11 AI Marketing Programs, Platforms and Tools for Your Small Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming businesses including their marketing aspects. A recent report from Salesforce indicates that 68% of marketers say they have a fully-defined AI strategy

AI can help you automate tasks, optimize campaigns, generate insights, personalize content, and enhance customer experience. It can also help you save time, money, and resources, which are crucial for small businesses.

But how can you leverage AI for marketing your small business? What are the best AI applications and tools that you can use?

Let’s explore.

What Is AI and How Does It Work?

AI is the ability of machines or software to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions and learning from data.

AI works by using algorithms, which are sets of rules or instructions that tell the machine how to solve a problem or perform a task. There are different types of algorithms, such as:

• Machine learning, which is the process of learning from data without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms can find patterns, make predictions, and improve over time based on feedback.
• Deep learning, which is a subset of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks, which are layers of interconnected nodes that mimic the structure and function of the human brain. Deep learning algorithms can process large amounts of complex data, such as images, videos, audio, and text.
• Natural language processing (NLP), which is the branch of AI that deals with understanding and generating natural language, such as speech and text. NLP algorithms can analyze sentiment, extract keywords, summarize text, translate languages, and generate content.
• Computer vision, which is the branch of AI that deals with understanding and manipulating visual information, such as images and videos. Computer vision algorithms can detect faces, recognize objects, classify scenes, and generate images.

What are the Benefits of Using AI for Marketing?

AI can offer many benefits for marketing your small business, such as:

• Automating tasks: AI can help you automate repetitive or tedious tasks, such as sending emails, scheduling posts, creating reports and optimizing bids. This can save you time and effort and allow you to focus on more creative or strategic aspects of your marketing.
• Optimizing campaigns: AI can help you optimize your marketing campaigns by analyzing data, testing variations, and providing recommendations. This can help you improve your performance metrics, such as conversions, click-through rates, engagement rates and return on investment (ROI).
• Generating insights: AI can help you generate insights from your data by finding patterns, trends, anomalies, and opportunities. This can help you understand your customers better, segment your audience more effectively, identify gaps in your strategy, and discover new ways to grow your business.
• Personalizing content: AI can help you personalize your content by tailoring it to the preferences, behaviors, needs, and interests of each individual customer. This can help you increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention and advocacy.
• Enhancing customer experience: AI can help you enhance your customer experience by providing faster responses, more relevant information, more convenient interactions and more human-like conversations. This can help you build trust, rapport and relationships with your customers.

What Some Good AI Programs for Small Business Marketing?

There are many AI programs that you can use for marketing your small business, depending on your goals, challenges, and budget.

CAVEAT: For programs that generate content, use it as a starting point. Don’t just cut and paste what is generated. Rewrite it in your company’s own voice, add important points, check for accuracy and do additional research. In other words, AI programs that produce content are not a replacement for writers. They are a tool for writers

Here are some popular ones.

• ChatGPT: ChatGPT was launched at the end of November 2022, and it has been all the buzz in recent months. It is a highly advanced AI language model with uses not just limited to marketing, but it can be extremely helpful to marketers. It can help you create engaging content from blog posts to ad copy to social media captions and more.

There is both a free and a paid version (only $20 per month as of this writing.) As of now, the free version limited to information up to September 2021. You can get around that by opting to subscribe to the reasonably priced paid version which is upgraded and includes current information from the Internet.

A way to use ChatGPT but also get information after 2021 for free is to use Bing Chat which incorporates ChatGPT. You can access Bing Chat in Microsoft’s Edge browser by going to the Chat menu item in the navigation at the top of the page of Bing.com.

• Jasper: Jasper is an all-purpose AI writer for marketers. It uses the GPT3-model developed by OpenAI as well as other technology to write human-sounding text. It also has built-in templates for various types of content, such as emails, blog posts, product descriptions, ad copy, headlines, website copy, social media captions and more. You can use Jasper.ai to generate content for any of your marketing collateral by adding your brand name or product and choosing a tone of voice. You can also use Jasper.ai to rewrite or improve existing content or check it for plagiarism.
• Surfer: Surfer is an AI-powered SEO tool that analyzes search terms and compares your content against the learnings of top-ranking search engine results pages. It helps you optimize your content for SEO by providing suggestions on keywords, content length, structure, headings images and more. You can use Surfer SEO to create SEO-friendly content or audit and improve your existing content.
• AI Chatbots for Customer Service and Sales from Umbrella: Umbrella’s AI Chatbots AI-based chatbots replace or complement live chat reps 24/7 for a fraction of the cost with dependable results.. Use them to generate leads, provide information, answer questions and even make sales with payment cart integration. You can increase your conversions two to four times,
• Ocoya: Ocoya is an AI marketing automation tool that helps you create and manage content and is particularly helpful for social media. You can use Ocoya to automate your marketing funnel and grow your online business.
• Grammarly: Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you write clear, correct and engaging content. It helps you check and improve your grammar, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, tone, and style. You can use Grammarly to polish your content and make it more professional and effective.
• Pictory: Pictory is an AI-powered image editor that helps you create stunning visuals for your marketing. It helps you crop, resize, enhance, filter, and edit your images with ease. You can use Pictory to remove backgrounds, add text or stickers, create collages or animations, and more. It also enables creating eye-catching images for your website, social media, ads and any other marketing materials.
• Lately: Lately is an AI-powered social media management tool that helps you plan, create and share content quickly and efficiently. It helps you generate social media posts from your blog posts, podcasts, videos and other content. It also helps you schedule, publish and monitor your posts across multiple platforms. You can use Lately to streamline your social media marketing and increase your reach and engagement.
• Otter AI: Otter AI is an AI-powered transcription tool that helps you transcribe audio or video files into text. It helps you capture, search, edit and share your conversations with ease. You can also use Otter AI to record live meetings or events and get real-time transcripts and summaries. Create transcripts for your podcasts, webinars, interviews and other audio or video content.
• Adzooma: Adzooma is an AI-powered digital marketing platform that helps you create, manage, and optimize your online advertising campaigns. It helps you find the best keywords, audiences and creatives for your ads. It also helps you monitor, analyze and improve your ad performance with smart suggestions and automation. You can use Adzooma to run ads on Google, Facebook or Microsoft.
• CreativeFlow by Shutterstock: CreativeFlow is a suite of apps for design and marketing. It helps you create graphics, logos, flyers, posters, videos and more. You can also use CreativeFlow to access millions of high-quality images, videos, music and fonts from Shutterstock. CreativeFlow can help you to create professional-looking designs for your marketing materials.

Need Help with Your Marketing?

Today there are powerful AI tools to can help you market your small business more effectively and efficiently.

However, AI is not a magic bullet that can solve all your marketing problems. You still need to have a clear strategy, a deep understanding of your audience, a strong brand identity, and a creative mindset. And nobody should be using AI content without solid editing and fact checking.

If you need marketing help for your small business, contact Umbrella Local for a free consultation at https://umbrellalocal.com/contact-us/ or call us at 1(646)440-1426.