AI for Small Business: The Key to Rapid Growth for Strapped SMBs in 2024? (Hint: Yes)

AI levels the playing field for small businesses. Learn how they streamline operations & reduce costs, so you can compete with the big players.

Nearly 20% of small businesses fail within their first year in the USA. After 10 years, that number rises above 65%. 

Reduced budgets and fewer resources mean small businesses and entrepreneurs often struggle to overcome even the most common business challenges, such as: 

• Finding leads

• Attracting customers

• Building social media marketing strategies

• Providing support

• Hiring the right people

Without sufficient brand awareness and enough sales to generate cash, many small business owners have to adopt a DIY approach. This can lead to subpar solutions because a handful of people can only accomplish so much alone. 

The emergence of sophisticated AI technology eases these problems and enhances your competitive edge, giving you sophisticated, decision-making assistance. 

This article will discuss how AI levels the playing field so small businesses can compete effectively with the big players. 

AI use cases for small businesses

AI's use cases for small businesses are almost endless, especially now that you can program custom AI into your business software.

However, many resort to out of the box AI tools to meet their business needs. The most popular AI tools fall under the following categories:

• AI-assisted writing

• AI-powered SEO outlines 

• SEO keyword research

• SEO content strategies

• Product descriptions

• Code generation for software developers

• Human resources language

• Code improvement and AI-powered code reviews

• AI-powered social media campaigns

• Content ideation

• Social media posts, such as LinkedIn

• Royalty-free image generation using AI

• Content summarization

• Chatbots and automated customer service

Whatever AI programs you decide to use, you can work with a Fiverr AI expert to “talk to the AI tool,” so you get the outcomes you desire. 

Examples of AI in action for small businesses

Wondering how using AI tools may look for your business?

Let's examine how business owners use artificial intelligence software to improve business processes and efficiency. 

AI-powered SEO content strategies

Artificial intelligence can help create SEO campaigns based on data points and data analysis. Two popular tools in this area are SurferSEO and Frase.io. 

SurferSEO uses AI to analyze the top-ranking pages for a chosen keyword and determine which phrases and topics are helping those pages rank better. Using this analysis, SurferSEO gathers "keyword clusters"—groups of related keywords—so you can create content around these clusters.  

SurferSEO is an AI-powered SEO content strategy tool

Frase.io, on the other hand, uses AI to generate written content from scratch, using headings and an outline developed after analyzing pages that rank well for your chosen keyword. 

Frase writes entire articles using an AI writing assistant. To make your content shine, work with a Fiverr expert to edit the AI content. 

Frase.io is an AI-writing assistant and SEO strategy tool

ChatGPT is another excellent tool for creating keyword clusters. Give it a list of keywords and ask it to cluster them in a table showing intent, keyword, and topic.

For example, we gathered keywords related to "Pizza" from the popular SEO tool, Ubersuggest:

Ubersuggest keyword research data related to "Pizza New York"

We then asked ChatGPT to cluster these keywords for us:

Prompt: Cluster the following keywords in a table with columns, Intent, Keyword, Topic: [list of keywords]

ChatGPT keyword clusters

Thanks to ChatGPT and its natural language processing abilities, we now have topics and intent tied to each keyword, allowing us to create a content strategy surrounding those topics. 

We then asked it to create an SEO content strategy based on the above data. It did a decent job and provided an excellent plan for companies operating on a shoestring budget. For those who can afford help, you can send this plan to a Fiverr SEO specialist to add the finishing touches. 

In either case, you're saving money: 

ChatGPT SEO content strategy

AI-assisted research

Salespeople need to research leads to help close deals. Creators and copywriters need to explore topics. Managers need to analyze markets to create business plans. 

Thanks to the internet, research and forecasting are easier to perform. Sifting through all your findings with your busy schedule…not so much.

Language model AI tools save you time by summarizing lengthy content and extracting the essentials, giving you the necessary information to make data-driven decisions. 

ChatGPT excels here. Just give it specific instructions to change the type of data summary you need.

For example, we asked it to summarize this article about the Metaverse. Since ChatGPT isn't connected to the internet, you must copy and paste the article into the prompt. 

We wrote, "Summarize the most important points, in bullet points, of the following article:" and then pasted the article into the prompt. 

This was the result: 

A concise summary of a long article makes it easier for small businesses to research

Another excellent AI-powered tool for summarizing is Wordtune Read. It takes any text from a URL or pasted text and summarizes all the major sections using AI. 

We fed it a Fiverr guide titled How to talk to GPT to get better results for SMBs, and here’s what we got back: 

Wordtune Read AI-powered summarizer

AI-assisted content generation

ChatGPT isn't the only language model attempting to produce human-sounding content. But it shows the most promise. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, also released an API—Application Programming Interface—that lets other companies use ChatGPT in their applications. 

Some of the AI tools that generate content are:

• ChatGPT

• Rytr

• Copy.ai

• Frase.io

• Writer.com's CoWrite tools

• Jasper

We had ChatGPT write an article for us and here’s what it generated:

ChatGPT AI-generated article

Very important: Unmodified generative AI content is easily detected, and Google may penalize you if it believes your content isn’t helpful to users. So it’s ideal to have human editors look it over before publishing.

Copyleaks quickly detects AI-generated content. Getting a human to improve any AI-generated content is best.

To write a good prompt you need to:

1. Know artistic concepts.  I don't mean to be an art expert, but it is necessary to have a general knowledge of art, especially styles and techniques.

2. Study and learn all the parameters, such as lighting, types of cameras, color palettes, dimensionality and more.

3. Know how to describe objects, people or scenes.

To write a good prompt you need to:

1. Know artistic concepts.  I don't mean to be an art expert, but it is necessary to have a general knowledge of art, especially styles and techniques.

2. Study and learn all the parameters, such as lighting, types of cameras, color palettes, dimensionality and more.

3. Know how to describe objects, people or scenes.

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AI chatbots

Implementing an AI Chatbot on your website can shave hours off your day. Chatbots vary in sophistication and can be trained specifically on your company's data to answer questions. 

It's also possible to create ChatGPT-powered AI Chatbots that integrate into your website and help users with common questions. Ada, a well-known customer service automation provider, recently announced that it would incorporate ChatGPT technology into its existing chatbot automation solution. 

AI chatbots are excellent for improving the customer experience with automated customer support. They can provide personalized follow-up to customers and take these repetitive tasks off your own plate. Businesses of all sizes benefit from improved customer relationships that lead to even more potential customers—meaning more profitability.

Ada's customer service automation can issue refunds when users ask for them

AI-powered social media strategies

AI can reduce the time taken to prepare social media strategies in several ways, including:

• Ideating marketing efforts

• Preparing social media marketing campaigns based on AI-powered data analysis

• Using machine learning to understand which social media posts perform the best

Lately.ai is an AI-powered social media tool that repurposes existing content and creates social media posts. The tool was designed to work with, and learn from, humans. Every edit you make helps Lately understand your tone and voice. Lately also analyzes the best-performing social media posts to learn what elements make them successful. It then implements these learnings in your social media posts.

Lately—AI-powered social media tool

Then there’s something called "sentiment analysis" that determines the tone of incoming customer communications and acts on negative sentiment. Kacper Rafalski, Demand Generation Team Leader at software company Netguru, uses this to review social media posts. 

He tells Fiverr his company uses sentiment analysis to analyze customer data, feedback, reviews, and social media posts. This identifies areas needing improvement, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and more new customers.

Example of sentiment analysis using ChatGPT

Although we used ChatGPT to demonstrate sentiment analysis, a sentiment analysis tool would ideally track reviews and social media content automatically. An AI Programmer can build this using GPT programming technology. The tool could then aggregate the sentiment of posts to understand which areas need work or are performing optimally. 

Royalty-free images for blog posts

AI-generated images represent ‌significant cost-savings in marketing efforts. Business owners can now generate royalty-free images at a fraction of the cost and time, eliminating the assortment of pricey marketing tools otherwise needed. 

These images are useful for:

• Blog posts

• Marketing material (you’ll likely need to hire a graphic designer to touch the picture up)

• Newsletters

Plus, it can help with creative inspiration, saving you the time and costs eaten up by the back and forth that happens with inital design projects

We generated the following four images on Midjourney with the simple prompt: "AI-powered content generation, digital art, super realistic, fantastical."

AI-generated image in Midjourney

And here’s another prompt: "Robot standing next to a page of written content coming out of a computer, amazed young human standing next to the robot, depth-of-focus, sunrise in the background, super realistic."

AI-generated Image on Midjourney

DALL-E 2 is another popular AI-powered image generation tool. It takes particular skill to generate precisely the right image, which DALL-E 2 and Midjourney artists spend many hours learning.

AI-assisted web development

You can improve your website code without a programmer. Or generate the initial code improvements using the power of AI and then hire a web developer to add the final touches. 

Some areas ‌AI can support web development include:

• Generating code from human language descriptions

• Debugging web code and HTML

• Ideating for web layouts

"I teach astrophotography for a living," says Anthony Robbins of Skies & Scopes. "I recently used ChatGPT to code an online calculator that recommends the best astrophotography camera settings to use. As someone with no knowledge of coding, this saved me a huge amount of time and money."

Pro Tip: Always work with a professional to review AI-generated web code to avoid potential bugs and hacks. 

We asked ChatGPT to create WordPress code for a plugin. The code it wrote was excellent yet basic. But it’s just enough to get the web developer going to improve the code. 

AI-Generated Code for a WordPress Plugin

AI-assisted software development

Similarly, AI systems can hasten the software development cycle in the following ways:

• Generating code based on human-readable comments

• Debugging code 

• Reviewing code for best practices

• Analyzing code and looking for inefficiencies

• Automated testing, which makes things easier for manual code testers.

GPT and AI-powered applications

Programmers can create AI apps for various use cases, like:

• Generating AI images

• Executing complicated language tasks

• Modifying Excel spreadsheet data sets

• Processing large amounts of data

• Carrying out dozens of other sophisticated tasks 

The possibilities here are vast and depend significantly on the programmer's imagination. 

Tips for implementing AI in your small business

The top tips for implementing AI in your business workflow are:

• AI is a tool. Use it as such. 

• AI has its own learning curve. Don't expect to learn everything in one day. 

• AI, on its own, produces subpar results. AI plus human intervention is a massive timesaver. 

• Always fact-check any writing that AI produces, and check for grammar. 

"One mistake I made," says Rafalski, "was underestimating how long it would take to learn how to operate the various AI tools. It took me several weeks of trial and error before I fully mastered the different pieces of software."

AI Prompt Engineering is a skill that users hone through a combination of:

• Trial and error

• Experience using the AI tool

• A nuanced understanding of the technology behind AI

So keep this in mind when debating whether to outsource AI tasks to a prompt engineer.

Challenges to overcome when using AI in your small business

Some of the most significant challenges of using AI for small businesses are:

• Putting too much faith in AI and failing to use human AI professionals to improve ‌AI-generated content

• Not understanding how to engineer AI prompts correctly

• Failing to fact-check ‌AI-generated content

"When we write articles on exams, the AI will often include outdated statistics and details, presumably because it is drawing from existing content that is itself outdated," says Lisa Speransky, founder of Ivy Tutors Network, a 20-year-old education brand.

AI in small businesses experiences the most mileage when people learn to use it properly. 

"Initially, I was too eager about using AI for my content creation," says Ben Kuhl, CEO of Shelf Expression, a home remodeling business and custom shelf maker in Charlotte, North Carolina. "I neglected to examine the tone of the writing produced. This led to me publishing blog posts that had a stiff, robotic feel. This was a valuable lesson for me as it highlighted the significance of carefully reviewing and adjusting AI-generated content to ensure that it accurately represents my brand and appeals to my target audience."

Hire a Fiverr AI freelancer to help maximize business growth

Now that you see the value AI can bring to your business, what’s your next step? Will you embark on the journey of learning to generate high-quality text, images, and code yourself? Or will you partner with AI experts who already did the hard work and can deliver the results you need fast?

If the latter sounds more appealing, then we invite you to explore our marketplace of freelance AI experts. We have someone for every type of AI project, from writing and image creation to editing and programming. 

Sign up to Fiverr today to find an AI freelancer to take your small business to the next level.