I Built a Free AI-Powered Tool to Plan Your Next Marketing Campaign

I recently launched a free automated campaign planner. Just answer a short quiz, and you’ll get a customized marketing campaign brief — tailored to your business goals — delivered straight to your inbox. This article dives into a bit of my thought process behind it.

You can try it here, or read below to learn about it.

Why I Built It

1. To help small businesses

I've worked with dozens of SMB clients over the years and I see one trend all the time: even smart, capable founders often treat marketing like a checklist — make some assets, try to “go viral,” and hope it turns into traction.

That cool idea you saw on Twitter or YouTube might be useful, but you won't get the results you want if it's not part of a strategy that's all pushing in the same direction. In other words, without a clear map, that efforts are scattered and don't translate into new customers.

I wanted to create a tool that helps fill that gap. This quiz maps your answers to campaign recommendations based on your goals, industry, growth stage, and more. Think of it as a shortcut to a focused marketing strategy.

2. To master new tools

As far as why I took this route to solve the problem: I’ve always had an affinity for AI and automation, and with how fast marketing is changing, I wanted to build skills to combine them more effectively. This is one of my early forays into "vibe coding" as well.

3. To test new lead generation tactics in the face of AI

Interactive tools like this are proving more reliable for lead generation than a gated PDF guide or similar, in part because they provide more value to the user. I expect I'll be building more in the future, so it seemed like a good time to start experimenting.

What You’ll Get (The Output)

The tool doesn’t just hand you generic advice — it delivers a campaign plan that covers:

• Messaging to emphasize

• Which channels to focus on

• What content formats to test first

• Brief explanations behind the decisions

Each recommendation is based on the inputs you provide, paired with automated research and analysis, focused by the guardrails in the strategy database (more on all this below).

You’ll receive your brief via email, so there’s nothing to install or download.

Who This Is For

Right now, the planner is optimized for B2B SaaS teams — especially smaller, fast-moving ones who need a strategic starting point they can act on quickly.

Not in SaaS? That’s fine. I added some“Other” answer options so non-SaaS companies can try it too and still get tailored suggestions.

The recommendation setup in the backend is less robust for the non-SaaS option, but you should still get something useful out of it. Feel free to contact me if you want to talk about similar solution though.

How I Set It Up

Originally, I planned to use AirOps to handle the automation, but some of the features I needed (like webhooks) were locked behind a paywall. Since I wanted to keep this project cheap, I switched to Zapier, which gave me what I needed at about 10% of the cost.

Zapier was cheaper but definitely came with tradeoffs, so I'm not sure if it would be powerful enough to make a business-ready version of this tool (such as for agency use cases). At least without other purchases.

For example, AirOps has more AI models available and more AI Search options, including Deep Research. If I wanted to set up more than GPT-4o Search for these steps, I'd need to set up the Perplexity API on top of the OpenAI API.

The quiz itself was originally going to use an off-the-shelf form builder, but the customization was too limited for what I wanted, so I coded it from scratch on Replit.

Surprisingly, coding it this way took less time than using the form-builders.

Here’s an overview of what the automation does under the hood:

1. Passes quiz responses into Zapier as JSON

2. Pulls info from a JSON database I built and sets some predefined guardrails

3. Runs a series of AI-based research steps on your company and target customer base

4. Uses info from steps 1-3 to pull strategy recommendations from the JSON database

5. Uses more prompt chaining to process the above info and assemble a campaign brief

6. Formats everything and sends it to your email

Limitations

The current (06-09-25) version has less powerful research tools, so it's not as thorough as I would like in its research. I added some compensation for this by breaking research into a series of more specific tasks and compiling the results, but overall it still taps into fewer sources than I'd prefer, and might still struggle handling brands that don't have unique names (i.e. the sentiment analysis step might get confused at times).

It will also underperform for companies who don't have much web presence to begin with.

Since research steps had to be broken up for better results, and Zapier charges credits per step, this means the usage limits will burn up faster than planned, and may ultimately cost more than a few API calls would have for more expensive models.

What’s Next

I’m still refining the AI prompts and exploring more integrations to improve the recommendations and delivery — all while keeping the process cost-effective.

The output is also currently all text, so I’m testing out more flexible prompts to create flowcharts and tables for easier readability.

Aside from the $20/month fees for Zapier and Replit (which I'll use for other things), the API costs for this are about $0.02 per run, which should be fine at this scale since I don't expect a huge amount of usage (and I have rate limits in place just in case), but if I move to a more sophisticated "next steps" automation, I'll probably require users to enter an API code of their own.

I'm aiming to make this useful enough that a team can use it to quickly clarify their next move. If you have requests or other feedback, you can contact me here.

Test out the campaign planner here. I'd love to hear your thoughts!