Iftikhar Alam
McKinsey called 2023 ‘’Generative AI’s breakout year,’’ and rightfully so. Thanks to the nascent availability and accessibility of these tools, experimentation with them is common across industries. Interestingly, it’s not only large enterprises with a lot of money at their disposal who are incorporating AI in their marketing and operations.
Small and midsize businesses are also benefiting from this technology. A small business typically means a company with 99 or fewer employees, while a mid-sized business has under 1,000 workers. The way to use startup marketing for entrepreneurs and SMBs is starkly different from its role in readily established enterprises. Entrepreneurs often have to account for market conditions and customer personas, whereas SMBs need to tackle cost and adoption hurdles.
The right approach can help you overcome these challenges. AI can be a powerful tool for entrepreneurs to gather insights and make data-driven decisions in a new market. SMBs, on the other hand, can use AI in marketing to streamline their processes and reduce costs. In this guide, we’ll explore how entrepreneurs and SMBs can use AI marketing to maximize efficiency on a budget.
AI Marketing for SMBs
McKinsey conducted a survey in April 2023 to determine how many companies were using Gen AI despite the technology being in its infancy. The results were surprising, as 79% of respondents reported having Gen AI exposure, and 22% said they use the technology in their everyday work life.
McKinsey survey results on the use of AI in industries
The most common use cases for Gen AI were marketing, product and service development, service operations, and sales. Among these, marketing was the primary area of interest for most respondents. In this department, companies used AI to:
- Craft first drafts for marketing content
- Personalize marketing
- Summarize documents
Reported uses of AI tools in businesses
Besides McKinsey, a Constant Contact survey also found that 91% of small businesses who use AI believe it has made them more successful. It seems like SMBs are using AI for cost savings since 28% of AI users said they expect to save $5,000 in the next 12 months. AI also saved entrepreneurs time, almost a third of the respondents said AI tools saved them over 40 minutes a week.
SMBs are leveraging AI in marketing for its potential to target more accurately and achieve better ROI on their ads. AI is also used to optimize email marketing campaigns, social media ads, and website content.
According to the US Chamber of Commerce, 23% of small businesses use AI. Most of these users leverage AI for customer communications and marketing. The Chamber’s findings further revealed that 39% of SMBs plan to use AI in the future.
Part of the reason for this adoption is the potential profitability through AI marketing. Businesses that have already been using AI experienced a 12-point increase in profitability compared to non-AI users. They also saw better performance and satisfaction.
Another reason SMBs use AI is to get on the same level as their larger counterparts. In an Intuit QuickBooks survey, 70% of SMBs said they could compete with larger companies with the help of AI.
Can AI help SMBs compete with large businesses? A survey
83% of the respondents in the same poll said they already use AI, while 65% reported wanting to make it a bigger part of their business operations. Some common use cases for AI in these organizations include marketing, data analytics, customer support, administrative tasks, and translation services.
Quick Read: How to Use AI in Marketing: Best Practices 2024!
Budget-Friendly AI Tools in Startup Marketing for Entrepreneurs and SMBs
According to the Harvard Business Review, startup marketing for entrepreneurs with AI could involve creating personalized marketing campaigns, analyzing customer data, studying demographics, and gauging customer preferences to refine marketing techniques. Similarly, SMBs can use AI for optimized content creation. Other use cases could include detecting customer sentiment, predicting customer behavior, and analyzing market trends.
As evident, all these use cases need several tools to manifest. Here’s a look at some budget-friendly AI tools that can offer the much-needed solution for marketing.
AI Branding Tools
You can use these tools to create a brand logo and manage brand identity in the long run. SMBs can leverage these tools to improve the identity of their brand and engage customers effectively. Similarly, these tools can help entrepreneurs build their brand’s reputation in the market.
Canva
Price: $130 per year for 5 people, $54.99 per year (solo)
Chances are you’ve already used Canva and for a good reason. The easy-to-use graphic design platform is ideal for creating professional-looking logos and social media posts.
Canva Magic Design
The recently added AI features like text-to-image, animations, translations, and Canva presentations make it even more helpful. Plus, the Visual Worksuite now has a ”Brand Hub.” a management suite that lets you stay consistent with your brand across all your designs.
Looka
Price: $96 per year for Brand Kit subscription
Looka is primarily an AI logo maker. Throw in a few keywords, and Looka comes up with logos that reflect your business’s personality. Looka’s Brand Kit also creates branded marketing material based on your logo’s color and font.
AI Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing tools help you create newsletters and automated email campaigns. These tools are particularly helpful for small and medium-sized businesses that may not have the resources to create customized email campaigns on their own.
Mailchimp
Price: Free plan or $13 per month to $350 per month
Mailchimp has long been a favorite among business owners who are starting with email marketing. Its notable features include automated workflows, content optimizer benchmarks, data-driven insights, drag-and-drop email builder, etc.
Sendgrid
Price: Free plan or $15 per month to $60 per month
Sendgrid uses AI to validate your email list, eventually lowering bounce rates. The tool also scans your metrics in real time to deliver insights like the best time to send emails and who your most engaged recipients are. Other features include email templates, automation, email testing, and email templates.
AI Social Media Management Tools
AI social media management tools offer features like automated posting, content curation, content calendars, insights, and data analysis. These are useful for entrepreneurs and SMBs alike since they reduce cost and time, streamline processes, and improve productivity.
Buffer
Price: Free plan or $6 per month (one channel) – $120 per month (10 channels)
Buffer is the go-to AI tool for entrepreneurs who want to manage all their social media accounts from one place.
Buffer AI assistant features
Its notable features include:
- Content integrations
- Overview analytics
- Sentiment labels
- Grid view
- Content calendar and queues
Flick
Price: $30 per month for 2 user logins, $70 per month for 5 user logins
Flick is a social media management tool specifically made for social media marketers and entrepreneurs. It allows you to handle everything from analytics to copywriting and scheduling in one platform. The AI assistant helps in hashtag creation, scheduling, caption writing, analytics, and more.
AI Tools for Analytics
Startup marketing for entrepreneurs wouldn’t be complete without thorough analytics. Luckily, several AI tools are available to help entrepreneurs make informed decisions. Entrepreneurs have to study their respective markets and plan their business strategies accordingly. SMBs also have to keep an eye on their competitors and respond quickly to changes in the market since they have limited resources compared to larger companies.
Coefficient
Price: Free
Coefficient is a GPT-powered AI tool that connects with your spreadsheets to build reports and visualize data trends. It’s free to use, making it suitable for SMBs.
You can simply give it text-based instructions to pull out the data of your choice. There’s also an option to sync your company’s live data from record systems like Snowflake, Tableau, Shopify, and Salesforce.
AnswerRocket
Price: Custom
AnswerRocket is an AI data analytics platform that lets you ask questions using natural language. Think of it like ChatGPT, except the responses are based on data from your business.
AnswerRocket in view
AI Content Creation Tools
AI content creation tools have come a long way. A while ago, you could only generate textual content. But now, you can also create images and videos with AI.
As a small or mid-sized business with limited resources, creating content for your marketing channels can be challenging. AI tools can be a budget-friendly solution.
Jasper
Price: Starts at $24/month
Jasper is an AI writing assistant that creates and optimizes written content. You can use it to write blog posts, product descriptions, website copy, and other marketing materials. It also has an image generator that creates a matching image for your content.
Grammarly
Price: Free plan. Paid plans $12 per month to $15 per month per member
If you like writing marketing content yourself but need to check it for grammar and spelling errors, Grammarly can help you. It uses AI to suggest corrections, detect plagiarism, and improve your writing style.
Grammarly also has a generative AI now, which can help you come up with new ideas for your written content.
Synthesia
Price: Starts at $22 per month
Synthesia is the perfect video creation app for entrepreneurs without the funds for a high-end studio, actors, microphones, cameras, and other equipment. It creates professional-looking videos with just a few clicks. You don’t even have to come up with a script; Synthesia can do that for you, too.
Synthesia in action
You can choose from various characters, backgrounds, and voice options to make your video content unique.
Canva Image Generator
Price: Free
We already discussed Canva earlier. The design platform also has an AI image generator that creates images based on your text. There are several art styles, such as color pencil, retro wave, neon, film, and watercolor.
Canva Image Generator
The Magic Edit feature lets you enhance the generated image with additional editing options. You can add filters and adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and other settings.
AI Tools for Website Building
As a budding business, website development is a significant expense but also an investment. In today’s fast-paced digital world, having a solid online presence is crucial for any company. Fortunately, AI tools can help startups and SMBs in this regard, too.
Wix ADI
Price: Business plans at $17 per month to $35 per month
Most people are already familiar with Wix. But many don’t know that Wix now has Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), a powerful AI tool that automatically creates websites. You simply have to give some business information and the type of website you want to make, and Wix ADI will design it for you in minutes. You can then customize the results based on your preferences.
Divi AI
Price:
Divi AI is built with Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, letting you create WordPress sites in minutes. Its no-code Visual Builder makes it easy for anyone to design websites without coding knowledge.
Divi’s use cases
Some key features include:
- Automatic image generation
- Fine-tuning on Divi codebase
- Modification of existing images
- On-brand results
- Automatic content generation
Case Studies of Successful Implementation of AI for Business Marketing
Does AI-backed startup marketing for entrepreneurs and SMBs work? We’d say it does. But let’s look at some proof to back up our claim.
Copy.ai: Fringe
Copy.ai is an AI content writing tool that can write landing page text, Instagram captions, ad copy, blog posts, etc. Users have to enter the name of their brand along with a description of the content they want to generate. The AI then writes content accordingly.
Fringe is a small brand design business. Initially, Fringe’s owner did not believe he could have any need for an AI tool. But when he used Copy.ai, he tackled his writing block. He also managed to write copy for his client’s businesses as well as his own.
Canva Pro: Socially Sorted
Socially Sorted is a social media strategy site that has won several awards, including the Winner of Best Business Blog in Australia 2014. Donna Moritz, the owner of Socially Sorted, is an avid user of Canva Pro since she believes ”visual content is vital.”
She reports that the brand kit has been handy for her business. Plus, she enjoys the collaboration features and uses the ”magic resize button all the time.”
Canva Magic resize
The business owner creates all her Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest images in Canva Pro.
Jasper: Bloomreach
Bloomreach is an AI-powered and e-commerce-focused digital experience platform. Over time, the business has grown, which means its content team of just four members had to scale massively. That’s when the company started using Jasper for its blog posts.
The results were impressive, with a 113% increase in blog post creation, leading to a 40% boost in traffic.
Tips for Maximizing ROI in Marketing for Entrepreneurs and SMBs
As a startup marketer, when you bring AI into the equation, you cannot expect it to work overnight. What you should expect is that it will take time to optimize and see results. Plus, you should have a few tricks up your sleeves to make AI deliver what it should.
Use Chatbots for Customer Interactions
Don’t sleep on conversational marketing because, as it turns out, customers don’t mind talking to chatbots. In 2024, chatbots will become a crucial part of customer interactions. SMBs can leverage chatbots to save the money they’d otherwise spend on hiring staff to handle customer inquiries.
Use of chatbots by businesses
You can use them to track how your customers react to various marketing campaigns and what they appreciate the most from your brand.
Use AI-Driven Insights
The AI analytics tools we discussed earlier will be super helpful in creating meaningful insights for your marketing strategy. These insights will form the backbone of every marketing decision you make.
Use them to gauge customer behavior and understand which channels bring in the most traffic. Base your future decisions on these insights. For instance, if you’re getting most of your traffic from social media, maybe it’s time to increase your budget for social media advertising.
Entrepreneurs in a new market can use AI-driven insights to understand their target audience and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly. For example, they can analyze customer demographics, purchasing behavior, interests, localized trends, etc.
Personalize Targeting
Personalization is a must-do in today’s marketing landscape. In fact, marketers are now talking about hyperpersonalization, which is a step further. According to a report from Segment, 69% of businesses plan to invest more in personalization. Why? Because over half of your consumers will come back for a repeat purchase if they get a personalized experience.
Personalization for repeat purchases
Speed Up Content Creation
Content was king and will remain king. But, if you want to keep up with the competition, you must produce quality content faster. That’s where AI content creation tools, like Synthesia and Jasper, come in. Master their usage to create quality content in no time.
Streamline CRO and SEO
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are two critical areas of digital marketing. It’s as simple as this: the more prominently you rank on popular search engines, the more traffic you’ll get. Ultimately, that means better chances of conversions and an increase in revenue. You can use a blend of AI SEO tools like Frase and analytics platforms like Google Analytics to stay on top of your SEO and CRO game.
CRO and SEO are imperative for both entrepreneurs and SMBs since both organization types need to make every dollar count. While SEO can give SMBs much-needed exposure, CRO converts that traffic into customers. The same holds true for entrepreneurs who need to keep their costs low while maximizing conversions.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Using AI in SMB and startup marketing is definitely a leap forward. But you want to reach somewhere and not fall in the process. Here are some pitfalls to avoid.
Relying Too Heavily on AI Without Human Oversight
AI can do a lot, but it can only do so much. Human oversight is imperative to ensure that AI makes logical decisions and does not just follow patterns.
As a marketer, you need to remember that you cannot rely on AI to do all the work. While it can automate specific tasks and provide valuable insights, human input is still necessary to make informed decisions and ensure the success of your marketing efforts.
Role of human oversight in AI content creation
Suppose you use an AI video generator to create a promotional video for your product. The video is visually appealing and ”looks” right. But maybe the voice-over or script added by the AI is a bit off. What if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience? Even worse, what if it’s offensive in some way? Human oversight wouldn’t let such a mistake slip through.
Neglecting Traditional Marketing Strategies
Being futuristic is important, but so is using the tried-and-tested methods. Don’t skimp on traditional marketing strategies like building a customer database, networking, attending industry events, using TV ads, or email marketing. These strategies are still relevant and can complement AI use.
Traditional marketing strategies
Not Prioritizing Data Privacy and Security
There are a lot of concerns surrounding AI and data privacy. As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to take these concerns seriously and prioritize the protection of your customers’ data. You don’t want to end up with any legal troubles, do you?
Takeaway
There’s no denying that AI will be a part of anything and everything, including marketing. But before you go on to use a plethora of AI tools in your startup, know the technology’s limitations. Know where to step in and take charge. The perfect concoction of AI and human efforts will bring the best results.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Best Platform for AI Marketing?
There’s no one ”best” AI marketing platform. Some good ones include Synthesia, Jasper, ChatGpt, Frase, Copy AI, Semrush, Grammarly, etc.
How Can AI Be Used For Marketing in SMBs?
SMBs can use AI in marketing for automating tasks, personalizing customer experience, predicting sales trends, creating content, resolving customer queries, building websites, managing social media accounts, and analyzing data to improve marketing strategies.
How Can Businesses Stay Ahead of Emerging AI Technologies in Marketing?
The key is to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest trends. Keep an eye on the market and your competitors. Also, invest in training, reskilling, and upskilling your team.
