The modern marketing stack is expanding faster than most teams can evaluate, adopt, or optimize. This has led to widespread adoption, but also a great deal of confusion. By choosing tools more intentionally, however, marketers can utilize these new tools and platforms in much more effective ways.
Over the past several years, the number of technologically advanced tools and platforms marketers have access to has expanded exponentially. From AI-powered ad platforms to calendar-based outreach, marketers are navigating a fragmented landscape where the right software can unlock efficiency. However, for as beneficial as these tools can be, they can also be highly detrimental, quietly draining the budgets of marketing companies in inefficient ways.
Here, five marketing leaders share the platforms and strategies that are actually moving the needle for their teams.
The Value of Automating the Right Tasks
Sartaj Singh, the Founding Product Marketing Director of Valid Co., which operates Valid, believes AI tools can be incredibly valuable to marketers, but must be positioned correctly within the larger structure of the team, with proper oversight. “AI is very good at being a good set of hands, if you will, right? The actual decision-making, the brain, is from the human marketer themselves. It’s, I would say, a lot of an execution layer.”
As AI tools multiply, marketing teams face a new pressure: deep technical fluency in platforms they didn’t need to understand a year ago. However, Singh argues that the solution isn’t to make every marketer an AI engineer. “I think it’s really the cost-cutting that ends up costing them more. For example, very good creatives are needed on platforms like Meta if you’re trying to advertise, and sometimes people think they can just produce a bunch cheaply, whereas obviously the actual return on the revenue you get on those creatives is so much lower on average.”
Instead, Valid uses an engineering team to automate repetitive execution tasks, freeing human strategists to focus on high-level decision-making. Every tool should either save time or unlock bigger bets, and software selection must be intentional. As he concludes, “AI is doing a really great job at basically taking out the rote daily tasks; uploading ads, data aggregation, basically anything routine. It gives our analysts and strategists more time to sit down and think about the actual overarching strategy.”
Improving Marketing Campaigns
Most marketers overlook one of their most-used communication channels: outbound email. As Jennifer Bassett, Head of Marketing at Rocketseed, says, this is a gross oversight that can serve to hamper marketers. “One-to-one email generally has a 99% open rate effortlessly. So you’re getting your marketing message at the right time in front of the right person.”
Rocketseed’s platform adds targeted marketing banners to outbound email signatures, achieving a 99% open rate thanks to the inherent 1-to-1 trust of business email. When comparing the platform to others in the space, Bassett says, “The biggest thing they’re missing is their tracking; they’ve got no data on whether the campaign is actually resonating with the audience. And if you do targeting without software, then it’s Batch and Blast to all. So you’re going to send one campaign that may be completely irrelevant to 80% of your email receivers.”
By centralizing management, marketers gain analytics, consistent branding, and granular targeting by sender, recipient, and engagement level. Bassett concludes, “The emails are already being sent. You’re already reaching this volume of people. And it’s a case of just bringing in your existing marketing campaigns from your wider business objectives and using email as a channel to push that message.”
The Importance of Adaptability
Adopting new tools without a framework is a recipe for wasted spend. Fortunately, Malorie Benjamin, Chief Transformation Officer at Dixon Schwabl + Company, has built a deliberate process for evaluating new technology. “We have what we call a test team, and the sole purpose of that is to have team members who are going to be actually using those tools participating in the process, understanding what the use cases might be, and testing those out in real-world situations before we make a wholesale change or implement it across the agency at large.”
Through the use of this dedicated “test team,” the company is able to vet tools before they’re rolled out agency-wide. The agency also uses AWS QuickSight’s AI-powered querying to democratize access to analytics, letting non-analysts explore data directly. As Benjamin explains, “Democratizing that data and making it available to our full teams is really something I’m super passionate about. This queryability of the data is the next step, because not everybody has had the benefit of really being able to dig into data sources, but they generally know the question they have about that data set. Having the accessibility to just go in and ask that question is going to be a game changer.”
The underlying philosophy: adaptability is a core competency; technical knowledge can be taught, but teams that adjust as platforms evolve stay relevant. As she concludes, “Adaptability is the number one skill. So much is going to continue to change, and I think this is not unique to the marketing space. Obviously, tech skills are really great, but none of it really matters—everything else can sort of be learned. If you’re not curious or adaptable, you’re not going to make it.”
Don’t Overlook Calendar Invites
Another often overlooked tool at modern marketers’ disposal is calendar invites. These can offer a significant signal advantage, especially when someone adds an event to their calendar; they’ve declared high intent. As Marissa Stone, Senior Manager of Product Marketing & Growth at AddEvent, notes, “It’s kind of like one of the last few digital spaces that isn’t overrun with advertisements. So if I am letting you into my calendar and I’m subscribing to your calendar, I’m very highly motivated to have a relationship with you. And from a qualification standpoint, I’m obviously a great lead or a great customer because I’m so invested.”
The company has witnessed the success first-hand. “We’ve seen a 30% increase in attendance rate when people start using add-to-calendar buttons because it’s actually on their calendar, and it’s removing the act of having to remember or see that email or get that text message. If it’s in my email, I’m probably going to forget because there are 500 other things I’m juggling,” Stone says.
Because the channel is uncluttered, these messages are able to cut through to their actual recipients that much more effectively. Keys to success: reliability, automation, CRM integration, and UTM tracking. As she surmises, “You need to know if they are signing up for this event, which channel are they coming from, what messaging was it. It’s a huge missed opportunity if you’re sending out five different things, a text, an email, a Facebook post, and you’re not tracking that, because then you don’t actually know which channels are driving registration.”
Human Strategy is a Must
AI has dramatically accelerated creative production, but the hardest part of advertising isn’t actually the generation of content; it’s the final critical steps before an ad goes live. John Gargiulo, Founder of Airpost.ai, calls this the “last five miles” problem: the human judgment, legal review, and brand oversight that no algorithm can replace. “There are a lot of AI marketing pilots, and the vast majority of them fail because AI by itself is just not good enough for most marketing organizations. You need people to take it to what I call the last five miles of AI. AI does not solve that for itself.”
Airpost.ai’s hybrid model pairs AI-powered production with human strategy, generating radically different creative concepts in hours instead of weeks. “We have a lot of clients where it’s taken six weeks to go from an idea at the whiteboard to an ad in their TikTok or Meta account. And we can shorten that to six hours. That is a huge advantage for a large marketing department over its competitors.”
As AI scales production velocity, human processes (such as legal or brand review) will increasingly become the primary bottleneck. However, Gargiulo believes AI can be a potent tool in combating these issues. “As AI gets faster and better at making ads, we’re going to get to a point where humans are the bottleneck. Having your legal team look at every one of those hundreds of ads every week, having the brand team review them—it’s going to get impossible. So we’re going to have to figure out how to scale human attention and judgment and taste and compliance to keep up with AI.”
Final Thoughts
Effective marketing tools do not replace expertise; they enhance it. Whether leveraging AI for execution while humans focus on strategy, uncovering hidden potential in channels like email or calendar, or creating structured frameworks for adopting new technology, successful marketers share a key trait: intentionality. As tools continue to evolve, the true competitive edge goes to those who master their use.
