A few months ago we wrote about 2023’s marketing trends and what that meant for 2024, and there’s one topic we highlighted that continues to dominate the news agenda – the use of artificial intelligence.
Although it’s been around for a long time, it feels like the last 12 months in particular have been spent talking about everything from how transformative it will be for businesses, to fears about the jobs it might replace (cue 2023’s strike by Hollywood actors and writers).
The challenge facing businesses is to cut through the noise to determine how AI, and which of the many tools available, can benefit their operation.
A study by Gartner last year found that 48% of marketers were already using generative AI in their marketing funnels, with another 43% saying they were planning to. Only 6% said they weren’t using AI and had no plans to. At EBY, we are among those already using AI across the business including in web development, content creation, CRM automations and social media, to create more value for our clients.
You might be using some elements of AI without realising it – even LinkedIn pops up with a ‘try writing with AI’ tool when you’re creating a post.
But how can you harness the power of AI for marketing your small business in the real world? And by ‘harness its power’ we mean deploy it in a way that significantly improves your business without compromising your brand’s personality, USPs or reputation. To put it another way, how do you take advantage of the robots without losing the human touch?
Because the absolute worst thing you can do is ask ChatGPT to write some generic blog on some generic topic and post it on your company website – these stick out like a sore thumb and we’d argue could do more harm than good.
Making AI work for your brand involves a much more considered and sophisticated approach altogether.
AI marketing tools in 2024
AI tools can be used across pretty much any element of marketing, including content, graphics, video production, lead generation, email flows, nurture sequences, branding, sales, advertising, customer service and so on.
Let’s have a quick look at some of the most common tools and how they can be used.
ChatGPT
We’ve written about ChatGPT before although it continues to develop at a rapid pace.
Microsoft Copilot
Copilot is integrated into the functions of Microsoft 365 to improve productivity through simple language prompts. It can do things like provide overviews of meetings, emails and chat threads, create presentations from relevant content, analyse trends, create data results from Excel sheets and more.
Copy.ai
This has a range of functions designed to help you ‘create content, enrich your CRM, scale your prospecting efforts and much more’. You can use pre-built workflows or design your own, essentially enabling you to automate hundreds of time-consuming and repetitive sales and marketing tasks. It can design marketing campaigns, create the content and expand your reach. You can add and analyse your brand voice.
Optimove
This is a customer-led relationship management platform for attracting, engaging and retaining customers. It allows effective, multi-channel communications to be orchestrated at scale, using customer-led journeys, with bespoke messaging, insights and data.
Rapidely
Boosts social media content creation with ideas for pre-planned content for a month, as well as AI-assisted content, carousel maker, scheduling and team collaboration.
Acrolinx
This is designed to help maintain brand consistency across all your content. As well as making sure content is aligned with style and compliance guidelines, it also provides detailed analytics about the quality and performance of your content.
Dall-E
Another offering from the house of OpenAI (Elon Musk), Dall-E focuses on images rather than text. You can put in a text prompt outlining what visual you need and a resulting graphic will be generated instantly.
Sora
OpenAI will soon be taking this to the next logical level with Sora, its video version of the image generator. While it’s currently being tested by select teams and not yet widely available, Sora has already made the headlines with its promise of life-like videos generated from simple text prompts.
Synthesia
This is another video platform which uses artificial avatars and voice-overs to create finished videos from your own script, or you can use it to create the script as well. This can be used as an alternative format to training presentations and slide decks.
Podcastle
An AI-powered app for podcast recording and editing, which allows you to record video and audio streams, including virtual interviews with up to 10 participants. It automates tasks like cutting out silences, suggesting trims, minimising background noise and maintaining consistent volume levels.
Surfer SEO
One of many AI-powered SEO tools, Surfer SEO aims to boost the quality of content on web pages to gain higher rankings on the search engine results pages. It looks for relevant search terms, generates and evaluates keywords for your business.
Brand24
A social media monitoring tool which helps businesses stay on top of what is being said about their brand, products and competitors across the internet. This real-time analysis of positive and negative feedback can be a useful tool in informing brand strategy.
Xembly
This productivity platform streams various aspects of the day-to-day such as scheduling meetings, summarising meetings, creating agendas, handling scheduling conflicts, integrating with calendars and tracking tasks.
Smartly.io
Smartly.io helps you launch and manage digital adverts across multiple platforms all at once, including creating assets designed to engage specific audiences, ad management, and analysis of what is and isn’t working.
Deciding what AI tools to use for your business
The above is by no means an exhaustive list – it’s just designed to give you an indication of some of the countless AI tools and platforms that now exist to make your life easier.
They vary in price as well, from free versions, to subscriptions with significant price tags, so deciding which specific tools you would actually use in a way that delivers real return on investment – including time saved – is key to determining how marketing AI can work for your business.
If you do decide to adopt an AI tool, it’s also worth making sure you always have a back-up plan in place, should anything go wrong with the technology.
Don’t forget your human advantage
People might worry about their jobs and the role for humans in the age of AI, but in many respects, it’s actually making us crave human interaction even more.
Leveraging the human advantage is still incredibly beneficial to your brand in frontline interactions, such as customer service, strategy and content. While we are using AI at EBY, it’s by no means a replacement for people. It’s a tool that helps us to deliver better solutions for clients and save time – time we can reinvest into providing more value-added support.
If all businesses just use AI to create their brand, content, videos, voices and customer communication points, it’s easy to imagine that everything would become similar and robotic. Designing brands that speak directly to humans in a way that a robot could never understand (think humour, the human psyche, nuances in behaviour etc), will become integral to standing out.
For us, making AI work for your small business marketing is more about automating the repetitive day-to-day tasks, organising your day, taking over time-consuming manual processes, and to some extent, kickstarting your creative process when you’re otherwise staring at a blank page. It’s not designed to be the very heart, soul and face of your business – these things must retain the human touch
While you might use AI to design a block of standard training videos, we wouldn’t advocate using an avatar to become the face of your business, for example.
For more information about how you might use AI in your business marketing, or for help in setting up marketing automation systems, contact the EBY team today.