AI and Digital Marketing – The Big Picture

With new AI tools and features launching every week it can be hard to keep up.

My honest view is that you do not need to learn everything. You just need to know what matters. What should you really focus on first and what can you leave for now and catch up with later. That is exactly what this post is going to give you.

 

The Framework You Need

I think about AI tools in four categories:

1. Essential — things that will directly help you grow your sales right now. You need to understand how to get the most out of LLMs like Chat GPT and you need to know how Google’s AI search engine works.
2. Very useful — things that will support your marketing and save you time such as how to use the best AI image tools.
3. Becoming important — AI agents such as Claude CoWork. Things you don’t 100% need yet but you should start getting your head around because these will become very important.
4. Nice to know — AI for making videos. It’s very interesting but not going to move the needle for your business

Most people make the mistake of going straight to category four which is the flashy exciting stuff and ignoring the essentials.

 

1. Essential #1: Learn to get the best results from a Large Language Model

A large language model  (Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude) is an AI that you ask questions and get expert answers from. If you are not using one of these tools regularly for your business this is where you start.

From a marketing point of view, you can ask it how to grow your sales over the next 12 months. You can ask it to help you price a new service. You can ask it how to use Instagram to attract more customers for your business. You can ask it to write a social media post, a product description, or an email newsletter — all tailored to your specific business.

You don’t need to be a marketing expert. You just need to ask the right questions.

 

So which tool should you use?

My advice is to start with ChatGPT. It’s the one most people begin with, and there’s a good reason for that — it’s excellent and you can easily secure your privacy.  Learn how to use it properly. Get comfortable with it.

Once you feel confident, move to Gemini. Here’s why that matters: most of what you pay €20 a month for in ChatGPT is available for free in Gemini. You can attach images, attach videos, share your screen on your phone and have a live conversation with it. You can create unlimited images. It’s incredibly powerful — and it’s free.

When you are feeling comfortable with both of those and you’re thinking “I want to go further”, your next step is Claude. Claude has developed a very strong reputation for writing content that sounds like you. People who use it consistently say the same thing … “ it just gets me”. It writes in their voice and the business-focused tools they have been building are really useful. I think you will hear more and more about Claude this year and you should familiarize yourself with it.

And then there’s Grok — Elon Musk’s AI. It’s optional. If you want an AI that gives you more direct, less filtered answers, it’s worth exploring. But it’s not where I’d be sending you first.

 

The main thing most people are missing

There’s a big difference between a) asking a question and getting a good answer and b) setting up your AI tool properly so that it is an expert in your business and industry and every answer it gives you is highly tailored to your business.

The way to do this is through what are called Projects in Chat GPT and Claude or Gems in Gemini. Think of it as creating a version of the AI where it already knows who you are, what you sell, who your customers are and what you’re trying to achieve. Every answer it gives you from that point on is built on that foundation.

You can achieve that by adding deep research to the project. You can generate deep research reports for free, five times a month in Chat GPT and Gemini.  When you add these deep research reports to your project as context you are now operating at a completely different level from most business owners. You are not just asking questions, you are getting advice that is highly tailored to you.

 

Essential #2: Understand AI Search

This one is urgent and most businesses are not paying attention to it yet, which means there is a real opportunity for you right now.

Google is changing. It launched its AI search engine called  AI mode and it is going to become the main way people use Google. So more and more people are using AI mode when searching for something like “best family-friendly restaurants in Limerick” or “accountant in Cork”. What is Google today will become the optional extra. AI mode will become the default.

So the question you need to be asking is “when someone searches for what I offer in my area, am I appearing in those AI recommendations?” If you don’t know the answer to that, go and check right now. Search for what you do, in your location and ask Google AI mode to recommend the best options. Are you on the list?

If you are not, there are specific things you can do to change that and the sooner you start, the better because as more businesses catch on, it will get more competitive.

 

2. Very Useful: AI for Creating Marketing Images

Once you have got the essentials working for you, creating marketing images using AI is where I would point you next.

The good news is that the free tools are excellent. Gemini’s image tool called Nano Banana  creates excellent images and you can use it to put your actual product into any setting you can imagine. It is remarkable what you can do, entirely for free.

Grok gives you unlimited free images as well and Meta AI produces some genuinely impressive results. And if you want professional-level quality and control, Midjourney at around €10 a month is still the best paid option.

The principle to understand here is simple: AI image tools are now good enough to create high-quality marketing visuals for your business at little or no cost without any design skills.

 

3. Getting Important: Agentic AI

You are going to hear a lot more about this over the next 3- 6 months so I want to make sure you understand what it means.

Everything I’ve described so far (Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude) is about the AI’s brain helping you. You ask it something, it gives you an answer, you do something with that answer. The AI is advising you.

Agentic AI is different. It’s the AI actually doing things for you.

Claude’s tool called Claude Cowork is the best example of this right now. You download it to your desktop, give it access to a folder on your computer and then ask it to do tasks such as organise your downloads by topic. Or, ask it to go and research the three companies I’m meeting this week and prepare a one-page briefing on each. Ask it to pull together a social media campaign based on my product information and save everything into a folder.

It goes off, does the work, and comes back with the result. Not just information, actual output.

It is very impressive and it is only going to get better. By the end of this year, all the major AI tools (Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude)  are aiming to be fully agentic. The AI will stop just advising you and start working for you.

You don’t need to learn everything about agents right now. But you should be aware this is coming because it will change how you do digital marketing significantly.

 

4. Nice to Know: AI Video

I know this might surprise you because AI video is everywhere right now and a lot of people see it as the exciting frontier of all this.

My honest view is that it’s the least important thing on this list for growing your sales.

There are an awful lot of AI-generated videos out there that look generic hollow and nothing like real marketing. Your customers want to see you, your face, your personality, your business, your real environment. That is what builds trust. That is what sells.

So keep making your own videos. Definitely use AI video tools to create background footage, interesting B-roll or visual content for voice over videos that you couldn’t otherwise create. Grok is excellent for this for free and tools like Gemini, OpenArt and Midjourney give you impressive capabilities for a around €10  a month.

But my advice is don’t replace your real presence with AI-generated content.

 

Where to Start

If you take one piece of advice from everything in this post, it would be this. Don’t try to learn everything and start doing the essentials properly.

Set up Chat GPT or Gemini with a project. Give it proper context about your business. Use the thinking model, not the fast model, when you are asking anything important. Run a deep research on your business and then go and check whether you are appearing in Google’s AI mode results for what you offer.

Do those things well, and you will be ahead of the vast majority of Irish business owners when it comes to AI for your marketing. And then move on from there.

 

 

Want step-by-step guidance?

If you would like step-by-step guidance on how to use AI to increase your sales, everything you need is in our Digital Marketing School where you can stream my courses that cover:

• How to create projects and Gems in Chat GPT and Gemini to get expert level answers tailored to your business
• How to get found in Google’s new AI mode (AI search engine)
• How to use AI to improve your social media marketing
• How to create images using the main AI tools
• Plus our upcoming live Zoom next Wednesday for members covers Claude AI and how to use it as an AI agent.
• Plus a live Zoom course with me every month that keeps you up-to-date on the latest digital marketing tactics and tools.

 

The members’ website also gives you a digital marketing plan for 2026 and courses covering Canva, website marketing, SEO, video marketing, social media marketing – everything you need to grow your sales using digital marketing.

 You can get more details here