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.
When people talk about AI in marketing, it can sound abstract. In reality, it comes down to a few very practical things:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.