Getting Started with AI Tools That Ramp Up Your Marketing

AI is reshaping marketing at every level of the funnel. From research to creative to analytics, today’s AI-powered tools give business leaders the ability to move faster, cut costs, and compete with greater precision. 

The advantage doesn’t come from the tools alone. It comes from the right balance of human judgment and machine intelligence. As the saying goes: “AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.” 

For growth-minded businesses that run marketing in-house or rely on a partner, it’s critical to know which AI applications are worth adopting.

That’s why we created this guide. It highlights practical ways AI is being applied across key marketing functions—content generation, SEO, analytics, and beyond. For each tool, you’ll learn what it does, how it combines human + machine, and who benefits most from using it. 

AI-powered marketing applications focus on improving tasks like buyer targeting, content generation, and data-driven decision making designed to increase marketing ROI.

AI tools are emerging to enhance how marketers: 

• Deliver targeted, personalized content
• Generate content fast and efficiently
• Automate repetitive tasks like campaign management and social media scheduling
• Analyze and enhance images, videos, and other visual content
• Optimize content and websites for search purposes
• Use predictive analytics to drive more informed decision-making, especially around budget and other resource allocation

Many AI-enabled marketing tools rely on large language models (LLMs). An LLM is trained using huge datasets from many sources to learn human language patterns and relationships. The main benefit of an LLM is that it can perform natural language processing (NLP) tasks like generating or translating text, summarizing information, and answering questions. 

LLMs like OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude power a growing ecosystem of marketing applications and can draft content, summarize research, translate, and answer questions in real time. 

With this foundation in mind, the next section explores how AI is transforming content creation. 

AI is already changing how we create the content that’s a bedrock of effective marketing, in ways that sometimes go unnoticed. The popular design platform Canva is a prime example.

Many professionals use Canva to create marketing collateral and presentations. What you might not realize is the platform incorporates AI under the hood. That’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to use, even for non-designers. Need to adapt an existing photo to work as a social media image that has to fit a 1 x 1 size? Canva’s photo editing capabilities make it simple.

Today, there’s no shortage of content generation tools that leverage AI to improve this vital marketing task in ways that can improve your bottom line. Here a few that our team evaluated.

What It Does: 

Perplexity functions as an AI-powered research assistant that searches the internet in real time to answer your questions with cited sources. Instead of giving you a list of links to sort through, it reads multiple sources and synthesizes the information into clear, comprehensive answers. The platform combines the search capabilities of traditional search engines with the conversational intelligence of ChatGPT, delivering research results that feel more like consulting with a knowledgeable colleague than wading through search results. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Perplexity excels at gathering market intelligence, competitor analysis, and industry trends quickly. However, you still need human judgment to interpret the findings and translate them into actionable marketing strategies. The tool works best when you ask specific, well-crafted questions rather than broad queries. While it saves hours of manual research, the quality of insights depends heavily on how precisely you frame your research questions. 

Who It’s Best For: 

Marketing managers and strategists who need quick access to current market data, competitive intelligence, or industry research. It’s particularly valuable for busy executives who want comprehensive briefings on topics without spending time navigating multiple websites and sources. 

What It Does:

Claude is a general-purpose conversational AI assistant with particular strength in writing and communication. It can handle everything from brief email responses to comprehensive reports and marketing materials, while also supporting brainstorming, research synthesis, and other collaborative tasks. It excels at understanding context and maintaining consistent tone across different types of content. Unlike simpler AI tools, Claude can engage in back-and-forth dialogue about your work, helping you refine ideas and improve messaging through iterative collaboration. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:

Claude requires clear direction about your brand voice, target audience, and specific goals to produce effective marketing content. While it can generate initial drafts quickly, experienced marketers get the best results by treating it as a collaborative partner rather than a content generator. Human oversight ensures accuracy, brand alignment, and strategic relevance. 

Who It’s Best For:

Content marketers and communication professionals who want a versatile AI partner for writing, ideation, and refinement across formats. It’s especially useful for companies producing regular content without large writing teams, and for executives who need support articulating complex ideas clearly. 

What It Does: 

Midjourney creates custom images from text descriptions, allowing you to generate marketing visuals, social media graphics, and conceptual artwork without hiring designers or purchasing stock photos. The platform uses advanced AI models to interpret your written prompts and produce high-quality images in various styles, from photorealistic to artistic interpretations. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Creating effective images with Midjourney requires learning how to write detailed, specific prompts that communicate your vision clearly. The tool works best when you can describe exactly what you want, including style, mood, colors, and composition. You’ll likely need to iterate through multiple versions to achieve the perfect result, and some prompts may require creative problem-solving to get the AI to understand your concept. 

Who It’s Best For: 

Small to medium businesses that need custom visuals but lack dedicated design resources. It’s particularly valuable for social media managers, content creators, and marketing teams that produce visual content regularly but have limited budgets for professional photography or graphic design. 

What It Does: 

VEO3 generates video content from text prompts, enabling businesses to create marketing videos, product demonstrations, and social media content without traditional video production. The platform can produce various video styles and lengths, from short social clips to longer explanatory content, based on detailed text descriptions of what you want to show. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

VEO3 requires specific, detailed prompts to create effective marketing videos. You need to clearly describe not just what happens in the video, but also the visual style, pacing, and mood you want to achieve. The technology is still evolving, so results may require multiple attempts and refinements. Human creativity remains essential for developing compelling concepts and ensuring the final product aligns with your marketing objectives. 

Who It’s Best For: 

Companies that need regular video content but lack video production capabilities or budget. It’s especially useful for social media marketing, product launches, and educational content where quick turnaround and cost efficiency matter more than Hollywood-level production values. 

Don’t rely on AI solely.  

Although AI can crank out a complete blog draft, no one wants to read generic, sound-alike content. Your buyers want to be engaged, inspired, and moved to action by content that’s authentic and original. That’s where your subject matter experts (SMEs) come into play.   

The unique insights and perspectives of your SMEs will be more important (not less) in a world where many competitors will churn out me-too content fully generated by AI. Your content is much more likely to convert a lead into a customer if it merges the best of human + machine, showcasing what makes your business unique and how you add value.   

Provide relevant input.  

Your AI-supported output will only be as good as your input. Think strategically about the information and prompts the tool will need in order to generate an output that’s on target and aligned with your goals and strategy. An AI-powered content generation tool can shorten the process and help with the mechanics, but it doesn’t eliminate the upfront thought needed to produce a deliverable that actually works.  

Your website is the destination that much of your marketing leads buyers to, so you need to be sure it ranks high on the list of search results your buyer sees. That’s the goal of SEO.

SEO is all about optimizing your website and other content so that it ranks well on conventional search engines, ideally placing you in the top few search results. Even as AI is changing the search landscape, SEO remains an important element in effective digital marketing.

Our team took a look at four of the latest options of SEO tools.

What It Does:  

SurferSEO analyzes top-ranking content in search results and provides specific recommendations for optimizing your own content to rank higher. The platform offers real-time content scoring, keyword suggestions, and structural recommendations while you write, making SEO optimization more intuitive and actionable than traditional keyword research methods. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

SurferSEO provides clear, actionable optimization suggestions, but creating high-quality content that serves both search engines and human readers requires editorial judgment. The tool excels at technical optimization guidance, but you need content strategy expertise to balance SEO requirements with engaging, valuable writing that converts readers into customers. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Content creators and marketing teams focused on improving search rankings through content optimization. It’s especially useful for companies publishing regular blog content or those looking to improve existing content performance without extensive SEO technical knowledge. 

What It Does: 

 Semrush provides comprehensive SEO and digital marketing analytics, now enhanced with AI features that track your visibility across both traditional search engines and emerging AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The platform combines keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing, and performance tracking in one interface, offering insights that help improve your search rankings and online visibility. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Semrush delivers data-driven insights, but translating those insights into effective SEO strategies requires marketing expertise. The AI features provide recommendations and identify opportunities, but you need to understand your business goals and audience to make the right optimization decisions. Success depends on consistently implementing the tool’s suggestions while adapting them to your specific market conditions. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Marketing managers and digital marketing agencies responsible for organic search performance. It’s particularly valuable for businesses that depend on search traffic and need comprehensive visibility into both current SEO performance and emerging AI search trends. 

What It Does:  

Indexly specializes in technical SEO optimization and ensuring your content gets discovered by both traditional search engines and AI-powered platforms. The tool monitors indexing status, identifies technical issues that prevent search visibility, and tracks how well your content performs across different AI search systems. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Indexly provides technical insights and automated monitoring, but improving site performance requires understanding both SEO fundamentals and your specific website architecture. The platform identifies problems clearly, but fixing them often requires coordination with web developers or technical team members. The value comes from catching issues early and maintaining consistent visibility. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Website managers and digital marketing professionals responsible for technical SEO performance. It’s particularly valuable for companies with large websites or those concerned about maintaining visibility as search technology evolves toward AI-powered platforms. 

What It Does: 

 Writesonic creates SEO-optimized content at scale, specializing in blog posts, meta descriptions, and website copy designed to rank well in search engines. The platform combines AI writing capabilities with SEO research tools, offering templates and workflows specifically designed for content that performs well organically. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Writesonic streamlines content production, but creating effective SEO content requires strategic input about target keywords, audience intent, and competitive positioning. The tool works best when you provide clear briefs and specific optimization goals. Human editing and quality control remain essential for ensuring the content meets both search engine requirements and user expectations. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Content marketing teams that need to produce large volumes of SEO-focused content efficiently. It’s especially useful for businesses in competitive markets where consistent, optimized content publication is crucial for maintaining search visibility. 

Use these tools where they work best. 

AI-enabled SEO tools are ideal for tasks you simply can’t do on your own, like analyzing massive data sets. For instance, they make short work of assessing how your website and other content is performing, especially in relation to your competitors. But it takes an experienced, talented human to evaluate the results and determine how to act on them, in sync with your goals and your strategy.  

Recognize that SEO is evolving. 

Buyers are increasingly using AI-powered chatbots and agents (not just search engines) to get credible information. That doesn’t mean SEO is going away; you just need to keep it in perspective. Your SEO strategy should live alongside an artificial intelligence optimization (AIO) strategy that ensures AI-powered chatbots and agents incorporate your online content into the curated responses they deliver when a buyer uses these tools for their research.   

Up until recently, most marketing analytics tools were built for analysts, not business owners and leaders.

Now generative AI is making marketing analytics more accessible to all, enabling every business to obtain (and make sense of) the data it takes to make informed decisions that boost marketing ROI.

Here’s a recap of AI-powered marketing analytics tools our team took for a test drive.

What It Does:  

HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates AI-powered marketing automation, analytics, and content management in a unified platform. The system tracks customer interactions across multiple channels, automates marketing workflows, and provides insights that help optimize campaigns and improve conversion rates throughout the customer journey. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

HubSpot’s AI features enhance marketing efficiency, but successful implementation requires strategic planning and consistent data management. The platform provides powerful automation and insights, but you need marketing expertise to design effective workflows and interpret analytics meaningfully. The tool works best when integrated thoughtfully with your overall marketing strategy rather than used as a standalone solution. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Mid-sized businesses looking for comprehensive marketing automation and analytics in one platform. It’s particularly valuable for companies with multiple marketing channels that need unified customer data and automated nurturing campaigns. 

What It Does:  

Scrunch AI analyzes how artificial intelligence systems and chatbots perceive and represent your brand when responding to user inquiries. As more consumers use AI assistants for recommendations and research, Scrunch helps you understand and influence how these systems discuss your company, products, and services. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Scrunch AI provides insights into AI-driven brand perception, but leveraging this information requires understanding both your brand positioning and the evolving landscape of AI-powered customer interactions. The platform identifies opportunities and issues, but developing effective responses requires strategic thinking about how AI integration affects your customer journey and competitive positioning. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Brand managers and digital marketing strategists concerned about how their company appears in AI-powered customer interactions. It’s especially relevant for businesses in competitive markets where AI recommendations significantly influence purchase decisions. 

What It Does:  

Brandwatch monitors social media conversations and online mentions of your brand, using AI to analyze sentiment, identify trends, and alert you to potential reputation issues or opportunities. The platform tracks discussions across major social platforms and provides insights into how your brand is perceived compared to competitors. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Brandwatch provides comprehensive social listening data, but turning insights into effective brand management requires understanding your audience and competitive landscape. The AI identifies patterns and sentiment shifts, but you need marketing judgment to determine which conversations matter most and how to respond appropriately. Success comes from consistent monitoring combined with strategic response planning. 

Who It’s Best For:  

Brand managers and public relations professionals responsible for online reputation management. It’s particularly valuable for companies in consumer-facing industries where social media conversations significantly impact brand perception and customer acquisition. 

Know what you’re trying to answer.  

Whenever you deal with data, you need complete clarity on what you’re trying to find out. Which marketing metrics are most important to your business? Which key performance indicators (KPIs) ladder up to your business objectives? Take time to answer questions like these before you dive into a marketing analytics tool.  

Add your expertise to the analysis.  

Though the term “analytics” might suggest otherwise, some of these tools are actually light on analysis. While you don’t need to handle the mechanics of compiling and reporting the numbers, you do need to sift through the results and determine what to do with them. Exactly how and where will you adjust your marketing to achieve better results? Now that the tool has freed you from the tedium of manipulating data, your internal team and your marketing partner will have more time to answer that question with confidence. 

Any time you’re venturing into new territory, there’s a risk you could step on some land mines. And generative AI definitely falls into the “new territory” category. Best practices like the following will help you navigate the evolving field of AI-powered marketing and avoid common pitfalls as you apply AI tools to make your marketing more efficient and effective. 

• Don’t view AI as a replacement for human expertise. Yes, AI can make a human’s work faster, more efficient, and sometimes even better. But in the field of marketing, there are few tasks we’ve found where AI is a complete substitute for human expertise. As we’ve already shared in many examples throughout this guide, generative AI works best in marketing when it’s a marriage of human + machine. Use AI tools to automate mechanical tasks, jump-start processes, and assess large data sets. Then rely on experienced, talented professionals (both in-house and outsourced) to do the rest. 

• Be careful when you share data. AI-powered analytics tools can make data-driven decision-making easier, but they’re only as good as the data you feed them. And sometimes, that data is proprietary or confidential. Before uploading data into a marketing analytics tool or other platform, check the vendor’s data privacy policy. You’ll want to be sure there are mechanisms and policies in place that keep your data from being shared with others.  

• Choose your AI data sources carefully. When you lean on AI tools that use LLMs for content research, you don’t know which information sources were used to train the LLM. And that means you can’t be certain how accurate or current the research is. That’s one reason our team likes a tool called Perplexity: Not only does it provide a concise, curated response to your question; it also discloses which sources it used in developing the response. You can go right to the source if you want to learn more.   

• Develop a robust AI policy. You might have concerns about using generative AI in your business, especially since it’s still evolving. That’s why it’s critical to develop a comprehensive AI policy before you venture too far into this field. An AI policy provides your internal team, any subcontractors you use, and your outsourced marketing partner with guidelines and requirements that help them apply AI tools prudently and safely.  

• Require fact-checking and plagiarism-checking for all content, even if the AI-enabled tool you use includes these features. You want to be certain you’re publishing accurate information and that you’re not regurgitating previously published material. At a minimum, Google and other search engines will penalize you. Whether you open yourself to a copyright lawsuit is still up for debate in the courts. 

• Check AI-generated or AI-informed content for bias, since LLMs have the potential to introduce bias based on the source material used to train them. The more you infuse your unique expertise and perspectives into your content, the less risk that bias will skew your output toward views that don’t reflect your company or brand. 

• Don’t allow your team or contractors to develop or publish content that is entirely AI-generated (which goes back to the first point—avoid plagiarism). Some companies even stipulate that only a maximum percentage of AI-generated material is permitted in their content. 

• Require full transparency when using AI-enabled marketing tools. For example, if you hire a subcontractor or marketing partner to generate content, they should disclose their use of AI writing tools. 

AI-enabled marketing tools have the potential to transform how in-house marketing teams and outsourced marketing partners work, in ways we couldn’t have imagined even a few years ago. 

While it’s not a cure-all, generative AI can help your marketing function work more efficiently and effectively. It’s just a matter of using AI and humans each where they’re best suited. 

Marketri continues to evaluate and test out AI-powered tools that can make our B2B marketing even more effective and drive higher ROI. If you’d like to learn how our data-driven marketing strategy and execution can help you achieve profitable growth, book a call with our President Deb Andrews.   

This post was originally published July 2024. Last updated September 2025.