By Daniel Griggs, founder of ATX The Brand, a digital transformation agency, focused on solving problems and growing businesses.
When I work with small business owners, one of their most common complaints is feeling stretched too thin by wearing all the hats in their company. They are unable to effectively grow and scale their businesses because their time and energy are taken up just maintaining daily operations and keeping everything afloat. For these burned-out business owners, the emergence of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT may seem like a welcome relief. I’ve known of small companies using AI for everything from writing emails to responding to customer complaints to generating blog content to creating budgets and proposals.
But here is the warning I give small businesses: AI can create content, but it can’t create results. Generating content and generating leads or sales are two very different job descriptions. And at the end of the day, whether a human or AI creates your content, you need to have a strategy in place to turn that content into results.
To put it another way, think of AI as your assistant—not as your replacement. It can help you do your job faster, but it can’t necessarily do your job for you. Approaching tools like ChatGPT with this framework will not only help you check administrative and content creation tasks off your list faster than ever, but it will also ensure that you’re meeting your business goals in the process.
I run a web design, web development and digital marketing agency in Austin, Texas. In this article, I’ll share how I incorporate AI into my business and how I recommend my clients do so as well.
Start with strategy.
I follow the same process with my clients as I do with my own company, and I always start by identifying goals. I like to get as specific as possible, breaking the big-picture goal into measurable benchmarks and milestones.
When it comes to increasing revenue (the goal of most companies), small business owners need to identify which services or products to prioritize and determine how to allocate resources. For example, a gym or company with membership-based services likely has tiered packages and options for customers. That business needs to define revenue benchmarks for each service that support the big-picture revenue goal.
Good strategy comes from asking the right questions—questions like, “How am I getting customers right now?” and “What is the minimum number of customers needed to meet my revenue goals?” and “Do I need to open new marketing channels?” AI can help you generate these questions, but it can’t answer them about your company.
Know your best marketing channels.
Before small businesses spend a lot of money on marketing, they need to identify the channels that work best for them. I always recommend starting with email and text marketing for established businesses. If you have a database, start using it. Build trust and rapport with your current circles of influence so that you can capitalize on warm leads and organically grow your reach. How do you build trust? You provide value. Whether it’s member-only incentives, special perks, free practical tips, branded products or something unique to your customers.
You’ll also need to understand where people are engaging with your content and responding to your calls-to-action, and why. Do you currently get traffic to your blogs? Do people take you up on your “free consultation” offer? What about email responses?
This step goes hand-in-hand with developing strategy and is crucial before you move into any type of content creation efforts using AI. Otherwise, you won’t have the data and direction necessary to use AI tools in a way that actually works for your business. AI-generated content is only as good as the information you feed it.
Understand the limits of AI.
There are certain tasks AI tools are great for and certain tasks that I find require a human touch. Knowing the difference will make or break your experience using artificial intelligence in your small business. Here are some tasks you can outsource to AI and save yourself a lot of time:
• Generating marketing or content ideas
• Generating email campaign structure ideas
• Creating base-level content
• Creating compelling subject lines for marketing emails
• Generating customer breakdowns and profiles
• Writing SEO blog posts
• Tweaking content for specific demographics
• Analyzing competitor information
• Summarizing and aggregating information for internal purposes
But before you use an AI program for any of these tasks, it is important to teach it correctly. If you just start generating, you’ll get poor results. You need to go through the steps of developing your strategy, customer base knowledge and marketing channels so that you can input this information into the tool before asking it to produce anything for you. This will yield the most effective results and separate you from the competition.
Don’t forget quality assurance.
While using AI, the biggest mistake you can make is thinking it is a “one-click-and-done” process. I’ve seen too many errors—and frankly embarrassing moments—result from this mentality. Always proofread your AI-generated content, fact-check the data and give the content your own voice. This is especially important when communicating directly with customers and clients.
Finally, make sure you have someone on your team acting as a strategist: reviewing analytics; looking at open rates, clicks and conversions; and then modifying accordingly so you can keep getting results.
In short, getting results is still a unique skill set, and artificial intelligence won’t automatically lead to those results. AI will help you do your job better, not do it for you.
