Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a AI, a.i and bots) is the next big thing in digital marketing. Artificial intelligence allows businesses to get more user engagement, leads and sales at the best possible return on investment (ROI). This article looks at products that use artificial intelligence technology to help with marketing activities and creates a list of the top Ai tools used by digital marketers.
There’s a lot of talk around now about artificial intelligence and machine learning. It kind of feels like the next step of the internet, doesn’t it? With AI, you can automate SEO, create lead nurturing campaigns, conduct sentiment analysis and much more. Sounds great right? But what are the best tools to use for building your artificial intelligence enabled marketing strategy? In this post I’ll give you five tools that I have personally used and a few honorable mentions. Let’s get started!
As part of my digital marketing coursework for my online marketing degree, my university professors put me in charge of finding and implementing an artificial intelligence solution for digital marketing. As you can imagine, this was not an easy task given the broad nature of digital media and its long history that includes many tools since the early 2000s era when search engines first came into “being”. However, I found a promising application that has 10+ years of development under its belt. Upon launching the program and setting up various test combinations, I’ve submitted a paper with all of my findings to date.
Best Ai Tools For Digital Marketing
An AI marketing tool is a software or platform that uses artificial intelligence technology to create automated decisions. These decisions are based on collected data that’s analyzed and interpreted together with the market trend. The goal is to develop a marketing strategy that anticipates the buyer’s next move.
All of this is done in real time without the intervention of an actual human. It’s this capacity to make automated decisions at lighting speed that makes AI marketing tools for business so formidable.
Why Use AI-Powered Marketing Tools?
Speed is the number one reason why artificial intelligence marketing tools should be present in every business. An AI tech crunches huge chunks of information taken from platforms like social media, email, and the Web. It also bridges the gap between the data and the actionable solutions you can implement to improve your marketing and sales campaigns.
The Benefits of Using AI in Marketing
Automates decisions
One of the biggest benefits of AI marketing technology is it can automate data-based decisions in an instant. Data is everything in marketing. It can show you how your customer would react to your message or tell you the best strategy to use for your email marketing campaigns.
Saves time and money
Every business wants to save money when running marketing campaigns. An AI marketing tool may require initial investment, but it pays in dividends by giving you cost savings. It allows businesses to work fast and efficiently without having to pay for staff to do the manual work. Instead of hiring a full team, you can focus on recruiting employees to perform critical tasks. AI tech also lessens human error.
Creates real-time personalization
Customers expect you to know what they want. One way AI marketing tools can help out is by adapting your sales and marketing strategy to generate a personalized experience for any specific customer. Artificial intelligence can use predictive analysis to gain a better understanding of the customers behavior and buying habits. This is the same thing Google, Netflix, and Instagram use to give you recommendations to watch or suggest posts.
Imagine the possibilities of being able to guide customers to a specific product or service based on their previous interactions with the company. Creating a personalized experience allows them to build a relationship with your brand. In fact, today’s consumers expect brands to offer a tailored message instead of a generic one.
Increases return of investment (ROI)
Smart marketing tools such as this allows marketers to maximize the information produced without wasting money on other campaigns.
In addition, AI technology provides deep customer insight and shows you what your buyers want. It also groups warm leads and guides them to move forward, ultimately leading to a sale and an increased ROI for your business.
How to Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing
From forecasting sales, generating content, to improving the customer experience, there are countless ways to use top AI marketing tools for your business. Here are a few suggestions:
Content generation
The main driving force for digital marketing is content. Without it, it would be hard for companies to sell their products or convince consumers to make a purchase. Writing and generating content can take several hours a day. Marketers need to plan their targets, write the copy, edit, then distribute it at just the right time to create maximum impact.
AI marketing tools can help in this regard by streamlining the content generation process. It can automate messages or improve engagement using various social media marketing platforms.
Automated email marketing campaigns
The best AI email marketing tools allow marketers to produce effective emails that engage customers and maintain brand relationships without effort. Emails are one of the most repetitive tasks in marketing. With an AI tool, businesses can cut back on the time spent researching, creating, and testing email content.
Chatbots
An AI chatbot is perfect for nurturing a lead. When set up correctly, a chatbot can create a better customer service experience. These bots can answer repetitive questions like price or the availability of a product or service. If more complicated answers are required, they can be forwarded to a customer service agent. Chatbots also help ensure that customers won’t feel ignored when they want to reach out to you.
Control dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing happens when the price of a product or service is changed based on the market condition and the supply or demand of the item.
AI-powered tools can use this pricing strategy to gain better margins, as it allows retailers to update their prices several times a day. Dynamic pricing is best exemplified in hotel booking websites or airline companies where the prices go up or down depending on availability.
Forecasting sales
To thrive, businesses need to have target revenues and find a way to ensure this goal is achieved throughout their campaign period. The application of AI marketing programs lets marketers understand and estimate possible sales based on their customer data and their past shopping behavior.
This predictive insight allows businesses to know which products will become a top seller, how many they should stock to avoid inventory issues, or which items they need to promote further.
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20 Best AI Marketing Tools You Should Be Using Today
AI Email Marketing Tools
- Phrasee
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Perfect for discovering and creating effective ad copy
Source: phrasee.co
Phrasee is an AI tool that focuses on “brand language optimization.” This AI powered marketing platform works by boosting the brand language used by companies in their copies. It can generate a copy for emails, Instagram, Facebook, or even push notifications using a natural language generation system together with a machine learning algorithm. The result is a human-sounding copy that is brand compliant and effective. It counts Virgin and Domino’s as among its clients.
- SEMRush
Price: (Monthly) $119 for Pro / $229 for Guru / $499 for Business
Best Feature:
Position tracking lets you see where you rank for targeted keywords
Source: semrush.com
SEMrush is the Swiss Army knife of SEO tools. Its entire suite lets you perform SEO, content marketing campaigns, social media marketing, PPC, analytics, and more. One of its strongest features is its position tracker. It provides businesses with a chance to track how they rank for keywords against rival sites. You can even see how your site ranks against the Top 100 in Google’s organic or paid results.
Another great feature is its Content Marketing Toolkit. It lets users perform topic searches to find out what’s trending and create content marketing plans from there.
They count popular ethical skincare brand, Lush Cosmetics, as among their clients.
- Seventh Sense
Price: (Monthly) Starts at $64 for Hubspot / Starts at $360 for Marketo
Best Feature:
Optimizing email marketing campaigns
Source: theseventhsense.com
An AI email marketing campaign tool, Seventh Sense ensures your emails get delivered at the right time for each customer. This personalized service allows marketers to engage with their audience better, knowing they will be opening their emails at the most optimal time.
The smart platform also helps with increasing email deliverability, which improves the sender score. This is an important parameter for companies who send out hundreds or thousands of emails a week. Seventh Sense is designed to work with Hubspot and Marketo only.
- Smartwriter.ai
Price: (Monthly) $59 for Basic / $149 for Popular / $369 for Pro
Best Features:
Perfect for creating personalized email outreach
Source: vimeo.com
Smartwriter.ai assists in automating your email outreach. This AI tool generates a personalized email, including a personal subject line to pique the interest of customers. It also provides backlink generation, Shopify product title and description creation, and even personalized cold email outreach.
It also allows for integration with other third-party tools and platforms to improve your cold email outreach process.
- Optimove
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Optibot, the built-in optimization marketing bot
Source: youtube.com
Optimove is a customer data platform with AI-based marketing functions. It helps collect data from different platforms to provide a unified view of all the information in one dashboard. Businesses can analyze or share the information as well as decide marketing strategies with ease.
Optibot, their AI tool, scours and analyzes all the customer data provided to generate actionable insights. It can suggest which campaigns to drop based on loss or let you know which customers may be too exposed to company communication.
Optimove’s clients include John Hardy, Sweaty Betty, and the New York Racing Association Inc. (NYRA).
AI Content Marketing Tools
- Grammarly
Price: Free for Basic / Custom Quote for Premium and Business
Best Features:
Powerful grammar and spell checker
Source: grammarly.com
Grammarly is one of the best free marketing tools for any business. This powerful AI content marketing platform allows businesses to double check their written copy to make sure it’s polished and professional.
It features highly accurate AI that checks spelling and grammar in real time online. However, you can also install it as an extension for Google Chrome. More powerful functions like checking for tone, clarity, and style are available in Premium and Business options.
- MarketMuse
Price: (Monthly) Free for Single User / $149 for Standard / $999 for Premium
Best Feature:
Longform content creation and optimization, SEO
Source: blog.marketmuse.com
MarketMuse prides itself for using AI technology in all of its services. The tool is designed for businesses needing help in crafting optimized long-form content like emails, sales copies, landing pages, or articles.
It starts by conducting deep AI research about the topic. Then, it creates a first draft based on the chosen subject to help users get started with the copy. It also includes KPIs and a content brief to serve as a guide. Users can continue editing the copy using the built-in editor and shape it according to the AI’s suggestions.
- Acrolinx
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Scores existing content so it meets brand metrics and guidelines
Source: acrolinx.com
This AI-powered marketing software improves the quality of content, so it meets brand parameters. Big companies like Google and Amazon, use this tool to make sure all their marketing content aligns with their brand. You can set style, tone, grammar, and even add in company-specific wording. Its AI will go through the content and offer suggestions for improvements.
- InstaText
Price: (Monthly) $11.99 for Single Users / Custom Quote for Business and Scholar
Best Feature:
Checks for basic grammar, spelling while also preserving the writer’s voice
Source: static.instatext.io
InstaText is an online AI-powered writing tool similar to Grammarly. It performs basic functions like grammar and spell checks but goes a step further by rewriting sentences, so it reads better. Its most important feature is its capacity to ensure the tone and style of the writer is preserved despite the rewrite. This is important for brands that want to maintain their authentic voice in all of their communications.
Another great InstaText feature is it lets you specify multiple keywords. When you use the program, it preserves the keywords as is, saving you time when editing the copy.
- DeepL
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Instantaneous and accurate translation of files and documents
Source: deepl.com
If you’re a business serving a global market, it’s beneficial to offer accurate translations of your marketing content or copy. DeepL is a powerful AI tool that translates documents and files into several popular languages of your choosing. It not only translates the text word for word, but it adds subtle nuances and words that some of the biggest translation tools like Google and Microsoft, have difficulty grasping. The end result is fluent text that is accurate and easy to read.
- Jasper.ai
Price(Monthly): $49 for Starter (20,000 words) / $99 for Boss Mode (50,000 words)
Best Feature:
Automates your content marketing strategy
Source: jasper.ai
Once known as Conversion.ai, Jasper is an advanced AI marketing tool intended to create high-quality ad copy, emails, landing pages, articles, or social media posts. This tool uses the GPT3-model developed by OpenAI to write human-sounding text. It also has built-in templates for AIDA, Feature to Benefit, PAS, and Before-After-Bridge Framework. All you need to do is add your brand name or product, and it will generate the copy for you.
E-commerce shops can also produce product descriptions using this powerful AI. It can generate Amazon product bullet points or descriptions as well as write titles and meta descriptions at a click of a button.
AI Chatbot and Monitoring Tools
- Chatfuel
Price: (Monthly) 50 Chats for Free / $15 for Pro / $199 for Premium
Best Feature:
Available 24/7 for customers, Easy drag-and-drop builder
Source: chatfuel.com
Chatfuel is among the most used chatbots in the market. It assists in automating FAQs as well as qualifying leads before they are directed to a live sales agent if they are ready to purchase.
It also provides integrations to various third-party tools like Calendly, Shopify, or Google Sheets. They even have an API in case you need a customized integration for your system.
- MobileMonkey
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Real time multi-platform bot, Great B2C
Source: mobilemonkey.com
Mobile Monkey is a multi-platform chatbot creator that enables businesses to easily manage their marketing chat content with ease. It has a Unified Chat Inbox including a toolbox of integrations for easy scaling of any campaign. They also offer InstaChamp, a great marketing chatbot designed for IG businesses.
- ManyChat
Price: (Monthly) Free / $15 for Pro
Best Features:
Captures phone numbers and email addresses
Source: manychat.com
Manychat has proven itself a prominent fixture in the world of AI chatbots. It’s easy to use and cleverly designed for sales and marketing. ManyChat focuses mainly on Facebook Messenger, but they do have support for Instagram Direct as well. The AI tool can be used without any coding knowledge, promising users that they can set up a bot in as little as 20 minutes.
AI SEO Tools
- GrowthBar
Price: (Monthly) $29 for Standard / $79 for Pro / $129 for Agency
Best Feature:
Great content generation feature
Source: growthbarseo.com
GrowthBar uses GPT-3 AI to automate content generation. It can suggest keywords, exact word count, links, images, and more. The tool is capable of providing extensive backlinking as well as creating blog post content outlines. There’s also a Chrome extension available.
GPT-3 AI technology was developed by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk. It’s the first AI tech that has passed the Turing Test, which ensures that the written copy would sound as humanlike as possible.
- Surfer SEO
Price: $49 for Basic / $99 for Pro / $199 for Business
Best Feature:
Convenient SERP Analyzer
Source: surferseo.com
Designed to optimize blog posts, articles, and other copies, SEO Surfer is an easy-to-use AI online tool. It’s created for more technical SEO, allowing users to fully audit existing copy and compare it with the competition. Surfer also has the capacity to evaluate keywords using Google’s BERT method and has over 500 ranking metrics to analyze content.
- Frase.io
Price: (Monthly) $44.99 for Basic / $114.99 for Team / Custom Quote for Enterprise
Best Feature:
Content insight software
Source: frase.io
Frase.io lets you create SEO optimized content better and faster. Once you enter a topic, Frase automatically compares and pulls data from the top sites with the same keyword. This artificial intelligence marketing tool then generates an SEO-friendly outline, so you can write content that would rank higher on search results.
As you create your content, Frase will score your work. The higher your score, the better your content will rank against competitor sites.
AI Social Media Tool
- Smartly.io
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Allows for creative ad testing across multiple platforms
Source: support.smartly.io
Smartly.io is an AI-based ad marketing tool that lets teams plan, test, and launch only the best performing ads to their target audience. It integrates with various major platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram, letting businesses handle all of their ad marketing on a single dashboard.
One of its strengths is it allows for modular ad testing across different channels. This lets businesses see which ad designs are performing best.
- Socialbakers
Price: Custom Quote
Best Feature:
Influencer marketing discovery and tracking
Source: socialbakers.com
Socialbakers is a social media management AI marketing tool that helps manage all of your social media profiles in one dashboard. You can use it for tracking campaigns to see how they performed.
Its best use, however, is to keep track of your influencer marketing. The unified dashboard lets you find, vet, and keep in touch with your influencers. It also offers insight analytics and even allows you to schedule posts to get the best results.
This tool is used by large companies like McDonald’s, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube for their marketing as well.
All Around AI Tools
- Brand24
Price: (Monthly) $49 for Plus / $99 for Premium / $199 for Business / $249 for Professional
Best Features:
Powerful social media reputation monitoring
Source: brand24.com
For any business, reputation is everything. With Brand24’s powerful AI social media monitoring tool, brands can keep track of positive and negative feedback about the company in real time. It analyzes conversations about the brand, products, and competitors all over the web.
Aside from monitoring brand reputation, it also lets you assess marketing campaigns and address issues that may come up before it gets out of hand.
Wrapping Up
Machine learning and AI marketing isn’t new. For years, companies have always looked towards technology to apply improvements in their work systems and draw actionable insights to improve revenue. But now, with an increasingly digital landscape, the use of top AI marketing tools is deemed a necessity and no longer a luxury.
As a business, it’s important to leverage AI marketing tools to create a sustainable, forward-thinking brand designed to last for years to come.