Small businesses using artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing can significantly streamline their workload and improve efficiency. AI tools handle time-consuming aspects, allowing you to focus on strategy and creativity.
In this article, you’ll learn about 20 AI-powered tools for marketing that small businesses can use to get results. The tools in this list are affordable and contain case studies that show their worth.
How AI marketing can help small businesses
The key advantage of using AI solutions for your small business or startup is that they automatically handle data-driven tasks. Marketing teams can focus on strategy and pass more qualified leads to salespeople who focus on building customer relationships and closing deals.
AI has become a business need rather than a competitive advantage. According to McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI report, AI adoption jumped to 72% for one or more business functions. Moreover, most of these businesses use AI in marketing and sales cycles.
Here’s how AI tools in marketing help at each stage of the process:
Challenge: visibility and attracting qualified prospects. Small businesses aim to stand out in crowded markets while balancing efficient content creation with their limited time. Streamlined strategies help them achieve both goals. Key areas: content creation, social media management, email strategy and search engine optimization. Example: a software consulting firm turns one client success story into five marketing pieces in 30 minutes. The firm’s AI tool creates a case study, LinkedIn posts and email sequences simultaneously. | |
Lead management (nurturing) | Challenge: maintain and personalize communication without letting leads go cold. Small businesses lose opportunities simply because they can’t keep up with follow-ups. Key areas: email personalization and content targeting. Example: a consulting firm uses AI to send timely follow-ups to 50 prospects based on their engagement patterns. |
Conversion optimization | Challenge: timing and personalization. Most small businesses struggle with turning prospects into paying customers. Key areas: deal tracking, follow-up emails, proposal creation and sales forecasting. Example: a software company uses AI to analyze sales conversations. The tool finds the most mentioned product features in won deals. It helps sales teams focus their pitches on those key points. |
Customer retention and upselling | Challenge: enhance customer experience to upsell or gain referrals. Small businesses focus so much on new sales that they miss opportunities to grow existing accounts. Key areas: customer behavior tracking, upsell identification, satisfaction monitoring and retention analysis. Example: a SaaS company uses AI to analyze support conversations and product usage. The tool identifies which customers might need additional training or are ready for premium features. |
When you identify an area where your team spends significant time on repetitive tasks (e.g., content creation or email follow-ups), it’s easier to see where AI fits into your marketing process.
To identify bottlenecks in your business, speak to your team, review your metrics or map your process. You can even use methods like the “Fishbone diagram” or the “Five Whys Method”.
20 best AI marketing tools for small businesses
Using AI tools in marketing saves you time while increasing your productivity, allowing you to concentrate on high-level strategies that boost profitability.
The Conference Board’s marketing technology survey shows that marketing professionals think AI will improve their creativity and work quality by 42% and 43%, respectively.
AI allows small business owners to concentrate on achieving results rather than worrying about the work required.
The challenge is selecting the tools that match your specific needs and budget. Here are 20 tools that deliver value to small businesses based on affordability, ease of use and proven results.
1. Pipedrive: best for integrated sales and marketing
Pipedrive is a well-known CRM tool that seamlessly aligns sales and marketing efforts. It combines email marketing campaigns with lead management to help teams track sales, optimize leads and close deals.
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Features:
AI Sales Assistant. Uses predictive analytics to analyze your deal’s information, contacts and emails to assess win probability and recommend the next steps. It sends you notifications and advice for sending personalized emails to high-value customers.
AI email creation. Generates marketing emails from custom prompts, reducing writing time. The tool offers tone, length and message type options, from nurturing sequences to promotional offers. Its AI adapts to different languages and creates content that boosts open rates and converts.
AI email summarization. Creates quick summaries of email conversations and marketing threads with one click. The feature assigns readiness-to-buy scores, spots accounts needing more nurturing and analyzes sentiment to guide marketing strategies. Perfect for maintaining momentum in marketing campaigns.
AI app recommendations and Marketplace. Make finding the right tools easier through natural language search and smart recommendations. The system analyzes usage patterns to suggest integrations that automate marketing tasks. It also understands simple questions without requiring specific keywords.
Pipedrive has a free 14-day trial with paid plans starting at $14 per month, billed annually.
Pipedrive’s AI capabilities were key to MinorCo founder Paul Minors’ transition from solo entrepreneur to building his sales team:
2. involve.me: best for interactive lead qualification funnels
involve.me is a platform that creates interactive lead funnels. You can guide, qualify and covert leads with multi-step sales funnels (e.g., appointments, lead magnets, quizzes and calculators). The platform turns visitor responses into customer data.
The AI-generated text feature allows you to create individual text feedback. Your users then see relevant offers based on their specific needs.
involve.me integrates with Pipedrive, syncing customer response data from template-based forms into the CRM system.
Features:
Quiz and form builder with templates
Conditional logic for personalized experiences
Payment processing integration
Lead scoring and segmentation
Analytics dashboard for tracking results
involve.me offers a free plan with pricing starting at $29 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Cognism, a sales intelligence platform, needed to show potential customers its ROI. The team built a calculator with involve.me that shows visitors how much revenue they could make using Cognism’s data. The calculator helped them improve user experience and collect better data about their ideal customers.
3. Wisepops: best for behavior-based lead capture
Wisepops is a pop-up builder that converts website visitors into leads. The tool tracks visitor behavior to provide personalized updates.
The AI wishlist feature predicts visitors’ purchase intent and acts as a shopping assistant, providing personalized recommendations.
Wisepops integrates with Pipedrive, allowing marketers to create email pop-ups.
Features:
Smart pop-up timing based on user behavior
Real-time segmentation
Multiple formats (e.g., pop-ups, sticky bars, embeds, tabs)
Performance analytics to understand visitors’ interactions
Drag-and-drop builder
Wisepops’ plans start at $124 per month if billed annually.
Case study: the fashion brand Asphalte needed to grow its email list and engage website visitors. Using Wisepops’ targeted pop-ups and notifications, Asphalte now generates 4,000+ new leads monthly. The brand’s pop-up click-through rate reached 25%, much higher than the typical 4–10% average.
4. Wishpond: best for social media contests and lead generation
Wishpond is a marketing platform with tools for capturing, nurturing and converting leads. You can build and launch complete marketing campaigns (e.g., email, ads, social, SEO, landing pages, etc.). Plus, you can automate your marketing tasks to save time.
Wishpond has an AI-powered website builder. You input specific information about your type of business, and the builder autogenerates web copy and images. You can also regenerate the text and images with specific instructions.
Wishpond integrates with Pipedrive, providing a marketing platform to nurture leads that come from the CRM.
Features:
Landing page and pop-up builder
Campaign analytics
Lead generation forms with A/B testing
Social media contest and competition tools
Wishpond has a free 14-day trial with paid plans starting at $44 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Shari’s Cafe & Pies wanted to boost engagement with a photo contest for its seasonal menu. Using Wishpond’s contest tools, it ran a campaign where customers shared photos of their food. The contest increased the brand’s Facebook traffic by 30% and brought hundreds of new customers to its website.
5. Fireflies.ai: best for capturing insights from customer conversations
Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant that records and analyzes sales conversations. It lets you capture customer calls, search past meetings and share insights with your team.
The AI transcribes your meetings and identifies important topics automatically. It summarizes key points, spots action items and pinpoints what matters most to your customers. You can use these insights to improve your marketing messages.
Fireflies.ai integrates with Pipedrive, creating notes and complete transcriptions of calls and automatically storing them in contact and deal records.
Features:
Automatic meeting transcription
Conversation search and analysis
Topic and keyword tracking
Meeting summaries and action items
Integration capabilities for team collaboration
Fireflies.ai offers a free plan with paid options starting at $10 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Amplified Innovation struggled to stay present in client meetings while taking detailed notes. After choosing Fireflies.ai, the team automatically captured complete meeting records. By focusing on customer interactions, it built stronger client relationships and offered better solutions.
6. ChatGPT: best for content creation
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that generates responses according to prompts. You can use it as a writing assistant to create marketing content, such as social media posts, email copy and blog articles.
ChatGPT’s machine learning algorithms understand context and specifications. You can ask for revisions, adjust the tone or generate multiple versions of your content to find the ideal fit for your target audience.
Features:
Library of GPTs for specific needs (e.g., creative writing, SEO, email marketing, etc.)
Multiple chats for different topics
Custom GPT creation
Content generation and brainstorming
“Search” and “Reason” capabilities
ChatGPT offers a free version with a paid plan starting at $20 per month.
Use case: Consider a local restaurant with a social media following. It needs to post social media content about new menu items, events and specials weekly. Between managing staff, overseeing operations and handling customers, creating social content becomes another time-consuming task on a busy manager’s plate.
Managers can create social posts by entering dish descriptions or images into ChatGPT. The platform generates multiple response options, allowing adjustments to match brand messaging.
7. Claude: best for customized marketing content
Claude is an AI-driven assistant that generates responses from prompts. You can create project folders and share files or instructions that Claude can reference in the project chat.
Claude’s AI technology can create blog posts, email campaigns and product descriptions. You can also choose your writing style (formal, explanatory or concise).
Features:
Project folders with specific instructions
Multiple writing styles to choose from
Long-form content creation
Content brainstorming
General task assistance
Claude offers a free version with a paid plan starting at $20 per month.
Use case: Imagine a small SaaS company managing different types of content. The marketing team needs emails that sell and blog posts that educate. Claude’s project feature allows the brand to create separate workspaces for each content type. The email project includes sales examples and brand guidelines. The blog project stores technical documents and writing samples.
With this organized structure, teams maintain consistent content formatting.
8. Jasper: best for high-quality marketing content creation
Jasper is a generative AI tool with solutions tailored to specific marketing areas (performance, content, product, brand, PR, etc.)
Jasper uses a combination of text prompts and structured input fields. Users enter content requirements through designated form fields and can also use text-based prompts. The platform also integrates with popular marketing tools to streamline workflows.
Features:
Voice, tone and style for different marketing materials
AI-writing guidance with marketing best practices
Image creation or transformation
Style guide to apply different sets of rules
Jasper chat for specific feedback
Jasper offers a 7-day free trial with plans starting at $39 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Mongoose Media, a digital marketing agency, needed to speed up its content creation for clients. Using Jasper alongside its copywriter, it cut blog writing time from 8–10 hours to just two hours per piece. Even after Google’s Helpful Content update, its client’s organic traffic increased by 166%, growing from 3,000 to 8,000 monthly visitors.
9. Grammarly: best for polishing marketing content
Grammarly is a writing assistant tool that checks marketing content for grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. The platform reviews emails and business documents for tone and clarity issues. It integrates with browsers and common business applications.
Grammarly’s AI analyzes writing for grammar, style and tone. The platform offers suggestions for clarity and audience engagement. Users can generate content drafts through AI-powered prompts.
Features:
Real-time writing suggestions
Tone adjustment tools
Brand style guide integration
Team collaboration features
Browser and app integration
Grammarly offers a free version with business plans starting at $12 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Zoom was expanding globally due to the widespread adoption of remote work. The marketing team had to align its messaging with new regional audiences. Grammarly Business helped it improve 71% of its communications in nine months. The platform delivered over 10,000 style suggestions and saved its team 7,000 hours in communication time, valued at $210,000.
10. Sprout Social: best for social media management
Sprout Social is a social media management platform for managing multiple social media marketing channels. The platform includes post-scheduling, message management and performance tracking. Moreover, it supports content calendar creation and brand sentiment analysis.
Sprout’s AI functionality analyzes posting time patterns for engagement and impressions. It also generates captions and finds brand-relevant content ideas. Individuals can use AI-powered analysis insights to identify top trends.
Features:
Unified inbox and chatbots to reply to messages
Social media scheduler and preview tool
Reports to track performance across channels
Spike alert notifications for specific topics
Team collaboration tools
Sprout Social offers a 30-day free trial and starts at $199 per month per user if billed annually.
Case study: MeUndies had issues handling its growing social media customer support needs. It used Sprout Social to manage over 12,000 Instagram messages in two months. The platform reduced response time to an average of 19 minutes. The team now deals with customer conversations faster while maintaining a personalized approach.
11. Canva: best for design creation
Canva is a design platform that provides template-based visuals for marketing materials. The platform has a drag-and-drop functionality to create social media posts, presentations and branded content. It includes millions of templates and design elements.
Canva’s AI technology transforms text into professional designs instantly. It includes functions to generate custom images, recolor existing designs and remove backgrounds automatically. The Magic Design feature generates entire presentations, videos or social posts with a prompt.
Features:
Content planner to schedule social media posts
AI-powered design tools
Template library
Team collaboration features
PDF editor
Canva offers a free version with Pro plans starting at $100 per person per year.
Case study: PeakMade Real Estate needed to speed up its design process and maintain brand consistency. Using Canva, it reduced flyer creation time from 90 to 30 minutes. The platform saved the brand $130,000 annually and reduced its reliance on external agencies by $10,000. Its teams now save 2–3 hours weekly on content creation.
12. Clearscope: best for content decay and optimization
Clearscope is an SEO tool that analyzes content performance metrics to optimize content and drive more traffic. The platform analyzes articles at the top of the search results, providing content recommendations and suggesting keywords.
Clearscope’s AI evaluates content against top-performing articles. It identifies which topics to cover, what questions to answer and how to structure content for better search rankings. The platform also grades optimization efforts in real time.
Features:
Content decay audits with actionable recommendations
Keyword research insights (search volume data, trends, subtopics, etc.)
AI-generated outlines
Content grading system
Competitive analysis
Clearscope’s plans start at $189 per month.
Case study: Podia needed to improve its competitor comparison pages for a new product launch. Using Clearscope’s content recommendations, it optimized over 40 pages. The updates generated $80,000 in SEO value in less than eight months – money saved from not having to pay for ads to get the same traffic.
13. Frase: best for content brief creation and optimization
Frase is a content optimization tool that allows users to research topics and optimize articles. It analyzes the common headings at the top of search results and frequently asked questions to generate content briefs.
Frase’s AI assesses information and content elements across search results to provide suggestions. The platform also creates first drafts using outlines previously created in the outline builder. It has a topic score to assess content compared to competitors.
Features:
AI Article Wizard for content writing
Outline builder with reusable templates
Topic score grading
Questions and headings research
Team collaboration tools
Frase has a free plan with paid plans starting at $38 per month if billed annually.
Use case: The content manager of a small content marketing agency with five freelance writers spends hours researching topics and creating briefs for each client article. With Frase, they create SEO-optimized outlines in 30 minutes. Writers can access briefs on the platform, see AI suggestions while writing and submit drafts. The manager tracks progress through a simple dashboard and ensures every article meets client requirements.
14. Surfer: best for on-page content optimization
Surfer is an SEO tool that optimizes and audits on-page content. Users can see what topics to cover, including how long the content should be and which keywords to include. The platform analyzes hundreds of search results to guide content decisions.
Surfer’s AI examines top-ranking pages and provides specific recommendations. It can generate content outlines, check content writing scores and track optimization progress. Plus, it shows how the user’s content compares to competitors in real time.
Features:
Topical map to visualize content needs
Content editor interface
Surfer AI content writer (11 languages)
Content audit for SEO opportunities
Multiple contributors on one page
Surfer plans start at $79 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Dapper Marketing is a marketing agency that helps small businesses with their online presence. One of its clients failed to rank in the business intelligence software industry. Dapper used Surfer to revamp the client’s existing content and create new articles. In two months, website traffic doubled and brought 150 new leads.
15. Semrush: best for deep marketing insights
Semrush is a marketing tool for SEO, content marketing, PPC and social media. The platform provides content audit, keyword research, competitor analysis and content strategy development features from a centralized dashboard.
Semrush offers multiple free AI tools for different needs (e.g., proofreading, summarizing, rephrasing, title generator, etc.) It also provides 15+ integrations with specialized AI software like ContentShake AI.
Features:
Keyword research and rank tracking system
Trends for market trend research
Site audit capability
Competitor analysis
Content optimization
Semrush has a free plan with paid plans starting at $117.33 per month if billed annually.
Case study: BetterVet, a mobile veterinary clinic, needed help growing organic traffic in a competitive market. It used Semrush to fix technical website issues and optimize content for local searches. Organic traffic increased by 2,000%, the clinic ranked in the top three search positions for over 6,400 keywords and weekly organic leads jumped from 45 to 85 new prospects.
16. Notion AI: best for workspace organization
Notion is a collaborative workspace platform for creating and organizing marketing content. Its central hub houses project databases, document workflows and team task management functionalities.
Notion AI is a workspace assistant with functionality beyond basic writing tasks. Its chat function allows users to find information across tools like Slack and Google Drive. It also analyzes PDFs and images and supports content writing projects.
The AI can also incorporate style guides, create outlines from scattered notes and transform content into different formats.
Features:
AI search that finds answers across Slack and Google Drive
Template-based workspaces for different team needs
Real-time document collaboration with inline comments
Knowledge base with smart categorization
Project tracking with customizable views
Notion offers a free plan with AI features starting at $10 per month per member if billed annually.
Case study: Pinecone’s sales team had scattered information across multiple tools. After centralizing everything in Notion, it created a knowledge hub. Using AI tools, it increased its productivity from 50 to 400 customer touchpoints weekly. Sales reps now have access to competitive information. The brand can create prospecting messages and document customer interactions in one place.
17. Midjourney: best for image creation
Midjourney is an AI image-generation tool that creates images using text descriptions. Users input prompts like “product photo of a coffee mug on a wooden table”. The platform generates four options, and users can modify any version until it matches their vision.
Team members can work together in shared workspaces. Plus, the platform matches style and color requirements to align with brand identity guidelines.
Features:
Text-to-image conversion with brand styles
Real-time image variations and refinements
High-quality image resolution controls
Reference image inspiration tools
Collaborative creative workspaces
Midjourney offers plans starting at $10 per month with business options available.
Use case: Imagine a digital marketing agency creating educational content daily. Each course and blog post needs custom illustrations, costing up to $100. Stock images rarely work well. With Midjourney, the agency could describe what it needs in simple words – for example, typing “friendly robot teaching digital marketing basics in a classroom”. Then, the agency could make changes until it’s satisfied.
18. Murf AI: best for voice generation
Murf AI is an AI voice generator that converts text into voice recordings. The platform processes text for video content, podcasts and training materials across 20+ languages. It includes controls for pitch, pace and emphasis adjustments to address varying content requirements. The audio processing system also manages background noise reduction and audio consistency corrections.
Users can pick from 120+ voices that match their brand’s style.
Features:
AI voice generator with custom options
Text-to-voice generator in 20+ languages
Edit voice recordings instantly
Remove background sounds
Connect with video tools (Canva, Adobe Audition, Adobe Captivate, etc.)
Murf has a free basic plan with paid plans starting at $19 per month if billed annually.
Use case: Imagine a small online tutoring company with 50 educational videos in English. It wants to reach a Spanish-speaking audience, but dubbing services cost up to $75 per minute. Using Murf’s AI dubbing product, it could convert its library into Spanish faster and cost-effectively.
19. Copy.ai: best for fast marketing copy creation
Copy.ai is an AI writing tool that helps users create drafts in minutes, enabling teams to focus on polishing content instead of starting from scratch.
Copy.ai technology offers data-driven topic suggestions and SEO-friendly drafts that match brand voice parameters. The system can also convert audio content from meetings and interviews into text-based articles, eliminating manual transcription.
Features:
SEO-optimization tools and brand voice customization
Meeting transcript transformation
Multi-language translation and localization
Team collaboration workflows
Copy.ai offers a free plan with 2,000 words per month. Paid plans start at $36 per month for unlimited words and advanced features.
Use case: Agencies, writers and editors can use Copy.ai to 4x their output at a quarter of the cost. Since this platform has workflows, marketing teams can set the strategy and define the type of output they want to see.
20. Otter.ai: best for transcribing business conversations
Otter.ai is an AI meeting assistant that records and transcribes business conversations. The platform converts live meetings, interviews and client calls into searchable and shareable documentation.
Otter’s AI assistant generates automated summaries from conversations, highlighting key moments. It can also extract action items and search through previous meetings. The AI recognizes different speakers and adapts to industry-specific terms.
Features:
Real-time transcription in 30+ languages
Automated meeting summaries and highlights
Custom vocabulary training
Meeting recording and sharing
Mobile and web access
Otter.ai offers a free basic plan and paid plans start at $8.33 per month if billed annually.
Case study: Ethical business Strategist Lucie Chiochetti wanted an efficient way to take notes in client meetings. She spent hours transcribing conversations and remembering key details. With Otter.ai, she automated meeting transcriptions and created a searchable reference library for client discussions. The change saved her time as a solo business owner and improved her team communication.
Final thoughts
AI works best as an assistant rather than a replacement. You bring strategic thinking, creativity and a human connection to your marketing efforts. AI handles the time-consuming work while you focus on understanding buyer needs and building meaningful relationships.
Running successful marketing campaigns requires both human insight and technological efficiency. AI tools help you execute faster, but your expertise guides the strategy. Start exploring these AI marketing tools to enhance your workflow. Remember to maintain the human touch that makes your business unique.
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