“Anyone who tries our products loves them. But how do we get more customers to know about them?”
“Let’s be realistic, I don’t have the money to do the things that larger companies do. I need a simple, quick, inexpensive and reliable way to find out who my true target customers are, to reach them, and to have them buy.”
Sound familiar? This is an age-old issue for small business owners and operators. It’s one of the most difficult problems to solve – how to effectively create and disseminate targeted ads that actually convert to sales.
Smaller companies have to compete for customers’ attention not only with the large, well-resourced companies, but also with several million other small businesses. Survival is often dependent on word of mouth and local connections. You may be a precious tree in the Amazon, but nobody can see you or appreciate you amongst the millions of trees surrounding you.
But hold on. What if small businesses had access to cutting edge technologies that allow them to stand out and market their products with the impact and professionalism of mega brands?
The Promise of Generative Artificial Intelligence
This is where generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) can be a game-changer – a growth engine - for small businesses. Gen AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from and mimic large amounts of data to create content, such as text, images, music, videos, code, and more, based on inputs or prompts. Gen AI applications such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity have become household names due to their user friendly and magically helpful ability to seemingly provide answers to any question.
For small businesses, Gen AI democratizes the playing field since it enables access to capabilities that were historically only available to large companies. Some companies have created multi-million dollar businesses within a year by identifying their consumers, creating the product and marketing it with just a handful people and Gen AI software. How did they do it that quickly and effectively?
A New Approach for Consumer Research and Ad Creation
Consider the consumer research function. Historically, large companies had a competitive advantage since this is a lengthy process involving multiple focus groups and analyses, and expensive resourcing to determine the target audience. Today, the starting point could be a simple initial prompt such as “I am attaching a report about trends in the toy industry this year. Please analyze it and tell me what my biggest opportunity is. Please then describe my target audience in detail, including age range, household income, typical location, and what they like about it, and what they don’t. Please list the sources of your information so I can verify”
The wealth of information that is created within seconds is astounding. A few more detailed follow-up questions can generate a full consumer research report on your product.
Let’s also consider the advertisement creation process, which historically is also long and expensive, involving internal resources and external agencies. A typical prompt could be: “Please create an Instagram ad that is catchy and appeals to my target audience, with the right messaging and visuals.” And with more tweaks (“iterations”) you are on your way to publishing and generating new revenues.
Too good to be true? Perhaps, if you are not fully comfortable with the iterative and “trial and error” based processes required when using general purpose Gen AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Additionally, they are not actually describing how real people – real consumers – feel about your products, since they are aggregating information that is publicly available. Moreover, while these tools certainly reduce the time to perform basic consumer research and to create advertising copy, small businesses may find them difficult to use and get consistent results.
This is where specialist Gen AI providers can help. Ideogram creates great pictures based on text prompts. Google’s Veo3 serves up great video. Eleven Labs is good for voice generation. Suno generates great music. And Extuitive makes great targeted ads that convert to sales, specifically for small businesses.
Using Agentic AI to Create, Validate and Launch More Effective Ads
How exactly does Extuitive help small businesses grow their revenues with targeted ad creation and publishing? In a nutshell, it uses AI Agents. Agentic AI is a software system which uses artificial intelligence to interact with its environment, gather information, and take actions to achieve specific goals. In Extuitive’s case, there are two important sets of AI agents.
Firstly, there are AI agents who function as consumers. These agents are modeled by Extuitive scientists after more than 100,000 real US consumers and interviewees. They are digital clones whose purchase preferences and behaviors mimic and correlate with their real human counterparts. Within seconds, small business owners on the Extuitive platform can understand who the target audience is for their product, in terms of uniqueness, purchase intent, and repeat purchase intent. They can also see what appeals to them, and where and how big this consumer base is. That makes it a lot easier to create targeted messages.
And secondly, there are AI agents who function as marketing and ad creative specialists. They generate or fix advertising copy, images, and video in just a few moments. They propose new campaign angles based on emerging trends. They instantly create videos for social media posts with a simple “Create reels” prompt based on the product information they have analyzed from the website.
Any organization utilizing just these two capabilities can reduce months of work to just a few minutes and up to a 100x in cost savings . That’s a mouthwatering prospect. For the 36 million US small businesses who employ 63 million people today, agentic AI applied in these situations may feel like science fiction. In fact, it’s just advanced science which gives new superpowers to small businesses. Those who capitalize on these advances in technology will not just survive. They will thrive.
Sunand Menon , President
