Joel Stone, founder of marketing agency Codebreak and SME AI and automation consultancy, That AI Guy, dives into the world of generative AI to explore how small business owners can use it to supercharge their products and services.

Every man and his dog seems to be generating images with AI these days. You’ve probably seen the action figure trend, with big brands like Aldi and Holland & Barrett jumping on the bandwagon.

Tools like Canva, Runway, Chat GPT and Sora are making it easier than ever. But the question is: could generative AI revolutionise marketing and give small businesses a more competitive edge?

Yes, absolutely. Here are a few examples.

We had to reprint our brochures the other week because one of the photos wasn’t high enough definition. So we upscaled it with AI and now it’s really sharp. It took seconds, and it saved us having to source another image.

Right now, I’m building out a sales funnel in our CRM system for a new campaign where we’re sending out boxes to our prospects. With the help of AI, I’ve built a nurture funnel on the other side where people get the box and three days later, they’ll get the first email and that triggers a series of emails.

But if they click the link and watch the video, it takes them into a different nurture sequence. And then if they book a call, it takes them into another different sequence.

And when all these actions have been completed, the AI then writes them a personal email that’s unique to them, based on how long it took them and what they consumed.

Recently, I was helping a client look at AI call answering services. He was blown away by the fact that he could even synthesise his own voice to answer calls. You can even put accents on it, because perhaps if most of your customers live in the Northeast, maybe they’d prefer to hear someone with the same accent.

If you’ve got a bit of creativity about you, you can create things that you’d never have been able to create before; Facebook ads, interactive web content… the world’s your oyster.

AI might be making some people nervous, but used in the right way, it has massive potential to make them even better at what they’re already doing. Anything is possible.

But there’s one caveat. The strength of what you create with AI relies on the strength of your prompts – the instructions you put into whatever AI program you’re using.

Prompt engineering – the art of writing a high-quality prompt with relevant, concise and creative instructions – is the key to creating something phenomenal. And that’s where a lot of people fall down; they’re all using the same basic prompts, and that’s why we’re seeing so many copycat action figures and getting a little bit bored with it.

You need quite a creative mind to be a good prompt engineer.

For example, I’ve been watching Simon Squibb on Instagram. You might’ve seen him; he asks strangers on the street what their dream business is, then offers them money to start it.

He helped to build a marketing agency called Fluid in Hong Kong, and within around five years, he’d taken it to something like 400 million.

I wanted to know exactly how he’d managed it. So I used ChatGPT’s Deep Research function asked it exactly that; what strategies he’d used, how he’d priced Fluid’s services, who they worked with, and any other insights.

It gave me a 40-page report, so I told it to reverse-engineer that information and said: “Imagine my business is starting from zero; what steps would we need to take in the next three years to duplicate the success of Fluid?”

And it gave me this unbelievable guide.

If you’re not using AI right now, start by creating an image. Go into ChatGPT and ask it to help you write a detailed and intricate prompt to get the best possible image result; the features you’d like, the style, the colours.

Then take the prompt it gives you, and create your image.

Another exercise you can try. Give Chat GPT an overview of your business, then tell it to act like a Senior Business Manager who’s looking for flaws in the business, and to ask you questions that will help it determine what those flaws are.

If you just use AI to jump on a trend and create a few action figures in the hope that it will have a meaningful impact on your business, you’ll end up being disappointed.

But if you get really creative, and start exploring the ways that generative AI can boost your business – from your marketing strategy to your operations – the possibilities are endless.