Apps That Will Help Your Small Business
The United States alone is home to nearly 30 million small businesses that are looking to become the next best thing. With such competition, it's no wonder small business owners are always looking for new ways to increase production, drive growth, and ultimately succeed.
However, due to the rapid growth of technology, it can be very confusing for small business owners to know what business solutions they should try next and which solutions will be driven out by better technology tomorrow.
If you are searching for tools to help you with your small business, these four apps offer solutions to common problems, have proven to be beneficial for many small businesses across the United States, and are a great place to start.
MailChimp
Across the globe, there are over 2.6 billion email users who have an account where they can receive online messages. For businesses across the globe, that means that there are 2.6 billion potential customers who have quick, convenient access to your marketing.
Although not all of these 2.6 billion email users check their email on a regular basis, the potential to market to them is a goldmine. However, in order to market to these potential customers, a small business must have a sophisticated way to get across their message and to analyze how it was received.
MailChimp is an online email platform that lets customers design professional looking emails, send them out to an acquired email list and then analyze their performance.
MailChimp comes in a number of different packages designed for new businesses to pro businesses. Furthermore, you can upgrade over time which means that there really is a plan for everyone.
Asana
For busy employees, there is nothing that poses a bigger problem than staying on task. In small businesses specifically, employees often serve more than one role which means that they need a way to organize their projects, tasks, and conversations in order to get the most accomplished in every day.
Asana is an online business organization tool that provides all of these needs in more. Inside the app, users can create task lists, share tasks with other users on their team, collaborate on projects, share documents back and forth, and monitor the progress of employees or team members.
Asana provides plans that are free and at cost through a monthly subscription. As an Asana user, you can upgrade anytime and add new team members as you need to.
Slack
Communication between employees and supervisors and among business team members is vital to the success of a business.
Employees should be able to share ideas and hold conversations regarding business without causing a great disruption to their day. In modern-day offices, even email communication is too slow to satisfy the demands of the workload, and therefore businesses need more.
Slack is an online application that allows for businesses to create a profile where all of their employees can log-in and hold conversations regarding their work.
In a single slack profile, businesses have the opportunity to create different channels to include only certain team members or channels that are based on only certain projects.
Slack is used by a number of businesses ranging in size from 3 employees to thousands.
Hootsuite
In the current technological age, all small businesses should be on social media promoting their business in an effort to increase customer retention, promote awareness of their brand, and recruit new customers. However, creating online posts and managing social media accounts can be a full-time job that not necessarily every small business has a budget for.
HootSuite is an online app for managing social media that can help a small business owner or the employee get the most out of their social media usage.
Through the Hootsuite app, you can schedule social media posts to go out at a set time and across multiple different platforms.
Due to its sophistication, Hootsuite also allows users to view their post analytics and follow other feeds that could help improve their own social media strategy.
HootSuite is also offered at a variety of price points, including free, which makes it a great tool for every small business.
Conclusion
Because these apps serve a wide variety of purposes, as a small business owner it is smart to have them all in your back pocket in order to achieve success.
If you are just diving into the technological realm, you can start with one, or if you are reevaluating your business tools, you can change out a current application for one of these.
However you choose to implement these tools, you will be putting your business on a better path for the future.
