What do today’s AI expert marketers do that others don’t? Simply put, they view AI as a teammate. 

This shift in perspective isn’t too surprising, as nearly all marketing professionals are using AI to some degree. In fact, over 85% of professionals now view AI and workplace automation positively, marking a significant increase in acceptance and enthusiasm compared to previous years.

However, as you’re expanding your marketers’ toolkit with everything from AI email marketing solutions to AI workflow tools, it’s critical to only lean into the solutions, practices and philosophies that will truly help you scale up your output while retaining its quality. After all, we’ve seen that AI-for-AI’s-sake can usher in some negative consequences (just ask Duolingo).

So what types of items actually belong in your marketing toolkit? We’ve tapped two AI experts to break it all down:

• Whitney Belmonte, AI educator and founder of Whitney Does AI
• R. J. Talyor, Founder & CEO of Backstroke/longtime leader teaching people how to use AI in marketing

In their upcoming webinar AI Secrets of Elite Marketers: How to Become a 10X Marketer, they’re spilling tea on the workflows, prompts, tools and tactics that are worth your time and investment. They’ll cover how to 10X your output without 10X-ing your headcount.

But before their session goes live, we’re giving you a sneak peek of the top 6 marketing toolkit essentials these two AI experts say every future-focused marketer should have in their arsenal.

Top 6 Marketing Toolkit Essentials

Marketing Toolkit Essential #1: Learn How to Write Good AI Prompts for Marketing Campaigns

Most marketers are still throwing random lines into ChatGPT and hoping for gold. It’s time to stop winging it, as real AI experts know how to prompt with purpose. (In fact, Whitney swears that the right prompting strategy collapses timelines and gets campaigns live faster than ever!)

Here’s where prompt writing practices like the Pyramid Method can enhance your prompt engineering. Instead of crafting the perfect prompt right away, the Pyramid Mehtod encourages you to build up to it. Start by describing a broad idea and layering in details that guide your generative or agentic AI tool toward a meaningful response.

Let's take a look at an example of the Pyramid Method at work for DTC marketers. Our example below makes writing good AI prompts—and receiving richer returns—significantly much more likely.

An Example Prompt Pyramid for DTC Email Marketing:

• State Your Goal: Re-engage lapsed skincare customers with a 20% off summer sale.
• Detail Your Audience: Women 25–40, eco-conscious, love clean beauty + self-care rituals.
• Explain Your Brand Voice: Warm, modern, a little playful. Think Glossier meets Goop.
• Mention the Specific of Your Campaign: Mention our new Brightening Serum. Use urgency (e.g., “Glow Now”). No all-caps.
• State Your Output Format: I want a subject line, preview text, headline, 2 short body lines, 1 CTA.

With these details in-mind, a solid email marketing AI prompt may look like:

“Write a re-engagement email for a summer skincare sale. The tone is warm, playful, Glossier-esque. Audience: 25–40 eco-conscious women. Mention our bestselling Brightening Serum and 20% off. Use a short subject line with urgency (“Glow Now”), and keep copy under 120 words. Include subject, preview text, headline, body, and CTA."

Marketing Toolkit Essential #2: Stack Your AI Toolkit Like a Creative Department

Obviously, AI isn’t a monolithic tool. It’s a squad. And it can be a killer marketing tech stack, if you draft the right players.

We suggest combining segmentation tools, vibe coding apps, image generators, strategic decision-making AI tools and AI email marketing platforms like Backstroke (*ahem*) to generate your campaigns in minutes with data-driven creative and 75+ templates.

The result? Your one-person marketing team now has the firepower of a 10-person crew. 

Marketing Toolkit Essential #3: Start with Signals, Not Content

Elite marketers don’t start with copy. They start with analyzing behavior. 

AI marketing automation tools like Backstroke analyze live subscriber signals to generate segments and personalized content instantly. This is due to Backstroke’s proprietary 12,000-brand training set, which provides real-time insights into consumer wants, needs, behaviors, and preferences, all of which marketers can learn from and adapt toward.

This era of AI agent workflows simply looks like: data → segment → render → revenue.

Marketing Toolkit Essential #4: Predictive Rendering > Guesswork

Manually rebuilding emails every time? That’s practically ancient history. 

10X marketers don’t A/B test their way into relevance. They use AI workflow tools that predict what layout, content, and message is most likely to convert, based on real behavior across thousands of email marketing campaigns.

Today’s best AI email marketing tools include smart templates with dynamic logic blocks to render product drops, loyalty flows and promos in seconds. In fact, Backstroke now has 75 customizable, easy-to-use email templates that are totally optimized for DTC workflows and ready to use.

It’s not guessing. It’s data-driven domination.

Marketing Toolkit Essential #5: Set Guardrails That Keep You On Brand

Sure, AI is powerful. But without keeping creative guidelines in mind, it can be quite chaotic.

It’s essential when using AI in marketing to protect your brand’s integrity, ensure consistency across messages and creative assets and mitigate risks associated with automated content creation. AI guardrails need to be incorporated into your workflows to strike the correct voice of the brand prompts, tone, styles, offers, and more. 

These guardrails ensure AI enhances your brand’s creativity, instead of derailing it or making it sound generic, inauthentic or downright silly.

Marketing Toolkit Essential #6: Think Like a “Do It Live” Marketer

This philosophical outlook is essential. It’s for the fearless risk-takers who are truly changing how marketing is done. 

Forget long briefs and waiting on approvals. 

10X marketers preview, tweak and send . . . all in one session. When you trust your AI agent workflow and AI email marketing toolkit, you're free to move fast, test often and learn while you earn. So be fearless, trust your AI toolkit and send away!

Get More Details & Direction From the AI Experts

Join Backstroke CEO R. J. Talyor and AI educator Whitney Belmonte for a high-energy, live session to get more details on these marketing toolkit essentials and other tips, tricks and insights.

RSVP to AI Secrets of Elite Marketers: How to Become a 10X Marketer to learn:

• Real prompts and practical frameworks 
• The exact AI stack behind 10X-the-output workflows
• A roadmap to plug into your strategy right now (seriously, you’ll be able to implement these tools in the moment!)

Register now and start scaling like the elite marketer you’re meant to be.