For many small and medium sized businesses, marketing isn’t a department it’s a task squeezed in between everything else. Whether it’s writing a newsletter, updating the website, or figuring out what to post on social media, it often falls to whoever has a spare moment and a decent grasp of grammar.
That’s where Notebook LM comes in. It’s an experimental tool from Google that uses AI to help you make sense of your own documents whether that’s a business plan, customer feedback, or last year’s product brochure. You simply upload the files, ask questions, and it responds with summaries, suggestions, or even draft content and It’s surprisingly good.
What Can It Actually Do?
Notebook LM can help with:
- Generating ideas for blog posts, emails, or social media updates based on your own materials.
- Creating audio content: If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or adding voiceovers to your website, Notebook LM can help you script and structure audio files. It won’t record them for you, but it can give you a solid starting point. In our case it delivered a 14 minute pod cast based purely on our web site and it was pretty awesome.
A Sensible Word of Warning
As with any AI tool, it’s important to be cautious. Don’t upload anything sensitive, confidential, or personal. That includes customer data, financials, or anything you wouldn’t want floating around the internet. Notebook LM is designed with privacy in mind, but it’s still experimental, and best used for general content and ideas. Most AI tools need data to be more accurate and relevant. Don’t give them access to your data without expecting them to use that data for training their own models going forward, which could mean your data ends up in someone else’s content. Only share data you’re comfortable with being in the public domain.
Top Tip: If you wouldn’t email it to a stranger, don’t upload it to an AI.
Final Thought
Notebook LM isn’t going to replace your business instincts or your understanding of your customers. But it might save you time, spark a few good ideas, and make marketing feel a bit less like a chore. For SMEs juggling a dozen priorities, that’s no small thing.