Fall in love with AI… a new world of marketing tools
By Martin Jones
Digital marketing consultant and web development business owner with 21 years running Red Design. In this series, I’ll be describing the new AI marketing tools and how they can help your business.
Fall in love with AI…
There are perhaps, as many reasons to love A.I. as there are to fear it. But I want to start this series on a positive note.
A.I. has been playing a part in marketing for some time, though quietly and behind the scenes. Chatbots are the most obvious example of A.I. making decisions for us to increase customer interaction and conversions.
But now the market is being flooded with new tools, third-party dashboards and services that give us much access to the power of A.I. It allows us to create content, manage sales funnels and lots more. Now is the time to embrace these new tools and get a relatively early handle on them.
Here are my 13 best AI tools for marketing
Not an exhaustive list, but a good guide to get you started.
Note, I will be expanding on these reviews shortly in separate posts.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you will have heard of Chat GPT. And if you’ve explored a little further, you may have encountered some of the image-generating equivalents. There are even new AI tools for generating entire suites of marketing materials in minutes. Powerful stuff!
But where people tend to get lost and confused is differentiating between the AI tools themselves and the front-end apps and dashboards used to manage them. So, I’ll guide you through some of the better and more prominent ones.
AI writing tools:
Grammarly has been around for a long time now and was an early example of a front-end AI tool. I’ve been using the Grammarly extension in my Google Chrome browser for years. It’s a grey area as to whether or not it’s strictly a marketing tool, but it’s a good place to start now it utilises more AI. It can be integrated into anything you do in a web browser. Give Grammarly a try.
Features: Proofing reading. Grammar suggestions. Sentence structure suggestions.
Chat GPT has been in the news every day for months as the world has become fixated on the benefits and threats of AI. If you have to generate copy for a website, email campaign, brochure or even a difficult email, Chat GPT is indispensable. It is trained using internet text data, including articles, books, websites, forums, social media posts and more. An earlier version of the chatbot was indeed trained on Wikipedia, which is often inaccurate, though this is not the case any more.
Features: Free. Human-like sentences. A vast database of information. Quick and easy to use.
Sudowrite is a writing tool for creative writers. It helps you generate text content, rewrite existing content and generate ideas. It’s one of the better AI content generators and can even write a whole novel in a week. You can even adjust the pace of the story and plot and character arcs.
Features: Prompt writing interface. Elaborate on pre-existing content. Rewrite existing content. Generate metaphors.
Formerly called Jarvis, Jasper is a big player in the generative AI market. They have acquired other AI writing tools like Headlime and Shortly AI. Jasper can be used for image generation, though its real strength is in content writing.
Features: Lots of templates. Prompt writing tools. AI assistant. Can reference Google Search. Editorial checks… allegedly.
AI image generation:
I love Midjourney! It has been around for a while but come on leaps and bounds this year. Only six months ago, it couldn’t get the hang of human hands. Now, that doesn’t seem to be a problem. Generate images in any style you want, very quickly.
Features: Simple prompt input. Cross-pollinate artist styles. Any type of image; illustrations, photo-realistic, logos, diagrams. Choose from 4 initial images. Use images as source material. Outpainting – expanding image edges.
Canva has been around for years and recently added an AI-based image generator. It is prompt-based and similar to Midjourney, with 4 images generated from each prompt.
Features: Integrated with Canva. Controls for aspect ratio. Drag-and-drop into other tools. Prompt writing. Pre-set style options. Free version.
Dall E – Now on version 2 – was created by OpenAI, who are at the forefront of lots of the latest AI marketing tools, not least Chat GPT. It’s not reinventing the AI wheel but is a solid tool that does pretty much what you’d expect.
Features: Photo-realistic images. Replace content in your image. Outpainting.
Wombo is a mobile-only app. Its styles lean toward fantasy art and very colourful results.
Features: Mobile app. Available on iOS and Android. Order prints of your artwork through the app.
Night Cafe is aimed firmly at creatives, so better suited to us marketeers.
Features: Choice of multiple algorithms. Machine-learning tools. Daily AI art challenges that can be fun.
Some broader AI tools:
Ad Creative AI is aimed at advert and social media content creation. It works with your current branding and has a dashboard in which you can save all your assets.
Features: Brand editing dashboard. Size and dimensions controls. Language selection. Stock image search & insert. Estimated conversion score.
SemRush is a powerful SEO and digital marketing tool. I’ve used this for years and, in my opinion it is the market leader. Recently SemRush started to integrate AI tools into its already comprehensive dashboard.
Features: Evaluates readability. Keyword research tool. Competitor analysis. User intent on keyword research. Detailed to-do lists for in-page SEO. position tracking. Local SEO pack.
Seventh Sense is all about email marketing. In their own words, Seventh Sense is ‘…designed to drive maximum performance and engagement with your existing email marketing program.’ The idea is to produce content for your email campaigns that is much more likely to convert.
Features: Behaviour profiling. Good reporting. Email template generation.
Ink (or Ink For All) has a few nice bits of functionality that the others don’t, such as its AI Sheild designed to protect your content and identify plagiarised content, or content that might be a target. And it has a good mix of other tools, like a writing tool, keyword research module, an optimisation function and image generation.
Features: AI protection from AI plagiarism. SEO optimization tool. WordPress integration.
