Getting Started with AI Tools That Ramp Up Your Marketing

AI is making big inroads into marketing, and with good reason: AI-powered marketing tools support critical business goals like improving efficiency, reducing costs, and driving growth.

The key is to find and leverage the secret sauce of human + machine.

Contrary to some reports, AI isn’t going to replace people; it’s going to enhance what they do. As the saying goes, “AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.” Many AI-enabled marketing tools are very inexpensive to license, so the return can far outstrip the investment.

What does it mean for you as a business owner or leader?

Whether you outsource your marketing to a third-party partner or staff a portion of your marketing function with in-house employees, it pays to understand which AI applications are worth the hype. For example, if you’re using an in-house generalist to handle a broad range of tactical tasks, AI-powered tools can jump-start or streamline their work. If you work with a marketing partner, they should be testing and using AI tools to work better and faster, and ultimately boost your marketing ROI.

That’s what led Marketri to create this guide.

We evaluated AI tools designed for some of the most critical marketing functions, guided by recommendations from the Marketing AI Institute, and chose a few that look promising based on our due diligence.

This guide explores select AI tools for content generation, search engine optimization (SEO), and analytics, explaining what each tool does, how it leverages human + machine, and who it’s best designed for. The guide concludes with a review of best practices that are essential when you’re venturing into the evolving arena of AI-enabled marketing.

We hope this guide helps you navigate your journey and speeds your learning curve as you determine which AI-powered marketing tools can help your in-house team or your marketing partner work smarter.

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. GPT models by OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Claude 3 are among the various LLMs making their way into AI-powered tools.

Now let’s dive into three areas where AI-based marketing tools and LLMs are making an impact.  

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:  

This AI-powered writing assistant won’t replace a skilled copywriter, but it can improve the efficiency of the content generation process. Copy.ai uses NLP to generate lots of different content types based on the user’s prompt, which could be a keyword phrase, a tagline, or a high-level concept. It’s actually a variety of tools and frameworks that get the process started, with templates for various content types. Copy.ai is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3 LLM, has been available since fall 2020, and is backed by $11 million in Series A funding. 

How Machine Meets Marketer:  

Copy.ai can produce content using templates that streamline the process, and the tool’s algorithms analyze the input to understand the context and intended voice. But it takes a skilled marketer to craft a prompt strategically to elicit the best response and evaluate the draft based on your strategy and the ideal buyer you’re looking to reach. A marketer will also need to add a human perspective to the content, confirm that it’s optimized for SEO, and incorporate the proper headings and calls to action. As with any AI tool, it’s up to the user to fact-check for accuracy and ensure there is no plagiarism. 

Who It’s Best For:  

For companies that want to develop a high volume of content, getting a jump-start with Copy.ai might prove helpful. A marketing generalist tasked with writing content could gain efficiencies by using this tool to develop topic ideas, generate a preliminary outline, and get editing and proofreading suggestions for their draft. If you provide a great deal of information about a company or product, the tool can match the brand style. However, analysts like Gartner don’t view Copy.ai as ideal for long-form content and criticize its lack of industry-specific knowledge (something your subject matter expert would layer on).  

What It Does: 

Jasper uses NLP and LLMs to help you create marketing campaign assets based on information about your company and products, incorporating both context and the company’s brand, voice, and style guidelines. Similar to Copy.ai, it gets the process started by offering templates for different content types (blog vs email vs social post, for example). Since it integrates with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and other popular tools, it’s easy to incorporate Jasper into your current workflow. The tool launched in 2021 and received $125 million in Series A funding in 2022.   

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Jasper can create content from scratch or analyze existing content. A skilled copywriter or other marketer still needs to provide relevant input, identify suitable keywords, and fine-tune the copy output to align with your goals and strategy. Some criticize the time it takes to produce quality content and the fact that longer content pieces often suffer from repetition.  

Who It’s Best For: 

Jasper can improve a content marketer’s work by getting the process started, refining ideas, and optimizing copy for better search engine rankings. It’s also helpful for in-house marketers who want to repurpose existing content on their own or get initial ideas for a marketing campaign.  

What It Does: 

If you use video in your marketing, you might want to put Descript on your radar. Backed by Series C venture capital, this AI-powered tool makes editing videos nearly as easy as editing a document. In fact, that’s pretty much how you use it: Descript transcribes your video or audio recordings into text. As you edit the text (deleting or moving elements), the tool automatically updates the video or audio file. 

Marketers can easily use Descript to remove those “ums” and other fillers, generate audio that mimics the speaker’s voice, add titles and annotations, and incorporate animations. The tool supports your brand identity by matching any custom fonts you upload, can translate captions into multiple languages, and can even create a highlight reel of top clips. Companies that create podcasts will especially like the ability to create an AI clone of the speaker’s voice, dub in a word with an AI voice, remove background noise, and correct eye contact.  

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

This is one AI tool that relies mostly on the technology rather than the user’s capabilities—and that’s one of its beauties. Descript facilitates the technical aspects of creating video content, but an experienced marketer still needs to come up with the video content ideas based on the marketing goal, strategy, and intended audience. Marketers will probably do some editing of the final product to ensure that it’s smooth and on target. 

Who It’s Best For: 

Descript can prove useful for a wide range of users—from the novice marketer who wants to turn video content into an engaging social media post, to a more experienced marketer who is looking to turn text-based content into a high-quality recording, to podcast hosts who want to enhance and improve the quality of the final product.  

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: 

MarketMuse goes beyond simply optimizing your existing content; it also points out content gaps and recommends relevant topic ideas. Using OpenAI and Google Gemini as its LLMs, this SEO tool evaluates your content against competitors, identifies low-performing content that needs attention, and determines if you’re linking to and from internal pages and external sources effectively. MarketMuse insights can help ensure your content is high-quality, relevant, authoritative, and sets you apart, even in a crowded space. Because it monitors search engine trends and updates, it’s continually adjusting its algorithms to keep current. MarketMuse has been available since 2013 and is backed by venture capital in Series A.  

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

The machine’s ability to analyze both your website and your competitors’ sites can improve the efficiency of an otherwise time-consuming task, and the topic recommendation feature is a nice addition that can speed a marketer’s work. Once MarketMuse points out your content’s strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, it’s up to a skilled strategic marketer to review the analysis, adjust the strategy, and map out and execute the next steps. 

Who It’s Best For: 

An internal or fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or other strategist can use the tool’s analysis and insights to adjust strategy and make data-driven decisions. Content writers will appreciate new topic ideas and suggestions for word choice and content organization. And SEO professionals will have more data to inform keyword selection and identify backlink opportunities (links from another source to your website). 

What It Does: 

Outranking uses Google NLP and GPT-4 to analyze the information you provide about your website and provides detailed instructions on how to improve your search engine ranking through better titles, meta descriptions, keyword use, and content structure. In addition to offering data-driven content strategies that help you outperform the competition, this tool can use AI to generate content SEO briefs, outlines, and first drafts, or audit existing content to identify SEO improvement opportunities. It’s been available since 2020 and is undergoing a redesign, with some users wishing the user interface was more intuitive. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Outranking performs many functions that make SEO more efficient and effective, like creating keyword clusters, organizing content into silos, and scoring your content. Where marketers most add value to this tool is in the input phase, since it analyzes the information you provide. Experienced content marketers will also fine-tune content outlines and drafts to fit the company’s strategy and tone.  

Who It’s Best For: 

SEO professionals are the most likely users of a tool like Outranking, and they’ll appreciate its ability to perform fast, in-depth search engine results page (SERP) analysis and to optimize existing content to generate more traffic. It’s also useful for content writers who want a jump-start on creating content quickly.   

What It Does: 

Scalenut is a bit of a hybrid tool, combining SEO and content generation capabilities to optimize content to improve rankings and organic traffic. Available since 2020 and backed by venture capital seed funding, it uses a proprietary AI model designed to comply with Google’s restrictions. The Keyword Planner suggest keywords that are semantically related, recommends topics to develop, and builds keyword clusters to improve visibility. The Cruise Mode AI writing assistant streamlines content creation by generating anything from an outline to a draft, even rephrasing sentences for better readability and engagement. And a social listening feature tells you what relevant buyers are talking about on Google, Quora, and Reddit. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Scalenut handles technical tasks like researching and recommending keywords, evaluating content against top-ranking pages, and getting content generation started. But marketers will need to ensure the tool is assessing content against the most relevant competitors, determine which keyword recommendations will prove most impactful for your audience, and adapt content drafts for strategy alignment, tone, and branding.   

Who It’s Best For: 

Different roles will find Scalenut useful for different purposes. CMOs can gain useful insights into how authoritative the company’s content really is. Both SEO professionals and content creators can use the tool’s keyword and topic cluster recommendations and ranking scores to refine new and existing content, while writers might find the writing assistant useful for getting the process underway.  

What It Does: 

Available since 2017, Surfer helps you plan, write, and publish content that’s optimized for search engine ranking, using GPT-4 as its LLM. Various tools within the platform handle tasks like analyzing top-ranking pages for targeted keywords, analyzing competitors’ content, digging into a buyer’s search intent, suggesting keywords, evaluating search engine results pages, and incorporating omitted words to achieve better rankings. On the content development side, Surfer can create an outline to get you started, recommend topic clusters to guide your content planning, score your content and offer improvement suggestions, and audit existing pages that may be underperforming.  

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Surfer is useful for tasks that are time-consuming to do manually, and marketers will appreciate advanced capabilities like the option to analyze the People Also Ask section of Google results pages and automatically included relevant questions. On the other hand, marketers will need to determine the best competitors to analyze and go beyond the tool’s basic content development features to write engaging content from the outline provided. 

Who It’s Best For: 

Digital marketers and SEO specialists are most likely to use Surfer to make data-driven decisions that ultimately improve how the company’s content ranks in a buyer’s search results.  

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.

As we explored in a recent blog, 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 two AI-powered marketing analytics tools our team took for a test drive.

What It Does: 

The BlueConic platform provides a single, unified view of customer data across your business. Available since 2015 and in the Series B stage of private equity funding, BlueConic streamlines data management across different functions and data sources to provide a holistic picture of your target audience, so you can understand and engage with them better. The insights you can glean from this tool enable you to segment buyers and personalize your marketing based on their behavior and preferences at different stages of the revenue funnel. An LLM triggers dialogues with buyers based on their profile and past actions, delivering the right message at the right time to advance buyers to the next stage in the sales cycle and eventually convert them to customers. 

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Where BlueConic focuses on combining and unifying data that might be locked up in silos within your company, experienced marketers will need to leverage their expertise to analyze and use that data to execute on the company’s marketing strategy. For example, your internal or fractional CMO will determine which metrics are most important to measure and provide the context that’s critical to determining what these numbers mean for your business.  And though the platform can recommend personalized actions based on the data, a skilled marketer will need to ensure those recommendations align with your goals and strategy.    

Who It’s Best For: 

BlueConic can prove useful for any organization that’s engaging in personalized, multi-channel marketing and eager to get a more complete picture of their ideal buyer. CMOs and business or service line leaders might find its customizable reporting features valuable for gaining insights that help generate the best return on the marketing spend and drive both revenue growth and higher customer satisfaction.   

What It Does: 

This AI-powered marketing analytics platform leverages data from tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), delivering all the power of Google Analytics without the need for specialized expertise. Backed by venture capital in the seed stage, Clickvoyant automates the process of connecting to your Google Analytics account, extracting insights from your data, and generating easy-to-use reports and recommendations on how to optimize your marketing and convert more buyers to customers. It’s an effective way to obtain insights about your marketing campaigns, landing pages, website speed, and audience demographics, among other categories. You can even glean insights on revenue opportunity, with details on how the tool arrived at those figures.    

How Machine Meets Marketer: 

Your CMO or marketing manager will determine the type of analysis that will be most helpful (for instance, insights on lead generation vs brand analysis). Then Clickvoyant uses AI to extract and report on the most relevant insights from Google Analytics. From there, it’s back to the marketer to review those insights and determine how to incorporate the findings into the marketing plan to guide actions that yield better results.  

Who It’s Best For: 

Both marketers and business leaders can use the output from Clickvoyant to leverage the power of Google Analytics to drive better marketing ROI, avoiding time-consuming manual work. Marketing professionals will then act on the platform’s recommendations, making data-driven decisions about how and where to allocate the marketing budget.  

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. 

While every company will have unique needs, here are a few must-haves for any AI policy:

• 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 panacea, 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, schedule a call with our President Deb Andrews.