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Can AI promote your small business without the help of a marketing team?
It’s no myth that small business owners need to do it all themselves. From finances to HR, the buck stops with you—and the smaller the company, the less help you’re likely to have from additional team members or consultants.
But having a great head for business doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an expert in every aspect of running a company, and marketing is one area where people can quickly run into trouble. After all, without good marketing you’ll be limited in how many customers you can get through the door.
That’s why many business owners feel pressured into hiring a marketing team or agency before they’re ready, or when the company’s budget doesn’t allow for it. However, in this age of AI tools and automation, there could be a third option: we decided to take a look at what AI marketing tools offer for small businesses, and whether the capabilities they promise do enough to take over this vital function.
What is an AI CMO?
An AI CMO promises to take over the role of a Chief Marketing Officer, delivering everything from top-line strategy to campaign development and execution. You’re left to oversee the work and make key decisions, but the operational tasks are taken off your plate and executed automatically by an AI marketing agent.
Developing your strategy
A human should always oversee the marketing strategy and give final sign-off, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some help with the development. AI CMO tools typically offer strategy development as a core part of the product, taking your existing website and running it through their system to understand what marketing opportunities might be the best fit.
For those who want a really hands-off approach, some tools let you do this without ever even speaking to another person: it’s as simple as sharing the URL of your site and letting the AI agents do their work. On other platforms, you may need to go through an onboarding call to talk through some of your objectives and figure out which tactics are the best fit.
So what will your AI marketing strategy contain? As we’ve already discussed, you need to have a clear sense of your overall strategic direction and what you’re hoping to achieve from a marketing strategy. Where AI marketing tools can step in is on the next level of detail: what keywords should you be targeting, which social media channels make the most sense for your brand?
Depending on the software you choose, it may also look at suggestions for ad campaigns or put together a content plan so you can start bringing in more traffic. These tactics would traditionally have required an experienced marketing team or dedicated expert, so letting an AI system take over is a strong potential money saver.
Boosting SEO
When considering how to market your small business, one of the key areas you’re likely to come across is SEO – search engine optimization – and, more recently, AEO, which stands for answer engine optimization and refers to the techniques used to make your content show up in AI answer results.
SEO is sometimes referred to as a ‘dark art’, referencing the complexity involved in optimizing your site to get good search rankings. However, AI marketing agents are designed to help with these techniques. Some of the features advertised by AI SEO agents include the ability to audit a website and find keyword gaps, identify underperforming pages and deliver technical fixes, track brand performance within both search results and AI engines like ChatGPT.
Many AI marketing tools will also draft content for you, providing articles that are specifically designed with your SEO plan in mind. This is a particularly helpful option, since maintaining consistency is crucial for good results but also one of the hardest things for a small business to do without enough staffing power.
Managing a social media campaign
SEO and content generation is one thing, but we were also curious to see how AI marketing tools for small businesses would handle social media. Many companies live or die based on their social media presence, but it’s not always easy to navigate the nuances of different platforms and the audiences they serve.
You may already have a clear idea of which social media platforms capture your intended audiences most effectively, and if not this should be uncovered as part of the strategy phase. From there, AI marketing tools offer a range of different functionalities, analyzing trends, developing campaign ideas and producing content that you can deploy straight to your accounts. They can also then support with managing the engagement—one of the more time-consuming aspects of any social campaign. This might include tasks such as filtering messages or drafting replies.
One thing we found promising when looking at different AI CMO options is the range of social media platforms they integrate with. Yes, Instagram, Facebook, X and LinkedIn were all mentioned, but so were other key platforms like Pinterest, Bluesky and Reddit.
Analytics and continuous improvement
Any marketing team worth its salt will engage in a process of continuous improvement, not just monitoring performance but making changes based on the results. AI CMO platforms certainly promise to monitor how well your marketing is performing, integrating with tools like Google Analytics to track key metrics such as web traffic and engagement.
What’s less clear is how the AI agents will act on this information, and how it will be presented to you as the business owner. Before going live with an AI marketing platform, we would recommend getting some clarity on how performance metrics are going to be presented, and what the system does to make sure your marketing relies on data-driven decisions.
The final verdict
Overall, we’re impressed by the range of features that AI CMO systems offer when it comes to marketing a small business. In particular, they could suit companies that don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated marketing team but still need to start taking proactive steps towards delivering a targeted marketing strategy. Tasks that may typically require several different specialists can all be handled by a single platform, and you can get on with the bigger job of running your business.
However, it all comes with a big caveat: human oversight remains essential. You need to make sure you’re still on top of the wider objectives—what is your marketing trying to achieve? You also need to make sure that somebody with strong understanding of your business is there to review content and campaign plans, checking for accuracy and tone of voice.
Ultimately, AI marketing tools could offer a practical alternative to hiring a full marketing team, provided you choose the right platform and are stay involved in the process. They may not replace human expertise entirely, but they could give small businesses the support they need to get their marketing moving.