Can Small Businesses Replace Marketing Assistants With AI Tools?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been rapidly evolving and is poised to transform many aspects of our lives. With all the talk about AI, here's a big question on the minds of small business owners: Can I replace my marketing assistant with AI yet? In this blog post, we’ll dive into the benefits and downsides of using AI for your marketing needs and help you decide if it’s something you should consider for your business.

The benefits of using AI for your business

1. One of the most attractive benefits of using AI for marketing assistance is that it can be incredibly cheap when compared to hiring a full-time or part-time employee. For example, Austin-based Jasper.AI generates content for ads, blogs, emails, and more for prices between approximately $40-$82/mo. ChatGPT by Open AI has a free option for users who are willing to settle for ChatGPT-3.5, or a subscription for $20 per month for the new and improved ChatGPT-4. Compare these prices to the thousands you'd be paying for a full-time employee and it's easy to see why it would be tempting to make the jump to AI.

2. Additionally, AI can be quite fast at generating outputs. For example, it may take 20 seconds or less to produce a blog post, whereas it might take an employee multiple hours. So using AI tools will allow you to create content quickly and easily.

3. One of the most exciting aspects of using AI assistants is how they can provide insights into trends and customer behavior that would be extremely time-consuming to analyze without an AI tool. Thanks to their advanced programming, AI assistants are able to quickly and accurately sort through an immense amount of data, identify patterns, and generate predictions, possibly resulting in improved communications with your customers.

The Drawbacks of Using AI

Despite the conveniences that come with using AI for marketing purposes, there are some drawbacks to consider before jumping on board with this technology.

1. For starters, mistakes can occur if the data used by the AI tool isn’t accurate or up-to-date. For example, grammatical errors are very common in AI-generated content, at least in part due to automated processes not recognizing certain words or phrases correctly. If you don't have a detail-oriented human reviewing that work, those errors may slip through and affect your final product.

2. Furthermore, the content generated by an AI tool may not always align perfectly with your brand values and your brand voice. And it certainly isn't likely to be customized to fit your company’s unique value prop. Whereas when you have a human touch, one who knows your company's unique differentiators, they may be able to produce content that more closely aligns with the things your customers love most about your unique brand or product.

3. There is always a risk of copyright infringement and plagiarism since some of these tools may pull content from other sources without permission or attribution. There is a lot of discussion right now over who actually owns the content produced via AI tools, whether you can copyright materials containing AI content, etc. You don't want to get yourself embroiled in a legal battle that could end up costing you way more than you would have paid an employee, do you?

4. Nothing is truly automated. Think about how robots have been able to "replace" workers in factories. I say "replace" in quotation marks because although the front-line worker has been removed from that equation, in reality, there is a team of programmers behind every robot. So really, we replaced one type of worker with another. The same is true for using AI tools. They have huge benefits, but only if a human is there to give them detailed, thoughtful prompts, and to correct them and give input when they miss the mark.

A balanced approach to using AI

AI is certainly a powerful and rapidly evolving technology that can offer immense value to businesses looking to automate certain tasks like writing copy or creating images without having to hire full-time employees. However, relying solely on automation is a bit risky at this stage. Mistakes happen even with sophisticated algorithms—and nobody wants their business associated with plagiarism or copyright infringement issues!

So, instead of jumping into the deep end now and completely replacing your marketing assistant with AI in 2023 , consider a part-time freelance or contract employee who can help you save money by working fewer hours, but can also make sure your marketing copy and imagery are customized and perfect for your business needs. This way you get all the advantages of automation without any of its possible pitfalls!

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