You’ve heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is especially true when it comes to business tools. Common business tools are often depicted in illustrations. There are various types of business tools. There are dozens of common business tools that most businesses use on a daily basis.
Want to learn about types of business tools? Or about common business tools? Check out the business tools and their uses for businesses.
Project management
A new business (particularly one with a remote workforce, or one that requires collaboration across various teams) will need help keeping track of its myriad projects and goals. Email isn’t optimal for this, as it’s too isolated, and it’s easy for members to be accidentally left off an update if they aren’t included on the latest message.
Project management platforms like Trello or Wrike are more efficient. These cloud-based tools give a full and transparent look at where each important project is in its lifecycle and allows everyone to trace its progress from inception to completion.
Communication and collaboration
Conversations between employees can be difficult to keep track of, especially as your business grows. Let teams chat, share files and integrate with other apps through a communication tool like Slack.
Website builder
Having a website is no longer optional for any business—it’s as important as the front door of a brick-and-mortar store. A website says that you’re a legitimate company, and you can use your site to impart news, information and alternative communication channels to your customers.
If you’re not tech-savvy, however, you don’t have to settle. Use a website builder like SquareSpace to create a clean, mobile-optimized site that you can build out to include a store, or promote via integrated marketing tools.
Website performance monitoring
No matter how you build your website, you’ll want to know how people are using it (or not using it) so you can adjust and influence them to make different decisions. Try a tool like Chartbeat or Google Analytics to track your visitors and see if they’re “bouncing” (immediately leaving), what pages they’re clicking into and other data you can mine to increase performance.
Customer relationship management
There’s no reason to operate your customer relationships on the fly any longer. Too often this leads to lost or forgotten leads, or turns repeat customers into ghosts.
Your customer relationship management (or CRM) tool will allow you to log and track every aspect of every relationship you build, letting you know how long it’s been since you’ve followed up with loyal customers, or which users are visiting your website and filling out forms but not closing the deal on a purchase. CRM software like HubSpot helps you stay organized internally and top-of-mind with customers.
Email Software
We’ve been hearing that email is dead for years, but in reality, that’s simply not true. Oberlo says that in 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion people.
In 2023, the figure will reach 4.3 billion. That is half of the world’s population, which includes your potential customers.
Given these statistics then, it makes sense to market your products via email to potential customers. For this, you can use email software like Moosend. The best email tools offer functions to take the leg-work out of making sales.
These include automation tools to ensure you have the best possible subject lines. You can also A/B test variations of your marketing emails to fully optimize them for maximum conversions.
With email marketing tools, you can send content to your audience to lure them back to your store, guide them towards a purchase or build client relationships. In ecommerce, this is typically done with special offers or recommended items, like so:
Social Media Management Tool
But having an online presence doesn’t only mean having a website. You also need a strong social media presence. Consider these facts. According to one study by Hootsuite and We Are Social, there are 3.725 billion active social media users in the world as of October 2019.
This is a 9.6% increase from the 328 million recorded in October of 2018, and the numbers will keep going up.
This means that if you want to run a successful business, social networks are a powerful platform to connect with customers. But it’s not enough to simply make a Facebook page and hope for the best. Really, you want to be active on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, any other platform you can think of.
After all, your potential customers are literally everywhere, and your job is to try to reach out to them as much as you can.
The problem with having too many social media accounts is that it can become very overwhelming to manage them. It can take hours to access one platform, maintain it, and then access another to do the same.
If you do these separately, you might also lose your brand consistency in the process, or let some platforms slide.
Thankfully, there are tools that allow you to manage your social media accounts. These will enable you to aggregate and schedule posts for every platform from a single tool. Since you can see all your accounts in just one platform, you can be sure there will be brand consistency across all your accounts.
The best Social Media tools also help you to optimize your posts for different platforms, both in terms of post length and tone. You’ll also platforms to manage your Google Ads, Facebook ads, and other retargeting to boost the effectiveness of your social media efforts.
File storage and access
All of your important documents, from your project files to your articles of incorporation, should be stored “off-site,” in the cloud. Get Google Drive or Dropbox storage to safeguard your backups, as well as grant access to users from any location and make updates to important files on the fly.
Virtual private network
Cyber attacks targeting small businesses are on the rise, which means you should take precautions to safeguard your startup from phishers, hackers and other cybercriminals. A VPN allows users to create a secure network connection even when you’re using a public network—such as the public WiFi networks at coffee shops. NordVPN is a popular option for its military-grade protections and thousands of available servers.
If you expect to conduct work from public spaces or collect sensitive data from clients, a VPN is an affordable way to protect you, your employees and your business.
Video conferencing software
Need to correspond with a remote team, or have a productive meeting with clients, prospective employees or consultants? A video conferencing solution that allows multiple parties to join and collaborate is a must. You can try free options like Join.me, but consider that they may max out at around 10 participants, so you can upgrade to a paid service for more attendees.
HR management software
When you’re just starting out, you may not have a full-fledged human resources team. HR management software can do everything from schedule employee shifts and send out company announcements to collect bank account information for direct deposit. There are so many small details that a new business owner could overlook that would then expose the business to issues and lawsuits. Put responsibility for these important tasks on one of the many leading digital HR tools on the market such as GoCo.
Accounting Software
Businesses are all about profit. To track this effectively, you need to monitor your outgoing costs, in addition to your gross profits. These can include employees’ pay, store rent, and electricity bills, among other things.
Sure, this can be done by one person. The downside, however, is they will be prone to mistakes. After all, we’re all human. Also, it will take a lot of time, since the accountant will have to make calculations on their own.
Remember, accountants are highly trained professionals, so their time is expensive.
This is where accounting software comes in handy. Instead of doing manual computations, you can just let the software do the sums for you.
You don’t even have to worry about the space it will occupy on your computer or laptop. Most accounting software nowadays is cloud-based, which means all you need to do is register online and pay if it’s not free.
Since all you need is the Internet and a device, you can access your financials anywhere and anytime.
Keyword research tools
If you’re just getting started in the content marketing game and want to figure out how your startup can create thoughtful, interesting content that ranks on Google search, use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to investigate words and search terms in your industry. Then build your well-written blog posts around these terms and watch your traffic grow.
A new startup that doesn’t have an array of digital tools to automate and simplify tasks, connect remote users and improve operations may soon be running behind its competitors. It’s especially important to have these tools in place to manage a remote workforce.
Start things off on the right foot by investigating these digital tools early—it’ll be easier to scale up with them than to retrofit your tools to your existing, perhaps inefficient, processes.
Timesheet App
Time is literally gold in any business. If you’re a day late delivering your products to your customers, you lose money. If you don’t give that contract to a potential partner on the agreed-on date, you can lose that partnership, and also money.
This is why it’s so important to monitor those responsible for your business operations, your employees. The key is to see to it that they are working at the time they’re supposed to be working, and in the place they’re supposed to be working.
But how can you do this if you can’t be at the office 24/7? Simple. Use a timesheet app.
Timesheet apps allow you to monitor whether or not your employee has clocked in at the right time. You won’t have to worry about them clocking in from home either. Timesheet apps typically use GPS to track where your employees are at a given time.
This improves accountability and saves management hours of time that can be put to better use.
Conclusion
Whether you run a small business or a large corporation, managing the tools and technology that support your organization can be a challenge. You need information to help you determine where to spend your time and money, and what tools will improve your business processes. This publication provides a brief overview of some types of tools and their uses in different areas of your business.