10 AI tools you need for 2024

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives is rapidly gaining momentum. From Teenage Engineering’s collaboration with Rabbit on the R1, to Humane’s (albeit underwhelming) debut of its AI pin, and OpenAI’s absolutely groundbreaking achievements with Sora, 2024 has begun with some truly incredible advancements in the technology and marks the start of AI’s growing ubiquity.  As we witness these technologies continue to weave seamlessly into our daily lives, marketers and businesses have the unique opportunity to leverage incredible new tools to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and personalisation.  

This article delves into the capabilities of ten leading AI-powered marketing tools that are setting new benchmarks in efficiency and personalisation, all available for marketers to use right now. 

1. Semrush: SEO and intelligence

Semrush has always stood out as a leader for enhancing search engine optimisation (SEO) and gathering competitive marketing and web intelligence. Most recently, Semrush has begun to leverage AI, providing marketers with advanced keyword research tools, site audits, and insights into competitors’ strategies.

To maximise the benefits of Semrush's AI capabilities, focus on integrating the tool into your routine SEO practices. Utilising AI-driven keyword research can help in identifying not only high-volume terms but also long-tail opportunities that are less competitive and more targeted, enhancing content relevance and reach. Regular AI-powered site audits can be scheduled to detect and rectify SEO issues before they impact rankings. Additionally, employing AI to monitor competitors' strategies enables marketers to stay adaptive and responsive. By keeping a pulse on competitors' moves, businesses can swiftly adjust their strategies to maintain competitive advantage.

2. ChatGPT: copy creation 

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is arguably the best known AI tool in our list and has already completely transformed content creation. For better or worse, its best known capability extends to generating copy-based content that ranges from blog posts and articles to social media updates and marketing copy. This tool empowers marketers to produce high-quality content quickly, facilitating more consistent and engaging communication with audiences.

The best method for leveraging ChatGPT effectively is by integrating it into your content strategies as a co-creator. Users can spot GPT written content a mile away, so it’s best used to draft content outlines or to generate ideas for blog posts and articles that align with your SEO goals, rather than producing final versions. It's also excellent for creating first drafts of content, which can then be refined and personalised by human editors, matching everything up with the brand’s tone of voice and audience expectations. Additionally, use ChatGPT to scale up content production for various platforms, ensuring that each piece remains tailored to the specific audience and your established platform norms. Used smartly, ChatGPT can significantly enhance your content creation goals.

3. Hootsuite Insights: social media management

Hootsuite, another very well known tool in marketing circles, offers real-time monitoring and analytics for social media. It enables businesses to track brand mentions, understand market trends, and gauge audience sentiment across various social platforms. This instant access to social media insights allows companies to react swiftly and effectively to maintain their brand presence and reputation online.

To fully leverage Hootsuite Insights, make routine checks on dashboard updates to stay current with brand mentions and changing audience sentiments. Setting up alerts for specific keywords or hashtags can help teams respond promptly to customer feedback or emerging trends. Analysing the data collected by Hootsuite Insights can deeply inform your next content strategy adjustments and campaign optimisations. By understanding which types of content resonate best with your audience, you can effectively tailor your posts to enhance engagement and reach. Additionally, Hootsuite’s ability to integrate with other tools means that you can use these insights to drive coordinated campaigns across multiple platforms, making it much easier to create a unified brand message and have a comprehensive understanding of campaign performance across platforms. 

4. PaveAI: data

PaveAI specialises in dissecting vast amounts of data to unearth actionable insights. This tool integrates with existing analytics services to convert data into understandable reports that help marketers make evidence-based decisions. PaveAI’s strength lies in its ability to identify revenue-generating opportunities from existing data points.

To get the most out of PaveAI, start by clearly defining the metrics that matter most to your business goals. Whether it's customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, or engagement metrics, setting PaveAI up to focus on these key indicators can provide more targeted and relevant insights. It will also help in avoiding becoming utterly overwhelmed by the data. Another great feature is its ability to provide regularly scheduled reports, allowing you to stay on top of emerging trends and patterns and making for truly agile responses to new market shifts. By using PaveAI to segment your customer data, you can also discover nuanced behaviour patterns and preferences, letting you tailor marketing strategies more effectively to different audience segments. Don’t forget to integrate PaveAI's insights with your other marketing tools to enhance your overall strategy and align all of your efforts across campaigns.

6. Canva: design

Canva is another very well known tool and has more recently implemented a handful of AI features to further simplify the graphic design process. Making professional-quality design accessible to marketers without extensive graphic design experience. Features like design suggestions, image enhancements, and content layout options help users create visually appealing marketing materials quickly and efficiently.

To fully harness Canva’s capabilities, start by exploring its vast library of templates, all of which have been tailored to various needs, from social media posts and banners to presentations and flyers. Canva's AI-driven design suggestions, all based on best practices and current trends, can be hugely helpful when choosing colour schemes, fonts, and layouts that enhance the visual impact of your content. Make use of Canva’s Magic Resize tool, which automatically adjusts the design to different format requirements, perfect for multichannel marketing campaigns. Additionally, experimenting with Canva’s image enhancer can improve the quality of your photos, ensuring that every piece of content you produce and publish not only looks professional but also has a consistent look and feel. As always, by integrating Canva with other marketing tools via its API library can totally streamline content creation and deployment, ensuring a cohesive workflow from design to publication.

7. Hume AI: customer intelligence

Hume AI leverages AI to interpret emotional cues from voice and text communications. This allows brands to understand and react to the emotional states of their customers, providing a more empathetic and tailored marketing approach. This tool is invaluable for brands aiming to connect on a more personal level with their audience.

To effectively integrate Hume AI into your marketing strategies, incorporate its analysis into your content creation ideation phase. By analysing the tone and sentiment of customer inquiries Hume’s insights will allow you to properly tailor messages that resonate emotionally with different audience segments. This might include adjusting the tone of email marketing campaigns based on the sentiment analysis of previous interactions with recipients, ensuring communications feel way more personalised and impactful. Hume AI can be instrumental in refining brand messaging across all platforms by providing insights into the emotional responses elicited by existing content on different platforms. This feedback can be incredibly useful in guiding the creative process, ensuring future materials not only catch the eye but also strike the right emotional chord with your audience.

8.  Google Gemini: content analysis

Google’s Gemini project is at the forefront of multimedia content analysis. This advanced AI interprets audio, video, and images to offer comprehensive insights about content engagement. Gemini enables marketers to refine their multimedia content strategies based on deep learning-driven data analysis.

To maximise the benefits of Gemini, first integrate it into your content review processes. By analysing existing multimedia content, Gemini can identify patterns and elements that are the most engaging to your audiences, providing specific insights that can guide the creation of future content. For instance, it can suggest which types of video segments keep viewers the most engaged or which audio cues lead to higher retention rates.

9. Jasper: content creation

Jasper excels in automated content generation across various formats. Whether it's blog posts, social media updates, or marketing copy, Jasper provides high-quality content that resonates with targeted audiences. This tool saves time and resources, allowing marketers to maintain a consistent content schedule without sacrificing quality.

To effectively use Jasper, start by setting clear parameters and style guides to ensure that the content it generates aligns with your brand’s tone of voice and goals. It’s super beneficial to feed Jasper examples of your brand’s best content first so that it can learn and replicate the same style and tone. For blog posts and long-form content, use Jasper in the same way as you would ChatGPT - let the tool create your initial drafts and then have human editors refine those drafts to inject brand-specific nuances and subtleties that AI can’t yet fully capture.

10. HeyGen: campaign personalisation

HeyGen focuses on campaign automation and personalised content creation. By analysing customer data, HeyGen enables marketers to craft personalised messages and campaigns that significantly increase engagement and conversion rates. It’s particularly effective for businesses looking to scale their personalisation efforts without a corresponding increase in workload.

Begin by integrating comprehensive customer data from various touch points across your customer’s journey. This might include data from website interactions, purchase history, customer service engagements, and social media activity. The richer the data HeyGen has to work with, the better its output. HeyGen will then be able to accurately target individual preferences and behaviours, allowing for perfectly tailored campaign messages. Don’t forget to leverage HeyGen’s automation features to set up dynamic content triggers based on specific customer actions or milestones. For instance, if a customer views a particular product several times without purchasing, HeyGen can automatically send a targeted offer or an informational message about that product, providing the perfect nudge towards a purchase at just the right time.

It's clear that these technologies bring unbelievable value in streamlining operations, enhancing personalisation, and providing deeper-than-before insights, but they aren’t going to take your job just yet.  AI works best as tools that augment your skills and extend your existing capabilities. By working with AI as an extension of your team, marketers can leverage the strengths of both human creativity and AI efficiency to craft strategies that are not only effective but also innovative and responsive to ever-changing market dynamics. By embracing AI tools in this way, you ensure that you and your business remain at the forefront of marketing evolution, driving success through a powerful blend of technology and human insight.