You could spend your time learning about online tools examples or online tools, or you could get to the good stuff! Online tools are put to use by practically every business on the planet. They streamline workflow and make life easier for teams. That means there are lots of tools out there to learn about. And while some will entertain you quite well, others can take your business to the next level.
Don’t let your business be left behind. There are online tools that make your life easy and save you time, improving productivity and helping you grow. In this article, we’ll help you learn about the tools you should know.
Blossom
Blossom lets you drag to-do items from one list to another in an intuitive way, using an interface that feels like rearranging Post-it notes on a whiteboard.
Blossom is an easy way to track the progress of personal projects, bigger projects, and really anything that comes to mind.
Buffer
Trying to remember what you want to post–or, worse, flooding your social-media stream with updates–can be the bane of your (and your followers’) social-media existence. Buffer lets you add links, photos, videos, etc. to a queue and automatically schedule them for publishing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can publish time-critical updates right on time and space out less time-sensitive updates.
Plus, you can use Buffer’s analytics to make smarter scheduling decisions. There are iPhone and Android apps as well as a great browser extension.
Evernote
Unless you’re this guy, you probably need a note-taking app. Evernote is arguably the best, with apps for almost every platform and the ability to sync seamlessly across almost all devices.
And it has great search functionality to let you find what you’ve written.
Help Scout
It may be easier for you, but your customers don’t like opening tickets or filling out forms to get the help they need. Help Scout lets customers send emails that you receive as easy-to-handle tickets in a separate, shared inbox. Responding is still easy for you, and you can organize and analyze queries, complaints, etc.
Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a well-designed tool that lets you place a bar at the top of your website that directs visitors anywhere you want.
Sounds simple, right? The power of Hello Bar is its built-in analytics and A/B testing tool. Test which messages resonate best with your customers and let Hello Bar do the hard work.
HipChat
You’re working as a small team, so you create a Skype room to chat. But then what? Exactly.
Ditch generic IM platforms and try a business IM app like HipChat. It allows you to create multiple rooms for different focus groups, connect with your most important apps, and a lot more.
IDoneThis
Getting stuff done is great–unless you can’t remember what you’ve done or what your team has done. IDoneThis lets you and your team fill in what they did and then browse that information like a Facebook feed to like, comment, and get ready for what’s next.
KISSmetrics
Instead of just finding out how much traffic you received, find out who did what on your site–and why. KISSmetrics lets you slice and dice data to make better decisions.
And make sure you check out its cohort analysis tools to measure visitor engagement over time.
Olark
According to this study, consumers are willing to spend an average of 13 percent more with a company they believe provides excellent customer service.
Olark, a small pop-up you place at the bottom of your website that allows you to chat with your customers, could be one way to differentiate the level of service you provide. If you aren’t available, you can still use the tool to send you an email.
Don’t you want your support to be simple and efficient–and most important, helpful for your customers? Thought so.
TextExpander
You write a lot of emails, and some of what you write is fairly repetitive.
With TextExpander, you can write and store your most important or most common messages. Then just type a keyword to automatically paste that text into any email.
Consider prewriting boilerplate paragraphs, common instructions, and responses to certain types of inquiries. Why write anything important more than once? Craft it, perfect it, and insert it with one word.
Soda PDF
Sorry, we couldn’t resist. Soda PDF is the revolutionary, reliable, and intuitive portable online collaboration tool that allows your teams to quickly create secure PDF documents, save them to the cloud, sign and send, and share them with the whole team.
It’s perfect if you’re a document-heavy company managing a remote team or a connected network of knowledge workers.
Functions such as:
- Multi-step security
- Fast and intuitive professional document creation in seconds
- Customizable doc options
- Side-by-side view mode for lightning-quick comparisons
Are what make this the perfect tool for the modern knowledge sharing company.
Slack
Slack is the communicative tool of communicative tools. It is to team collaboration what Google is to search engines: the be-all end-all.
With millions of users across the globe, Slack allows employees to send direct messages and files to independent users and allows entire teams to organize chats into specific channels for separate projects or general team banter (for example, a work-related chat and an “employees only” group for good-natured fun).
You can drag, drop, and share files with ease, though it’s not a great solution for cloud storage.
Trello
Does your team have trouble identifying goals, parsing them out into manageable tasks, and tracking progress each step of the way? You aren’t alone.
That’s why Trello, the ultimate project management software available on the web, is trusted by teams everywhere to help them get the job done. Its unique system of project cards allows you to do everything from identifying the importance of a task to gauging progress within a project.
Did we mention it was FREE!
Bonus: Trello integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, and Slack.
Asana
Video calls, project tracking, handy integrations such as reminders, to-do lists, and direct requests—Asana is another heavy hitter in the team collaboration tool division.
Watch your communication and organizational woes melt away in Asana’s colourful board or list format and behold your productivity soaring through the roof.
Google Keep
Part of Google’s ever-expanding dominance of all things “the Internet”, Google Keep is their note-taking rival to Evernote and OneNote, and it has quickly become one of the best tools online.
Quickly take and save notes, photos, voice memos, and checklists, and share them with your team. With integration into Google’s suite of services, it’s impossible to beat the flexibility and convenience.
GoToMeeting
Robust, affordable, and replete with features such as messaging, group chat, recording, and integration with helpful tools, GoToMeeting is one of the premier online collaboration tools for business and is your answer for seamless business meetings in just a single click.
It’s the ideal solution for international teams that can’t get enough of seeing each other’s faces in HD. It even supports screen sharing to help lessen the learning curve!
Yammer
The business social network, Yammer, is a veteran of the online collab scene:
- Like each other’s statuses
- Create your own ingroup with company emails
- Chat privately or in the open
- And share documents with ease
It’s all as easy as logging in and saying hello!
Yammer is the most widely used of all team collaboration tools, and it’s one of the best ways to increase employee bonding, collaboration, and morale.
ConceptBoard
ConceptBoard is a cloud-based whiteboard project management tool that allows for collaborative design on all things visual. It’s basically a one-stop shop tool for designers and creatives.
Create private sessions and upload files for continuous discussion, revision, and feedback. Perfect for marketing campaigns being worked on by teams of remote creatives such as designers, graphic artists, and copywriters!
Redbooth
Oh, your team doesn’t have Redbooth? It should! It’s one of the most comprehensive and in-depth project management tools on the market.
You can create projects, assign colleagues different tasks, track hours worked, and even view fancy Gantt charts and visualize productivity in stunning colours. The chat functions keep everyone on the same page and video and instant messaging allow for fast, effective communication.
Blink
What makes Blink special is focusing on a really good mobile app experience. But what is Blink? It’s a combination of a chat application, mixed with great storage options.
You can get relevant info to your frontline team, when they need it. Due to its simple design and user focused features, you’ll find that an increase to your employee engagement.
If you make it easy to chat and share files, you’ll have a very happy team.
Google Docs
When it comes to simplicity and affordability, it’s hard to beat Google Docs. For one, it’s free. Aside from that, it’s extremely simple and effective.
Create a document, spreadsheet, or presentation and share it with a coworker. You can even get a shareable link and let anyone who clicks on it have a view.
Multiple people can edit at the same time (in neat colour patterns), leave comments, and make editing suggestions. You also benefit from the functionally unlimited storage that comes with all things Google.
There’s nothing more powerful than collaboration for a business. If you want to increase your productivity and profits, try these top 10 online collaboration tools.
If you want to try the best tool there is, head over to Soda PDF and start your free trial today.
Conclusion
There’s a reason we don’t remember our telephone numbers anymore. Our mobile phones make it far easier to dial the number and store that information in our phones than to keep it in our heads. Similarly, there are plenty of online tools that make life like a junior marketer much easier.