Published on: March 29, 2023
AI Marketing Tools: A Complete Guide to Streamline Your Strategy
Author: Inge von Aulock
With AI dominating the headlines, all industries are beginning to ask how they can use it for their business. And so they should be. When used right, AI can smooth out workflows, provide useful insights, and sometimes even take over tasks.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to code your own bot. There are already hundreds of AI tools out there that are designed to help you market your business. But where do you start? It can be daunting getting to grips with the terminology and complex science behind each piece of software.
To kickstart your AI marketing strategy, we’re going to dive into everything you need to know. After you’ve got to grips with the basics, we take a look at our top 4 AI marketing tools and how they work. Are you ready to up your game?
What is AI marketing?
AI marketing refers to using artificial intelligence to make elements of your marketing strategy automated. It can do this by observing and analyzing data, making decisions, and even creating content. Ultimately, this means that human intervention is not needed.
There are 3 main types of AI that make up the building blocks of most marketing tools:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): The computer’s ability to understand speech and text.
- Machine learning: Computers use data and algorithms to become more accurate over time, mimicking the way humans learn.
- Deep learning: A type of machine learning where instead of linear algorithms, they are stacked in a hierarchy of complexity. This means computers can process and analyze huge amounts of data and use the information for predictive modeling.
Each of these can be used throughout your marketing strategy. Just how you do that is what we’ll get onto next.
How you can use AI in marketing
Now, the exciting stuff. How will you use this new technology?
There are plenty of great opportunities to organize your tasks and ease your workflow with AI, from creating a content strategy to organizing your digital marketing campaigns.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a tech expert to get started. Most tools are aimed at beginners to make them more accessible. So, let’s take a look at what elements of your marketing efforts could use some help from AI.
Content creation
The main pillar holding up your content marketing is content creation. However, this is where many companies struggle. Producing high-quality, original content takes time and expertize. If you’re a small business that doesn’t have a dedicated marketing team, getting your brand out there will prove difficult.
So how can AI help? Well, really, the possibilities are endless. But currently, there are tools out there that can take care of your:
- Copywriting: AI writing has changed the industry. Now, a blog that would have taken an experienced and qualified writer a few days takes just a few seconds. This means businesses can have constant content published without spending time or money on it. This consistency will improve where the site is ranking on search engines.
- Social media posts: Need a witty, engaging caption with a call-to-action (CTA) at the end? No worries, ask an AI and cut your social media planning time in half. They can also tell you what current trends you should take part in and analyze your engagement for each post.
- Content optimization: In order for your digital content to be seen, it needs to be planned and written with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. AI can tell you what keywords to focus on, identify issues with your current content that are preventing it from being seen, and tell you what word count will be optimal to rank.
Analytics
Any form of marketing without analytics is doomed to fail. You can’t improve without knowing what’s working and what’s not. And it’s super unlikely you got it spot on the first time around.
However, in order to find out how you’re performing, huge amounts of customer data need to be analyzed. Do you know who can take over that task? Yep, you guessed it. AI! The following can be provided by many tools to focus your next campaign:
- Actionable insights: After analyzing your website data, like traffic, visitors, bounce rate, and more, AI will be able to offer constructive suggestions based on what it found. For example, it may advise you to include more internal links to keep people on your site for longer and reduce the bounce rate.
- Metrics: AI can monitor important metrics and create visual aids to help understand trends. This is important in tracking the progress and success of a new campaign. For example, you may notice a peak in organic traffic which means your content marketing was particularly effective at that time. From this, you’ll know what to keep doing.
- Predictive analytics: Wouldn’t it be great if you could predict the future? You can, and if you’re not already, you’re one step behind your competition. AI finds patterns that can predict future behavior. This is super helpful for making decisions on paid ad campaigns and other elements of your marketing strategy. It eliminates the element of risk and means you’re more likely to get it right first time. Huge companies like Amazon use this to forecast demand for products, so their supply chain is optimized.
Social listening
Want to know what people think of your brand? Tracking comments and conversations is a tricky task if you have a large following. But don’t fret. AI bots can trawl through your social media in real-time and analyze:
- Tone of conversations: Find out how your latest campaign went down by having AI analyze the sentiment behind the conversations happening. Did you miss the mark and make people angry? Or maybe you hit the nail on the head, and people are joyous and inspired. Either way, you’ll know how to respond, interact, and move forward in the best way.
- Your brand voice: It’s not just your audience that needs analyzing. What about you? In your mind, your social media posts might be fun, informal, and witty. But how true is this? AI will tell you exactly how you’re coming across by your tone of voice and how your audience is responding.
- Whether you’re reaching your target audience: You may be getting high levels of engagement, but is it from your target demographic? AI can tell you everything there is to know about the profiles of people regularly interacting with your brand.
These insights are essential when deciding on your social media marketing strategy. They help inform future decisions and ensure your interactions with your audience are positive and effective.
Ad targeting
Swear your phone is listening to you? Me too. However, it’s most likely just good ad targeting.
The advancement in AI technology means that sometimes it feels like it knows what you want before you do. Thinking you might invest in some roller skates to try out a new hobby? Suddenly an ad pops up for beginners’ skates and safety pads.
AI can do a lot, but it can’t read minds. Instead, it tracks your behavior on the internet and social media and comes to certain conclusions about what you might be interested in. This has a lot of benefits when it comes to marketing, but the two most important are:
- Customer engagement: Of course, you’re more likely to click on an ad if you’re genuinely interested in the product. By using data to target specific customers, you’re much more likely to have a higher engagement.
- Conversion rates and lead generation: More engagement leads to more conversions. Half the battle is encouraging people to click through to your site. If they’ve jumped this hurdle, they should be easier to close.
Email marketing
According to HubSpot, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. This form of digital marketing is essential in generating leads and creating a loyal and interested customer base.
AI can help optimize your email campaigns to ensure you’re leveraging your subscribed audience as best as you can.
- Subject lines: Need catchy and effective subject lines? AI can generate the best options for your target audience based on data analyzed about their demographic and behavior.
- Create better copy: Have you written out an email, and it’s just not sounding quite right? You can paste it into an AI tool and ask it to rewrite the email with a specific tone to make it more engaging.
- Run multivariate tests: Eliminate the risky guesswork, and run multiple email campaigns at the same time to find out which is most effective. AI will analyze the results and offer detailed insights as to what worked and what didn’t.
Marketing automation
Automation is a marketer’s dream. There are so many unnecessary tasks that take a long time, but this doesn’t need to be the case. Instead, let AI-powered tools take over.
This will give you the time and space to focus on more important jobs rather than wasting effort on menial tasks. The possibilities are endless, but here are just a few ways your strategy can be automated:
- Personalization: By analyzing individual customers’ behavior, AI can automate suggestions for them to get the most out of your product or service. Think about LinkedIn’s job suggestions. It uses machine learning, and since the introduction of this software, they have seen a 30% increase in job applications.
- Lead nurturing: Afraid you’re missing out on conversions because you haven’t got the time to nurture each lead? AI can ensure no opportunity is missed by guiding each lead through the sales funnel based on their personal data.
- Chatbots: A huge amount of time is wasted answering basic customer service questions. You may roll your eyes at the thought of talking to a chatbot, but AI is so advanced now you probably won’t even realize it. This automation means customers stay happy and loyal while you save time and money.
Top 4 AI marketing tools
Now, the really helpful stuff. We’ve whittled it down to the 4 most useful AI marketing tools. We’ll look at pricing, use cases, and customer experience for each, so you can decide which one is most suited to your team.
1. OpenAI
OpenAI is all the rage at the moment, and it’s not surprising why. It’s probably the most advanced and useful application of AI so far. It is comprised of two models: ChatGPT and Dall-E 2.
ChatGPT is a language model. In fact, the GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which is a type of large language model neural network. Confused? Don’t worry. All you need to know is that this means it can learn from interactions with humans from text and analyze and understand language.
It can solve problems, answer questions, and write creative content like scripts, blogs, poems, and songs. For this reason, the possibilities of using ChatGPT in marketing are endless. Here are just a few:
- Blog writing: If you give it a good prompt, it can write a fully formed blog piece in seconds. You can guarantee it is engaging, articulate, and (mostly) accurate. It’s important to fact-check and proofread to ensure no subtle biases are included.
- Title generation: If you need a list of good titles based on certain keywords, but haven’t got the time or space to think them through, simply ask ChatGPT, and you’ll have a list as long as you want in no time.
- Email or customer response writing: Customer service not your strong spot? Type the answer to a query into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite with a more formal or helpful tone. Alternatively, if you’re planning a big email campaign, you can bullet point the important elements you want to convey to your audience and let the AI write it out in an easy-to-read and engaging email.
As you can imagine, when you get creative, ChatGPT feels limitless. What’s better is that you can use it for free. You’ll still have access to it when demand is low, receive standard response speeds, and have regular updates.
If you want to splash out on $20 a month, upgrade to a Plus account. This will guarantee usage even when demand is high. You’ll also receive faster response speeds and gain priority access to new features.
Dall-E 2 works by interpreting natural language and generating images and art. This is super helpful when it comes to content creation for marketing campaigns.
Whether you need an interesting image to accompany a blog post or to include in an email campaign. Or maybe you want an example of something but can’t find an appropriate image yourself. In a few seconds, you can create anything you want. You could even write a new idea for a product description and see what it could potentially look like.
A big plus for Dall-E 2 is you only pay for what you use. It’s a per-image cost that changes depending on the resolution you desire. If you’re worried about wasting money on AI, you won’t be with OpenAI.
Jasper
Jasper is like your one-stop shop for AI. Think ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 combined. It is designed with businesses in mind with features like:
- Boss mode: This allows you to write long-form content 5x faster, like blog pieces, stories, and emails. They guarantee it is 100% original and written with SEO in mind, with Grammarly included to ensure there are no errors. They advertise that 80% will be written by AI and 20% will be edited by you.
- Business features: Jasper is the only AI out there that can be trained to your brand’s style. This means you can generate consistent content. It takes into account knowledge, tone, and style to nail your business’s voice.
- Surfer SEO integration: A 2-hour training session teaches you how to incorporate Jasper into your SEO content writing. With their help, you can rest assured your hard work pays off when your landing pages are ranking at number 1.
- Chrome extension: Unlike other AI tools, Jasper can act as an extension of your chrome browser. This means it can be seamlessly incorporated into your workflows to speed up tasks. Think AI suggestions in Google Docs.
So, how much are we looking at for such an advanced tool? Check out their sliding scale below.
Chatbot
Customer service is a huge element of marketing. Without a clear point of contact, people are unlikely to trust your brand. Why would you commit to something if you feel like you won’t be supported? However, it’s also one of the most time-consuming and expensive elements. Enter, Chatbot.
This software aims to make adding AI to your customer service team a breeze. It’s an all-in-one platform that requires no coding, meaning you can start using it instantly. Some of the features that add to the simplicity are:
- Drag and drop builder: To customize your bot, all you have to do is drag and drop conversational elements into the builder. Choose from bot response formats and actions to create an engaging experience.
- Chatbot academy: Intimidated by the prospect of building a bot? Well, you have nothing to worry about. A training program built by specialists and experts means all your questions can be answered before you start.
- Pre-built templates: If you don’t fancy starting from scratch, choose from the many templates on offer and customize them. You’ll be able to find one that works for your business!
Easy integrations with platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WordPress, mean your customer service team can focus on those who need real support and guidance whilst your AI takes care of the FAQs. Everyone’s a winner!
As for pricing, check out the sliding scale below. It may be an investment, but it’ll definitely be worth it.
MarketMuse
For MarketMuse, SEO is key. It markets itself as automating the content audit process. This means it can analyze a huge amount of data and offer crucial insights into how your content is performing.
Instead of generic keyword metrics, MarketMuse offers personalized data that takes into account your domain. This means building a strategy can be much easier, more reliable, and more personalized. The main features are:
- Keyword research: MarketMuse focuses on organizing keyword research. It simplifies and removes subjectivity, so you’re only left with what you’ll be able to rank for. This can make building a content strategy a lot easier and less time-consuming. It also delivers a personalized difficulty score after analyzing your website. This bespoke approach means you’re more likely to rank.
- Competitive content analysis: The Telescope feature offers a visual breakdown of everything your competitors are doing. Including the subjects they have covered and the subjects they are missing. It allows you to identify areas where you can outrank them, and it even suggests optimal content structures that can compete against them.
- Content clusters: MarketMuse doesn’t believe in stand-alone content. Instead, it encourages ‘topic clusters’ to improve your chances of ranking. The AI software can analyze these clusters on your site and your competitors to see how well you are performing.
- Content planning: By completing a full analysis of all your published content, MarketMuse can tell you what to focus on next, identify gaps, and identify subjects where your site is considered an authority. This makes planning your strategy a breeze without making mistakes like repeating content or focusing on areas you won’t rank for.
- Content brief generator: When moving to the content writing stage, MarketMuse generates briefs for writers. These include links to relevant sites, ideal structures, questions to answer, and relevant topics to consider. This keeps the creative side of the strategy focused.
Believe it or not, there is a free version of this AI. But it’s likely you’ll need to upgrade if you’re part of a larger team. Check out the pricing below.
Ready to streamline your marketing strategy with AI?
Many businesses are already clocking on to how useful AI marketing tools can be. Don’t get left behind.
Marketing is a tough element of business. You’re continually fighting to be seen in saturated niches with hundreds if not thousands of competitors. Incorporating these tools could bring in lots of potential customers by being one step ahead of the trends.
If you think you could benefit from any of these AI marketing platforms, why not sign up for a free trial? Most companies offer them, and it means you don’t have to worry about risking any investment.
If you want your social media management, content creation, and content distribution to work effectively and efficiently, AI marketing tools might just be the solution.
If you’re interested in finding more AI solutions, check out our huge directory to choose the right one for you.
Inge von Aulock
I'm the Founder & CEO of Top Apps, the #1 App directory available online. In my spare time, I write about Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and review apps and tools I've tried, right here on the Top Apps blog.
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