10 Right Tools to Help Boost Your Small Business
Starting any type of business is not easy, particularly a small business. Small business owners are extremely busy people who are frequently overworked.
As a small business owner, you’ll be in charge of everything that is going on in your company. More often than not, you will have to juggle multiple tasks at the same time, which can easily divide your attention, making it super difficult to stay focused.
With all of that, trying to boost your small business will bring even more responsibility and obligations your way.
With such a huge and serious undertaking, small business owners need to be ready to use various tools, software solutions and services that will help them make this goal a reality.
10 Free Tools Your Small Business Should Be Using Today
Luckily, today, there are various technological solutions designed specifically for this purpose. And since we live in the age of technology, not using them doesn’t really make much sense.
With that in mind, here are just some of the tools any small business should use.
1. Use a Website Builder
Regardless of its size, any modern-day business simply can’t hope to reach success without a good website in place. That being said, there are numerous website-building tools on the market – both free and paid like WordPress, Wix, Weebly– that offer small businesses a chance to create an excellent website that will work as their online storefront.
When browsing the offer, look for a tool that will enable you to create a full-featured mobile-friendly website that will not only be fast, responsive and feature a user-friendly design but will also contain all crucial elements necessary for boosting your SEO.
What’s best, Google itself offers this type of service for free.
2. Choose Web Hosting Services
Next, you will also need to choose a reliable web hosting service. Simply making a good website just won’t be enough if your audience can access it. That’s why you need to find a reliable web hosting service that will help you make your website accessible via the internet. We recommend BlueHost and SiteGround for your business site.
Here, you will get a chance to choose from managed hosting, cloud hosting, colocation facilities and a private virtual server. All of these options have their strong points, so make sure you choose the one that’s best suited for your business.
3. Use Email Marketing Tools
Even though email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing, it’s still heavily used today. Every business, and small business, in particular, should use this online marketing strategy to boost their business.
Since email marketing is also one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing, small businesses heavily rely on it. Now, as a small business owner, you should look for helpful email marketing tools that will help you boost your online promotion. There are many email marketing tools available but among them ConstantContact, ConvertKit, Ontraport is popular.
With email marketing tools, you’ll be able to streamline the process of creating, sending, testing, optimizing and reporting on your email marketing campaigns.
4. Rely on Business Intelligence Tools
The simplest way to put it is that business intelligence tools are used to make business owners more intelligent about their business.
Even though it’s quite a simple explanation, it does make a lot of sense. Especially if you consider the fact that tools such as Couranto business intelligence offer customization and management options regarding end-to-end information, contracts and licenses.
Such tools help businesses better understand all the parts of their organization, which results in better overall performance.
5. Look for a Good Project Management Tool
The overall goal of all business people is to be able to do more in less time. In the business world, time is money. And, needless to say, one of the easiest ways to achieve that is by finding good tools and solutions that will enable you to better organize and optimize your workday.
Tools, such as Trello, for instance, use boards, lists and cards for organizing and prioritizing daily tasks. Aside from these, you should also look into collaboration tools, such as Slack, that offer seamless, real-time communication and collaboration options.
The less time you spend on managing things that can be managed more efficiently with the help of a good tool, the more time you’ll have to dedicate to boosting your business, in general.
6. Find Quality Social Media Management Tools
Moreover, since social media plays such a huge role in this day and age, it’s only natural that any small business will want to use it to bring more attention to their endeavour. But what many people fail to realize is just how much time social media management actually requires.
Unless you approach social media management wisely, you’ll find yourself spending more time on it than you can probably afford to. So, once more, instead of trying to take care of everything yourself, look for quality social media management tools, such as Hootsuite, Tailwind to help you out.
7. Use Tools for Blogging and Content Management
Creating high-quality blog posts and content, in general, is a great way to offer your audience something more than just your product or services.
With high-quality, original content, you can easily not just boost your business visibility but also improve your reputation and boost your relevancy.
However, you will not only need to spend time and resources on creating this content, but you’ll also need to find a way to manage it properly. That’s why you should also look for solutions and tools that will streamline this process as well.
8. Scheduling Tools will Save the Day
We simply can’t stress enough just how important it is to be able to stay organized, particularly as a small business owner. That’s one of the reasons many small businesses will greatly benefit from relying on quality scheduling tools.
Scheduling tools will enable you to organize and schedule not only the behind-the-scenes aspects of your business but also client appointments, deliveries and all the other things related to your business.
So, instead of banging your head against a brick wall, make sure you find a reliable scheduling tool to help you out.
9. Look for Business Planning Tools
Last but not least, the better the business plan you manage to put together, the more success you can expect to achieve.
Small businesses, in general, should always try to attract outside investors and secure additional funds that will help them stay afloat.
Needless to say, without a good business plan, this simply won’t be possible. That’s why you need to look for good business planning tools that will enable you to create, analyze and share your business plan with all of your current – and future – investors.
10. Google Docs Document Management
For small firms with light document workloads, Google Docs is an excellent document management solution.
Unlimited file and folder sharing, desktop sync, editing tools, user management, and version history are free to use. For enhanced user experience Google has included many other features like Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites, and Google Keep. In addition, for a business user, it has introduced Google Workspace, which is more secured, and you can control your team. The business feature allows you to collaborate in real-time.
Conclusion
While starting a small business is not all that difficult, turning it into success will require a lot of time, patience, devotion and resources. That’s why any small business that’s looking to improve its processes and become successful needs to find various solutions and tools to help them out.
As mentioned previously, the more business processes you manage to streamline within your organization, the more time you’ll have to dedicate to other areas of your business that also require your undivided attention.
That way, boosting your business will be far easier to achieve than you may have initially imagined.
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