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Making your small business more digital can extend to a variety of areas of your business and increase your overall business success. From daily tasks to strategic planning, there is a free or affordable online and/or mobile tool to help you do it.
Following are four ways you can integrate digital tools into your processes to improve your small business, including some digital tool suggestions, so you can do it without breaking the bank.
1. Accounting and Bookkeeping
While no tool can replace the expertise of an accountant, there are some digital tools that can help you manage all aspects of your business accounting and bookkeeping. For creating, sending, and tracking quotes and invoices, FreshBooks is an excellent option with a variety of account features and prices to choose from depending on your business needs.
If you want to fully integrate your bank accounts and create more advanced accounting reports, Wave is free and easy to use. To get even more advanced with more robust accounting features, Xero is feature-rich, extremely popular and affordable.
2. Marketing
There are digital tools to help you manage, streamline, and save time and money for almost every marketing activity you can think of. Some of the most popular areas for digital streamlining are email marketing and social media marketing.
MailChimp offers a free email marketing account for small businesses that sends a small number of marketing email messages each month. It’s very easy to use and MailChimp offers a variety of tutorial videos and a deep online help section filled with articles that answer just about every question you might have. When you learn that you need more, you can upgrade your account.
You can also use MailChimp to create newsletter subscription forms, auto-responders, and RSS-to-email campaigns (so people who subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed get a visually appealing email rather than the more generic and plainer version sent by most feed management tools, and you get better performance tracking reports). If you have a bigger budget, AWeber is one of the best email marketing and list management tools available for small businesses.
Social media marketing tools come in many forms and can help you with content discovery, curation, creation, sharing, tracking, and more. HootSuite is one of the best tools to use as a first step to streamlining your social media marketing activities on a daily basis. The free account is perfect to get started, and you can upgrade to a paid account at a later date if you need to integrate more social media profiles than the free account allows or need more advanced reporting and features.
If HootSuite offers more than you need or want to tackle right now, Buffer is a great option for simply steamlining the process of sharing content across your social media profiles.
3. Website Design and Ecommerce
Thanks to easy-to-use digital tools, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on website design and ongoing web maintenance and management. You can do a lot of it yourself. With WordPress, you can create a customized website for your small business and easily add an online store. If you need a tool that’s even easier to use (although not as flexible or feature-rich), SquareSpace is a great option.
If you want to create an online store quickly and easily, ecommerce and shopping cart platforms like Shopify and Volusion offer a variety of options at affordable prices.
4. Project Management
Whether you need to manage your own tasks from start to finish or need to collaborate on tasks with other people, there are free and affordable digital tools that make most aspects of project management simple. For example, Producteev is a great free task management tool that enables you to manage hundreds of employees and projects, delegate tasks, track results, and more.
If you have a budget, Teambox is one of the most popular online tools for managing tasks, sharing files, and communicating with team members. You even have the option to conduct video conferences from within the tool. Up to five users can be included in a free account, and you can upgrade to a paid account if you need additional features.
An alternative tool for collaboration and project management in a digital environment is Basecamp. A free trial is available with reasonable monthly prices available if you decide to stick with it.
Go Digital and Improve Your Small Business
Today, there is no reason not to go digital by streamlining some of the tasks that eat up time or cost you money with free and affordable online tools. The sooner you go digital, the sooner you’ll see both your productivity level and profits rise.
I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit http://visa.com/business.
Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women on Business. She is a 30-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).
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