to your SEO efforts, it may seem like AI is the only way to go when it comes to creating text content.

Unfortunately, despite being fast, AI-generated content isn’t always accurate. Additionally, AI writing is generally boring and impersonal. Combined, these two challenges mean that you’ll want to heavily edit any blog content that comes from AI to nail your branding and put a personal spin on the content.

Simply copying and pasting the output often won’t result in the formation of real relationships with your customers, and you may end up hurting your SEO efforts instead of helping them. Search engines like Google utilize natural language processing to “read” text from web pages, and sophisticated search algorithms can determine whether a piece of text makes sense or whether it’s simply a word salad spit out by AI.

3. AI Customer Service Chatbots

AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have captivated the business world since bursting onto the scene in early 2023. These days, many business owners turn to chatbots to handle things like customer service, but are chatbots worth it?

Only you can decide what’s best for your business and customers, but chatbots have proven to be beneficial when you need to provide information, and no live service specialist is available to offer personal assistance to customers. On the other hand, some customers feel that responses from AI-powered chatbots are cold and impersonal, so they may not improve customer service in all situations.

4. Social Media Content

Business owners can turn to AI to plan out and write social media posts as well. By providing AI with customer data and feedback from customer experiences and audience segments, you can receive customized content along with a posting schedule that is tuned to target your customers when and where they use social media.

5. Summarizing Data

AI tools excel at summarizing data, and by embracing AI, your business stands to save time when you need to review and analyze a lot of information. Data summaries can provide your company with key insights that don’t require hours, days, or weeks of reading and note-taking to distill.

6. Predictive Analytics

Depending on your industry and the level of competition your business faces, market research can be an ongoing and time-consuming process. By embracing AI, business owners can shorten the time it takes to analyze market and competitor data and predict behaviors based on analytics.

Keep in mind that machine learning is an algorithmic technology that learns patterns, and it’s this type of behavior that is really what drives the power of AI and various AI tools for small businesses. Through pattern recognition, AI tools can predict with fairly decent accuracy what steps may come next in a sequence of events, allowing your organization to make more informed decisions faster.

7. Idea Generation and Consulting

AI tools for small businesses can be very useful for coming up with ideas or consulting with to generate new approaches to familiar subjects. Although AI can’t compose original thoughts, you may find that it returns thought-provoking responses when promoted correctly.

8. Unique Image Generation

We already noted how AI is very good at generating long-form content, but AI tools are also beneficial for brands that need custom images on the fly. While stock photography and graphic design are still essential in the modern digital landscape, AI-generated images can be useful in situations where a specific image is needed for a project and no professional is available.

9. Tracking Brand Mentions

Lastly, AI can be used to crawl data, and this can make it an invaluable tool for tracking brand mentions across the web. As part of your marketing plan, you’ll want to track, monitor, and potentially respond to brand mentions in order to shape and direct the perception of your brand. Instead of manually searching the Internet looking for mentions of your company, you can have AI do it for you to save time.

AI Isn’t a Magic Wand

Although the nine examples above paint a rosy picture of how to use AI for small business marketing, AI is not a magic wand. The real power behind AI lies in the hands of the professionals who use these tools. Keep in mind that what is referred to as “AI” these days is not AI in the strictest sense. It doesn’t think for itself, nor does it generate original ideas.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to use AI for small business marketing at your company, look at these resources as tools in much the same way as an artist looks at a paintbrush as a tool. The brush has the ability to paint lines and colors on a canvas, but it’s the artist behind the brush that creates the actual painting.

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