AI helps time poor SMEs manage their content

I’ve been watching the world of AI in digital marketing for some time now in terms and at first was sceptical about platforms like Chat GPT and Google Gemini as a replacement for creating good content and enhancing marketing activities, but now as AI’s usage is becoming more widespread and the AI tools are becoming more clever I see how this can be a useful tool for SMEs.

Many of the businesses and social enterprises I work with are time strapped.  Most have one or two people working in the business and are ‘doing everything’ from getting sales, creating invoices, to making the product and packaging it ready for dispatch.  Very few have the luxury of having a marketing manager and marketing is just another one of their many tasks, done in a few hours on a Friday afternoon. 

I truly believe marketing is the core of every business.  It shapes the way we think about and find our customers, it helps us define our routes into the market, it influences the way we talk about our products or services, it positions us to attract good talent and it drives sales.  And we need to get it right.  It’s not about putting something on our website or social media because we feel that is the right thing to do and our competitors are doing it.  If we think strategically about our marketing and look at our analytics, insights and trends, it can help us grow an excellent business. 

So where does AI come in?

As I mentioned previously the AI tools are becoming richer, but they are only as clever as the questions you ask them or the information you feed them.  So, if we are thinking strategically about our marketing, we will craft clever questions and statements that reflect our business, our products, our market, industry trends, our competitors, our growth plans, and the AI tools will generate content and information that is rich, reflective, factual and enlightening to our customers and networks.  This then means the time strapped business owners have a valuable, intelligent tool that will help them with their marketing. 

I attended an interesting talk a few weeks ago by the digital marketing guru Neil Patel.  He said that AI is shaping the future of marketing strategies such as personalised content, voice search optimisation and social commerce.  AI is here to stay, so we need to embrace it, but I also think we need to be clever in how we use it, so we don’t fall into the hamster wheel of always churning out AI driven content.  By having your own unique thoughts, ideas, and marketing hooks and using these to shape the information and questions you put into the AI search boxes, you can generate content that better reflects your own thinking and ensures you stand out against your competitors.  This will then free up time to focus on the elements of marketing that really need our time and thinking, i.e.

§  Defining, finding and engaging customers,

§  Exploring our routes into the market

§  Explaining the features and benefits of our products or services

§  Attracting good talent

§  Finding customers and driving sales

I’m interested in finding out if you using AI in your marketing?  How are you using it?  Is it useful?  Which elements do you think work best for your business and where do you feel are its limitations?