Let’s face it; it is practically impossible to run a functional and profitable business without the right technology today. You need tech to attract customers, keep your team productive, communicate with customers, and make smarter business decisions.
Are you finding it difficult deciding on the types of tech tools to add to your business to improve your productivity and results? This post is for you. Here, we share the top three essential software stacks that every modern company has to acquire today.
1. Financial tools
The financial industry is littered with hundreds of money management tools, but only a few can beat Freshbooks and Quickbooks. Here is what each of them offers you:
#Freshbooks
Freshbooks is a hugely popular web-based accounting solution that’s primarily targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. This cloud app helps with tasks such as expense tracking, invoicing, payment management, and time tracking, to name just a few. You can also collect vital business data using this tool to assist you with tax filing, creating profit and loss statements, and calculating time spent on projects. Freshbooks allows easy integration with popular services, including PayPal, MailChimp, and Basecamp.
#Quickbooks
Like Freshbooks, Quickbooks is also an equally popular accounting tool whose primary target market comprises small and medium-sized business owners looking to streamline their finances processes. While it’s a little pricier compared to its counterpart, it packs superior features like the ability to prepare payrolls, keep track of daily transactions, and helping with tax calculations. Quickbooks also supports invoice generation, integration with popular business tools, and can assist you in projecting business growth and other patterns.
2. Marketing tools
When running a business, your aim should always be to get as many people as you can to know about its existence and the products you sell. This means you need to be promoting it at every available opportunity, whether that is on social media, SEO, or directory websites. The following are tools and platforms that could help you achieve significant marketing results fast.
#HootSuite
If you’re planning to use social media for marketing your business, you need to be smart in your promotional activities; otherwise, you may end up wasting a lot of time on these platforms while thinking you’re productive. An excellent place to start is to automate how you post content on here. You don’t always need to do it manually as social media can be quite a big time suck if not adequately managed. Having a tool like HootSuite that helps you schedule and automate content posting on platforms like Facebook and Twitter can save you a lot of your productive time and even money.
#Yelp
Yelp and many other similar customer review websites can prove quite useful when you are trying to create a brand for your business. All you need is to claim your business on these platforms and use them to respond to your customers and prospects. You can also encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews on these platforms to help your business build trust and reputation in the market.
3. Communication tools
How you communicate within and outside of your business can make or break your employee and customer relations. As such, you should create a standard method of communication using technology tools like Slack and Zendesk.
#Slack
Over the past few years, Slack has emerged as a top chat system that teams can rely on for effective communication between members. This tool allows you to create public chat rooms where members can interact among themselves. Besides, team members can converse privately with each other when necessary. Slack integrates seamlessly with many different business tools, including Google Drive and Dropbox, in case you need to share files stored on these cloud storage platforms. There are downloadable apps for users on desktop and mobile, while you can also access your Slack dashboard on the web.
#Zendesk
Customer support plays an integral role in the success or failure of any business. Offer quality and timely support to your customers and their loyalty and trust in your brand grows. The opposite is also true. If you’re looking to automate and get more organized in your customer support services, Zendesk is a tool you may consider. This cloud app helps to organize all support tickets and customer questions coming from various channels like social media, phone calls, email, and live chats. Being able to manage all of these requests from a single point is what you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed and ultimately improve your productivity.
Which other software stacks do you consider a must-have when running your small business? We’d love to hear your feedback.
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