In the summer of 1968, audiences everywhere were shocked by the sights and visions presented in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick’s cinematic opus featured technologies that seemed, well, extremely far-fetched at the time. Taking center stage was an artificial intelligence known as HAL 9000.
While we’re still quite a bit away from AI singing Daisy, developments in AI have started to impact work everywhere, including marketing. These tools are powerful additions to any marketing team. Below, we’ll discuss the benefits and cover 15 tools you can use today.
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The Benefits of Using AI in Marketing
Whenever AI or automation comes up, many fear AI causing mass unemployment. This is nothing new. People had the same fear back in the 1800s during the industrial revolution, and the Luddites were literally going around with sledgehammers breaking machines.
After the huge splash from the release of ChatGPT, there is little doubt that AI is impacting marketing jobs already. Research from the University of Pennsylvania estimates that “19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.”
The key word in that statement, though, is impacted.
Marketers who learn to leverage AI-powered tools will see better results from their campaigns and diversify their skillset.
Today’s AI tools still have a huge amount of growth potential. Still, those already available can significantly reduce the time it takes to complete tasks and reduce the lift for completing complex tasks, all while running 24/7 with no downtime.
15 AI Tools for Marketers
AI in marketing has been sweeping the news, mostly in the content generation space.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022 and had millions of users within weeks. Marketing teams were experimenting with the tool’s limits, testing everything from writing blog posts to campaign ideation to composing emails.
While content-related tasks are the current lightning rod around AI, plenty of other use cases stretch across various marketing disciplines. We will talk about 15 tools you can use today to make your team more efficient.
1. HubSpot
- Price: Free.
- Best for: Creating written content.
- What it does: Hubspot’s content assistant is a suite of free, AI-powered features that help you plan, create, and share remarkable content quickly.
Creating content isn’t easy. And creating content that supports an entire organization can be extremely time-consuming. Our AI content assistant makes content creation simpler. It integrates with all of your HubSpot tools to generate and share quality content.
You can use content assistant tools to write blog posts, landing pages, and more, along with conversation intelligence — all without needing to switch between different tools.
What we love: Content Assistant can help you generate SEO-optimized outlines if you still want to do the writing yourself.
2. Jasper.ai
- Price: Plans start at $40 per month.
- Best for: Content creation and ideation.
- What it does: Jasper.ai’s platform is capable of just about everything you’d hope a good writing assistant should do, short of going on a coffee run.
Jasper.ai’s easy-to-use interface can help you generate ideas, craft first drafts, and edit final posts. Their available templates cover social, PPC, blogging, and more.
It does take practice to insert prompts that get the result you’re looking for, but Jasper.ai is an excellent tool for conquering the blank page.
Remember: As with so many of the other AI content tools on the market, Jasper is based on GPT-3. Its ability to write naturally will only improve with time.
3. Howler AI
- Price: $8,000 per month.
- Best for: Targeted campaigns for press releases.
- What it does: Sifts through a database of 600 thousand journalists to find those that fit your industry and niche based on what they’ve written or published about before.
Journalists’ inboxes are inundated with pitches. With Howler.AI, your team can increase the chances that your email won’t end up in the trash. Likewise, a hyper-targeted approach can ensure you align with the journalists’ existing audience.
What we love: Howler AI can help you write and perfect your pitch to help you generate interest.
4. 6Sense Revenue AI for Marketing
- Price: Free versions are available. Pricing is available upon inquiry.
- Best for: Account targeting and prioritization.
- What it does: Leverages AI to analyze audience data to glean visibility into anonymous buying team research to prioritize accounts and to help focus resources.
When only a small fraction of your total addressable market is buying at any given time, having insight into who is actually looking for a change can turn marketing from guesswork into a predictable pipeline.
Long a contender in the intent data space, 6Sense now has AI sifting through the massive amount of intent data to surface actionable insights. That way, your team is focusing on the highest-value activities at any given time.
What we love: 6Sense can help you match buying signals to accounts across devices and channels.
5. Adverity
- Price: Plans start at $500 per month.
- Best for: Data analytics
- What it does: Centralizes all marketing data from various sources, including campaigns across all channels, where it can be easily analyzed.
No marketer will ever say that they have too little data. Adverity helps give a single-pane view into your marketing analytics. This can help your team surface trends and insights that empower you to make better, more informed decisions.
Data governance is also built into the platform. This can help you ensure that your information is complete and high-quality. You can also maintain complete control of your data all from one place.
What we love: Adverity has pre-built connectors and no-code templates that allow you to use the platform without coding expertise.
6. Drift
- Price: Plans start at $2,500 per month.
- Best for: Conversational marketing
- What it does: Turns the choose-your-own-adventure chatbot experience into an interactive support and lead generation tool.
Drift has trained its AI to answer human questions and integrated it into its chatbot experience. This way, if a person has a question that is not featured in the chosen path, users will still get an answer or otherwise be routed directly to a person.
What we love: Drift’s AI features can help give a VIP experience to key accounts or relieve overburdened support teams from answering simple questions that the bot can handle.
7. Zapier
- Pricing: Free plans are available. Paid plans start at $19 a month.
- Best for: Text parsing.
- What it does: Connect your apps to automated workflows, saving your team time so you can focus on growth.
Zapier is designed to help you scale your business by automating time-intensive tasks. For marketers, that could include sending contacts to email lists and kicking off important workflows.
Zapier can also turn text-based input — whether that’s emails, Slack messages, Tweets, or a form — into data and answer simple questions. Whether routing hand raisers from a “Contact Us” form or lead routing, Zapier can drastically cut down on manual work.
What we love: With automated text analysis, marketing teams can also parse huge amounts of text and acquire valuable insights from customer feedback that people might miss.
8. Brand24
- Price: Plans start at $69 per month.
- Best for: Social listening and sentiment analysis.
- What it does: Sifts through massive amounts of information generated on public platforms, whether that’s social media or forums. Provides organizations with a dashboard that analyzes everything from mentions, the volume of discussion, and overall brand sentiment.
Customers today expect brands to respond quickly on social media. The trouble is, if an organization is present across every major social media platform, there’s simply too much data to keep track of every comment, mention, and trending topic — and spot the signal through the noise.
Brand24 helps surface the conversations that your community management, evangelists, or social media teams should be paying attention to.
What we love: Brand24 insights can help you identify ways to improve your marketing campaign and even the product itself.
9. MarketMuse
- Price: Free. Paid plans start at $149 per month.
- Best for: Content strategy and planning.
- What it does: Analyzes your website and uncovers top opportunities in search, helping surface gaps in your content.
Depending on how long your content engine has been running, the volume of content existing on your website could make auditing everything a time suck. MarketMuse can help you focus on what matters: creating better content your audience wants.
What we love: MarketMuse can help you find keywords that match your content. You’ll also see ways to optimize your content for search engine result pages.
10. Semrush
- Price: Plans start at $119.95 per month.
- Best for: Search Engine Optimization
- What it does: Helps generate content and ensure your writing is optimized for SEO.
Semrush has long been a top contender for managing keyword targeting for SEO and paid campaigns. Now they’ve integrated AI in the form of The SEO Writing Assistant (SWA), making an already powerful platform even more robust.
What we love: SWA is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s like a personal writing assistant who can ensure your writing is targeted toward achieving the best results in search.
11. Crayon
- Price: Pricing is available upon request.
- Best for: Competitive Intelligence
- What it does: Automatically gathers and organizes data from millions of sources to help you track industry trends.
Similar to Semrush, Crayon has been a leader in their field for years. They’ve recently integrated AI to help sort through millions of data points from sources across the web to help you gain a better competitive advantage.
Crayon’s AI and machine learning integrations help make sense of what information is important about your competitors and what’s just noise. It helps keep track of SEC filings, pricing updates, messaging pivots, and more while summarizing the important information in an easy-to-share format.
What we love: You can take a deep dive into competitors. Crayon assesses your competitors’ digital footprints to provide a view of the competitive landscape.
12. Lavender
- Price: Pricing starts at $29 per month.
- Best for: Email training.
- What it does: Plugs directly into your email platform of choice and suggests how to improve email content to drive more replies.
If you’re looking to optimize your emails, Lavender can help. Whether you’re writing an internal memo or a pitch for journalists, Lavender can compose the text for you — or just help you optimize your message.
Lavender can also help your sales teams. Account executives and sales development representatives can craft personalized emails to hook prospects.
What we love: Lavender gathers prospect news, data, and insights so you can craft a personalized, timely message to close deals.
13. Braze
- Price: Pricing is available upon request.
- Best for: Customer intelligence.
- What it does: Integrates with all your data sources (CRM, MAP, etc.) and looks for signals that a customer might be at risk for churn or shows interest in potential upsell opportunities. Suggests potential messaging strategies to use based on that same data.
Many organizations have been laser-focused on customer retention. Braze helps even the smallest teams save thousands of hours sifting through data to understand what their customers need, whether that’s an additional feature or more engagement from their account managers.
Sometimes the signals related to churn are difficult to see. Braze can help your sales team re-engage prospects with marketing content, customer support, and more.
What we love: Braze can also help marketing create personalized offers using data. You can also A/B test your campaigns to see how they impact sales.
14. Axiom.ai
- Pricing: Plans start at $15 a month.
- Best for: Automation of repetitive tasks.
- What it does: Automates scraping and interacts with websites in simple ways that previously required a person.
Unlike the process flow automation offered by tools like Zapier, Axiom.ai falls into a category known as Robotic Process Automation.
Axiom.ai can scrape data and automate simple tasks. Your team can gather data from Google Trends, automate website actions, and build bots.
What we love: Axiom can scrape websites for data, extract information, or perform other simple user interface actions.
15. Hemingway
Pricing: $19.99
Best for: Content editing.
What it does: Analyzes your content and suggests where you could make it clearer, more concise, or improve your diction.
As Strunk and White suggest, you should omit needless words when writing. The only question that we sometimes have is, which ones? Hemingway uses AI and machine learning to identify opportunities at a sentence level that can make your writing that much stronger.
What we love: Hemingway gives you a readability score so you can assess your overall performance.
Getting Started
Used properly, ethically, and with the right guidelines in place, AI is no different than any other tool. Marketing teams can and should be using all the tools at their disposal to maximize their impact on revenue generation.
So while the whole HAL 9000 thing may not be on the horizon anytime soon, well…it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be nice to the robots.
