Essential Tools for Growing A Small Business

No matter how much effort you put into your business, without tools, you’ll be slowing down your progress and be defeated to the constant changing form of online marketing. Most of these tools are absolutely free (upgrades are also affordable), and if you did some research, you can take advantage of these tools below:

Social Media Management

In creating noise in social media, an application that you will definitely love is HootSuite - which lets you manage multiple social media accounts at the same time. This will get you connected to your fan base, expand a market forum, and lets you schedule contents to be posted at a later time.

Its auto-scheduling feature also allows you to leverage the power of having your posts scheduled at a time when engagements are the highest.

You may also create a list of influential people you follow in your niche via Hootsuite so that you can easily see their tweets. This will enable you to re-tweet them, and this will hopefully get you noticed by these influencers.

Finance

For the novice in online business and with little finance background, financial applications like QuickBooks can keep track of your expenses and pay the taxes for you.

A word of advice to all entrepreneurs - be vigilant in accounting your expenses right from the start of your business to maintain an organized record later on. If you procrastinate and pile receipts for recording later on, you may be surprised at how much work will need to be done compared to recording them as they happen. Besides, you wouldn’t want to overlook any financial transaction that might hurt your bottom line in the long run.

Email Management

Yes, this might be a shock to you, but email is not yet dead. On the contrary, many businesses have survived with an email in tow as part of their successful business strategy.

You can send newsletters and valuable contents to the subscribers, filled with promos and contests to keep them hooked.

You may try Aweber as its templates allow for easy integration into your blogs. It also helps you keep tabs how your subscribers is growing and send them email broadcasts at specific time which you can set.

Never underestimate the power of email marketing as it’s one proven strategy that has helped business through the years.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

These babies manage your company’s interactions with current and future customers, tracking data to maximize sales and directly your focus to where it should be.

Customer relationship management tools will allow you to analyze how your customers are behaving, see what are the things that matter to them and help you see which of your marketing strategies are working and which are just duds.

Has the world changed so much that quickly? Yep.  So better keep up and be in the know, and use tools that will make you work more efficiently.

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Article contributed by Startup Jobs Asia's Team.

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