This post is written by Chris LaRoche (Director, SMB Solutions), Emily Taylor (Senior SEO Analyst, SMB Solutions), and Bella Chandler (Senior Paid Media Analyst, SMB Solutions) of Workshop Digital.
Workshop Digital is a valued member of CallRail’s agency community.
For small business owners and marketers, the advent of AI-powered tools has brought great opportunities to improve marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. From advanced language models that create vast amounts of content to GPT-powered analysis tools that promise to provide new insights from existing data streams, there is endless potential for savvy marketers to effectively leverage these new tools.
From the sea of possibilities, let’s simplify with three effective applications of AI tools that you can start using today.
Explaining analytics and data
As a small business owner, do analytics and data make your head spin? Do you have trouble understanding metrics in Google Analytics? AI can help! Instead of struggling to interpret complex numbers and terms, let AI break them down for you.
If you're having trouble figuring out why X metric has increased or decreased over a certain period, try phrasing your question in simple terms and asking ChatGPT. You can provide large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT with reports, data points, and images to give them context, allowing them to provide you with more meaningful insights.
You can even ask the LLM to show its work, giving you a better understanding of how it came to its answer. AI can help small business owners understand key metrics, without having to take a digital marketing or analytics class. With AI-powered insights, you can make informed decisions faster and with more confidence. Stop struggling with confusing data and consider using AI.
Caption: Ask ChatGPT questions in natural language that makes the most sense to you. You can even ask follow-ups to clarify anything that is hard to understand.
Get new ideas & create content
Small business owners can use AI tools like ChatGPT to help brainstorm blog post ideas, create images and videos for content, and write ad copy or social media posts. Instead of spending hours thinking of the perfect sentence, AI can help you get an idea down on paper that you can refine with your superior human brain.
AI tools are fantastic for jump-starting creativity and organizing ideas, but they work best as a complement to your own expertise. For instance, if you have a blog idea, you can brainstorm freely with ChatGPT, letting it help structure your thoughts and generate a draft. Just like that, you have a clear roadmap for your writing!
However, AI shouldn't replace your own input—it’s most effective as a tool to enhance your skills and save time. People often recognize AI-generated content, and when something is entirely AI-produced, it can come across as unpolished or impersonal. This is even more noticeable with AI-generated images and videos, where quality and authenticity can make a big difference.
Caption: ChatGPT is great at helping you get started with a blog post that you can write as the topical expert, OR create a first draft that you can edit & add to.
Propagate cross-channel strategies
One strength of today’s AI tools is their ability to take existing material and reform it into something new. In fact, that’s how large language models like ChatGPT are trained. You can do this on a smaller scale to help you expand your marketing strategies more easily.
Say you’re doing a great job posting engaging organic content on Facebook, but you don’t run in any other marketing channels because you simply don’t have the time to come up with material for Google Ads, email marketing, or even billboards. With a ChatGPT Pro plan, you can upload the posts that get the best engagement, and simply ask it to generate content based on those posts, optimized for other applications:
Caption: Upload your data to ChatGPT so it can reference it in response to your prompts.
While this approach still requires your attention to set up and manage new media channels, using AI to get started can create the momentum that propels your marketing forward.
Start leveraging AI for your small business
With all the hype around AI, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or not know where to begin. But by starting with a few straightforward applications, you can find myriad ways to improve your small business marketing.
