2020 taught us a few essential lessons and the importance of having a wide range of efficient business tools for keeping your company up and running.
If you’re a business or a startup owner, you’re probably being pulled in different directions all at once.
Reaching out to stakeholders or customers, collaborating with employees, delegating tasks, handling taxes and payroll, controlling business expenses has never been easy, especially now.
Still, the ongoing pandemic makes running a business even harder than before for everyone involved.
However, with the right apps at your disposal, you can stay on top of everything and keep moving forward at a faster pace while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
The question is, how do you select the best apps for your business?
It is quite a time-consuming task, finding the right tools. You need to do research and read through lots of reviews, but we’ve got you covered.
You might need to consider live chat tools to streamline your customer engagement or get a chatbot to automate your customer support. It all depends on the needs of your business.
Here is a list of 10 business tools and techniques that have a proven track, allowing you and your team to maximize productivity, deliver better services to your clients, and optimize and leverage the user experience,
Team Communication and CollaborationThe best team collaboration tools allow you to:
- Navigate within an app quickly.
- Organize conversations through different channels and threads with the ability to tag people
- Quickly find relevant information with filtering features.
- Hold video and audio meetings.
- Collaborate on a project due to efficient collaboration-specific features
You can find all these features in the app called Ryver. This app has the potential to become essential to your workflow.
- Ryver
Ryver is an advanced, user-friendly communication management platform suited for remote work.
This excellent tool offers both communication and task management features, which means it supports:
- In-group and guest messaging systems,
- Video and audio conferencing,
- Team and personal task boards and checklists
- Screen sharing.
Quick and easy installation means you can begin using the app within minutes.
Ryver integrates with Dropbox, Trello, Google Docs, Google Drive, Asana, and many other popular tools seamlessly, so you can use it as a hub where your remote team members can gather for both professional and team-building purposes.
Project ManagementProject management software is a type of collaborative app that allows teams to work on a project or a few of them in an online environment.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s embarking on a wide-scale marketing campaign, streamlining the sales pipeline, designing a new product, or constructing a website.
The best project management platforms include useful features such as:
- Handling Deadlines
- Automatically rescheduling tasks
- Generating reports that give team leaders acute insights
The project managers see what needs to be done and who is the best possible candidate for any upcoming assignment. Employees and team members provide progress updates on their work and mark off tasks when completed.
A great project management software helps log billable hours, track project budgets, and much more.
- Monday
Monday offers top-notch solutions for remote project management, task management, and team collaboration, letting you follow all processes and workflows. Team communication and collaboration are easy with a set of comprehensive tools all in one system.
The platform’s slick and intuitive UI and ready-made templates mean teams can get started in a few clicks after installation.
While its impressive functionality and flexibility allow you to do the heavy lifting of integrating various project management approaches and build solid management frameworks.
2. CROOW All project management software is the same…until it isn’t. CROOW is a performance management platform that includes everything you need to manage a creative or services organization. Projects are flexible to fit within your company’s workflows from agile to waterfall and project templates and requests are powerful tools to automate the intake of work and setup of projects (learn more about CROOW requests).
Beyond the platform’s best-in-breed project manage-ment features, CROOW really shines with advanced collaboration and business intelligence designed for the creative class. It helps leaders predict upcoming work, optimize resources, and make smart decisions faster. With CROOW team management and workload scheduling, anything is possible, and everything gets conquered.
Productivity Tools- HootSuite
Social Media is an essential part of any modern business. But if you have several social media accounts and not enough time to manage all of them, HootSuite might be a tremendously helpful tool.
It allows you to monitor your social activity across all your platforms in one user-friendly dashboard and create beautiful, engaging posts for every social network.
With HootSuite, you can:
- Schedule and publish your content to the right platforms at the right time
- Delegate assignments to team members
- Keep the conversation flowing seamlessly across public channels and private messages
- Measure performance through social analytics integrations
2. Bookafy
Bookafy is the best scheduling app for sales teams, support teams and small businesses. It’s a saas that allows for your customers to you’re your online appointment booking app to book appointments in real time. Bookafy syncs with your personal calendar to show real time availability… You can easily save hours per day/week by automating reminders, confirmations, sending zoom links and much much more.
3. Free PDF Business Templates
As a business, one of your main goals is to stay professional at all times when interacting with your clients or customers. This is why having professional-looking agreements and contracts is essential.
If you are a large company, you can hire experienced professionals, but what if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford that kind of workforce?
Whether you are a startup, a sole proprietor, or a small business, this collection of PDF templates can serve as an inspiration for your next project. Each template is carefully designed to meet the specific requirements of various companies.
Since utilizing these templates requires a reliable PDF Editor, we recommend using Kdan PDF Reader, a versatile tool that you’ll find indispensable after integrating it into your business workflow.
4. Calm
Though this tool is more of a personal productivity app, it can help you focus on your tasks, reduce stress levels, calm down, and fall asleep faster and easier. All these factors are essential for maintaining a healthy life-work balance. That’s why we’ve included Calm on this list.
You’ll notice positive changes right after using it for the first time. Calm is excellent for waking up on time, enhancing your work, an afternoon reset, or improving your sleep.
5. Teamwork
Teamwork is another great tool for project management that helps teams of all types track, manage, and execute various tasks and initiatives. Its smart design and user-friendly interface make the app very easy to implement and use.
Teamwork allows marketing teams to manage task-specific communication channels, social media content channels, and real-time activity logs.
6. DottedSign
DottedSign is an electronic signature software as a service (Saas) tool, ideal for small and medium businesses that want to sign documents online.
Online electronic signatures are becoming accepted for freelancers that run their own business, independent contractors, product and service purchase contracts, and growing applications every day.
DottedSign makes it easy to integrate electronic signatures into your workflow and tap into the speed and flexibility of signing documents online.
Data AnalyticsWith a global shift to the digital realm over the last year, companies handle more data than ever before. The number of online shoppers, social media platforms’ users, and eCommerce companies is increasing daily.
But how can companies analyze their data without drowning in numbers?
If you’re thinking about optimizing, comparing numbers, improving your UI design, and understanding users’ behavior, you need powerful tools that will handle all these aspects smoothly.
- Google Analytics 4
The long-awaited Google Analytics update comes with a set of free tools to analyze all your business data in one place.
Google Analytics 4 offers an event-based model instead of sessions and introduces improved event measurement. This means that there is now one unified management table for all current and future custom dimensions and metrics.
- You can export data freely to BigQuery. You have different analysis options – you may choose between exporting data and using techniques like funnel or path analysis and segment overlap for free, without a Google 360 account.
2. Smartlook
Are you aware that a well-designed user interface can yield conversion rates up to 200%, and a better UX design could raise a website’s conversion rate by a whopping 400%?
Smartlook software optimizes your page in more ways than you can imagine.
It doesn’t matter if you work with UX designers in-house or outsource them; this sophisticated tool lets you spot problematic places based on user recordings and heatmaps.
Smartlook allows you to see what exactly your visitors do on your website. It analyzes your customers’ behavior and draws conclusions based on relevant information to extract the most of your user-tracking techniques.
Smartlook also integrates with Google Analytics. Due to such unification, you will use both – the quantitative and the qualitative platforms – to obtain a complete picture of your target audience.
Marketing AutomationMany teams automate their email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns using marketing automation software.
If you’re publishing lots of content and generating a stable flow of organic leads, it is the right time to implement the tools capable of boosting your efforts.
- HubSpot
Marketing automation mainly focuses on email campaigns, but today, the most advanced platforms allow you to oversee inbound marketing, content creation, and demand generation as well.
Alignment of the top, middle, and bottom-funnel activities is becoming a pivotal factor for maximizing your outcomes.
HubSpot helps you achieve all this and more. HubSpot is a marketing automation platform that lets you implement a fully-aligned approach to sales and marketing.
Executing all of your inbound marketing and lead generation efforts through HubSpot will allow your team to focus on strengthening the strategy, creating great content, and keep your business growing.
2. Outfunnel
Outfunnel is an affordable revenue marketing automation tool best suited as a marketing automation solution for small and midsize businesses. It comes with both marketing and sales functions.
Depending on how quickly you want to scale your business, you might not need all the functionality HubSpot’s Marketing & Sales Professional plans offer.
If you want to give a shot to a lightweight platform for implementing email workflows for lead nurturing and sales, Outfunnel comes in very handy.
And its HubSpot CRM Integration (a contact relationship management tool that offers a wide range of free features) lets you send out automated email marketing campaigns to any HubSpot list.
On top of that, you will be able to see your campaign engagement and web visits in HubSpot CRM and find your hottest leads with lead scoring – a popular technique used by marketing and sales teams to calculate how likely their leads are to make a purchase.
Final ThoughtsWithout great tools, your team is handicapped in their abilities to communicate, collaborate, work productively, and delight your customers.
Understanding that will help you consider implementing such tools as an investment in team happiness, saved time, and improved efficiency, all of which enable you to achieve a lot more and to do so sustainably over the long-term period
