AI tools for marketing teams: ten worth knowing and how to choose

New marketing tools with AI features appear every week, and the lists that rank them go out of date almost as quickly. Rather than a ranking, this guide groups ten established tools by the job they do, and then covers how to choose and use them. The point is to find the one or two that make a real difference to your team, not to collect subscriptions.

All tools named here were well established at the time of writing. Features and pricing change often, so check the supplier’s current information and test with your own material.

Why the choice matters

A good tool saves time on repetitive work, helps you produce more consistent content and gives you quicker access to data. A poor choice adds another login, produces generic copy and leaves your customer data somewhere you didn’t intend. The difference usually comes from fit with the job and with the rest of your software, not from the tool’s popularity.

Writing and research

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

General-purpose assistants from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. They draft and edit text, summarise research, brainstorm angles, analyse spreadsheets and turn rough notes into outlines. Gemini connects naturally to Google’s office tools, and the others connect to many business apps. Each handles instructions a little differently, so try the same task in more than one. Our guide to prompts for business teams will help you get better results from any of them.

Best for: first drafts, rewriting, research summaries and ideas.

Jasper

A writing platform built for marketing teams. Its strengths are templates for ads, landing pages and emails, and settings that keep drafts in a consistent brand voice across a team.

Best for: teams that produce a lot of similar content and need consistency.

Grammarly

Checks grammar, clarity and tone as you write, in email, documents and the browser. It is less about generating content and more about making sure what you publish reads well.

Best for: final editing and keeping a consistent standard across contributors.

Search and content strategy

Surfer

Compares your draft with pages that already rank for a topic and suggests terms, headings and length. Useful as a guide, as long as you write for readers first and don’t stuff in suggestions.

Best for: optimising articles and landing pages.

MarketMuse

Analyses your site’s coverage of a topic, shows gaps against competitors and suggests what to write next. It leans towards planning rather than drafting.

Best for: content planning on sites with many pages.

Visuals

Midjourney and Adobe Firefly

Image generators that create illustrations and concept art from a description. Firefly is built into Adobe’s design tools and is trained on licensed material, which matters if you need to be clear about rights. Midjourney is known for distinctive, stylised images.

Use generated images with care. Customers react poorly to images that look fake, and you must check the licence terms. For people and products, real photographs are almost always more convincing.

Best for: backgrounds, concept illustrations and social graphics.

Campaigns and customer data

HubSpot

A marketing, sales and service platform with AI features for drafting emails, summarising customer interactions, scoring leads and building reports. The attraction is that the AI works with your own customer records, in one place.

Best for: teams that want email, CRM and reporting in one system.

AdCreative.ai

Generates ad images and copy variations and scores them to help decide which to test. It saves time on production for paid campaigns, though the output still needs a human eye for brand fit.

Best for: paid social and display ads that need many variations.

How to choose

1. Start with the task. Write down the three jobs that cost your team the most time.
2. Check what you already own. Your email platform, CRM, design tool and ad manager probably include AI features.
3. Test two or three tools on real work, using the same brief, and have the people who will use them compare the results.
4. Read the data terms. Find out where your data is processed, whether it is used to train models, and who owns what you create.
5. Check integration. A tool that connects to your CRM and calendar will get used. One that needs copy-and-paste often won’t.
6. Price the real cost. Include seats, usage limits and the time to learn it.

Using them well

• Keep a person accountable for everything published, with a final check on facts, figures and claims.
• Never paste confidential customer or company information into a tool your company hasn’t approved.
• Don’t let a tool grade its own work. Judge results by sales, leads and customer feedback.
• Keep a short list of approved tools and what each is for, so people aren’t guessing.

Next steps

If you’d like to see how these tools fit into a wider plan, our overview of how AI is changing digital marketing and our marketing playbook cover the tactics. And if you’d like help choosing, testing and measuring them against your own numbers, that is part of our AI-era growth work, or you can book a session.