The opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As the holidays approach, U.S. retail and e-commerce sales are expected to increase, providing shoppers with a variety of choices and businesses with many opportunities to reach their customers. In 2022, shoppers will spend more than $1 trillion on holiday purchases at retailers, breaking previous records. Also in 2022, more people said they were likely to shop on Small Business Saturday than on Black Friday, showing their support for independent retailers. All of this is great news for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) — if they’re willing to take advantage of the opportunity.
In my role as head of Google Customer Solutions, an organization serving millions of customers around the world, one of the frequent questions small business owners ask me is how best to prepare for the holiday shopping season. My answer, which applies to businesses that sell online or from a physical store: Take advantage of digital tools to achieve your business goals. Four out of five small businesses say that digital ads help them compete with larger businesses, and 82% agree that digital ads reach potential customers more effectively than offline ads.
AI-powered tools make it even easier for small and medium-sized businesses, especially those without large marketing teams or advertising budgets, to compete with the most sophisticated advertisers, giving millions of businesses access to local and global markets. Whether it’s campaign types or new opportunities, these tools can help SMBs find potential customers, design compelling advertising messages faster, gather information about ad campaign performance, and make distribution decisions of the budget with confidence.
There’s still time for SMBs to achieve their business goals and grow this holiday season by enhancing their marketing with AI. Here are five tips to get you started:
1. Make your business discoverable online
Before promoting your business, make sure customers can easily find you by updating your business details, hours, website, location and contact information on search engines and review sites. Having up-to-date information about your business and even your available inventory is critical to helping you reach potential customers online, wherever they are. As you start working with more AI-powered marketing products, you’ll realize how important the input you share about your business is to your success—it’s not just set it and forget it.
2. Create more compelling creatives
AI can make your creative assets more compelling. Yet asset creation remains a major challenge in developing and optimizing a marketing campaign. With new tools like Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express, Affable.ai or Omni, you can instantly create text, graphic and video assets or make your existing ones more dynamic. This includes capabilities such as converting text from ads into a professional-sounding narrative or automatically generating video from static image assets. Experimenting with these creative tools will help you take your campaign to new heights more effectively.
3. Use AI to connect with customers everywhere
By using AI-powered campaigns, merchants with an online presence can promote their products directly to shoppers across multiple channels where customers can begin their shopping journey. According to data from Case, an online retailer of tech accessories, investing in Performance Max, an AI-powered campaign that ran across Google’s inventory, helped increase revenue by 169% in just eight weeks. Start by inputting your business goals and creative assets, then let AI do the heavy lifting.
4. Take the guesswork out of budget allocation
It’s important for SMBs to stretch their advertising budget as much as possible and put resources into the campaigns that perform best. Planning is another important part of managing AI-powered campaigns. Using tools like Performance Planner, you can easily create a month-by-month plan and see forecasts for different budget scenarios on a weekly basis during peak marketing season to take the guesswork out of making your budget the most difficult.
5. Maximize your efficiency
Having tools to measure traffic and engagement is critical. It is important to understand what is working well and what can be improved. Doing this effectively requires analyzing the right data, which can be daunting for some businesses. AI-powered measurement tools like Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot or Twilio Flex can automate this process, helping SMBs make better decisions. They can also process, analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data to help SMBs predict and respond to future customer behavior – invaluable information to help you prepare for the holiday shopping season year after year .
Now more than ever, artificial intelligence is leveling the playing field and creating new opportunities for small businesses to grow and thrive. Whatever your plans are for this holiday season, business owner or customer (or both), remember that small businesses are the beating heart of our local economies. They create jobs in our communities and diversify our choice of goods and services. Maintaining them throughout the year, especially during the holidays, creates positive ripple effects that benefit us all.