7 Powerful AI Marketing Tools You Need (Tested)

Seen your LinkedIn lately? AI marketing tools are everywhere. And almost all of them promise better results than the last one. But is it just talk? Not really. Many AI tools actually give strong results.

In fact, for every dollar spent on generative AI, the return is about 3.7 times more. But this only happens if we choose the right tools.

To make it easier, we tested seven well-known AI tools for different marketing tasks. This includes writing, making videos, and understanding customer needs.

See our full reviews below for all the details. Short on time? Take a look at the quick highlights for each tool here:

What Are the Best AI Marketing Tools?

1. ChatGPT:

Best all-purpose AI marketing helper.

Price: $20+/month; limited free plan available.

We have to start with ChatGPT when talking about top AI tools for marketing. It’s not just famous—it’s searched more often than the word “AI” itself.

Why is it so useful? Because it can handle many marketing tasks and adjust based on your industry.

But here’s something important:

ChatGPT works best when we give it clear instructions.

If the prompts (instructions) are unclear, the answers won’t be great.

But if we learn how to write better prompts, ChatGPT becomes a strong tool for marketing teams.

Create Helpful First Drafts

ChatGPT helps us go from a blank screen to a full first draft quickly. It helps us write faster, no matter what we’re making. This includes blog posts, product descriptions, emails, and more.

For example, we often use ChatGPT to plan ideas and draft marketing content faster.

We usually give these things at the start:

• A short content brief and task goals
• Keywords or data from tools like Semrush
• Info about competitors
• Research notes

When we add this info early, the content it gives back is more useful and on-point. But remember: we should never copy and paste the content as-is. Every draft still needs editing by a person. Also, we may need to try different prompts a few times to get the best version.

Speed Up Customer Research

ChatGPT is also great for learning about customers. We can use it to:

• Write better survey questions
• Understand customer feelings
• Pull useful info from long reviews or feedback

For example, customer feedback used to take us a long time to go through. We’d spend weeks sorting comments and finding common themes.

Now, we use ChatGPT to do the same job much faster. We give it reviews from Google, TrustPilot, or our own surveys. Then we ask it to find patterns and customer emotions.

It saves us time and helps us focus on the insights that matter. It also shows us the exact words customers use when talking about their problems. We can use those words in our writing to make it more real and helpful. And we can improve our products or services based on those pain points.

2. Semrush:

Best for full marketing tasks with strong AI tools.

Price: Starts at $139.95/month; AI Toolkit and Enterprise AIO need separate plans.

Semrush is now one of the most useful AI-powered marketing platforms out there. It’s not just an SEO tool anymore. Whether we are working on SEO, planning blog posts, running ads, checking out competitors, or seeing how our brand appears in AI tools, Semrush can help.

And unlike many new AI tools, Semrush has a strong base. It comes with over 10 years of data, strong crawling tech, and well-developed features.

Track Your Brand in AI Search

One of Semrush’s most powerful features is showing how our brand appears in AI results.

The Enterprise AIO tool does this well.

It tracks where and how our brand is mentioned in tools like:

• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• Perplexity
• Claude
• Google AI Overviews

It measures:

• Mentions of brand, product, or ideas
• Feelings behind the quotes
• Comparison with competitors
• Sources used by AI
• Trends by topic, region, or model

If we run a large or well-known brand, this tool is a big help.

See What AI Platforms Say About You

The Semrush AI Toolkit is great for small teams, startups, or growing brands. It helps us understand how AI tools talk about our brand — and how we can improve.

For $99/month (per domain), we can:

• See how our brand shows up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more
• Track mentions and compare over time
• Discover new topics with strong user interest
• Get tips to improve our content and brand message

This tool is focused and practical, not a lighter version. It gives us useful feedback based on what AI sees and hears.

For example, when we looked at warbyparker.com (a glasses company), the tool showed that many users had questions about payment and finance options.

It also gave this helpful tip:

Clearly explain finance options on your website and checkout pages.

That’s what makes the AI Toolkit powerful. It doesn’t just give data — it finds user problems and suggests how to fix them.

Keep Social Content On Brand

The Semrush Social Media Toolkit uses AI to help us plan and post social content.

We can create weeks of posts in just minutes and share them on many platforms.

Here’s how it works:

• The tool shows trending topics our audience cares about (updated daily)
• We pick a topic, and the AI writes a post that fits our brand voice
• We can add AI-made hashtags, images, or short videos
• Then, we schedule the post to go live on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more

3. Flick

Best for social media marketing with a small budget.

Price: Starts at $18/month; 7-day free trial available.

Want to look like we have a full marketing team without spending too much? We can use Flick.

This AI tool helps us plan a full social media strategy, write posts, and stay on schedule.

We just need to set our content topics (called “content pillars”) in the Brand Hub once.

After that, Iris (Flick’s AI tool) handles the rest.

That includes:

• Suggesting post ideas that fit our brand
• Turning blog posts into ready-to-use social content
• Creating a posting schedule for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn

It’s perfect for busy founders or marketers who want to post more but don’t have time to plan everything.

Create a Social Media Calendar

Many tools help schedule posts, but Flick also helps us decide what to post. Its AI assistant makes a content calendar without long planning sessions. For example, we made a 30-day calendar in less than five minutes using Flick.

Here’s how we did it:

1.Set up the Brand Hub with our content pillars:

• Writing that helps convert
• AI tips
• Marketing funnels for SaaS and ecommerce

2. Added our brand voice and audience.
3. Picked a 1-month time frame.

In less than a minute, Iris gave us post ideas that matched our brand.

Some of them were:

• A video showing 5 SaaS brands with great value offers
• 3 AI prompts to improve email subject lines
• A before-and-after case study showing how we boosted signups

We clicked “Add to scheduler,” and the calendar was ready. Now we have 30+ post ideas we can easily turn into real content.

Turn Long Content into Social Posts

Have a blog post or YouTube video that took a lot of work? Flick’s Repurpose tool turns it into quick social content.

It’s super easy:

• Click Iris > Repurpose Blog Post
• Enter the link to your blog, video, or newsletter

That’s it.

We tested this with an article about AI SEO tools. In seconds, Iris gave four different post ideas.

We picked one. The AI wrote a short post that shared the main idea clearly — great for social.

For each post, we can:

• Make the caption short or long
• Add better hashtags
• Attach images or videos
• Set a posting time

We can even adjust each post for different platforms.

4. Canva

Best for creating visual content quickly.

Price: $15/month; free plan available.

Most of us already know Canva. It’s a design tool that helps us make anything from a social media post to a full marketing design.

Now, Canva has added AI features through its Magic Studio. We just give it a simple prompt, and it can create graphics, write text, and even make code.

From the first idea to the final design, Canva’s AI makes the process faster. And we don’t even have to leave the Canva platform.

Here are two things that stood out to us the most:

• It was easy to use. We didn’t need any training.
• The AI image tool created designs that looked just like what we imagined.

Turn Ideas into Visual Designs

Canva’s AI can create complete visual content like slides, social posts, charts, and more.

Inside Magic Studio, there are several helpful options:

• Design for me: Builds branded templates for posts or slides
• Create an image: Makes pictures from text prompts
• Draft a doc: Writes blog posts, emails, and social content
• Code for me: Makes simple code for websites, forms, and quizzes

So, how well did Magic Studio work?

It gave us four ready-made slide decks to choose from, and they were quite good. However, the text wasn’t exactly what we wanted, So we had to make small changes to both the words and images.
(It was easy to edit.)

The AI tool made the design process easier, but not super fast. If we were making the slides by hand, it would have taken at least an hour. With Magic Studio, it only took 15 minutes. That’s a big time-saver.

5. Synthesia:

Best for making videos without filming.

Price: $29+/month; free plan available (no downloads on free plan).

Synthesia helps turn our ideas into videos with a virtual presenter — no camera needed.

We can use it to create:

• Product demos
• Training videos
• How-to or welcome videos
• Global messages in many languages

It has 200+ AI avatars and supports more than 140 languages and voices. This is perfect for teams who need professional-looking videos quickly.

And the best part?

We don’t need to appear in the video at all.

Make Videos Without a Camera

Synthesia lets us build a video using a script, a web link, or a file.

We tested this by using the link: https://www.semrush.com/kb/801-advertising-toolkit

Our goal was to create a short promo video for Semrush’s PPC Advertising Toolkit.

The AI Video Assistant walked us through the steps.

It asked us to:

• Enter the link
• Pick video length
• Choose the audience and tone
• Set the goal and pick a speaker

Then, Synthesia created a video plan.

From there, we could:

• Add or remove scenes
• Change the avatar and voice
• Edit the script
• Add music, transitions, or more slides

Make Videos for Global Audiences

Synthesia’s AI can translate and voice-over videos in 140+ languages.

So, businesses can easily create content for people in different countries without hiring voice actors or recording again. For our test, we uploaded a TikTok video and asked Synthesia to turn it into French.

The result? It was surprisingly good. It was fun and strange to hear “us” speaking in another language. But it worked — and it did it very quickly.

6. AdCreative.ai

Best for making many ads that work well.

Price: Starts at $39/month; free plan available (up to 10 downloads).

Running paid ads? Then AdCreative.ai is a great tool to try. It makes full ads — pictures, text, and call-to-action buttons — in just a few minutes. These ads work on platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn, and more.

What makes it special?
It’s trained using billions of ads that already worked well.

So, the ads it creates are based on what’s proven to get results.

That means we don’t just get random designs. We get ready-to-use ads that match our market and have a better chance to perform well.

Make Ads Fast and at Scale

AdCreative.ai is helpful when we’re handling many ad campaigns at once.

To get started, we set up a simple brand profile:

Add our logo, brand colors, and a short description.

Next, we choose what kind of ad we want:

• Picture (static)
• Video
• Text-based

We tested the tool using one of our blog articles from Backlinko. First, the tool scanned the site to understand the brand. It pulled in Backlinko’s info right away.

Then, we gave it the blog link so it could find the right content for the ad.

We picked:

• LinkedIn as the ad platform
• The ad format we wanted
• A background image (optional)

After that, we clicked “Generate.”In seconds, the tool gave us several ad options — all with layout, text, and a “Conversion Score.”

That score shows how well the ad is expected to do. Pretty smart.

Some ads weren’t perfect, but that’s okay. We edited them easily in the Creative Studio. After a few quick changes, the ads were ready to publish.

7. HubSpot:

Best for using AI to manage marketing automatically.

Price: Starts at $20/month per user; free CRM plan available.

HubSpot brings email, ads, blog content, automation, and customer tracking all into one system.

It uses an AI called Breeze, which learns from our own data.

That includes:

• Contact info in our CRM
• How past campaigns performed
• What our customers usually do

So instead of giving random tips, Breeze gives advice that matches our real audience. That makes HubSpot feel more like a helpful teammate than just a tool.

Find Leads That Are Ready to Buy

HubSpot’s Breeze Intelligence can help us find leads who are most likely to become customers.

It tracks how people use our website.

Like:

• What they click
• How long they stay
• If they come back to certain pages

It then adds more info from public data to guess where they work. For example, Breeze might notice someone from a large company:

• Checking our pricing page
• Reading our customer stories
• Visiting again and again

This shows they are very interested — the kind of person our sales team should talk to.

We can even send messages based on what that person already viewed.

That helps us say the right thing at the right time, So we don’t need to sell hard — just guide the conversation.

3 More AI Marketing Tools to Consider

These tools didn’t make the top list, but still offer great features for special tasks.

1. Hootsuite

Best for deep social media tracking and reports.

Price: Starts at $149 per user/month.

Hootsuite uses AI to help manage all our social accounts in one place.

Its OwlyWriter AI gives us new post ideas, rewrites our best content, and writes captions that match our brand style.

But what really makes it stand out is Blue Silk AI — a smart tool that listens to what people say online. It checks millions of online talks to find brand mentions and audience opinions.

It then helps us:

• Post at the best times
• Boost organic posts with paid ads
• Spot trending topics early

These features help social media teams work faster and make smart choices.

But Hootsuite is harder to use than simple tools like Flick. It also costs more — $149/month per user, compared to Flick’s $18/month.

Still, if we manage many brands or need advanced planning and tracking, Hootsuite is a strong option.

2. Claude

Best LLM for writing content.

Price: Starts at $17/month; free plan available.

Claude is a language model like ChatGPT. But it uses a different system called Constitutional AI.

This system helps Claude give answers that are more helpful, honest, and sound more natural.

From our experience, Claude understands small details well. It also knows what we mean and keeps the tone steady.

Many marketing writers we know like Claude for long content.

Why? Because Claude keeps the same voice and clear structure over many words. This makes it perfect for sales pages, reports, or any content that needs smooth flow.

3. Zapier

Best AI tool for easy automation.

Price: $29.99/month; free plan available.

Want strong AI workflows but don’t want to switch to a new all-in-one platform?

Zapier is a great choice.

Unlike tools like HubSpot that want you to stay inside their system, Zapier connects with over 8,000 apps. This includes Gmail, Mailchimp, Slack, and Salesforce.

This means we can build many AI workflows that save us time.

Here’s an example:

• A customer sends a question through Gmail
• ChatGPT reads the message and writes a personal reply
• The reply is sent and saved in the CRM automatically
• A follow-up task is made in the project tool
• A summary is sent to Slack so the team stays informed

Set this up once in Zapier, and the whole process runs on its own.

Next Step: Get AI to Talk About Your Brand

AI marketing tools help us create content faster and easier than before. They also let us grow our business with less work.

What should we do next? Get ahead by owning Google’s AI Overviews.

Learn how to make your site ready for AI Overviews to improve or keep your organic search traffic. Get ahead of others and turn AI search into your next growth tool.