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! 

If you want to up your game this year, join my mail­ing list!