Top AI-Powered Tools for New Small Businesses

Can you afford to ignore a brave new world?

Some small business owners may be reluctant to try and get to grips with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Who can blame them? For decades, Hollywood has conjured up visions of out-of-control AI robots.

However, what if AI tools were actually a blessing rather than a curse? The evidence in this article will show you that the positives outweigh the negatives. You may also be surprised that AI can be used at a relatively low cost, often coming with useful free versions.

You could also factor in that AI steps in and relieves you of repetitive tasks. It can also lend a hand with your more intricate tasks such as:

• Complex Business Processes
• Content Creation
• Search Engine Optimization

AI can do all the above while offering valuable insights into your marketing efforts, whether they be digital marketing or the results you collect from a project management tool.

We might also do right by you by mentioning that just last year, the AI technology market was worth a staggering $200 Billion USD. 

Ultimately, the top AI tools your small business needs are dependent on your goals. As we take you through the top AI tools, you’ll quickly be able to spot which tools will be of the most help to you.

• Benefits of AI Tools for Small Businesses
• Best AI Marketing Tools for Small Business SEO
• Social Media Posts: Best Free AI Tools for Small Business
• Influencer Marketing AI Tools for Small Business
• Customer Service AI Tools for Small Business Owners
• Best AI Tools for Small Business Productivity
• The Importance of Good Web Design When Using AI Tools
• Which AI Tool Is Best for Small Business Owners?
• How AI Tools for Small Business Work

Blog Highlights

• The benefits of AI tools: Small businesses will find AI not only a time saver but also a door opener into areas of business unknown to them, such as SEO, social media, and influencer marketing.
• Customer service AI tools: We do a deep dive into how AI can reinvent customer service. AI can do customer service 24/7/365 while you catch up on your sleep, making it one of the best AI tools for small businesses.
• An explanation in a nutshell: We first give you a list of 7 incredible AI-Powered tools we recommend. Following that—unlike other articles on the subject—we explain how AI tools for small businesses work in simple, plain English. 

“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Benefits of AI Tools for Small Businesses

How many employees do you have? Well, if you’re a small business, we assume it won’t be too many. Rather than putting people out of work, AI can radically change the direction your business is heading in. If you plan to expand your business and hire more people, AI can plot out your marketing and sales, accounting and finance, and, of course, HR management. 

How AI Tools Transform Work Styles

So, as an example, let’s break down just what AI can do for those sectors of your business we discussed earlier. Excuse us for a second while we get AI to do that for us:

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 1: ChatGPT

According to Chat GPT, AI can help you with everything listed in the above table. So, it seems transforming the style of your work has never been easier. Hold on…

What Is ChatGPT Anyway?

As well as being the most well-known AI, ChatGPT was released by a research organization known as OpenAI in November of 2022. OpenAI is also a company that concentrates on artificial intelligence. 

Yes, but What Does ChatGPT Actually Mean?

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. We answered your question, didn’t we? I suppose we should break our answer down into something a little easier to understand:

• Chat: The main task ChatGPT carries out is to have conversations with you that are engaging enough to make you feel as if you’re talking to another person rather than the Terminator.
• Generative: This means that ChatGPT is able to create responses for you based on what you have asked it to do. This means the answers you receive to your questions are not overwritten robotic replies.
• Pre-trained: This tells us that ChatGPT has been trained on a huge amount of information. It’s read every book you can think of, most of the Internet’s content, and watched every episode of Gossip Girl. Okay, we’re joking about Gossip Girl. But you never know…
• Transformer: In a nutshell, a transformer can be thought of as the way information is considered and responded to. ChatGPT contains immense amounts of data that, using its hardware and likely software, considers and responds to.

What are the pros and cons of using Chat GPT? From our experience, we can offer you the following information:

Pros:

1. ChatGPT can not only answer your questions, but it can also elaborate on them or even sum them up. By that, we mean you can ask ChatGPT to reduce information of 2000 words or more into a summary of two paragraphs or less.
2. You can use ChatGPT without even registering for an account. This choice is very handy when you need to know how to use a piece of software and get step-by-step instructions to go with your query.

Cons:

1. All information that ChatGPT provides must be taken with a pinch of salt. Although it continues to develop at an incredible rate, this AI tool’s results should be double-checked when in doubt.
2. If using ChatGPT to create content for blogs and creative work, be aware that it simply rehashes what it has learned. This means you end up with content that is easily detected as AI, and there is no emotional substance.

“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.”

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Best AI Marketing Tools for Small Business SEO

Have you decided to outsource your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Perhaps you’re spending a lot of time and money to receive articles and marketing work loaded with keywords to get you found on Google’s search engine? 

AI Marketing Tools for Digital Marketing

In the first part of your digital marketing strategy, you will want everyone to know your business exists. This is where SEO comes in. You will more than likely have heard of SEO. But, just in case:

A Two Paragraph Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With SEO, you are looking to convert readers into customers. For that reason, you produce engaging content such as articles and e-books. The text in your content will contain words that are often searched for on Google. For example, let’s say “Best Web Hosting”. These words are known as keywords. This content will make your website easier to find on Google.

To compete online, the content you provide must be relevant to the person searching Google and also to you. When a reader is hooked on your content, you should be able to also convert that reader into a paying customer. If your content is relevant to the customer’s search and your product or service, SEO will increase your online sales.

An AI Tool for Checking Paid for Content

If you’re running a new business you may have decided to do content at scale. This is where you pay for content creation, such as blogs, e-books, infographics, newsletters, podcasts, and maybe even videos.

How do you ensure the content you’re paying for is good enough? Well, we can recommend an AI tool that can easily be used to check your written content.

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 2: Grammarly

Think about this. The ability to check the text content you’re paying for and to discover if it’s actually original content. Grammarly allows you to do both of these tasks in one handy AI tool.

What is Grammarly? 

Described as a typing assistant, Grammarly works in the cloud (the Internet) to check the spelling, punctuation, and grammar quality of written materials. What makes Grammarly a particularly useful AI marketing tool is its ability to detect plagiarism.

This quality makes Grammarly a winner for a small business owner wanting to make sure they are receiving good quality content for the price they are paying.

Pros: 

1. Grammarly can perform English grammar checks at an incredible speed. A specific editing task that usually takes two weeks to complete on a normal-sized book manuscript takes Grammarly just two days!
2. The price point at which Grammarly sells itself is very good value. We suggest opting for the 12-month contract. We have paid for 1 month previously, but an annual subscription is a lot cheaper. Many other AI tools are far more pricey than Grammarly.

Cons:

1. When using Grammarly as an editor, we recommend you ignore its suggested words feature as it tends to recommend using the same words over and over again.
2. Grammarly is still very much in development. In running plagiarism checks on our writers’ original works, it claimed we had copied the work from elsewhere.

Okay, so you have ChatGPT to help you transform the way you work and even help you with digital marketing insights. You also have Grammarly to check the SEO content you’re paying for, but what more can AI tools be doing for you? How about a full process to transform your business’s interactions with social media?

Social Media Posts: Best Free AI Tools for Small Business

As well as SEO, social media requires an extensive list of processes including ad campaigns that go after your target audience and succeed in capturing customer engagement. Your content creation process will include hiring human writers. 

As we discussed in our section on Grammarly, content quality will need to be checked during the writing process to make sure freelancers have not simply turned in substandard work generated by AI writing tools.

You’ll also want image creation to put a visual element to your content’s written text. The written content will need to match the images carefully to become social media posts and also video tutorials that can be shown on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

However, suppose you want to save money and cover some of these processes yourself. In that case, we can recommend a few incredible AI marketing tools for your small business.

AI Marketing Tools for a Small Business: Introducing Art on Demand

Imagine this: You’re suddenly given the ability to conjure unlimited works of art with just a neatly constructed sentence or two. All in one handy tool that provides a finished product good enough to use in marketing campaigns and on social media channels. How about an introduction to one of these AI marketing products?

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 3: Microsoft Designer

For AI marketing, we can suggest you get into what are known as prompts. One or two carefully thought-out sentences are created to make a prompt that will tell AI exactly what you want it to do. Microsoft Designer creates images using prompts.

What Is Microsoft Designer?

Using the power of AI, Microsoft Designer is an art tool that helps users create visuals that are close to the quality of a professional artist.

As an example, for a topic about learning the Japanese language for LinkedIn, we used MS Designer to create an image. We gave it this prompt: Osaka in the shape of a chocolate cake.

Pros:

1. Microsoft Designer has a very nice, but sometimes cluttered, dashboard. It is simple to use and, for the moment, it does not need payment or credits in advance to be used. 
2. The images that Microsoft Designer can produce are very accurate to the prompt you provide. For example, we were very pleased with the Osaka Chocolate cake picture it provided. Want to see? Okay, here it is: 

Prompt: Osaka in the shape of a chocolate cake

Cons:

1. Our biggest issue with Microsoft Designer is its inability to produce images to the size we have asked it for. A LinkedIn banner needs to be a size of 1584 pixels horizontal by 396 pixels vertical; this means you will have to edit Microsoft Designer’s images.
2. Elaborating on point number 1, when using Microsoft Designer, you may want to use an image of 1024 pixels horizontal by 512 vertical. The problem when adjusting an image is that your editing may shrink, squeeze, and generally obscure your Microsoft Designer image.

But what if you could use another AI art tool to neatly edit or even expand on the design you’ve created?

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 4: DALL·E

As an image editing tool, DALL·E might be the biggest rival Adobe Photoshop now faces. 

So, you have an image that you really like, but you either want to expand it or edit it: remove blur, change colours, or even add lighting?

DALL·E can make all of the above changes possible and do them so quickly and neatly you’ll be amazed.

What Is DALL·E?

OpenAI launched DALL·E in January of 2021. Using the text prompts provided by users, DALL·E is an AI tool that quickly creates images from your text descriptions.

As I mentioned before, DALL·E can produce good images, but for us, it has been of great use as a visual editor.

Pros:

1. DALL·E produces incredible edits to images, the addition of coloured lighting to some photos is truly incredible.
2. DALL·E is a very intuitive and fun AI creation tool to use. You can find yourself lost for a couple of hours experimenting with old pictures.

Cons:

1. DALL·E relies on using credits to create and edit images. For that reason, you may want to first hone your prompt skills using Microsoft Designer before signing up for DALL·E. 
2. Another issue is similar to Microsoft Designer’s flaw: image sizes. Again, you cannot create images to your desired size.

As with other AI art tools, we strongly recommend you always check the image your AI tool produces. Also, with AI content, always try to personalize your text or images to add a human touch to the outcome. 

Influencer Marketing AI Tools for Small Business

Marketing campaigns led by popular influencers have become the latest fashion. Whether a small business sells clothes, jewellery, or food products—an influencer can boost how much content quality is seen.

With AI tools, your chances of being matched with a relevant influencer are increased exponentially. An influencer’s presence will be felt in the response you receive to digital marketing, such as email marketing campaigns, and AI algorithms will love you for it.

So, how do you find an influencer that’s a good match for your brand?

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 5: Pitchbox

Would you like help with not only finding influencers but also generating leads, campaign management, email templates, and more? If so, Pitchbox might just tick your boxes.

What Is Pitchbox?

Pitchbox is a platform that uses AI to help you with content marketing, link building, and finding influencers in your niche.

Pros:

1. Pitchbox makes it easy to find targeted prospects, such as influencers or other businesses with whom you can share backlinks. The idea of backlinks is that you link your website to another, and this will help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
2. As marketing tools go, Pitchbox is really made for backlinks. However, its work in assisting with influencer marketing will be a great asset to your other marketing tools and work, such as the content writing process. 

Cons: 

1. Pitchbox has quite a steep learning curve.
2. The price of Pitchbox is expensive, and it requires a 12-month contract.

Customer Service AI Tools for Small Business Owners

In terms of your global customer interactions, AI can help you keep your online store open 24/7/365. In fact, a good AI customer service system offers a competitive advantage with the ability to respond to customer queries in detail.

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 6: Forethought

Forethought offers advanced AI customer support through the use of generative agents. As an AI tool, Forethought provides intelligent AI agent customer support that is scalable to your needs. It also supports every enquiry from first contact to final resolution.

Pros:

1. Forethought enables easy interaction with current customer care solutions.
2. The software Forethought uses is designed to prioritize customer service tickets.

Cons:

1. As with all customer service AI, you may run the risk of high-paying customers not enjoying the sudden lack of personalization.
2. Customer insights may be missed without the interaction of phone calls and video calls. Even if you decide to use AI powered chatbots, please continue to take customer inquiries by phone so as not to lose those all-important customer insights.

Best AI Tools for Small Business Productivity

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal assistant help with your business operations, complex business processes, customer data, project management, and maybe even your scheduling? With an AI-Powered tool, you’ll feel like you’re collaborating with a superstar.

EasyHosting AI-Powered Tool Number 7: Notion AI

Notion AI could be considered similar to ChatGPT in that it looks through large amounts of data in an attempt to find patterns. This training data it accumulates is used to create models which allow it to answer a whole host of questions.

Pros:

1. Notion’s use of AI can analyze your daily tasks, helping to streamline them and increase their fruitfulness. 
2. Notion AI is responsive. If you set work goals, Notion AI can quickly generate an action plan.

Cons:

1. At the moment, Notion AI does not come with a chat function. 
2. Before Notion AI launched, the original version of Notion was criticized for its steep learning curve.

Advanced AI Tools for Small Businesses

As an AI assistant, Notion AI offers functionality that will help if you decide to incorporate a sales team or offload your content work to marketing teams.

However, there is another area that is seldom discussed when talking about AI-Powered tools, and that is good web design.

The Importance of Good Web Design When Using AI Tools

No matter how simple or advanced your use of AI becomes, a good website is what first attracts new customers to your small business. 

The other issue of AI is taking the time to learn about and use each AI-Powered tool. With professional and affordable website design, you can free up your time to focus on your AI-related endeavours.

With EasyHosting, we offer a professional website design that is mobile-optimized right out of the box. If you were interested in what we had to say about Search Engine Optimization, we can also assure you that we take care of SEO for you. 

Not only that, but we keep our customer service personal to you. We offer you a fulfillment team to guarantee you get the website you want. Our team is fully equipped with highly trained website designers, copywriters, and quality assurance specialists. Just think of that: A team of experts working for you! Not to mention 24/7 technical support on hand whenever you need it.

Reach out & Speak with Us Today!

support@easyhosting.com

Call us: 1-888-390-1210

Which AI Tool Is Best for Small Business Owners?

Before we answer this question, let’s remind ourselves of the 7 AI-Powered tools we’ve shown you here today:

1. ChatGPT
2. Grammarly
3. Microsoft Designer
4. DALL·E
5. Pitchbox
6. Forethought
7. Notion AI

Out of all the above, we think ChatGPT should be your first port of call. Our reason is that it’s a fun, helpful, also free introduction to the world of AI-Powered tools.

It’s also super handy for presentations and formatting data. Would you like an example? Okay, as we say at EasyHosting: no worries. Let’s say you’ve decided to visit Seoul and need to know the 10 most used verbs in Korean. Here we go:

ChatGPT created the above table for us… in 10 seconds! Now think about what this great AI-Powered tool can do for your new small business.

How AI Tools for Small Business Work

EasyHosting never forgets a promise, and we did offer to explain AI tools in plain English for you, didn’t we? We’re going to do this by explaining two things that give AI its user-centric focus.

How AI Tools for Small Business Work: An Explanation in a Nutshell

Our first explanation describes what a Large Language Model (LLM) does and how it affects the outcome of your AI-Powered content.

How Does an LLM Work in an AI Tool for Small Business?

In a nutshell: Think of an LLM as an enormous library with billions of books, journals, and newspapers. In every library is an assistant. But imagine an assistant who could not only read billions of books but also remember every word in them!

What an LLM Is

An LLM can answer your questions by simply filling in the holes in your information. Of course, the whole LLM process is incredibly complex and highly technical, so we’re going to make it very easy to understand.

You decide to ask an AI-Powered tool the following question:

What is the last word of this sentence? Mary had a little…

The LLM will quickly research its databank of books and internet archives to assemble a list of possible answers it can give you:

• Criminal record: 5%
• Toy bear: 20%
• Roller-skates: 15%
• Lamb: 90%

You can see that the LLM has created a percentage of how correct each answer to your question is likely to be. As the word Lamb has a 90% chance of being correct, the LLM has gone for the option with the most possibility: Lamb.

“I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them.”

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

What a Difference a Prompt Makes in AI Tools for Small Business

To fully explain a prompt, let’s think of it in the context of working in an office. A manager issues the following prompt to one of his employees:

• Prompt: Dave, would you mind photocopying this document for me?

The above prompt is fairly straightforward, but a few things seem to have been missed. Let’s revise the prompt to make it clearer:

• Prompt: Dave, would you mind photocopying this document for me? The copy needs to be in colour, and I need it before 5pm this afternoon.

You can see the benefits in the revised prompt above, but how does that help AI-Powered tools?

What Do Prompts Do for AI Marketing and Content Creation?

Here’s another opportunity to see Microsoft Designer at work. Below, you can see an image we’ve created using a relatively simple prompt: Artificial intelligence riding a bike.

Prompt: Artificial intelligence riding a bike

The image is fairly decent, but let’s say we want it to have a look closer to a video game advertisement or something with Hollywood style lighting? Let’s rethink our prompt.

Prompt: Artificial intelligence riding a bike, 4k, detailed, cinematic lighting

You can easily see the difference between the two images; this shows us the benefits of a better thought-out prompt.

In Summary: AI Marketing Tools Are Not Going Away

We hope we’ve answered the question of what are the top AI-Powered tools for new small businesses but also how AI can help your small business.

And please don’t forget that EasyHosting can take care of your website design so that you can focus on reaping the benefits of AI-Powered tools.

Need help to get more people to convert to your eCommerce store online?

Get in touch for help with SEO, copywriting, and much more!

Frequently Asked Questions

Are AI marketing tools for small business actually cost-effective?

Most definitely. Many, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Designer, are completely free.

How can the best AI tools for small business help me to improve efficiency?

When we chose ChatGPT as our favourite AI-Powered tool, we mentioned how it can refine data plus simplify and shorten written content.

How can AI tools for small business upgrade business operations?

AI-Powered tools reduce your repetitive tasks by automating work that would otherwise be time-consuming. The ability to do this means that AI frees up you and your staff so that you can perform more complex work. You can then concentrate on increasing your profits and filling your money box!

Prompt: An Art Deco money box