As digital marketing experts, we want to get one thing straight right from the beginning: AI marketing tools aren't here to replace the human touch in marketing — they're here to help us provide value doing the things we already do best.
At Baal & Spots, we've spent years perfecting our craft, understanding what makes brands stand out, and developing strategies that actually get results. But here's the thing — the marketing landscape moves fast, and staying ahead means embracing tools that amplify our expertise.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that we let robots run your marketing campaigns. We utilize AI marketing tools to enhance the creative, strategic thinking that only comes from real people with real industry experience. Think of it this way: when a master chef uses a high-quality knife, the knife isn’t doing the cooking; it just helps them work more precisely and efficiently.
If you’re ready to elevate your digital marketing game, Baal & Spots has got you covered. Contact us or request a free site audit to see what we can do for you.
What can AI be used for in marketing?
AI capabilities in marketing span everything from content creation and data analysis to audience research and campaign optimization. The key is knowing where these tools can add genuine value versus where they’re just providing a shortcut.
At its core, AI excels at pattern recognition, data processing, and generating variations on established themes. This makes it incredibly useful for tasks that require analyzing large datasets, personalizing content at scale, or exploring creative alternatives you might not have considered. But — and this is crucial — it's not great at understanding nuance, reading between the lines, or making strategic decisions.
At Baal & Spots, we only utilize AI tools that help us stay efficient and insightful, not ones that promise to do the work for us. Everything touched by AI is meticulously proofed, edited, and simply made better by our amazing human team members who can provide the nuance and industry expertise that AI inherently lacks.
With the disclaimers out of the way, here are the best AI marketing tools that Baal & Spots uses to amplify our clients’ online strategies.
1. Semrush: Our SEO and competitive intelligence powerhouse
Semrush has been a staple in our toolkit for years, but their recent AI integrations have taken it to another level. We use Semrush's AI-powered features to identify content gaps, analyze competitor strategies, and discover keyword opportunities that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
What makes Semrush particularly valuable is how it combines traditional SEO data with AI-driven insights. When we're developing content marketing strategies for clients, we can quickly identify what topics their competitors are ranking for, what questions their audience is asking, and where there are opportunities to create better, more comprehensive content.
The tool's AI capabilities help us spot trends before they become obvious, giving our clients a competitive edge. But here's the important part — we don't just take these insights at face value. Our team interprets the data through the lens of each client's unique brand voice, market position, and business goals.
“Each of our clients brings a unique perspective to their industries. So while we might take topic inspiration from an AI competitor analysis, only we know how to tailor that content to fit that specific brand’s goals and existing online persona. Unless we feed it that information prior, AI can’t fill in those gaps.”
Chloe Kingston | Senior Content Specialist at Baal & Spots
2. Claude: Our AI writing and strategy partner
We sometimes like to pretend that we have a little French guy on our team, and his name is Claude. You’ve probably heard of him. Claude serves as our content writing and AI brainstorming partner, research assistant, and fine-tuner when we're developing content strategies and copy.
When we're working on content writing projects, Claude helps us explore different angles, identify potential gaps in our reasoning, and generate multiple variations of key messaging. It's particularly useful in the early stages of strategy development when we're trying to ensure we've considered every angle and possibility.
But here's what Claude doesn't do: it doesn't understand your brand's soul, it doesn't know your customers' unspoken frustrations, and it can't replace the strategic intuition that comes from years of working with real businesses facing real challenges. What it can do is help us work through the variables more efficiently, leaving more time for the high-level strategic thinking that really moves businesses forward.
Claude can provide outlines, information, and summed-up research that our talented content writers can take and run with. It tells us what large language models (LLMs) want to see from our content, so we can dedicate more energy to delivering a polished (and future-proofed) final product.
3. Mixpanel: AI-enhanced analytics for deeper insights
As an agency that deeply values data, we turned to Mixpanel a few years ago and have never looked back. Its integration of AI features, including generative AI, has transformed how we approach marketing and data analytics. The platform doesn't just tell us what happened — it helps us understand why it happened and what we should do about it.
The AI-powered insights help us identify user behavior patterns that might not be immediately obvious, predict future trends, and automatically surface the most important findings from complex data. When we're analyzing campaign performance or user engagement, Mixpanel's AI capabilities help us cut through the noise and focus on actionable insights.
Importantly, Mixpanel can’t make strategic decisions for us. It surfaces the data points that our experienced analysts then interpret through the lens of business objectives, market context, and brand positioning.
4. Visily: Streamlining design and user experience
Visily brings AI to the design process, which can be a huge time saver for our ever-busy designers. When we're developing website landing pages, email templates, or social media content, Visily's AI features help us quickly explore different design directions and layouts.
We find this particularly valuable for social media because it can create visual consistency and rapid iteration for campaigns. Instead of spending hours on initial mockups, we can quickly generate multiple design concepts and focus our human creativity on refining the concepts that show the most promise.
5. Madgicx: AI-powered social media advertising
AI marketing tools for social media can sometimes feel like a scam, but for social media advertising, Madgicx optimizes ad spend and targeting with a level of precision that would be impossible to achieve manually. The platform uses AI capabilities to analyze ad performance in real-time and automatically adjust targeting, bidding, and creative elements.
What we love about Madgicx is that it isn’t built to replace strategic thinking — it’s made to enhance it. We develop the overall campaign strategy, create the core messaging, and make the big-picture decisions, but Madgicx helps us execute those strategies with great precision, automatically optimizing for the metrics that matter most to each client.
Areas where we integrate AI and digital marketing
As we’ve said before, when used correctly, AI and digital marketing can work together in harmony to create efficient, well-researched, and well-rounded content for your brand. Here are some examples of marketing services where AI can add genuine value.
Developing buyer personas
One area where AI has proven particularly valuable is in buyer persona development for our clients’ brand messaging and strategy. Brand messaging is all about ideating and asking questions, something that LLMs are great at doing. Here's how we approach it:
“AI should be used to impel and expand your thinking, rather than do your thinking for you. We build a personas from our research and questionnaires as we normally would, then use an LLM to help challenge our assumptions about the person we've just built. We ask questions like: What questions am I not asking? What assumptions might I be making? Walk me through alternative ways these decisions might be made."
Levi Dunning | Senior Content Specialist at Baal & Spots
While you shouldn't try to replace your own creative instincts (and you should test everything against your own human intuition), AI saves you the time of trying to brute force your way through every possible variable. Instead of trying to come up with every possible scenario manually, you can now draft options and audit them against your expertise and experience.
In summary, AI helps us explore blind spots and alternative perspectives, but the final persona — and the strategy built around it — is still grounded in our team’s expertise to create a fully tailored and unique solution.
Content creation
Content creation is probably where most people think AI will have the biggest impact, but not in the way they might expect. AI excels at generating initial drafts, exploring different angles, and helping overcome writer's block. It's particularly useful for creating multiple variations of social media posts, email subject lines, or ad copy that we can then test and optimize.
At Baal & Spots, we use AI as a starting point for content creation, not an endpoint. Our writers and strategists use generative AI drafts as raw material that gets shaped, refined, and infused with the deep research, brand personality, and strategic thinking that only comes from a human understanding of each client's business. These deliverables can come in the form of:
- Long-form content like blogs and landing pages
- Email marketing campaigns
- White papers
- Social media content and strategies
- Videos (including scripting and concepting)
- Guides & infographics
- And more
We provide some of the best content marketing services Houston has to offer because we combine tailored marketing solutions with cutting-edge technology — which includes leveraging AI where it counts — to keep your business competitive online.
AI marketing tools amplify our talent. They don’t replace it.
The marketing industry is becoming a little too reliant on AI tools to replace human talent, but overly AI-reliant strategies just don’t work — we’ve seen the results. Which is why at Baal & Spots, fancy tools will never replace your marketing partners. Your business is run by real humans, and so should your marketing.
The AI marketing tools in our arsenal aren't magic solutions that automatically generate better results — they're instruments that help us, your agency, to work more efficiently and effectively. Every deliverable that leaves our agency has been crafted by human hands, guided by human strategy, and grounded in human understanding of what makes businesses successful.
Baal & Spots: An agency that integrates AI without losing the human touch
While we do utilize AI marketing tools, we have strict standards for their use. Our number one goal is they help us add value for our clients. When you work with Baal & Spots, you're not getting AI-generated marketing: you're getting human-crafted strategies that leverage the best available tools to ensure your brand stays competitive in the complex digital realm. Everything we create is made with integrity..
You don’t want to partner with an agency that provides cookie-cutter strategies that lead to lukewarm results. Baal & Spots provides personalized, data-driven, and tested digital marketing strategies that help brands soar. We love working with ambitious and open-minded business owners who really want to see the fruits of their labor blossom.
Let’s talk about what we, as a digital marketing agency in Houston, can do for you.
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