Ten Tools to Give Small Businesses a Triumphant Edge

As a small business or entrepreneur, it’s more likely that you will face more threats from finances, innovations and barriers to market entry compared to larger businesses. To ensure that you survive in this environment, you need to be frugal and calculating with the resources you have. The following is a list of tools that can assist you to help you maximise your profitability.

1. Due

Though consumers rely on credit cards, sometimes the processing system can be slow and expensive. Due helps solve this problem by offering a more streamlined service. It offers a highly efficient and secure service that prides itself on being completely transparent from hiding any additional fees.

2. MouseFlow

This particular tool can be handy when you want to know what the customers are interacting with on your site. MouseFlow creates a CCTV-esque recording which records each visitor movement on your site and creates numerous heat maps to show where they’ve been putting their cursor.

3. You Need A Budget (YNAB)

YNAB helps small businesses and entrepreneurs with their accounting and legal needs, by using visualisation and categorisation techniques. This tool is great for businesses as it allows you to accurately calculate the scalability and profitability of your product or service, therefore allowing you to forecast and plan for the future.

4. GetResponse

This helps you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one place by using a marketing automation platform that can track emails marketing, landing pages and webinars. This helps reduce the time small businesses and entrepreneurs have to spend on marketing, meaning time can be invested better elsewhere.

5. Slack

Slack is a great messaging platform that has everything: Text channels, calling, video, file and screen sharing. This is particularly helpful if you happen to have a number of people in different time zones and you need to collect or present information.

6. Intercom

Customer management can be especially difficult when you have different avenues of communication. Intercom allows for you to collect all the different platforms into a blue messenger box at the bottom of your screen. This allows for you to keep track the customer service of multiple platforms easily and monitor which ones need immediate attention.

7. Trello

This is an online whiteboard that helps you collect all the ideas and information from other professionals or customers onto a personalised whiteboard. It’s perfect for brainstorming and arranging tasks. Overall it reduces clutter and keeps your business tidy.

8. Shopify

It’s been suggested that e-commerce will grow another 8-12% thanks to the increase in mobile sales and technology. Shopify offers you a quick and easy way to construct an aesthetically pleasing platform for your business.

9. Rapportive

Emails are often overlooked by businesses when marketing. But, if you use it correctly, it can provide great leads, conversations and customer retention. Email marketing is one of the best marketing platforms to use in terms of return on investment (ROI) as it’s higher than any other marketing alternative.

10. Google Docs or Dropbox

This is a no-brainer. Having one of these tools massively helps a business, as it allows you to store information that can be accessed by everyone. It helps you keep in contact and up-to-date with the work other people have done, and best of all, you can access it from anywhere in the world.