The AI conversation, which has exploded in the mainstream, is impacting the small business arena too. For small businesses, AI marketing in particular is gaining interest as a powerful and cost-effective tool that can help with building brand awareness and with garnering valuable insights into customer behaviours.

AI marketing can also help with streamlining and automating processes, resulting in big impact for little investment. Moreover, it can be used for automated targeting, lead generation, content creation, and social media management—and if your business is small, it reduces marketing costs while saving time and resources.

As AI becomes more commonplace for marketers and consumers alike, small businesses should consider dipping a toe in and learning how to optimise their marketing efforts to gain a competitive advantage.

Machine learning through AI can help small businesses navigate the customer journey through to purchase. In the awareness stage, prospects discover your business as a solution to a problem; then in consideration, they compare your prices and services to others; and finally, at conversion, they’re ready to purchase. Let’s look at three ways AI can significantly improve how prospects move through the customer purchase funnel.

AI learns consumer buying patterns to help you build smarter campaigns

The first AI trend is all about understanding customer data and behaviour, which is what AI is really known for. It can analyse a lot of data and make real-time recommendations based on machine learning.

In marketing, AI will recommend where and how to place your ads—the most effective channels, placements, and ad formats for a business to use to reach your target audience.

Generative AI creates the right content at the right moment

Within the various stages of the customer journey, you can use generative AI. This subset of AI focuses on creating content like images, music, or text that are built based on patterns that AI learns from existing data. The AI function of ChatGPT can write blogs that are targeted to a specific need your customer may have. Because AI can analyse large amounts of customer data, identify patterns, and generate insights, small businesses can use this map to pinpoint where customers are losing interest and identify ways to re-engage them and reinvigorate sales.

 AI knows your audience

One of the most ground-breaking functions of AI is that it can garner the attention of your audience. Once your potential customers are aware of your business, they may sign up for an email newsletter or follow you on social media. This is where AI can make your connection to them even more meaningful.

When creating a targeted email campaign, a new feature of AI is a marketing tool that will allow you to automate ‘predictive sending times’. This AI feature analyses when that individual email recipient is most likely to check their inbox and will deliver the email accordingly.

Another fantastic feature is the social media scheduling tool, which will provide ‘optimal posting times’ for a specific audience on each of your channels—be it Facebook, Instagram, or others—so your message has the opportunity to be seen when they’re most active.

Additionally, AI can learn how your customers have interacted with your business and present content based on their preferences. For example, while working in the background with a feature called a ‘pixel’, AI will follow a customer as they visit your website. The next time that customer visits Facebook, they will see an ad for a service they were researching on your site, thanks to that pixel.

While AI may be the ‘in thing’ right now, it’s certainly not the be-all solution for every business—at least not yet. Ensure that using AI will help you be more personable in your business rather than taking the human element away from it.

This article was originally published on flyingsolo.com and has been edited for brevity and republished here with permission.