AI workflows for marketers—and recommended tools for each
If you don’t adopt AI as a marketer, you won’t be efficient or effective enough to compete—we’ve all heard this many, many times at this point.
But, figuring out what tools to use for your specific company amidst all the noise and testing tool after tool to find the perfect fit can be a full-time job (even if you use AI to research these AI tools!).
Good news: This is basically our full-time job at MKT1. Kathleen and I are marketers and investors. Because of this, we see more GTM tech than the average human. By talking to so many marketers and companies, we’ve developed lots of opinions on how to use AI to improve marketing workflows and we can (and we will!) suggest which tools to use.
Back in December, we brought together 9 companies—plus many of you—for an AI Showcase. If you missed it or just want another recap because the holidays made you forget it all, you can watch the full video here or keep on reading.
After reading this newsletter, you should have a few products to check out and a better tactical understanding of how AI can make you a better marketer. We’ll cover:
An overview of the 4 main workflows AI can help marketers with, plus examples of products that can help with each.
Recap of our AI showcase and the 9 companies we met, who we believe are collectively representative of the range of products we are seeing in this space.
Overview of AI workflows for marketers
Before we jump into each product from our Showcase, here are the 4 AI workflows all marketers should adopt ASAP.:
Get answers from large amounts of data: It’s so much easier and faster to conduct research, do analysis, and get insights quickly with AI—whether the data is in a spreadsheet, in articles, in another tool, or in all of these places.
Improve marketing operations and processes: Use AI to streamline your team and free up time to work on meatier projects. Consolidating and connecting tools and automating manual processes and tasks will take just a few hours to get set up, and save you weeks—maybe months—in the future.
Create & distribute relevant, high quality content across all formats and channels faster
Video, audio, & visual content - Create or edit brand assets yourself that would’ve required specialists in the past.
Personalized content at scale - Create relevant content for a specific person, company, funnel stage, and/or channel at scale.
Let’s dive into the 9 products from our showcase to give you concrete and tactical ways to use AI:
AI products for marketing research, analysis, and insights
Getting signal from a sea of information is just so much easier now. So stop spending your time doing millions of Google searches, wrestling with complex formulas, and doing expensive studies, etc. Whether you're doing keyword research, prospecting for leads, analyzing data, or doing audience research or segmentation, AI is making these processes so much faster.
These 2 companies from our showcase, Clay & Ignition, blew our minds. Processes that used to take hours and hours, like making a detailed outbound prospect list or doing extensive competitive research in advance of a launch, now take minutes. And what’s amazing about these products is they don’t stop at research capabilities, they also add powerful workflows on top.
Clay
If you want to experiment with or accelerate outbound without sending spammy messages into the abyss or hiring a football team’s worth of SDRs, try Clay. If you want to enrich data on people or companies, try Clay for that too.
Put simply, we love it–it’s one of those tools you start using and it instantly feels magical. We actually used Clay to research which companies to include in our AI Showcase (how meta).
What is it? Clay combines 50+ data providers, real-time scraping, AI, and outbound workflows, so you can send automated, 1-1 personalized campaigns (and book more meetings than your sales team).
Who is it for? Clay helps B2B GTM teams (primarily growth marketers & Marketing/rev-ops teams) enrich their data and use it to automate highly targeted outbound at scale. But it’s a self-serve product and anyone can use it!
AI-driven use case(s) for marketers:
Research information on prospects from multiple data sources (use Clay’s API access or add your own API keys)
Create and send personalized outbound emails based on prospecting data.
How to buy: Start a free trial at Clay.com (it’s entirely self-serve). They also have an active community at clay.com/slack.
Ignition
The role of product marketing is a bit ambiguous and means different things at different companies. But it almost always involves researching your audience, product, competitors, and ecosystem and connecting the dots across product, sales, and GTM.
Because of the range of things PMMs do, there hasn’t been a source of truth platform for this role in the past. Until now. Ignition is poised to become the source of truth for PMMs and everyone they collaborate with.
What is it? Ignition GTM Ops platform lets you align product & GTM teams and unify & automate competitive intel, road mapping, GTM planning, and enablement.
Who is it for? Ignition aligns product, marketing, and sales teams, and is most frequently used by Product Marketers at tech companies.
AI use cases for marketers:
Analyze a competitor with AI battle cards
Analyze a segment of the voice of customer feedback to identify ideas & insights
Input product feature information & generate a launch campaign
Generate campaign or launch materials
How to buy: Try it for free here or book a demo here. 25% off first year with code “MKT1” at checkout
A note on using AI for marketing analytics & ChatGPT
We didn’t have any companies in this category in this showcase, but I recently wrote a LinkedIn post with the help of Recalc Academy on how to create a bottom-up marketing forecast using ChatGPT and your historical marketing data.
Generally speaking, with the paid version of ChatGPT, you can upload spreadsheets and get answers. Just make sure to double-check the results!
AI products to improve marketing ops and processes
Marketing is most impactful when it’s a multidisciplinary team (across fuel and engine), drives full-funnel growth, and owns all one-to-many communication. This requires a lot of handoffs, moving pieces, tools, etc.
It used to be that adding new tools to the mix made everything feel bloated—we’ve all thought to ourselves, “not another marketing tool.” But the AI tools in this category from our Showcase, n8n and Default, do the opposite. They integrate with all the tools you use and augment them with AI–making your tech stack more effective in helping you connect the dots.
n8n
So much is possible with automation and AI these days, but building complex automation can still be a struggle–fighting with APIs, writing scripts, etc. If you are a more technical marketer who loves Zapier, you’ll really enjoy using this tool for marketing ops and analytics especially.
n8n gives you infinite ways to automate your marketing workflows and incorporate AI into these workflows–and has tons of templates to help you discover what automations to build and get started faster.
What is it? Low-code platform that allows you to create custom AI apps and automated workflow. It's easy to start with 400+ pre-built integrations.
Who is it for? n8n is a horizontal platform for many types of users, but it's particularly useful for marketing ops, marketing analysts, and technical marketers.
AI use case(s) for marketers:
Use 400+ app nodes to create, read, and update the data across your apps…if you can think up the process you can likely build it n8n.
Upload marketing or contact data and use AI to analyze it, and even update the original spreadsheet.
Save time managing leads by connecting all your marketing tools, like Typeform and Hubspot, to run on autopilot.
CRM customization: Build custom integrations to move any data you want between your apps and systems.
How to buy: Get started for free here. Use the code “MKT1COMMUNITY” for a 50% discount on cloud accounts. Mention MKT1 to sales for an enterprise discount, starting at 10%.
Default
I’ve been looking for a product like Default for a while, and I’m so happy it now exists. The conversion flow process from visiting the website to filling out a form, to qualified lead to booking a meeting often has way too many steps and lots of room for improvement.
Often the first thing I tell companies I meet with to fix is this process. Making improvements here almost always improves full-funnel metrics, and Default makes this easy.
What is it? Default helps you accelerate your inbound. It's an all-in-one inbound lead automation platform that helps marketing & rev ops teams build inbound qualification, scheduling & routing workflows for their lead funnels.
Who is it for? Marketing and rev ops teams at B2B companies with an inbound motion and a sales team.
AI use case(s) for marketers: In addition to meeting scheduling, lead forms and lead enrichment, and routing capabilities, Default’s AI enables you to:
Take the right actions on inbound leads as soon as they’re routed to sales reps
Create AI lead summaries to help sales reps save time on manual qualification & pre-demo research
How to buy: Book a demo here.
AI products to make high-quality, multi-media content
If you are spending the same amount of time or money creating videos, slides, images, diagrams, etc. in 2024 as you did in past years, you’re doing it wrong. To stand out in 2024—when it's easier than ever to create content—you need to think outside the box (and by box I mean blog post) to get your audience’s attention.
You need to experiment with new formats and let your brand and story shine. For example, you can use Beautiful.ai to–you guessed it—make beautiful, modern presentations and Goldcast to run more engaging events and speed up content repurposing.
Beautiful.ai
We know firsthand that creating slides can be a huge time suck, whether for an event or for internal presentations like sharing marketing plans. Beautiful.ai makes the whole process way faster–and the results look super professional and polished.
What is it? Beautiful.ai is collaborative AI presentation software that works with you to create powerful presentations in record time, every time. From marketing proposals to performance reports, your content will always look brilliant.
Who is it for? Anyone who makes slide decks and presentations. Marketers are a focus audience for Beautiful.ai, and they have clear use cases and workflows for marketers.
AI use case(s) for marketers:
Create presentations using text-to-slide prompts
Creating images using text-to-image prompts
Add text to presentations using AI.
How to buy: Self-serve free trials are available for all plans, and get 3 months free when you use the code “MKT3MO”
Goldcast
We’re never running an event on Zoom again. It’s just not the best platform for hosting guests, recording great content, repurposing that content, and continuing to get mileage out of the event after the fact. We’ll now be running all of our events in Goldcast, and then creating video clips right in Goldcast too.
What is it? Goldcast is a B2B events platform for digital & in-person events. Boost attendance, captivate audiences, and drive revenue with actionable intent data. And now create marketing content from past events.
Who is it for? Marketers running events
AI use case(s) for marketers:
Goldast Product Lab, which just launched, lets you use AI to automatically create video snippets from past event recordings (whether you recorded it on Goldcast or not)
You can also edit video clips with magic layouts, transcript editing, etc.
And create blog posts, email content, and social content from past events.
How to buy: Fill out the form on the Goldcast Product Lab page to get a demo of the new Content Lab product.
AI products to create personalized, relevant content—and distribute it across channels
In the past, if you wanted to create content for 50 target accounts, SEO pages for every vertical, or content specific to every channel, it would take you 9 years (that’s obviously an exaggeration, but it did feel that way). Today, we cannot only make a higher volume of assets faster, but we can personalize that content for every contact, account, channel, etc.
If you use the right tools, you can get a ton of mileage out of your content efforts. Tofu, Letterdrop, and Naro, all help you make personalized, relevant, and quality content at scale. They also help you distribute that content across the channels that work for your audience. Perfect for marketers managing ABM, sales enablement, content, social, etc.
Tofu
Personalization used to be something we talked about doing in marketing, but couldn't really do at any sort of scale or volume. It was a bit of a pipe dream, but that’s no longer true. Creating personalized content for many channels is much, much easier and Tofu is leading the way here.
What is it? Tofu is a unified platform for creating hyper-personalized, omnichannel campaigns at scale that convert leads for B2B marketing teams.
Who is it for? B2B Marketers, especially at mid-market and enterprise-focused companies who are scaling up account-based marketing and demand gen campaigns.
AI use case(s) for marketers:
Execute 1:1 personalized campaigns via your current tools (including Hubspot & Marketo).
Repurpose existing content across multiple channels using your brand messaging.
Generate landing pages & PDF assets for verticals, personas, or other segments.
How to buy: Visit tofuhq.com to schedule a demo
Letterdrop
So much marketing content is a waste of time for everyone involved–for the people who spend time creating it and the people who spend time consuming it. Products need to solve big problems for a specific audience, and your content needs to do the same—it needs to add value.
Making content that drives impact involves developing the right content ideas, executing that idea effectively, and distributing it—and then distributing it some more. Getting all of these pieces right is hard, but one platform can help you with all of these things: Letterdrop.
What is it? Letterdrop puts B2B content operations on autopilot. Prioritize, create, and distribute revenue-generating content across SEO, LinkedIn, and your sales team. Understand what content is driving revenue and create more of it.
Who is it for? B2B marketers
AI use case(s) for marketers:
Understand what questions are blocking sales
Create content using first-party interviews and fill in gaps for SEO
Repurpose content into LinkedIn posts and automate distribution << this is my personal favorite Letterdrop use case
Understand accounts engaging with your content
How to buy: letterdrop.com/demo. Tell the sales team you came from MKT1 for 10% off.
Naro
The days of marketers responding to infinite requests from sales for content and customer stories (that probably never get used) are over. It's now possible to serve sellers the right content at exactly the right moment and track how it is being used.
Naro uses AI to automatically organize marketing content (saving your team time), puts it in the center of seller conversations, and provides insights into what's working and what's not. I wish I’d had this when partnering with sales as a marketing leader.
What is it? Naro is a modern AI sales content platform that helps companies organize and surface the right content and knowledge in every interaction.
Who is it for? Marketers, sales, and rev ops teams
AI use case(s) for marketers:
A universal platform for all customer-facing knowledge and content
Uses AI to automatically organize, tag, and summarize content, reducing the time it takes to curate sales content library
Smart recommendations put content in front of sellers as they respond to prospects, and works inside your email and meetings
Provides analytics on seller and buyer usage and engagement, so marketers know what's working and what's not
How to buy: Get a demo at narohq.com mention MKT1 and get 2 months free and white-glove content onboarding when you join by 2/15
I know you’re wondering: Do I think AI will replace your marketing job? No, but your job description has already evolved due to AI, whether you know it or not. You need to augment your skillset with AI to get time back, and spend more time adding actual value to your prospects’ and customers’ workdays.
We hope you’ll try a bunch of these products. And remember you can watch the full video from the showcase here. Thanks to everyone who participated in our Showcase!
More from MKT1
Jobs: We have a newish job board. It’s still an MVP, but you’ll find jobs from our network there. If you're interested in one of these roles or generally looking for a marketing role at an early or growth stage B2B startup, we’re happy to review your profile. We’ll then intro you to founders directly if there’s a fit. Fill out this form to apply.
Newsletter sponsorships: If you’re interested in reaching our nearly 35,000 subscribers, get in touch. Email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co
MKT1 Guide & Community Waitlist: We’ve been working on a (paid) Guide to B2B startup marketing with over 200 resources & articles. We are opening up the beta to paid subscribers this week: join the waitlist.
The Webby Awards for B2B Marketing
We’re judging this year’s Webby Awards! They now have B2B Marketing categories and we’re honored to get to help choose the first set of winners. B2B awards categories include Advertising, Media & PR, Social, Video, and Podcasts.
We’d love to see some MKT1 readers get recognized, and you still have a few weeks to enter.
The extended deadline to enter the 28th Annual Webby Awards is Friday, February 9th–register and learn more.
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*Quick Note/Full Disclosure: The 9 AI products in this newsletter were highly curated by the MKT1 team, but the startups paid to present at our AI Showcase. To make sure we’re bringing you the best of the best, we required all companies to submit an application with a Loom video of the AI-driven workflow for marketers. We then chose 9 companies that represented the AI martech landscape as a whole with the most compelling demos.