What has always been one of the biggest barriers for SMBs in elevating their enterprise? A lack of access to industry-ready design capabilities. With recent advancements in generative AI technologies, however, small business owners now finally have access to design capabilities that were once only available for enterprise and corporate teams.
The improved access to AI design tools has already worked wonders when it comes to levelling the playing field between SMBs and their larger enterprise competitors. With AI tools, SMBs can now develop market-ready, high-impact visual content in a matter of minutes, allowing small business teams to maintain a frequency of communications across digital campaigns and platforms that simply wasn’t possible before the age of AI.
But volume of campaign messaging doesn’t equate to quality messaging. Small businesses need to know how they can conscientiously adopt AI art in a way that supports rather than detracts or distracts from their brand messaging.
Here are some key strategies that SMBs can use when integrating AI art into their marketing workflows.
How can SMBs use AI Art?
Digital Marketing
In the information age, all industries sought to invest in their digital presence as a measure for establishing new lead channels, and cultivating consumer trust. Today in the digital age, digital marketing plays an even greater role in driving commercial activities, thanks in part to evolutions in social media and online banking that are both working to facilitate seamless shopping experiences.
For SMBs, this essentially means that investing in their digital presence can also help generate online sales. The issue is that a digital presence that captures consumer attention today is reliant on a higher volume of commercially-ready brand assets. This is where AI art generators enter the equation.
But the answer here isn’t just any AI art generators. SMBs need to utilise brand-safe tools like Adobe Firefly’s AI art generator, for instance.
With Adobe’s fully managed training data for their LLM models plus the inclusion of Content Credentials for tracking AI-generated assets, Firefly AI is proving to be the tool of choice for not only SMBs but enterprise clients as well, thanks in part to the rollout of Adobe Firefly Foundry which provides more control to enterprises with dynamic brand guidelines.
Content & Social Media
Outside of focused or targeted digital campaigns, AI art tools can also be valuable in keeping digital channels populated with relevant content all across the calendar year.
For SMBs looking to maintain engagement on their digital platforms between sales periods, using AI art tools to generate content for their blog or even for social media, can help to essentially automate the process of channel maintenance.
This is especially valuable for SMBs that may not have their own dedicated in-house marketing team. If your digital specialists are also juggling other administrative tasks within your daily business operations, being able to use AI art tools to generate digital content and social media assets across even just a few minutes a day, can help to keep your digital platforms active.
This signals to Google Search that your website and overall web presence is consistently current and up-to-date – which will also help your SMB maintain its organic rankings, web traffic, and by extension, its conversion rates as well.
Design Prototyping
Speaking of staying current, one thing that enterprises are so adept at is developing new products and services and diversifying with efficiency. It makes sense after all, they have entire teams tasked with product research and development. With the sheer manpower behind enterprise R&D projects, it’s no surprise why SMBs typically can’t compete.
With creative AI tools, however, prototyping might become a little easier for SMBs. Now with tools like Adobe Firefly or Midjourney, SMBs can easily mock up different designs for product or service R&D, before then testing these prototypes in controlled environments.
The capabilities of AI for design prototyping when combined with digital-era fast manufacturing technologies like 3D printing or laser cutting, now makes it easier and even cheaper for SMBs to custom order product prototypes for market testing.
In short, if your SMB has a great idea for a new product in your market niche, don’t wait to test it out! With the iterative power of AI art generators, you may end up finding a viable design and being eligible to secure a potentially high-value patent before your competitors.
Packaging & Brand Assets
On top of product prototyping, AI art generators can also be used for quickly mocking up different packaging designs for your business. This is particularly useful for ecommerce businesses that may be looking into perfecting their ‘unboxing’ experience to support viral UGC campaigns.
But this is only just one of the ways that AI is revolutionising ecommerce branding and marketing. Alongside packaging mockups, SMBs offering products online can also use AI art generators to develop other brand assets like posters, brochures, flyers, and stickers to be distributed to consumers within packaging or via giveaways, downloads, and other special offers.
The potential for AI art generators in developing brand assets really is close to endless, especially now that AI art generators can create art across a variety of styles and mediums, including animations and video.
Strategies for Integrating AI Art & Design
Invest in the Right AI Tools for your SMB
Once again, finding the right tools for your AI art projects is crucial for maximising the power of AI art for your SMB. Be sure to look for AI art generators that are rated ‘brand-safe’ to ensure that your business isn’t at risk of copyright infringements.
Refine Brand Guidelines for AI Outputs
Another essential method for maintaining the quality of your AI outputs is including your brand guidelines within AI prompts. This measure helps to ensure that all your generated assets maintain brand consistency and are ready for publication with minimal processing.
Commercial-grade tools like Adobe Firefly Foundry are ideal here again, as they specifically include brand guideline parameters that help enterprise clients generate outputs across a consistent style.
For SMBs looking to use AI art generators for social media and content production, ensuring AI generated content stays stylistically aligned can make content automation processes a lot more feasible, sustainable, and risk-free.
Ensure AI Outputs are Always Purpose-Driven
One thing we’ve observed in digital spheres over the past few years is that consumer audiences don’t respond well to frivolous content online. To ensure your AI art assets always hit the mark, SMBs are encouraged to keep their content ‘purpose-driven’. This means never publishing content for the sake of content.
Yes, it’s worth keeping your channels up-to-date, but publishing content that consistently provides no value can run the risk of your web presence looking less quality and more spammy.
Balance Ethics with Engagement
On the same note as keeping your AI use purpose-driven, SMBs are also encouraged to take AI ethics into account when using AI art generators. Using commercially-safe tools that are designed not to infringe on copyrights and IP is essential here, and can help provide your SMB with cultivating a conscientious and authoritative digital presence.
If you have the capacity to do so, it can also be worthwhile integrating an AI code of conduct into your company policies to provide process infrastructure as your business grows.
Maintaining a proactive approach to AI integration can help ensure your standards for generative AI use aren’t lost in the fog as the commercial gains of your AI strategies come to fruition and your company inevitably begins to grow.
Adopt a ‘Human in the Loop’ Workflow
Finally, one staple of your AI code of conduct should always be the integration of a ‘human in the loop’ to manage quality control for all of your AI content. Having a dedicated content and marketing specialist or even a team of specialists as your company grows, can help ensure that all your AI-generated art aligns with not only your brand guidelines, but also consumer sentiments and preferences across your target audiences online.
Harness the Power of Quality AI Art for your Small Business
Unlocking the full commercial potential of AI art for your small business does require a little bit of set-up and tailored strategising. AI tools that grow with your business cannot be set up overnight, and if you’re yet to define your brand guidelines, this will undoubtedly need to be ticked off first before you can even think about quality output control.
The good news is that industry-leading AI tools like Adobe Firefly are designing their systems with business owners in mind – so the tech is only growing more and more enterprise-friendly.
If you adopt their AI art tools earlier, however, you can benefit from having models that are campaign-ready faster, which will indefatigably help you keep a leg up on your competitors, even if your competitors happen to be enterprises themselves.
