6 Lesser-Known AI Tools You’ll WANT to Use for Your Marketing Portfolio
If you’re tired of AI slop but still want to use AI to create a more impressive marketing portfolio and do it faster, you’ll love the tools I have for you today. Instead of giving you a never-ending, confusing guide on how to connect Claude to anything and everything, I curated lesser-known AI tools to help you in different parts of your portfolio-building process.
Feel free to pick and choose or try them all for your workflow. Some are free, some are paid: I’ll tell you all the details you need to know.
Granola - for taking and summarizing notes from your client meetings to use in your portfolio later. Free to use of $14/month for more features.
Notion AI - to prepare and organize all of your materials and figure out your strategy. Limited free trial, then $24/month.
Brandi by Copyfolio - to discover your personal brand and build your on-brand portfolio website easily. Free to chat with Brandi, $15/month to publish your portfolio
Reve - for creating single product images for your projects with a cool editor. Free to use or $7.99/month for more usage.
Lumalabs - to generate images, animations, and videos that’ll make people say “wow”. Limited free trial, then $30/month
Graphy - to make on-brand data visualizations, because although they’re not very exciting, they’re still much needed for a marketing portfolio. Free to use or $20/month for more usage.
I watched hundreds of videos, read even more reviews, and tried a dozen tools, so you don’t have to. After all that, here are the 6 best AI tools I found for creating a marketing portfolio that’ll actually get you hired. We’ll go through them roughly in the order of how you’d use them while working on your portfolio.
1. Granola for meeting notes and summaries
Summarizing your meeting notes doesn’t sound so sexy, but trust me, this will become a gold mine with time. Granola essentially transcribes the meetings you join and then summarizes them for you, doing a surprisingly good job.
My team has tried a couple of different options, but honestly, nothing beats Granola. So just start turning it on for client meetings and important work calls, they might come in handy for your portfolio later.
True, it’s not a tool you can just sign up for and get the benefit of right this moment, but one worth trying nonetheless.
Is Granola free to use?
Yes, Granola Basic is totally free. It takes your AI meeting notes, and you can use customized note templates too, it just has a limited meeting history. But you can always copy and paste notes to be stored elsewhere.
Or if you want your unlimited history in-app and some other, more advanced AI features, you can upgrade to Business for $14/month.
A Granola fun fact
They actually send 1.5% of your subscription fee (if you choose to pay) to Stripe Climate to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We love an eco-conscious brand.
2. Notion AI for prep and organization
Okay this one tool might not be so lesser-known, but it definitely deserves a thumbs up.
Notion itself is one of the best productivity and life management tools out there. It’s free and can do sooo much once you get the hang of it. You can find templates for it online and easily create a dashboard to track any aspect of your life.
Yes, including all the info that you’ll need for your portfolio. On top of that comes Notion AI, their agent that can help you come up with what materials you will need to collect and keep track of, figure out a system for how to do so, and so much more.
You can use it to structure your raw project notes, have it interview you about your projects for case study writing, or use it to draft your case study from different snippets and files you’ve collected.
It can basically help you with all the prep and organization you need to do before you jump into actually creating your marketing portfolio.
Is Notion AI free to use?
Notion itself is free to use for individuals, and it includes a limited trial of Notion AI. But if you actually want to use Notion Agent, you’ll have to subscribe to Notion Business for $24/month (or $240/year, which comes to $20/month).
3. Brandi by Copyfolio for creating your personal brand and portfolio website
With all your materials ready to go, it’s time to actually create your portfolio. Copyfolio itself is a portfolio website builder that was made specifically for writers and marketers, and Brandi is an AI personal branding coach that lives within Copyfolio.
You could totally jump into creating your portfolio site without thinking about your branding, but you’ll save yourself a lot of time if you sort that out first.
Figure out your personal branding
Brandi will ask you questions about you and your work to help you lay your personal brand’s foundations: your brand personality, tone of voice, and unique selling point. Based on these, she can even recommend matching fonts and colors to use.
Now imagine doing all this after you build your portfolio, having to go back to adjust everything to be on-brand. 🫠
Build your actual portfolio website
And don’t worry, Brandi doesn’t stop there. She can then either draft your social media strategy and content pillars with you (hey, visibility), or go on and help create the actual website and case studies.
You can chat about which of your projects would be the best to include, and she can advise you on the best format too. Will you need full-blown case studies? Or maybe a video gallery will do? You figure it out together, and she can actually add the sections and projects you need to your portfolio website.
And if you need help with writing an on-brand intro or any other bits, Brandi’s of course here to help you with that too.
Is Brandi by Copyfolio free to use?
Yes, Brandi is free to use, with no message limits, anytime you need her!
The only caveat is that if you like the portfolio you’ve built with Copyfolio and want to publish it, you’ll have to upgrade to Copyfolio Premium. That’s either $15/month or $108/year (which comes to $9/month)
Check these marketing portfolio examples if you want to see what marketers’ personal brands and portfolio websites made with Copyfolio look like!
4. Reve for generating stunning product shots
You’ve done a really impressive project, but it’s under NDA. Or perhaps you have a cool idea for a marketing campaign, but it doesn’t actually exist yet. How do you then show it, especially visually, in your portfolio? That’s where Reve comes in.
Reve is an AI image generator, but one that produces results that do not look like AI slop. You can upload a photo to start with and extend it with a prompt, and you can generate images to illustrate restricted or mock campaigns that’ll wow your recruiters.
Cindy Zhu on TikTok has a quick workflow with Claude and Reve for creating campaign images. Take a look and give it a try for your portfolio:
Is Reve free to use?
Yes, Reve has a Free plan where you can generate and edit images, but with a daily usage limit. If you want more capacity, they have Lite and Pro plans for $7.99 and $19.99 per month, depending on how much you want to use it.
Note the “Reve Model Training” line at the bottom of the table
Beware, though: if you look closer at their subscription plan details, they say that on the Free plan, you cannot opt out of their model being trained on your data. So any image you upload or prompt you enter will be gobbled up.
5. Lumalabs for creating images and cool animations
If you want to take it one step further and create not just static images but also cool animations and videos to illustrate campaigns, take a look at Lumalabs.
Similar to Reve, it works with prompts and ideally pictures to start with. But here you can create scenes from the different generated images and animate them together super easily.
Looking at the animation in Steven’s video, I first thought I definitely wouldn’t be able to create something like that. But then he broke it down step by step, and I realized that with the right tools, it’s actually really not that hard anymore.
Is Lumalabs free to use?
Lumalabs has a limited free trial, but no free plan. For proper usage, you’ll need to upgrade. Their lowest plan Lumalabs Plus includes 10,000 credits, Luma and third-party image and video models, and commercial use, for $30/month. For 4x the credits and usage, you can get Pro for $90/month, or for 15x usage, Ultra for $300/month.
As an AI tool for creating a few visuals for your marketing portfolio, the free trial or one month of their Plus plan will probably be enough, though.
6. Graphy for data visualization
Making data look pretty is most probably all marketers’ bane of existence (mine included). And while 3-4 years ago I used to trace Google Analytics graphs in Photoshop to make it look more on-brand, now we have AI tools like Graphy that make this a little easier.
You essentially drop your data in (think spreadsheets and whatnot), tell it what insights you’re looking for, and it’ll create more aesthetic visualizations for you. Of course, you can then also adjust the looks to make it on-brand and match your portfolio.
Hiring managers love seeing the performance of your work while also not being big fans of eyesore graph screenshots. So adding a more palatable version will be a win-win for everyone.
Is Graphy free to use?
Yes! With a 5-chart limit, you can use Graphy for free. But if you want to change their colors, remove the Graphy logo and/or more graphs and AI features, you’ll have to upgrade to their Plus plan for $20/month
Our AI toolkit for leveling up your marketing portfolio
There you have it. Our AI toolkit for pimping up your marketing portfolio without filling it up with AI slop.
There seem to be AI tools popping up for everything these days, but it’s hard to find the ones that are actually legit. I hope this list helped you cut through the noise and discover some tools you’ll enjoy using.
