Using AI for Marketing Your Small to Medium-Sized Business, Part 1

Keeping up with the evolving state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is daunting and it feels like every day a new tool, or update is being launched. A question was posed to me recently as an avid marketing news consumer, tech junkie, and performance marketer; “How can our small to medium-sized customers start leveraging AI to improve their marketing?”.

This is a hard topic to cover with things changing rapidly, but I’ve nailed down a few areas you could start leveraging AI in your business’s marketing today.

How to Use AI for Marketing Your Business

When first getting started with any AI model it’s important to understand how to ask it a question or a prompt in the right way to get your desired result. With AI being very new prompts have quickly become all the rage and you can find many opinions on what’s the best approach across the internet. Based on my personal testing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, two leading AI models, I have found that the best results come from asking your questions with several supporting details and resources where applicable.

In this post, we are going to focus on how to use AI to build keyword lists and improve your website’s SEO.

1. Performing Keyword Research with AI

Start a new conversation with AI and tell it a bit about your business including your website, services, and target audience. Then, tell it what you want to achieve. For example:

What are the top 10 keywords that our website, [Insert your company website], should optimize for if we want to drive more leads for our products/services? Please organize this list into the following categories “Branded (For [Insert Brand Name])” / “Non-Branded”.

This should produce a list of branded and non-branded keywords that you can add to your website copy to improve your SEO. You can also take this a step further and ask the AI to categorize the list by product/service or search intent (informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional).

2. Generating Competitive Keywords with AI

Once you’ve opened a conversation with AI and told it a bit about your business, now you just need to keep the conversation around SEO going. Let’s look into how to generate a list of competitive keywords in our next prompt:

Our main competitor is [Insert competitors website] and we want to make sure our website page [Insert your company website page] has better visibility than this page: [Insert top competitor website page] – what kinds of keywords should we target for SEO?

This should produce a list of keywords that you can add to your relevant page copy in an effort to rank higher than a competitor in search engines like Google. By specifying your intent and a competitor in your prompt you give the AI the necessary details it needs to compare the two websites. You can then repeat this process for all relevant pages and competitors you want to outrank.

For more tips on ways to identify keywords, check out my series on SEO & Finding Your Brand’s Keywords.

3. Inserting Keywords Into Page Copy with AI

Once you’ve collected a list of keywords the next step is typically to rewrite your site copy or blog posts while interweaving those keywords organically. Believe it or not, you can actually leverage AI to do this for you by using the following prompt:

Please weave in the following words [insert keywords comma separated] into this content [insert the block of content]. Please expand text if necessary and write in a [insert brand tone] tone of voice.

This should produce an output of shiny, new copy that you can tweak and then leverage on your site with the keywords included. In my testing, I’ve found that the best results came from using small blocks of content vs an entire page of content. If the output is too long for the desired spot on your website, I suggest inserting a word count limit into the prompt.

What to be Mindful of with AI

I highly suggest you thoroughly read and tweak every output you receive from AI to ensure it fits your brand voice before publishing it on your website. Currently, AI has a habit of pulling content from across the web to produce its responses which can lead to plagiarism. This is one area search engines like Google scan for when ranking your site which could hurt your page or site rankings.

Overall AI is a testing ground for many marketers looking to speed up content production but it’s important to keep in mind that the consumer on the other side is a human. Just like any good brand stewardess, your content should be focused on connecting with your target community. This means everything you post should feel and sound like it’s coming from a relatable human which at least for now still appears to require a bit of human touch.

Check back in a few weeks for more ways to use AI in your small to medium-sized business marketing.