Discover the best AI marketing tools to streamline your startup operations, automate tasks, and enhance customer engagement.
Hailey Chong
October 3, 2024
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According to a study by Duke University, marketers who use AI marketing tools reported a 6.2% increase in sales, a 7% increase in customer satisfaction, and a 7.2% reduction in marketing overheads. Forbes also reports that around 56% of organizations are using AI tools to improve their business operations.
Based on these numbers, the adoption of AI in marketing is not merely a trend. Rather, we’re seeing businesses making it a key part of their operations and strategy. That bodes well, and you may be wondering about the specific AI marketing tools driving these results.
This article explores 23 best AI marketing tools in several categories, such as paid ads, automation, content writing and editing, image and video generation, SEO, data analytics, CRM, and research — tailored for startup requirements.
An AI marketing tool is software that uses artificial intelligence to enhance the execution of marketing tasks and workflows. These tools analyze vast amounts of data with which they form insights or automate tasks.
By automating marketing tasks, AI marketing tools can help startups save time, reduce errors, and work faster while being cost-effective. They can also benefit from AI in other ways, such as;
Despite these benefits, startups must ensure they supervise AI usage and crosscheck its outputs. That way, they can get good results and avoid costly errors.
AI in paid ads helps startups optimize their budget allocation, get channel recommendations, and bring their ad creative ideas to life. It is based on these that they can then create entertaining, touching, captivating, or memorable copy and creatives that resonate with their audience. Here are AI tools that you can use in different aspects of paid ads.
Kaya’s Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool is an AI-powered solution that analyzes your competitors’ ads across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Bing. It tracks your competitor's ad activities and provides insights on their keywords, copies, creatives and ad spend.
Key features:
Why use it: It is fast and easy to use, and you get all of your competitor's ad insights in one place. And unlike regular competitor ad analysis tools, it offers recommendations on channels and what you should spend.
Pricing: $100 per month gives you full access to your competitors’ ads and actionable insights on keywords, ad copies, and ad spend data. Get a free report to see how it's like here.
AdCreative.ai is an AI-powered platform that generates high-converting ad creatives for digital marketing campaigns. It analyzes your data and uses what it learns to create visually appealing, on-brand ads tailored to your audience and ad platforms.
Key features:
Why use it: It can save you up to 90% of design costs and tasks for ad creatives. It can also produce multiple ad variations quickly, allowing you to test and optimize your ad efforts without extensive design skills or a large ad budget.
Pricing: It offers a free trial plan with 10 free credits for the first week. The 'Startup Plans' goes for $29 per month, the 'professional plan' goes for $209 per month, and the ultimate plan goes for $549 per month.
Smart Bidding is a bid strategy that uses Google AI to optimize your ads for conversions or conversion value in every auction. It uses 4 strategies, which are Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversion and Maximize conversion value. It offers a wide range of signals, flexible controls, and transparent reporting.
Key features:
Why use it: It increases your ROI potential by improving the quantity and quality of your conversions. Small businesses like FishingBooker grew their ROAS by 49% using Smart Bidding. Google reports that over 80% of advertisers are using automated bidding.
Pricing: Free to use within the Google Ads platform. Costs are based on ad spend.
HubSpot's Campaign Assistant is an AI-powered tool that allows you to create landing page copy, marketing email copy, and ad copies for Google, Meta or LinkedIn Ads.
Key features:
Why use it: It is free to use. It also supports a multi-channel ad strategy, with a focus on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn ad platforms. It is also part of a large suite of marketing tools offered by HubSpot.
Pricing: It is free to use.
Canva's Free Ad Creator is an AI-powered tool that allows you to create visually impressive and action-driven ads for search and social ad platforms. It is integrated with Canva's extensive template and design library.
Key features:
Why use it: Canva reports that 70% of marketers stated that AI helped them enhance their team’s productivity. It is beginner-friendly, free and works for all ad channels, including Google Ads, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter).
Pricing: It is free to use. If you need extra Canva features, you can subscribe to Canva Pro at $15 per month or $10 per month per person for Canva Teams.
With AI-powered and automated workflows, you can follow up on leads and prioritize tasks by importance and relevance. AI also allows you to create chatbots that can manage customer inquiries, answer questions, resolve issues, and nurture leads. The automation tools below will help streamline your marketing workflow.
Zapier AI is an automation platform that integrates AI workflow automation tools. It uses AI to draft email replies to your customers, create to-do's from Slack reactions, follow up leads, summarize your business documents, etc.
Key features:
Why use it: Zapier AI allows you to automate customer support and talk to leads 24/7. If you're struggling with data entry, Zapier can collect lead data, send it to the right app, and update it whenever there's a change. You can also use it to build AI assistants and Chatbots for customer support without writing a single line of code.
Pricing: It has a free version for basic use. It also has the Professional plan for 19.99 per month, the Team plan for $69 per month, and the Enterprise plan available on demand.
Gumloop is an AI solution backed by Y Combinator that allows you to automate any workflow using a drag-and-drop interface. It uses AI to scrape leads from websites and categorize them. It extracts data from PDF or other document formats. It can also be used to automate SEO tasks, such as finding internal linking opportunities and planning your content based on your keyword clusters.
Key features:
Why use it: It can convert YouTube content to SEO blog posts. So, it helps you repurpose content. It can personalize your sales emails, it can score and rank your leads, research new leads, and send them personalized greetings.
Pricing: It has a free plan, a Starter plan for $97, a Pro plan for $297, and a custom plan.
Sometimes, brands can struggle to maintain consistency in their messaging. Also, repurposing content can be time-consuming. AI tools learn from a brand’s style guide and voice, with which it produces on-brand content. These tools can also repurpose content in seconds, which saves time. Here are AI tools that you can use as your writing assistant.
Jasper.ai is an AI copilot and copywriting solution built for enterprise marketing teams. Jasper is trained on your brand’s style, tone, and knowledge base. It always requires you to create on-brand marketing content at scale.
Key features:
Why use it: It is different from generic AI writing tools as you can upload your style guide and knowledge base. So, it writes content that aligns with your brand information. You can also generate assets for a full marketing campaign by uploading the campaign brief. If you're new to copywriting, Jasper can study your current writing and assign tone and formatting rules, ensuring its future writing sounds like you.
Pricing: Jasper offers 3 plans. The Creator plan for $39 per month, the Pro plan for $59 per month, and the custom Business plan.
Copy.ai is an AI solution for automating marketing and sales tasks, content writing and go-to-market strategy. It has two main products. The AI marketing OS generates content from briefs given to it, refreshes content, and automates content repurposing. The AI sales OS uses pre-built playbooks for lead generation and sales enablement.
Key features:
Why use it. You can use it to generate blogs or social posts from a sales call, craft thought leadership pieces, and generate Google and Facebook Ad copies based on a given persona and URL. Aside from creating content, Copy.ai can also check your content against Google's helpful content guidelines and automate editing and plagiarism checks.
Pricing: Copy.ai has a free plan, a $36 per month Starter plan, a $186 per month Advance plan, and an Enterprise plan available on demand.
ChatGPT is a generative AI and advanced language model that can generate human-like responses when prompted. It helps with content writing, research, image generation, and data analysis.
Key features:
Why use it: Startups can use it to brainstorm ideas and draft content. It also saves time. An MIT study states that using ChatGPT resulted in 40% time-saving on writing tasks and 18% improvement in task quality.
Pricing: ChatGPT offers a free plan with access to GPT-4o mini and Limited access to GPT-4o, while the premium plan is $20 per month with access to GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, DALL·E for image generation, etc.
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that can improve the quality and clarity of written content. It checks content for errors, readability, and plagiarism. It also helps you improve content correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
Key features:
Why use it: It helps you overcome writer’s block. The free plan can do most of the editing you need. It also helps you maintain messaging consistency through the goal feature, where you can choose the tone of writing, intent, audience, and whether you want the content to be formal, neutral, or information.
Pricing: Grammarly is free. They also offer a premium plan at $12 per month or $144 per year.
The Hemingway App is an AI-powered tool that helps simplify and improve your writing, making it more accessible and readable. It proofreads content, fixes wordy sentences, and corrects grammar issues.
Key features:
Why use it: It integrates with WordPress, which is the content management system used by most websites (43%). It can reduce editing time while helping you produce error-free content.
Pricing: Hemingway is free to use on browsers. The desktop app costs a one-time fee of $19.99 per license.
Takeaway: Although regular AI copywriting tools can do a good job, successful marketing requires that the AI tool understands your target audience, tailors content to your brand voice, and understands your business such that it can highlight your unique selling point (USP) effectively in ad copies.
This requires experienced marketers who can create the right knowledge bases and strategies that drive results. Kaya has built an elite team of marketing experts for that purpose, with the experience and track record to manage your ad campaigns end-to-end.
Image and video production requires time, money, and talent to plan, shoot, and edit, which can be a luxury for lean marketing teams like startups. AI marketing tools solve these problems by enabling startups to create high-quality videos at low costs and with little technical knowledge. You can start creating high-quality, impactful videos and images with the tools below.
Synthesia is an AI tool for creating studio-quality videos and AI avatars with voiceovers in over 140 languages. It offers video editing, 1-click translations, and video templates. Synthesia can be used to create videos for paid ads, social media marketing campaigns, and product explainers.
Key features
Why use it: Xerox achieved a 50% reduction in video production cost by using Synthesia. So, it is a good choice if you want to cut your video production costs. If you also engage your customers with video campaigns, YouTube Ads, or TikTok Ads, Synthesia is a great option. Its availability in over 140 languages also allows you to localize content to multiple regions.
Pricing: The Starter plan costs $18 per month, the Creator plan costs $64 per month, and there's custom pricing for the Enterprise plan.
Pictory is an AI video creator that allows you to make short-form videos for marketing, educational content, branding, etc. It supports video creation for social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Meta.
Key features
Why use it: It does not require technical skills. So, you can save money on buying video equipment or hiring an in-house video creator. It is also a good tool for video advertising campaigns on YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn, etc.
Pricing: There are 4 tiers. The Starter plan costs $19 per month, the Professional plan costs $39 per month, the Teams plan costs $99, and you need to contact the company to get a quote on Enterprise plans.
Beautiful.ai is a generative AI solution for creating business presentations. It offers customizable style themes, AI-assisted designs and templates that allow you to set up impactful presentations quickly. Startups like Udacity and AdWeek use Beautiful.ai.
Key Features:
Why use it: Meeting investors for fundraising can be daunting. With this tool, you can quickly create winning pitch decks 10x faster. It has templates for several use cases, such as Series A, go-to-market, investment proposal, pitch deck, etc.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $12 per month for the pro tier, the team tier costs $40 per month, and for the enterprise tier, you need to request a quote.
Pebblely is an AI-powered tool that allows you to create AI product photos without the need for manual editing or Photoshop skills. You can use it to create marketing assets, such as ad creatives, email banners, website imagery, social media content, marketplace listings, etc.
Key features:
Why use it: If you are a direct-to-customer company, you can generate and edit product photos for use in social posts, ads, email marketing, etc. It is suitable for use in multiple online marketplaces, such as Amazon, Etsy, Lazada, Walmart, etc. Its AI is trained to remove the photo background in seconds, which saves you time and allows you to reuse images on multiple platforms.
Pricing: Pebblely offers 3 pricing plans. The Pro plan is at $59 per month, the Premium plan is at $99, and the Business plan is at $299 per month.
Prior to generative AI, you'd need a data analyst to crunch the numbers and make sense of data. This can be challenging when you have data from multiple sources, as you'll need to import, merge, and clean the data before analysis. This usually requires multiple tools and, sometimes, different specialty skills.
With AI models, you can now question your data in plain language and get fast, accurate results. Mixpanel and PostHug are two AI-driven analytics tools that can ease the workload.
Mixpanel is a Y Combinator-backed advanced analytics platform that provides real-time insights into user behavior, engagement, and product usage. It helps businesses to understand how users interact with their products. It offers cohort analysis and funnel tracking, enabling data-driven decision-making for user retention and product improvement.
Mixpanel's generative AI, Spark, can be queried in plain language. Then, it builds viewable and editable reports. It can also break down behavioral patterns, aggregate data, and segment data into custom buckets.
Key features:
Why use it: It is a great option if you’re beta testing your product or you need to collect data from your early adopters after your MVP release. It also shows how your customers interact at every step of the funnel, which enables you to improve your growth tactics. It is an essential website tracking tool and a key part of a startup's minimum viable marketing analytics stack.
Pricing: It offers a free plan and a Growth plan for $28 per month. Startups can get a free one-year subscription on the Growth plan provided they are under 5 years old, with up to $8M in total funding.
Also backed by Y Combinator, PostHog is an open-source, all-in-one platform for product analytics, A/B testing, surveys, feature flags, etc. It also offers web analytics, including UTM tracking, bounce tracking, and scroll tracking.
It supports integrations with multiple LLM platforms to track metrics for LLM apps and pinpoint performance bottlenecks. This makes it easy for users to understand their LLM costs per customer and model, know how many users are interacting with their LLM features, etc. It also allows users to consolidate their LLM data from multiple platforms into a single dashboard.
Key features:
Why use it: It is a good option if you need something more advanced and customizable than Google Analytics 4. It shows how visitors interact with your website. It also analyzes your funnel to find drop-offs. It is one of the advanced tools for your marketing analytics stack. It is also a great tool for A/B tests and other experiments. For instance, Y Combinator used PostHog experiments to increase engagement by 40%.
Pricing: PostHog offers a free plan and the starship enterprise plan, which starts at $2000.
SEO is usually high effort but takes anything from 3 to 6 months. You need to sort out technical issues like SSL or TLS security certificate, XML sitemaps, monitoring site health, etc. For content, research keywords, build links, etc.
Technical SEO can be tricky. One wrong click can prevent your site from being crawled. It may also require various tools that may be costly and beyond the reach of startups with lean budgets. The AI tools below help simplify these tasks, ensuring you avoid costly technical and content SEO errors.
Beki AI is an SEO tool that helps you find, build, and monitor internal links with the help of AI. It uses its advanced algorithms to suggest the most natural internal links that can improve your site's performance. It also helps to generate anchor texts using AI.
Key features:
Why use it: Internal link building is one of the key ranking factors, and it can be time-consuming when done manually. With Beki AI, you can build internal links 10x faster, which may help you outrank your competitors. It also generates meta tags and tracks the impact of your internal links on your SEO performance.
Pricing: It offers a free plan with limited features. The Starter costs $15 per month, the Agency plan costs $49 per month, and the Pro plan costs $99 per month.
Scalenut uses AI Co-pilot to power the entire SEO content lifecycle. It also offers AI-powered tools for generating long-tail keywords and minifying HTML and JavaScript. Its AI also helps you with content strategies and keyword clusters to build topical authority.
Key features:
Why use it: It offers multiple tools that can simplify technical SEO. For instance, you can use it to compress HTML, check HREF lang, and also handle content SEO tasks like finding search keywords. It also uses AI to read the web, extract relevant data and create ready-to-use vontent briefs for SEO content writing.
Pricing: It has 3 plans. The Essential plan for $19 per month, the Growth plan for $39 per month, and the Pro plan for $74 per month.
Startups need to keep up with customers, whether by follow-ups, answering questions, or resolving issues. With AI, they can provide personalized customer support faster, enabling them to improve customer relationships. Here are two AI tools that can supercharge your customer service.
Tidio is an AI-driven customer service solution that combines AI chatbots and live chats to help businesses improve customer support and grow sales. It answers up to 70% of customer inquiries without any human intervention.
Key features:
Why use it: Tidio is a good option for startups that want to improve customer service without costly spending on hiring human agents. Its Lyro AI Chatbot enables you to offer real-time customer support as it answers customers in 6 seconds.
Pricing: Its most popular plan is the Growth plan at $59 per month. Other plans include the free plan, Starter plan at $29 per month, Tidio+ at $749 per month, and Enterprise plan at $2999 per month.
Zoho is an AI CRM tool that helps businesses attract and retain customers. Its AI assistant, Zia, helps to automate routine marketing tasks and offers predictive sales and sentiment analysis.
Key features:
Pricing: $14 for the Standard plan, $23 for the Professional plan, $40 for the Enterprise plan, and $52 for the Ultimate plan.
Google remains an excellent solution for online research. However, finding exact information can require time. With conversational AI, you can get specific information and its source. You can also drill down on topics and get answers, all in one chat window. The AI also suggests extra questions that you can click on to get deeper insight.
Perplexity AI is an AI-driven conversational search engine that offers accessible and verifiable answers to queries. It summarizes answers with references, pulls real-time information, and offers follow-up question suggestions to enrich your search experience.
Marketers can use it to generate content ideas and gather insights on complex topics, target audiences, competitors, and industry trends. They can also use its citations and source integration features to create content that is backed by credible and current data.
Perplexity can also be used to optimize content for search engines. It also offers marketers the chance to drive organic traffic via Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) before Google launches its AI-powered search solution.
Key features:
Why use it: It is conversational—so you can get follow-up suggestions for deeper research. It provides up-to-date and real-time information. It also gives you the sources of the information, which allows you to cross-check for accuracy.
Pricing: It is free. The Pro plan is available at $20 per month.
The statistics show a marked improvement when businesses incorporate AI marketing tools. Despite the popularity of AI writing solutions like ChatGPT and Grammarly, there are many other AI tools that marketers rely on to automate and improve their workflows.
These AI tools can be used in various categories of marketing tasks, such as AI-driven paid advertising, competitor ad analysis, image and video generation, data analytics, SEO, CRM, and research. With the help of AI marketing tools, startups can speed up marketing tasks, save money on video creation equipment, and provide customer support without spending too much on human agents.
By using AI tools in marketing, startups can level the playing field against larger organizations.
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