7 Tools Every Small Business Must Have

Own­ing a small busi­ness is not easy! In hon­or of small busi­ness week, we want­ed to share some things we have learned along the way. Nicte Cre­ative Design will turn 7 in June and in that entre­pre­neur­ial jour­ney, we’ve learned quite a few lessons. One of them, is using the right tools to help you man­age your busi­ness. We’ve used sev­er­al dif­fer­ent tools over the course of the years and these 7 Tools Every Small Busi­ness Must Have. They NEVER let us down and have been cru­cial to our growth.

7 Tools Every Small Business Must Have

Man­ag­ing a small busi­ness can be a chal­lenge. Between mar­ket­ing your own ser­vices, doing essen­tial busi­ness stuff to work­ing on your client work. That can be a lot to han­dle for a small team or even a team of one! In order to bal­ance all the aspects of a busi­ness, we need to find a bal­ance between them all and work smarter not hard­er. Hav­ing the right tools can help stream­line your busi­ness and cut down on task man­age­ment time — help­ing you save mon­ey. So here are our must have tools to date.

1. A Reliable Website Host

In our ever-grow­ing dig­i­tal world, almost every busi­ness has a web­site now. Work­ing with a reli­able host and domain provider is cru­cial to a busi­ness. Your web­site should essen­tial­ly work for you while you sleep. Our busi­ness has used ICDSOFT.com for hosting/domain ser­vices since 2005! Their cus­tomer ser­vice is amaz­ing and in all these years they have nev­er let us down. Not to men­tion their pric­ing is excel­lent and nav­i­gat­ing their sys­tem is far eas­i­er than oth­ers we have used.

2. Content Management System (CMS)

Not every busi­ness will have a web­site design­er on staff. So hav­ing a web­site that is easy to update is cru­cial. While we can design and code our own site, we found it so ben­e­fi­cial to use a self-host­ed site using Word­Press as our CMS. We designed and cod­ed our theme and once that was done, we han­dle the updates on our self-host­ed Word­Press. While there is a learn­ing curve, we always pro­vide our clients with exclu­sive train­ing on how to man­age their web­site when we fin­ish. You can always buy a pre-built theme, but even then, some­times you will encounter cus­tomiza­tion chal­lenges. So, make sure you do your research first on what you need your web­site to do before you buy a theme.

3. Getting Paid & Accounting 

This has been a HUGE pain point for us over the years. We’ve used sev­er­al dif­fer­ent soft­ware and none of them aligned with our needs. They either required a lot of man­u­al data entry or they became way to com­pli­cat­ed to close out a paid invoice… until we dis­cov­ered Fresh­Books! Using Freshbooks.com has been a game chang­er for our busi­ness! It auto­mat­i­cal­ly imports your expens­es, helps you cat­e­go­rize them, keeps dig­i­tal receipts, and makes it easy to share with your accoun­tant. Not to men­tion their whole process is green — HUGE WIN. But that’s not all. Our favorite fea­ture is the cus­tomized invoic­ing sys­tem and pay­ment reminders our clients get. This soft­ware alone, has improved our accounting/invoicing sys­tem by 100%. And because of that, Fresh­books is one of our favorite on our list of every tools a small busi­ness must have.

4. Building an Email List

Email mar­ket­ing is some­thing we didn’t embrace until a few years ago. And it wasn’t because we didn’t want to. It was lack of knowl­edge. We love MailChimp because it’s easy to use, auto­mate and DESIGN cus­tom brand­ed themes. And while we are still grow­ing (and learn­ing), we’ve been able to grow our list to over 300 peo­ple, some of which have turned into valu­able part­ner­ships and cus­tomers. Build­ing an email list has helped us build more of a per­son­al con­nec­tion with those in our inner com­mu­ni­ty. Our focus hasn’t been to sale sale sale. It’s been nur­ture nur­ture nurture.

5. Design Software

We know not every busi­ness own­er is a design­er or may have a pro design­er on staff. But hav­ing an estab­lished brand by a design­er is cru­cial to cre­at­ing a cohe­sive and rec­og­niz­able brand. We per­son­al­ly use Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Inde­sign and Pho­to­shop to cre­ate most of our con­tent. But we also love using Adobe Express (for­mer­ly Adobe Spark) when we are on the go and even for our clients! Adobe Express is the per­fect tool for any small busi­ness because it lets you design graph­ics in all for­mats through their mobile or brows­er app. When it comes to our clients who need to man­age their own social media graph­ics, we always use Adobe Express! Their pre­mi­um ver­sion allows you to cre­ate cus­tom brand­ed tem­plates so we are able to design these for our clients and nei­ther of us wor­ry about the designs loos­ing integri­ty. 

6. Social Media Management 

There are so many options out there to man­age your social media that it can get over­whelm­ing. Price point is an impor­tant fac­tor for a small busi­ness, espe­cial­ly if you are start­ing off. But we’ve found two tools we love that are very affordable!

If you haven’t noticed, we love show­ing up dai­ly on Insta­gram with tips rang­ing from design, brand­ing, col­or, typog­ra­phy and they busi­ness jour­ney. Plan­ning valu­able con­tent and orga­niz­ing our feed through our spe­cif­ic lay­out was a big headache. And also time con­sum­ing. We’ve used Plan­nthat for sev­er­al months and we LOVE it! It’s been a HUGE game chang­er for our Insta­gram strat­e­gy! There is no more headache in our con­tent process and we are able to visu­al­ize the col­or con­ti­nu­ity of our feed. You can cre­ate cus­tom hash­tags, Plann your con­tent months in advance, see your met­rics, and even take a sneaky peak at your com­peti­tors insight!

For the rest of our social man­age­ment, we love using Buffer. It makes our plan­ning and shar­ing so much eas­i­er — espe­cial­ly dur­ing a cam­paign launch or even shar­ing a blog post like this one. If you use Adobe­Spark to cre­ate your graph­ics, you can eas­i­ly resize them to fit all social media dimen­sions at the click of a but­ton. Place those graph­ics in your Buffer feed and tada! You can now focus on engag­ing with your audience.

No mat­ter who you use, don’t for­get how impor­tant it is to main­tain con­sis­ten­cy across your plat­forms. You can learn more about our 5 Com­mon Design Mis­takes on Social Media here.

7. Editing Photos on the Go

If you are like us, we’re either out explor­ing (hel­lo busi­ness & moth­er­hood), trav­el­ing or on busi­ness meet­ings. And you prob­a­bly find some amaz­ing pho­tos to share for your social plat­forms along the way. Hav­ing well lit pho­tos is so impor­tant! You can have an amaz­ing mes­sage behind the image (or graph­ic) but if the visu­als are poor, peo­ple will scroll right through. A Col­orSto­ry is our go to pho­to edit­ing app. It’s helped us main­tain a con­sis­tent look through out our feed. Keep­ing the tone and light­ing of your pho­tos con­sis­tent is cru­cial to build­ing brand recog­ni­tion! If you are going for moody tones because it aligns with your brand, then keep it that way. Don’t sprin­kle in sparkles and con­fet­ti here. It would just cre­ate con­fu­sion. Remem­ber you want peo­ple to rec­og­nize your brand in our busy social media world.

We hope that these 7 Tools Every Small Busi­ness Must Have was help­ful to you! They cer­tain­ly have for us. And if you have any oth­er tools you’d like to share with us, please let us know in the comments.