The 7-Layer AI Stack Every Modern Marketer Should Be Using
Welcome to the era of AI-driven marketing technology (MarTech)! This is the age when human creativity syncs with AI for mind-blowing marketing wins and record-breaking business leaps.
As of 2025, the top three AI applications in marketing are as follows:
- Content creation (35%)
- Data analysis and insights (30%)
- Workflow automation (20%)
But there are more!
Let’s peel off all the layers one by one to understand which digital instruments you may definitely need to save for your AI marketing toolbox, whether you’re a novice or seasoned marketer. But first, read why everyone (and you will, too!) is hunting for the best AI marketing tools. Cover photo by Aerps.
Primary Advantages of AI in Marketing
It Automates Everything and Saves Time (a Truckload of It!).
Don’t you want an extra 11–12 hours weekly (or approximately 26 workdays yearly!) freed by artificial intelligence for you?
You can’t but agree that manual marketing is the worst time thief. On the contrary, AI MarTech tools are the best time donors for marketers.
If, years ago, you vanished into scrolling and sifting through competitors’ content strategies or smashed the keyboard to type social media posts for hours, you don’t have to jump into that time-stealing rabbit hole now. Thanks to AI-powered automation today, routine marketing tasks that used to eat up your whole workday take minutes. Most probably, anytime soon, they will take seconds with AI speed-driving the future of marketing.
It Generates the Highest ROI (Return on Investment).
As an expert in financial technologies, Jeffrey Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans, says, “If there’s something AI should be put on every marketer’s priority list for, that’s ROI, surely. AI’s financial potential lies not only in Automation 2.0, as we call it today. It can also optimize your budget for ads or organic promotional campaigns, delivering five to eight times the ROI on your marketing spend. However, the actual financial gain is largely determined by responsible and sensible AI usage.”
Now, look at the average ROI improvements with AI on different marketing layers (Source):
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) → by 72% (in particular: Instagram ad ROI → by 40% and Google Ads ROI → by 52%)
- Video marketing ROI → by 82%
- Influencer ad selection → by 38%
It Hyper-Personalizes Customer Experiences.
Do you remember the joy of walking into your favorite coffee shop and hearing something like this after the greeting, “Double-latte with oat milk, right?” (Sorry, Team Cappuccino or Americano!)
That’s an experience AI shapes for each and every customer. AI’s algorithms crunch data like snacks and cater hyper-personalized experiences to them. They do it in such an exquisite way that your customers wonder whether you, by chance, have developed mind-reading skills.
For instance, it can be an interactive landing page with a personalized AI-generated video (e.g., using your customer’s real or profile name).
At the outcome, you get one of the most impactful benefits of AI in marketing. With AI-powered personalization, you observe satisfied and loyal customers coming back to you every time and endorsing you everywhere.
Build Your AI Marketing Stack: Layer by Layer
Layer #1. Competitive Research
AI tools:
- Competely.ai
- SpyFu
- Pricefy (specifically for price tracking and comparison)
- SimilarWeb
- Comparables.ai
What are your competitors up to? Aren’t you wondering what marketing campaigns they run and why they might outperform your brand?
The above-mentioned AI stack for marketers will show how you’re benchmarking against your competitors day to day (or month to month), what keywords they’re ranking for, or whether their TikTok ideas or Instagram Reels are actually winning the audience’s hearts and minds.
Example:
Kasta, a fashion retailer, used SimilarWeb Benchmarking Intelligence to monitor competitor strategies and optimize performance through data-backed decisions. As a result, the company saw a 2.5x increase in gross revenue.
Layer #2. Content Creation
AI tools:
For Texts
- ChatGPT
- Writesonic
- Copy.ai
- NeuralText
- Storylab.ai
Fact: Marketers use AI copywriting tools mainly for researching topics (58%), paraphrasing texts (52%), and writing content from scratch (50%), among other tasks.
For Visuals
- For pictures → Canva Magic Studio, Piktochart AI, Napkin.ai, Midjourney
- For GIFs, animations, or other motion designs → Kaiber AI, Pika.art, Animaker, Adobe Firefly
- For videos → Lumalabs.ai, Veed.io, Sora by OpenAI
- For all-in-one visual content: image + video + audio → Steve AI, Designs.ai, Adobe Firefly
Whichever you need for your content marketing strategy, you throw an idea, like a stick or ball, and generative AI (GenAI) will “fetch” (generate) the result to you, like a well-trained dog.
“Particularly,” remarks Nicolas Breedlove, CEO at PlaygroundEquipment.com, “AI content generation tools are useful when it comes to producing complex, interactive items for higher user engagement (take, for instance, a quiz or a mini-game). It can also be long-form content that drains your time. With the right instructions and supervision, AI does it in minutes, not hours, when marketers used to do it manually.”
Example:
In the case of Playground Equipment, a nearly 200-page digital catalog of outdoor playsets was perhaps the longest piece of content they created with AI. For that, they used Flipsnack, an AI-enhanced flipbook maker.
Layer #3. Email Marketing
AI tools:
- Klaviyo
- MailMunch
- Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
- MailerLite
- Brevo
Very much alive and thriving, thank you (but all “thanks” should go to artificial intelligence, of course!). Actually, 57% of enterprise marketers automate emails with AI, and another 25% plan to tap into it for their email campaigns in the near future.
If you still doubt whether it’s worth the effort, let’s review several emails powered by AI marketing tools you should definitely be using, too.
Example #1:
Designmodo crafted the following branded email for Black Friday with Postcards Email Builder powered by AI.
Example #2:
Byrna uses Klaviyo’s AI features for newsletter automation, from subject lines to copies with interactive elements. For instance, they actively add videos to emails sent with Klaviyo.
Layer #4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
AI tools:
- For social listening: Keyhole, YouScan.io, Brand24
- For crafting and scheduling posts: Circleboom Publish, Ocoya, ContentStudio.io
- For social media management overall: Lately.ai, SocialBee, Buffer
Fact: If 44% of marketers turn to GenAI to create email copies, 42% do the same for social media posts.
At this point, here’s a substantial note from Lacey Jarvis, COO at AAA State of Play. She says, “I believe one of the most overlooked SMM sub-layers artificial intelligence can help a modern marketer with is repurposing, aka recycling, content. Rather than generating new social media posts with AI, leverage its fullest potential to repurpose, reformat, and reuse them on other platforms. That’s a double-win benefit of AI in MarTech marketers typically miss out on.”
Example:
The AAA State of Play team uses innovative tools for video repurposing across social channels. Here’s one of the short-form videos they recycled (cut and subtitled) from YouTube for TikTok with a CTA, “Watch the full video on our YouTube page!”
Layer #5. SEO
AI tools:
- SurferSEO
- Alli AI
- Search Atlas
- SEO.ai
- RankIQ
Fact: 65% of companies have already reported better SEO results after integrating artificial intelligence.
Let’s face it—today’s marketers would be blocked from so-much-wanted content discoverability and high rankings without essential SEO skills (and tools!). So, every content marketer should implement the AI stack for search engine optimization.
In the words of Adrian Iorga, Founder & President of 617 Boston Movers, a local moving business, “AI in SEO, as a valuable marketing layer, effortlessly covers both directions: general and local SEO. What’s more important, it doesn’t let you go to extremes like keyword overstuffing or take other missteps, often leading to considerable rank drops. And we all know how hard it is to balance SEO. That’s when AI protects you from failures and predicts a better, optimized future for your content, on the website or elsewhere.”
Example:
Look at this homepage optimized for local and general SEO based on advanced keyword research tools. The brand added localized keywords like the “best movers in Boston” or “reliable movers Boston” and general keywords, such as “Residential Moves,” “Office Moves,” “Long-Distance Moves,” etc.
Layer #6. Influencer Marketing
AI tools:
- Upfluence
- Heepsy
- Favikon
- Influencermarketing.ai
- HypeAuditor
- Lionize.ai
- Iqfluence.io
Fact: 38% of marketing specialists leverage AI for influencer campaigns occasionally, in small doses, and 22% rely entirely on AI tools when partnering with influencers.
Finding social media influencers and collaborating with them effectively was a close-to-nightmare task for marketers in the past. Now, AI marketing tools can easily match your company with the right influencer who ideally aligns with your brand vision, target audience, engagement requirements, and so on. Moreover, shrewd AI checkers will keep you away from scammers who participate in follower fraud. So, no more collabs with fake influencers who bought followers or—say—meat-eating bloggers when you’re selling vegan food.
Example:
Fruitz used HypeAuditor to find local Gen-Z influencers from France to promote their dating app. They perfectly resonated with the younger French audience and “skyrocketed app downloads.”
Layer #7. Measurement and Data-Driven Insights
AI tools:
- For monitoring site traffic and user behavior → Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Userlytics, Hotjar
- For measuring social growth → Dash Social, Mandala AI, Sprout Social
- For customer journey mapping and predictive analytics → Smaply, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Zoho CRM with Zia AI
- For A/B testing → HubSpot, Abtesting.ai, Optimizely
From web pages to socials, it’s as if AI could tell you exactly: “Hey, this CTA text doesn’t convert your leads into buyers.” (By the way, even one word change matters for conversions.) Or, “Psst… Your YouTube Shorts are the heavy-hitters among all other types of content—keep posting!”
Yet, there’s one crucial takeaway you can’t leave this article without.
Operating in the legal services, Chris Aubeeluck, Head of Sales and Marketing at Osbornes Law, reminds us about data security and privacy concerns about artificial intelligence. “When you’re using AI tools for analytics as a marketer, needless to say, you grant them access to customers’ personal data. That’s why it’s crucial not only to protect this information but also to anticipate and answer all customer questions about why and how you collect and manage it with AI.”
Example:
The Osbornes Law team has an extensive AI MarTech stack to measure and analyze data from the website, including Google Analytics, Unbounce, Hotjar, and others. They openly disclose this in the Cookies Policy and describe data tracking operations for content personalization in the cookie consent message.
Wrapping Up Your AI Marketing Tools
While picking the best AI tool from one of the marketing layers or copying and saving the whole pack (nobody is stopping you!), consider taking along some great stuff FilterGrade offers for content creation. It can be a social media template, a sound effect, or a video LUT—whichever you need to create amazing content for any platform. These little details can help your posts stand out among the millions that get published each minute online.
Marry your creative genius with artificial intelligence and let this happy couple punch through the highest marketing goals.
