AI marketing tools for time-poor solopreneurs
If you run your business on your own, "which AI tool should I use for my marketing?" is the wrong question. Ask "which task is eating my week?" instead.
It's the question we open Marketing at Machine Speed with on Thursday 8 October. It's also the thread through our whole NSW Small Business Month series. As I wrote last week in Build your own AI-powered marketing machine, AI hasn't changed the fundamentals of marketing. It's changed the workload.
So start with the workload.
The real cost isn't the subscription
A $30 subscription is the smallest number in this sum. The real cost is the hours, and the decision fatigue of juggling tools that don't talk to each other.
Most small business owners are stretched before the marketing even starts. In Dext's Built for Bigger Things research, a survey of 500 Australian SME decision-makers, a staggering 40% said they spend more time on finance admin than on growing their business (Dext, 2025). Marketing admin sits on top of that!
So before you look at any tool, look at last week and ask these three questions:
What did you do more than twice?
What did you put off because it's tedious?
What needed your judgement, and what didn't?
The answers to the first two are your shortlist. The third tells you what stays with you.
Four jobs worth handing to AI
For most solopreneurs, the same four jobs come up again and again. In each one, AI does the first pass and you keep the part that needs you.
Content drafts: AI writes the first draft of a post, email or article. You bring the angle, the voice and the final edit.
Social captions: AI turns one piece into several captions. You pick, trim and schedule.
Email follow-ups: AI drafts the follow-up email from your meeting notes. You personalise it and send it.
Research: AI summarises a market, a competitor or a prospect before you meet. You check the sources and decide what to do with it.
Notice what isn't on the list? Your strategy, your offer and the conversation itself. That's the line Nimmity and I keep coming back to all month.
AI handles the transactional. People handle the relational.
Brief it like a new team member
Most of us started using AI like a search engine, so we still talk to it like one. One line in, one generic answer out. Then we decide AI "doesn't sound like us".
Same tool, different result, once you brief it properly. This is the five-line brief I'm sharing on 8 October:
Role: you're helping a [type of] business owner write [thing].
Audience: who's reading, and what they care about.
Voice: three words that describe how you sound.
Example: something you've written that you like.
Don'ts: words and phrases you never use.
Without a brief, you get copy that could belong to anyone, and rewriting it takes longer than writing it yourself. With one, the draft already sounds like you and the edits take minutes.
And it's even better if you build a proper Business Brain!
REMEMBER: Whatever AI drafts, you need to read it before it goes out. That's the one rule I don't break.
Is this tool worth it? Four questions before you subscribe
Ask these in order, before you add anything:
Which task does it replace? No clear task = no subscription.
Does it talk to what you already use? Another island adds admin.
What does it cost to learn? Count the hours, not just the fee.
Do you already own it? Check what your current tools can do first.
The last one surprises people. In my experience, most solopreneurs are already paying for something that could do the job they're about to buy another tool for.
Your five-minute time audit
Try this before Thursday. It's the exercise we do live in the session.
List five things you did last week.
Star the ones that repeat.
Pick one that fits the four jobs above.
Try the five-line brief on it this afternoon.
Bring your list. You'll get far more out of the demos with a real task in mind than with a general sense that marketing takes too long.
See it done live on 8 October
Marketing at Machine Speed: AI Tools That Actually Save You Time is the second session in our NSW Small Business Month series, co-hosted with Nimmity Zappert of Authentic Selling.
It's the practical marketing one. Three live demos, start to finish: one blog post turned into five social captions, a follow-up email written from rough meeting notes, and a ten-minute research brief. Nim adds where the same tools help your selling, without losing the human touch.
It's on Thursday 8 October, 11:30am to 12:30pm AEDT, online. Tickets are $10 ($7 for members), or $50 ($40 for members) for the series bundle.
A week later, on 15 October, Nim leads Selling as a Human: Less AI Sales Slop. More You which covers practical ways to support your selling with AI and not lose the human touch.
Register for Thursday 8 October →
Or book the rest of the series with the bundle →
Frequently asked questions
I've tried AI tools before and they didn't save me any time. What's different?
Most first attempts fail because people choose a tool before naming the task. This session starts with your task list, not a tool list.
Do I need technical skills?
No. Nothing in this session needs code. For most solopreneurs, the hard part is deciding what to hand over, not the set-up.
How much time will I get back?
It depends on your task list, which is why the time audit matters more than any tool recommendation. In my experience, some solopreneurs get back an hour a week. Once drafting and follow-ups are both handled, others get back closer to half a day.
I've already got a system I mostly like. Is this still relevant?
Yes. The value usually isn't in tearing down what works. It's in finding the one or two tasks still done by hand next to a system that could absorb them.
