Top 5 Small Business Tools to Improve your Internet Marketing Strategies

Small businesses today spend a great deal of time creating and maintaining websites, blogs, and other forms of social media and web content to build and maintain an audience over the web. Well, this makes perfect sense since not only is online marketing highly effective in terms of brand recognition and traffic response, it’s also cost effective. Here are some small business tools you can use to help improve your Internet marketing strategy.

Let’s say that your small business website already features your products and/or services, posted some high quality, relevant articles, videos, and pictures, and you are actively performing SEO tasks to increase your website’s overall rank. The only question is how long can you keep it up? It is true that these tasks take up a lot of time and effort. Creating quality and relevant content and keeping up with SEO is no easy task. This is where business tools and automation come into play. So what are some popular automation tools that you can use for your small business?

MailChimp – This is probably one of the best automation tools small businesses can use for email marketing. Once you have successfully created an email list and you are already reaching out to all your contacts, you need to know how to automate responses in case they reach out to you by filling out a contact form, download your eBook, white paper, brochure, etc. MailChimp allows you to send follow up emails to your list automatically. The best thing about this is that this tool is free until your contact list reaches 2,000.

Zemanta – This is a great plugin if you have a WordPress powered blog or website. Zemanta suggests royalty free photos based on the keywords that appear in your post. You do not have to search manually for an applicable image. This tool will also suggest other links to related content for SEO purposes and to help your readers to find relatable content on your blog. Zemanta is also free to use.

Scribe – This tool is like hiring a content marketing expert to check everything you write. It will tell you how your articles rate on how interesting or engaging they are and even some tips on how to increase readability. This great tool also helps analyze your posts and websites to provide you the best keywords to increase traffic. It will also help you create Internal and external links to drive more traffic to your website. Scribe costs about $100 per month.

Hubspot – Everything you need for your small business is already provided by Hubspot. This resource includes information on how to manage landing pages, lead management, forms and opt-ins, SEO, social and blogging tools, and even provides you with some amazing inbound marketing knowledge. It costs around $200 to $1,000, which is a great deal considering all the features that come along with this tool and service.

Toll Free Numbers – Some people think that toll free numbers are not considered automation software, and for the most part, this is in fact true. However, many successful small businesses will that say that an effective toll free vanity number is one of the best business tools available. Vanity toll free numbers help to close the gap between your business and your customers. By providing a toll free number to your customers, you provide them convenience.

Today marketing is all about convenience and personalization. How can your small business utilize these automation tools to provide your convenience and personalization they are looking for?