In today’s digital world, local businesses must prioritize maintaining a positive online reputation, a requirement that was previously optional. Because more and more people are making use of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and even search engines like Google, online shopping catalogs, and reviews are now pivotal supplements influencing them to purchase goods and services.
There is, for instance, local review optimization, social media interaction, and many more; the online world has to offer countless pathways for business growth. Having the appropriate tools to cater to your audience is crucial. This article goes through some of the basic yet useful features local businesses can benefit from, reaching their customer base optimally and digitally offshore for effective results. These tools serve for cafés and store owners on a small scale to achieve community-wide recognition.
What are the tools for small businesses?
Put simply, any software utilized by your small business on a daily basis can be classified as a “small business tool.” One report shows that almost all small businesses —95% for the precise figure— make use of at least one platform.
Moreover, 87% of people participating in the survey agree that the introduction of technological platforms has aided them in running their businesses efficiently. With that in mind, there are different business tools that one can use to manage day-to-day activities. A few examples are:
- Tools for Project Management
- Marketing and Financial Management Tools
- Tools for Communication, Organization, and Collaboration
- Tools for Accounting
- Customer Relation Management (CRM) Tools
- Automation Tools
Why are tools important for every small business?
There are various reasons as to why a small business would need online business tools. Some of the main pros of using the best small business tools are:
Increasing Effectiveness
Small business tools are essential, as they are designed to trim down processes, automate tasks, and cut down the time and energy it takes to manage different business functions. This allows small businesses to streamline their operations and concentrate on the business’s primary areas of service.
Boosted Organization
Small business tools enable businesses to be organized as they are able to keep track of their work, including tasks, schedules, and deadlines. This will help businesses manage their time and resources effectively while ensuring that they are not missing deadlines or falling behind in critical tasks.
Improved Communication and Collaboration
Small business tools enable businesses to more effectively communicate and collaborate with their clients, stakeholders, and team members. This will assist in improving productivity and make sure everyone is working toward the same goals.
Increased Productivity
Small business tools enable businesses to accomplish more work in a shorter time because of streamlined processes, enhanced collaboration, and improved communication. This will result in increased productivity, and improved outcomes.
Improved Decision-Making
Small business tools give businesses the data and analytics necessary for informed decision-making. This will allow businesses to make better decisions on how to grow and improve their operational activities.
Top 7 Small Business tools
This is our pick of 7 tools that can help you tackle different aspects of your business, from scheduling and project management to marketing, accounting, and more.
1. Motion
Complete daily activities and planning tasks easier with motion. An AI-powered productivity application that does the thinking for you. It handles task scheduling, automation, planning, and virtually everything else. Some of the features it provides include the following:
- Task management solution featuring custom time block creation, setting up repeating tasks, and creating new tasks by simply clicking.
- AI-based project management that allows you to add attachments, labels, and notes to projects; create custom project templates; and automate planning for everyone on the team using custom schedules.
- AI Assistant for meetings with customizable meeting booking pages, daily meeting caps, templates for seamless scheduling, and the ability to schedule recurring meetings.
- Smart calendar that provides time blocking, personal calendar and work calendar merging and calendar view consolidation to show all activities and meetings at once.
- Support for external applications and users, which include Google Meet, Google Calendar, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, iCloud Calendar, and Zapier.
2. Slack
In business, you know how vital communication is, even in social life. Keeping all employees updated at the same time is always important and beneficial to reduce miscommunication that is common and can easily be avoided.
That’s why you need an app where you can all chat and communicate with one another.
If it is not for personal reasons, Skype and WhatsApp serve their purpose when it comes to talking to individuals. But, Zoom requires considering those groups whose number of members is greater than two to three, such as in a team setting. In this case, you may require something more sophisticated, like Slack.
With Slack, you have individual as well as group messaging, which eases communication with different teams to a great extent. For example, you can create a specific group for your designers or web developers and you can have calls as well.
3. Google Meet
Because so many people work as freelancers or from home, it is essential to have video meetings to discuss business matters and even conduct meetings. Many new small-scale businesses have had to resort to using the online medium to connect with their employees, suppliers, associates, and even their target customers.
If you are looking for a video conferencing solution for your business, then Google Meet is worth giving a try. It is true that Zoom has gained a lot of popularity in the last year and is great for video meetings, but Google Meet is worth looking into for small businesses, particularly those that want free services.
4. Calendly
Calendly can be very helpful for small businesses with scheduling. They can automate a lot of tedious tasks like setting appointments for prospective clients, enabling them to focus more on their business.
With Calendly, businesses can create and share customizable scheduling links that allow customers and clients to self-schedule meetings at their convenience. It is very helpful for businesses such as consulting and coaching, which may require advanced scheduling.
Some advantages of using the tool as a small business include:
- Strain-free Scheduling: Automating the scheduling process results in less communication back and forth with clients, saving a lot of free time.
- Customization: Businesses can set specific dates and even rules to control booking, such as minimum advance notice, maximum appointments per day, and a range of other customizable options.
- Other Integrations: Apart from their very own tools, Calendly integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, Zoom, and many other productivity tools for convenient appointment and meeting management.
- User-friendly Interface: This is one of the most frequented services and best-rated due to its extremely intuitive interface accessible to businesses of any size.
5. Asana
Asana is a project management software that allows businesses and organizations to communicate with their team members while organizing work, tracking tasks, and meeting set deadlines. To ensure productivity and organization, Asana has numerous features that help teams to:
- Create and assign tasks: Adding context with notes and attachments and setting deadlines make it easy for users to create and appoint tasks in Asana.
- Communicate with team members: In real time, team members and collaborators can work and chat with each other using Asana’s internal messaging feature.
- Track progress: With tools like Gantt charts and calendars, Asana helps teams track the progress of their work.
- Integrate with other tools: Team members can easily share and access files and other information through Dropbox and Slack, which are integrated with Asana.
6. Canva
Even in the absence of a graphic designer in your marketing team, you can still generate visually appealing and professional digital marketing materials, such as social media posts, infographics, business cards, and newsletters.
Perfect for novice graphic designers is Canva, a content creation tool with a consumer-friendly interface, extensive features, and thousands of templates. Some of its features are:
- You can work simultaneously on designs and leave comments in Whiteboards and Canva Docs.
- Brand Kit, a section for safekeeping the brand assets, allows storage of icons, logos, fonts, and color palettes in Brand Kits for future use.
- Text generation powered by OpenAI with Magic Write.
7. Zapier
With over 6,000 third-party apps, no-code automation platforms integrate easily. Chances are, whichever tools your team utilizes can be connected through Zapier and portions of workflows can be automated.
However, if you do not have preset tools within your app stack, then Zapier is practically useless, and this is how it can be optimized:
Connect other apps featured in this list to Motion via Zapier, choose one of the supported triggers, and preset actions to automate workflows. It’ll take your productivity to a whole new level.
Benefits of small business tools
From your optimal understanding of a small business, you are already aware of the many tools and challenges of setting up a small business. To add on, this is even more challenging when resources are limited. The good news is that technology can solve some, or all, of your challenges with the help of cloud tools.
Here are a few motive points why you need to invest in business tools optimized for small businesses:
- Time is a keystone asset in any capitalistic society. With the restraint of automating tedious, repetitive tasks, there comes the gift of having enough to spare for strategic growth and management of the business. This improves efficiency significantly but also productivity.
- Team collaboration is a linchpin to any business; thus, having vital chat, conference, and file-sharing services is essential so that users get access to chat, video, and file-sharing tools “for instant messaging.” This will smoothen the communication gap in any collaborative task.
- With custom and detailed reporting at your disposal, you can make more informed decisions and maintain a competitive edge.
- Having technology to aid in task management and tracking progress as well as in proper distribution of available resources helps in boosting internal organization alongside increased productivity.
Conclusion
In order for small businesses to gain a competitive advantage in the digital world, they have to make use of various technologies that will facilitate the establishment and growth of their online presence. These tools facilitate audience engagement, provide business intelligence to make strategic decisions, and even automate complicated processes such as content generation and email marketing. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of these tools is their affordability, which makes them useful for even the most budget-restrained startups.
Achieving business goals such as garnering more traffic to the website, improving customer engagement metrics, or nurturing brand advocacy can be done seamlessly when using the right tools. These tools provide actionable business intelligence, allowing for strategy refinement to maximize ROI. You may be able to analyze your website data better than before, and that helps drive an informed decision on what steps to take next.
Lastly, having a digitally recognizable brand is not simply as easy as ‘make a profile and notify everyone you are available,’ but it requires a clear strategy to foster deeper engagement with the audience. Having the right tools on a scalable basis makes this possible. After all, relentless efforts coupled with effective tactics can aid small businesses to thrive even amid the cutthroat online market.
