The short version: ChatGPT or Claude for the thinking and structure, Perplexity for research, SEMrush or Ahrefs for the data behind your decisions, and a place like Notion to hold it all together. No single tool builds your strategy for you. You still have to know your business better than the software does.
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What people mean when they ask this
Every week someone asks me “what’s the best AI tool for marketing strategy” as if there’s one app that spits out a finished plan. There isn’t. I’ve tested most of the well-known ones over the past two years, some for clients, some out of morbid curiosity, and the honest picture is messier and more useful than the marketing pages for these tools let on.
A marketing strategy has maybe five real parts: who you’re selling to, what you’re saying to them, where you’re saying it, how you’ll measure it, and what you’ll cut when the budget gets squeezed. AI tools are brilliant at some of those and near useless at others. The trick is matching the tool to the part of the job, not buying one platform and hoping it does everything.
The tools I use, and what each one is for
ChatGPT and Claude, for the thinking
I use ChatGPT (£16 to £18 a month for Plus, roughly $20) most days for the messy first draft of strategic thinking: turning a vague goal like “we want more leads from LinkedIn” into a structured brief with audience segments, message angles, and a rough content mix. Claude, from Anthropic, does a similar job and in my experience writes a slightly more natural first draft, which matters if you’re going to publish anything close to what it gives you.
Neither tool knows your business. Both will happily invent statistics if you don’t push back. I always ask for sources and I always check them, because I’ve caught both tools citing survey numbers that don’t exist when I go looking. Treat them as a very well-read junior strategist who has never sat in one of your sales calls, not as an oracle.
Perplexity, for research that would otherwise eat a whole afternoon
Before Perplexity I’d spend two or three hours pulling together competitor positioning, recent industry stats, and what’s changed in a market. Now that same research pass takes twenty to thirty minutes because it shows its sources inline, so I can check them as I go rather than at the end. That’s not a small saving when you’re building a full strategy document and need six or seven research threads running.
SEMrush and Ahrefs, for the numbers behind the story
Strategy without data is just a strong opinion, and I’ve written plenty of those in my time, so I try to catch myself now. SEMrush (from $139.95 a month) and Ahrefs (from $129 a month) tell you what people are searching for, what your competitors rank for, and where the traffic gaps are. Neither is technically an “AI tool” in the flashy sense, but both have added AI-generated content gap reports and topic clustering that speed up the research phase of a strategy. I lean on these before I let ChatGPT touch a content plan, because otherwise you’re building a plan on guesses.
HubSpot, for turning strategy into something a team can run
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub (starter plans from £15 a month, though most small businesses end up on the £780-a-month Professional tier once they need workflows and reporting) has built AI features into its campaign assistant that draft emails, social posts, and basic ad copy from a strategy brief. It’s not the most creative tool on this list, but it’s the one that connects strategy to execution and to your actual CRM data, which matters more once you’re past the planning stage and into running the thing.
Notion AI, for keeping the whole plan in one place
This sounds boring compared to the others but it’s the one that stops a strategy dying in a Google Doc nobody opens again. I keep every client’s strategy, audience research, and content calendar in Notion, and the built-in AI is handy for summarising long research threads into a one-page brief the client’s team will read.
A real example: the accountancy firm and the six-hour plan
Last year I worked with a mid-sized accountancy firm in Surrey who wanted a content and LinkedIn strategy but had no marketing person and a partner who was, fairly, sceptical of anything with “AI” in the name. We built the whole first draft of a 90-day strategy in one afternoon.
Here’s roughly what that looked like:
- 40 minutes with Perplexity researching what small business owners search for around tax deadlines, cash flow, and HMRC changes, instead of guessing.
- An hour in ChatGPT turning that research into audience segments (sole traders, small limited companies, growing SMEs needing a CFO-type conversation) with a different message angle for each.
- 90 minutes in SEMrush checking search volume and competition for the topics that came out of that, which killed off two ideas the partner loved but nobody was searching for.
- Two hours building a content calendar and email sequence structure in Notion, with ChatGPT drafting the first version of each piece.
Total time: about five and a half hours for a plan that would normally take me a day and a half to two days to research and draft from scratch. That’s the real gain. Not “AI writes your strategy,” but AI compresses the research and drafting stages hard enough that you spend your actual time on judgment calls instead of typing.
Step by step: building a strategy with these tools
- Start with the business question, not the tool. Write down, in one sentence, what the strategy has to achieve in the next 90 days. If you can’t do that, no tool will save you.
- Research with Perplexity, not ChatGPT. Ask it what’s changed in your market in the last twelve months, what your top three competitors are doing, and what questions your customers are asking online. Save the sources it gives you.
- Check the data with SEMrush or Ahrefs. Pull search volume and competition for the topics and keywords that came out of step two. This is where most AI-only strategies fall apart, because a topic can sound smart and have zero search demand.
- Draft the structure in ChatGPT or Claude. Feed it your business goal, your audience research, and your keyword data, and ask for a structured strategy: audience segments, core messages, channel mix, and a content calendar outline.
- Rewrite the parts that sound generic. This is non-negotiable. If you understand what copywriting does within a marketing plan, you’ll spot instantly which lines an AI tool wrote versus which ones sound like your business. Rewrite the first kind.
- Map the customer journey to a funnel. Every channel and content piece should sit somewhere in a sales funnel, awareness, consideration, decision, or it doesn’t belong in the plan yet.
- Put it somewhere your team will open again. Notion, ClickUp, or a shared doc, it doesn’t matter which. It matters that it’s not a PDF that gets emailed once and forgotten.
The part nobody selling these tools wants to say out loud
Here’s the bit that gets left out of most of these listicles: the tools that get the most marketing budget spent on them, the all-in-one “AI marketing platforms” promising to build your entire strategy, are usually worse for actual strategic thinking than plain ChatGPT with a good prompt. I’ve sat in demos for two of these platforms in the last year where the “strategy generator” produced something a first-year marketing student would be embarrassed to hand in, full of phrases like “leveraging synergies across channels” and zero specifics about the actual business.
The expensive platform isn’t buying you better thinking. It’s buying you a nicer dashboard around the same large language model everyone else is using underneath. If you’re choosing between a £200-a-month AI marketing suite and £20-a-month ChatGPT Plus plus your own judgment, the second option wins more often than the software companies want you to believe. Save the money for the tools that give you real data, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or actual ad spend, not the ones selling you a nicer wrapper on the same chatbot.
The uncomfortable follow-on truth: most businesses using AI for marketing right now aren’t building better strategies, they’re producing more content faster without any strategy underneath it. That’s not progress, it’s just noise with better grammar. If your content calendar is full but you couldn’t say in one sentence why you’re publishing what you’re publishing, the tools have made your problem faster, not smaller.
What these tools cannot do
- They cannot tell you what your business is good at versus what you wish it was good at. That comes from you, your sales team, and your actual customer conversations.
- They cannot make a hard prioritisation call when you’ve got four good ideas and budget for one. That’s judgment, and judgment comes from experience, not a prompt.
- They cannot spot when your positioning is wrong because it’s built on internal opinion rather than what customers say. I’ve seen AI tools happily build a beautiful strategy around a value proposition that a decent customer interview would have knocked down in ten minutes.
- They don’t know your industry’s unwritten rules, the thing everyone in your market knows that never gets written on a website. If you’re in a niche field, that gap shows up fast.
Where the channel-specific tools fit in
Once the core strategy is set, you’ll want tools for individual channels. If social is part of the plan, worth knowing which Instagram apps help small business owners rather than just adding to the noise. If content is a bigger part of your plan than you first thought, it’s also worth reading honestly about whether content marketing is a viable long-term investment for your business, because a strategy built on content needs a realistic timeline, usually six to nine months before you see meaningful traffic, not six weeks.
What this costs, month to month
For a small business building and running a strategy with AI tools, a realistic monthly stack looks like this: ChatGPT Plus at $20, SEMrush Pro at $139.95 (or Ahrefs Lite at $129), Notion Plus at $10 per user, and either nothing more or HubSpot Starter at £15 to £20 if you want automation and a CRM connected to it. That’s somewhere between £150 and £250 a month for the tools themselves. Compare that to what a junior in-house marketer or a small agency retainer costs, usually £1,500 to £4,000 a month, and you can see why so many small businesses are trying to do the strategy work themselves with AI first and bringing in help for execution second.
If you get to the point where the tools are giving you good research and drafts but you’re not confident turning that into a decision, that’s usually the moment to bring in outside help rather than keep guessing. I work with small businesses on exactly this gap through AI consulting for small business marketing, and the sessions that go best are the ones where the business has already done the AI-assisted research and just needs someone to tell them which three things to do first.
A quick word on getting it wrong
I’ve made the mistake myself of letting a client’s AI-drafted strategy go out with confident-sounding statistics that turned out to be wrong. It happened on a project two years ago where a draft claimed a specific percentage of consumers preferred video content, a number that sounded plausible and turned out to be from a study that didn’t say what the summary claimed. We caught it before it went to the client, but it taught me the rule I now stick to without exception: every number in a strategy document gets a source I’ve personally checked, not one the AI tool told me existed. That single habit has saved me more embarrassment than any tool has saved me time.
Frequently asked questions
Can ChatGPT alone build a full marketing strategy?
It can draft the structure and language of one, but it can’t do your market research, verify data, or make the judgment calls about priorities and budget that a real strategy needs, so treat it as a strong first draft tool, not the whole job.
Is it worth paying for an all-in-one AI marketing platform instead of separate tools?
Usually not for strategy work specifically, most of these platforms wrap the same underlying AI model in a nicer interface, so a combination of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a proper SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs tends to give better results for less money.
How long does it take to build an AI-assisted marketing strategy from scratch?
For a small business, a realistic first draft covering audience, messaging, channels, and a 90-day content plan takes around five to six hours of focused work spread across the research, data check, and drafting stages, not the two full days it took before these tools existed.
Do I still need a marketing person or consultant if I’m using AI tools?
Yes, if the business is past the very early stage, because AI tools speed up the research and drafting but can’t set priorities, catch a flawed value proposition, or make the calls that come from knowing your customers and your numbers.
