Thinking about how to grow your business in the New Year? You are welcome to the league of great entrepreneurs looking to see their business reach the top this year with all goals achieved. When we talk about growing your business, it is essential to find the right tools to help you get the job done.
While it may be a bit challenging for business owners to keep their business in the spotlight, getting the right tools can make the job a lot easier. In this post, I have compiled 8 essential and irreplaceable tools every business worth it’s salt should have this year in its arsenal.
Tools To Grow Your Business This Year
#1: Google My Business
This is an essential tool you need to create more presence online and so get your more visible to your prospective customers. If you are familiar with searching for products and services online, you must have noticed the power of Google My Business (GMB). It is the box Google displays on the right side of the page showing relevant information about a specific business or company.
When you get yourself on GMB, you have just increased your chance of getting seen easily online by your prospective customers and clients. Google My Business is completely free, and one interesting fact about it is that it provides a good chance for your satisfied customers to leave feedback and reviews on your business. It encourages more prospective customers in the future to choose your business. GMB is a good tool to grow your business online.
#2: Canva
If your resources are limited but you don’t want the image of your business to look resentful, Canva is an excellent tool for you. It allows us to create designs of all kinds in minutes without having to have great knowledge of graphic design.
It allows you to create documents of all kinds: from images for social networks to email headers or material such as flyers or restaurant menus. Its drag and drop operation and its free templates make it an extremely simple tool with which you can achieve very professional results and improve the image of your brand.
#3: Calendly
Running a business can be very hectic and troublesome. One can always run out of time and can forget many important events. So, time is precious, once it is lost it will never come back. You need to manage your time accordingly. There are many applications like Calendly that can help you to manage your time.
#4: Yoast
If you already manage your own website and your next goal is to optimize your search engine rankings, then you will be familiar with the “SEO” concept. The world of SEO is wide and complex and there are several factors that come into play when determining where you appear on Google every time someone searches for your product or business.
Yoast is a WordPress plug-in that gives you tools for a correct configuration of your pages so that you can compete on Google with other companies in your sector. You only have to choose which keyword you want to position yourself for. For example, let’s say you have a shoe store and are working on the positioning of your page on “soccer shoes,” Yoast will tell you where you should put those words along with the page so that Google detects that page and how it’s relevant to that search.
#5: Mailchimp
E-mail is a powerful tool for growing your business. So, your e-mail marketing campaigns need to be very effective. Mailchimp is a well-known tool that allows you to perform and analyze the results of email marketing campaigns. It allows you to organize your contacts in different lists to launch different campaigns with different objectives depending on who they are aimed at. Its design tools are also very useful and will allow you to create very attractive mails without having to have knowledge of design or programming.
It also allows you to see email opening statistics as well as the percentage of clicks you receive on every link that you have placed, which can come pretty handy when deciding what to change for future actions.
The free version is quite complete, and if you don’t work with a very high number of contacts, it may be enough. However, you have several payment options (from $10 per month) that will allow you to increase the number of contacts and shipments available monthly.
#6: Hootsuite
If you dedicate yourself to managing the social networks of your business and have realized that it is starting to take longer than it should, Hootsuite can help you optimize your time. You can program and manage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ without having to enter each one of them.
A good idea to optimize your time is that you spend a few hours of a single day of the week to schedule the content that you will publish on social networks throughout the week. You can assign dates and times according to the time of day when your followers are most active. If you organize yourself in this way you will only have to check from time to time to answer comments.
#7: Dropbox
Dropbox is a classic when it comes to filing storage in the cloud. It allows you to organize and store your documents and always have them available from any device. It is ideal to work among several members of a team on the same document or to instantly share documents between devices.
You have payment options for companies from a few dollars per month, in case you need more storage space or more users associated with the same account.
#8: Fiverr
Do you need the timely collaboration of experts in graphic design, marketing, programming, content creation, etc.? Fiverr is your platform. It puts you in touch with freelancers of all kinds, and from really modest prices. You will find infinite categories and all kinds of works related to them. It is a good option when you need professional services for very specific jobs and at a low cost.
Normally, the freelancers that you will find in Fiverr offer different versions of their service at different costs. Say for example that you are looking for someone who designs a logo for your brand: the cheapest option could include single logo design, in one format and without revisions, while the most expensive option could include three logo designs, in different formats, with transparency, revisions, and changes of the chosen design. Without a doubt, having a platform like Fiverr where you can easily get things done by experienced and professional freelancers at the fraction of the cost is important.
