A Beginner’s Guide to AI Marketing Tools for Small Businesses​

Hello AI! Small businesses continually look for ways to stay competitive, efficient, and relevant. That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in. Once reserved for large corporations with big budgets, AI-powered marketing tools are now accessible to businesses of all sizes. These tools can revolutionize how you market your brand and business, giving you a competitive edge while saving time and money. If you’re a small business owner looking to boost your marketing efforts, you’re in the right place! Managing multiple platforms and creating engaging content can be time-consuming; you want to focus on running your business. Fortunately, several powerful digital tools can streamline your social media efforts and help you achieve maximum impact. Here are our top 5 AI marketing tools to elevate your brand, streamline your processes, and connect with your target audience, even if you’re a beginner!

Top 5 AI Marketing Tools:

1. Canva: Your All-in-One Design Powerhouse

Canva is a user-friendly design tool that has become a go-to for many small businesses or those looking to up their content game. It has changed how companies and individuals create stunning visuals over the years. Beyond just being a design tool, Canva helps simplify the creative process with its AI-powered features on computers and smartphones. With a few clicks and creativity, you can create social media graphics, presentations, YouTube videos, marketing materials, and more with customizable sizes.

Streamline Your Design Workflow

One of Canva’s greatest strengths is its ability to streamline your design workflow. With its easy drag-and-drop features, you can quickly create professional-quality designs without experience. You can also easily resize designs to fit various social media platforms, ensuring consistency across all your channels. At Express My Media, where we create content for multiple clients, Sarah prefers the desktop version, while Kirsty typically uses her smartphone. Talk about a #winwin for on-the-go marketing tools!

Generate Content with Ease

Canvas AI-powered tools take content creation to the next level. Within the platform, it can generate unique ideas for you, saving you valuable time and effort. If sourcing images and videos is difficult for your business, Canva’s extensive library of stock images and videos makes it easy to create professional-looking content while staying true to your brand.

Collaborate Seamlessly

Canvas collaboration features make it easy to work with your team, no matter where they are. You can share designs, leave comments, and make real-time edits to ensure everyone is on the same page.

What Should You Not Use Canva’s AI For?

Avoid using Canva for logo design due to its limitations. The platform’s generic templates, fonts, shapes, and lower-quality file formats may not be suitable for creating a professional and impactful brand identity. Consider hiring a designer for a unique, high-quality logo that can better represent your brand than one made on Canva.

Whether you’re a marketer, small business owner, or content creator, Canva is the perfect tool to help bring your creative vision to life. On to AI-powered tool #2!

2. Social Media Schedulers

Later is a planning tool that helps you create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing feed for your brand and business. It lets you plan your content, preview your feed, and collaborate with your team, with room to leave comments for corrections by your team or the clients you share it with. Later’s powerful analytics features help you track performance and identify the best times to post. At Express My Media, this is one of our favorite parts! But don’t forget to check the social media platform’s analytics, too. With AI-powered features like intelligent scheduling and content suggestions, Later can optimize your posting strategy at a minimal monthly cost.

Pallyy is another user-friendly social media management platform focused on Instagram and scheduling, making it ideal for businesses and creators. It also offers analyzing performance, managing comments, and creating custom link-in-bio pages if you need easy click-link access. AI-driven insights help you identify your target audience and tailor content accordingly. Pallyy is especially valuable for businesses looking to optimize their Instagram presence.

3. CapCut: Edit Video Content

CapCut is one of our favorite video editors! It’s an AI-powered video editing tool that simplifies creating professional-looking videos without needing advanced skills. This app has gained popularity for its many features that make video editing quick and accessible, even for beginners. CapCut leverages artificial intelligence to enhance video editing in several ways:

• Smart Cut: CapCut automatically detects the best parts of your video clips and suggests cuts to remove unnecessary sections, making the editing process faster and more efficient. You can also do this manually!
• Auto-Captions: Using AI, CapCut can automatically generate captions for your videos by transcribing spoken words.
• AI Effects and Filters: CapCut offers a range of AI-powered effects and filters that adjust based on the content of your video. Whether adjusting brightness and color or adding special effects, the AI tools ensure that your edits enhance the video without manual tweaking. Of course, manual tweaking is an option inside the app as well!
• Auto-Sync with Music: One of CapCut’s standout features is its ability to automatically sync video clips with the beat of music. (Although we usually use the pro tip below, the AI analyzes the rhythm and timing of your chosen song to help create seamless transitions and cuts that align perfectly with the track and video.)

Pro Tips for Social Media Content

Record trending audio from your favorite social media platform and extract the audio file into CapCut. This extraction feature can be beneficial for creating videos that align with trending sounds on platforms like Instagram. We all know that using trending audio is better than using random audio! Once you upload the video, Instagram will automatically tag the audio, making your content more discoverable and giving you a better chance of going viral.

4. Grammarly

Grammarly is a powerful writing assistant that helps improve your writing by identifying grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. It also provides suggestions for sentence structure and style. By using Grammarly, you can ensure your content is clear, concise, and error-free. It can even be downloaded to your computer or smartphone, ensuring your text messages and emails sound correct.

5. AI Writing Tools

Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriting tool that generates creative and persuasive copy. Any social media business can use this vital tool to write descriptions, website copy, email subject lines, and more. It can also generate multiple copywriting options by providing a brief prompt, saving time and effort. Copy.ai is beneficial for running or managing a social media business, reducing content creation time while improving creativity and consistency.

Jasper.ai is a versatile AI writing assistant that helps create high-quality content quickly. It can generate blog posts, social media captions, email copy, and more. By providing a prompt, Jasper.ai generates engaging content tailored to your brand’s voice and style. AI Chat, or Jasper Chat, is a real-time assistant that brainstorms ideas, summarizes documents, answers marketing questions, and generates content quickly.

ChatGPT offers robust tools that help businesses improve creativity and efficiency and provide decision-making across various departments. It is the perfect tool for generating text-based content, answering queries, brainstorming ideas, or performing customer service tasks. It can even help businesses write code. #mindblown

Gemini is a newer AI tool similar to ChatGPT, designed to help businesses create personalized and compelling content. We find that Gemini provides more bullet-point responses than any other AI writing tool, but it can still create detailed content tailored to the goals you want it to write for. Using Google’s AI models helps businesses enhance productivity, automate tasks, and unlock new creative capabilities.

While these tools share many similarities, the responses from each platform can significantly differ in length, wording, organization, and more. Exploring and seeing what works best for your unique brand is essential, and so is “priming” the AI based on your business needs, branding, tone, and requirements.

Why AI Marketing Tools Are Important for Small Businesses in 2025

AI tools offer more than just an easier way to do tasks. They help small businesses save time on repetitive tasks like writing, scheduling, and analyzing data. They also help them gain insights into their target audience’s behavior, level the playing field with larger companies, and stay competitive and responsive to quickly changing industry trends.

These tools help save time, reduce costs, and improve the quality of your campaigns. As AI technology evolves, staying updated on the latest trends and tools is essential to staying ahead of the competition.

By leveraging these top 5 AI marketing tools, small businesses can enhance their social media presence, save time, and achieve more significant results. Remember, consistency and engagement are key to successful social media marketing, and you can learn more about that by reading through our previous blogs.

Elevate Your Social Media with Express My Media

Ready to take your social media to the next level? Express My Media offers services to small businesses to help achieve their marketing goals. With some help from AI, and our top 5 AI marketing tools, we tailor and provide solutions for your unique needs, from content creation and strategy to social media management. Let us handle the complexities so you can focus on what you do best: running your business.