How smaller businesses can reimagine brand building with generative AI

Generating and maintaining awareness is notoriously challenging for small businesses, often working with limited in-house resources and without the budget for external marketing support.

In fact, recent research found that 67% of small business founders considered marketing and sales support one of their biggest challenges, with marketing budgets one of the first to see cuts in difficult conditions.¹

But generative AI (genAI) could answer this challenge, unleashing a new wave of creativity for smaller businesses. For example, it can help generate ideas for brand-building content and optimise marketing campaigns.

GenAI tools can help businesses research topics for email campaigns, social media posts or blogs, using search data and social media trends to find relevant and engaging angles, tailored to their customers’ interests.

They can then help draft the content, working with existing marketing documents and new research to create material that can be polished and refined by the in-house team in a fraction of the time it would take from scratch.

The same tools could then be used to come up with subject lines or headlines or customise the content for specific audiences. In this way, genAI brings big business marketing capabilities within the reach of smaller firms.

Eye catching

This is just the start. Tools like Adobe Photoshop and Canva have now embedded AI image generation into their workflows, enabling non-designers to put together professional-looking graphics or layouts.

Microsoft’s new Image Creator and Cocreator tools bring similar capabilities to the Windows Paint and Photos apps, with Image Creator developing scenes based on text-based prompts, while Cocreator uses AI to redraw and recompose even primitive sketches into eye-catching visual concepts.

In the Photos app users can use the same capabilities to restyle photos through a range of convincing artistic treatments, or simply develop new imagery from text.

Meanwhile, genAI tools like Synthesia are opening up video to smaller businesses, giving them the capabilities to create their own clips complete with AI avatars and voiceovers.

Combine these tools with AI enhancements to existing video editing tools, and it’s possible to create unique videos that sell the brand, then spread them through the most appropriate social media channels. With the aid of AI music tools, such as Musicfy or Soundraw, businesses could even add their own soundtracks.

Making the most of these exciting capabilities requires a new generation of PCs – the Copilot+ PC.

These feature new, high-performance CPUs with their own high-performing integrated Neural Processing Units (NPU), capable of running AI operations at speeds of up to 45 trillion per second.

Up until now, most AI tools have operated through the cloud, but a growing number – including Image Create, Cocreator, DaVinci Resolve Studio and Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Express – are moving some or all of their AI features to the PC to harness the power of these new AI machines.

Here, Dell’s Copilot+ PCs, like the XPS 13 and Inspiron 14 Plus, give business users the features they need to embrace this creative potential, including the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon^® X Plus and Snapdragon^® X Elite processors, bright and colour accurate 3K and QHD+ touchscreens, dual-array microphones and immersive spatial audio.

Through touch, text and speech, they enable smaller businesses to be creative in new ways, building brand awareness without breaking the bank.

Find out more about how Dell Technologies is empowering this new wave of business creativity.

¹ Research quoted in Lack of support with sales and marketing most pressing issue for small businesses research shows, City A.M., 8/1/24, https://www.cityam.com/smes-seek-hope-in-marketing-support-while-funding-struggles-continue/