I run a small digital marketing agency and have ten employees, five of which are software that work almost as hard as any other team member. In all these years of running this agency, I’ve never seen these tools facing any productivity issues like the rest of the employees, including me.
However, the best part is yet to come. From managing financial books to creating marketing campaigns and optimizing them for better results, I trust these tools with everything. And, to say that the rest of us don’t do anything, except use and manage these tools, wouldn’t be wrong.
Here, I’ll share the tools I use that efficiently manage my business and explain how I get the most out of them. But before I get to it, I’ll start with a few factors to keep in mind before you integrate any software into your business.
Points To Keep in Mind
Choosing the right set of tools for your business is a crucial decision.
Since there are tons of business tools available, choosing the right one can be confusing. Although such tools don’t ask for a raise, you still have to buy their subscription (which can be expensive sometimes) to access their full features.
Here, I’ll recommend availing a free trial at first, as most tools offer a grace period to explore their features and determine if it’s the right fit for your business.
Business software needs ample bandwidth to work efficiently. Since you might use such bandwidth-heavy tools along with other online activities, it’s best to have a high-speed and reliable connection.
For recommendations, you can check out Spectrum Internet deals, as it’s from the ISP I’m subscribed to. Speaking from experience, Spectrum efficiently caters to my online business’s needs.
From most basic online activities, such as sending an email, to bandwidth-heavy tasks like data collection and analysis, I don’t recall facing any issues with this network.
5 Tools I Use to Streamline My Business
As I mentioned above, I consider these tools as permanent employees of my business. Here, I’ll explain why I consider them so highly.
HubSpot for Social Media Marketing
As a digital marketing agency, most of our clients expect us to scale and grow their social media pages. Also, we prefer Social Media Marketing (SMM) since it’s easier to reach millions of potential clients on such platforms.
However, managing numerous clients’ campaigns on several social platforms simultaneously can be daunting. But for us, HubSpot does everything. From creating social media campaigns to scheduling and posting them, as well as optimizing and analyzing their performance, HubSpot can manage everything.
Also, it can generate insightful reports and offer suggestions to improve my campaign’s performance across multiple social media platforms.
Salesforce for Customer Relationship Management
It’s only been a year since I started using Salesforce. There was a time when my team and I could easily manage clients. However, as my business expanded, I eventually needed a tool for seamless client management.
Originally, I needed to integrate customer support as I found it increasingly difficult to answer my clients’ queries. For that reason, Salesforce became my top choice as it offered AI-powered, 24/7 customer support.
However, the free trial helped me discover a few more features, such as workflow automation, integration options, and customer analytics. For instance, Salesforce can automatically communicate with potential leads and offer more information or better insights about advertised products and services.
Additionally, I’ve integrated this tool with HubSpot. This way, the data is automatically synced between them and automates data entry, reduces the risk of errors, and offers a single-window view of other important customer-related operations.
FreshBooks For Accounting and Finance
As a business owner, managing finances has always been my weakness.
However, to keep my business afloat, I simply couldn’t ignore it and hence, got help from FreshBooks. I think of this tool as an accountant who maintains a thorough record of every penny coming in and out of the business.
Coming to its features, I can customize business invoices in FreshBooks, and don’t have to keep their record since this tool stores them on a secure cloud. Additionally, FreshBooks can track your business spending and generate detailed reports like balance sheets, ledgers, and other financial documents.
Last but not least, I also use FreshBooks to get paid. It offers diverse options to get paid from clients using credit cards, Apple Pay, bank transfers, and more.
Asana for Project Management
I believe effective collaboration is the key to success when you’re leading a small team. And, to ensure your team stays on track to achieve all the KPIs and milestones, a project management tool is a must.
Speaking from experience, Asana is probably the best tool when it comes to task management. You can create a new task, write a detailed description, set deadlines and priority, add collaborators, and assign it to your team.
You can also take follow-ups on different tasks, reassign them, or change their deadlines. Not just this, Asana lets you create different projects and share them with different stakeholders. Additionally, you can view assigned tasks in different views, like a kanban board, list, or calendar, to understand your employees’ workload.
Mailchimp for Email Marketing
I believe email marketing is the most effective way to reach out to new clients and stay in touch with your existing ones. Firstly, most business professionals actively check their emails, and secondly, it’s a cheaper way of client hunting.
MailChimp is quite good at automation, as it can write a professional email from scratch. All I need is to instruct it about the email contents, review, edit, and simply send it. Additionally, I can automate replies to general queries with MailChimp as well.
Having said that, I find this tool to be very effective in providing a personalized experience to customers. MailChimp offers 50+ behavior-based triggers for email personalization that make communicating with customers more effective.
Credit where credit is due. These tools are a major reason why my business is thriving. And to conclude, I’d recommend you incorporate these tools in your business as well. Such tools can positively impact your business’s efficiency, share responsibilities, and, importantly, always stay productive.