My 15 Minutes of Fame: Marketing Automation Tools for Smaller Tasks

While they may not be looking for advanced solutions, small businesses can benefit from many simple, free marketing automation tools. Here's a look at several of the options available.

Marketing automation is a broad term that can mean something different to different people - and for small business owners, there's no doubt that marketing automation will mean something vastly different than it does to a large enterprise. While writing Marketing Automation for Dummies, I distinguished between Marketing Automation with a capital "M," and marketing automation with a lowercase "m." Even basic automations (think the lowercase "m" version) can make your small business run more efficiently.

The marketing automation revolution has created a ton of companies who serve this marketplace. There are also a lot of companies who are not "marketing automation vendors" and never show up on any analyst radar, but which can easily help you streamline your marketing via simple automations. Let's take a look at four technologies that I'd suggest small business owners take a serious look at as their first step toward full automation.

Content Marketing for SMBs

Content marketing is a large piece of marketing automation. Every bit of communication you have with your leads and customers needs to be following the methodologies set out by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing, published by Wiley in 1999. He advises marketers to provide people with value, and they will in turn value your relationship. In a world with so much noise from companies, this is the best way to engage and build relationships.

The biggest issue with content marketing for many small businesses is finding the resources to create content. Between finding topics to write about and creating an attractive finished product, content creation can seem like a major drain on time and resources - but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few free tools that can easily help you get over all of these humps.

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