Building Your Own Automated Marketing System with Agentic AI for Denver Small Businesses in 2025
Discover how Denver small businesses can leverage agentic AI to automate their marketing efforts. This guide walks you through setting up essential platforms like Mailchimp, Buffer, Canva, and Google My Business, laying the groundwork for a smarter, more efficient marketing system in 2025.
Welcome to the first post in our series on agentic AI for Denver small businesses! I’m Benjamin Blair, a 20+ year marketing veteran who’s passionate about helping local businesses thrive. Today, we’ll set up profiles on key platforms to prepare for automated marketing with agentic AI. Don’t worry—you can absolutely handle these steps yourself, even if you’re new to tech. Let’s get started!
Why Start Here?
Setting up profiles on the right platforms is the foundation for automating your marketing. These accounts will later connect to agentic AI tools that handle tasks like scheduling and personalization, saving you time while growing your Denver business.
The Platforms You’ll Need
We’ll use four free tools that are perfect for small businesses and ready for AI integration:
Mailchimp: For email marketing with AI-driven features.
Buffer: To schedule social media posts across platforms.
Canva: For creating visuals with AI assistance.
Google My Business (GMB): To boost your local presence in Denver.
You can set up all these profiles in under an hour—let’s walk through the steps together.
Step-by-Step Setup Guide
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform built to help small businesses grow. From email campaigns to automations and audience insights, it makes it easy to connect with customers and drive results.
1. Mailchimp (Email Marketing)
Mailchimp’s free plan lets you manage contacts and send emails with AI help (e.g., optimizing send times). Here’s how to start:
Go to mailchimp.com and sign up with your email (e.g., yourbusiness@gmail.com).
Create a list called “Denver Customers” and add a few contacts (e.g., from your phone).
You can set this up in 10 minutes—I promise you’ve got this!
Buffer is a super handy social media management tool designed to help individuals, creators, and small businesses streamline their online presence. With Buffer, you can schedule posts across various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, Threads, and even YouTube.
2. Buffer (Social Media Scheduling)
Buffer lets you schedule posts for up to 3 social accounts (e.g., X, LinkedIn, Instagram). It also has AI to suggest post times.
Visit buffer.com and sign up for the free plan.
Connect your social accounts (e.g., your X handle @yourbusiness).
Schedule your first post (e.g., “Excited to grow my Denver business!”).
You’re capable of this—it’s quick and straightforward!
Canva is a user-friendly design platform that lets anyone create stunning graphics, presentations, and social media content with drag-and-drop ease—no design experience needed.
3. Canva (Content Creation)
Canva’s free plan includes AI tools like Magic Design to create stunning graphics for your posts.
Head to canva.com and create a free account.
Search for “Social Media Post” and use the AI to generate a design (e.g., “Denver Sale!”).
Download your design—you can do this easily in minutes!
Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool that helps businesses manage their online presence across Google Search and Maps, making it easier for customers to find and connect with them.
4. Google My Business (Local SEO)
Google My Business helps Denver customers find you, with AI insights to improve your profile.
Go to business.google.com and claim your business.
Add your Denver address, hours, and phone number.
You’ve got this—it’s a simple way to boost local visibility!
Download Detailed Guides
Need more help? I’ve created detailed guides for each platform, with step-by-step instructions to ensure you succeed. Download them below:
These guides walk you through every click, so you can set up with confidence.
What’s Next?
Now that your profiles are ready, our next post will show you how to connect these platforms to agentic AI for automation—think automated emails, scheduled posts, and more! Stay tuned for the rest of the series, and let me know how this setup goes for you in the comments or on LinkedIn.
Let’s keep growing your Denver business together!
Your Website Is Not a Brochure—It’s a Growth Engine
Your Website Is Not a Brochure—It’s a Growth Engine
If your website isn’t generating leads, it’s not a website—it’s a liability.
Topics:
What separates high-performing sites from static ones
The role of speed, UX, and conversion paths
Real-world changes that drive traffic and conversions
CTA: Tie into the Accelerator Plan (hands-on support)
If you are like most businesses, you treat your website like a digital flyer—something to point people towards, not a platform that actually move the needle. Don’t take it personally, for most of my marketing career, that is how websites were built. Informational, branded, and static. Pretty but passive. Tons of work upfront, but then kind of just fading into another marketing asset rather than an engine to drive growth.
In todays market, a passive website is actually a liability.
Websites should generate revenue, not just impressions.
As I have waxed on about in nauseum, the modern customer journey is fragmented and non-linear. People aren’t just landing on your home or landing pages and just immediately filling out a contact form. They bounce between pages, look you up on social media, read every negative review they can find, check out your content, etc., all before most business owners even know they exist.
If your website isn’t designed with a strategy to guide and convert this anonymous visitors in to qualified leads, than it is failing at it most important function. Your website is not a brochure, it isn’t a text book, and it isn’t a welcome mat, it is the starting line of your sales engine.
What separates growth driven websites from static ones?
If we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of websites look fine on the surface, but are bleeding opportunity underneath. Fixing this problem can seem like a bit of a daunting task, so I have put together the most common areas where things fall apart so you have somewhere to start diagnosing.
Slow load times and poor mobile optimization. Search engines and users penalize it. User bounce has massive impact on your site and it is a relatively simple fix.
Lack of clear conversion pathways. If you aren’t showing users the next step, they aren’t going to take it. Period, its that simple.
Generic messaging. This is becoming more and more of a problem as people have AI write their content instead of rolling of their sleeves and writing it themselves. Your website should sound and feel like you, not some corporate template or some AI generated jargon. People like people.
No data feedback loop. This is not the time to “set it and forget it.” If you aren’t testing, tracking, and reiterating, you are making assumptions rather than improvements.
The role of UX, Speed, and Conversion Strategy
The very best, high performance websites on the market aren’t just pretty, they are purposeful. Every element serves a function to support the primary objective of the site, conversion.
Here are some of the common aspects of the most effective websites that give them an edge over their competition:
Speed First- For starters, effective websites are fast…like under 2.5s load time or you are losing leads, prospects are bouncing, and you SEO is suffering. You site needs to feel instant.
Frictionless UX- The design should get out of the way of the message. Despite the incredible talent and creativity of our graphic designers, function and message should always be the focus. Clean navigation, mobile first wins every time.
Conversion Pathways on every page- More than just a call to action at the bottom of a landing page, the most effective sites guide the user on every single page. Soft asks, hard asks, and contextual prompts keep momentum towards conversion.
Designed with User Psychology in mind- The use of authority signals, scarcity cues, testimonials and social consent, as well as visuals that reduce uncertainty and built trust are all standard in any conversion focused website.
Real-world changes that drive actual Real Growth
Like most things in life, a small strategic shift in thinking and planning will lead to massive performance gains. I have seen conversion rates double after rewriting a single headline to better reflect a customer’s pain point. I have had websites reduce bounce rates by over 40% overnight by shaving a couple seconds off of load time. A couple of years ago at a Solar Engineering Firm whose lead generation I was managing, we tripled our lead volume while reducing our CPA all by just adding a simple downloadable checklist as a mid-funnel magnet.
The Bottom Line
Your website isn’t a billboard, it isn’t a brochure. It is the engine that fuels your growth. If it isn’t tuned to convert, it is costing you money every single day. The bright side? Most sites only need a few focused changes to go from flat to high performing.
Let’s make this work for you!
I don’t just build pretty websites. I build systems that scale.
I take a hands-on role in optimizing your site to drive traffic, capture leads, and convert attention into action.