Top 7 AI Tools for Marketers (That Are Actually Useful)

Commit before you collect

There are thousands of marketing tools with AI attached to them, but most do not deserve a permanent place in a marketer’s workflow. My shortlist comes from tools I have tested repeatedly, not from a directory of every launch. The standard is simple: does it help me do useful work on a near-daily basis?

I start with ChatGPT as the general system. Gemini and Claude are legitimate alternatives, but I prefer committing to one ecosystem long enough to learn its strengths. Constantly switching tools creates the illusion of progress while making it harder to build repeatable habits.

Choose tools by the job

The rest of the stack should solve distinct problems. A research tool can help me gather and summarize source material. A transcription or recording tool can turn conversations into usable content. Image and design tools can speed up creative production, while automation tools connect the work across systems. The exact list will change, but the principle holds: each tool earns its place by removing a bottleneck.

I also use AI features inside familiar software. Photoshop’s tools can help with image work, especially when I already know the design workflow. I do not need to replace every established application with an AI-first competitor. Sometimes the best improvement is a capability added to a tool I already open every day.

Test the stack in real work

A good tool list is not a shopping list. Pick one workflow and measure whether the tool makes it faster, better, or easier to repeat. If it produces more cleanup than value, remove it. If it works, document the process so the benefit survives beyond the person who discovered it.

The market will keep changing. One model will lead, another will catch up, and a new product will promise to replace them all. I do not need to chase every announcement. I need a small stack I understand deeply enough to produce results, then I can add a tool when it clearly solves a problem the current system cannot.

Seven useful tools beat fifty subscriptions I never open. Build around the work, commit long enough to learn, and let repeated results decide what stays.

welcome back to the AI driven marketer I'm Dan Sanchez my friends commi danz and today we're talking about the best AI tools for marketers because as you all know there are thousands maybe even tens of thousands of marketing tools that now have ai built into them right it's pretty much every tool that we were using before now equipped with AI the problem is most of them suck most of them aren't helpful on a day-to-day basis so what do you do where do you go from here I want to share with you my seven favorite that I'm using on a near daily basis that I've vetted and I've worked and I've beaten to death because they're just so freaking productive that I can't get away from them and I just want to say to the rest of them I I don't know people keep sending me links to sh ones and because they know I'm the AI marketing guy they just assume that I've seen it I haven't I probably haven't seen the tool honestly Beyond these these core tools that I'm going to show you today I've seen very few of the of the tools out there because I just find that most of them are junk and some of them just don't do Mo don't do better what I'm already doing with these seven tools and I'm looking all the time I'm exploring and testing and figuring out new stuff but there's so many of them and so little time that I find that I just use these seven over and over again and you know what they've gotten better over time so I haven't found away like a reason to to get away from them yet because they keep getting better so without further Ado let's dive into the seven tools that you should be using as a marketer the first one is kind of come on like we have to start off with the general one first so I'm sorry but like chat GPT like if you're not paying for chat GPT in 2024 like what what are you doing and I okay I'll give you if you're paying for Gemini or you're paying for Claude fine th those are fine I stick with chat GPT because you know what just freaking commit to one and just stick to it for more than 3 months yes they get better back they go back and forth uh chat GPT just launched 01 preview it's the Top Model now it's okay great I'm sure I'm pretty sure Claude has an announcement they're going to make this week and they will outdo one one previe but then chat GPT will come back doesn't really matter just pick one system and commit to it I'm pretty committed to the chat GPT kind of ecosystem I'm an Apple guy it's got a nice desktop app like I have here and honestly I use it all the time I use this for everything that these other tools don't do I'm probably using chat GPT for I use it for everything from just research ideation just having something to bounce ideas off of troubleshooting problems with Adobe Illustrator like I I could take screenshots I can upload stuff to it files Google Docs photos spreadsheets copy paste code into it I can write code with it uh I can just record my voice and kind of rant about something for five minutes even 10 minutes I've literally dumped five minutes of me just trying to explain a problem to it and give it a proper context and then I actually click it and you can see even here on my screen uh it's gone and transcribed everything for me so I don't have to write it out I could just word vomit and then give it the problem and then it fixes it for me it's fantastic even here I've I have all my custom gpts to automate the processes of everything here I have my showrunner which is my favorite and most used GPT to help me do all the pre-production for my podcast episodes especially with guests it does all the research on the guest finds the angle finds the title makes the outline even writes the email for the guest comes up with show notes all the stuff is based on a custom GPT if you want access to it you want to make your own custom GPT based on the instructions I've written go to myow runner.com I've given it away for it it freely there so go check it out I need to update that soon so stay tuned for my showrunner 2.0 that's maybe in the next few weeks that'll be coming but chat GPT man it is the it is the one AI tool that can freaking rule them all if I only had one AI tool it would just be chat GPT because it's so freaking useful and across the wide broad tool set for marketing from coming up with content to helping you do strategic work I have a backlog of episodes of all the things I've shown people how to do with just chat GPT okay so number one tool chat GPT let's move on though uh a second favorite tool and it's the one I'm using to record Rec this video freaking right now is amazing and it used to be Loom it's it's called and but this one's not Loom it's called ta it's like the upgraded Loom it's like the loom if you were a Creator the loom if you were just using it to create content for marketing because it's 10 times better than Loom what makes it 10 times better well it gives you video editing abilities uh without having being a video editor without having to download a Premiere Pro a final cut a cap cut or any of those things it helps me make these videos in fact I don't even I don't even edit the videos I just edit them here in ta because ta actually allows me to record my screen like I'm here now but allows me to then like here I have an opening you probably releasing it updates to create bre so full screen and then I just added a layout and that's that then goes to this side by side thing so even as you're watching this video now and you see my head over on the right side and that you were're watching the screen now like I did in this one you can have animated backgrounds and the cool thing is it uses AI to go and trim this is the important part and this is where AI is really helpful because it can again F like just kind of find all the filler words remove them creates the transcript removes the silences and removes the buffers and uses AIS to do all that and create the the transcripts it's a really simple AI use case but I find one that's just extremely helpful and he even uses AI to come up with the titles with it Loom does some of these things too but this one just Does It Better creates better content and just does it faster to the point where I've just gotten rid of and I've gone all in on ta that and I find looms getting more expensive and ta's been holding strong so thank you ta uh this isn't a sponsored video by any of these tools by the way if you case you are wondering because I'm so enthusiastic about them no no sponsorships just telling you about my favorite tools that I'm using all the time hence I'm using it right now to make this video pointing like there's the point I'm actually using these two as old tool tools all the time and it's really really handy so I use ta to make awesome one like solo videos and Screen recordings I make it for this podcast I use these kinds of videos even to just answer questions on LinkedIn all the time if you want to get someone's attention record a nice little video and send them a link to it it's fantastic way to get their attention and like turn a follower into a fan through video one by one to one video it's really good for that you can even embed little animated gifts and send them in the email if you really want to catch someone's attention it's fantastic tool and is now my go-to like one toone video creation tool and just solo Creator tool out there so t.tv check it out uh zener Zen cter is my other video content creation tool because if you know if you're a marketer like content creation is kind of the name of the game right like you have paid media and then you have content creation and then there's other bunch of stuff up there like PR and strategic relationships and all that kind of stuff but let's be honest most of the work of marketing these days is running paid ads and coming up with content and let's let's even the paid ads is content these days so like you got to come up with lots of content Zen Caster is my favorite tool specifically for doing interviews and it's also where I take this solo video that I'm recording right now through ta and then we'll upload it for distribution through zenc Caster so what is zenc caster zenc Caster is kind of like your all-in-one podcasting tool it really does everything shoot it would even be a great YouTube Tool because it uploads directly to YouTube you can see on my screen here it's got all the different places uh it gets syndicated to from of course zenc has its own little Network RSS Apple Castro pod friend castbox overcast and of course all the other podcasts Spotify and YouTube it just automatically goes here as soon as I upload my my episodes here but it's more than a podcast host you can actually record sessions here you can see I have a session here that I recorded with Lisa uh it was a past episode if you haven't checked it out it's one of my favorites um and a created episode had separate recorded files that are uh uploaded in the background so you get high resolution uh podcast podcast right because if you're not doing video podcasts like you're missing out YouTube's become the biggest like part of podcast viewership today it actually just overtook Spotify so if you're not making video podcast do that and the cool part is is it will then take it it does what Riverside does uploads the video but then goes through all the processes let's see if I can even pull it up real quick go to preview give you a little demo go to edit and it will come up not only with your long form content but then automatically using AI detect all the best nuggets you dropped in the podcast episode or your guest dropped in the podcast episode and turn them into all the clips it even remembers all the styles that I've already set for my captions so that's already ready to go it's already pre-loaded my intro and outro for the podcast on there if you're ever wondering that's just fully automated and it's like the fastest way for me to come up with content now you can edit the episode via the transcript it but it automatically goes through and cuts out all the filler words uh ums and oz of course or Advanced filler words it removes long pauses and it kind of do all the basic editing you would ever need to do in fact that's all I'm doing for my podcast episodes anymore I'm not doing any advanced edits I'm just having real conversations with real people doing awesome work and then just publishing it as fast as possible so Zen cters become the fastest way to produce lots of lots of content really quickly and used to take like two weeks a whole team of people two weeks at Sweet fish media where I used to work to produce one episode now I can do in about you know 60 90 minutes depending on how many Clips there are to review and like either kill or publish or edit uh before they go out but it's so nice because in just right after recording the interview it's already up I don't have to upload it it's already there I edit it I publish it I get the clips and I go through them all see let's find some I go through all the clips and I either publish them I archive them or I edit them right there so it's just so nice to be able to go through and click it it's all in one place and then you can publish all your long form podcast episodes to everywhere it needs to go and then publish your short form to all the different social channels to then promote the long form episode and it's just so fast and uses AI to do all the little writing in between because you know even if you have the clip there's always that problem of like well you got to add some text to it you know you got to add the header text to it you got to come up with the captions on top the clip there's all this writing but they use AI to go and create all that and fill in all these little tiny tasks you'd have to do that would slow this whole process down Zen cter makes it easy which is why they've become probably after chat GPT gosh it's kind of a tie between TAA and Zen cter but if I have to give the nod to something it's going to be Zen Caster uh for becoming the PowerHouse of content creation I can't really speak highly enough about Zen Caster they're crushing it with their tool and I've seen a demo what they have coming out next is even better um but I'm crushing with what they have right now able to put out content without with minimal effort and time um and for somebody who's doing a lot of work and only has so much time for this podcast it becomes a big deal so what do we got we got chat GPT we got ta we got zenc Caster moving on we have high level high level oh my gosh high level is an like one of those All-In-One tools I used to be an infusion soft guy uh back when I was doing some higher red marketing I used to do all my marketing on automation now that's kind of died out and high levels become the tool the cool thing about high levels you can have all your instances in it if you pay the 300 bucks a month you can have multiple instances of it run multiple businesses out of it or have clients have their own instances of it so that's kind of what's unique about high level but we're not here to talk about the awesomeness that is high level really we want to know what about Ai and high level well AI is high level is one of those generic tools that can does everything from text message marketing email marketing marketing automation website building funnel building reputation management all it does all the stuff it just does it I I do my invoicing through here and my it does e-commerce uh I receive payments through it I track all my product sales I have a membership platform I have courses built into this thing it does every freaking thing I would ever want to do as a marketer highle does it's and it's it's cheap it's like a hundred bucks a month for 300 bucks a month you get unlimited instances of it it's it's just like what the heck it's just so cheap that it's become a no-brainer for me shoot I even host my WordPress site here and it's really good and I'm picky about WordPress hosting so just kind of shows goes to show you like high L does a lot but let's talk about what how I use highle for AI they actually have a social media tool in here where you can use AI to come up with social content I don't really use it that much what I really use that I think is the most interesting is using AI in the journey Builder or in the the workflows or automations you know whatever you want to call it your marketing automation you can use AI in this in fact here's a sequence I made called the newsletter Builder that I reviewed in a past podcast episode that I used to come up with my newsletter content I actually fill out a form with something like the transcript from this very episode and I have a few pieces of information I put it including the transcript and then it takes that transcript and then pings chat GPT here it's chat GPT 40 uh specifically and then in injects all the information that I gave it to in the form and then comes up with this prompt then it captures that information stores it in a field and then uses goes back to chat GPT to come up with some more pieces of the newsletter and then essentially builds all the content out in the newsletter stores it in the right places and then a different sequence actually sends it out to the whole newsletter base I don't even build the newsletter anymore I just let AI run my newsletter and because it's coming from my transcript from my content I know it's going to have a certain level of credibility with the AI newsletter to the point that I don't even check it anymore because it's so spoton once it's gotten it wrong and you know that's cool because I just learned from the lesson I remember what it can and can't do uh but generally the it's it's fantastic to see what you can automate here I've even automated this to email my guest after the podcast episode goes out and it comes up with tweets for them based on that episode um and it does a fantastic job of it so this is where I think a lot of future work will be done is not necessarily coming up with these one-off tools it's having AI integrated into your current market marketing automation tools and maybe it's high level but maybe it's not maybe it's HubSpot maybe it's Salesforce maybe whatever it is it whatever you're doing marketing automation with AI is probably plugging into it and it's able to manipulate the data as things run through your marketing automation sequences that's where the lot of the Leverage is going to happen for marketers so if you're already not maybe you you're like well I'm not in marketing Ops like roll up your sleeves a little bit and figuring out how to become marketing Ops oriented because this is what's to drive a lot of progress in the future for AI marketers learn how to automate things figure out what are the things that you're doing repetitively that you can then turn into step-by-step instructions as if you're going to delegate it and then figure out how to automate it and how AI can actually be part of that process this is the game and I've I wanted to automate a newsletter and this was part of the sequence that I learned how to automate a newsletter with uh and I'm doing it through high level I freaking love ey level it's a great great tool and they have a lot of AI built into it and they're doing more all the time so I'm excited about that my next tool is a fantastic tool called cast magic while I'm probably using like just chat gpts and custom gpts to do this specific task more often I'm still using cast magic quite a bit what you do is you upload your podcast or any video or audio content really it could be sales calls it doesn't really matter what it is you can upload it to cast magic and it transcribes it for you identifies the speakers in it this was actually a guest episode that I reposted last week onto the AI driven marketer but I needed some text content so I uploaded it to cast magic it trans and then came up with all the lot all the different assets for it for title title ideas my show notes resources mentioned so I can get those in the show notes timestamps mid Journey prompts yes I actually have it give me my mid Journey prompts which is hint my next tool post actionable advice for marketers I was trying to get this on the website I haven't been super consistent with that but like it can come up with all the content and then you can go to magic chat which is really just chat GPT that's already armed with the transcript that it has and then you can ask it to tell to build you tweets or whatever kind of text content you want based on that transcript it's a very powerful tool and you can build your own prompt so that every time you upload something it spits out something new like I had it do mid Journey prompts you might want something else you might want to you might want to upload customer interviews and put like this the story breakdown outline or the headers or like a narrative or whatever the heck you want out of one you can build and have these pins so that every time it uh it it creates all this content for you and you get to decide what that is it's just a nice tool that if you have a reoccurring piece of audio or video content you want to turn into a lot of text content this is the best way to do it I've seen people get really creative with this tool because even though it seems like it has a narrow Focus you could you could use this in so many ways from turning sales calls into marketing assets to even taking uh prospective buyers that are maybe speaking on stage a lot and then turning their messages into outline so you can have something to go outbound with them out outbound to them with you know so there's all kinds of little creative ways you can use this thing because you don't even have to own the content you run through this you could literally just plug YouTube videos into it if you need to if that's if that's useful to you so uh cast magic great AI tool that comes up with lots of content makes it EAS easier for us marketers the sixth tool is mid Journey mid Journey while chat GPT has Dolly and can create some images and they're not bad mid journey is really where the best image creation is for Mark for for AI right now you can see I have a bunch of pictures here I generally create a lot of images like here I I was producing a podcast for close mode a sales podcast and the title was around B2B street fighting and so I was like huh I need a picture I had a bunch I had a cast magic come up with some ideas and you could see it generated a bunch of ideas one of them was a guy in the boxing gloves I'm like H that's more straightforward I think I'll stick to that so I ended up picking this guy and then I upscaled it to be even larger to be this guy here and I downloaded this actually a huge file so mid journey is where I start for getting essentially stock assets creative stock assets because you can come up with so much stuff I also come up with all the illustrations that I use for the AI driven marketer like here's the last one I used for the last podcast episode I did I I did on AI driven marketer but of course while you could use this stock thing that comes out of mid journey I usually like to do a little bit more design which comes to my last my seventh and last tool that I'm using AI on all the time and that's just oldfashioned Photoshop I used to be a graphic designer and I don't I don't recommend Photoshop unless you have some experience with it or want to dive into the deep end on it because it is a it is a beefy tool it takes time to learn canva probably has some good alternatives for this but I can't lie like can't Photoshop is still a tool that I use almost every single day and this is just a template that I made for close mode that a show that I produce but there's a very consistent uh while I use a couple AI Tools in here there's one tool that I use more than anything else and that's just generative fill it used to be that I'd have to take a photo like this and then somehow force it to be like fill out the frame that I have here but now with generative fill I can get the photo right where I want it and then just say expand and then bam it comes up with the rest of the photo I bet you can't even tell where the mid Journey image starts and uh the ex the expand fill actually filled in where this this fake sales man with boxing gloves is now right because it's so seamless it did such a good job in filling in what needed to be filled in there so that I could put the right thing in the right place and then fill in with AI everything else it is a freaking magic tool and is a game Cher for any of the design projects that I've ever worked on just this simple fill option I know Adobe has a lot more AI tools in the works and I use some of them with illustrator and some other ones with uh but this generative fill is freaking magic in fact actually I think you can do this with um Mid Journey these days you can actually go and fill it to the right or to the left so I could have mid journeyed my way through it I think I could even Circle it and like just ask it to prompt to fill in this but I just find that photoshop since I'm already doing the design there it's better it's faster a generative fill than mid journey is so I kind of stick to it that way but if you're not a Photoshop person you could probably just get away with just doing it in Photoshop because I'm pretty sure there is an edit button in fact I know there there's an edit button I just I don't use it because I use Photoshop you can actually go to edit a image and just like I could Circle this guy and say hey make this a blank wall and it would just get rid of it so there's only one guy sitting in this picture for example uh if I weren't a graphic designer already doing stuff doing stuff in Photoshop I would just be using mid Journey so but I had to become clean I am using Photoshop almost every day with the AI Tools in it and there you have it there are my seven favorite AI tools that I'm using on a near daily basis there's a lot of them out there I will probably adopt more in the future but for now these seven are making me fly and I'll be able to do more and better and faster as a marketer uh by leveraging these AI tools thank you so much for listening to the AI driven marketer if this show was any good please give it a festar or whatever star rating you think it deserves on the podcast app that you're listening to and tap that thumbs up button on YouTube and if you want to dive deeper into Ai and you're still not sure if you've mastered the fundamentals go to my free AI course at Aid driven marketer.com and take a look learn the fundamentals and you will never have to look for a prom cheat sheet again five video series and you'll even find that I've customized the course so it's hyper personalized for you your role and the people you're marketing to take a look at it and let's get started so we can do 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