Starting your business is easy, but growing it takes time and effort. Sometimes you have to do most of the job, especially if you run a small business.
You take care of most of your business needs, like accounting, stock, and customer service. All of these tasks are daunting, and sometimes you might neglect certain parts of your business as you focus on others.
But nowadays, managing every part of your small business is not a problem. There are tools created to assist and make your life as a business owner, uncomplicated.
Listed here are apps and software you can use to help you in some aspects of your business.
Table of Contents
1.) Freshbooks:
If you are looking for a tool that can help you manage your accounting department, FreshBooks will work for your business.
It’s an all-in-one invoicing and accounting tool that perfectly suits freelancers and small business owners.
Features:
- Easy to create professional-looking invoices for clients
- Track your business’s expenses
- Track your time and your team with its time tracking feature
- Accepts payment
- It can be integrated with other apps, such as Basecamp, MailChimp, and WordPress
Since it’s a cloud-based app, you can sync your data and manage it wherever you go. It also has mobile apps version, which means you can take your work outside of the office.
Price: For small businesses, their plan starts at $25 per month. It can manage 50 clients at the same time.
2.) Hootsuite:
Many businesses have already taken the time to be on social media. They have seen the importance of using this platform to promote their brand.
But social media marketing is a tedious job, requiring time and planning to make it work.
Since social media is popular, developers are quick to provide tools to help businesses. That’s why we see a lot of scheduling tools that are designed for social media marketing.
If you have a team managing your social media, or you have been doing it alone, using software such as Hootsuite can help.
Features:
- Allows scheduling of posts on different social media accounts
- It collects data on your post’s performance for you to see if a campaign is working
- Flexible workflow between team members
- Secure all content and data of your account
- Allows integration of other apps
- Keyword monitoring
- You can also check what your competitors are doing
Price: They have a free plan, with limited features, but can manage three social media accounts. Their paid plan starts at $19 per month.
3.) Slack:
Communication comes easy with Slack, a tool designed to help team members collaborate without distractions.
Unlike the traditional email method, where it gets piled up, and you forget to read some of it, Slack takes another approach.
There are channels created for each team or department to make communication easy. You don’t have to receive emails or messages if you are not part of the team. Now there’s no distraction.
Features:
- You can join or leave each channel
- Team members can search for a previous message
- It allows the integration of other tools
- You can also share conversations or channels with clients
- Sharing of documents, images, and videos is possible
- Call and screen sharing option
Price: They have a free tier, but with limited features. Their premium plans begin at $6.67 per month.
4.) Mailchimp:
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies to grow a business. It has an ROI of $52 for every dollar you spent, that’s why many companies invest in it.
If you are planning to include email marketing into your marketing strategy, you should need a tool that will help you with your work.
MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing tool that makes emailing easy.
Features:
- Allows promotion of campaigns through different platforms, like email, landing page, and social media.
- Integration of more than 300 apps
- It allows data collection to help in the growth of a business
- You can create campaigns with their templates
- Personalization of content for the audience
- Flexible plans. You can change plans as your business grows.
Price: They have a free basic plan. Their paid plans start at $9.99 per month.
5.) RescueTime:
Another way for you to grow your business is to become productive. The more productive you become, the more sales you can get because you use your time wisely.
Even your employees’ productivity has an impact on the growth of your business.
But being productive is not easy. You can’t be productive all the time if you don’t know where you spend most of your time.
That’s why RescueTime can help you and your employees know where you spend your time, and you can now start being productive.
Features:
- Time tracking can help you determine where you mostly spend your time, and how long you spend your time in a particular site.
- You can block sites to make you focus on your work.
- Sends you weekly reports on where you spend most of your time.
Price: They offer two plans, Individuals and Teams. The individual plan starts at $6 per month. The price for the Team plan will be given upon request.
6.) Asana:
Another tool you can use to check your team’s productivity is Asana. It’s a project management tool to check on the progress of projects.
Features:
- You can meet deadlines with its reminder and to-do list features
- Allow commenting on projects or tasks
- Sharing of media
- Team collaboration
- Tracking of each member’s work progress
- Gantt chart present
Price: The paid plan starts at $10.99 per user/ month.
7.) LeadPages:
If you want to convert your visitors to customers, having a well-crafted landing page will help. Leadpages is a tool that helps small businesses grow.
Features:
- Drag-and-drop feature to make the creation of landing page easy
- Conversion toolkit that will help turn more leads to sales
- A/B split testing to determine which works best for your business
- Integration with other apps like Facebook
- 24/7 tech support
- Facebook and Instagram ad builder
Price: Their basic plan starts at $37 a month. But you can avail of their yearly subscription to get up to 39% off.
8.) Zapier:
You can now focus on tasks that can grow your business when using Zapier. This tool takes care of simple details to lessen your workload.
With Zapier, it triggers a certain app to do its function. When you receive an email, what Zapier will do is automatically save the email’s attachment on your Dropbox, and Slack will alert you with a new file on your Dropbox.
Zapier connects apps, making the workflow smooth.
Price: Their free plan permits 100 tasks per month. You can increase the number of tasks by availing one of their paid tiers, which starts at $19.99 per month.
9.) Semrush:
Getting to know what your competitors are doing is part of growing your business. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spy on your competitors to copy what they do.
Competitor analysis helps businesses see what works from what doesn’t. It also helps to bring things on the table which are not offered by your competitors.
If you want to know what your competitors are up to, SEMRush is a tool that can help you.
Features:
- See what strategies or marketing campaigns your competitors are using
- Check on their website traffic
- Find leads for your business
- Determine your competitors’ keywords and find the keyword for your brand
- You can also check on what your competitors are up to in their advertising campaign and social media accounts.
The best part of SEMRush is that it doesn’t only offer competitor’s analysis, but it has other features such as SEO, marketing research, and social media. It’s an all-in-one marketing tool for your business.
Price: Their paid plan starts at $99.95 per month.
10.) Boost.Ai
Your customers are the most vital part of your business. Without them, you won’t be able to make sales. That’s why it’s vital to provide great user experience, and one way to do so is to integrate a chatbot on your website.
One of the most popular AI chatbot software often used is Boost.ai. It can assist with customer service by providing quick answers to customers’ frequently asked questions.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Can be trained easily
- It transitions customer support to humans if there are complex tasks
- You can integrate it into other apps such as Skype, Facebook messenger, and Slack
Price: Contact their team for more details about the price.
With the help of these apps and software, you can now easily take care of other parts of your business. You can place more time on what matters for your business growth, while simple tasks will be taken care of by these tools.
About the Author:John Ocampos is an Opera Singer by profession and a member of the Philippine Tenors. Ever since Digital Marketing has always been his forte. He is the Founder of SEO-Guru, and the Managing Director of Tech Hacker. John is also the Strategic SEO and Influencer Marketing Manager of Softvire Australia – the leading software eCommerce company in Australia and Softvire New Zealand.
some great app list that you have shared here… I think ‘Asana’ will be very much useful to me:)
Welcome here and thanks for reading our article and sharing your view. This will be very helpful to us to let us motivate to provide you more awesome and valuable content from a different mind. Thanks for reading this article.