HubSpot Basic Package with 2,000 contacts costs $4,800/year.

What small businesses need:

Pricing that makes sense for smaller marketing programs. Other industries like email marketing have pricing that scales based on list size where small businesses can get started for less than $10/month.

Since we are talking about marketing tools here, what about a product that starts free and only requires businesses to pay after their web marketing program is successful?

False Assumption #3: Web Marketing is All You Need to Do This Year

So let’s say you happen to be a trained web marketing expert and your small business has a huge marketing budget. You’re all set, right?

Unfortunately most of today’s web marketing tools will still fail you because each one has developed their own non-standard way to show you those millions of data points you’re paying them to store for you. You’ll spend days or weeks learning to use the system only to find that it requires your constant attention to produce consistent results.

Most tools assume that there is someone in your company whose entire job is web marketing. In the average small business where the marketer is also CEO, head of finance, head of technology, janitor, and chief-fire-putter-outer, its rare to find an extra 40 hours a week in anyone’s schedule. For many small businesses allocating more than two hours each week to web marketing is a real challenge.

HubSpot offers a week-long course to train you on their own product (for which they charge you $2,000). Conductor has a 40 hour course, which is pretty much required because they send you a 20mb Excel file full of data each month that they expect you to mine through to find little hidden nuggets of wisdom about your marketing program. SEOMoz is supported by a community of volunteer product experts whose opinions on best practices vary widely

What small businesses need:

Tools that take less than a minute to begin using and that put clear focus on the easiest and most impactful actions that a user can take right now. An ideal tool would show the relative importance of each action and would break larger items up into small tasks so that progress can always be made in increments as small as five minutes.

A Huge Opportunity: Web Marketing Optimization Tools for Small Businesses

Today’s leading web marketing optimization tool providers are laser-focused on building complex, robust, costly solutions for the world’s largest companies. Because of this a huge opportunity exists for web marketing products that are tailored to the needs of the world’s 18 million real small business users.

The perfect small business marketing tool must be suitable for the novice user, have pricing that starts very low and scales only when businesses grow, and must quickly answer more questions than it creates. This is what small businesses need, and this will make web marketing easier and smarter for everyone.