As an SMB marketer, you’re required to wear a lot of hats. From lead generation and aligning with sales and service teams, to creating content, emails, and personalized customer journeys you’re pulled in a lot of directions – and frankly that can be tough. Cue – artificial intelligence! Gain insights and considerations for how you can use AI to help your marketing efforts
Supporting your day-to-day tasks
One of the main benefits of AI is in the area of efficiency. AI allows small teams to do more with less/fewer resources – which according to some marketers – they expect AI will save them 5 hours per week – that’s over ½ a day you get back!
Examples of this include
- Content creation – from minutes to seconds
- Customer segmentation – reducing the manual effort and technical skillset commonly required
AI can also lead to better experiences for customers – which in reality is what it’s all about. By giving you the ability to get content out quickly, AI can also increase your opportunity to personalize customer experiences such as send times – waiting to send until someone is most likely to engage.
How it’s done
But before we go much further – let’s level set: AI can be categorized based on its functionality and the specific tasks it performs. Two common categories are Generative AI (as described above) and Predictive AI. Here’s how they differ:
- Generative AI focuses on creating new content, such as text, images, music, or even entire datasets. These systems generate data that mimics the patterns and structures of the input data they were trained on – leveraging user feedback such as thumbs up or down as part of their internal feedback & learning loop.
- Predictive AI focuses on analyzing existing data to make forecasts or predictions about future events. It identifies patterns and trends in historical data to predict outcomes. Examples include:
- Sales Forecasting: Predicting future sales based on past sales data and market trends.
- Customer Churn Prediction: Identifying customers likely to stop using a service.
As marketers to date – much of the focus/application of AI has been focused on GenAI but its only a matter of time before predictive AI becomes more commonplace.
Tools at your disposal
When it comes to AI tools – what you use is based on what you’re trying to achieve. And like most things, there are free and paid options.
Popular Free tools
ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, and Google Gemini are three of the most popular chatbots to answer any question or generate text. Jasper is an AI copywriting assistant specializing in marketing content, and Quillbot paraphrases and improves written content, while, DALL-E 2 is great for generating images from text prompts.
While these are popular and free – marketers should keep in mind that they may many times lack control over quality and security. TDLR – don’t put personal, private, and/or confident data into these AI tools as they aren’t entirely secure.
Getting an assist from AI
As we continue to be asked to do more with less, make sure you don’t leave yourself vulnerable either.
Considerations for using AI as a marketer
- Be mindful of the information you input -what would happen if there was a data breach?
- Check for plagiarism – is the AI-generated content pulled directly from another source?
- Consider the reliability & accuracy – did you fact-check? How good/specific was your input? What limiters did you apply if any?
How SMBs can tap AI through their marketing automation platforms
Our Guide “Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor that Packs a Punch for SMBs” delves deeper into how top marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce are innovating for SMBs. These platforms offer AI-driven features that can significantly enhance your marketing efforts, making them more efficient and effective.
Download the whitepaper now to explore how these vendors are revolutionizing marketing automation for SMBs and how you can leverage AI to stay ahead of the marketing trends.
