Revised April 3, 2024
Revised February 7, 2024
Revised August 10, 2023
There’s a lot of excitement and new technology developing around artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing. There is also a bit of nervousness and some dangerous myths. Here’s what you need to know, along with several tools that can help you enhance your marketing efforts with AI today.
Myth #1: AI is going to take my marketing job.
Not to worry. Though there is more concern today than there was a few years ago, it remains unlikely that AI, machine learning (ML), or a robot will take your marketing job.
It is likely that these technologies will continue to automate simple, repetitive tasks, even taking some roles in industries like food service. Even there, however, robots and AI are more likely to help out and work alongside humans than to replace them.
It’s already becoming a smart assistant to marketing professionals, helping to automate basic tasks and speed up others, like content creation.
Who knows? A robot may take your job someday in the future. But for now, AI copywriting simply has too many serious limitations to threaten the jobs of marketers in general, and professional copywriters more specifically.
Myth #2: AI will fundamentally transform marketing practices.
Again, in the long term, anything is possible. But in the short term—not really.
AI and ML are predominantly used in marketing today to either add smart automation to repetitive tasks (e.g., sending influencer outreach emails) or to perform common tasks more effectively (e.g., to extract insights from analytics or generate leads).
Myth #3: To remain valuable as a marketer, I’m going to have to become an expert in AI technology.
In terms of becoming a software engineer or math PhD? Fortunately, no! What’s most important is for marketers to understand what IA can do and how to apply it to improve marketing processes.
It is important to understand the basics of how AI works, what it can and can’t do, and how to write prompts to generate text or images. As Usama Fayyad, Executive Director at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, noted in Forbes, “AI will not replace your job, but a human using AI will replace your job … if you are not using AI.”
Also fortunately, there are an expanding number of tools available that enable you to take advantage of the capabilities of AI without deep knowledge of the underlying technology. Here are nine 12 of the top AI-based tools for marketing and sales professionals.
10 11 12 14 AI-Based Marketing and Sales Tools
Click360 combines website visit data with the information in your CRM system to help predict which leads are ready to buy and how you can best move them through the sales cycle. It’s a sales and marketing intelligence platform that uses deep learning to extract actionable insights from prospect engagement on your site.
Hoppy Copy is an AI-powered email writing platform for marketers. Though it won’t really enable you to “write any email campaign or newsletter in seconds”—it’s just technology, not magic—it can help significantly speed up these writing processes by starting with proven, high-performing templates you can customize.
It can also accelerate the process of repurposing content, from blog posts to email copy, text messages, and social media updates.
Chatfuel helps you increase sales, reduce costs, and automate support on Facebook by building an AI-powered bot, with no coding or previous experience required. Engage with prospects online and connect warm leads to a sales rep in a live chat. Answer common questions with your bot to increase customer satisfaction and reduce support costs.
Predis.ai generates ready-to-publish social media posts, videos, carousels, memes, captions, and hashtags—all from simple text input. It’s like Canva, ChatGPT, and Hootsuite all rolled into one tool.
The platform can produce social media creative content using your brand colors and logo; support team collaboration; and seamlessly integrate with the most popular social networks as well as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Google My Business.
Jimdo is a super-easy website building platform for small businesses. It enables business owners to create a website and even sell online without any coding knowledge.
But if choosing a template, uploading graphics, and writing web content is still too much effort, Jimdo’s AI capabilities can do it for you. If you already have a Facebook or Google Business page, Jimdo will pull your company information and images to create a beautiful, professional website for you in less than five minutes.
PaveAI allows agencies, ecommerce vendors, and businesses of all sizes to focus their content marketing efforts more effectively by using AI to identify correlations in Google Analytics data which would extremely hard to spot manually.
The tool’s algorithm algorithm looks at 16+ million possible combinations to identify the most important insights across all marketing channels. Get data-driven recommendations on exactly how to increase your ROI. Discover which products it’s best to promote, when, on which platform, and more.
Squigl is a learning (and marketing) tool that uses AI to help create animated videos in minutes.
Simply copy and paste your text into the Squigl platform. The tool will use its proprietary AI engine to recommend specific words and phrases to animate in the video. Next, record your own voiceover or use the system’s automated voice. Finally, export and share you animated video.
Remesh is an AI-based marketing research tool that lets you have a live conversation with any audience that matters to you. Using AI, the platform analyzes the opinions and interactions of up to 1,000 participants, and helps you understand the responses that best represent the group, all in a matter of minutes.
Outreach for influencer marketing, link building, or digital PR has to be done right, or it’s not worth doing at all. And a LOT of it is poorly done.
Respona helps personalize outreach efforts at scale. Respona’s AI assistant studies the content created by the influencers and helps you quickly personalize each pitch for higher response rates. It simplifies finding direct contact information, keeps all of your outreach process in one platform, and provides analytics to track results.
xiQ is an AI-powered SaaS platform for sales and marketing. For marketing, xiQ’s AI algorithm identifies the right mix of company collateral and syndicated content to develop highly engaging campaigns that generate more leads, faster.
For sales, xiQ’s AI-generated (DISC) personality analysis allows reps to personalize and custom-tailor their sales pitches to match each prospective buyer’s personality traits.
Highspot is a sales enablement platform that helps sales and marketing teams find and personalize the most effective content to share with your buyers and track their engagement.
Patented ML technology analyzes how content is being used and how effective it is in closing revenue to surface the best recommendations. It applies intelligent content scoring based on how content is being used by your sales team, how it engages customers, and how much revenue it has helped drive.
Rumi started off as a video conferencing tool for influencers and evolved into a powerful video conferencing platform for entrepreneurs and businesses, with the ability to create action items and summarize meetings while integrating tasks in project management tools and CRMs.
Like with Zoom, you can sign up in seconds to become a meeting host. From there, you can schedule meetings from your dashboard or right from Google Calendar. Manage your workflow by sending AI generated notes and action items to your go-to ticketing and messaging platforms. You can even keep sensitive parts of conversations “off the record,” ignored by AI.
Latana
Latana is an AI-powered brand tracking solution for B2B companies. It enables brand and marketing managers to gather insights regarding overall brand performance amongst their target audience, and use the data to adapt their marketing strategy.
The platform enables brands to choose from over 1000+ profile attributes to build and track the target audiences that matter most for their brand. The platform can also be used to compare brand performance across markets, audiences, and competitors.
Best known for its marketing automation platform, HubSpot also provides a suite of AI-powered tools for content development and CRM. Its AI content assistant natively integrates with the HubSpot CRM platform and other tools, allowing you to toggle between manual and AI content creation to generate compelling content in seconds for blogs, social posts, marketing emails, and more.
HubSpot’s suite of AI-powered applications includes content assistant plus Content Writer, Campaign Assistant, AI-Powered CRM, and AI for WordPress, which enables you to leverage AI-generated content to elevate your website strategy and connect with your customers.
In Conclusion
AI is already having a big impact on sales and marketing—and that’s a good thing for marketers. The tools will be designed to work with marketing professionals, making their work more interesting and effective, rather than replacing them.
And the most important knowledge for marketers to have will be an understanding of what these tools can do, rather than exactly how they work.