SMBs take to AI to automate tasks and sharpen customer engagement

While the debate over ChatGPT rages around the world, Amrutam, an Ayurvedic lifestyle brand based in Gwalior, is quietly reaping the benefits of the AI (artificial intelligence) content writing tool. 

Stuti Gupta, Principal of Brand and Vision at Amrutam, has been using ChatGPT for the past few months to send proposal emails to celebrities and to create social media plans—at a fraction of the time these tasks used to take earlier. 

Prior to this, Stuti had to draft these communications manually, which left her with very less time to focus on crucial business tasks, such as manufacturing, sales, and other operations. But now, she just feeds basic information into ChatGPT, which then churns out emails, blogs, and captions for social media posts. 

Avimee Herbal, a herbal haircare and skincare brand from Surat, too has been using AI for the last few months. It has employed SemRush—an AI-powered content marketing/online visibility platform—to pick up keywords for brand marketing.  

Keyword extraction helps marketers identify the most relevant and valuable words used by people online and create marketing campaigns and communication accordingly. 

“Brand marketing these days is dependent on Instagram and YouTube, and both these platforms are continuously evolving in terms of algorithms and trends. If any AI tool can analyse the content before it is out and give recommendations, what’s better than that?” says Avimee’s Managing Director, Siddhant Agarwal.

Avimee and Amrutam are among the many SMBs (small and medium businesses) that are turning to AI solutions for a variety of reasons—to simplify and automate tasks, gain customer insights, and engage with customers in a targeted manner. 

Rise of AI-powered tools

Given the uncertainties in the market, SMBs are striving hard to keep their business running, and strong marketing plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers and growing ROI (return on investment) and revenue. This has led to a gradual adoption of AI tools in marketing among SMBs. 

According to the 'Small Business, Mighty Marketing' survey released recently by LinkedIn, 68% of Indian SMBs plan to increase their digital marketing spend; of these, one in three SMBs are inclined towards marketing automation, AI, and online communities in 2023.

Ashutosh Gupta, India Country Manager at Linkedin, says 44% of SMB marketers in India state that their top priority is to expand their customer base, while 43% are prioritising growth in business revenue and market share. These priorities have prompted marketers to step up adoption of marketing tech (martech), he says. 

Nearly 35% of SMB marketers today are ramping up investment in measurement tools to maximise ROI and showcase efficacy of marketing campaigns. 

AI adoption among SMBs is growing around the world, and Indian SMBs are also joining the bandwagon. According to the Linkedin survey, 9 out of 10 SMBs in India are investing in AI and automation for marketing. 

Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of Learnbay, an online edtech platform offering programmes in data and business analytics, allocates 30-35% of his company’s revenue towards marketing, with an emphasis on AI and digital marketing tools such as SemRush, Leadsquared, and HubSpot. The company uses these tools for social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimisation, and pay-per-click advertising. 

Applications of AI

In today’s hyper-competitive business world, AI-powered marketing and automation tools are providing game-changing solutions to businesses. 

Automation tools are helping SMBs reduce the time spent on repetitive or laborious tasks so that they can utilise that time for core functions and complex tasks.

Avimee Herbal uses ChatGPT to partially automate the creation of Instagram reels. 

“To make a reel of a DIY recipe, we just feed the ingredients to ChatGPT. It analyses and makes a recipe for us and, with a few manual changes—adding human emotions here and there—we get ready to be out on Instagram. It designs the content flow for us along with captions,” explains Agarwal. 

Can ChatGPT completely replace the need for human intervention? Not quite, say SMB owners. 

Stuti points out that, while ChatGPT helps draft emails and social media posts, at the end of the day, her team has to “edit” and “play around” with the chatbot-generated content to keep it interesting and add an emotional touch to it. 

Apart from ChatGPT, Amrutam also uses the Piggy Magic AI content creator tool to create interactive content and relevant graphics for social media posts. 

AI marketing tools are enabling SMBs to devise creative digital marketing strategies that address their business needs and tailor their communication with customers based on actionable insights derived by AI.

Ankush Goyal, Head of Digital Marketing at Coding Ninjas, an edtech platform for coding, says analytics is revolutionising the way marketers interact with customers.

"By utilising machine learning and AI to monitor and evaluate multiple metrics, businesses can optimise their marketing strategies and improve customer engagement," he says.

Driving business growth

While it’s too soon to measure the exact quantitative impact, early indications suggest that AI-powered martech tools have the potential to drive business growth in the days to come. 

According to Stuti, AI tools have helped her create more social media posts and engage more frequently with customers, which contributes to lead generation and sales in the long run. 

Kumar of Learnbay says martech tools have provided easy reporting and dashboarding and helped the company make better decisions and strategise marketing campaigns. They have also helped increase brand loyalty and drive online sales, he says.

In the last two months, thanks to the data and insights provided by SemRush, Avimee Herbal’s ROI has been 4.8% on Google Ads and 7% on ecommerce platform Amazon. AI tools have also helped boost the company’s sales by 12%-13% per month and productivity 3X times, says Agarwal.

According to an IndustryARC report, artificial intelligence in the SMB market is estimated to reach $90.68 billion by 2027 globally, growing at a CAGR of 22.10%.  

As the AI market continues to grow and find new use cases and applications, more and more SMBs will leverage this technology for their growth and success.