AI For Small Business Marketing: Get A Competitive Edge Today

Artificial intelligence (AI) hands small businesses an arsenal of marketing superpowers allowing them to compete at an entirely new level.

By automating repetitive tasks, uncovering actionable insights, and tailoring interactions to each individual, AI enables small teams to achieve a scale of productivity, relevance and connection previously unattainable.

Harnessing this transformative technology grants small brands almost magical capabilities to captivate customers and carve out competitive advantages against even the largest corporations. Let's dive in and discover how to use ai for small business marketing in 2024 and beyond.

Key Takeaways

• AI powered tools transformative marketing capabilities for small businesses like automated task management, data-driven insights, and hyper-personalization.
• Core applications covered include optimizing websites, email, ads, content, chatbots and analytics with AI tools.
• Akkio's no-code AI analytics platform enables small marketing teams to efficiently derive actionable insights from data to inform strategy. Sign up for a free trial.
• By integrating AI marketing innovations, small businesses can gain decisive competitive advantages through greater productivity, relevance and customer connections.

How to use AI for Small Business Marketing

There are several key benefits AI offers for small business owners and marketing teams:

• Increased Efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks, AI lets small teams get more done in less time. An AI assistant can write social media posts, design assets, moderate comments, and more.
• Valuable Insights: AI can uncover patterns in customer data to reveal valuable insights for segmentation and targeting. This leads to higher conversion rates.
• Personalization: AI tools can tailor messaging and experiences to each customer. This level of personalization was previously only feasible for large corporations.

This guide will explore techniques small businesses can use to integrate AI into their marketing, including building websites, creating content, optimizing ads, analyzing data, and more. Follow along to transform your small business with ai marketing tools.

Building Websites with AI

A stunning yet functional website is essential for any modern, small business owner. AI website builders make easy work of creating an effective online presence.

AI Website Builders

AI Tools like Wix ADI ask you questions about your business then automatically generate a customized website template. The AI considers elements like industry, style preferences, and goals to design a site tailored to your brand. With little web design expertise, small businesses can quickly build professional sites that establish credibility.

Wix has long been one of the most popular website builder for small business owners and they started adopting AI before others.

Other AI Website builders include:

• Jimdo: Jimdo Dolphin, an AI-powered website builder integrated into Jimdo's platform, creates personalized websites with just a few questions. It's user-friendly and offers a free plan including mobile optimization and an image library, but SEO tools are behind a paywall. Pricing starts from $9/month for SEO features​​.
• 10Web: Ideal for WordPress fans, 10Web uses AI to build templates and recreate website designs from URLs. It offers an AI content assistant, automated WordPress hosting, a speed booster, and security features. Plans start at $10/month, but it lacks e-commerce functionality​​.
• Weblium: This user-friendly builder offers over 300 AI templates and an AI Design Supervisor to assist with design elements. It includes SSL security, SEO optimization, and features like online payment collection and CRM. Plans start at $8.25/month​​.
• GoDaddy AI: Known for hosting and domain services, GoDaddy AI offers tailored design suggestions, content enhancement, digital marketing guidance, and AI-driven SEO suggestions. However, it might feel restrictive for experienced developers. Pricing details can be found on their website​​.
• Framer AI: Allows you to generate entire website designs using a single text prompt. It's a no-code visual builder similar to Figma or Webflow, perfect for landing pages or blogs. It offers free publishing for simple projects, with upgrade options for more features​​.

Optimizing Website UX

You can also use AI powered tools to optimize your existing website's user experience. Services like UserTesting record visitors navigating your site then assess pain points. The detailed playback and analysis spotlight opportunities to improve conversions by enhancing site navigation, checkout, forms, and more.

Sitebulb is a toolthat audits technical SEO elements like page speed and responsiveness. It gives actionable tips for creating seamless site experiences that encourage visitors to stay longer and convert more often.

Personalized Site Search

Relevant, personalized search is key for keeping visitors engaged. AI tools like Algolia analyze visitor behavior then tweak results to highlight more relevant products, services, and information matching their demonstrated interests.

Other innovations like conversational AI chatbots can answer customer queries to facilitate site navigation. They capture this visitor data to keep refining site search toward hyper-personalized experiences.

Examples of conversational AI chatbots for customer support include:

• Zendesk: Offers omnichannel deployment and integrates with third-party systems. Features include intelligent routing, customer context collection, and reporting analytics.
• Zoho SalesIQ: This platform features a drag-and-drop chatbot builder called Zobot, a Zia AI assistant for customer support, and task automation. Pricing ranges from $7 to $20 per operator license/month​​.
• Netomi: Known for its conversational AI and integrated knowledge search, Netomi's chatbot is tailored for quick customer service ticket resolution. It offers multilingual experiences and proactive messaging. Pricing is available upon request​​.
• Intercom Fin: Built using OpenAI, it's capable of understanding complex questions and integrating information from your business’s knowledge base. However, it may lack flexibility in chatbot flow building.
• Einstein by Salesforce: Ideal for Salesforce users, it helps streamline workflows and drive sales. It integrates with OpenAI for generative AI features. Note that setting up Einstein can be resource-intensive and may take up to 6 months​​.

Email Marketing With AI

Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Combining it with AI optimization and email marketing tools can skyrocket conversions for small businesses.

Collecting Customer Data

Precision email marketing relies on detailed customer data. Manually organizing disparate data sources like CRMs, email metrics, web analytics, and sales records is extremely tedious.

AI-powered customer data platforms (CDPs) like Segment automatically aggregate data then structure it for unified profiles. This gives small marketing teams valuable consolidated insights for segmentation and targeting.

Creating Targeted Campaigns

Services like Rasa ingest your email and customer data then automatically optimize your email marketing campaigns. The AI considers factors like past email engagement, web visits, order history, and more to segment subscribers and tailor messaging for 2-5X higher open and click rates.

Rasa also tests variations of email content like subject lines, preview text, and calls-to-action to determine what resonates best with each subscriber segment. It then sends fully personalized versions built for higher engagement and conversion.

Email Automation

AI can also automate extensive, personalized marketing campaigns and email sequences to convert and retain customers.

Tools like Omnisend track on-site behaviors like abandoned carts then trigger automated recovery emails to re-engage visitors. The AI personalizes the timing, messaging, products displayed, and discounts offered in these emails to optimize results.

Other popular email automation platforms include:

• Mailchimp: A versatile platform that offers a free basic platform and automated sequences triggered by user actions. It's widely recognized but has limitations in automation functionalities​​​​. Mailchimp enters the realm of ai powered marketing tools with AI-generated email copy.
• Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): This platform is great for businesses getting started with email automation and offers over 40+ predesigned templates, predefined workflow automation, and various integrations​​​​.
• ActiveCampaign: Designed to automate the entire customer experience, it allows the building of visually appealing workflows and conditional rules for email interactions​​​​. ActiveCampaign has a plethora of artificial intelligence features, and you can find the full list here.

AI Tools For Brand Identity

Using AI, small businesses can generate polished brand assets and accurate ad campaigns that reinforce identity and credibility with little effort or expense.

Logo Generators

Platforms like Looka and Designhill offer smart logo generators. Just input your company name, industry, and design preferences to instantly see unique logo options combining fonts, colors, icons, and shapes. The AI generates hundreds of on-brand logo variations in seconds for inspiration or final selection.

Image & Graphic Creation

Beyond logos, AI graphic design platforms like Canva help create website images, social posts, flyers, product mockups, and more that visually communicate your brand identity.

Describe what you need like "a Facebook ad for our new vegan skincare range featuring purple flowers" and the AI generates polished visuals matching your specifications.

Text-To-Image Generators

Another option is text-to-image generators like DALL-E that convert text descriptions into photorealistic images. Instead of hiring a designer, just describe the visuals needed like "a graphic of a barista serving coffee in our new brand colors" and the AI imagines unique images for you.

This helps quickly mock up visual concepts when ideating creatives or campaigns to bring marketing ideas to life.

The most popular AI tools to generate images with artificial intelligence are:

• Midjourney: a Discord channel capable of generating stunning hyper-realistic images for any use case;
• Stable Diffusion: the cheapest and most commonly integrated API to generate images with artificial intelligence in SaaS products;  

Small business owners can take advantage of AI powered tools to streamline image generation and avoid hefty copyright fees. As of the time of writing, there's no copyright on AI-generated images, meaning you can usually use them freely.

However, please note AI can and will generate copyrighted material, like logos of companies or popular products. If it does, then you still have to double-check whether you have the right to publish the image or not. It's suggested to only trust AI for abstract generations. For everything else, double check with a legal or at least take a look before publishing!

AI Content Creation

Creating optimized content that attracts and converts visitors is critical but time-intensive. AI writing assistants and content tools boost productivity for small marketing teams.

Writing Assistants

AI writing assistants like Grammarly review your drafts for spelling, grammar, tone, and clarity. This allows beginners to produce professional-quality content quickly.

Tools like Jasper take your content direction to write entire blog posts or create content for social media captions from scratch. Describe the topic, tone, length and Jasper composes, structures and polishes unique drafts for you to review and refine before publishing.

Other AI content generators include:

1. Rytr: Stands out for its ability to adapt to various tones and styles, making it suitable for crafting brand-specific content. It supports over 20 languages and offers features like grammar and spelling checks​​​​.
2. Copy.ai: This tool specializes in writing compelling copy for digital platforms and offers a 'Brainstorm' feature for generating content variations​​​​​​.
3. ContentBot.ai: Known for its 'Deep Rewrite' feature, it assists in revising existing articles while maintaining their original meaning. It's versatile, supporting various content types including emails and blog introductions​​​​.
4. Writesonic: Great for generating a variety of content, including landing pages and ads. Known for its 'Landing Page Generator', it's an excellent choice for enhancing digital presence​​​​.
5. HyperWrite: An AI-based text generator excelling in generating web content, from product descriptions to SEO-friendly articles. It focuses on enhancing productivity and creativity in content creation, with features like AI-assisted writing and an integrated plagiarism checker​​​​. Read our full review on HyperWrite.

Chatbots For Research

Conducting content research is hugely simplified by AI chatbots like ChatGPT. For any topic, the chatbot can summarize key ideas, define concepts, analyze trends and data, and recommend sources to reference - delivering a mini research report on demand.

Perplexity.ai is also an invaluable assistant when scouting for real, factual data. The bot uses GPT-3.5,  GPT-4, or Claude (depending on your subscription level) to scrape the web and look for fact-based answers to your query.

Targeted Ads With AI

Pay-per-click and paid social are extremely more effective marketing strategy when optimized using AI capabilities for precision targeting.

Precision Ad Targeting

Platforms like AcuityAds offer AI ad targeting to analyze customer data then identify your highest potential customers. This allows displaying your ads only to likely buyers based on attributes like demographics, interests, past purchases, browsing history and more.

Confining ads to receptive audiences increases relevance, conversion rates and ROI for digital ads. It also reduces wasted ad spend from broad targeting of cold audiences.

Predicting Customer Behavior

AI ad platforms determine likely future actions by analyzing historical data. When targeting new customers, marketing tools like Google Ads gauge probability of desired conversions based on similarity to existing best customers.

For current customers, AI evaluates past site interactions to predict their next likely purchases or engagement drops to proactively re-engage at optimal times.

Other than the ad networks themselves, you can use ai for small business marketing solutions like Akkio to predict future success of current marketing campaigns.

Using our no-code solution, you can forecast ROAS, connect Google Analytics to analyze current performance and predict future landing page engagement, predict churn rate, and even generate graphs or dashboard to identify insights and key drivers of success.

You can give Akkio a try for 14 days here. It's completely free, no credit card required.

Automating Campaign Creation

AI can also design full ad campaigns tailored to your goals. Instead of intensive ongoing management, Persado generates thousands of creative variations then displays the highest performing assets to each audience.

The AI constantly learns and optimizes to maximize results. This allows small teams to implement advanced multi-channel campaigns that respond to customers in real-time.

SEO Optimization With AI

AI is revolutionizing search engine optimization through smart tools for research, analysis and recommendations.

Tools For Keyword Research

The foundation of SEO is using strategic keywords so people can discover your content. AI software like Semrush facilitates this by revealing high-opportunity terms related to your business.

Input a focus keyword like "dog training", your URL and target monthly searches. Semrush's AI instantly analyzes your site and competitors to suggest viable keyword variations matching your parameters for traffic and difficulty.

Other SEO tools with AI tools include:

• GrowthBar: Focused on DYI SEO, it provides keyword suggestions and competitor analysis, making it an ideal tool for creating keyword-rich content.
• Frase: More than just a content generator, Frase is a complete content optimization tool with features like SEO optimization and content research.
• INK: Offers advanced features for creating content quickly. It's suitable for generating blogs and articles that can rank on search engines​​. They developed their own AI and started offering AI keyword research.

Analyzing Content Gaps

You can further harness Semrush's AI to assess your existing content's keyword performance. It pinpoints terms driving traffic along with optimization opportunities to target more searches.

Sitebulb compares your pages side-by-side with top-ranked competitors for a given term. The AI highlights specific areas you fail to match like word count, keyword volume and placement so you can upgrade your content.

Site Audits & Improvement Tips

For a holistic website health check, tools like Sitebulb perform 500+ point technical SEO audits. The AI scanner evaluates page speed, security protocols, structured data markup, link profiles and URL optimization.

It generates actionable recommendations so you can readily fix issues hindering performance. Sitebulb also tracks progress over time as you implement improvements.

Moderating UGC With AI

User-generated content builds community but requires moderation to control quality. AI makes this achievable for small teams.

Automated Content Moderation

AI services like Besedo automatically scan all user submissions to flag toxic comments based on keyword libraries and machine learning models. It hides offensive posts and empowers you to set policies determining which are deleted or trigger bans.

For approving legitimate posts, Spot filters them into topics like "positive feedback", "bug report'' or "feature request" saving manual sorting.

Moderating Images & Video

AI can also moderate visual UGC. SightEngine assesses images and videos then filters out nudity, violence or copyrighted content. This allows safely incorporating rich media at scale while maintaining brand standards.

Chatbots For Guidance & Queries

Customers.ai enables creating Facebook Messenger and SMS chatbots with drag-and-drop simplicity. Build conversations guiding users to desired outcomes like bookings, purchases or content downloads.

Integrate callbacks so real staff handle complex queries the AI chatbot routes based on analysis of question topics and sentiment. This balances automation with human connections.

Other chatbot tools include ManyChat and ChatFuel.

Personalized Recommendations

Ecommerce chatbots analyze customer data to give personalized product ideas and discounts when visitors return. The AI identifies their preferences based on past browsing, then recommends relevant items to encourage repeat purchases.

Capturing Visitor Insights

Chatbots engage customers while capturing invaluable data like contact info, product interests and feedback. MobileMonkey lets you export these visitor profiles for use in platforms like email and social ad targeting.

AI Video Creation Tools

Video drives substantial customer engagement and conversions but is resource-heavy to produce at scale. AI video creation platforms streamline production so small businesses can tap into the medium.

Text-To-Video Software

Instead of expensive video teams, tools like Videomaker.ai convert text transcripts, blog posts or product descriptions into polished square videos ready for social media. Choose backgrounds, visual styles and branding to match your channel aesthetic.

Though currently basic, the AI saves time creating short promotional and educational video content to boost visibility.

AI Market Research Assistants

Market intelligence guides a marketing strategy, but thorough research is demanding for small marketing teams. AI assistants automate the process for rapid insights.

Data Analysis Automation

Tools like Akkio instantly analyze competitors using AI augmented data aggregation. Input target company names and Comparables compiles hundreds of data points on traffic, search visibility, social media traction, paid ad spend and more. It tracks growth over time and benchmarks performance to uncover strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.

Akkio is a powerful AI platform that offers a wide range of applications for small business marketing. It provides advanced AI analytics capabilities, including sentiment analysis, social media monitoring, campaign optimization, and a fully-fledged AI insights report.

Akkio's user-friendly interface and no-code ML platform make it suitable for both technical and non-technical users, enabling small businesses to harness the power of AI for various marketing tasks, such as churn reduction, predicting customer lifetime value, text classification, and fraud detection.

Additionally, Akkio's features, such as Chat Explore and Chat Data Prep, enable analysts to understand data, find actionable insights, and report on business outcomes faster than traditional methods, thus improving productivity and decision-making. Overall, Akkio's AI capabilities can significantly enhance the marketing efforts of small businesses, allowing them to make more informed, proactive, and strategic decisions.

Such AI analysis in minutes saves weeks of manual research. You gain actionable competitive intelligence to sharpen online positioning.

Market Trend Predictions

AI can also forecast future industry shifts based on macro-economic signals, political developments, commercial initiatives and consumer behaviors.

The AI-generated insights help marketing and product leaders de-risk strategy by anticipating challenges and capitalizing on emerging opportunities early.

If you already have the data you need at hand, Akkio can help with the predictions. Akkio helped a political party in the US gather more donations using artificial intelligence.

Growth Opportunities & Recommendations

To identify quick revenue opportunities, tools like 6sense find prospects already investigating your brand. The AI scans millions of company websites to reveal ones referencing you as an alternative solution.

It alerts you to these competitors' customers ripe for targeting. With tailored outreach, you sway interested prospects at a pivotal buying stage for fast wins and momentum.

The Future of AI In Marketing

This guide explored 12 AI applications to strengthen small business marketing across websites, branding, content, ads, analytics and more. As the technology advances, further innovations will provide integrated automation so entrepreneurs can manage full-stack marketing campaigns through intuitive central platforms.

With AI eliminating routine tasks, small marketing teams can focus their energy on devising creative brand-building strategies and customer experiences that foster loyalty and commitment at scale.

The key promise on the horizon is hyper-personalization of customer interactions. By synthesizing audience insights, behaviors and preferences, continuously-learning AI will allow small brands to interact with each customer as intimately as the local shopkeeper of yore. Except instead of merely remembering someone's name and favorite cigarette brand, AI will grasp comprehensive lifestyle and value drivers to bond buyers to products meaningfully aligned with self-image and aspirations.

Conclusion

AI marketing tools offer transformative potential for small businesses to gain a competitive edge. By automating repetitive tasks, generating insights from data, and personalizing customer interactions, AI allows small teams to achieve an outsized impact.

The applications explored in this guide demonstrate how AI can optimize major marketing channels like websites, email, social media, SEO, ads, content, and analytics. Small businesses willing to test and integrate these innovations can drive greater efficiency, relevance and results from their digital marketing efforts too.

As AI capabilities continue advancing, small brands will gain access to integrated automation that manages ongoing campaign optimization from a unified platform. With AI handling the heavy lifting, entrepreneurs can instead focus on devising creative brand-building strategies that foster genuine customer connections.

Start exploring the future of your company by trying out Akkio for free. It will change how you look at data forever with end-to-end AI workflows, digital marketing use cases, and artificial intelligence tools for all data needs.