As a small business owner, you know how quickly the costs pile up when you’re looking to scale your business. Fortunately, there are abundant tools on the market that can help your business without burning a large hole in the pocket. While there are way too many tools to choose from, we narrowed it down to a list of 10 must have tools to grow your business. So let’s check out the list.
Hubspot CRM – Every Business needs a tool that will help in building a relationship with their customers. We’re talking about a Customer Relationship Management tool that will give your team clear visibility on their leads and a plethora of features that will enable them to close the deal. If you’re looking for one and don’t want to spend a dime, then Hubspot’s free CRM is the tool for you. From booking meetings to placing calls, to creating and sending personalized emails, you can do it all using this tool. If you’re looking to grow your business seriously, then this tool is a must-have.
Constant Contact – Started in the year 1995, Constant Contact has grown to become one of the leaders in the Email Marketing industry. It includes a plethora of tools that will help you with surveys, newsletters, events and even Facebook promotions. Email automation is also a breeze with this tool, and you can choose from one of their hundreds of templates to get started.
Slack – If you’re looking for a tool that will help you quickly and seamlessly communicate with your team then Slack is just for you. Though relatively new in the market, Slack has become quite popular in the business space. Besides simplifying communication, this tool integrates with most popular enterprise and productivity tools, thus making it easier to collaborate and get work done.
Trello: This is a collaboration tool that will give you a visual overview of your projects. Trello organizes all your projects into Boards, Lists, and Cards. You can assign cards to your team members and also allocate deadlines to it. Trello is an exceptional tool that will help you to plan your business tasks and track it to completion
G Suite – Google provides you a list of tools viz. G Suite that will enable you to Connect, Create, Access and Control. Some of the tools include Gmail for email, Calendar for scheduling and Hangouts for video chat. Another important tool that deserves a special mention is Google Drive. It offers almost all features of Microsoft Office, and it is accessible from practically anywhere, albeit with internet access. You can collaborate on documents with your co-workers and share with others without having to fear if they have compatible software installed on their workstations.
Google Analytics – This tool gives you a ton load of insights on what is happening on your website. If you want to know whether your marketing plan is indeed working or not, we recommend that you start using Google Analytics from day one. From visits to Bounce rates and even conversions, Google Analytics is all you will need, to truly understand your website performance
Canva – One of the many challenges for small businesses is to deliver exceptional designs for their brand consistently. The high cost of subscribing to design tools and hiring a designer may often put a small business on the back foot. But luckily, there is a free tool called Canva that can help you build beautiful designs for their communication. From Social media posts to flyers, you name it, and this tool will allow you to create them quickly. We were so intrigued by this tool that we test ran it and even posted a few posts on our social channels.
Biteable – Videos are a great way to communicate your brand’s story, but it can be a costly affair, to begin with. We looked around for a while and stumbled upon a tool that we believe is the best video creation tool out there. From creating presentations, infographics, intros and even ad, Biteable will ensure that your video creation task will be a breeze.
Buffer – This is probably the best social media management tool out there. Buffer makes it possible to manage everything, from planning to scheduling your posts, responding to customers and even analyzing the performance of your social media marketing, all at one place. We recommend that you sign up for their free plan to test the waters and go Pro once you know that this tool is the one.
Pixabay – Businesses rely on free stock images available on the internet, but honestly there is very little to choose from. Thankfully, there is Pixabay which has some exciting stock images and quite a plenty of them. You may not be able to find all the photos that you are looking for because not all good stuff comes for free. For everything else there is Shutterstock 😉
We hope that you find value in using these tools to grow your business. If you would like to share some other tools that can help businesses, then feel free to share them in the comments section below
