‘Growth at all costs’ is a distant SaaS memory. In 2025, capital efficiency is the name of the game and every marketing dollar has to work harder.
In other words, it’s the perfect time to try out AI marketing tools.
From market research and lead nurturing to content distribution and personalisation, AI tools are not only improving SaaS marketing efficiency, but also lowering the barrier to entry for marketing tactics that traditionally required hefty budgets.
But with a never-ending list of use cases and solutions on the AI menu, how do you know which AI marketing tools will actually help grow your SaaS business?
In this post, we’ll break down 12 budget-friendly ways to implement AI in your marketing workflows.
12 AI SaaS marketing tactics and how to use them
1. Use AI for market research
Data collection, market trends, competitor analysis, customer behaviour. Traditionally, the depth of your market research aligned with the depth of your pockets, but AI has made it much easier (and cheaper) to gauge market needs, sentiment and expectations.
Be it primary research (i.e. AI creating surveys and analysing the responses) or secondary research (i.e. AI summarising the key findings from industry reports), AI tools can analyse trends, find common pain points and spot opportunities for differentiation.
Skaled, for instance, uses AI assistants to research prospects and compile competitive intelligence, saving its sales reps 3-4 hours per week. The same can be true for your marketing team.
3 x AI market research tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Crayon | Monitoring competitor activity | N/A – No published pricing |
| Apollo | Finding and researching marketing leads | ✅ Freemium Paid from $59 per user, per month |
| SparkToro | Learning what your target customers engage with online | ✅ Freemium Paid from $50 per month |
2. Use AI to identify your target customers
Marketing to everyone is inefficient and counter-productive. But with AI, you can easily identify your ideal customers, what they’re interested in, and where they’re most likely to be found online.
By analysing your existing customer base and identifying commonalities among your best-fit customers, AI can create a database of target customers and detailed buyer personas – separated by needs, pain points, goals and responsibilities etc. In turn, this single database of targets helps you create highly targeted marketing campaigns that generate quality pipeline and speed up sales cycles.
For example, when BetterCloud narrowed its ICP and buyer personas, they cut their sales cycle by 30% and increased their close rate by 100%.
3 x AI pipeline tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Clay | Identifying best-fit customers and building highly targeted lead lists | ✅ Freemium Paid from $149 per month |
| Similarweb | Learning who visits your competitors and where you can reach them | ✅ Free experience Paid from $199 per month |
| Delve | Generating data-backed buyer personas instead of guessing | ✅ Free experience Paid from $89 per month |
3. Use AI to scale your content marketing efforts
Content is still king. It drives traffic, builds your brand and generates leads. But great content is no longer the preserve of those that can afford a team of copywriters and videographers.
AI-generated content has vastly improved and provides a stepping stone for budget-constrained SaaS. Like a copywriter’s equivalent of a sous-chef, an AI writing tool can prepare the legwork of external-facing articles, blogs and newsletters – in your brand style, tone of voice (TOV) and target persona language – before being finished off by a copywriter. In addition, AI tools can generate images from prompts and turn written content into podcasts, explainer videos or product demos, giving smaller start-ups some of the same capabilities as leading SaaS.
3 x AI content tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Producing content for any marketing purpose, including images and videos | ✅ Freemium Paid from $20 per month |
| Jasper | Writing blogs, webpages & social content etc | ✅ Free trial (7 days) Paid from $59 per seat, per month |
| Lumen5 | Creating branded videos directly from text | ✅ Freemium Paid from $29 per month |
4. Use AI to optimise for SEO and AI search
AI search (i.e. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews) has upended how buyers find information about your solution:
- Traffic to company sites is falling by up to 30%.
- AI referral traffic is growing 40% month-on-month.
- 60% of buyer searches now end with AI recommendations, not your website.
However, SEO is not dead (AI search is still based on good SEO), so it’s vital to optimise your content for both traditional and AI search – using AI tools. For example, AI can analyse your content and suggest keywords to improve traffic, formatting to improve readability, meta tags to improve discoverability and structural changes to improve content performance.
3 x AI SEO tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Semrush | Site auditing and SEO content optimisation (and LLM search in non-budget options) | ✅ Freemium Paid from $140 per month |
| Peec AI | Tracking and improving AI search visibility | ✅ Free trial (7 days) Paid from $89 per month |
| SurferSEO | Optimising your content for topically relevant keywords | ❌ Paid from $99 per month 7-day money back guarantee |
5. Use AI for content distribution
What’s the point in creating great content if your target market never sees it? AI automatically distributes your content across different platforms to maximise visibility and engagement.
From generating and scheduling social media posts on LinkedIn to personalising the content for different personas and customer segments, AI tools can design, populate and execute a fully scheduled social media plan. These tools also use machine learning to analyse performance and improve over time.
What’s more, use AI to easily cut long videos or clip webinars into social media-sized shorts and publish them across different social platforms for viral traction. This is especially helpful for YouTube and TikTok, where Jose Cayasso, Co-founder & CEO at Slidebean, notes that usefulness and originality are key.
3 x AI content distribution tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Ocoya | AI writing, scheduling, visual design and analytics | ✅ Free trial (7 days) Paid from $19 per month |
| Buffer | Generating and scheduling content on social media | ✅ Freemium Paid from $6 per month |
| CapCut | Creating, clipping, captioning and publishing videos | ✅ Freemium Paid from $20 per month |
6. Use AI for performance marketing
Turning eyes into clicks into leads is the core of content marketing. But many SaaS marketing tactics have poor attribution (i.e. brand building) while others have low conversion rates (i.e. cold emails). The solution? AI.
AI can design and build your landing page. AI can write the landing page copy with conversion-optimised language. AI can provide visual heatmaps to show where users are clicking or scrolling. AI can even A/B test different landing pages to maximise performance.
It’s not just landing pages either – AI can analyse, track and improve the performance of your online ads, social media posts, and messaging. For example, PandaDoc uses LLMs to draft, test and iterate the language on its website to ensure it resonates with its ICP.
3 x AI performance marketing tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Durable | Building optimised landing pages, websites and webapps | ✅ Freemium Paid from $15 per month |
| Hotjar | Tracking how users are interacting with your website | ✅ Freemium Paid from $39 per month |
| AdCreative.ai | Generating conversion-focused ad visuals, banners, texts and videos | ✅ 10 free downloads Paid from $39 per month |
7. Use AI for marketing data management
Collating internal and external marketing data. Analysing data on customer journeys and attribution. Logging campaign data and performance. This all used to be carried by marketers – now it’s done by AI.
AI automatically creates, populates and updates marketing lists in real-time, pulling data from ad platforms, CRM, email and your product into one actionable view. AI can track CAC, drop-off points and attribution across channels, as well as spot trends and correlations in the data (i.e. the days and regions you’re getting the most traction). You can even speak directly to the data (i.e. ‘what is the most common pain point in the last 3 months?’) to help you identify opportunities or threats.
Crucially, you can also use AI to focus your marketing efforts on what generates the most revenue (not the most leads) – which Gong CMO Emily He says is vital to SaaS success.
3 x AI data management tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Clay | Turning 130+ data sources into actionable GTM insights and workflows | ✅ Freemium Paid from $149 per month |
| Speak | Analysing data across multiple mediums (like speaking to an AI chatbot) | ✅ Freemium Paid from $15 per month |
| Funnel.io | Collecting, managing, analysing, and using marketing data for business growth | ✅ 4 free connectors Paid depending on # connectors |
8. Use AI for email marketing
Email is not dead (there’s even a website dedicated to debunking this myth). It has 4 billion+ users, is checked daily and remains “the backbone of business communication.” But traditional email conversion rates are poor and personalising email at scale is time-consuming…until now.
AI-powered email marketing platforms can help you create, send and manage your email marketing campaigns more efficiently. From length and tone to subject lines and content to send time and cadence, AI identifies what works and optimises accordingly. It can also personalise per segment or industry (i.e. show relevant case studies and testimonials) and ensure you’re only sending emails to those who engage or are likely to be interested (to avoid email fatigue).
3 x AI email marketing tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Superhuman | Managing inboxes and drafting emails using your team’s writing style and knowledge | ✅ Free trial (one year for eligible start-ups) Paid from $30 per user, per month |
| Seventh Sense | Optimising email delivery via Hubspot/Marketo based on engagement | ❌ Paid from $80 per month |
| ActiveCampaign | Automating and personalising email marketing at scale | ✅ Free trial (14 days) Paid from $15 per month |
9. Use AI for personalisation at scale
Be it email open rates or social media engagement, personalisation trumps a blanket approach every time. With AI, personalisation is no longer a time-consuming endeavour – no matter the size of your target audience.
AI can analyse data from your website, social media platforms and email lists to identify user behaviour and spot patterns by individuals or segments. It can personalise landing page content for SaaS audiences (e.g. different homepage for CTOs vs CMOs) and adapt product demos according to personal preferences. This is particularly helpful for upselling. For example, at Go Nimbly, they integrate Clay with their CRM, to analyse their customer’s product usage and can then send personalised emails to them about their usage.
3 x AI personalisation tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Personyze | Personalising your website, email or app content based on user attributes | ✅ Freemium Paid from $250 per month |
| Chameleon | Personalising demos, promos and in-app experiences | ✅ Unlimited free demos Paid from $279 per month |
| Dynamic Yield | Matching content, products, and offers to your customer’s preferences | N/A – No published pricing |
10. Use AI to nurture leads
In 2025, Marketing must work alongside Sales throughout the funnel, nurturing high-quality leads that convert. AI is your not-so secret weapon.
AI determines the best channels for finding leads and the messages that drive them to act. AI tracks how leads interact with your product, website and emails, and then segments them accordingly (i.e. ready-to-talk to sales; most likely to convert). AI identifies high-intent leads and assigns lead scores automatically, so your sales team knows where to focus.
For instance, at Chili Piper, AI agents support SDRs with pipeline health and lead qualification, while offline engagement platform Postal achieved 5,000%+ revenue growth with only one SDR due to the quality of the leads.
However, it’s important to note that lead nurturing tools are expensive in comparison to other AI marketing tools.
3 x AI lead nurturing tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Pecan AI | Predictive modelling for marketing based on LTV/conversions etc | ❌ First month trial $450 (then $950 per month) |
| Pardot (Salesforce) | Grading marketing leads based on fit and intent | ❌ From $1,250 per month |
| MadKudu | Lead scoring and prioritisation | ❌ From $999 per month |
11. Use AI to collect and analyse customer feedback
According to Metaplane Co-Founder, Kevin Hu, customer “feedback is sometimes just as important as revenue” as it helps you build a better product and has a huge downstream impact.
AI-powered tools can help you collect and analyse customer feedback quickly and easily. Whether it’s through customer calls, support tickets or surveys, AI enables you to gauge customer sentiment needs, pain points and preferences – as well as the language they use – to improve your marketing. You can also use AI tools to test your message with real people in your target audience in almost any language.
3 x AI customer feedback tools to consider
| AI tool | SaaS marketing focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Gong | Capturing valuable insights from customer or survey calls | ❌ Reach out to sales for a quote |
| Survicate | Analysing customer feedback, surveys, onboarding etc | ✅ Freemium Paid from $70 per month |
| Delighted | Collecting and analysing survey data | ✅ Freemium Paid from $17 per month |
12. Use AI to ensure brand consistency
Great brands are like flagpoles – they help you stand out in a crowded market. According to Angeley Mullins, CCO at Resourcify, building a strong brand is key to pipeline generation, so she recommends spending 20%-30% of your market budget on brand. Or you can spend considerably less with AI.
AI can help you build a brand that resonates with target customers, using customer data insights and customer language. AI can also ensure that you maintain your brand tone and formatting across all content – be it social media posts or internal product documentation – and monitor how customers feel about your brand with social listening and reporting.
3 x AI brand tools to consider
| AI Tool | SaaS Marketing Focus | Try it for free? |
|---|---|---|
| Icon | Branding suite for creating logos, colour schemes, font pairings etc | ✅ Free trial (3 days) Paid from $39 per month |
| Brand24 | Monitoring brand mentions across social media, and assessing sentiment | ✅ Free trial (14 days) Paid from $199 per month |
| BrandGuard | Monitoring all internal and external content for brand compliance | ✅ Free trial Paid pricing not published |
Where to start with AI SaaS marketing tools?
“If you’re not testing out these different tools, you’re really missing out. Play around with them and see how they can play a role in your go-to-market strategy.”
Kyle Poyar, Co-Founder and Operating Partner at Tremont
Yes, there are lots of AI marketing tools out there, but don’t be put off.
When choosing AI tools, Keith Rabkin, President, PandaDoc, recommends waiting to see what works with others before diving in:
“Let a thousand flowers bloom, let a bunch of people experiment with it, find what works, and let the cream rise to the top.”
All 12 of these marketing areas may be useful to you at some point in your SaaS journey, but to decide what you need now follow these three steps.
- Audit your marketing process. Sit down with your marketing team for half an hour to understand their process, find areas that are painful and pinpoint AI automation opportunities. For instance, over 60% of marketing time is spent on data-related tasks – i.e. collecting or analysing data – so this could be a good place to start.
- Free human creativity. AI doesn’t do everything well (i.e. brand strategy or product messaging), but it does free up your team to focus where they add the most value. For SaaS marketing, that’s usually creative elements or connecting with customers.
- Consider what’s affordable. Some AI tools are free, some offer a free trial and some provide a freemium experience, so start with the most affordable and see what works before deciding to sign-up. You can always reach out directly and ask for a personalised trial (i.e. 10 marketing reps for one month for a negotiated fee). If they back their product, they’ll likely agree.
Still unsure? Connect with other SaaS Founders and Marketing leaders in the SaaStock community to learn what AI marketing tools are working for them and how to implement them. Subscribe to SaaStock.
