• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 14, 2023

Almost all small business marketers believe they need to adopt AI, judging by The Future Of AI Marketing Isn’t Added On—It’s Built In, a study by Intuit Mailchimp, with a survey conducted by Forrester. 

Of the SMBs polled, 88% believe they must increase their use of automation and AI to meet customer expectations and stay competitive.  

What’s more, 68% say that strategically boosting their adoption of marketing automation is important or very important to their organization.  

But many are unable to leverage these advanced tools. The following issues are holding them back from achieving their goals: 

• Limited understanding of how our creative execution compares to best practices — 53%
• Inadequate AI adoption — 50%
• Limited ability to compare their performance to industry peers — 44%
• Lack of internal skills/staff — 42%
• Inadequate automation adoption — 41% 
• Lack of standard processes — 35% 

Here's one more problem: 70% lack data-driven recommendations to improve performance compared to their peers. Many have to manually pull data.

Still, the need is there, and growing ever more urgent: 88% of marketers say customer expectations are at an all-time high.  

Why are they so high? “There are three key factors that explain these elevated expectations,” says Michelle Taite, chief marketing officer, Intuit Mailchimp. “First, customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and want a more personalized experience from the brands they interact with.” 

“Second, customers crave connected journeys with consistent interactions across all of their marketing channels. And third, customers have a strong desire to see more innovation from the companies they support— including better products and newer ways to access those products,” Taite adds. 

Small businesses seem to know this, and they also realize there are risks to not doing a good job of deploying automation and AI technology: 

• Limited scalability — 49%
• Low Customer Acquisition — 43%
• Decreased Competitive Advantage — 42% 
• Decreased Efficiency — 40%

What to do? “My advice to marketers is to take time to understand machine learning and understand what it unlocks in terms of the potential to differentiate groups of customers at scale to stay ahead of the curve,” says Maya Wilson, director of data science at Intuit Mailchimp. “AI-powered tools are starting to understand content the way a marketer understands it, and can provide recommendations based on that understanding. This can be used for design, segmentation strategy and content optimization.”

Forrester surveyed 313 small business marketers in North America, Australia and the UK in March 2023.