What does AI Mean for Small Australian Businesses.

“Hey Siri, please generate some leads for my business. Sure…done!”. This might sound like science fiction, but we are not too far off. In a few years, AI assistants will be able to take a simple prompt and turn it into hard cash. In the meantime, small businesses need to learn how to use AI tools like ChatGPT for their marketing and, at the same time, understand their limitations.

Are these new AI tools “intelligent”?

When people talk about AI tools or AI software, we often refer to generative AI like ChatGPT. These tools do not think and create; they create by guessing. They are extremely good at specialised tasks like writing paragraphs or generating images as they have been trained on large amounts of data. After all, if you had read millions of Facebook posts, you would probably be good at writing some yourself. These tools simply guess what word comes next when creating a sentence or what pixel comes next when generating an image; for this reason, we cannot talk about intelligence—it is a series of very educated guesses.

Can AI tools help your business?

When it comes to marketing, these models can really increase your productivity. Instead of spending days looking for some ideas for social media, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a list of popular topics and write hundreds of Facebook posts in seconds. You can also ask Firefly, Adobe’s AI tool, to create a pretty convincing image for a post using a simple prompt (see screenshot below). In the same vein, Gemini AI, Google’s AI model, can generate a list of niche keywords for Google Ads and create a series of ads to go along in seconds—it is truly impressive.

Not only do these tools speed up your work, they can also cut costs. Stock images, animations, music for videos, and voiceover artists can be pricey, especially if you are planning on using these assets for an advert that will air on TV, radio, or at the cinema. Once the AI model has created music, for example, you do not have to pay any royalties to the company that created the AI…for now.

Firefly from Adobe can create royalty-free images using a simple prompt. Good enough for small ads, not your website. Look at that nose!

Don’t over do it

It's fast, pretty accurate, and costs a fraction, so what’s the catch? Well, social media platforms like YouTube and search engines like Google will always promote content created by real people, not AI—the same way a teacher will make sure the essay submitted was written by the student, not someone else or ChatGPT. With the explosion of content generated by AI, these platforms will soon restrict its usage and penalise your website, pages, or channels that use AI-generated content excessively. The million-dollar question is, what does “excessively" mean? Is it okay to add two new blog posts to your website 100% written by AI? What about adding 10 or 100? Only time will tell. One thing is certain: real content written by real people, for real people, will always do better. So, make sure you use AI tools to improve your work, not do your work.

Do you still need a creative agency then?

Since generative AI tools create by guessing, they can often be wrong or not up to scratch. Some facts might be incorrect, the tone might also feel too impersonal, music sound too artificial, and images appear too fake—especially if models have eight fingers per hand. When you start using AI tools, it feels like having a team of lawyers, copywriters, photographers, and marketing professionals by your side, but it is only an illusion. If you do not have these skills in-house, it will become very hard for you to review the work these AI tools have done for you before publishing them under your name/business. This is why it is still important to surround yourself with creative professionals who can help you take advantage of these new tools and also help you with the least sexy part of marketing—the implementation.

An example of a Facebook ad created by ChatGPT to generate leads for an optometrist. Is it good? Well, you tell me.

Creation vs. implementation

As I said at the beginning of this article, AI assistants are not around yet. Current AI tools can help you create hundreds of paragraphs and lists of keywords, but they cannot add them to your website, yet. This means when you have hundreds of Facebook posts or blog posts ready, you still need someone to review them and add them to your website or schedule them on Facebook. The creation can be done by an AI but not the implementation; you will still need some help from a creative agency or a digital jack-of-all-trades like me. One day you will not need a creative agency to do your digital marketing or run your campaign, but we are still a few years away. Also, these advanced AI assistants won’t be cheap.

What does that mean for your marketing budget?

If you work with a creative agency that is upfront about using AI tools, the creation of campaigns should become cheaper, but the advertising cost won’t be. As the number of companies doing digital marketing explodes, the number of customers using these platforms will remain the same, and as a result, the price of advertising will go up. To summarise, it should cost you less to create content, but it will cost you more to promote your content. If you choose the right marketing partner, your marketing budget might stay the same.

I hope you found this article useful and now understand more about the opportunities and limitations of generative AI for small Australian businesses. If you would like to work with a marketing professional who is transparent about using AI tools, feel free to contact me and book a 15-minute chat today.

Note: This article was not written by ChatGPT hence the typos ;)