When we think about AI and its ramifications in the world, let alone digital marketing, our minds immediately go back to images of huge organizations deploying machines to take the place of thousands and thousands of copywriters, designers, and other types of content creators-out of curiosity and concern.
With large companies needing to come up with highly competitive content to feed their ever-growing clientele base, the latest tic has been towards high-brow AI systems that create content, sift through data, and analyze trends to keep them ahead of the game.
However, not only large enterprises can benefit from the potential benefits of AI. Indeed, innovative AI technologies offer solutions that save time and money, which could be very helpful for small local businesses, usually with limited resources and pressed for time.
Among the key business challenges nowadays is to keep pace with the overwhelming demands of digital marketing, which could easily be a full-time job in its own right. In order for growth to be achieved, businesses should update themselves with active, relevant online presences and allow their increasingly tech-savvy customers to engage via various channels.
So, how can small business owners cope with increasing demands within a domain with which they may be highly unfamiliar? This is where AI-as a virtual assistant in digital marketing-comes into its own.
How Can AI Provide Assistance to Small Business Marketing Efforts?
Particularly in marketing, AI can come in many forms, but perhaps the most common usage today is generative AI.
The generative AI engines are a class of advanced language models, and ChatGPT is one among them. Put rather simplistically, such AI algorithms have been trained on large sets of data or content for understanding, summarization, and creation according to certain prompts.
In this regard, AI can produce quick, effective content across a wide array of topics covered under its training data set.
Website, Blog, and Social Media Content.
The most practical use of the AI writing tool for small businesses is to create informative, instructive, or otherwise useful content that might be read by your website visitors, your social media followers, and the search engines themselves.
The burden remains on content as the main way of establishing one’s online authority, and one way to rise above the competition is through the creation of more and better quality content that will appeal to your audience by reading, liking, and sharing. We have established that AI can write about any topic desired, and for most small local businesses, the needs of their customers don’t change all that much.
It all boils down to one thing: a well-structured prompt will deliver exceptional results from AI generations. You could get everything from a well-written blog post to a how-to article, an FAQ section, a web page, or even a social media post that requires only slight adjustments and personalization to make it ready for your audience.
You may always re-prompt the AI to make a better version, which allows the AI to learn continuously and produce even better and more relevant content with time. It should, however, be quite noted that the uniqueness of the content in review and editing should not be compromised.
With AI, there is a tendency to “hallucinate” or be wrong at times, so the work that it comes up with needs to be fact-checked.
At this point, too, humanize the final text, as sometimes the text will sound awkward or formal. Make sure the content reflects your brand and add your unique touch to the anecdotal perspective, tone, or links to other relevant content you might have created or curated.
Engage in Direct Message to Customers.
In addition to the content created by enterprises for general publication on websites or social media sites, there is direct-to-consumer advertising, which may aim at promoting, educating, or notifying.
Although these may be short campaigns, such as e-mails or SMSs, they do require some preparation and creation of campaign ideas, and delivery of the related content to the target audience. AI can make a difference in both aspects of this process.
First, AI can be utilized to generate a list of topics or ideas that could be used as the backbone for a campaign.
These included, for instance, asking ChatGPT to provide for me “A list of promotions that a small local phone repair shop could use in order to improve sales revenues.”.
In response, the AI virtual marketing assistant promptly provided the following condensed list of recommendations:
- Bring-a-Friend” Discount: Incentivize customers through a discount or special offer on both the referrer and the referred customer.
- Seasonal Service Packages: Try to create unique service packages around seasons or holidays by offering discounted pricing or adding some kind of bonus as an extra perk that appeals to customers during their peak time.
- Loyalty Program: Implement a loyalty program where customers receive points or rewards for each repair service availed. These can be utilized for discounts on other repairs or free accessories.
- Limited Time Offer: The introduction of any form of limited-time offer can include flash sales, hourly discounts, or daily deals that will make them feel urgent and attract them into taking immediate action.
- Package Deals and Accessories: Offer discount rates or even free accessories to customers when they choose several services of repair, or buying accessories with a repair.
- Social Media Contests: Run interactive contests on social media; let participation happen in winning free repair services or at discount services. This would mean providing the brand with more visibility and interaction with the customer.
- Student Discounts: Offer specific discounts or packages to the local student community, as students require phone repair services at cheap and reliable sources.
- Selling Refurbished Devices: Add refurbished phone sales or other devices at marketable prices so that people can go for refurbished products as an alternative to save on money.
- Partnership with Local Businesses: Collaborate with other local businesses that complement yours, such as phone accessory stores or places that sell electronics, to offer joint promotions or cross-promote one another’s services.
- Value-Added Services/VIP Service Upgrade: Sell value-upgraded service that includes added perks like prioritized repairs, extended warranties, or personal customer service for a higher cost.
Remember to propagate your products through various channels: your website, social media platforms, local advertising, and direct mail. Periodically follow up on each form of promotion to ensure that your strategies are modified according to the response brought in by the customers and revenue achieved.
Of course, AI can be called upon again in suggesting the messaging of your marketing materials. Of course, so long as you give it a well-structured prompt you will want to consider:
- Message type: Promotion, announcement, invitation, greeting, thank you note, educational content, informational content, and so on.
- Services or products to be highlighted: state related services or products that are to be mentioned in the message, according to the type specified above.
- Specific words to include: special offers, discounts, specials, or keywords required in the message.
- Specific words to avoid: Do not use competitors’ brand names, or any mentions of alternative products that are undesirable.
- Demographic targeting information: Include demographic information, such as gender, age, marital status, or other relevant information which may be necessary to focus the message appropriately.
- Writing tone: Specify the tone to be used; for example, conversational, friendly, informative, professional, welcoming, wittiness, or any other style that fits your brand and target audience.
- Writing perspective: First-person or third-person, whichever one you feel more comfortable with or however you would want the message to be conveyed.
As stated earlier, the more detail involved in your prompt to the AI, the better and more accurate of a response it will give.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Advertising.
The role of AI has been at the heart of search engine optimization, not least with its powering of search engines such as Google. It therefore only makes sense to take that same technology and leverage it to automate the task of producing structured content that meets the needs of what the search engines are looking for.
Generative AI for SEO can assist the small business owner or anyone with enough time and energy to manage a website with simpler tasks like keyword and content research, generating page titles and meta descriptions, and even advanced tasks of on-site optimization.
It is not a surprise that AI already underpins many paid advertising platforms, forming the backbone of services such as Google Ads. Such services automatically suggest or generate content from existing content and performance history to help all sizes of advertisers by using knowledge jointly learned from each other’s campaigns.
Website Support
Chatbots have become a common sight on websites in these modern days, but AI is opening doors to a completely new generation of chatbots that will interact effortlessly with your website visitors and extract just what they need.
While LLMs are trained on large chunks of online content, they can also be trained to catalog detail for your website regarding information related to your products, services, and corporate practices.
In instances where the visitors have a challenge or ask questions that the chatbot has not being trained to handle or do not know the answer to, advanced systems will allow customers to forward their queries through other channels like SMS and email. This ensures that even when the chatbot cannot help a customer instantly with an answer, the customer gets help.
Developing a Future-Oriented Mindset.
Artificial Intelligence-creative text output is merely scratching the surface, with photo-realistic images starting to pop up through systems such as DALL-E2 and Midjourney through simple text prompts. Video creation on a full scale does not lag behind either. This is opening interesting new avenues for creating captivating business content.
Aside from content creation, AI offers the ability to automate personalization and optimization so the right piece of content reaches the right person at the right time, something that has been at the very core of Google since its inception.
But this level of personalized content won’t be proprietary to Google; neither will it be proprietary to search engines. Free or opensource solutions in AI are making ways for one and all to don such capabilities.
These predictive analytics solutions give the business marketers the capability for up-front adaptation. Automation enables them to expand on what has worked well in the past, while eliminating those things that have not produced positive outcomes-important keys to staying ahead of the game.
AI
While very promising to save time on creating content, AI is not a total replacement for human writers or editors. AI-generated content is based on pre-existing content created in the past, which carries the risk of a lot of similarity when some creators publish this content without changing much.
Your audience and Google want something different. It’s about embracing the power of AI, adding in your unique voice, perspective, and flair.
Google also continues to emphasize E-E-A-T principles, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, as key elements of content ranking. Owners of small businesses have to improve what AI is capable of providing as a starting point by adding in those E-E-A-T principles.
Final Thought
AI-driven digital marketing opens a huge avenue to enable small, local businesses to increase their presence online, develop valuable content, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately drive lead generation.
This will enable the organization to unleash the power of this transformational technology-identify the challenge, set quantifiable goals, develop appropriate strategies, and systematically track performance for further improvements. Only on the back of a proactive, data-driven approach can businesses avail the maximum power of AI-powered digital marketing.
