The use of AI in industry is rapidly increasing across all sectors, from market automation to customer data processing. Small businesses must take advantage of AI’s many benefits to grow and remain competitive in this rapidly developing climate.
However, knowing where to start and what types of AI to leverage can be challenging with so many forms of AI available. This article, with its practical advice and real-world examples, will help you identify some possible use cases that apply to your small business. It provides a starting point to explore how you can leverage AI to benefit and grow your small business.
Keep reading as we explore the top 20 AI-powered tools for small business growth.
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How AI Can Help Your Small Business
Before diving into specific tools, let’s briefly take a look at how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to enhance your operations. While AI technology can help small businesses in many different ways, in this article, we focus on three main areas: marketing, sales, and productivity.
- Marketing: Using AI tools in marketing can help your business boost customer engagement and target audiences more effectively. By automating repetitive marketing tasks, you can also enjoy increased efficiency.
- Sales: AI-powered CRM tools enable you to streamline your business’s sales processes, ultimately increasing your lead generation and conversion rates.
- Productivity: By automating mundane tasks with AI, your team can focus on more critical activities. AI also helps to enhance team collaboration and project management, thus increasing your overall productivity level.
Leveraging AI to automate marketing, streamline sales processes, and automate mundane tasks will benefit you by increasing efficiency, improving lead generation, and increasing conversion rates. These improvements will also increase productivity, giving your business the boost it needs to set itself apart from the competition.
For a custom AI solution, you can hire organizations such as Idea Maker who will tailor AI solutions to your business challenges and needs.
20 Best AI Tools for Small Businesses
To make informed decisions about what AI to leverage, you will need to have an understanding of the following use cases and the benefits they provide. This will enable you to identify which options best suit your business, providing solutions to your specific challenges and business needs.
AI-Powered Writing and Content Generation
Artificial intelligence models lend themselves perfectly to writing and content generation. In fact, the primary aim of generative AI is to mimic human language in both content creation and understanding.
1. Grammarly: Proofreading and Grammar Checking
Grammarly is one of the most widely used AI-powered tools with over 30 million users taking advantage of its proofreading and grammar checking features. With this tool, users can paste text into its editor, which then highlights any grammatical and spelling errors and even provides suggestions. It also allows you to customize your dialect and grammatical preferences such as including the Oxford comma, for example.
2. MarketMuse: Content Strategy and Optimization
MarketMuse is an AI-based platform designed to improve content creation and SEO. It utilizes natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to offer topic research, detailed content briefs, optimization tips, competitive analysis, and strategic planning. With these insightful features, MarketMuse helps enhance content quality and boost search engine rankings.
3. Frase.io: Writing SEO-Optimized Content
Like MarketMuse, Frase.io also assists businesses and writers with content briefs, topic research, SEO optimization, and competitor analysis, ensuring high-quality, relevant content that ranks well on search engines. While the platform has a relatively low user base at just over 700 business-level users, its valuable functionality makes it an underdog worth trying.
4. MagicSlides: Presentation Generation
MagicSlides allows users to create presentations automatically through the power of artificial intelligence. It generates slides based on user input, streamlining the process of making professional and visually appealing presentations. By leveraging advanced algorithms, MagicSlides can significantly save your time and effort, as it instantly produces customized slides that meet your specific needs and preferences.
5. Anyword: Copywriting
Anyword helps businesses and marketers craft compelling content across mediums such as ads, social media, emails, and websites. By leveraging advanced large language algorithms, Anyword offers data-driven insights and optimizations to enhance marketing effectiveness and engagement.
AI-Powered Marketing Tools
With its powerful data processing capability, artificial intelligence is an invaluable addition to any marketing tool. Below are some AI-powered marketing tools that can help elevate your promotional operations.
6. Jacquard: Writing Email Subject Lines and Marketing Copy
Formerly known as Phrasee, Jacquard is a popular marketing technology that uses AI to generate and refine language specifically for email marketing and copy. Its machine learning algorithms create optimized copy that enhances audience engagement and boosts conversion rates, enabling brands to execute more impactful and personalized communication strategies.
7. UpMetrics: Business Planning and Performance Tracking
UpMetrics utilizes artificial intelligence to streamline the creation of detailed business plans and assist with performance tracking. It provides templates and features for financial projections, market analysis, and strategy formulation, making it an ideal tool for entrepreneurs and businesses. UpMetrics ultimately facilitates clear articulation of ideas, supports funding efforts, and enables goal achievement through organized planning and actionable insights.
8. Lavender.ai: AI-Powered Sales Email Assistant
Lavender.ai leverages AI technology to deliver conversational marketing solutions, particularly through messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It automates customer interactions via chatbots, enhancing engagement with personalized responses and streamlining sales processes. The platform also analyzes customer data to refine messaging strategies and improve overall effectiveness.
9. Sniper AI: Recruitment and Talent Acquisition
Sniper AI is an innovative tool designed for precision in digital advertising campaigns. Powered by AI, it meticulously analyzes data to pinpoint optimal audience segments and advertising placements. This technology empowers marketers with data-driven insights, enhancing campaign effectiveness and maximizing return on investment efficiently.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Tools
Customer relationship management is another area in which AI excels, thanks to its data processing capabilities. By analyzing current and historical customer data, there are many AI tools that can be used to help your business make data-driven decisions.
10. Einstein GPT: AI-Powered CRM by Salesforce
Einstein GPT combines Salesforce’s AI-driven CRM platform – Einstein – with OpenAI’s GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) model to help businesses improve their efficiency and customer engagement. This integration revolutionizes Salesforce’s CRM capabilities by leveraging GPT’s natural language processing to automate tasks, personalize customer interactions, and deliver actionable insights.
11. Zia: Zoho CRM’s Conversational Sales Assistant
Zia is an AI-driven sales assistant within Zoho CRM that leverages data analysis to predict outcomes, automate tasks, and offer contextual insights. With these innovative features, sales teams are empowered to boost their productivity and foster stronger customer relationships. The Zoho tool suite also boasts an impressive user base of over 45 million users, making it a reliable choice for your business’s CRM.
12. Reply.io: AI Sales Outreach and Lead Generation Automation
Reply.io is a robust sales engagement platform designed to automate and streamline outreach efforts. It facilitates personalized email sequences, calls, and task management, enhancing prospecting efficiency and optimizing communication strategies. With comprehensive analytics, Reply.io can significantly improve your business’s response rates and sales conversion metrics.
13. Crystal Knows: Personality Insights for Sales and Communication
Crystal Knows delivers customer personality insights to enhance business communication and relationships. By examining public data and online behaviors, it generates comprehensive personality profiles, enabling businesses to effectively customize their communication approaches. These insights can also be utilized to foster stronger connections with prospects, clients, and colleagues, and improve overall customer engagement.
Design and Creative Tools
Thanks to its contextual understanding of user prompts and image generation capabilities, artificial intelligence is an excellent compliment to any design tools. Using AI for creative purposes can also increase your staff’s productivity and efficiency by streamlining the design process.
14. Appy Pie Design: DIY Design Tool
Appy Pie Design is a cloud-based tool that simplifies graphic design for users with varying skill levels. It features an intuitive interface and a vast selection of templates, enabling easy creation of logos, social media graphics, presentations, and other visual content.
15. Fliki: – AI-Powered Video Creation
Fliki allows users to transform text into dynamic videos and voice overs, streamlining the creation of high-quality multimedia content. With text-to-speech capabilities, automatic video generation, and a variety of templates and media assets, this tool is especially useful for marketers, educators, and content creators.
Data and Document Management
Manually managing data and important documents can be cumbersome for businesses of all sizes. Fortunately, with the power of AI, documents can be fed to intelligent algorithms to automatically extract essential information and identify data trends.
16. Secoda: Data Management and Discovery
Secoda is a platform focused on data discovery and management that enables teams to locate, comprehend, and utilize their data efficiently. It consolidates data assets, features robust search functions, and includes tools for documentation, collaboration, and governance. Secoda enhances organizational productivity and data-driven decision making by improving data accessibility and usability.
AI-Powered Productivity and Collaboration Tools
Together, the capabilities of artificial intelligence lend themselves to a variety of productivity and collaboration tools aimed at streamlining your daily operations. Below, we’ve outlined some of the top AI-powered productivity tools that you should consider implementing for increased efficiency and innovative growth.
17. Notion AI: Notes and Productivity
Notion AI is an advanced feature embedded in Notion, a versatile productivity and collaboration platform, that aids users by generating text, summarizing content, and enhancing writing. This integration streamlines tasks such as drafting, brainstorming, and project management, making information creation and organization more efficient and effective.
18. Glassix: Communication and Collaboration
Glassix is a cloud-based solution tailored to remote workforce management and customer support. It provides real-time monitoring, screen recording, and detailed analytics to enhance agent productivity, customer service quality, and operational efficiency.
19. Otter: Transcription and Meeting Follow-Ups
Otter is an innovative platform that leverages AI for real-time transcription and note taking. It transforms spoken words into text, offering features such as automatic transcription, speaker identification, and searchable transcripts. Otter enhances productivity by enabling easy access to accurate meeting notes and facilitating efficient information capture and review.
20. Trello: Project Management
Trello incorporates AI-driven features to enhance project management efficiency. It utilizes advanced algorithms for task prioritization, smart scheduling based on workload analysis, and predictive insights into project completion timelines. These AI capabilities help teams optimize workflows, improve task management, and achieve project goals more effectively.
How to Choose the Right AI Tool for Your Specific Business Needs
With so many AI-driven business tools available, you might find yourself overwhelmed when choosing the best option for your needs. If this is the case, it’s important to ask yourself a few basic questions:
- Is this AI tool likely to help achieve my business goals and provide a solution to the challenges I’m currently facing?
- Does the AI tool have the features I require to solve my business issue and streamline my operations?
- Is the AI tool compatible with my existing business systems or will I need to use it as a standalone application? How will this affect my workflow?
- Can I scale my AI tool usage as my business requirements grow? Can I add new users?
- Is the cost worth the level of return it will generate?
Thoughtfully answering each of these questions will provide crucial insight into an AI tool’s worth and its potential impact on your business.
Idea Maker Can Help With AI Tools for Your Small Business
If you’re uncertain about what AI tool to choose for your business and need a little extra advice, the experts at Idea Maker offer an AI consultation service to help you better understand your options. However, we always recommend building your AI tool from scratch. While this may seem daunting, when you consider the return on investment you’ll enjoy with a custom AI tool, it’s much more affordable than you think. To get started, schedule a free consultation with us today.
