Branding goes beyond designing a simple logo and slapping your creation on all of your product packages or employee uniforms. It goes to the root of your business personality and how your business projects it to the public.
Every business values its brand, and building a reputable brand that people trust takes time. Thankfully, the rise of AI and its potential have made it an effective tool to help businesses supercharge their branding, alongside human creatives.
Although graphic designers may see the generative aspect of artificial intelligence as a source of conflict for their own artistic processes, GenAI can offer a more collaborative outlook when it comes to content ideation and brainstorming. This paves the way for greater productivity and originality without losing that all-important human touch in content marketing.
Many leading creatives are using AI already and it’s possible for you to use affordable tools to boost your startup or SME and supercharge your existing branding processes.
What to do before picking an AI tool for your branding
Besides considering costs, you need a quick roadmap before you jump on the AI trend. These are steps you should consider as you aim to improve your small business’s brand:
- Identify what areas you want AI to work on: will that be simply designing your branding?
- Investigate available tools
- Pick what best fits your business and your budget
- Train your staff
- Scale up gradually
Artificial intelligence tools can level up your branding and build recognition among multiple audience segments. How? Let’s take a deeper look at how AI can spark marketing innovation for businesses and marketers:
How can AI level-up your SME branding?
There are many ways in which artificial intelligence can level up small business branding, and some key emerging use cases include:
01. Next-Generation brand design
Your brand design will be the first point of contact between your business and your audience. With this in mind, it’s vital to adapt your branding to appeal directly to your customer profile, their expectations, and their values.
For many SMEs, branding can be a resource-heavy and time consuming process. However, generative AI tools have helped to remove the common pain points for brands and empower businesses to assist with rapidly building engaging multimedia and text-based content that resonates well with leads and provides concepts for designers to run with.
ChatGPT has quickly emerged as a leading resource for budget-friendly marketing materials, and large-language models (LLMs) are capable of performing a number of tasks based on a simple series of user prompts.
From detailed ads to blog content and even brainstorming sessions for new slogans and catchphrases, generative AI offers SMEs and graphic designers the chance to tap into a smart marketing assistant on a smaller budget.
Platforms like Midjourney are also resources for improving business logos and other areas of brand design.
Find out more about the impact of AI on graphic design.
02. Customer service
As we’ve already touched on, ChatGPT is a good example of an LLM that’s capable of understanding user queries on a natural and contextual basis.
This makes generative AI chatbots one of the cheapest yet most effective brand development tools for small businesses.
AI chatbots use machine learning (ML) algorithms to be trained to understand more common and easily solved queries while diverting more complex issues to your existing customer service units.
This brand move helps your business stay helpful to customers while maintaining that all-important laser-focus on marketing innovation among creative employees.
Read our advice on using AI chatbots here.
03. Customised marketing
Marketing is vital for any business to build their audience, and many AI tools can streamline your marketing efforts.
You can use these tools to maintain a consistent brand image by harmonising your brand voice across all of your marketing channels. Artificial intelligence can help SMEs adopt a more omnichannel approach to marketing, helping to convert blog posts, announcements, and new campaigns into blog posts, newsletters, and press releases accordingly.
For graphic designers, this can help to provide a collaborative environment where your designs can be automatically cropped, adapted, and optimised for each channel.
Furthermore, with AI’s ability to analyse data, you can gather actionable insights from your customers. This helps your business customise marketing to fit individual customers and boost your brand image.
Generative AI is even capable of providing a level of personalisation that’s previously been impossible for human marketers to undertake. In using ML to accurately segment customers based on their likes, purchasing behaviour, and even demographics that could change their content delivery expectations.
This can pave the way for generative AI marketing tools to create content on pages that’s fully customised to appeal directly to specific audience segments, helping to maximize engagement opportunities.
04. Website optimisation
Your website is usually where most of your customers will transact with you. AI tools can help you build a website from scratch and optimize it.
Having a stable website that performs well and ranks well is essential if you are starting an online business in the current scenario. It is best for your brand if your website loads fast and has an optimal design and message that is uniform with other media forms you use, and AI can help you with this (as can some of the best website builders for small business).
There are AI tools that can help your website rank better, load faster, and make the entire web process easy for your customers. Generative AI website builders can even pre-populate your pages and automatically add your branding to make it easier than ever to build an engaging online presence.
This can help your content travel further, providing translations on-the-fly and adaptations that match the right segmented audience and their expectations.
05. Social Media management
Social media management is a place where brands are made or marred. Having a great social media presence will benefit your brand.
With simple AI tools, you can take care of part of the social media hassle, such as scheduling posts or generating content ideas. This frees you up to create content and meet your customers expectations.
While this level of automation can be excellent for optimising repetitive tasks, AI will form a more collaborative bond with content creators, who can use the tools to polish raw ideas and conceptualise new campaigns based on customer insights.
Today, social media networks are becoming heavily characterised by their demographics, with different customer segments using platforms like TikTok compared to X or LinkedIn, for instance. This calls for artificial intelligence solutions to strategize content and schedule different posts optimized for their host platforms. Generative tools can understand these intricacies and draft diversified posts for maximum engagement.
06. Incisive social listening
Social media is important, and while you are crafting great content for your brand image, you should also be aware that your brand is being talked about.
You cannot always keep track of every mention or @, but with AI tools, you can listen and gather information on how your brand is perceived by customers and strangers. This can be helpful in decision-making for your small business.
This is another excellent example of how designers and creatives can achieve synergy with artificial intelligence. The tool can provide far greater levels of information about the type of content customers want to aid the creation process in a more resounding manner.
Social listening has become an important means of understanding sentiment towards your brand. Although reviews and mentions from high-reputation accounts are essential to brands, they rarely tell the full story of how your SME is viewed by your target audience as a whole.
There are plenty of AI social listening tools available, and they can work wonders in uncovering sentiment towards your brand throughout your channels. This can pave the way for insights into how you can optimise your strategy for specific social networks, understanding common customer pain points, and understanding any areas that consistently confuse your target audience.
Embracing the AI revolution
Small businesses and marketing creatives should not shy away from using AI tools to their advantage, especially for projecting a strong brand and building a niche for themselves in competitive markets.
There is so much to gain with the available AI tools, and they can transform your SME in various areas, from things like automating payouts and running payrolls to social media management and online marketing. Through actionable insights, accurate customer segmentation, and a deeper level of personalisation, AI can transform your customer experience on a comprehensive level.
While designers and creatives may hold justifiable concerns about the threat of AI and automation technology in marketing, the most effective use of the technology will be more collaborative, helping to form ideas and shape the design process.
The AI revolution is already underway, and by moving decisively, it’s possible for your brand to outmanoeuvre your competitors and win a stronger market share sooner rather than later.
But what's coming up for AI? Find out all about the future of AI in graphic design.
