11 Tools To Help You Launch And Grow Your New Business
Many new businesses and startups use many online tools to help them manage time, tasks, or calculate the budget. This is one of the reasons why many young people are more confident to start a new business online – because they know they can have a lot of help and useful insights from these digital tools.
But as you probably know, there are so many tools all over the internet that are meant for many different purposes. And depending on the kind of your business, you should probably choose only the ones that are relevant to your business. Although there are some that could help any startup.
Even if you know what sort of tools you would like to use, it is difficult to choose between similar ones. So how do you know which ones are the best? Therefore, in this article, we are going to start faster and easier.
Tools For Project Management
Project management is something any online business needs to think about; therefore, they could earn a great advantage from using digital tools for project management. This is most relevant for online businesses that tend to work with remote employees or freelancers. It is true that digital jobs can be performed perfectly from anywhere, but the bigger the team, the more difficult it becomes to manage projects remotely.
That is why an online business could hardly function properly without a project management tool. Separate tasks might be done fine, but what if one person has to finish his job in order for another to start his job? It becomes very complicated to manage projects while just using email or Facebook Messenger for communication.
Also, it is very important to keep on track with the main goal of the project. To be capable of seeing how much has been done, how much is still left, what are the current results, to see if your team is on schedule, and visually see the deadline. To manage such projects online, you can use online tools like Asana.
Tools For Conversations Between Co-Workers
Surely you could use email or Facebook Messenger for communication with your workers. But there are a few cons in using a social media platform messenger for work. The first and most obvious one is that you can easily get distracted and start procrastinating without even wanting to.
If you knew that all of your work notifications are coming in via Facebook Messenger, you would check your phone each time you heard a notification. What a distraction, right? As you know, many people have problems with the distractions that their personal phones create, so it is better to put your phone aside while you are in the middle of work.
More to it, probably all of us have experienced an annoying situation both at work and personal life, where we need to scroll through a conversation for a minimum of 5 minutes to find the information we were looking for. So unproductive and time-wasting. On the other hand, if you use such tools like Slack for your online communication, you can create threads on a specific topic and get back to it in a few seconds.
Tools For Website Building
Website building could cost a big sum of money and require a huge budget, especially if you have no coders on your team. More to it, creating a well functioning website from a complete zero takes time. Don’t even mention all the corrections and testing.
The fact is that startups usually can not afford big investments and are often just based on original ideas that might be interesting for the digital society. But if you use online tools for the website building, you will save both money and time.
The best thing about online tools for website building is that it usually does not require any programming knowledge and is designed in such a way that any person could use it to build a website. You could use tools like WIX or Yola. You will pick a template that you like and will be able to build a basic but responsive and mobile-friendly website out of it.
Tools for Logo Design
When you first start a business one of the first things you will do is design a logo. Every business needs a logo, and when you do design one for the first time it puts you on the map, and says that you have arrived.
Traditionally businesses turned to graphic designers (those with logo design skills) to create a logo for their business. But, just like with most things in life today, this job once done by humans is now done by online tools.
Now, when it comes time to create a logo for your business you can use logo maker tools, there are many of them on the market, they are cheaper and faster than using graphic designers, and the end result is usually very high quality.
Tools For Email Marketing
Email marketing is always great for reminding your customers about yourself and carrying out a successful remarketing campaign for your business. The most common mistake that is made while trying to use email marketing in advertising campaigns is being too annoying and sending emails too often.
But how can you send the emails too often if you are doing it by hand? If you are surprised – you shouldn’t be. There are still many companies that are keeping a list of their client’s emails in a Word document and sending the email out by copying those email addresses to Outlook or any other email application. In order to not get blocked, they have to know how many emails they can send per hour and keep on track with it.
To avoid all this useless mechanical work, you can start using online email marketing tools to automate your newsletter. For example, you can try out MailChimp – you will be able to send out an email campaign with one click, copy a campaign and edit it next time, schedule the time when you want to send it, and see valuable insights about how people reacted to your email.
Tools For Social Media
In the digital world that we are living, it is no longer enough to have a website and work with Google Ads. You need to be everywhere if you want to get noticed, especially on social media. It is very important to come up with interesting and engaging content and to post updates regularly.
To help you manage all of your social media platforms and save you from checking on these accounts every other minute, you can use an online tool for social media management like Hootsuite that will help you schedule your posts and give you many other benefits.
Tools For VPN
The more new small startups are appearing online, the more cyber attacks are happening, and often their target is a smaller business that has no serious protection. But a virtual private network could help out in cases like this.
A VPN will help your startup create a secure network connection even in those moments when someone on your team will be using a public WiFi. Just think about losing all the hard work that you have been doing on your computer or even worse – all that work being stolen. To avoid that, you can try out online tools for VPN like ExpressVPN or Cyberghost.
Tools For File Storage
No matter what kind of a business niche you are in, all companies have files, and eventually, they have too much, especially if you are working with graphics or other types of visuals. As you probably know, clogging up your work computer with files is no good – this will slow down your computer, and decrease your productivity.
This is both because a computer with a packed hard drive starts to function slower, and it is simply impossible to find needed files when there is chaos on your work computer. So to store your files, you can use online tools like DropBox. This will also let you easily access and share your files from anywhere.
Tools For Human Relations
If you are a fresh startup, it is very normal that you still don’t have a proper HR team. But it is okay because you can easily use a human relation management software to help you out with scheduling work hours or sending out important announcements to your team.
You have to admit that when you start a new business, there is a lot of hassle going on, and the smaller the team is, the more difficult it is to remember and take care of everything. Thankfully, there is such software like GoCo that can help you with HR management.
Tools For Managing Customer Relationship
It is a well-known problem that when customer requests are handled by a person who is sometimes checking the mailbox or live chat and sometimes not, this often ends up with lost or forgotten leads, which have a negative impact on the company.
First of all, a company loses a potential customer, and therefore – money. The company also loses the possibility to build a loyal relationship between the company and the customer.
And in even worse situations, an angry customer who might feel ignored could leave an angry review of your customer service. Try to avoid that in all cases – an online review will impact your SEO, especially a negative one. You can do that by using online tools for customer relationship management, like HubSpot. It will easily help you track every step of your relationship with a specific customer.
Tools For Video Conferences
Even if your team is working remotely and each person is responsible for individual tasks, you will still be working on projects together or have to resolve some mutual issues that might occur along the way. So in situations like this, it would be nice to have an online tool to hold video conferences.
If you are in need of such an online tool, you could try out services like GoToMeeting, Pexip, or TeamViewer. But make sure you read a few reviews before you choose the one that is best for your team – each team has their priorities.
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