As an entrepreneur, it’s your responsibility to efficiently run, grow and expand your business. It often feels like an impossible task, doesn’t it?
After all you're the person that wears all of the hats. You’re a marketer, secretary, web designer, and many others. Some days you’re most likely overwhelmed with things to do - managing your social media accounts, sending out emails, creating the perfect marketing campaign, and updating your website. These things are time-consuming, and many important tasks are often put off because of a lack of time.
Hiring someone to help might seem like the next logical step. But there are a handful of tools that will help you build a successful business while freeing up your time to get all of the important things you need to get done and allowing you to enjoy the freedoms of owning your own business.
Being productive is more important than being busy, you’ve heard the saying before, “work smarter not harder”. Stop working longer hours to get the things done when you can utilize business tools and resources that will free up your time.
Here is a list of some of the best tools that every business should be utilizing these tools and apps to efficiently run their business. Having the right tools means having more time to grow your business and enjoy the freedoms of owning your own business,
HootSuite allows you to easily manage all of your social media accounts from one place - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. But it’s more than just a scheduling system. This tool helps you to create a constant stream of content based on social conversations and trends. You have all of this information right in front of you so you’ll never need to leave HootSuite. Plus, you’ll be able to easily respond to comments across all platforms. This will free up a great amount of your time and allow you to stay active daily with your social media marketing!
Email marketing is still one of the best marketing methods available. But sending out personalized emails can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Often one that we’ll avoid. But if you’re looking to engage your prospects and get your message out to your audience then you’ll need an email marketing tool that will allow you to streamline the process. There are plenty of good ones to choose from, Aweber, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact are the most popular. They all offer ways to help you build your list, send out personalized content, send different messages to different people within your list, and more
We live in a world filled with instant gratification. When people want answers, they don’t want to wait, and there’s no better way to answer questions instantly than with live chat on your website. A user can ask a question and be answered right away. This will increase sales, improve customer service, and aid in growing your business faster. You’ll find a ton of live chat tips online that will help you get the most out of this type of tool.
Good organization is the key to utilizing the day efficiently. How long do you spend looking for a file to share with someone? Have you ever decided to work from home but realized the document you need is at the office? Stop storing your files on your computer so that you can easily access them from anywhere. DropBox and Google Drive are the best tools to save images, documents, and video clips that you can easily share and access from anywhere while protecting your files safety. What would happen if your computer went down today? All of your files would be gone with it.
Owning a business means having a website; this isn’t optional. Hiring a web designer can be costly. Thankfully you can easily create and maintain your website with a website builder such as Squarespace or Wix. Both of these tools allow you to build clean, mobile-optimized websites without any web design knowledge. There are tons of templates to choose from, but designing a website from scratch is simple; it doesn’t matter if you’re looking to build an online store, lead generation page, or a 5-page website. They even provide you with some marketing tools to help get the word out about your newly designed website.
