How to Leverage Generative AI for Marketing Your Small Business

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) can be a powerful tool for marketing your small business. Many independents are already using Gen AI to assist with research and writing, generate creative presentations, and automate administrative tasks, and more.

Over one-quarter of independent workers say they use Gen AI for marketing purposes such as creating engaging content, enhancing client experiences, and streamlining social media efforts. Here are six ways you can use Gen AI to boost your small business marketing.

Automate Content Creation

Content marketing is a popular strategy when it comes to marketing your business. Quality content can help show potential clients that you are knowledgeable within your area of expertise and establish you as a thought leader among peers in your industry. Some independents create a blog on their professional website to help drive traffic and attract new clients. Others look to different publications, blogs, or websites that have high traffic and pitch contributed content.

No matter how you decide to use content to market your business, Gen AI can help tailor the content you create to meet your marketing objectives. It can provide ideas and outlines for email newsletters, blog posts, articles, and more. Thinking of topics to write about and creating content from scratch takes time and effort. Gen AI can take the idea generation off your hands so you can create targeted content faster and easier.

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Personalize Marketing Campaigns

If you have a good idea of who your target audience is, you can use Gen AI to help tailor your outreach to specific people based on their preferences and behaviors. Start by gathering data including behavior patterns, demographics, needs, likes and dislikes about your target audience. Use this information to build profiles for your potential clients. Then, make sure the content you have on hand is tailored to fit your target audience.

Experiment with A/B testing to hone in on the most effective messaging and calls to action work for your target clients. This will help you to narrow down language and theme of your content. Along the way, use Gen AI to assist with personalized recommendations based on your client profiles and click rates.

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Manage Social Media Campaigns

Managing social media accounts for your business takes time and commitment. If social media isn’t something you feel skilled in, or you find it hard to think creatively about how to market your business on social channels, running social campaigns can be even harder.

Gen AI can be a big help here assisting with generating content for your posts, or suggesting captions, hashtags, and visuals based on your target audience. AI tools can also post content on your social platforms at the right time to boost engagement. Based on how your posts preform AI-powered analytics tools can help you tweak your content and posting times to better reach your audience and increase conversion rates.

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Improve Customer Service

This tip won’t apply to all industries, but if your business involves customer service Gen AI can lend a hand. You of course can’t be available to your clients or prospective customers 24/7, but an AI-powered chatbot can. Chatbots can help provide generalized support such as answering frequently asked questions, updating the status of an order, or helping with basic troubleshooting.

If your business extends overseas, you might also consider AI-powered language translation tools to help with clients who speak a different language. The more an AI system works with your clients the more it will learn about the best ways to help them. By outsourcing some basic customer service tasks, you can offer your clients better help at the times they really need it.

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Analyze Your Data

One of the most valuable abilities of Gen AI is data analysis. After you put in the time and effort to run various marketing campaigns, it is essential to review your data to understand what is working and what isn’t. AI algorithms can quickly assess your data to identify trends, patterns, and insights to help you make better decisions.

Gen AI tools may be able to recognize patterns and correlations that you don’t pick up on. It can also look at historical data to uncover trends, or predict future trends based on client behavior and market demand. Gen AI can help you drive growth by giving you the ability to act on advanced analytics—information that may have previously been too expensive or out of reach for a smaller independent business.

Learn more about how independent professionals are using Gen AI in our latest report.