With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), many businesses are using AI-powered tools and software to streamline their operations and gain valuable market insights. AI technologies can help companies brainstorm and create content, automate workflows, analyze customer insights, and more.
Here are a few of the most popular AI tools in 2026 you can leverage to take your small business’s marketing to the next level.
Brand24
Social media monitoring tool Brand24 helps businesses track customer feedback and sentiment in real time. It scours the web to aggregate brand mentions across various online sources, using AI to flag both positive and negative posts in context.
Pricing for Brand24 starts at $199 a month. This tool is ideal for a small business that already has some brand or product buzz online and wants to catch complaints or praise before they spread. At this price point, it’s probably not the right fit for a brand-new company with little to monitor yet.
Canva Magic Studio
Canva's AI suite, branded Magic Studio, is built into the same drag-and-drop editor Canva already offers, so there's no new app to learn. It covers text-to-image generation, AI copywriting (Magic Write), background removal, one-tap resizing for different platforms, and, more recently, a text-to-video tool. It's a good fit for anyone who needs polished visuals fast without hiring a designer. Anyone with no design background can easily master Canva to produce social graphics, flyers, or listing photos in-house.
A free Canva plan includes limited monthly AI credits. Canva Pro costs $15 a month and includes 500 AI credits a month, unlimited cloud storage, and Canva's Brand Kit.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's ChatGPT has become a default tool for drafting marketing copy, outlining campaigns, brainstorming content ideas, and doing quick research, all in a plain-language chat interface. Business owners running a small team can share a workspace with teammates rather than juggling individual logins. The best part: It’s affordable. The free plan covers basic everyday use. Plus costs $20 a month for an individual with expanded access and priority features. Use ChatGPT if you’re looking for a general-purpose assistant for writing, brainstorming, and quick research, rather than a specialized marketing tool.
DeepBrain AI
DeepBrain AI converts written text into videos through its AI Studios tool. Send the tool a script to generate a voiceover and subtitles, then select an AI avatar to deliver it, complete with naturalistic speech and movement. This tool is great for anyone who wants to create training materials, product explainers, or company-intro videos on a regular basis but doesn't have the budget or time for on-camera talent and video production.
A Starter plan costs $30 a month for around 10 minutes of video, and a Pro plan costs $225 a month for around 90 minutes.
[Read more: What's the Difference Between Traditional and Generative AI?]
HubSpot AI Marketing Hub
HubSpot AI offers a range of AI-powered marketing tools across its platform, including automated campaign development, content generation, and performance tracking. HubSpot offers an extensive range of marketing capabilities, and it’s a good fit for small businesses ready to move beyond spreadsheets and manage its contacts, email marketing, and campaign tracking in one system.
HubSpot moved to seat-based pricing in 2024, although several core marketing tools remain available in the free version. The paid Starter tier now runs roughly $9 to $20 per seat per month depending on the source and billing term, though costs climb quickly with additional marketing contacts. Start with a free trial to see if it’s the right fit for your marketing team.
Influencity
For businesses looking to leverage influencer marketing, Influencity offers a platform to connect with influencers, collaborate on campaigns, and track performance. The AI-powered tool helps companies find best-fit influencers across social networks and analyze return on investment. If your marketing team spends a lot of time managing influencer relationships and tracking results, this tool could be helpful.
Pricing for Influencity starts at $168 a month. There's no free plan, and pricing is credit-based rather than tied to a fixed user count.
Jasper
Jasper, "the AI copilot," generates marketing assets, including social media posts, sales emails, blog content, and website copy. It lets you upload information about your business so content stays on-brand, and it includes SEO features plus integrations with third-party SEO and customer relationship management tools. This is a great option for a solo marketer or small team that produces a steady volume of on-brand content—blog posts, ads, emails—and wants to lock in a consistent voice across all of it.
Jasper’s pro plan now costs $69 a month, or $59 a month on annual billing. The business plan remains custom-priced for teams and typically starts around $900 a month for small teams based on third-party reporting.
[Read more: AI Tools That Can Help You Start, Run, and Grow Your Small Business]
Seventh Sense
Hubspot and Marketo users can enhance their email marketing campaigns with Seventh Sense. The tool's AI analyzes each recipient's engagement patterns to optimize individual send times, and it now also handles cross-campaign frequency capping, blackout windows, and automatic "audience recycling" for contacts who've stopped engaging. If you already use HubSpot or Marketo, it’s worth trying Seventh Sense’s free trial.
Seventh Sense has moved away from the separate HubSpot and Marketo pricing to a single unified, per-contact model with no per-seat fees. The Business plan starts at $400 a month for 25,000 marketing contacts, billed annually ($4,800 a year). Enterprise pricing is custom, starting at 150,000 contacts, and adds single sign-on and a dedicated customer success manager.
Sprout Social
If you’re looking to get a stronger return on investment (ROI) for your social media marketing efforts, Sprout Social can help. If you're looking to get a stronger return on your social media marketing, Sprout Social can help. The all-in-one social media management platform uses AI to understand audience behavior, suggest the best time to post, and identify potential brand advocates and influencers. Sprout Social is best for anyone who is ready to invest seriously in social media and needs one dashboard for scheduling, engagement, and reporting.
Sprout Social pricing starts at $199 per seat a month (up to five social profiles).
Many tools advertise a low headline price, then gate the features you actually want—AI credits, integrations, more than one seat—behind a higher tier. Before committing, map out what you'd need month to month, not just what looks good on the pricing page.
Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO helps content teams optimize articles against what's already ranking on Google, scoring content and providing keyword and structure recommendations inside a built-in editor that connects to Google Docs and WordPress. Surfer SEO is a good match for marketing teams that publish blog content regularly and want to rank higher on Google, rather than someone writing the occasional post.
As of mid-2026, Surfer SEO pricing starts at $99 a month ($79 annually) with 30 content credits.
Trellis
E-commerce stores can turn to Trellis to optimize ad campaigns and overall return on investment. Sellers on Amazon, Google Shopping, or Walmart that are ready to stop manually adjusting ad bids and prices can benefit from this AI tool. Trellis's AI suggests and updates keyword bids, provides analytics and insights, and adjusts campaigns based on identified patterns.
Trellis charges a fixed monthly price based on marketplace sales. Reach out through their website to get a specific quote.
Zapier
Zapier empowers teams to create customized, cross-system workflows to automate repetitive tasks, working with thousands of integrations to streamline processes. It also offers AI-powered chatbot templates for both internal use and customer-facing interactions. Zapier is a good fit for marketing teams juggling several disconnected tools (email, forms, spreadsheets, CRM) who want to automate the busywork between them without hiring a developer.
Zapier's free tier now caps at 100 tasks a month. Paid plans now start at $29.99 a month for the Professional tier (750 tasks). It’s also worth noting that the AI chatbot and AI agent features we described are billed as separate paid add-ons, each roughly $20 a month.
[Read more: Getting Started With AI: Artificial Intelligence Applications for Small Businesses]
How to choose an AI marketing tool
With so many options crowding the market, it helps to work through a few questions before signing up for anything.
First, figure out the problem you’re trying to solve. Are you trying to save time on a specific task, like writing social captions or scheduling posts? Or are you trying to do something you can't do manually at all, like predicting the best time to email each subscriber? The clearer the problem, the easier it is to rule tools in or out.
Next, try a few tools before you invest in a subscription. A lot of these platforms have an accessible entry tier and a much steeper tier as your usage scales. If you're just starting to build an email list or run social campaigns, look for the tool built for that stage, rather than the one built for a team that's already matured.
Check what's actually included at the price you'd pay. Many tools advertise a low headline price, then gate the features you actually want—AI credits, integrations, more than one seat—behind a higher tier. Before committing, map out what you'd need month to month, not just what looks good on the pricing page.
Some tools, like Seventh Sense, only work if you're already on a specific platform, such as HubSpot or Marketo. Others integrate broadly. Knowing what's already in your tech stack narrows the list quickly.
Finally, revisit your choice periodically. Pricing and features in this category change often, sometimes every few months, so a tool that was the right fit a year ago may not be anymore, and a new one may now fit better.
AI marketing use cases for small businesses
AI tools can take on a surprising range of marketing tasks. The best starting point is usually the task eating up the most time each week. Start with the repetitive, time-consuming marketing activities that don’t require a lot of oversight, such as:
- Scheduling social posts and monitoring brand mentions across the web.
- Analyzing customer data to spot patterns, such as which products sell best together or when customers are most likely to open an email.
- Personalizing email send times and content based on individual subscriber behavior.
- Researching keywords and optimizing website content to rank higher in search results.
- Moving new leads from a contact form into a customer relationship management tool.
From there, you can start to expand your AI use into more complex tasks, like chatbots that answer common customer questions around the clock, graphic design, and writing content.
Danielle Fallon-O'Leary contributed to this article.
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