Own a small coffee shop and not sure how to bring your business online properly – from shipping orders to establishing an online media presence? Do you have a small company and are tired of managing your employees on WhatsApp?
Small business management comes with careful planning, and fortunately, there are a bunch of tools available out there to make your journey easier. Investing in digital tools for business is worth it, as they save you time, as well as money.
To shed some light on the most affordable tech tools that make a difference in achieving success, we’ve put together a series of tool recommendations you need to check when managing your business.
Why are tech tools relevant for small business management? Here are a few reasons you should look into it:
- It allows you to focus on what matters most like your startup growth strategy
- Spend less time uploading documents and more time meeting potential clients
- Gives you the freedom to perform “business-as-usual” activities from any location or on any device
- The administrative part of your business is made easy
- Allows you to limit in-person interactions when needed
- The flexibility to you cancel your services any time you decide a tool isn’t working for you
Project Management Tools
Trello – Move Work Forward
Trello is the tool that can replace any tool you need for small business management. You can add all your projects, monitor the progress, assign tasks and follow the process intuitively. Moreover, you can forget about writing endless emails to your team or slack notes, as Trello also offers the Chat option.
Here’s why you should give it a try:
- Trello actually helps increase the members’ productivity
- Trello helps users keep track of daily tasks using just one platform
- Trello can work for tracking personal expenses and income using cards
- Managing a project or team gets a lot more structured
- Trello is environment-friendly, helping users get rid of writing notes
- Trello has a great notification system because every move made on the software can be seen
Communication & Collaboration
Slack
Slack provides you and your team with a shared view of the work to be done, offering members access to the same information, while new members can get a full context when they join. Live voice conversations are also available in the app, using Slack Huddles.
Slack helps with staying on the same page and making decisions faster by bringing all of your work communication into one place for:
- Productivity – conversations, and files become a searchable archive that gets more useful with time
- Organizing – channels bring order and clarity to work — you can create them for every project, topic, or team
- Alignment – with access to the same information, everyone in the channel can work in sync
- Automatization – you can automate away everyday tasks inside even if you don’t a lick of code – it’s called Workflow Builder
File sharing and storage
Dropbox Business
Every business starts out small and benefits from having the right digital tools for business. Dropbox explores the idea of keeping team productivity and your data safe in one place, which is essential when you manage your business.
From Dropbox’s core features, like Storage, to more advanced Advanced content protection features, this tool is helping sensitive information move at the speed your business needs.
- Link permissions – you password-protect your links, disable downloads, or set expiry dates to grant temporary access.
- Administrative tools – team management stays simple from a central location, the admin console.
- Security features – you protect sensitive company files with enterprise-grade security features.
- Online-only storage – you save hard drive space by moving files to the cloud while keeping them accessible directly from your desktop.
- Team folder manager – you get visibility and control of team folders, including sync management.
- Dropbox Transfer – you easily deliver final files of up to 100 GB to collaborators and clients.
Dropbox Capture Tool Aims To Help You Cut Down On Video Meetings
Content-Research
BuzzSumo
Assuming your business requires keeping up with the latest industry trends, keeping an eye on the competition, or even exploring how to you influencer marketing, BuzzSumo is a great digital tool at hand.
When using BuzzSumo for your small business, you get to:
- Search Content Ideas – you can enter any keyword, topic, or domain and the tool will find the top-performing content.
- Refine – you can narrow your result using filters to specify a date range, country, language, and much more!
- Analyze – you can deep into the data to gain actionable insights with analysis reports.
- Compare – you can analyze 4 searches side by side in the analysis tab to see how each performs.
When using Monitoring and Alerts, you can keep an eye on your brand and competitor mentions, and follow posts from an author of interest or topics relevant.
Content creation and infographics
Venngage
The Venngage infographic maker is an AI-powered design tool that helps users create visually engaging content for marketing campaigns. It ensures turning your boring data into interesting infographics. Moreover
- Venngage offers a range of templates, icons, and graphics
- It is customizable to match the user’s brand and message
- It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface
- It includes built-in templates
- It allows users to create professional-looking designs
- It allows tracking of design performance
- It is suitable for creating social media posts and presentations
Contact Research
Hunter
Do you need to find contacts and get in touch with prospects? Hunter is just the right tech tool for that, as it helps you find professional email addresses in seconds and connect with the people you need to collaborate with.
Here’s how you can use Hunter for your business:
- Find the email addresses of a company
- Find the email addresses of professionals
- Verify any email address
- Outreach email campaigns
- Enjoy Resources like Webinars, Templates, and Customer Stories
Accounting Software
Managing your finances in a small business is essential, especially when you’re beginning to dive into your enterprise. You’ll want to track your expenses in one place, as well as your income and taxes.
Wave
Managing your business also means managing your finances wisely, and if you choose to do it yourself you need a simple, all-in-one financial management solution that you can understand and work with.
Wave is an accounting feature with no set-up fees, no hidden charges, and no monthly fee and keeps you organized and stress-free by offering:
- Unlimited income and expense tracking
- Track sales tax on income and expenses
- The possibility of adding unlimited partners, collaborators, or accountants
- Fully functional double-entry system. Generate financial statements for year-end
- Powerful reports on Overdue Invoices & Bills, Cash Flow, Profit & Loss, and more
- Unlimited bank and credit card connections
- The option to manage income and expenses into tax categories
- Run multiple businesses in one account
- Instantly see how your business is performing on your dashboard
Video Conferencing
Google Meet
Whether you need to catch up on the company’s priorities and goals or have a 1 on 1 with a colleague, Google Meet is the go digital tool for video conferencing your business needs.
When it comes to using Google Meet we can only think of the pros:
- Easy to use, all you need is to set up a meeting and share a link
- Fully integrated with Google Workspace
- Cheap and free forever for up to 100 participants
- Easy to access directly from Gmail
- Ideal for hearing-impaired participants, with its speech-to-text real-time captioning feature
- Comes with unlimited Google Drive storage
You Can Now Enjoy Group Calls On Google Meet or Duo Using a Smart Display
Social Media Management
Buffer
As a small business, having a social media presence is a key factor in creating brand awareness, as well as building customer loyalty. What if posting on Social Media takes you too much time? Instead of handling Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms one by one, you can create and schedule posts for all of these channels with this free Social Media tool.
Here’s what Buffer can do for your small business:
- Share content faster with Browser extensions
- Clip and queue text and images as you find them
- Post updates when your followers are most likely to see it
- Track performing posts with the Buffer analytics feature
- Check and compare your most important metrics
- Integrate Buffer with your most-used apps
Video editing
VEED Video Editor
No matter which social media strategy you decide to go with, having video content is incredibly important to promote your products and services.
Unfortunately, for a small business having a video editor as a full-time employee or even a contractor is way above most owners’ budgets.
How Veed.io can help a small business:
- Lets you create videos without any prior experience
- Helps you create social media-ready clips with effects and captions
- Lets you create a brand color palette so anyone in your team can create videos that keep the same style as your existing materials
- Offers collaboration tools so more people can work on a project
- Helps you add subtitles to videos or transcribe them
Of course, there are plenty of affordable tech tools out there, are we’re more than curious to find out which ones you prefer for your small business management. In the end, each one of us can choose whichever of the digital tools for business make sense for our startup growth, increase the efficiency of systems, products, and services and generate connections with customers.
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