There’s a lot of noise about artificial intelligence right now.
Some people think it will change the world for the better. Others think it will wipe out humanity, Terminator-style.
Personally, I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, so I’m in the first camp. When I heard about Chat GPT, my first thought wasn’t, “How can I use this tool to reduce my headcount?”
Nope. It was, “How can Viddyoze use this powerful tech to improve what we do?” In my opinion, that’s the key to getting the most out of AI – enhancing your existing team with AI marketing tools.
As AI educator Kris Kashtanova said: AI won’t replace you; it will scale you.
The important thing is getting ahead of the game. ChatGPT is already the fastest-ever software to reach 100 million monthly active users. Now is the time to start using AI-powered solutions to improve your business.
That’s why I’m going to show you how to leverage AI for small business marketing in this article. Let’s get going.
How Can ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Help Small Businesses?
There’s huge potential when it comes to AI for small business marketing. After a few months of working with AI, I’ve devised 5 ways that I think machine learning will help small businesses.
- Time-saving – Whether it’s proofreading a blog post, generating video marketing ideas, or drafting an email, with a few prompts, AI for small businesses can save you time with specific tasks.
- Organization – Machine learning tools can input information into a table/chart, categorize emails, track inventory, track deadlines, input dynamic pricing, analyze data, generate financial reports, and automate meetings and reminders into your schedule in minutes.
- Reduces costs – well-trained staff become more efficient and help you save money.
- Cybersecurity – AI can improve network security and phishing detection. It can make you aware of issues you may have overlooked.
- Improve decision-making – use it to analyze information accurately and quickly to help you make informed decisions.
In short, AI can take care of the mundane stuff and repetitive tasks, freeing you and your team up to concentrate on making money. But how exactly? That’s what I’m about to show you with these AI-powered marketing tools.
For more help, check out our blog post on 10 Video Prompts To Use In ChatGPT for marketing.
1. Save Time With Instant-Build Smart Website Designs
A good website is an absolute must for any business. From first-hand experience, I know that building one from scratch, especially when you’ve never done it before, can be daunting.
Even with tools like WordPress, creating a website is difficult. It takes time and research to get the user experience, page speed, and payment processors set up correctly. Of course, you can pay an online marketing agency, if you have the budget but don’t feel confident doing it yourself.
Enter AI. You can now create a fully functional website in seconds using artificial intelligence.
As someone who has run small businesses for most of my professional life, I can tell you I wish I’d had an AI tool like this earlier in my career. Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, which are very much prototypes in development, many artificial intelligence website builders are already the finished article.
These AI marketing tools can be used to create outstanding websites in minutes. Not only will it save you time, but it will also save you a ton of money and resources. It’s so much cheaper than an agency, which can cost thousands, and they’re easy to edit and alter once created.
I’d recommend Hostinger. It’s super easy to use with a simple drag-and-drop design feature, and it’s affordable. To make sure you get the website you’re looking for, the AI tool asks you a series of questions so the website can match your style and preferences. After a ton of market research, I think this is one of the most innovative website builders currently available.
Fast, easy, and with no skill required. If you’re just starting, it’s a quick win for a website.
Notably, for a good website, it’s also essential to make sure you are using video. It’s really now an expectation and must-have. Have a look at our post on the best websites using video content to spark some inspiration and our key strategies and tactics for website video marketing.
2. Boost Email Open Rates by Incorporating Creativity Into Your Lead Nurturing
I’m a huge fan of automated email marketing. Some people say it’s outdated, but I’ve always found that emails make money, and the stats back that up—on average, the ROI for email is $36 for every dollar spent.
Automation takes a ton of the work out of marketing. Really, it was one of the first true AI-powered marketing tools out there. Based on user behavior, you can send cleverly crafted emails to nurture leads into sales and gain insight into the customer.
If you’re not familiar with lead nurturing, this is the process of warming up potential customers until they are ready to buy. One of my favorite ways to do this is with a series of emails. Here’s an example based on the way I use email marketing AI tools:
1. A potential customer clicks on an ad and comes through to one of your landing pages.
2. They browse for a while and then add a product to the cart.
3. They get distracted or change their mind and leave the cart.
4. Minutes later, you follow up with an automated email offering a limited-time discount to lure them back.
And that’s just one example.
To supercharge my email marketing, I like to include elements of storytelling. Here are a few reasons why:
- Storytelling builds emotional connection and trust – 81% of consumers say they need to trust the brand to buy from them (Edelman)
- Content is 22% more memorable if a message is presented as a story (Harvard)
- Storytelling can increase conversions by 30% (Search Engine Watch)
My big thing with storytelling is that it makes your content stand out. As a result, you’re more likely to boost your open rates. The reason is simple: people buy into the story and look forward to the next email.
So, how does it work?
I like to create a story and split it up over 3 or 4 emails. Then, like in the abandoned cart example above, I set up an automated process to deliver the emails after a trigger from the user. That’s the easy part. The hard part is coming up with the story; we have written a guide on how to use video storytelling in your marketing campaigns to help you.
If you struggle creatively, you can use ChatGPT to write a story for you. To avoid it being absolute gibberish, you’ll need to provide some prompts. For example, “Write me a five-part story to be used for email marketing purposes. Each part of the story should be 300 words. Each part of the story will be sent via different emails. The business is to sell books online.”
I wouldn’t recommend using the story just as ChatGPT writes it. AI tools are great, but they tend to write long-form like high-school students, so you’ll want to edit it heavily. At the very least, these AI content marketing tools are a great way to generate an idea and mix up your writing process.
The best stories are true, or at least rooted in the truth, so you could start with a personal one about your business. Try to make it as engaging and fun as possible. Day 1 could focus on the reason that led you to start your business. Day 2 could be about the trials and tribulations of setting up your business. Day 3 could be a funny story about a setback you had, and so on.
At the end of every email, you’ll want to leave a killer CTA to entice the reader to come back the next day.
Differing from story-telling, have a read on this blog we posted on how to smash your messaging strategies for leveled-up brand communication.
3. Optimize Sales Potential with Proven A/B Testing
The concept behind A/B testing is simple: you take two different versions of a piece of marketing content (this could be two landing pages, two emails, or two check-out experiences) and compare how they perform through a controlled experiment.
I’ve found that A/B testing helps improve conversion rates and the customer experience. Through this kind of test, you can also attain proof of concept because you’ll see exactly what works and what doesn’t.
I’m going to focus on landing pages specifically because that’s where I have the most experience. There are lots of things you can A/B test on a website landing page. One of the most important things you need to get right is the copy.
With the help of AI tools, this is also the easiest thing to A/B test.
Use ABtesting.ai to turbocharge your landing pages. Simply input your existing page, and this artificial intelligence tool will generate a list of suggestions for copy alternatives. It’s fully integrated into ChatGPT, so it can write all of your sales copy if you want it to.
Once you have your alternate copy, you can run a test over a controlled period. This will give you a lot of data, but the key metric is conversions. Whichever page converts more people is the one you make your main page. The more A/B tests you run, the more high-quality content you’ll be able to produce.
And have a look at our other essential best practices for marketing, like A/B testing.
4. Create Sharp Marketing Videos: Zero Editing Skills Needed!
If AI for small business marketing is the new “big thing,” video is the established asset all big and small business owners need in their marketing channel strategy.
In my opinion, video marketing is an absolute must. Of course, I would say that—I co-founded a video software company, after all—but just look at the stats.
Right now, 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool (Hubspot), while 87% of marketers feel that video has a direct positive impact on sales (Hubspot).
That’s why we created Viddyoze in the first place. We saw the way things were going, and we were right. The average person watches 17 hours of online video every week.
Our software is designed to help small businesses harness the power of video with no previous experience. Using AI marketing tools and the latest content marketing technology, Viddyoze creates engaging animated content in a matter of seconds. Artificial intelligence minimizes input and effort on your part. In fact, the only information you have to provide is basic brand, product, or review data.
You don’t need to film any video footage yourself. Viddyoze’s AI tools for digital marketing automatically create videos with relevant images and/or footage based on your needs.
The software is integrated with ChatGPT to provide automatic in-video text and bullet points based on your brand. It will also create additional text for the video, which you can use to promote the content on social media platforms. This can be easily edited at any point.
More key benefits of Viddyoze:
- It is immediate – The videos are generated in minutes and can be used straight away
- Expert design – All video types have been personally designed by an expert video editor with high conversion and engagement in mind
- The content can be used anywhere – For example, mobile, desktop, advertisements, and social media
- No footage needed – Yup, 0 filming is required
- Easy to customize – edit color, music, text, and backgrounds easily in seconds
But don’t just take my word for it. Try out our trial for free today and see for yourself.
5. Grab Attention Amongst The Noise In The Social Media Feeds
Social media presence is still a huge part of building a successful business. I believe that’s as true now as it was when I helped launch Viddyoze in 2015.
The only difference is that more brands are doing it and doing it well. With so much competition out there for small businesses, getting started can be overwhelming. That’s why I want to highlight this Tweet from entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck:
The point is, you can do it, and you should because the potential is massive. As of right now, over 4.80 billion people use social media, which is 59.9% of the world’s population. That is a lot of eyeballs.
With AI tools, there’s really no excuse. Just look at Adcreative. This new digital marketing tech claims to “Generate over 100 engagement-focused social creatives in seconds”. Adcreative takes data from successful social media posts and creates new content designed to convert. And this is just one example.
Even if you just use AI marketing technology to help generate ideas, think of the time you’ll save in your marketing meetings. You’ll already have a starting point for your marketing campaigns, all thanks to an AI marketing tool.
Adcreative is great because anyone can use it. You don’t need any design experience (this is a big one for small business owners who can’t yet afford a designer in-house), it’s super-fast, and it can be posted across all major social media sites.
6. Drive More Sales with Product Recommendations For Your Store
AdRoll gives you the power to upsell your customers, increasing the total revenue on their final orders. I swear by this and have used it in previous businesses because it works so well.
So how does it work?
Using machine learning, AdRoll studies the way people interact with your website. From the pages they browse, it can analyze patterns and customer behavior. Once they add something to their cart, AdRoll offers real-time suggestions for other products at checkout based on this data.
This isn’t some random product. It’s something the consumer might actually want, which makes them more likely to buy it. It can also suggest more products through ads or email recommendations, depending on your AI marketing strategy.
In my experience, there’s no reason not to use AI tools to improve your upsell rate. It can boost conversions by as much as 23% and drastically reduce cart abandonment. When I’ve used it, I’ve seen an increase in AOV (average order value), too.
If the user doesn’t accept the upsell suggestion, AdRoll sends out an email reminder in a bid to pull the consumer back in. It doesn’t always work, but it increases your chances of an extra sale.
Once again, this AI marketing tool for small businesses saves tons of time and effort. It’s all automated to process data and act based on your strategic goals.
7. Customer Service: Say Hello To 24-Hour Support
Animated chatbots are programmed to respond to a series of common questions, providing possible solutions, such as video guides, before a customer service representative is needed. They use conversational AI and natural language.
Chatbots help with cost savings and free up time for your customer service team to deal with more complex issues. They’re brilliant because they work 24/7 and can cover non-working hours, improving your customer service contact time.
Big companies, such as Amazon, are already well into this trend, so we know it’s going to be a winner for small businesses. If current market trends stay as they are, there will be a lot more animated chatbots, and website chat functions popping up over the next year.
Tidio is one example I really like. Not only is it efficient, but it’s practical as it can be integrated with Shopify, Wix, MailChimp, WordPress, and more.
Tidio can track a customer’s order, check on product availability, and even offer discounts to try and persuade hesitant new customers. That’s on top of the other features that chatbots provide, such as time-saving and cost-saving. I like to think of it as an AI assistant for service-based business queries.
There are even individual chatbot options for social media channels, such as Instagram (Tidio), Facebook (ChatBot), and WhatsApp (Chatfuel).
8. Get More Website And YouTube Clicks With AI-Written Headlines
Whether you need SEO titles for your business website, titles for a YouTube video, or titles for your ads, AI-powered tools can help a small business write catchy headlines for its marketing strategy.
The rationale behind this is solid. The better your titles, the more people will find you on Google. I’ve found that Chat GPT SEO is pretty good at this. Here are some I generated using the following prompt:
<Create a catchy headline to be used for each of the following 5 YouTube video topics: video marketing, YouTube marketing, viral videos, social media videos, and customer video testimonials. Each headline should be SEO optimized and meet YouTube’s video title criteria.>
ChatGPT results:
1. “Unlock Your Brand’s Potential: Master Video Marketing Strategies for Explosive Growth”
2. “YouTube Marketing Secrets Unleashed: Skyrocket Your Channel’s Reach and Engagement”
3. “From Zero to Viral: How to Create Share-Worthy Videos That Break the Internet”
4. “Social Media Videos That Stop the Scroll: Captivate Your Audience with Compelling Content”
5. “Real Customers, Real Results: Inspiring Video Testimonials That Boost Trust and Sales
As with anything you create on ChatGPT, it might not be perfect. The chatbot added this caveat at the end of the list it provided: “While these headlines aim to be catchy and SEO-optimized, it’s important to conduct further keyword research and ensure that the specific keywords and phrases used align with the latest SEO trends and YouTube’s video title criteria.”
Double-check all results from AI SEO tools before you publish, and have a go at following our SEO video marketing blueprint for maximum success.
9. Find Industry Influencers Who Share Your Brand Values
Influencer marketing campaigns have become commonplace for small businesses. They are an easy way to tap into an existing local or global audience and promote your products through a trusted source.
The truth is modern buyers listen to their favorite influencers more than they listen to businesses. In fact, 61% of consumers trust an influencer recommendation more than they trust branded content. It also helps with content creation, as a business can rely on the influencer to provide videos, blogs, social posts, and so on.
Unfortunately, you can’t use AI to generate a readymade influencer in your industry—not yet, anyway. However, it can recommend an influencer for you to work with based on your target demographic.
Here’s a prompt I used:
<Suggest five video marketing influencers with between 5,000 and 10,000 followers on Instagram>
The influencers suggested were hit-and-miss. Some were perfect, and some didn’t even exist anymore. Small businesses will need to check each one carefully, as ChatGPT’s memory only runs until 2021. Just like with content creation, AI for small businesses can help improve efficiency and organization, but it isn’t perfect.
10. Boost Your SEO By Building Backlinks To Your Website
I’ve already covered the importance of SEO for your business in point 8. Ultimately, the more customers that can find you, the better it is for a small business.
Good SEO is the best way to ensure that a potential customer can find you as quickly as possible. In addition to search-engine-optimized headlines and website copy, link-building is essential for small businesses.
Link building has two main benefits:
- The added exposure improves your domain authority and enables small businesses to rank higher
- You gain referral traffic from users clicking through to your website from third-party sites
So what is link building? This is the process of creating a network of links to your website from other websites. For the vast majority of small business websites, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do this passively.
That means you’ll need to run a concentrated outreach campaign instead. Luckily, AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, can be used to speed up this process for small businesses. There are two ways to do this:
- Provide ChatGPT with a summary of your business website, including what your small business does, your target audience, and a list of keywords. Next, ask the machine learning model to recommend a list of relevant websites. Finally, contact these websites and ask if they’re willing to link to your site.
- Provide ChatGPT with a brief description of a website/influencer you want to reach out to. Ask the machine learning model to draft a persuasive email. You can turn this into a template for other businesses.
11. Keep Your Social Media Accounts Active With Automated Content Calendars
Although marketing automation is nothing new, the sheer number of small businesses that don’t use it still astounds me.
Consistency is the key to social media, after all. Just ask marketer Andrea Bosoni:
Posting daily can be a challenge for a small business. I get that. I’ve been there myself, which is why I use AI-powered tools to make my life easier. The first step to social media success is creating an in-depth calendar.
This used to take hours. Tons of time is spent thinking of ideas and meticulously planning out months of content. In my opinion, it’s worth it, but again, I understand the challenge this poses for small businesses. Predis is an example of an AI tool that will do this for you.
The AI marketing tool gives you ideas for posts, highlights important dates and holidays, and schedules them across your social media sites. You can edit the posts easily, ensuring they match your tone and retain a real human touch.
With all the tedious work done, your team is free to get on with other tasks. No surprise marketing teams love this AI tech.
12. Increase Your Blog Posting Frequency with Auto-Generated Writing
First off, I want to point out that ChatGPT, or any AI for small business marketing tools, should not be used to write all of your content marketing blogs.
In my opinion, ChatGPT isn’t great at writing long-form content. Its writing style is very basic, and it can’t be fully trusted with facts – its memory only runs up until 2021. It’s fine for short stuff, such as digital marketing copywriting (for example, product descriptions, meta descriptions, or social posts), but blogs and articles are best left to humans.
What’s more, AI solutions for content writing are not great when it comes to search-optimized content (SEO) and can hinder your performance on Google and other search engines. So avoid using it to write your landing pages, blogs, or other SEO-optimized content.
What it can do, however, is help speed up your copywriting process and content output. I’d recommend using AI-powered technology to help improve the efficiency of your marketing team. Here’s how:
- Generate blog topic ideas for your industry
- Create a detailed writing plan and outline for your blogs
- Check for grammar and spelling mistakes
- Improve the readability, tone, and length of the piece
13. Improve Your Brand’s Chances Of Going Viral with Generated Memes
Whether it’s Twitter, TikTok (have a look at our beginners guide to TikTok for business), or Instagram, social media has been flooded with weird and wonderful AI-generated content.
AI-powered app This Meme Does Not Exist made headlines recently for its bizarre content. The AI system takes existing memes (you know, like the iconic Shiba Inu meme or surprised Pikachu) and generates a meme based on a text prompt.
The memes are usually so strange and often nonsensical that people can’t help but share them. The internet is a strange place, after all.
Predis, which I’ve already mentioned, does something similar, although a lot more goes into generating these memes. By analyzing data from your social media output, Predis creates content based on your target audience and branding.
I can’t promise these memes will go viral—that is incredibly hard to do, and social media algorithms change all the time—but Predis will increase your output, which can improve your chances of striking viral gold. It will also save you time, which is a big win for small businesses that don’t have huge budgets.
14. Use ChatGPT to Code Calculator Lead Magnets
I love a free online calculator. I’ve used them for working out my taxes, my mortgage, and even my calorie intake. I’m willing to bet that you’ve used a few yourself.
So let me ask you this: before you could use the calculator, were you asked for an email address?
If yes, you’ve experienced lead magnet content firsthand.
A lead magnet is the soft exchange of data for a valuable piece of online content. For the marketer, this is invaluable. That’s because once you have a consumer’s email address, you can start marketing to them directly. Calculators are great for this.
Of course, a calculator will only be worth making if it adds value to the customer. It must also be related to your industry. If you sell organic dog food, it’s unlikely anyone will come to you to figure out their income tax.
Once you’ve got your idea, you can use ChatGPT to provide the code you need to embed the calculator on your website. Simply give ChatGPT a prompt to create the calculator and provide your chosen language, in this case, JavaScript.
This will save you money and time (no need to learn how to code) and improve your inbound web traffic.
It’s a good idea to focus on your lead generation strategies to increase your chances of more sales ultimately.
15. Create Customer Profiles with Zero Research Time
What does your dream customer look like? The one that is most likely to use your product? Do you know how old these are? What do they do for a job? Where do they live?
For small businesses, this kind of key data collection is very important. By creating customer profiles based on this data, you’ll be able to target the right people and build an in-depth understanding of your audience.
It can be tricky to collect this info at first. That said, there are AI technologies that can help you with demographic research. Here’s an example using the conversational AI tool ChatGPT. We asked it to provide a list of consumers (including key demographics) who would be most likely to use an earwax removal tool product.
You can see the results in this screenshot:
Having run this, I now have an idea for at least one customer profile: an adult over 50 years of age, a regular swimmer, possibly wears hearing aids, and has shown interest in the past in health and self-care products, such as vitamins or immune boosters.
Final Thoughts
We just covered a lot about AI marketing tools, I know. But before I finish up, the point I want to stress again is this:
AI tools should be used to enhance, not replace.
For small businesses with small teams and modest resources, artificial intelligence marketing tools can help you supercharge what you already have—remember, think of it like an AI assistant—and give you a competitive edge over your rivals. By adopting AI tools for business early, you can improve your ROI, AOV, and conversion rates, as I’ve mentioned in this article.
We don’t know what the future will hold for AI marketing. The only thing we can say for certain is that it’s not going away. It will continue to develop and improve. ChatGPT is the shiny new toy right now, but there are tons of other products in the pipeline.
Those who take advantage of AI technology now will be ahead of the pack when it becomes the norm, which will happen sooner than you think. So start your AI journey now with a free trial to Viddyoze. Newly integrated with AI technology, our video maker is easier than ever to use. Try it now for free.
