Whether you face cutthroat competition or have found a winning niche, the tools and the strategy you apply will help you achieve your goals. Tools, in particular, have become indispensable to business growth, and the right ones are guaranteed to work for you.
This guide broadly categorized business tools into marketing tools, field management apps for businesses providing services, custom mapping tools, SEO, accounting, and project management tools. It contains examples of specific tools as well.
1. Marketing
Your team's content management system is the foundation of all the content you create, regardless of what type. It can be an About Us page, a blog post, or the company's whole website. The CMS will be a staple of your marketing technology, and you should consider it as one of the most important tools that you choose.
Your blogging tools should optimize your content for search and help your marketing team create appealing posts. They should also make them easily shareable on social media. Your followers should get access to new content as soon as it's generated.
The blogging tools should let you see how often views convert to leads and which blog posts are driving the biggest growth.
2. Field management apps
Field management apps can help you measure and track data, and choosing the right one for your needs is essential. If you're in the business of providing services, your technicians need access to the relevant data to perform them. You'd benefit from an app that can analyze data and a dashboard to interpret and organize it into statistics and interactive charts.
Supervisors and managers use field management apps to plan routes, organize schedules, allocate resources, and assign employees and teams to sites. Employees use apps to provide updates on task completion, productivity, and arrival and departure times. They can also use them to ask for technical support if they face an unusual challenge onsite.
3. Custom mapping tools
As digital mapping technologies have gone mainstream, maps have become interactive, revolutionizing the way companies and individuals use them to engage target groups and visualize data. One tool worth mentioning is Maptive, a comprehensive tech set created with users in mind. It works by uploading location data from CRMs or spreadsheets to quickly create custom maps, including sales territory maps, demographic maps, heat maps, optimizing routes, color-coded maps, etc.
4. Search Engine Optimization tools
It's challenging to tailor content to your target group and consider the elements search engines are looking for at the same time. When selecting an SEO tool, make sure it integrates with your content creation tools, including CMS. Consider how many aspects of SEO it helps with – the more, the better. Ideally, it should optimize on-page SEO and assist with keyword research.
When it comes to organic traffic, what main metrics are you tracking? Consider how long it takes to collect and report on these metrics.
5. Accounting tools
Every business needs a reliable accounting tool. QuickBooks is a leader in accounting tools for small businesses. Its software targets business owners who don't have time to track inflows and outflows manually, freeing up their time for more pertinent aspects of business, like attracting new clients.
6. Project management tools
Project management tools like Asana and Slack are indispensable for tracking and managing work. Teams can use Asana for collective agendas, making to-do lists, and keeping track of communication. It increases productivity substantially.
Slack is also an excellent way for teams to stay connected. The messaging app ensures efficient and straightforward communication. It is very popular, with more than 12 million active users. Companies of all sizes, from startups to corporations, can use it. Slack provides flexibility, security, transparency, collaboration, automation, and integration.
