No marketing department? This page is for you.
In plenty of good businesses, the marketing is the owner, the office manager, and whoever built the website. AI can save that small team real hours. It also hands you a new job: checking what it writes before a customer reads it.
Before you spend anything on AI, count two things for one ordinary week: the hours it could save, and the hours someone will spend checking what it produces. The calculator on this site does the sums and turns them into pounds over a year.
If the saving is bigger than the checking, carry on. If it isn't, you have found out cheaply.
The jobs that eat the evenings.
These are the tasks owners most often hand to AI first. Each one still needs a person to read it before it goes out.
- First drafts of quotes, tenders and covering letters
- Turning site notes or job photos into a short social post or case study
- Replying to routine enquiries, using wording you have already approved
- Tidying up the website's service pages so they say what you actually do
- Summarising a long tender document so you can decide whether to bid
of UK workers who use AI at work have relied on its output without checking how accurate it was. In a small firm, the checker is usually you.KPMG Trust in AI study, UK respondents, 2025
Before you hand it the keys.
Prices and promises
AI will happily invent a delivery date, a discount or a guarantee. Make a short list of what it must never promise, and keep it next to the tool.
Customer details
Don't paste customers' personal information into free AI tools. Use a business account, and check what the provider does with what you type.
Being the only one who knows
If you set it all up yourself, write down which tools you use, what they do, which logins exist and who holds them. Keep the passwords themselves in a password manager, never on the page. One page is enough.
A guide for firms with no marketing team.
Prompts and checklists for the jobs smaller firms actually do, sector by sector: tenders, quotes, case studies, enquiries. If you'd like it, tell us your trade and the three jobs you'd most like AI to help with.