22 powerful AI marketing tools to boost your small business productivity

When used strategically, AI (artificial intelligence) has the potential to make your business more efficient and productive by changing the way your team works. They're fast becoming the ultimate productivity hack.

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What is AI?

How AI can be useful for marketing strategies

A list of useful AI marketing tools for small businesses

What is AI?

AI (artificial intelligence) is a technology that involves teaching machines to do things that ordinarily would require human intelligence. Examples include learning, reasoning, problem solving and decision making. AI uses computer programmes and algorithms to analyse data. It then learns from this and uses it to make predictions or recommendations.

This is what makes AI a powerful tool for a wide range of applications – from speech recognition to autonomous vehicles to personalised medicine.

AI can be very useful for marketing because it can help businesses collect, analyse and utilise vast amounts of data to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

How AI can boost your small business marketing strategy

Target your audience: With AI, you can gather and analyse data about your target customers. This can be used to create detailed buyer profiles. With this information, you can develop marketing campaigns that are more relevant to the people you want to make your customers.

Marketing automation: Many marketing tasks are time consuming and repetitive, such as creating email lists, sending out segmented email campaigns or devising social media posts. AI can automate these tasks. This can help free up time that can then be spent working on strategy or other parts of the business.

Increase customer engagement: Through its ability to learn, AI-powered scheduling tools can ensure that content is posted at the best times – when your customers are most likely to engage with you.

Personalisation: AI algorithms can use your customer data to predict and create individual customer experiences. You can then tailor your marketing based on a customer’s preferences. For example, recommendations of products your customer would probably like could be sent via email, adverts or social media posts. This will help your customers feel they are being communicated with at an individual level rather than as part of an anonymous whole.

Content creation: AI can be used to create and improve your marketing content. It can generate headlines, write product descriptions, create social media posts and write blogs. It can also help simplify SEO (search engine optimisation).

Predictive analytics: AI can use data to predict which customers are most likely to buy (and which are less likely). With these more actionable customer insights, businesses can then focus their marketing efforts where there are better chances of making sales.

Marketing campaign performance: AI can be used to monitor the success of your marketing campaigns. It can test which are performing well and which need improvement. This allows you to constantly improve your campaigns for better results.

Improve customer service: One of the leading uses of AI is customer service automation. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can interact with customers in real-time and provide personalised interactions. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are another option where calls can be routed automatically to the right person for the customer to speak to.

Overall, AI can help marketers understand and target their customers better. It can help create more effective marketing campaigns and an enhanced customer experience.

The best thing about AI is that it can help save you time which should improve your company’s productivity. Better productivity should lead to lower costs and healthier profits.

The biggest challenge for AI is that it relies on high quality data to be effective. Data management and integration is, therefore, critical. As is data security.

While marketers aren’t data scientists, they need to be able to interpret the results generated by AI. This is easier with some AI applications than others.

A list of useful AI marketing tools for small businesses

Below is a list of AI marketing tools broken down by segment.

What are the best AI tools for personalisation?

Klevu.com – Klevu is an AI search tool. It uses data to display to a customer the products they are most likely to buy. Klevu can work across multiple languages and cultures.

Clerk.io – Clerk is also an AI search tool. Its technology analyses customer behaviour, trends and transactions. It then uses this to generate compatible search results and content.

Amazon Personalize – Amazon Personalize is an AI personalisation marketing tool. Using a company’s own data, it uses this to target customers.

Vue.ai – Vue’s AI technology focuses on minimising shopping cart abandonment. It uses personalised re-targeting campaigns and on-site recommendations to keep customers interested and ready to buy.

What are the best AI tools for creating marketing content?

Copy.AI – CopyAI can help you write engaging and effective marketing copy – whether that’s a blog, social media post, website copy or email.

Jasper.AI – Similar to CopyAI, JasperAI is a copywriting content creator. This tool is also trained to optimise SEO results.

Growthbar – Growthbar’s AI technology works on creating SEO-friendly content for websites, blogs and articles.

Ryter.me – Ryter uses templates and use cases to help generate written marketing content. Its platform comes with over 30 languages and more than 20 tones of voice.

Phrasee – Phrasee uses AI to develop your company’s brand language so all content is in human-sounding language consistent with your brand.

DeepL.com – For companies working across international markets, DeepL can translate marketing copy into several languages – not only word for word but also with nuances that other translation tools often miss.

InstaText and Grammarly are spelling and grammar AI tools. InstaText can correct while also preserving your brand’s voice.

What are the best AI tools for video and audio creation?

Synthesia.io – Synthesia is an AI video creation platform. It can convert any script into realistic, animated video presentation. The platform comes with over 70 human-like AI narrators and 120 languages.

Wisecut.video – Wisecut uses AI-powered facial and voice recognition software to automatically edit videos and generate subtitles (with translation). It can use long-form videos to create snippets or short clips for social media.

Elevenlabs.io – Elevenlabs can take any given text and convert it into an audio recording. If has a selection of AI-generated voices to choose from (provided you want an American accent).

What are the best AI tools for marketing campaigns?

Persado.com – Persado is an AI platform that generates marketing campaigns in language personalised to the customer. It creates precise language designed to motivate people to engage with the brand.

Albert.ai – Albert uses personalisation AI technology to improve the effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns.

Smartwriter.ai – Smartwriter.ai is designed to automate and personalise email marketing campaigns.

What are the best AI tools for CRMs (customer relationship management systems)?

Optimove – Optimove collects data from different platforms. It then uses this to show a unified view on one dashboard. Its AI tool, Optibot, scours and analyses all the customer data so actionable insights can be generated, e.g. which campaigns to ditch or if any customers are being over-exposed.

Brandwatch – Brandwatch’s AI solutions cover consumer intelligence (CI) and social media management. It works on understanding customers better while also analysing where a brand fits in its market.

What are the best AI tools for chatbots and IVRs?

Chatfuel.com – Chatfuel is among the most popular chatbots. It can automate FAQs and qualify leads before they are directed to a live sales agent.

Tidio.com – Tidio claims it can automate up to 73% of customer questions.

Drift.com – Drift’s chatbot supports B2B companies. It can also schedule meetings with potential clients.

Of course, this is in no way an exhaustive or final list. There are many more AI marketing tools to choose from and the list is growing every day. And as the technology becomes smarter, what AI can do will only expand.