AI and Its Growing Impact on Marketing and Advertising

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming advertising and marketing, aiding both small and large businesses as they look to gain insights into customer behavior and optimize their campaigns. As consumers become more difficult to reach and even more selective with their wallets, AI could be the secret sauce to making your marketing and ad campaigns the most successful they’ve ever been. 

Small businesses stand to gain the most from AI technology, as they already tend to have strong customer relationships. Adding the power of AI to their marketing strategies will enable them to deepen those bonds, elevate their experience, and grow.

From enabling unprecedented personalization to using data to optimize ad campaigns, here are a few ways AI is helping small businesses do more with their marketing and advertising. 

Prioritizing Personalization  

One of the biggest benefits of using AI is the ability to personalize consumer experiences. When you think about the brands you typically engage with, the ones that stand out probably go above and beyond to make their customers feel valued and understood. Every message feels timely and relevant, and that feeling keeps them coming back again and again. AI is a great tool to help create that type of experience.

Salesforce reports that personalization is much more than a preference these days – 56 percent of consumers expect offers to be personalized. Letting AI handle the hard work of analyzing customer behavior can help ensure campaigns are more engaging and relevant to each customer.

Another report shows that companies that grow faster than average gain 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. So, if you want to grow, focus on personalizing your communications to customers. 

Using AI to Create Content

If you’ve ever struggled with writer’s block, or wondered what might make someone more likely to open your email, then AI can bring you a lot of value. As we’ve seen recently with the explosion of interest in ChatGPT, AI has the power to automatically generate content after a few simple prompts. This has immediate implications for small businesses when it comes to creating marketing campaigns. 

Take email marketing, for example. Most small businesses are only marketers by necessity, so the need to regularly create new email campaigns to communicate customers can feel confusing and overwhelming. Luckily, AI technology is smart enough now to automate the writing process, and the resulting copy is often very polished. 

That means small businesses don’t have to iterate for hours about the words for their next campaign – they can create something great in seconds. AI removes the guesswork and speeds up the content creation process so business leaders can focus on keeping everything else running smoothly.

I’d recommend going beyond just email, though. AI is a great tool to help small businesses improve text marketing campaigns, and even generate social media copy. 

Make Ad Campaigns Go Further

AI is also becoming the new norm in the advertising world, and for good reason. Its data processing power is invaluable when it comes to audience identification and acting on a customer’s recent actions or preferences.

While many small businesses don’t do the same amount of advertising as their larger competitors, there is a clear draw for those that do. Using AI to test messages for different audiences, or fine-tune a specific cohort of potential customers is incredibly valuable. It allows businesses to target their ads more effectively and eliminate the outdated one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. 

What Happens Next

AI will continue to reshape the world of marketing and advertising as the quest to understand what makes consumers want to make a purchase continues. The best part about this trend is that AI tools have never been more accessible to small businesses, and there are plenty of tools that were purpose-built specifically for that audience. Time will tell how AI will advance, but it’s clear that it will continue to improve the way we target and interact with customers.