AI for Marketing: The Best Free and Paid AI Tools

charlie
June 6, 2023

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Last Updated: 1 May 23 (AKA many moons ago in AI years.) For the latest updates: https://aimarketingschool.beehiiv.com/

The world’s top marketing departments – and the best marketers I know – are all using AI tools to work faster, smarter, and more profitably. It’s mindblowing how quickly these tools have taken hold.

With hundreds of AI tools available, and new ones popping up daily, it can be confusing to know where to start. To help you in your search, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most popular and effective AI tools for marketers. Building your own stack of tools that work for you and your business is the ultimate goal.

Onward.

AI Writing Assistants

The AI writing assistant is the first thing most people will think of when it comes to AI tools. They use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to

Write more effective, engaging, and targeted content faster than ever before, OR;
Pump out more generic, bland content than previously thought possible.

Which bucket will your output fall into? Well, that depends on two factors. First, your writing ability and subject-matter expertise. And second, your skill in manipulating and extracting value from your writing assistant of choice.

As experienced writers and marketers, it’s easy to disregard writing assistants as a gimmick. But make no mistake. These are powerful tools.

An AI writing assistant can’t magically transform a mediocre writer into an excellent one. But it can save a superb marketer a tremendous amount of time – time they can devote to improving their output and income.

How Do AI Writing Assistants Work?

AI writing assistants are advanced computer programs that can understand and generate text like a human. They’ve learned the patterns and structure of language from studying a vast amount of text data from books, articles, websites, and forums.

When you give an AI writing assistant a prompt, such as a sentence or a question, it predicts the next word in the sequence until it generates a defined number of words or reaches a natural stopping point. It’s like the world’s most powerful autocomplete, only insanely more powerful.

The most popular AI writing assistants on the market use a language generation model called GPT-3 (or GPT-3.5). Developed by OpenAI (a company part-owned by Elon Musk), GPT-3 can generate, transform, translate, summarize, complete, edit text, and more. You can create a Tweet, marketing slogan, or 1000+ word article in seconds. But with varying degrees of success.

How to Choose The Best AI Writing Tools

All the key players in the AI writing assistant market are built on top of CHAT API. They’re pretty much on a par when it comes to their writing ability, so the choice comes down to other factors, such as

How easy are they to use?
How well do they integrate with your existing tools?
How much support and training do they provide?
Are they for individuals or teams?
Are they designed for your industry?
The price!

A cursory Google search surfaces more than 40 AI writing assistants, and more pop up daily. Below are the solutions we recommend. Try a few out and pick one you can stick with for the medium term. The longer you use one solution, the better you get at prompting and the better the output becomes.

1. ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Target customer: Everyone and anyone

Price: Free

ChatGPT is the most powerful large language model, fine-tuned from GPT-3.5 to interact with users in a conversational way. It’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use – type a prompt into the dialog box, and the program will do as you wish.

ChatGPT’s beauty lies in its simplicity. Using it is as easy as chatting with a real person. You can get it to summarize an article, write a conclusion, provide facts, transform bullet points into flowing text, create a table from a jumble of random crap, or generate ideas for blog outlines or titles. All you have to do is ask.

To get started with ChatGPT, sign up for an account at https://chat.openai.com/. It’s free, and you can get going immediately. Have a good play around with the functionality. For many marketers, using ChatGPT for the first time is a truly profound experience. Enjoy.

However…

There is a severe downside to ChatGPT: these days, it’s frequently unavailable. If you use ChatGPT as regularly as I do (it’s my favourite tool), you’ll be accustomed to the dreaded “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message. (Try bypassing this by refreshing your browser a few times.) This notification means their servers are under a hefty load.

If the above is starting to hold you back (or piss you off), you can either:

Pay $20/mo for ChatGPT Plus, which gives you 24/7 availability, faster response speed, and early access to new features.
Use OpenAI’s GPT-3 Playground – an interactive web-based interface that allows users to experiment with different input and control settings and generate text. It’s less user-friendly than ChatGPT Plus but way cheaper. To generate 750 words costs around $0.002.
Use another writing assistant discussed below.

2. Jasper

Target customer: Content creators (long-form)

Price: From $24/mo (20k words) or $49/mo for Boss Mode (50k words)

Jasper was early in recognizing the potential of generative AI for marketing and sales and has since been valued at $1.5 billion, making it (easily) the market-leading solution in the space (100,000 customers can’t be wrong!)

Essentially, Jasper–and the other assistants in this list–resell OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 output (for a massive markup) by embedding a fine-tuned version of the language into their pre-design copywriting templates and workflows.

Unlike ChatGPT, which is designed for all-purpose use, Jasper is designed explicitly for content generation. Jasper has all the bells and whistles you’d expect, including its version of ChatGPT (Jasper Chat) and a lot more.

50+ templates for generating everything from product descriptions to blog post outlines, topic ideas, conclusion paragraphs, LinkedIn bios, Facebook Ads, Quora articles, video scripts – the list goes on.
The ability to generate longer-form blog content that’s plagiarism-free (with Boss Mode).
The ability to generate images with Jasper Art.
Seamless integration of Grammarly and Surfer SEO to optimize articles for search. For many, this works beautifully and will be reason enough to use Jasper.

3. Copy.ai

Target customer: social media managers and email marketers (geared towards short-form)

Price: $0/mo (2k words) or $49/mo (unlimited)

Jasper specializes in long-form content, while Copy.ai focuses on short-form – social media posts, website copy, and email marketing use cases. Both will help you kickstart your writing process and produce first-draft-worthy content, saving you considerable time.

Copy.ai relies heavily on templates. They offer A LOT. Although templates like the Real Estate Flyer template and the Thank You For Graduation Money template (yes, really) are pretty useless.

Both Jasper and Copy.ai use GPT-3, so the output is similar. In my experiments, Jasper produces marginally better content (probably has something to do with how they have fine-tuned the language model.)

When it comes to long-form, Jasper has the edge. Jasper’s writing assistant is intuitive for anybody familiar with Google Docs (i.e., everybody) and is more efficient than switching templates all the time.

While I prefer Jasper overall, if I wanted to create a limited amount of varied short-form content each month, I would go with Copy.ai. Why? Because it’s less expensive. (If you stay under the 2k word-limit, you can use Copy.ai for free.)

If I was a social media manager, I’d probably hitch my horse to Copy.ai too. Word on the internet is they have some really cool stuff in the works. Instead of just writing ads, they want to automate A/B testing, bidding for impressions, modifying text, and stopping/starting campaigns. That would be awesome.

4. Writer.com

Target customer: Teams

Price: $18/mo (1-5 people) or More (enterprise)

While Jasper and Copy.ai go after the freelancers, Writer.com (with its Ballin’ domain name) is going after the teams. It does all the basic AI writing assistant stuff but with the ability to collaborate on documents easily and stick to style guides without having to triple-check everything. I’ve used Writer.com a lot. I really like it.

When multiple writers are producing content for a business across a blog, product pages, help center, and social media, Writer.com makes it easy to maintain a consistent voice and tone for the brand, which means less editing and greater productivity. You can integrate Writer with Word, Google Docs, Figma, Chrome, Outlook, and more, so it’s super-accessible.

Best of the rest…

5. Hypotenuse AI

Target Customer: Bloggers, social media, e-commerce
Price: $24/mo (25k words) or $49 (87.5k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Content Detective – generate citations and references for your articles.

6. Writesonic

Target Customer: Long-form copywriters and content writers
Price: From $12.67 (47.5k words)
Free Trial: Yes (6,250 words/mo)
Standout Features: SurferSEO integration, cheaper Jasper alternative.

7. Frase

Target Customer: Content writers with an SEO focus
Price: From $14.99/mo (4k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Content Detective – generate citations and references for your articles.

8. Kafkai

Target Customer: Article writers
Price: From $29/mo (100 articles)
Free Trial: $1 trial (5 days)
Standout Features: Good for outlines and SEO optimization.

9. AI Writer

Target Customer: Social media, advertising
Price: FREE
Free Trial: n/a
Standout Features: Great for short snappy stuff.

10. GoCharlie

Target Customer: Content creators
Price: $39/mo (unlimited
Free Trial: Free “Preview” Version
Standout Features: Fun design, unlimited use.

11. Copysmith

Target Customer: Enterprise and e-commerce
Price: From $19/mo (20k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Product descriptions, solid set of integrations.

12. Growthbar

Target Customer: SEOs
Price: From $29/mo
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Keyword research built-in.

13. Article Forge

Target Customer: Content mills
Price: From $27/mo (25k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Write 1,500+ word articles with one click, good for pumping and dumping.

14. Laika

Target Customer: Creative writers
Price: Apply for Beta
Free Trial: n/a
Standout Features: For creative writing

15. Notion.ai

Target Customer: Notion users
Price: Join the waitlist
Free Trial: n/a
Standout Features: Use in Notion

16. Sudowrite

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: From $10/mo (30k words)
Free Trial: Yes (no credit card)
Standout Features: Nice design. Classy client list (Vanity Fair, etc.)

17. Compose.ai

Target Customer: Chrome users
Price: Free
Free Trial: n/a
Standout Features: Chrome extension only. Y Combinator alums.

18. GhostWryter

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: $2.99/mo, then $1 for 37.5k words (pay as you go)
Free Trial: No
Standout Features: Made for Google Docs. Need an OpenAI License Key (free.)

Other AI Marketing Tools

Here’s a selection of other AI apps that may or may not be helpful to your marketing endeavors. Many are “Ones to Watch,” i.e., not quite there yet, but showing real promise. Everything’s worth keeping an eye on and trying if it’s free. We’re going to keep adding to this list.

Glasp: Highlight, summarize, and store articles and other long-form information you find on the web. Very cool. Free (beta).
tome: Create Powerpoint-killing slides and presentations. Free trial.
Waymark: Generate video and digital ads. Free trial.
DALL-E 2: Create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions. From the makers of ChatGPT. Free.
Whimsical: Whiteboards and mind maps with the help of AI. Free trial.
Vidyo.ai: Automatically edit long videos down into short ones. Free trial.
AdCreative.ai: Generate conversion-focused ad creatives and social media post creatives.
Stable Diffusion: Another text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input. An OpenAI competitor. Free.
Beautiful.ai: Generate pitch decks for presentations. From $12/mo.
SlidesAI: Create professional, engaging slides from any text. Free trial.
Supernormal: Create meeting notes and transcripts automatically so you can stay focused. Very cool. From free (10 meetings/mo).
Phrasee: Generate, optimize, automate, and analyze marketing messages in real-time. Test AI variants against a human-generated control. Free demo.
Human: AI-powered personalization tool that reveals products & services people are most interested in. Free Trial.
Simplified. One-click graphic design, written content, videos, and animation. Free trial.
Markopolo: Automatic cross-platform marketing for Meta, Google, TikTok, Linkedin. Free trial.
Adcreative.ai: Generate ad creative, as the name suggests. Free trial.
VOC.ai: VOC and sentiment analysis tool for Amazon reviews and competitor analysis. Free trial.
Supercreator.ai: Short-form video generator.
Flair: Generate ads and product images based on your written instructions. Imagine being able to recreate an entire photo shoot in minutes for a couple of bucks. The potential is huge. Free Trial.
Photoroom: Generate unique backgrounds for product shots using Stable Diffusion. Free.
Evolv.ai: Discover, personalize, and serve progressively better journeys by continuously adapting to live user behavior. Free demo.
Verb: Storytelling app for fiction writers.
GPTZero: Detects GPT content. Targeted at educators. Free.
MarketingIdeas.ai: Generate marketing ideas for product. Free.
Durable: Build a website in 30 seconds using artificial intelligence. Free demo.
Post Parrot: Generate post titles targeted to a specific subreddit. Free – not very good yet.
Tweept3: Send AI-generated tweets automatically. Free – not very good yet.
Viral Post Generator: Create a cringe-worthy LinkedIn post. Free – just for lols.
Seventhsense: Increase email deliverability and performance. From $64/mo – highly regarded for Marketo and Hubspot users.
Automizy: Email marketing software designed to increase your email open rates. From $9/mo (200 subs).

38. OpenAI Zapier Integrations

If you use many different online tools and you’re not already familiar with Zapier, you will probably be soon. It’s awesome.

Zapier lets you create automated tasks, called Zaps, that are triggered by an event in one app and performed in another. It sounds complicated, but Zapier makes it easy.

OpenAI (ChatGPT) is one of the 5,000+ apps you can connect with Zapier. Here are some examples of valuable zaps that can be created with Zapier and OpenAI:

Text summarization: You can set up a zap to automatically summarize long articles or documents using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and then send the summary to a specific email or chat channel.
Sentiment analysis: You can set up a zap to automatically analyze the sentiment of customer reviews or social media posts using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and then send the results to a spreadsheet or CRM app.
Language translation: You can set up a zap to automatically translate text from one language to another using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and then send the translated text to a specific email or chat channel.
Text generation: You can set up a zap to automatically generate text using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model. For example, create a product description, develop a script for a video, and generate a title for an article.
Image captioning: You can set up a zap to automatically generate captions for images using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 model and then send the captions to a specific email or chat channel.
Automated writing: You can set up a zap to automatically write an article, a blog post, or a script using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and then send the text to a specific email or chat channel

More(!) AI Writing Assistants

The number of writing assistants coming to the market and their uncanny resemblance to one another demonstrates how easy it is to clone and launch an app these days, especially with the help of excellent no-code tools like Webflow.

Anyword

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: From $24/mo (20k words)
Free Trial: Yes (no credit card)
Standout Features: Predictive performance score – see how demographics will respond to your article

Instoried

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: $59mo
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: none

Copymatic

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: $32/mo
Free Trial: Yes (no credit card)
Standout Features: none

Creaitor.ai

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: From $9/mo (100k characters)
Free Trial: Yes (no credit card)
Standout Features: none

GoCopy

Target Customer: Anybody
Price: From $79/mo (12k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: none

Elephas

Target Customer: Mac Users (a bit of a gimmick)
Price: From $4.99/mo (1 Apple Device)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: Use across all devices

SEO.ai

Target Customer: SEOs
Price: From $49/mo (40k words)
Free Trial: Yes
Standout Features: SEO functionality
Worth a Free Trial? Yes

Webcopilot

Target Customer: Notion users
Price: Free
Free Trial: n/a
Standout Features: Use in Notion, and it’s free (probably redundant once Notion launces Notion.ai)