Most SMEs have tried AI by now: a free ChatGPT account, a few blog drafts, some social captions. Very few have a plan for it. Research for the Accelerating AI white paper found that nearly two thirds of South Midlands businesses surveyed are still exploring AI or running early experiments.
You can get value from AI without a big strategy. Start with a few uses that save real time and keep your brand safe.
1. Content drafting and repurposing
AI gets you from a blank page to a solid first draft, then turns one piece of content into several. A blog post becomes a LinkedIn post, an email intro and a set of social captions. A spreadsheet of product specs becomes first-pass descriptions for a whole category. AI handles the structure and volume. A person adds the detail and the brand voice.
Starting is usually the slowest part of writing. Hand that to AI and your team spends its time editing and improving the draft. For ecommerce brands with hundreds of product pages, that is often the difference between “we’ll get to it” and done.
Try: Claude or ChatGPT. Give it a clear brief and an example of writing you like, rather than a one-line prompt.
2. PPC ad copy and testing at scale
Google’s responsive search ads take up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Writing that many good ones for every ad group is tedious, so most accounts recycle the same few lines. AI can produce a long list of angles (price, speed, quality, trust, urgency) for a person to shortlist, check against ad policy and load in.
It also helps you move quickly when platforms change. When Google announced new product fields for AI-powered Shopping results, Mary on our paid media team used AI to pull together the research and analyse a client’s data. She estimates the work would have taken over a week by hand. It took a day, and the client went live ahead of competitors.
You save hours of copywriting per campaign, and you can run more tests at once. More tests means you find the winning ads sooner.
Try: the asset suggestions built into Google Ads, then a general AI assistant to widen the range of angles.
Read more about our Paid Media & PPC work.
3. Reporting and insight summaries
Most SMEs have plenty of data and little time to read it. AI can take a month of Google Ads, Analytics or Shopify figures and draft a plain-English summary: which campaigns moved, which products dropped off, what looks unusual and what to do next.
We’re doing this internally too. Jason and Mary are automating our PPC reporting in Google Sheets, starting with a weekly report that pulls from Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Keeping recurring reports up to date was taking them around 3 to 4 hours a week between them. That time can now go into strategy.
It also cuts the month-end scramble, and the risk that a report goes out without anyone reading it properly.
Try: Looker Studio for the dashboard, with an AI assistant like Claude to turn exports into a list of actions.
4. Customer service and email personalisation
AI can draft replies to routine enquiries, such as delivery times and returns, for a person to check and send. On the email side, platforms now use AI to suggest subject lines, predict when each customer is likely to buy again and build segments from customer behaviour.
Customers get faster replies, and your team spends fewer hours building segments and writing subject line variations. A small team can now personalise email in a way that used to need a dedicated CRM person.
Try: Klaviyo’s built-in AI features for subject lines, segments and predicted next order dates.
5. Design and creative production
One campaign might need a web banner, a square social post, a story, an email header and a display ad. AI design tools resize and adapt a master design across all of them, remove backgrounds, extend images and suggest layouts.
One member of our team built a small browser tool that compresses large batches of client images locally. Files stay secure, and clients can send us unprocessed imagery.
AI takes most of the repetitive production work off your designer, so they can spend the time on the idea.
Try: Canva’s Magic Studio, especially Magic Resize and the background tools.
What to watch out for
AI produces work fast, which means it can also produce mistakes fast. Keep three things in check:
- Brand voice. Left alone, AI writes in the same flat, safe tone as everyone else. Give it examples of your writing and edit hard.
- Accuracy. AI states things confidently that aren’t true. Check every figure, product detail and claim before it goes live, and check ad copy against platform policy.
- Human review. At Qoob, a person checks everything before it reaches a client. We default to read-only access when connecting AI tools to our systems, and we’re careful about what customer data goes into them.
Where to start
Don’t try all five at once. Pick the one that takes up most of your week, try it for a month, and measure the time before and after. If it works, move on to the next.
If you’d like help working out where AI fits in your marketing, talk to us.
Learn more at Accelerating AI
For more practical examples like these, join us at Accelerating AI, a free conference co-hosted by Qoob on Tuesday 13 October at Unity Place, Milton Keynes. Lunch is included. Speakers include Canva, Microsoft, NatWest and FreeAgent, and Qoob will cover AI in marketing.
Book your free place or visit acceleratingai.co.uk.