If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re often short on time and money. Tools and resources can help you to stay productive and grow your company, but not all of them are free or affordable. So we decided to take a look at some of the best free resources out there.
Flowlu
AppSumo Deal: Flowlu
Unify your business processes with a comprehensive project and customer management platform.
$49.00 | $708.00
Flowlu is a complete business management software with project management, invoicing, mind maps, and CRM.
Pros
- Create a visual funnel. Use it to track sales and measure the funnel’s effectiveness.
- Create to-do’s or follow-ups and delegate to team members.
- Automate repetitive tasks to save time and reduce errors.
- Organize and manage the sales process with kanban boards.
Cons
- Very few integrations.
- Pricing’s a bit high without the AppSumo deal.
Lead Generation Tools
#1. Lead Generation Marketing Tools for Small Business: MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is an omnichannel chatbot marketing platform that instantly connects customers and prospects to brands through live chat, SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging apps, all from one platform.
Adding MobileMonkey to your digital marketing tools set is guaranteed to generate tons of quality leads for your small business, and fast.
Additionally, just like mass email marketing, MobileMonkey has an automated, reliable method of sending mass content all at once to your audiences across multiple channels.
Here are some other great examples you can get started with today to generate leads using live chat:
- Proactive live chat
- Build a chatbot for sales
- Run click-to-Messenger ads on Facebook
- Set up Facebook autoresponders on all your posts
- Chatbot drip marketing campaigns
- Run a giveaway on Facebook
- Boost your social media posts and other content
Graphic Design Marketing Tools for Small Business: Canva
Canva is one of the most used digital marketing tools to quickly create images, presentations, ads, and other visual content.
The visual content creator integrates millions of images, fonts, templates, and illustrations for marketers with little to no design skills to build professional-looking images.
Canva has pre-built templates for all of your favorite marketing channels, such as:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
Trello
It’s time to get organized. Once you start a business, you learn that your head, napkins, and random scraps of notebook paper no longer cut it for keeping track of projects and to-do lists. This is why I love Trello. Trello is a project management tool that allows you to set up all your tasks and to-do lists in one neatly organized website, accessible from any device. With Trello’s free plan, you get unlimited boards, lists, cards, members, checklists, and attachments.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: MobileMonkey
More than 1.5 billion people actively use Facebook Messenger chat. But less than 1% of businesses are utilizing this lucrative marketing channel.
Therefore, Messenger presents an opportunity to engage with consumers on an untapped and highly engaging marketing channel.
Furthermore, Messenger is trending because it’s compatible with another high-performing marketing tool – chatbots.
MobileMonkey Facebook Messenger chatbots allow you to engage with your audience with marketing automation tools such as:
- Chat blasting: Just like email blasts, but with chatbots
- One-time notifications: Invite users to get updates and promotional messages
- Drip campaigns: Sequenced messages across Facebook, SMS, and web chat
- Facebook post autoresponders: Capture leads and subscribers from organic Facebook posts
All the Messenger contacts captured by your Facebook Messenger bot can be added to other MobileMonkey marketing channels. This includes SMS text messaging, native live chat for your website, and other web chat apps like Instagram and WhatsApp.
This way, you’ll be able to build user profiles, see their entire history across channels, trigger messages based on their behavior, and opt them into other campaigns.
Learn how to create a Facebook Messenger funnel that drives conversion.
Viral Marketing Tools for Small Business: Quuu
I’ve used Quuu multiple times to curate and promote content for social media accounts.
Quuu’s promotion tool gets real profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to click and share your content.
Recently, Quuu introduced a new feature called Pods, which is really interesting.
It allows you to automate social media sharing of content between your accounts and your friends, colleagues, and business partners accounts.
Use Quuu to curate content that your social media audiences will find value in, and then promote your company’s best performing content to increase traffic to your blog.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a multipurpose CRM for various departments like sales, marketing, customer service, and operations. It makes it easy for different departments to collaborate.
Price: $45 to $4,200 per month. Free trial available.
Pros
- Has a good feature-studded free plan.
- Has all the necessary CRM features like prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, deal tracking, and pipeline management.
- Marketing CRM features like automation, smart content, and SEO are a bonus. Data from multiple sources makes it easy to serve customers better.
Cons
- The full plan is expensive.
- Many cheaper pricing options are available. But it’s time-consuming to get through them.
- Requires a big learning curve.
Deskera
AppSumo Deal: Deskera
An award-winning unified platform for your invoicing, accounting, payroll, HR, and CRM.
$149.00 | $1,188.00
Deskera is an all-in-one business software for startups and small businesses, with more than 500,000 users.
Pros
- Sales and marketing automation and workflows save you time and money.
- Sales CRM features include contact management, deal management, and pipelines.
- Marketing CRM features include email campaigns, templates, segments, and scheduling.
- Also, has customer support CRM features.
Cons
- A good complete business tool, but CRM features are limited.
- Doesn’t have many integrations.
Online Advertising Tools for Small Business Marketing: AdEspresso
AdEspresso is for performance markers that need to manage hundreds of ads and ad variations at a time.
The platform has a combination of marketing automation tools designed to save you time while increasing conversions.
Use Evernote for organization.
When it comes to marketing your business, organization is critical. Ideas may come to you at any hour of the day. If you’re not able to organize and prioritize your notes, you may not be able to capitalize on opportunities.
Evernote will help you capture ideas, inspiration and trends, all while storing it in one easily accessible location. You can access it on your phone, laptop or tablet, making it the perfect tool for finding and storing content ideas, market research, brainstorming and competitive analyses.
7. Use SurveyMonkey to secure customer feedback.
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular free online survey tools. Surveys are a good way to collect consumer information, engage customers, uncover trends and secure tangible insights on your business. SurveyMonkey’s software is incredibly simple. In just a few minutes, you can design, create and publish your own business survey. Additionally, you’ll be able to analyze the results in the backend.
Using AdEspresso, you can quickly create and analyze your ad campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, and Google, all from one platform.
Running lots of Facebook ads? Check out the top 7 Facebook ad hacks of all time to get some more ideas!
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a flexible and easy-to-use CRM for sales teams that’s used by 95,000 companies in 179 countries.
Price: $15, $29, $59 and $99 per month. Add-ons cost extra. 14-day free trial available.
Pros
- Customizable and intuitive software.
- Includes important sales-centric features like deal management, contact management, email templates, and meeting scheduler.
- Scores of integrations available.
Cons
- Starting price is low, but add-ons can make it expensive.
- Smaller plans limited to chat support.
Conclusion
Are you stuck and don’t know what to do next? Do you want to control your destiny, do work that matters, and have the freedom to travel?
Entrepreneurs typically want to do everything themselves and be in charge of their business. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. In reality, we don’t have enough time to take care of every single aspect of our business on our own. Let these tools and services help you organize your day, on a professional and personal level.