There are over 30 million small businesses in the United States alone. It can be a challenge for any small business to gain a footing in their industry. Thankfully, the internet has a variety of tools and applications to help small businesses in their endeavors. Here is an insightful list.
Maximize Your productivity and Efficiency with This Set of Tools
1.-G Suite:
This is the brand name for a collection of some of the web’s most comprehensive tools. This collection relies heavily on cloud computing and is used primarily for productivity and collaboration. Did I mention that Google is the developer? You’ve probably heard of some of these tools already:
- Gmail
- Drive
- Docs
- Sheets
- Slides
- Calendars
The beauty of GSuite is the security and centralization that it provides. Users are treated with a great internal search engine and backup, so documents, emails, and files are all in one place, but also backed up on the cloud at the same time.
2.-Trello:
This is a web-based project management application owned by Atlassian. Trello is flexibility at your disposal. Your organization can use it in many different ways. From bulletin boards to Agile methodology, the sky’s the limit. It is easy to use and can be an important productivity tool for small businesses.
3.-Slack:
It’s a tool that is all about communication. The evolution of its uses is pushing Slack to become an alternative to social media messengers such as Facebook or Google Hangouts, giving your teams custom channels to share and discuss ideas. It is fully integrated with popular applications like Google Drive and Github, giving you endless value. Slack has also become a unique platform for community development. It lets your teams interact with other teams and people in an open community format that does not exist on other platforms yet. Slack is also downloadable on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, ensuring that you’ll never miss a conversation.
4.-Toggl:
It’s a free time tracking application great for time management and productivity. It’s perfect to measuring your team’s tasks. In every company, it’s common for individuals to love freedom. However, freedom should not restrict progress and therein lies the trick. How do you give people enough freedom but also push progress at the same time? The short answer is you measure it. This is the tool to do so and it gives control over how your employees track their time giving you a KPI measure to understand if there is any problem.
5.-MailChimp:
There are plenty of services for email marketing, but few give you enough freedom of automation like Mailchimp does. The content still needs to be created by your team and the email lists must be filled out one way or another, but once start engaging with the emails through MailChimp, it’s only a matter of time before these emails become leads. MailChimp has customizable templates for use and offers the ability to connect to various eCommerce applications like Shopify and Woocommerce.
6.-Canva:
In today’s digital world, content playings a huge role in any organization. Canva allows you to you create original images that will help attract attention from potential customers or leads. Canva gives you a variety of templates to choose from based on what content you have in mind. Remember that Canva cannot replace an inhouse designer, but it is still a great tool to create mockups or social media posts quickly and can in some situations ease the workload and stress of the design team.
7.-Streak:
This is not a superpowered system like Salesforce, but it’s a still an amazing tool to get your head in the game and start managing emails, internal information, and employees’ pipelines. The great thing about Streak is that it offers a free version, and the paid version is only $49 per month per user, which isn’t a bad deal.
Honorable Tool Mentions for Small Businesses
- Shipstation: If you are in e-commerce B2C retail, then you’ve probably heard about Shipstation. It offers extremely widespread integration with all the big applications. Be careful about how you use it, learn the best practices and support it with an agile CRM system. This will allow you to have full control over errors and this tool does require a certain level of mastery before it can be used to its full potential.
- SurveyMonkey: One of the most powerful ways to gather information and data quickly is in the form of a survey. This tool is free but offers limited capability. However, as the name implies, it’s all about surveys and you can get a survey up and running in less than a minute.
- Blogging: And once you think everything is ready to go you find out you need inbound content. To create engaging content we recommend you a solid blog that can help you interact with your users on a deeper level. Use this list to get a good grasp of what you already have and what you need to do to improve your blog.
As a result, there are a lot of resources that your organization can use to scale your operations and gain advantage among small businesses.
