AI in Action: Boosting Sales with AI-Powered Marketing Materials

First published in February 2024 and rewritten in October 2026. The client work below took place before the original publication date. The final section is new.

The problem

A small clothing boutique was struggling to compete with larger retailers and online brands. It had a limited marketing budget and few resources for creating strong ad campaigns.

What we did

We set the boutique up with Airo, GoDaddy's AI tool for small businesses, which generates marketing materials such as social media posts and targeted ads. It gave the boutique a way to produce good marketing material without hiring an agency.

What happened

• More engagement. The AI-generated ads led to a 20% rise in social media engagement and website traffic.
• Better targeting. Airo allowed better targeting of local demographics, and the conversion rate from targeted ads rose by 15%.
• Lower cost. Airo's subscription was a cost-effective way to create high-quality marketing materials compared with hiring an agency.

After the project, the boutique reworked its marketing strategy and output, made important changes across the business and kept the work running effectively in-house.

What Airo is now

Airo has changed a lot since then. GoDaddy's February 2024 launch announcement described logo designs, websites, email campaigns, a social media calendar and social and search ads. In November 2025 GoDaddy launched Airo.ai in beta, an agentic version that it says "turns a simple conversation into completed tasks for small businesses", from registering a domain to building and publishing a website.

What we would do today

AI-generated marketing material is now everywhere, and that moves the advantage. When every boutique can produce a polished post in seconds, the material that stands out is the material that sounds like one particular shop and the person who runs it.

• Content in the owner's voice. The owner records a voice note about new stock or this week's styling ideas. The content engine turns it into posts, a newsletter and carousels that sound like the owner. Nothing publishes without approval.
• A check on every draft. Generating is easy, and checking is the hard part. In outreach, my quality gate checks every AI draft against the client's rules, rewrites it up to three times and holds it if it still fails. It has stopped 1,420 weak drafts from going out.
• The admin behind the marketing. Order confirmations, customer records and low-stock alerts run automatically on systems the boutique owns, so the time saved on content is not lost elsewhere.

Done carefully, AI writing beats the alternative. Over 16 weeks, with the same audience and sequence, AI-written messages drew replies from 13.6% of people against 7.7% for a client's own templates. It is cheap, too: in August 2026, writing and checking outreach messages with AI cost about $3 to $6 per 1,000 messages.

If you want to know which of your marketing and admin jobs could run themselves, start with the 10-Hour Audit.