Small Biz
AI Marketing

I'm Dan MacInnis, and I did a podcast for about 11 years, almost 15 years ago. But I've jumped back into the recording studio because what I've found is small businesses are now grappling with another change, and that is AI. So this podcast is about how you leverage AI for small business marketing, what you need to know, and how you get the best brains in the room, making sure that one of them is yours.

I started with AI in April last year. It was over the Easter break, and I was really just playing with ChatGPT. I was doing the usual things: planning my next holiday, asking it questions, researching, taking a draft of something I'd written and trying to make it sound better. Over those four days I went from understanding ChatGPT as a resource of knowledge to understanding how to customise it to make it like another employee for my business.

I imagine a lot of you are playing with lots of tools and trying to work out how this could be a point of leverage for your business. That's what I encourage you to do. Take what you do in your business and see how these tools can improve it. They can't replace you. It's a new way of thinking: using the tools to improve your decision-making and take away the low-level tasks, so you can do more high-level strategic thinking.

It's about thinking about how you work with AI, not just creating more of what they call AI slop, which is just more content, more output. I know it's tempting, but this is a really powerful shift in the way people work, particularly for small businesses. It gives you the ability to be an expert in so many areas because it can take over tasks you're doing manually or outsourcing. But without a harness on whichever tool you're using, and without customising it, it isn't going to serve your business as well as it could.

So let's talk about the first thing I would do. Spend a weekend just playing with it if you've never used ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot before. Perhaps use all of them. Just ask it questions. Just play. After you've done that for one weekend, the next thing is to customise it so it's useful for you.

What does that mean? In each tool there's an area of personalisation. Whenever you're in doubt, just ask the tool and it'll show you where it is. Ask it to interview you so you can customise it for your business. It'll ask what your business is about, how you work, who your ideal customer is, what makes your brand different. If you upload that into the personalised section of the tool, whichever tool it is, the output improves tenfold. Instead of general advice it starts to fit you. It recommends things that are much more relevant. That gives you a little insight into how powerful this platform is, and then you can start to harness it for much better workflows and outputs.

So first play, then customise. Next episode we'll talk about how to build skills and workflows that will streamline how you work.