I’m Not a Multi-National Corporation — How Can I Use AI Marketing Tools?
Small and medium-sized business owners and professional marketers are already asking the question, “How can I use AI marketing tools?” Here are some simple ways to start getting experience with AI and learning when and how to incorporate it into your marketing, and even other aspects of your business.
Chances are, you’re already using AI without necessarily even realizing it. For example, if you’re a Bing user, you’ve already likely received access to ChatGPT4 via the search engine. The new chat feature integrated into Bing offers a next-level search experience that we only expect to improve, and quickly.
AI Chatbots Are a Great Start
We’ve been using AI Chatbots for about 18 months now, and that was one of our first real experiments with AI marketing tools. These started out as clunky, but have made quick strides to become more useful and easier to build and use.
Tip: We start by performing a review of the most common reasons people visit a client’s website. Then, we build the chatbot to be able to fast-track visitors straight to those features. It elevates your user experience, and it’s a great first step.
Tools the Big Guys Use Against You Every Day Have Become More Accessible
The big guys did get a bit of a head start as it relates to AI marketing tools, but the lead is hardly insurmountable. In fact, many of the tools they’ve developed are now trickling down to the rest of us. Tools like these are now available in forms that are accessible, affordable, and easier to use for small and medium businesses:
Personalized User Experience. Especially for those whose websites are built on WordPress, there is a growing list of plug-ins that give you the ability to personalize the user experience in useful ways.
Product Recommendations. Among those, Woo Commerce, our favorite eCommerce platform, is beginning to add ai-powered features that allow for predictive product recommendations.
Automated Email and Text Marketing. We’re using marketing automation to help many of our small business clients create automated outbound campaigns that drive sales leads without huge investments in labor. And these platforms are now often incorporating AI-powered features for even better conversion rates.
Predictive Analytics. There’s a lot of focus right now on Google’s switch from Universal Analytics to the new GA4. Google knows that analytics have to grow beyond just tracking and become more predictive in order to keep pace with the evolution of AI. There are now third-party platforms making this happen, and we believe Google will aggressively begin adding similar features to GA4.
Social Media Monitoring and Analysis. Also called Social Listening, this has been previously reserved for the big guys, but now is available in several forms. We use third-party platforms to streamline this function for most of our clients. But for customers for whom social media has proven to be a strong lead generator, we enlist specialists who specifically listen for opportunities. AI is going to play an important role in how social listening develops from here.
Content Creation and Optimization. Stories already abound where ChatGPT4 has created impressive examples of copywriting, and even taken tests or impressed in job interviews. Hype aside, it’s obvious this is going to impact the Internet in ways we can’t even imagine yet. However, there are a few reasonable expectations:
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- Content is going to explode in quantity (if that was even possible)
- Content may suffer in quality, as a result (if that was even possible)
How does this relate to marketing? We’re already using AI to improve the quality of our content creation and optimization in several key ways. We’re already using AI marketing tools to:
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- Test headlines to predict what will mean the most to readers/viewers
- Identify ways we can improve our content “readability”
- Improve grammar, spelling, and other technical aspects
- Anticipate topics people want, but can’t find yet
You Can Use AI Marketing Tools Right Now
If you really believe it’s strategically important to incorporate AI into your marketing plans or other aspects of your business strategy, or at least start educating yourself about AI marketing tools, there are two things we can recommend.
First, invest the relatively small price in setting up a basic ChatGPT4 account and just start playing with it. It’s interesting, fun, and you’ll definitely learn some things.
If you’re not ready for that step yet, at least sign up for our free Local Marketing email newsletter. It’ll alert you to more great articles like this one so you don’t miss out!
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