AI has quickly become part of everyday marketing, from the ads we run to the content we create. If you feel like AI in marketing is moving faster than you can keep up with, you’re not alone. New tools, new features, and new ways of running campaigns seem to appear every week.
The good news is, you don’t need to master everything at once. What matters is understanding the changes that actually affect how you reach customers and grow your business.
What AI is actually doing for marketing
When people talk about AI in marketing, it can sound abstract. In reality, it comes down to a few very practical things:
- Spotting what’s coming. AI can sift through behaviour patterns and tell you which products or campaigns are likely to perform well, giving you a head start.
- Handling the fiddly bits. From audience testing, bid adjustments, to ad placements, AI tools now do these automatically in the background.
- Giving you a first draft. Whether it’s a product description, social caption or campaign concept, generative AI can give you something to work with quickly.
Put together, that means less manual work and more time spent on the parts of marketing that need your judgment and creativity. For smaller businesses especially, this is where AI offers real leverage.
AI-powered advertising: what to expect (and use)
The big ad platforms have put AI at the heart of campaign delivery. The good news is you don’t need specialist skills to benefit, what matters is knowing how to set them up and how to guide them.
Take Google Performance Max. Instead of building separate campaigns across Search, Display, YouTube and Shopping, you can hand Google your goals and creative assets, and the AI will decide where and how to show your ads. For SMEs, this is often the fastest way to reach people across multiple channels without juggling lots of separate setups.
Meta’s Advantage+ automations sit under the broader AI umbrella. They’re powered by machine learning, a subset of AI, which handles the optimisation side. It tests different combinations of creative, adjusts targeting, and shifts budget towards what’s performing best. The promise is to take much of the heavy lifting out of audience management and optimisation.
On top of this, Meta has been rolling out creative AI tools, from background generation for catalogue images to AI-assisted copy suggestions, which can add extra efficiency. These are still evolving rather than fully polished solutions, so for now they’re best treated as useful additions rather than wholesale replacements for human input.
The advantage of these AI-driven optimisations is they spot opportunities you’d struggle to find manually, keep budgets flowing towards what’s performing, and take away much of the fiddly bid and placement tweaking that used to soak up time. And looking ahead, Meta has signalled plans to expand its AI capabilities further, with ambitions to fully automate ad creation and targeting by 2026, which is a development worth keeping a close eye on.
Until then, that doesn’t mean we’re anywhere near being able to set it and forget it. To get good results, you still need to set them up with strong creative, accurate conversion tracking, and a clear objective. It also pays to start small and treat the first few weeks as a learning phase, the AI needs time to test, adapt and understand what works for your business.
Search and SEO shifting from keywords to conversations
We’ve recently been seeing a change in search and how it’s being used, shifting from keyword matching to answering real questions. With conversational models and multimodal search (text, voice, images) becoming the new normal, your SEO strategy needs to be reframed in order to stand out.
- Prioritise intent. Write content that directly answers the kinds of questions customers actually ask. Longer, natural queries are on the rise (e.g. “How do I choose a raincoat that lasts?” rather than just “best raincoat”).
- Make it easy for machines. Clear headings, FAQs, bullet points, and schema markup help search engines pull your content into snippets and summaries.
- Optimise your visuals. Image and video searches are growing fast. Use descriptive filenames, alt text, and captions so your content is visible to AI systems.
- Think multimodal. Adapt content for voice assistants and chat-based search: keep it human-friendly, factually clear, and easy to summarise aloud.
We recently published a deeper dive on AI-driven search, if you want the lowdown on how to get your SEO efforts seen by AIOs then check it out here.
Audience insights, forecasting and product mix
AI is becoming less about reporting what already happened and more about giving you a glimpse of what’s likely to happen next. For small teams, that means you don’t need a dedicated analyst to spot when a product is heating up, which promotions are worth running, or which customer groups are most likely to convert.
Most platforms are already surfacing these signals, flagging high-value segments, predicting demand curves, or suggesting which products deserve more budget. The challenge is knowing how much weight to give them. An algorithm might highlight a rising trend, but it won’t know if you’re low on stock, or whether the margins make sense for a big push. That’s where human context has to stay in the loop.
And one thing hasn’t changed: the quality of your data determines the quality of your insights. If your CRM is patchy or your tracking is messy, the forecasts won’t be of much use. Clean, accurate first-party data is what makes AI predictions reliable enough to act on.
Practical checklist for SMEs and what to do this quarter
- Turn on automated campaigns for one objective. Pick either Performance Max or Advantage+ and let it run with clear tracking. Monitor and learn.
- Improve your measurement foundation. Ensure your conversion pixels/tags work and that first-party data is organised. AI needs clean signals.
- Use AI for drafts and then edit for brand. Let AI speed up content production, but always review and humanise before publishing.
- Make content machine-friendly. Add FAQ blocks, concise answers and schema to your priority pages.
- Optimise images and video. Titles, captions and alt text matter for visual search signals.
- Set guardrails. Define acceptable tone, factual checks and data privacy rules for any AI-generated output.
- Experiment & learn. Treat early campaigns as experiments rather than final verdicts; AI learns from your business signals.
When to work with an agency (and what to expect)
AI makes agencies faster. The thinking still has to come from somewhere. The real value now isn’t pushing buttons inside a platform, it’s knowing which AI features are worth betting on, how to train them with clean data, and when to challenge the machine’s decisions.
An agency that just “sets up Performance Max” isn’t adding value. A good agency will run controlled experiments, question why the algorithm is spending where it does, and translate opaque outputs into actions that actually make sense commercially.
With platforms rolling out new features at breakneck speed, agencies act as the filter, separating the genuine opportunities from the noise, so you’re not wasting money chasing every shiny new option.
The simple test? Are they using AI to blindly automate, or to speed up smart, human-led strategy? The first keeps you dependent. The second keeps you ahead.
To Wrap It All Up
AI isn’t optional anymore, it’s quietly running much of modern digital marketing. For SMEs, that can mean better-targeted campaigns, content that doesn’t take forever to produce, and forecasts that actually hint at what customers will do next, all without hiring a bigger team!
A pragmatic way to start is to get your measurement in order, run a single AI-powered campaign, and let generative tools do the repetitive work. But don’t hand over the reins. Keep humans in charge of creative choices, tone of voice, and quality checks. If your in-house team can’t keep up with the pace of platform updates, an agency (like us) can run the experiments and translate the outputs into something sensible, rather than letting the algorithms dictate your strategy.
The mindset matters more than the tools. AI is a way to make good marketing faster and more precise. Combine it with clean data, a clear strategy, and a willingness to test, and you can stay one step ahead without wasting time chasing every shiny new feature.
August 28, 2025
