The AI Tools I Actually Use for Marketing

My primary AI tool — full stop. I use it for almost everything: long-form content, strategy documents, campaign briefs, ad copy, data analysis, and building tools. The difference between Claude and most alternatives isn't capability on simple tasks — it's how it handles complexity. Long, layered prompts with multiple constraints. Nuanced strategy work where the answer isn't obvious. Tasks where the quality of thinking matters as much as the speed of output.

Two ways I use it: Claude in the browser for everyday work, and Claude for Desktop for deeper workflows. The desktop app is what I'd describe as Claude Code for knowledge workers — it can interact with your local files, connect to tools via MCP, and handle tasks that live outside a browser tab. If you're a marketer who wants to move faster without hiring developers, this is the serious tool.

Three distinct use cases that make Gemini earn its place alongside Claude. First, it's my overflow model — when I hit Claude's context limits on a long project, Gemini picks it up without skipping a beat. Second, it's the best AI for anything inside the Google ecosystem. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets — Gemini integrates natively in a way nothing else does.

Google Workspace Studio takes this further: build automated workflows directly inside Gmail and Calendar using AI. Summarize threads, draft responses, create calendar events from emails — without leaving Google. Natively integrated in a way nothing else matches.

Two reasons Grok earns a permanent place in my stack. First, it's the only AI with real-time access to X conversations — for staying on top of what practitioners are actually saying about AI, marketing trends, and industry discourse right now, nothing else comes close.

Second: Grok Voice is the best voice AI I've used. It's the one that actually feels like a natural conversation — not a voice assistant reading text back at you, but a back-and-forth that holds context and pushes the thinking forward. I use it to work through strategy out loud, think through problems on the go, and pressure-test ideas before writing them up. I have it as a shortcut on my home screen so I can open it instantly.

When I need actual research — sourced, cited, verifiable — Perplexity is the tool. Not a confident paragraph that might be fabricated, but answers I can trace back to sources. Strong for financial analysis, market sizing, industry research, and anything where accuracy matters more than creativity.

The habit: Perplexity for facts, Claude for thinking.

Before buying any third-party AI ad tool, use what Google already gives you. Smart Bidding outperforms manual bidding in most accounts once you have enough conversion volume (roughly 30+ conversions per month per campaign). AI Max is the newer evolution — it extends your reach beyond exact match keywords using AI to find relevant searches you'd otherwise miss. Early results are promising, particularly for accounts that have historically been constrained by tight keyword targeting.

Feed it clean conversion signals and good ad copy. The AI optimizes distribution — you still control the message.

Meta's AI targeting has gotten significantly better. Advantage+ Shopping for e-commerce and Advantage+ Audience for lead gen are worth testing before layering on third-party tools. The honest take: it works best when you give it creative variety. Feed it 5–10 assets and let it find what works. One static image won't move the needle regardless of how good the AI is.

I built MediaPlan.ca because nothing in the existing tool stack solved the planning problem well. It's an AI-powered operating system for media planners — brief intake, budget allocation across channels, flowchart generation, and competitive insights. Where I find it most valuable: preparing for pitches and RFPs (it compresses days of planning into hours), structuring brand campaigns where the media mix decision is genuinely complex, and media mix modeling to validate budget allocation before committing spend.

If your media planning still lives in spreadsheets, this is the specific tool I'd point you to first.

The most comprehensive SEO tool most marketing teams need. For small businesses, the highest-value features are keyword research (what your audience is searching), competitive gap analysis (what competitors rank for that you don't), and the site audit (technical issues dragging down your rankings). It's been adding AI features steadily, but the core data is where the value is.

If you're writing content without doing keyword research first, you're guessing. Semrush stops the guessing.

This is the forward-looking one on this list. Traditional SEO gets you onto Google's results page. GEO — generative engine optimization — gets you into the answers that AI tools surface when people ask questions. Writesonic has been building toward this: helping you structure and optimize content so it gets cited by large language models, not just indexed by search engines.

Most small businesses haven't heard of GEO yet. That's the opportunity. The teams building for it now will own that real estate when the behaviour fully shifts.

Connects to everything Google (Analytics, Ads, Search Console) and an expanding list of third-party sources. If your reporting lives in spreadsheets or you're manually pulling numbers each week, Looker Studio is the first fix. The learning curve is real — a few hours to build your first useful dashboard — but it's free and the output saves hours every month.

Attribution is the hardest problem in paid marketing and it's gotten harder since iOS 14 broke platform-reported numbers. Triple Whale gives e-commerce businesses a clearer picture of which channels are actually driving revenue — not just what Google and Meta claim. Worth the investment at meaningful ad spend.

The connective tissue of a modern marketing stack. New lead in your form goes to your CRM, new CRM contact triggers a welcome sequence, new content publishes and automatically posts to LinkedIn. Without Zapier, those handoffs are manual or broken. Most small business stacks have 5–10 places where data moves by hand. Zapier eliminates most of them.

I use Notion as a knowledge center — where the team's thinking lives, processes are documented, and institutional knowledge doesn't walk out the door when someone leaves. Clear, organized, searchable.

One thing worth knowing: I don't use Notion's built-in AI features. Instead, I connect Claude directly to Notion via MCP (Model Context Protocol). That means I can ask Claude to pull information from my Notion workspace, create new pages, and update existing ones — all from Claude, without switching contexts. More powerful than Notion AI, and it uses a tool I'm already in all day. If you're a Claude user and you keep your knowledge in Notion, look into the Notion MCP integration. It changes the workflow.

Claude Code is how I build. Running inside VS Code as a CLI, it handles meaningful development tasks — not just autocomplete, but actually writing, debugging, and refactoring code with context across the whole project. The gap between “marketer who can build” and “developer” has closed significantly. If you're curious about building your own tools, this is where to start.

When I want to test an idea fast — a quick internal tool, a prototype to validate a concept — Base44 and Google AI Studio are where I start. Less structure than a full dev environment, more speed. Build something ugly that works, see if the idea is worth pursuing, then invest in building it properly. Most ideas don't survive contact with reality. These tools make that discovery cheap.

Most AI tools are only as good as the data or content you give them. If the inputs aren't there, the tool won't perform.

A tool nobody owns is a tool nobody uses. Before adding anything, name the person responsible for it — who configures it, monitors it, and decides when to replace it.

Set a simple baseline metric before you start — time saved, cost per lead, output volume — and check it after 60 days. If the number doesn't move, the tool isn't earning its place.