As A Small Business, You Will Be Greatly Impacted By AI. Now Let's Get Ready

As the owner and founder of Media Leveling, I spoke with many small businesses from food industries to art, fitness, and etc. Most small businesses are aware that AI is impacting us at a significant level. Some might even be aware of some of the very recent layoffs from Meta, PayPal, Microsoft, Hopkins, but when I asked them how AI was impacting them. They told me that they were not much impacted. 

Disruption of Economy Impacts Consumer Behavior

AI bubbles are taking away jobs. Those who are impacted, likely all of us, would be more cautious with the spend. What could be worse is when consumers are out of money. What would consumers do when they do not have money? Consumers would slow down with spending. Value driven purchases would likely replace some of the impulsive buy, not completely but significantly. With people having less buying power, small businesses will be impacted especially businesses that focus on selling luxurious products to middle class. Pricing is perhaps more important than ever before because now consumers need to justify why they must spend the money now at a great amount. 

Noticeable Slowdown in Digital Commerce

Digital commerce gets hit the first when the economy is slowing down. Solely reliant on digital commerce can be detrimental. This means that if you have a trade shows to go, go and get very prepared. If you do not have trade shows on the calendar, go and schedule some. This does not mean digital commerce does not matter, it matters more than before because with all AI contents, your store would likely get less traffic than before. Strategic planning to run a digital business, intentionally crafted content, collaboration with other small businesses to boost organic traffic matter MORE than ever before. This might also mean that some good ads need to be put out there too. You need to have more investment~

Apply other sells technique to encourage people to buy. "Support small businesses" is a trigger but it is so overly used. Why must they support you? How are you bringing value to the consumers is what you should be focusing on. 

Loss of Digital Presence

I recommend to many small businesses that they must focus on one social media to engage consumers are different marketing funnel phases. Focus on one and do a good job. How the social media works now is no longer the same as the time when we had the COVID pandemic. Publishing one mediocre post will not get you anywhere. Consistent quality content gets you to places. The algorithm might not be fair to new faces on social media, or to those that now start to commit. Keep pushing. Good content + consistency + viral content technique + ad boost help ~