Harnessing Affordable AI Tools to Enhance Marketing Efficiency
Overcoming Cost Barriers: The Role of Affordable AI in Marketing
Our recent State of AI 28% of marketers who don’t use AI in their roles say it’s because generative AI tools are too expensive. This makes sense because, as a good marketer, you should be skeptical about high-priced tech, especially with emerging technology.
But, at the same time, there are many affordable AI tools that can help you save time and meet your marketing goals. And, for what it’s worth, 60% of marketers in the same survey also reported that AI/automation tools are important in their day-to-day roles.
In this piece, we’ll share a list of free AI tools, outline the three-step process for implementing AI on a budget, and share how marketers currently leverage AI tools in their roles.
Affordable AI Tools for Business
Even though marketers who responded to our survey say that they’ve not yet adopted AI because of the price, also consider that all survey respondents who use AI/automation tools say it saves an average of two hours and 24 minutes per day.
Here’s a list of affordable and free AI tools to consider adopting into your marketing processes.
1.GlobalGPT
Price: Pay-as-you-go; starting from $1
GlobalGPT is an advanced AI writing tool that supports a wide array of AI models including ChatGPT-4/3.5, DALL-E, Claude, midjourney, suno, and perplexity. Designed to be incredibly user-friendly, it allows for direct connectivity in China and straightforward email registration and login, eliminating the need for complex setups.
With GlobalGPT, you pay only for what you use, making it an economical choice for businesses and individuals alike. It uses cutting-edge technology to understand prompts and deliver original, detailed, and accurate responses across various content needs. Whether you're looking to draft blog posts, create marketing emails, or generate engaging content for social media, GlobalGPT provides the tools and flexibility to get the job done effectively.
The image below is an example of a marketing email created by GlobalGPT for a new product launch, showcasing its capability to produce professional and compelling content that can captivate an audience.
Explore more about GlobalGPT and its features here
2.HubSpot
Price: Free CRM; Plans start at $50 per month and vary based on team size and tier subscription tier.
HubSpot incorporates AI in a number of ways. Here are just a few:
Content Creation: HubSpot’s AI Assistant uses generative AI to help you create outlines, emails, and even blog ideas so you can share high-quality content with your audiences. You can also use HubSpot’s free AI-powered Campaign Assistant to quickly and easily generate landing pages or ad copy in your preferred language.
SEO: HubSpot's COS and CMS use algorithms to scour your posts for search optimization suggestions before you post. HubSpot’s AI Assistant also writes SEO-friendly meta descriptions and titles based on the content on your page.
Emails and Workflows: When a customer does something such as engage with an email or landing page, this will trigger a canned email to be sent to them with their name and other personalizations in it.
Social Media: HubSpot's social media platform allows you to autogenerate post caption copy using machine learning. This technology recognizes sentences that you might regularly tweet or meta descriptions in a link you're sharing, then crafts a caption that you can then edit or tweak.
Deduplication features: If you upload a new list into a HubSpot CRM, or a pre-existing contact subscribes to your marketing newsletter, HubSpot will search the CRM to find matching contacts and prevent any duplicates from being added.
3.Grammarly
Price: Free; Paid plans $12/mo - $15/mo per member
Grammarly is an intuitive copy-editing tool that uses machine learning to recognize and highlight spelling, grammar, and other phrasing errors on platforms like Google Docs, email, and social media sites.
As an individual user, Grammarly tracks your writing performance, gives edit suggestions based on your writing experience, and sends you emails that show where you're excelling and areas for improvement.
Grammarly's tone detection tool is a high-quality feature that recognizes the tone of your writing For example, if you're writing an email with "Thank you" in it, Grammarly will note that your message sounds "appreciative," or "optimistic.""
Pro Tip
Grammarly's team version unlocks customizable editing features that allow the software to make suggestions with your company's writing styles and branded words in mind.
To learn more about Grammarly and other productivity tools, check out this blog post.
4.ChatGPT
Price: Free; ChatGPT Plus $20/month
ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational chatbot, meaning you can reply to its responses and have a conversation to get all the information you need. It uses natural language processing (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 Beta language models) to understand prompts and provide original, detailed, and accurate responses.
You can use the tool to get inspiration or produce content like blog posts or marketing emails. The image below is an example of a marketing email I asked it to create for a product announcement."
You can also use ChatGPT Plugins (waitlist here) that connect to third-party applications to help you get the best use of the tool for your needs.
Pro Tip
OpenAI’s Chat API lets you build applications using GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 or integrate the tools with your existing applications and products. You can find API pricing here. It also hosts two plugins for web browsing (in beta), a code interpreter for Python, and a knowledge-base retrieval plugin available through open-source code.
5.Frase.io
Price: $14.99/mo (solo) - $114.99/mo for 3 seats.
Frase.io is an AI-powered research assistant and question-answering bot helps you optimize articles and other content for SEO by reading your text, comparing it with similar online content, and offering search and keyword-based suggestions.
"Frase.io also has a bot feature that site visitors can use to locate content on your site by simply typing a question into the message box.It uses machine learning to understand phrases and match the words with content or pages related to those words."
Pro Tip
Battling writer's block? Frase.io can help with that. It offers a number of tools that create content automatically — such as its Blog Introduction Tool, which automatically generates a 100-word introduction for your blog title."
Pay-as-You-Go:
Top Up from Just $1 Balance Never Expires
All-in-One: Access All Models in One Place
AI Total Data Privacy
Unlimited Usage Limitation
Accepts Fiat and Crypto Payments
How to Implement AI on a Budget
Determine where AI tools could help you eliminate costs.
At some point, you'll need to spend money to implement AI. But, how you structure an AI pilot project can help you defray some of the costs.
Although AI, when done right, can increase revenue and reduce costs, you'll still want to start with a cost-reduction pilot before a revenue-increasing experiment.
A cost-reduction pilot aims to improve (or streamline) processes you already have in place. A revenue-generating pilot, on the other hand, might require new processes — which could ultimately cost more time and money.
To kickstart your cost-reduction pilot, first identify time-intensive or repetitive tasks that hold you — or your team — back from high-quality projects in your organization."
Start by making a list of your recurring responsibilities. Track everything you do every week or month, and list the amount of time you spend on each activity. Chances are, there are a ton of tasks that take way too much time each month. It's likely they're also pretty data-driven, too.
Next, explore vendors who have created more intelligent ways to do the tasks that are blocking your team.
For example, you might discover that tagging images on your website takes up too much time. AI software can probably free you up from doing that task. Or, you might spend hours each week managing paid advertising. AI can help there, too.
In fact, there are dozens of ways you can apply AI to immediately free up team time and resources. And, depending on the cost reductions, these pilots may pay for themselves.
Research tools that work out of the box.
A handful of small to medium-sized businesses might worry about blowing their budgets when they hear the words, "artificial intelligence" because — at the moment — many AI solutions are built for corporate enterprise.
The truth is, many AI tools need access to quality data at scale to produce results. Enterprises are often the only source of this data. But this doesn't mean you need to count out AI as a marketer for a smaller business.
In fact, a number of AI tools are affordable, work out of the box, and cut time on basic marketing tasks (like the ones listed above).
Additionally, you might not know it, but you might already be using popular office tools that are powered by AI.
Familiarizing Yourself With AI
Artificial intelligence can sound intimidating and expensive but, truth is, it’s only going to get more and more prominent in our workplaces.
Ultimately, the best strategy for vetting AI products, tools, and opportunities that may come your way in the future is to research credible sources and ask the right questions about the software you're considering.
If you’re looking to take the next step with technology implementation, check out HubSpot Academy’s latest course, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Marketing.” The course gives an introduction to AI and machine learning while also walking you through how to implement it in your company's marketing department.
See Also
Free Mastery of Claude 3 Opus: An In-Depth Manual
Free Access to GPT-4: A Detailed Tutorial
AI Empowerment: Unleashing the Potential of ChatGPT
