A bumblebee collecting honey and spreading pollen — Generated by Midjourney

A Comprehensive Guide to Using AI Tools for Marketing

Madhukar Kumar
madhukarkumar

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How to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to create and optimize your marketing content, campaigns, and analytics.

Introduction

In the last 15 months or so we have seen an explosion in the number of AI tools and apps that have been created. Given my predisposition to learning and experimenting with any tech that piques my interest, I started to keep track of some of these tools that I started to first play with and then use.

The list of tools specifically for marketing tasks is truly staggering but if you are willing to go past the fatigue there are some amazing applications that can help you do things that were previously unimaginable and automate things that were repetitive and extremely boring.

In this article, let me explore some of the best AI tools for marketing, especially in the B2B context, and explain how to use them effectively. In case you are wondering, I do have a way to keep the list of the tools updated in this fast changing world but you will have to read the whole article to figure out how I plan to do this.

Content — Text

Text content is the backbone of any marketing strategy, whether it is a blog post, website copy, a white paper, a case study, or an email. However, creating high-quality and relevant text content can be time-consuming and challenging. Fortunately, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of text content creation, such as research, writing, editing, and formatting. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for text content:

Tavily: Tavily is an AI tool that helps you do research on any topic. You can enter a keyword or a question, and Tavily will provide you with relevant sources, summaries, and insights by searching over 20 different resources. There is also an open source version called GPT researcher which you can download and run locally.

LM Notebook: LM Notebook is a Google Labs product currently in experimental stage. When you are working on a writing project, you can load up multiple pdfs and documents which now become the research material and knowledge source that you can continuously learn more about through natural language and then work on your magnum opus.

Copilot Word: Copilot Word is a Microsoft Word add-in that helps you write better and faster. Copilot Word uses AI to provide you with suggestions, feedback, and corrections as you type. You can also use Copilot Word to do research within the same document, by asking questions or entering keywords. Copilot Word will show you relevant sources, summaries, and citations.

Scribe AI: Scribe AI is an AI tool that helps you create step-by-step guides for blogs and training documents. You can use Scribe AI to generate instructions, screenshots, and videos for any task or process. You can also use Scribe AI to edit and optimize your guides, by adding keywords, headings, and call-to-actions.

Content — Audio

Audio content is a great way to reach and engage your audience, especially in the B2B context, where podcasts, webinars, and audiobooks are popular formats. However, creating and editing audio content can be costly and complicated. Luckily, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of audio content creation, such as text-to-audio, background noise removal, and music generation. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for audio content:

Eleven Labs: Eleven Labs is an AI tool that helps you convert any text into natural and expressive audio. You can use Eleven Labs to create audio versions of your blog posts, white papers, case studies, or emails. You can also use Eleven Labs to customize the voice, tone, speed, and emotion of your audio content.

Murf AI: Similar to Eleven Labs, Murf AI is an AI tool that helps you create and edit audio content using your voice. You can use Murf AI to record your voice, transcribe it, and edit it using simple commands. You can also use Murf AI to add sound effects, music, and transitions to your audio content.

Beatoven: Beatoven is an AI tool that helps you generate royalty-free music for your audio content. You can use Beatoven to create music tracks based on your mood, genre, and tempo preferences. You can also use Beatoven to mix and match different instruments, loops, and effects to create your own unique music. You can then integrate this with your video which we will talk about next.

Content — Video

Video content is one of the most effective and engaging forms of marketing, especially in the B2B context, where demos, testimonials, and tutorials are common formats. However, creating and editing video content can be expensive and time-consuming. Thankfully, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of video content creation, such as background noise removal, video downloading, video conversion, and video generation. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for video content:

Krisp AI: Krisp AI is an AI tool that helps you remove background noise from your video content. You can use Krisp AI to mute any unwanted sounds, such as traffic, wind, or echo, from your video recordings. You can also use Krisp AI to enhance your voice quality and clarity.

Ssemble: Ssemble is an AI tool that helps you download YouTube videos and edit them. You can use Ssemble to download any YouTube video in any format and quality. You can also use Ssemble to trim, crop, rotate, and merge your video clips.

Opus Video: Opus Video is an AI tool that helps you convert large videos into social media posts. You can use Opus Video to upload any video and select the social media platform that you want to target. Opus Video will then automatically generate short and engaging video clips that are optimized for your chosen platform.

Invideo, Pika, and Runway: These are AI tools that help you create short videos from text. You can use these tools to enter any text, such as a headline, a quote, or a message, and they will generate a video that matches your text. You can also use these tools to customize the video style, music, and voice-over. For B2B early startups, building faceless videos cannot get easier that using a Custom GPT built by InVideo. You simply start a chat with the InVideo GPT, give it a narrative and after a few minutes it builds a video for you. You can take the video and further customize it to suit your needs in the InVideo app.

HeyGen: HeyGen is an AI tool that helps you build highly custom videos and send them to your prospects and customers. You can use HeyGen to create personalized video messages that address your audience by name, company, and pain point. You can also use HeyGen to track and measure the performance of your video messages. It is one of the best tools if you are looking to personalize video for every single audience member and send them a video through email or LinkedIn etc.

Content — Images

Image content is a powerful way to attract and retain your audience’s attention, especially in the B2B context, where infographics, charts, and diagrams are useful formats. However, creating and editing image content can be difficult and tedious. Fortunately, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of image content creation, such as branding, design, illustration, and diagramming. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for image content:

Midjourney: Midjourney is an AI tool that helps you build an entire catalog of branded images. You can use Midjourney to upload your logo, color palette, and fonts, and it will generate hundreds of images that match your brand identity. You can also use Midjourney to edit and resize your images for different platforms and purposes.

Canva, Firefly, Gemini, and Dalle: These are pretty well-known AI tools that help you create general purpose social media images. You can use these tools to choose from a variety of templates, layouts, and graphics, and customize them with your own text, images, and logos. You can also use these tools to apply filters, effects, and animations to your images.

Napkin AI and Tldraw: These are AI tools that help you come up with illustrations and diagrams for your image content. You can use these tools to draw simple sketches or shapes, and they will generate professional and polished illustrations or diagrams based on your input. You can also use these tools to edit and annotate your illustrations or diagrams.

Building Agents, Chatbots, and Workflows for Campaigns

Agents, chatbots, and workflows are essential components of any marketing campaign, especially in the B2B context, where lead generation, nurturing, and conversion are crucial goals. However, building and managing agents, chatbots, and workflows can be complex and time-consuming. Luckily, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of building and managing agents, chatbots, and workflows for your campaigns, such as orchestration, automation, and information synthesis. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for building and managing agents, chatbots, and workflows:

Promptly: Probably one of the most powerful tools, Promptly is an AI tool that helps you orchestrate and automate your campaign tasks. You can use Promptly to create and schedule tasks, such as sending emails, posting on social media, or calling prospects, and assign them to different agents or chatbots. You can also use Promptly to monitor and optimize your campaign performance, by tracking metrics, feedback, and results. The one killer feature that separates Promptly from other tools like it is the ability to create an Agent that has access to browser and keyboard and can log in as you into any application and click around and input details almost identically the way you would in order to perform specific task.

Flowise: My favorite for building agents or workflows to automate tasks is an open source tool called Flowise. You can use Flowise to create generative AI applications that collect, analyze, and present information from various sources, such as websites, databases, or APIs. You can also use Flowise to create applications that interact with your audience, such as chatbots, voice assistants, or dashboards. In addition, you can deploy your application to a platform like Render with ease, password protect it and expose your workflows as API end points that can be consumed by other services like Zapier, Make or even OpenAI’s Assistant APIs.

Product-led Sales — Prospecting

Outreach Kaya: Outreach Kaya is an AI tool that helps you record and transcribe your sales calls. You can use Outreach Kaya to capture the voice and screen of your sales meeting (of course after you seek permission from the participants) and get a searchable transcript with key insights and action items. You can also use Outreach Kaya to coach your sales team, by providing feedback, tips, and best practices. If you are only looking to transcribing and searching meetings and conversations you can also use Otter.ai

Factors.ai: Factors.ai is an AI tool that helps you find users with intent and reach out to them appropriately. You can use Factors.ai to analyze your user behavior data, and identify the signals and patterns that indicate purchase intent. You can also use Factors.ai to create personalized and relevant messages, and deliver them through the right channels and timing.

6sense: 6sense is an enterprise grade marketing tool that helps you find users with intent and in the market for buying a product in your offering category. You can use 6sense to uncover anonymous and known accounts that are in the market for your solution, and segment them based on their buying stage, industry, and persona. You can also use 6sense to create and execute targeted and timely campaigns, and measure their impact and ROI.

Measurement

Measurement is a vital part of any marketing strategy, especially in the B2B context, where data-driven decision making is essential. However, measuring and interpreting your marketing data can be challenging and overwhelming. Thankfully, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of measuring and interpreting your marketing data, such as data querying, data visualization, and data storytelling. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for measuring and interpreting your marketing data:

SingleStore SQrL Bot: SingleStore SQrL Bot is an AI tool that helps you talk to your data in English. You can use SingleStore SQrL Bot to ask questions or enter commands, and it will provide you with answers or actions. You can also use SingleStore SQrL Bot to create and update your data tables, views, and indexes.

Notebooks: Python Notebooks are interactive web pages that allow you to create and share data analysis and visualization. You can use notebooks to import data from various sources, such as CSV files, databases, or APIs, and apply different methods, such as statistics, machine learning, or NLP, to analyze and visualize your data. You can also use notebooks to write and execute code, such as Python, R, or SQL, to manipulate and explore your data. Some popular platforms where you can sign up and use Python Notebooks include Google Collab and SingleStore.

Advanced Development

If you want full control over the technical stack (always a good thing) and you and your team has coding chops then consider building applications that are entirely meant for your use case and your custom needs. However, advanced development can be expensive and complicated. Fortunately, there are AI tools that can help you with various aspects of advanced development, such as tuning, evaluating, debugging, and hosting your AI models and applications. Here are some of the AI tools that you can use for advanced development, especially building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications.

RAGtune: RAGtune is an AI tool that helps you tune RAG s. You can use RAGtune to fine-tune your RAG models on your own data and tasks, such as question answering, summarization, or generation. You can also use RAGtune to compare and optimize your RAG models based on different metrics, such as accuracy, speed, and diversity.

RAGAs: RAGAs is an open source library that helps you evaluate RAG pipelines. You can use RAGAs to test your RAG models on various benchmarks and datasets. You can also use RAGAs to analyze and visualize your RAG models’ performance, behavior, and errors.

LangSmith: LangSmith, from LangChain is an AI tool that helps you debug and live view your LLM (Large Language Model) responses. You can use LangSmith to enter any input, such as a prompt, a query, or a command, and see how your LLM responds. You can also use LangSmith to inspect and modify your LLM’s parameters, such as temperature, top-k, and top-p, and see how they affect your LLM’s output. More recently, LangSmith also added a feature that takes a feedback from the user and uses it to live “train” the future responses.

Llamaindex: Llamaindex is an AI tool that helps you build RAG-based applications. You can use Llamaindex to create and manage your own knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia, PubMed, or ArXiv, and use them as sources for your RAG models. You can also use Llamaindex to deploy and integrate your RAG models with various platforms and services, such as Slack, Telegram, or Zapier.

Replit and Vercel: These are platforms that help you host your Python and NextJS applications. You can use these platforms to write and run your code online, without installing or configuring anything. You can also use these tools to deploy and share your applications with a single click, and access them from any device or browser.

Hugging Face: Hugging Face is an AI platform that helps you find, use and blend open-source models. You can use Hugging Face to browse and download thousands of pre-trained models for various NLP tasks, such as classification, generation, translation, or sentiment analysis. You can also use Hugging Face to fine-tune and mix your own models with the pre-trained models, and share them with the community.

LMStudio and Ollama: These are AI tools that help you use and test local open-source models. You can use these tools to install and run your own models on your local machine, without relying on any cloud service or API. You can also use these tools to experiment and evaluate your models on different inputs and outputs, and see how they perform.

Conclusion and Bonus Material

If you have reached this far then I have a gift for you. I have created a list of all the tools mentioned above and more in an Airtable database that you can access anytime here (If clicking on the links doesn’t work then try copying and pasting the links below in a new browser window)— https://airtable.com/appNBjiO1enemJ7e1/shr6C5cQN9JAJbvpY or in a grid view here — https://airtable.com/appNBjiO1enemJ7e1/shr5pKxYCz4ReY1HM

If you have additional tools that you use and find useful, please add it to the list above using this link — https://airtable.com/appNBjiO1enemJ7e1/pag6jTPi0e2R6WY6p/form

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Madhukar Kumar
madhukarkumar

CMO @SingleStore, tech buff, ind developer, hacker, distance runner ex @redislabs ex @zuora ex @oracle. My views are my own