You hear “AI in marketing,” and your mind might shoot straight to tech giants with huge budgets and teams of data scientists. But AI isn’t only some gadget for the rich and famous. Every business can use it.
Whether you run a corner bakery, a small online boutique, or a growing design agency, you can benefit from using AI in your online marketing strategies.
Let’s break it down—without the fluff and the TLAs (three-letter acronyms). In this article, we offer four ways any business can use Artificial Intelligence to sharpen their digital marketing efforts and generate more leads.
1. Use AI to Write (and Personalise) Your Content—Without Sounding Like a Robot
Content is the lifeblood of online marketing. But when you’re running a business, how can you ever find the time to do it?
Enter AI tools like Jasper, Claude, or even ChatGPT. These platforms can help brainstorm, write, or refine content that actually sounds human. No poor phrasing. No generic spammy stuff. We’re talking social posts that resonate, emails that feel personal, and product descriptions that don’t read like gobbledygook.
AI can help with personalisation too. Tools like Persado or Phrasee tailor messages to different customer segments based on tone, behaviour, and even emotional triggers. That means your emails can sound friendly and warm to new subscribers but direct and efficient to longtime customers. You can also use it to tailor messages to different generations, for instance, writing posts for the specific audiences of Facebook and Instagram.
2. Get Help Generating Smarter Customer Insights
Customer insights power digital marketing strategies.
Most businesses are sitting on a goldmine of customer data – emails, purchase history, clicks, likes and scrolls. But let’s be honest: who has the time (or the tools) to sift through all that?
AI-powered platforms like HubSpot, Zoho CRM, or Google Analytics with machine learning integrations can turn the piles of abstract data into usable insights. These tools identify patterns that might take hours of data manipulation to spot, such as when people tend to make purchases, which customers are slipping through the net, and what kind of blog posts tend to attract traffic.
If this is all still sounding a bit intimidating, don’t worry. AI simplifies the process and serves up recommendations you can act upon without needing a degree in data science. Let the AI do the hard work!
3. Optimise Your Ads Using AI
Running paid ads can feel like tossing money into a digital wishing well. Will it hit the right people? Will it flop? Why did one ad work and the other fall flat?
This is where AI can help.
Google Ads and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) now use machine learning to optimise your campaigns automatically – adjusting bids, testing copy variations, and targeting users based on behaviour, not just demographics. That means better performance with less babysitting.
Even platforms like Adzooma and Wordstream help small businesses make sense of ad performance, highlighting what to tweak and what to lose.
You still need to guide it, of course. The best-performing campaigns mix human creativity with machine precision. But it will save you lots of time, so you can focus on what really matters.
4. AI Chatbots That Actually Work
There’s nothing more frustrating than opening the live chat on a website and being confronted with a clunky bot. Thankfully, as AI progresses, these technological relics are joining Clippy on the helpbot subs bench.
Modern AI chatbots, like those powered by Tidio, Intercom, or Drift, are smarter, smoother, and more natural in conversation. They can answer FAQs, suggest products and qualify leads. They might even surprise you by closing out a sale!
They’re especially useful for small businesses that can’t afford round-the-clock support. And if you’re worried about losing the human touch, you can always use chatbots to seamlessly feed into a human operator, so you can field more queries at once or reduce the perceived waiting time.
Feel free to give your chatbot a name, but be aware they won’t be able to attend the Christmas party.
Using AI for Marketing: Final Thoughts
Whether you begin to use AI for ad optimisation or a chatbot, you don’t need to overhaul your marketing strategy completely. Start small, test a few tools and see how it goes. Maybe it improves your content hit rate or saves you time.
AI doesn’t replace your creativity—it supports it. It handles the repetitive, analytical, slightly soul-sucking stuff so you can focus on what really matters: connecting with your customers, building something meaningful, and, hopefully, generating more leads.
So if you’re still thinking AI is out of reach, consider this your starting point. AI is here. It’s useful. And it’s honestly kind of fun.