By Brianna Vetrano, Digital Place Marketing Consultant, Vetrano Digital Marketing

With the AI revolution well underway, there is no shortage of AI tools for place marketers to choose from. But knowing which tool to use (and when) can make all the difference.

This guide dives into ten powerful AI tools to explore what they’re best at, where they fall short, and how place marketers can use them to be more creative, strategic, and efficient.

1. ChatGPT

Use this tool when you want to write strong content, generate ideas, craft strategies, generate basic code, or are looking for general AI support.

• Strengths: Highly conversational; great at brainstorming; skilled at matching brand voice and tone; deep research capabilities; builds a memory about your preferences; advanced data analysis and graph creation available in the paid version.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Known for sharing false information (hallucinations); doesn’t automatically cite sources; trained on data with a cutoff of October 2023.
  
  
• A feature that may surprise you: You can create Custom GPTs trained on your region’s messaging, assets, and priorities and embed it into your site as a chatbot assistant.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Build a custom GPT to serve as a talent relocation concierge; build detailed location decision maker personas; brainstorm campaign themes.

2. Perplexity AI

Use this tool for research, comparisons, fact checking, and finding more recent information.

• Strengths: Surfaces timely news and content; great at comparative insights; reliably sources citations; includes real-time browsing.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Not great for long-form writing; less creative; limited memory and context for follow-ups; tone and formatting are less customisable.
  
  
• A feature that may surprise you: In Copilot mode, Perplexity walks you through multi-step research processes, showing what it searched, clicked, and summarised.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Benchmark your city against peer regions for cost of business; find recent rankings and media mentions; collect the latest updates about a prospect company.

3. Claude

Use this tool to summarise long documents or draft reports, whitepapers, and briefs.

• Strengths: Great at handling long-form documents; aware of context when summarising; better at ethical reasoning and using a diplomatic tone
  
  
• Weaknesses: Not as strong at creative writing or campaign ideation.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Claude can analyse multiple large documents in a single chat and extract insights across them without losing context.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Summarise business climate reports for presentation decks; distil local government policies into investor-friendly briefs; convert research findings into talking points for executives; pull key insights from industry reports.

4. Gemini

Use this tool to analyse data in Google Sheets or within Google Workspace.

• Strengths: Good at interpreting charts, spreadsheets, and structured data; deeply integrated with Google Docs, Gmail, Drive, and Sheets; access to Google Search for real-time context.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Output often lacks depth; weaker at strategic recommendations; less intuitive for long-form ideation.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you:  Gemini can analyse PDFs or images directly from chat.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Analyse industry cluster data in Google Sheets; extract insights from a scanned property map or investment brief PDF; summarise stakeholder meeting notes stored in Google Docs.

5. Jasper

Use this tool to help your team produce strong, on-brand content consistently and efficiently

• Strengths: Can be trained on your brand’s tone and voice; ideal for content across web, social, and email; includes templates for different content types; built for team collaboration.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Lacks deep strategic reasoning; requires content examples to fine-tune tone; better for execution than planning.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Use the “Brand Voice” feature to upload writing samples and help Jasper learn your place brand’s voice.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Scale out content for social, newsletters, and landing pages; ensure consistent tone across talent and investment messaging; draft event promotions for MICE audiences.

6. Midjourney

Use this tool to create imaginative imagery, visual storytelling, and concept mock-ups. 

• Strengths: Generates high-quality visuals from detailed prompts; Easy to use; great for concept mock-ups or storytelling; fun to experiment and brainstorm with.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Doesn’t always follow prompt details; using photorealistic representations of destinations or experience may risk audience trust, so it’s best for abstract or stylised visuals.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Upload an image and use the /describe command to get four prompt ideas based on your image, which can be helpful for creative ideation.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Mock up trade show booth ideas; build artistic maps for your city; experiment with animated storytelling, create concept art and brainstorm visual themes for campaigns.

7. Talkwalker AI

Use this tool when you want to monitor brand perception, track sentiment, and analyse trends of conversations across channels. 

• Strengths: Detects emotion and sentiment in real time; strong filtering and data visualisation; includes predictive trend analysis.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Higher subscription costs; needs proper configuration to avoid irrelevant noise; interface can be complex for new users.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Visual listening can detect imagery like logos, scenes, and landmarks, even when your destination or organisation name isn’t mentioned.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Track how your city is being represented in global media; monitor sentiment across social channels; analyse travel interest from specific markets.

8. Fireflies.ai

Use this tool when you want to automate meeting notes and track conversations.

• Strengths: Creates smart summaries from transcribed conversations; builds action items lists; searchable transcript archive; integrates with Zoom, Teams, and other platforms.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Occasional transcription inaccuracies; some features locked behind paywalls.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Ask Fireflies chatbot questions like “What deadline did we set?” and it will search the transcript to answer.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Document stakeholder interviews or community feedback sessions; review past conversations ahead of executive meetings; action item summaries for each team member during campaign planning.

9. SEMrush

Use this tool when you want to analyse and improve your website’s SEO performance.

• Strengths: Comprehensive SEO toolkit; includes writing assistant for keyword optimisation; helps find and track backlinks; competitive analysis.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Doesn’t track visibility in AI agents like ChatGPT or Perplexity; may feel complex for non-SEOs.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: The Keyword Gap tool lets you compare your rankings with up to five competitors, showing what keywords they rank for that you don’t.
  
  
• Ideas for place marketers: Identify missed opportunities in search visibility; see what topics potential talent is searching about your region; find backlink opportunities based on industry keywords.

10. Lovo AI

Use this tool when you want to create high-quality, human-like voiceovers for videos, ads, and presentations.

• Strengths: Large voice and language library; realistic, natural-sounding output; customisable pitch, pace, and delivery; easy to use.
  
  
• Weaknesses: Requires some trial and error to perfect the tone or cadence.
  
  
• Feature that may surprise you: Lovo’s beta voice cloning lets you clone your own voice for more personalised narration.
  
  
• Place marketing use cases: Create multilingual voiceovers for investment attraction videos; turn your annual report into a highlight reel with voiceover; add narration to an animated video showing how your team supports companies during relocation.

Learning how to integrate AI into your daily workflow isn’t just smart, it’s essential. And the better you get at pairing the right tool with the right task, the more impact you can deliver for your region, even with limited resources.

Expert support for place brands

Brianna Vetrano is a digital place marketing consultant helping place brands drive meaningful, measurable results through digital marketing. Over the last decade, she has worked with more than 85 place teams to attract investment, visitors and talent to regions around the globe. Learn more about Brianna and her services at vetranodigital.com.