7 Tools Small Businesses Need to Start the Year Off Right
Every business and brand needs tools to help them work smarter — not harder! Our list of tried and true business tools will optimize your time and produce better results for your brand’s efforts!
It’s a fresh new year! Whatever we’ve all been through in 2020, it’s hard not to look ahead and plan what we want to do — and how to do it better. The business tools listed below are ones we use and love for what it’s done for our productivity, ease of communication and business growth. We can’t wait for you to dive in!
Adobe Spark: Every brand needs Spark in their life! Adobe Spark makes it easy for you and your team to promote your brand or business with stunning graphics, videos, and animations. Start quickly from thousands of beautiful templates. Create on mobile and desktop and resize for any social platform in just one tap. Make all your and your team’s content look and feel consistent with Spark’s award-winning, powerful branding capabilities!
LinkedIn Learning: Whether you’ve been impacted by this economic downturn or want to uplevel your expertise, check out the incredible resource offered by LinkedIn, Microsoft, and GitHub! You can take 10 different learning paths featuring several excellent courses by my fellow LinkedIn Instructors. A few examples to train for are: Software Developer, Project Manager, Digital Marketer, and Graphic Designer! P.S. My Color Trends course is featured in the Graphic Designer Learning Path. Watch it for FREE.
PlannThat: This is our favorite tool to plan and schedule content on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. With it you can create a cohesive feed or folders with your media files, and even develop a color-coded content strategy along with hashtag sets. There’s both a free and paid version.
Dubsado: We LOVE this client relationship management system(CRM). Create password-protected client portals, send proposals, sign contracts, access an automated scheduler for those meetings, schedule automated emails and workflows to save you hours, handle payments, and so much more! The free version allows up to 3 clients, and the paid version is incredible!
Zoho: We also use Zoho Social to coordinate and track our social media analytics. While there are no media file folder capabilities like with PlannThat, we love the visuals that Zoho provides to our social media channels as a whole. We get an entire overview of our brand health in ONE spot.
Freshbooks: This is cloud accounting magic! If Quickbooks takes you for an upside-down headspin, Freshbooks is there to save you! Their focus is on empowering small businesses. They strategically pinpoint their user experience to those needs. It automates invoicing by actually filling them out and sending them for you! And it keeps track of your expenses — no more shoebox of receipts. Your CPA will love it as much as you do.
Trello: If Slack makes you feel lost in the comments space and crave visual organization, we recommend Trello. This is the hub where we manage our main content calendar, workflow for client projects, and video training for the team, making on-boarding new team members a breeze.
We want to spare you all the time and cost of experimenting and instead benefit from what we’ve learned to be the most effective and user friendly for you and your team! We hope it gives you that needed boost as we leave 2020 behind and start a brand new year!
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