Many SME leaders find it difficult to mentor, develop, and motivate marketers, especially considering the current backdrop of rapid technological change and increasingly complex market dynamics. Over 80% of marketing leaders are concerned by their artificial intelligence (AI) skills gap along with knowledge of data, analytics, and marketing technology.
We are now operating in an environment where AI, when appropriately used, can significantly empower SMEs with limited marketing resources to punch significantly above their weight. Conversely, failing to use the various powerful AI driven tools could result in SMEs rapidly losing ground to competitors.
In this fast-paced environment, strategic clarity becomes even more critical.
Clearly defining our goals enables us to use generative AI effectively, supporting rapid, intelligent execution, and maximising our productivity. With this strategic approach, SMEs can profoundly deepen their marketing impact, differentiate themselves, and capture the attention of increasingly discerning audiences.
Significant transformations are underway across the entire company-to-customer buyers journey. A typical journey and the various marketing activities at each stage may look something like this:
AI at the top of the buyers journey
Decision-makers and influencers increasingly begin their search with AI Chat search rather than traditional search engines. This paradigm shift demands SMEs adapt their approaches swiftly to remain relevant and effective, thereby avoiding declining visibility and diminishing returns.
A notable illustration is the case of HubSpot, a company renowned for content marketing excellence. Recently, their organic search traffic saw a significant decline at the same time AI-driven search alternatives rose sharply. The chart below, created using SEMRush analytics, shows a huge drop in organic traffic to their website:
This trend underscores how quickly traditional approaches can lose effectiveness.
A number of SEO agencies are using AI to create detailed AI prompts and adding them to MyGPTs. They are then auditing the market for the competitors that are performing the best against their target keywords and then using the SEO Skyscrapper technique, along with AI creation tools, to rapidly rewrite SEO optimised blogs in quantity. You will often see this through an increased volume and depth of blog on their websites. If many companies are now doing this, which from my experience they are, the high volume of content is polluting the impact of the blog in supporting content marketing and SEO. This is visible in HubSpot's organic traffic decline.
SMEs therefore require innovative approaches to stand out and perform amidst vast content saturation.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude, CoPilot, Perplexity, Bard, and Grok allow marketers to rapidly create compelling, highly tailored blog posts, articles, and social media content, significantly enhancing both consistency and output without additional staffing resources. For instance, ChatGPT and Claude offer exceptional capabilities for content ideation and quick drafting, while Google's Gemini and Bard can deliver diverse perspectives and fresh insights, further enriching the content’s depth. The general rule to apply is quality in delivers quality out. A well constructured AI prompt can take anumber of hours to engineer.
Visual storytelling becomes more crucial than ever, and AI-driven image creation tools such as MidJourney and DALL·E dramatically empower SMEs by generating high-quality, customised graphics and artwork from text prompts. For example, MidJourney enables SMEs to quickly visualise marketing concepts or create attractive promotional visuals without requiring professional graphic designers, significantly lowering costs and expediting timelines. Similarly, AI tools such as Napkin AI turns text into visuals and process flows. The visual generation capaibilities are becoming impressive.
For example, the following which embeds an animated version of myself (Steve Ward) was created within a couple of minutes using OpenAI ChatGPT 4.0:
AI video creation tools such as Synthesia and Arcads rapidly turn text into videos to support educational and promotional marketing. Podcasts that take text and create them into voice can be rapidly created using ElevenLabs.
AI is also being used across the advertising platforms. Whether using Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, or another advertising platform, from audience selection, through image and text creation, to channel placement you will find all platforms are increasingly using and encouraging you to use Generative AI and Predictive AI to support the creation of performing ads. Care needs to be taken to ensure the AI has the detail to be able to determine the good from the bad. If an ad platform thinks the higher the quantity of leads is better than quality, as they don't have a closed loop to what quality really means for your business, guess what, they will double down on producing volume even if quality suffers. This is what will will often see with Google Performance Max campaigns.
Introducing a closed loop to your actual orders, by connecting your sales pipeline management system if you use one, can help AI understand what is really performing for you. For example, on Google Ads you may introduced Enhanced Conversion for Leads to achieve this.
AI in the middle of the buyers journey
In the pivotal middle stages of the buyer’s journey, AI-driven personalisation radically enhances customer engagement and lead nurturing. Traditional, generic messaging no longer suffices in today’s hyper-competitive environment. SMEs can now effortlessly produce hyper-targeted email campaigns using MyGPTs, a custom GPT-driven assistant that dynamically tailors email content based on user behaviour and preferences. This precise personalisation significantly boosts email open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately lead conversion metrics.
Chatbots powered by advanced generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and CoPilot further transform customer engagement. SMEs deploying these intelligent virtual assistants provide prospects with instant, accurate responses to complex queries, keeping potential buyers continuously engaged. According to recent studies, such AI-driven chatbots have shown to increase website lead conversion rates by up to 23%, a tangible demonstration of their profound impact on marketing effectiveness.
Moreover, tools like Elicit equip SMEs with rapid access to high-quality market insights, leveraging summaries of academic research and structured data to pinpoint emerging consumer trends and preferences. For example, an SME launching a new cybersecurity service can swiftly validate their campaign messaging and positioning against rigorously researched insights, significantly enhancing content credibility and consumer trust.
AI at the bottom of the buyers journey
At the critical bottom-of-funnel stage, AI continues to transform historically cumbersome tasks like proposal creation, follow-up communications, and buyer analytics. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and CoPilot rapidly generate customised, professional-quality proposals tailored precisely to client specifications, drastically reducing response times from days to mere hours. This responsiveness significantly increases the probability of closing deals by maintaining momentum and effectively addressing buyer needs.
AI-powered CRM platforms such as HubSpot AI and Salesforce Einstein leverage intelligent automation to prompt timely, personalised follow-up interactions, ensuring leads remain actively engaged and further reducing overall sales cycle durations. Additionally, sophisticated sentiment analysis tools like Gong and Grok provide sales teams deep insights into client concerns, priorities, and emotional responses during communications. Armed with these insights, sales representatives can address objections proactively, refine negotiation strategies, and secure client commitments more effectively.
Furthermore, multimedia communication methods enhanced by AI tools like Synthesia and ElevenLabs, as already referenced above, enable SMEs to produce professional-quality, scalable video and audio content cost-effectively. Synthesia allows SMEs to create highly engaging personalised video presentations featuring AI-generated avatars, ideal for explainer videos, demos, or targeted marketing pitches. Similarly, ElevenLabs provides high-quality, expressive AI-generated voiceovers for podcasts, promotional videos, and interactive audio experiences, significantly expanding SMEs' capabilities in audio marketing without incurring high production costs. If you call +44 (0) 121 7240447 you will be able to experience one example of how AI voice can support your sales process.
Ultimately, by strategically integrating advanced AI technologies at each critical stage of the customer journey, SMEs can comprehensively overcome historical limitations in marketing reach, resource constraints, and personalisation capabilities. The cumulative effect is a significant enhancement in productivity, market penetration, and end user engagement.
In today's rapidly evolving marketplace, SMEs that proactively embrace AI-driven marketing transformations not only secure competitive parity but position themselves for remarkable, sustainable growth. This approach ensures that even SMEs with limited resources can compete effectively with larger corporations, achieving transformative outcomes in customer acquisition, brand loyalty, and long-term business success.
Beyond the buyers journey
AI can significantly enhance the journey from company to loyal customer. However, AI is rapidly accelerating the ability to use individual AI agents that map to your wider comapny processes to be able to utilise their intelligence to be able to take automated actions without human intervention. Combining AI agents enable us to create tools that digitally connect one process to another. For example, you may evaluate your business operations with AI agents designed to streamline workflows and enhance the customer experience. AI agent solutions can seamlessly connect with your current systems, enabling automation of tasks like data retrieval, entry, processing, and handling customer inquiries. See this web page by Scorchsoft for further detail.
AI can also greatly enhance the process of strategic marketing and business development itself. Platforms such as Google's NotebookLM can effectively synthesise complex market research and competitor analysis data into clear, actionable insights, helping SMEs rapidly formulate highly targeted marketing strategies and responsive campaign plans. Also, deep research tools within ChatGPT and Perplexity enable rapid deep research of the web for comprehensive research findings that would have probably taken you several days to complete.
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About Epitomise:
We help SME and Technology companies use modern marketing strategies to grow. From strategic advice to tactical execution grow your business with the support of a 'top-100' award-winning marketing leader who is supported by a network of expert marketing specialists. With over 20-years' senior marketing experience and a track record of delivering results, as an attentive expert strategic marketing and services company, we help you grow your brand, leads, sales and customers by doing the right things the right way. Help for as long or as short as you need.
