Running a small business is a lot of work. Besides being on top of the day-to-day requirements like scheduling meetings and working on projects, you also are responsible for meeting your business goals. This means keeping the entire team focused and on the same page. It’s easy to go into overdrive, but this can inevitably lead to burnout. This is where small business tools can come to the rescue.
The following list of small business tools are all designed to help you better manage business processes. Some may boost sales by increasing your efficiency and productivity while others may help your team collaborate better. Regardless of their specific features or capabilities, these tools should assist with your business needs and help you achieve your specific goals. Take a look at the list below and see which ones will be advantageous for your company.
1. Comprehensive Marketing Platform
Do you find yourself wasting time on repetitive tasks and pushing off your bigger strategic and creative thinking projects? If so, you’ll want to enlist the help of a comprehensive marketing platform such as marketing automation software. With a marketing automation approach, you’ll be relying on a set of tools used to streamline workflows. These tools may work in silos, but they ladder up to your bigger marketing objectives. For instance, different tools can be leveraged to automate customer replies, publish social media posts, and organize business information.
To get the most out of marketing automation, you’ll want to find what hiccups you’re experiencing in your business. If you’re struggling to capture leads, lean on marketing automation to organize any new contacts in a unified platform. This way, you have a solid list of interested people that you can follow up with. Or if you need to improve your customer experience, use your buyer personas to send the most relevant content to users. They will come across your site with the information they’re looking for, which can lead to a new customer.
2. Project Management Software
A running to-do list on paper can only get you so far. While it may feel satisfying to cross off what you and your team accomplished during the day, it’s not the most reliable tracking solution. As your business continues to grow, you’ll want to adopt some type of project management software. This tool will help you plan, track, and assess various projects happening at once. Everyone on the team will have an overall sense of where a project stands, who is working on it, and if it’s on track for a set deadline.
There is a large range of project management tools available to businesses. When deciding on which platform is best for your needs, think about what types of features may be beneficial. Some tools are best at task management while others can be more useful for collaboration. If time tracking is important to you, then be sure the tool you select has a reporting option. Some of the most commonly used project management software tools include ClickUp, Trello, Jira, and Asana.
3. Digital Asset Creator
As a business, it’s important that the visuals you’re putting out there are consistent with your brand identity. You want a user to see your logo or brand image and be able to identify it. But unless you’ve hired a graphic design team or contracted with one, creating on-brand visuals can be tedious work. Fortunately, creating professional-looking visuals and logos has never been easier with the help of digital asset creators. Even those who are not artistic can design aesthetically pleasing social media infographics, business cards, and newsletters.
Many of these design-specific tools allow for collaboration; a teammate can come up with a design and easily share it across the entire company for feedback. Someone can make a tweak and the new design will automatically save. These tools also allow you to save images, which makes it easy for anyone to grab the company logo and place it on a presentation. This ensures that your brand image, logos, colors, and fonts remain consistent. Some examples of digital asset creators are Canva, Adobe Photoshop, and Prezi.
4. File Management
While saving every new document and presentation to your desktop may be easy, it doesn’t allow for collaboration. A teammate in another department may be working on something that you’ve already created. This lack of transparency leads to inefficiency, which is why a file management platform is important. An organized file management system can increase productivity as employees spend less time searching and scanning for the files they need. This can reduce rework and eliminate unnecessary frustration.
Also, a file management system can help you control who has access to what. You may not want everyone to have editor access to your company’s mission and vision statement document. And not everyone should be able to view or download sensitive employee information. Google is well-known for its Google Drive filing system. Other options include SharePoint and OneDrive.
Conclusion
These tools can all be great additions to your tech stack. But at the end of the day, you’ll need to decide which small business tools you will use. Before making any decision, evaluate what your team needs the most help with. Find the white spaces in team processes to reduce inefficiencies and speed up processes. From there, look at the numerous types of platforms and try a demo to see if you like the user interface and features. By going through these extra steps, you’ll know that you’re making the best decision for your business today.