How to Use AI to With Marketing Automation Tools

You haven't posted on one of your social media platforms in two weeks. Because a client deadline showed up… then another one… and marketing fell to the bottom of the to-do list.

Sound familiar?

Even though it’s creative work, marketing comes with a lot of repetitive tasks. You can make it easier by relying on marketing automation tools, which keep your marketing running day-to-day so you don’t have to give it your constant attention.

I keep the creative work human, but I have handed over many tasks to automation and AI that follow the same steps every week or month. The result? More time for creative work (or client work) and less time spent on the un-fun parts of marketing.

The cost of the subscription is worth buying back my time.

How marketing automation helps a solo business

Marketing automation means handing the repeatable parts of your marketing to software, so a task runs in the background without your involvement. Scheduling your social media posts is an example of marketing automation. So is an email sequence that sends itself the moment someone downloads a lead magnet.

Marketing often feels non-urgent, especially if you’re running a solo business and have a full roster of clients. Client work comes with deadlines, and marketing doesn't, so marketing is what gets dropped when you’re busy. Not only does automation save you time, but you don’t have to remember to spend time on marketing.

Another benefit is content repurposing, or re-using existing ideas. Marketing automation can do something like “take this blog post and turn it into social posts,” so you’re getting more mileage out of the marketing you’ve already created and spending less time creating from scratch.

The role of AI and MCPs in marketing automation

The automation possibilities changed once I could connect AI tools to the apps I already use. These connectors, often called MCPs (Model Context Protocol), let a tool like Claude or ChatGPT work inside another app, read what's there, and take actions on your behalf.

Every tool in my list below has one. In some cases, I have scheduled tasks running in Claude that take actions on a regular basis. In other instances, I give Claude an instruction in the moment and Claude completes the task on the fly — which still saves me time. I can also save my instructions to Claude as a skill, so Claude follows the same steps every time.

4 marketing automation tools worth paying for

A few tools, in particular, have removed a significant amount of manual work from my marketing efforts.

1. Social media creation and scheduling

My tool: Buffer [affiliate link]

Social media is one of the main ways people find me, especially LinkedIn.

I’ve long had a process to repurpose my blog posts (like this one) as social media post, but the MCP connector to Buffer made this even easier.

Here’s what happens:

• Claude reads my published blog posts.
• Claude writes drafts of social posts. My general rule of thumb is one social post per H2.
• Claude sends the draft social posts directly to Buffer
• I go into Buffer, edit the draft, and add it to my queue.

The quality of this process depends substantially on reference files that Claude can work from. I have a voice and tone guide and examples of my LinkedIn content that Claude reads on every run.

With this process, I now prep social content monthly instead of weekly. The amount of time saved is substantial, since Claude can add the posts directly to Buffer.

Email marketing

My tool: Kit [affiliate link]

I use Kit for my newsletter, landing pages, and email sequences. I follow a similar process every time. If I create a new lead magnet, for example, I copy the landing page of another product, edit it, and create a new email sequence. Now, Claude can help with this process substantially.

With a new lead magnet:

• I create a brief that describes the new product
• Claude writes a first draft of the landing page and saves it to my Google Drive for review
• I review and edit the landing page draft
• Claude builds the landing page in Kit, saving me the manual copying/pasting of information from my draft
• Claude can build email sequences in Kit
• I go into Kit, confirm everything looks good, and connect the landing page to the sequence

I also use the Kit connector for analysis, like “How many new subscribers grabbed a free product I offered at the end of a webinar?” This is a bit tricky on its own. I provide a link to the landing page when they attend the webinar, and a tag is applied in Kit if someone downloads the free product.

But the actual question is a timing one: How many people got this new tag within X days of the webinar? Claude can answer that for me, and it runs on a scheduled task.

How to Evaluate Your Solopreneur Tech Stack

Which tools best meet your needs, for the right price?

Building SoloAnna Burgess Yang

Video editing

My tools: Riverside and Claude

Video is a hangup for many solopreneurs, because editing takes skill and time you may not have (myself included). This is the category where AI completely changed what I was capable of doing.

Claude can create branded videos for me now, which I couldn't do on my own before. No amount of dinking around in Canva got me what I wanted. I have a skill that turns some of my blog posts into short animated videos.

For editing footage I've already recorded (such as webinars I host), I work through the Riverside MCP. The editing is transcript-based, so I can tell Claude which parts to cut by pointing at the obvious parts where I made a mistake. I used to do this myself with transcript-based tools (highlight a section of the transcript and hit “delete”), but now Claude can do it for me.

Blog uploading

My tools: Notion and Ghost

Drafting is the creative part. Getting a finished draft onto your website is the tedious part. It's the exact same copying and reformatting every time.

I draft blog posts in Notion [affiliate link], and Ghost is my content management system (CMS). Moving a post between them used to be entirely manual, often taking 20 minutes per blog post.

So I used Claude Code to build an automation that does it for me, working from Ghost's API documentation. I'm not a developer. I described what I wanted in plain language and Claude built it. I use Cloudflare, which is free, and a Cloudflare Worker runs in the background and handles moving the new post over to Ghost.

Everything comes over:

• The body of my post, fully formatted
• The meta description
• Tags
• The featured image

I never let this automation automatically publish posts. But now, it takes me about two minutes to go into Ghost, review the draft, and schedule it. At the volume I publish, this can save me hours of time every month.

Why I Publish on Substack, Ghost, and Kit

I publish on three separate platforms because it works for me.

Building SoloAnna Burgess Yang

What to think about before you commit to a tool

• Check whether the tool grows with you. A tool you outgrow in a year costs you the migration on top of the subscription, so think about where your business is headed when you add something new.
• Do the time math. If upgrading a tool to access AI features costs $20 a month and saves me an hour, it's worth it, because my time is worth more than $20 an hour.
• Prefer tools that do one thing well. I'd rather run several specific tools with their own MCPs than one all-in-one platform that does everything in a mediocre way.

How to decide where to start

MCP access — connecting your AI tool to your marketing tools — is rarely available on a free plan. So even if you’re using the free plan of any marketing automation tools, you’ll likely need to upgrade to add AI.

If a tool has built-in automation that’s already working well for you, start with a tool where you think you’d save additional time with AI. Social media, for me, is near-constant. Creating a new landing page in Kit, for me, is less frequent. So if I were to pick one, adding automation via the Buffer MCP gives me a lot more immediate benefit in my business.

Look at the last two weeks and find the task you did by hand more than once, like formatting a newsletter or writing social posts one at a time. A $20 to $30 monthly subscription probably handles it from here.

Let the next tool wait until another repetitive task turns up. But once you see how much time you can save by adding AI to your marketing automation tools, you’ll probably be itching to do more.

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