AI tools that the best marketing agencies use have led to a massive overhaul of entire marketing processes and systems, ranging from competitor and consumer data analysis at split-second speed to automation of protocols for content creation, lead generation, social media management, SEO refinements, and more.
What that really means for you is that you can use the AI tools I’m about to share with you to automate all of those marketing processes, thus saving much-needed time, eliminating the need to hire a lot of staff, and, overall, running your marketing agency with AI effectively. Want to learn more about how to run a marketing agency using AI?
In this post, I go into detail on the transformative role of the AI tools every marketing agency should have in their toolbox. My point of focus is on AI tools and their role in the following fields of digital marketing:
- SEO
- Email marketing
- Social media management
- Lead generation
- Content creation
Then, I will discuss three or more AI tools in each category and their unique benefits to AI marketing agencies.
Want to learn more about what an AI marketing agency is instead? Follow this link. Already know what an AI marketing agency is but want to know how to start one? Check this link out.
If you are still here, then you are all in for the best AI tools every AI marketing agency shouldn’t miss out on, no matter the industry your client is involved in.
Let’s dive in!
Categories of AI tools in Marketing
From SEO to lead generation, here’s how AI tools can assist you in improving the quality of any service you render to clients. In fact, selecting the right tools for the right task is essential to setting up AI workflows when running your marketing agency with AI.
AI SEO Tools
It is virtually impossible to underestimate the fact that sound SEO strategies are the key to online visibility. These strategies involve highly targeted keyword research processes that provide your client businesses with content tailored to their unique audience and search intent.
That’s where AI tools for SEO come in. They help AI marketing agencies automate nearly all of the background tasks associated with discovering high-value long-tail and short-tail keywords with the potential for driving higher conversion rates.
Along with keyword research assistance, AI SEO tools perform on-page optimization tasks, such as identifying and integrating secondary keywords into your content for an extra SEO punch.
They also provide suggestions to improve and enhance your content’s readability. Another bonkers benefit of AI SEO tools for your AI marketing agency is the ability to analyze your competitors’ keyword and link-building strategies to identify what they might be overlooking.
ChatGPT
Contentshake AI
Perplexity
Semrush Co-pilot
AI Email Marketing Tools
AI email-drafting tools are handy in drafting intriguing and personalised email subject lines that prove irresistible to open, thus increasing the likelihood of being opened.
These AI tools for AI marketing agencies can also generate entire emails very quickly, which can be a handy tool when your client business needs to send bulk emails to a large number of clients or customers at once.
It’s not just about speed, however. These AI tools allow you to compose emails that suit a wide range of parameters, such as the target audience, demographics, tone, and more.
Also, because of their utility in tracking customers’ shopping behaviors and other metrics of their online activity, AI email marketing tools play a vital role in sending personalized product suggestions via email.
Reply.io
Jasper.ai
Zapier
Social Media Tools
Consistency and productivity are two vital qualities that will make your social media management efforts fruitful as an AI marketing agency.
When you need to improve your client’s brand visibility, AI social media management tools are your best bet. These tools go way beyond generic content distribution and reactive customer service.
Rather, they help your marketing agency run with AI to generate diverse content types for businesses and individuals reliant on you. They use powerful algorithms to predict the best posting times, anticipate potential customer needs and issues, predict ad performance pre-publishing, and more.
This means your corporate clients can move away from repetitive tasks, focus on more innovative processes, and serve their audience with precise content that meets their needs.
Buffer
Vista Social
Audiense
AI Lead Generation Tools
The lead generation process involves finding potential customers who are interested in your products and services and nurturing their interest until they become paying customers.
However, the fact that an AI marketing agency deals with commercial human clients doesn’t mean there is no place for AI to help out.
The truth is that top-tier AI lead generation tools for marketing agencies can help you research your enterprise client’s target market and create engaging content in various formats that solve their problems. However, that’s just the beginning.
AI lead generation software can already assist customer care teams by sorting and responding to customer queries. These AI tools can also provide tailored product recommendations, predict a prospect’s purchase process, and use keyword identification from the sales funnel position and behavior to score leads. This can then give you an accurate estimate of their interest in a particular product or service.
Customers.ai
Seamless AI
Carrd
AI Content Creation
AI tools are proving to be handy assistants to content creation teams that work with AI marketing agencies.
These tools cut brainstorming time in half. They generate content ideas, develop outlines, and create full posts with the right prompts and the click of a button.
AI tools are also getting better and better at generating content that ranks well at the top of search engines and satisfactorily answers user queries.
AI content creation tools really shorten the content creation process by prowling online forums, social media, and search engine results pages for particular queries. They save your AI marketing agency the hassle of starting from scratch.
Writesonic
INK Editor
Anyword
Grammarly
Top AI Tools for Marketing Agencies
Now we are here, and at this point, I can’t help but take a moment to mention in passing that selecting the right AI tools is one of the core preparatory steps to implement when contemplating how to start your AI marketing agency. Now, you know where to start in your search for the best AI tools.
AI SEO Tools
From ChatGPT to Semrush Co-pilot, discover the best AI tools every AI marketing agency needs to automate and streamline their SEO process and generate content that ticks the entire SEO checklist.
ChatGPT
Rating: 9.2/10
Free plan: Yes, free forever (limited access to ChatGPT 4o)
Pricing: $20 for ChatGPT Plus
Best for: Crafting content that pleases search engine algorithms and utilizes insights from user behavior
If you thought ChatGPT was only for providing quick summarized answers to replace your web searches, think again.
The truth is that ChatGPT is also imbued with an incredible amount of knowledge, including information on how search engines work and how users interact with content.
ChatGPT’s knowledge of keyword optimization strategies and other SEO best practices makes it a solid aid to AI marketing agencies, at least when it comes to creating title tags, meta descriptions, and content outlines.
You can provide the app with specific directions in the form of highly detailed prompts that tell it exactly what to include in its output. This approach can help you avoid results that feel repetitive or highly similar to those on the web.
Contentshake AI
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes, for seven days
Pricing: 60/month
Best for: Creating SEO long-form content that integrates SEO insights from Semrush’s robust competitive database.
Contentshake AI is an AI writing tool that is especially useful for AI marketing agencies specializing in SEO-friendly content writing.
Owing to its Semrush origins, Contentshake AI leverages that SEO giant’s exclusive SEO data to enrich the articles generated by Contentshake AI.
It’s not like Semrush itself writes your articles for you, but it’s close.
Furthermore, the app lets you add details about your client firm’s business, target location, and language. This, along with other abilities afforded by the platform’s AI, allows AI marketing agencies to approach content creation in your client brand’s voice and unique writing style.
You can also add images via the AI image-generation tool to make the articles more complete. Another feature you will love is the one WordPress publishing.
Perplexity
Rating: 7/10
Free plan: Yes, free forever
Pricing: $20 for pro plan
Best for: Conducting high-quality research that scours all over the internet and even from your uploaded files.
AI content-generation tools are cool, but their content can only go so far. For one thing, they are hardly usable right away, as a human editor must identify repetitiveness and stiffness and fact-check the article for the information provided.
Perplexity is the right AI-powered tool marketing agencies need to produce original content. It’s basically for conducting research—an aspect of content creation that forms the backbone of any creative piece.
Perplexity scans the Internet’s enormous library of information to find relevant, fresh, and evergreen information and useful examples that will breathe life into your content piece. You can even tell Perplexity to source information from your own documents in multiple file formats.
Semrush Co-pilot
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes, included with a Semrush 7-day free trial
Pricing: Free to use with a Semrush subscription
Best for: Automating routine SEO analysis and planning tasks and delivering personalized recommendations for your website right within Semrush
When you need to identify gaps or weaknesses in a corporate client’s SEO strategy or you just want to spot any SEO issues with your content, Semrush Co-pilot really lives up to its name.
Copilot is a Semrush AI assistant that serves as a standby examiner to assess the performance of your SEO efforts on your website and backlinks.
It also scans your keyword optimization strategy to assess its performance and track your ranking positions for critical keywords in the SERPs over time.
Semrush Co-pilot gathers all this data from its SEO checkup and gives tailored recommendation cards related to your keyword ranking and overall SEO health.
It’s recommended that you use the tool to check for SEO recommendations regularly and spot issues with your on-page SEO, technical SEO, and backlinks.
AI Email Marketing Tools
As an AI marketing agency, you are responsible for the email marketing needs of your client businesses. The AI tools below will help you craft well-composed emails that are hyper-personalized to your recipients’ interests, online behavior, and purchase preferences.
Reply.io
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: 14-day free trial
Pricing: From $99 monthly
Best for: Mass email replies complete with all the nuances that will appeal to your client business’s audience subscribers.
Writing professional email responses can be challenging because you need to organize your thoughts and present your ideas in succinct, personalized terms.
Templates can help, but when you need to send out thousands of follow-up emails to individuals and client brands, a tool like Reply.io can free your email marketing arm of much of the repetitive and labor-intensive tasks.
Reply.io uses powerful AI algorithms to generate entire lines with just the click of a button or a list of bullet points that you provide.
These email drafts are complete with all the nuances that will appeal to your client business’s audience subscribers because the AI-powered platform crafts these email responses to suit the context you provide. And yes, it checks your grammar and coherence on the fly!
Jasper AI
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: 7-day free trial
Pricing: From $39 monthly
Best for: creating engaging email copy infused with your brand’s voice and presentation style. Also offers a brand suite of apps and features for various aspects of email marketing.
Jasper AI, formerly christened Jarvis, is arguably the most popular AI-powered copywriting platform today.
This GPT-4-driven tool can save you the hassle of starting your email copy from scratch. It has been specifically trained on a massive database of email marketing copy skills and best practices.
Jasper AI is proficient (though not perfect) at creating engaging email copy infused with your brand’s voice and presentation style. This ensures that your readers won’t be thrown off by any disjointment between their acquired perception of you and the aura reflected in your email copy.
More than that, Jasper AI offers a brand suite of apps and features for various aspects of email marketing. With them, you can draft a comprehensive brief, complete with goals and deliverables for your marketing campaigns, guide customers through their product awareness and buying process with a tailored email sequence, compose detailed product descriptions that highlight the best parts of your offerings, and even repurpose your content for other specific goals.
Zapier
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: from $19 monthly
Best for: connecting your email marketing platforms with other applications you use and expanding their email marketing automation features
Zapier helps an AI marketing agency in so many ways in the context of email marketing. The beauty of this AI-powered tool lies in how it is built to connect your email marketing platforms with other applications you use.
For instance, you can link your email service, such as MailChimp or HubSpot, with your website’s forms or CRM software, thus going far beyond the automation features these platforms provide.
Hence, you can send emails to your subscribers on a consistent schedule, segment users based on their purchasing behaviour, and create customized, multi-step workflows.
For instance, a form filled out on your website will automatically send its data to your CRM (e.g., HubSpot or Salesforce). Your CRM might then recognise that this new subscriber needs a welcome message. If they purchase on your e-commerce platform, the status of this lead can then be updated in your CRM, after which they will receive a follow-up email.
Social Media Tools
From harvesting insights about your audience’s preferences to managing your content generation and posting schedule, here are three of the most powerful AI tools every AI marketing agency should have.
Buffer
Rating: 8.6/10
Free plan: Yes (forever)
Pricing: From $6 monthly upwards
Best for: for scheduling posts across up to 11 social media platforms and ensuring that your content is optimized to align with each social media’s algorithmic rules, style, and audience
Buffer (for ensuring that your content is optimized to align with each social media’s algorithmic rules, style, and audience)
To all you experts on social media posting, you already know that being fluent with one social media platform’s post style is never a guarantee that you can apply the same tricks to another social media app. LinkedIn’s professional connection style of content is a far cry from X’s (formerly Twitter) more casual and usually edgy tone.
Buffer saves its users the stress of having to learn how to optimize their posts for each platform one by one. It intelligently detects which social media channel you are writing for and trims, resizes, rewrites, or reframes the content as needed.
Buffer also has space for storing all of your creative ideas whenever a bolt of inspiration strikes. Or you can just use AI to generate starting points. But Buffer is also multi-dimensional as it packs the ability to run the equivalent of email marketing drip campaigns on multiple channels so that no matter where your audience is on social media, you can serve them with content arcs in the form of content topics and seasonal posts or promotions spread out over the year.
Vista Social
Rating: 9.5/10
Free plan: 14-day free trial
Pricing: from $39 monthly
Best for: managing all of your social media accounts from one place and customizing your posts to the requirements of each social media channel
Available on the Web, iOS, and Android, Vista Social can rightly be described as a tool that can serve as the mothership of all other social media platforms. It is the home for all of a client’s social media accounts, and you can easily switch between them from your dashboard.
What is more, you do not have to depend on your social media channels to access post scheduling, chatting, review tracking, and so on, as Vista Social comes with all those abilities and more. In fact, even though Vista Social can be a little pricey, you still pay less than you would if you subscribed to each social media channel’s premium version individually.
And then comes the AI prowess, which, unfortunately, is only available in the premium plan for now. AI intelligently customises your posts to the requirements of each social media channel. Of course, you can use the AI text generation features to generate or rewrite the text before repurposing it for your Twitter threads or Instagram captions.
Audiense
Rating: 9.9/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $30 for X marketing and $1499 for Audience Intelligence
Best for: Fetching rich information about your audience on everything from customer segmentation profiles and cultural insights to insider knowledge of leading voices in conversations and survey panels
Serving tantalising content to your target audience, even as a marketing agency, is virtually impossible if you don’t know much about them—their demographics, interests, buying habits, and what makes them tick.
You can fetch data about your audience in many ways, but few beat the depth of insights delivered by Audiense. This AI-powered audience intelligence software is loaded with three powerful packages: social intelligence, digital intelligence, and demand intelligence. These packages can work singly or in tandem to deliver robust insights on everything from customer segmentation profiles and cultural insights to insider knowledge of leading voices in conversations and survey panels.
Audiense integrates well with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (and more integrations are on the way) to help you glean deep information in the form of highly detailed reports. Connecting the app to your accounts allows you to generate reports showing your audience’s demographics and inclination toward any of the big five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism).
AI Lead Generation Tools
For sure, lead generation is becoming more complex as the number of businesses competing for the same audience increases. Besides, the need for every business to identify their ideal customer profile only keeps growing, but these tools will help you as a marketing agency to help those businesses figure their way out in this
Customer.ai
Rating: 8.8/10
Free plan: 7-day free trial on all paid plans
Pricing: From $199
Best for: Revealing a lot of information about your anonymous website visitors, such as their names, emails, demographics, website behavior, engagement levels, interests, and intents based on browsing patterns.
Customers.ai is an AI-driven lead generation tool for AI marketing agencies. It automates many marketing processes, such as email and SMS outreach, audience segmentation, follow-ups, retargeting, and more.
The platform also enables AI marketing agencies to conduct omnichannel marketing using chatbots, SMS, email, and social media.
Customers.ai is especially skilled at revealing a lot of information about your anonymous website visitors, such as their names, emails, demographics, website behavior, engagement levels, interests, and intents based on browsing patterns.
Customers.ai uses all of that data to intelligently skim out the right leads. Then, it adds them to a contact list from where automated outreach processes take over to engage these leads with personalized email sequences that guide them through the product awareness stage all the way to where they can make their purchase decision.
Seamless.ai
Rating: 7.1/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: Customised pricing. Contact sales
Best for: Finding the accurate contact addresses and professional profiles of potential leads for your products and services from its massive database of over 2 billion contacts and over 120 million companies
This AI platform simplifies and streamlines the process of finding leads for your client businesses. This powerful lead generation tool wipes out much of the hassle involved in finding the accurate contact addresses and professional profiles of potential leads for your products and services.
Seamless.ai stands out with its massive database of over 2 billion contacts and over 120 million companies.
The AI lead generation platform dynamically finds contacts quickly. It sources information from various credible social media networks, professional websites, public data repositories, and public directories.
Overall, Seamless.ai is a very useful sales intelligence software with powerful features. For example, it uses advanced filters to find targeted lead lists through contact search. Data enrichment ensures that you always have updated contact records, and job change tracking gives you an idea of your leads’ professional journey.
Carrd
Rating: 9.2/10
Free plan: 7-day free trial
Pricing: From $9 yearly
Best for: Building responsive, all-device-friendly landing pages for harnessing your mobile traffic, selling products, or building a subscriber base
This platform makes this list because it facilitates the lead generation process for AI marketing agencies.
After collecting your leads’ contact details and nurturing their interest through carefully crafted personalized messages, you want them to have a definite place to go to ultimately become paying customers. This is the work of landing pages, for which you need a landing page builder.
Whether you are focused on mobile traffic, selling products, or looking to grow your subscriber base, Carrd makes everything simple and responsive on every screen size and is free for the most part.
AI Content Creation
Content creation is among the most time-consuming aspects of digital marketing, and writer’s block doesn’t exactly help matters. Add to all that the need for your corporate client’s content to be compelling and engaging, and the need for AI tools to supercharge your writing only becomes more evident.
Writesonic
Rating: 8.3/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $49 monthly
Best for: creating marketing content that outperforms the competition by integrating a lot of insights from competitor analysis
Writesonic is AI SEO and marketing software that integrates AI chat, AI article writing, market research, multichannel publishing, and more into one place for seamless cross-actions.
On the content creation side, Writesonic is an extremely helpful assistant for your client corporation’s blog content, landing page copy, social media copy, video content copy, and anywhere else creative, factual, and engaging content dictates your marketing success.
Writesonic excels at creating content with solid substance. It doesn’t just write off the top of its head, however. The AI platform is carefully engineered to pull reams of data from deep web analysis, live competitor info, and strategic internal linking to ensure that the content it generates for you outperforms your competitors and ultimately pushes your sales up.
Visual creation is also on point because of its powerful image-generation capabilities.
Here’s another utility of Writesonic that is hard to overemphasize: It makes content repurposing a breeze. That’s right. Writesonic can help you turn your existing blog post into a LinkedIn article, condense an X (formerly Twitter) article into an engaging newsletter, and more.
INK Editor
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: 5-day free trial
Pricing: from $49 monthly
Best for: quickly creating engagement-boosting text and visuals that hit your audience’s pain points and needs with a variety of storytelling techniques
INK Editor is among the best AI tools for AI marketing agencies to use for quickly generating high-performing content that clinches the top spots on search engines in a way that reduces the content creation process to minutes instead of hours or days.
A glance at the platform’s deliverables gives straightforward insights into the specific ways INK Editor can help you outperform the competition.
INK Editor enables you to create engagement-boosting text and visuals speedily without missing out on your audience’s specific pain points and needs.
The content INK Editor’s AI whips up also features clear and concise messaging, uses a variety of storytelling techniques to build an emotional connection, and is well optimized for the host platform, be it a blog, website, or social media channel.
Anyword
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: 7-day free trial on all paid plans
Pricing: from $49 monthly
Best for: Best for AI-powered content that sounds as human as possible, is customised to your audience’s buyer persona, and ranks well against the top performers in your industry.
Anyword is copywriting software built for marketing and sales teams. It emphasizes creating content that doesn’t sound like an AI’s musings.
The AI-powered content creation platform has content intelligence features that stylize your writing to match the buyer personas that best describe your audience.
Beyond that, Anyword’s content intelligence vets your published content against that of the top performers in your industry. It then highlights areas for improvement in existing content and subsequent AI-generated write-ups.
Grammarly
Rating: 9.1/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $30 monthly
Best for: Ridding your content of any grammatical flaws and improving its tone to avoid being misunderstood
Grammarly is designed to make AI your assistant while writing. This highly helpful tool polishes your grammar, improves tone, and can even complete sentences.
Grammarly is really designed to lighten the load of content creation. You don’t need a first-class degree in English or any of Grammarly’s supported languages, as the software is meant to be a full-fat spell-checker, grammar checker, tone analyzer, and plagiarism checker, all in one!
Although its feature set is less robust than that of the other AI content creation platforms mentioned above, it’s really helpful for getting the basics right.
With Grammarly, you can’t go out of style and won’t send content that is mismatched to the context and audience.
Conclusion
As an AI marketing agency, your client’s needs and pain points are, by default, yours to bear as well. With the help of the best AI tools for marketing agencies, you are better qualified to help your clients navigate the twists and turns of the road to better conversion rates and, ultimately, more sales.
That said, none of the foregoing means that you should delegate all your duties to AI-infused marketing tools and chatbots as an AI marketing agency, nor should you neglect the role of human eyes and minds in vetting the output of these AI tools. You will need to take some precautions to be on the safe side.
In particular, before using any AI tool, make sure that it has a strict privacy policy and does its best to comply with data protection laws. Abuse of consumer data can strip you of all the trust invested in you as a marketing agency and land you in complex legal battles. Ensure that you get explicit consent from your customers if you use their personal data to serve them better.
Also, when running ads, for instance, there should be transparency around where it displays your ads and cross-check to confirm that you have a measure of control over the consumers you are targeting and the web pages that run the ad. All these are to ensure that you are not relinquishing control to the algorithms.
Always remember that AI is not meant to produce the end result. At best, it’s just a starting point. Verify its output before you trust it, build upon and refine its output, and confirm that it is not plagiarized in any way.