With thousands of AI tools to choose from, and new ones released daily, it’s hard to make sense of it all—here’s a list of the best AI apps for your business.
We’re constantly being told AI is coming to revolutionise how we work, unlock massive breakthroughs and make our lives easier. But with thousands of AI tools to choose from, and new ones released daily, it’s hard to make sense of it all and bring the benefits into our business.
Here are the essentials that I use daily and wouldn’t now be without, from strategy and analysis to design and content creation.
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Research and Insights
Effective marketing is all about resonating with your audience, but that’s impossible if you don’t know the audience. And we’re not talking about demographic basics like their age and gender. They’re a less reliable predictor of what messages will resonate with someone than ever today anyway. It’s about going beyond that to uncover insights on behaviour, attitudes, values and content preferences.
If you’re looking for a tool that can pull out facts and figures and drill down into details, you can’t beat Perplexity. It’s free to use for the basic package, with a $20 subscription fee for anyone who wants to access more features. It’s the place I always start with for any research projects.
Looking to analyse multiple documents or media files? Notebook LM has you covered. It’s marketed as a note-taking tool, but when you look a little closer, it’s so much more than that. Despite being free to use, it can analyse up to 50 large documents, videos, podcasts, or other links for comparison, and extract the relevant information into bite-sized notes. My most common use for it is digesting heavy industry reports and white papers to pick out key insights.
If you’re specifically looking for ‘what the science says’ on any topic, including things like consumer behaviour, media consumption as well as more obvious areas of scientific research, Consensus creates reliable, instant summaries of scientific research. You name your field, Consensus can help you find and understand the science behind your subject faster.
Strategy and Planning
If you want to achieve anything on social media, you have to have a strategy. And to do that, you need to fully understand your goals and work out how to go about achieving them. AI can help with that too.
ChatGPT has to be the best known of all the current AI platforms. But very few people take the time to discover its full potential. If you’re looking for a simple approach to social media strategy building, ChatGPT can use its search, memory, and project features to help you sculpt the ultimate end-to-end social strategy for your business. This cheat sheet of prompts will build a full strategy for you.
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Writing
While ChatGPT has many uses, too many people have fallen into relying upon it for writing, and the reality is that there are many better writing tools out there. If you’re looking for a human voice, Claude has a lot to offer, including the ability to train pre-set writing styles.
For more serious writers, Lex offers a distraction-free interface and advanced feedback on long-form articles and white papers, making it a favourite among those penning thousands of words at a time. AI for Work provides a huge prompt database, which can help you to improve your own writing and output over time, as you learn from how their prompts work.
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Imagery and Design
Imagery and design are traditionally resource-hungry processes. If you’re working on a small scale, AI can help to reduce your outsourcing overheads through image generation, guided photo editing, and composition. Even larger companies with inhouse photography, art, and design teams are using AI for early mock-ups or proof-of-concepts to share ideas, expediting the design process.
Adobe Firefly is one of the most underrated editing tools around, and it can be seamlessly integrated with the entire Adobe suite. It can both generate new, or edit existing images.
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For unique imagery creation, you can choose from either Midjourney or Ideogram. Both generate art from text prompts. But while Midjourney offers more photo-realistic results, Ideogram is better at combining words and images to create posters, ads and logos – ideal for social media and web design.
Video and Audio
Video has become the primary format online today, with all social channels prioritising it in their feeds now. People engage with it more than any other format, and if you do it right, it delivers the highest conversion rates. The problem is that brands still struggle with, or are intimidated by the complexity and cost of, creating video content.
With Pika, you have cutting edge video generation with a suite of sophisticated (and fun) editing tools, which allows you to create convincing footage of practically any scenario. While with Luma, you can take existing footage and make it better.
And if you’re looking for credible and compelling audio without the expense of paid voice over artists, Eleven Labs is one of the most realistic voice generators around. It’s quick and incredibly easy to use, requiring just one minute of someone’s voice to clone them, or offering a library of pre-trained voices to choose from.
Reporting and Analytics
This is probably the most used feature of AI amongst businesses right now. AI’s ability to gather and process data has been the ultimate game-changer. However, there are still a lot of businesses unsure of how to take advantage of this ability. But whatever you want to do, there is an app waiting to help.
For large-scale dataset analysis, we go back to ChatGPT or Claude. You just need to upload XLS or CSV files exported from your existing marketing stack. Think Google Analytics, Meta Insights, keyword research tools et al. Drop in those exported data files and let AI do the rest, extracting insights and whatever data you need. If you want to then create PowerPoint slides, presentations, social carousels, or landing pages based upon that data, Gamma is there to help.
And lastly, there’s Rows, which can pull in and analyse live analytics from most parts of your marketing stack, from website and commerce to social and CRM, giving you a low-effort, high-value live dashboard that you can further analyse with their built-in AI analyst.
AI isn’t a fix-all for businesses. You’ll still need to use professional creators, writers, designers, and analysts if you want to get things right. But with AI, you won’t need those niche professionals all the time. And when you do need them, you can give them the tools necessary to expedite their work, producing results more quickly and effectively. All you have to do is know which AI product to use.
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