Ten tools

Every marketer asks me what tools I use. Here are ten. Most of them don't matter as much as you think.

ChatGPT ($20/mo) is for thinking, not publishing. I use it to argue with myself before I write anything. The output goes in the trash. The clarity stays.

Jasper ($49/mo) is the one to use if you need volume. Hundreds of templates, decent brand voice controls. It writes first drafts. You still need to write the final one.

Canva AI ($15/mo) is good enough. That's not an insult. For most teams, good enough shipped yesterday beats perfect shipped never.

Buffer ($6/mo) solved scheduling. Not strategy. Scheduling. Don't confuse the two.

Adkumo turns one prompt into 100 ad creatives. Set up your brand kit — colors, tone, guidelines — and everything stays on-brand on its own. It plugs straight into Google Ads and Meta, so you go from idea to live campaign in minutes. No public pricing. You have to talk to sales.

Zapier (free-$69/mo) is the invisible glue between everything else on this list. You'll forget it's running. That's the point.

Mailchimp ($13/mo) because email still works. It works better than anything on Instagram. Nobody wants to hear that.

Surfer SEO ($89/mo) is worth it if you care about search. Most people say they care about search. Most people don't actually do anything about it.

Copy.ai ($49/mo) writes drafts, not finals. Treat it like a brainstorming partner with no taste. Useful. Not sufficient.

HubSpot ($20/mo+) is for when you need the whole thing. CRM, email, landing pages, analytics. It does everything. Nothing spectacularly. Sometimes that's exactly what you need.

Tools don't fix strategy. They accelerate whatever you already have. If what you have is nothing, you'll get there faster.