If you run a business of any kind and you don’t use AI, you are already behind! You can see it in the news all the time: the big corporations are firing people and switching to AI workloads to make things faster and more efficient. If the big ones can do it, then you know that you can too!
If you are a smaller business, AI can be even more of a help, you basically get workers for almost nothing. For my company, while I didn’t have to fire anyone, I tried to get people on board to use AI and AI workloads to get results quicker, optimize the mundane and boring tasks, and focus on the more important ones.
AI isn’t just some distant future, it’s now, so start using it!
It’s not about replacing humans with robots. It’s about making your smaller business more competitive with the bigger players, getting more customers, having less manual work, making smarter decisions, and doing all of this a lot faster! So let’s go through some ideas together so I can show you why AI is incredibly important for small businesses!
Understand Your Audience
If you can’t get more customers, you likely don’t understand your customers in the first place. Luckily, AI can help with that.
AI tools can analyze customer behaviour, segment your audience, and even predict which prospects are most likely to convert. That’s the difference between spray and pray marketing and real optimized campaigns that actually work.
Some tools that could be helpful here are HubSpot or Pipedrive. The first is the industry standard, and the second is an affordable option that is still good for small businesses.
Let AI Help Create Content That Converts
As a small business, your bottleneck likely isn’t new ideas, but a lack of time. I’m sure you can think of various content you could add and improve upon, but there is not just enough time.
We all know that there is a bunch of AI tools that can help you write and create. But the thing is. Most of them suck.
When you read through any of them, you can see its AI slop, and if you can tell, so can your audience, and so can Google, especially if you are trying to rank highly organically.
So what’s the solution?
Well, you should stick to the big AI players and optimize with them. You can do GPT, or my current favorite, Gemini, or maybe some of the others. What you should do is make a custom Gem/Skill/GPT that is trained on your style and content, and then just give it topics and change the text where you think it messed up.
Rank Higher for Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is still some of the best quality traffic you can get.
These people are hard to get, since you need to do a lot of SEO optimizations, but AI makes it so much easier. Instead of slaving away for hours or even days on optimizing minute details like before, now you give a good tool a few inputs and it does it for you.
Semrush and SurferSEO come to mind as some of the best tools out there for this. With them, you can do keyword research, competitive insight, page structure optimization, and all of the things you don’t even consider when doing SEO yourself.
Use AI to Analyze, Improve, and Automate
This is something I use all the time. Since Claude CLI came out, I have been just coding my own apps that fit my use case. Its a bit taunting at first, but as you get going, it just gets easier and easier, and the tools get better.
As an example, I used to pay for third-party meta tools like Birch, which have all of these optimizations, rules, and workflows coded. For a time it was great, but then I realized that I can make my own tool, for less money, that works better for my work case.
I have been switching my team slowly to these tools and getting them incentives to code their own stuff, even though some of them are a bit stubborn about getting started. Now we have our own suite of tools for the $20/mo Claude sub, and I used to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on various tools that sometimes didn’t even work.
One of the best examples is my Meta ultimate tool. It’s completely internal, so I won’t share the exact code with you, but basically, some of its features are:
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- Analyze performance
- Analyze KPIs
- Auto Optimize Campaigns, ad groups, and Ads
- Automatic rules that can turn off, turn on, change settings, and delete campaigns
- Bulk import and export of ads
- AI-assisted insights into performance
- Detailed data presentation
- And much more
This tool alone helped me save so much time and money, and it made my team able to scale even harder than before. Remember, my team is relatively small, so im also somewhat of a small business. For me, AI improved productivity by at least a factor of 3. It’s like I hired some crazy experts in various departments and now they are all working for me for pennies. Of course, AI doesn’t replace real people completely, there are things that humans just do better, but there are fewer of these things every day.
Conclusion
AI isn’t magic. You can just click on a bot and expect it to get you more customers. But what it is is a crazy tool that, if you use right, can make your business grow like crazy. It’s no wonder all of these big corporations are investing billions in it. It’s the future. And you need to adapt to the future.
I’ve been long enough in this industry to know that if you don’t adapt, you die. So try these tools, especially if you are a small business. I am not sponsored by these tech companies (though I would love to be lol), but im telling you, if you are a small business, and you don’t utilize all of things available to you to even the playing field with the big guys, you are gone!
If you want to watch the article instead, here you go!
