Essential Tools to Grow Your Business
Entrepreneurs are faced with the constant challenge of juggling the many facets of owning a company and running a business. It doesn’t matter what your business or role is, all brands need the proper tools to be successful.
Staying on top of leads, managing email inbox overload, organizing and sharing important documents, and project management—it’s a full-time job to handle small business logistics. Fortunately for the modern business owner, there are myriad apps, widgets, and software to help entrepreneurs work more efficiently and effectively; many of these services and programs are free or priced affordably so that business owners can work smarter and better.
We often share our thoughts about the best tools to improve your business, and in this article we’ve collected some of our preferred resources to help company leaders increase productivity and streamline communication.
Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, an established small business owner, or a part of a team at a startup, we hope this list of resources help your brand function more effectively.
*We’ve included some special links to discounts and promotions for these services or products. If you sign up with these links you’ll get major savings if you use our affiliate links below.
Create Conversations, Our 2019 Game Changer!
As a fully-remote agency, we’ve become naturals at managing communication across various timezones. Before we were introduced to Slack, our team relied heavily on Google chat messages, text messages, and email threads. It proved difficult to categorize our conversations based on each project, but with Slack, we can easily organize and archive all company communications. Depending on your company needs, Slack allows you to send and receive instant messages, group chats, and even share files. Beyond the channels, we are able to schedule messages, set reminders, and integrate our other favorite apps like Asana and Google Drive.
Ready to try Slack? Start here and save $100.
Manage Your Client Projects
Investing in a reliable CRM is vitally important to the health of a business. A customer relationship manager is a platform that is aimed to encompass as many tools possible to create a seamless system for working with clients. An efficient customer relationship management system can help you track and analyze all interactions you have with your customers and prospects. We’ve been using Dubsado since 2017, and we love that it’s a cloud-based platform that we can use to track leads and client projects, manage our incoming payments, and easily communicate with our clients. The best part about Dubsado? Their customer service is impeccable, or should we say imBECCAble, since the co-founder’s name is Becca! Their team is quick to respond with assistance and the Dubsado team regularly continues to grow and add new features and tools to their CRM.
Dubsado has enhanced our onboarding and offboarding experiences and upped our professional game. The platform ensures that our client’s experience is easily managed, stress-free, and enjoyable. Once a client has hired us, they’re set up with a password-protected client portal where they can access design files, review meeting notes, pay an invoice, and track the progress of their project. If you’re a service-based business, and you’re looking for a way to streamline your business, check out Dubsado.
Get 20% off when you sign up here and use the code: iluvl&f
Get down to business with Asana. It’s true when Asana says it can help you “reduce work about work”. If you counted the amount of hours you spend writing emails to just check about the update on a project, you’d have spent a lot of useless time. Asana lets you focus more on getting things done and less time talking about it. Asana increases accountability and it helps cut down on time-wasting emails. It’s like having a support team and project manager all rolled into one helpful tool. We love using Asana as a task management platform; it allows us to develop templates for project boards so that we know exactly what needs to happen next and who is responsible for the task. It makes collaborating simple—your team members will get notified when necessary pieces of a project are complete. Project management is a breeze with easy-to-set deadlines to ensure client’s projects stay track.
If you’re team is looking for a tool to easily delegate tasks and organize projects, Asana is a great option to help you grow your brand.
Take Control of Your Email
BOOMERANG
Do you need a friendly reminder in your ear to nudge you to circle back to important emails? Then please meet Boomerang. Boomerang is free or you can upgrade for more bells and whistles. With this fantastic tool, you can send reminders (with or without notes) to reply to particular emails. Or if you’re working into the late-night hours (or maybe on the west coast), you can schedule your outgoing emails so there are no more late-night email responses sent to the east coast. Not only does this allow for greater professionalism, but it’s also a life-saver! You can even set up follow-up reminders to hit you back when an email you sent goes unread after a certain amount of time. It’s a life-saver! Enjoy the holy Boomerang!
A Time-Saving Tool for Scheduling Your Meetings
Never again send back-and-forth emails asking “what time works for you?”; Acuity is the perfect assistant for your scheduling needs. After syncing your calendar to the cloud-based software, you can set standard operating hours and customize availability for your various services, offerings, or meetings. As a branding agency, we are big believers in maintaining brand consistency throughout our client-facing pages, we love Acuity allows brand’s to customize the interface to make for a smooth customer experience. Your web master can embed the code directly onto our website for a seamless booking experience, making customer conversions easier. Additionally, Acuity can send automated emails(confirmation, cancellation, intake forms, etc.) to save you time and energy. Based on which plan you decide to invest in, the paid features add offer even more flexibility for services offering, multiple calendar scheduling and syncing, booking, and customer payments.
Become a Wordsmith
Whether or not you’re a writer, running a business or leading a team requires a huge amount of writing. You write emails, social media posts, newsletters, contracts, proposals, applications, and maybe even some blog posts. Grammarly takes the guesswork out of writing. It’s a valuable tool that increases confidence and productivity by catching time-consuming writing errors. With less time spent on proofreading, you’ll have more time to focus on the core of your message. The truth is, it’s easier to get your message out when you’re not worried about comma placement and sentence structure.
Manage Your Social Media
TAILWIND
If you’re looking for a social media scheduler, meet your new best friend. Tailwind is the ultimate scheduler for Instagram and Pinterest; it helps you plan, organize, and publish consistent content, which leads to more exposure and an increase in followers. There are three main reasons why we have decided to invest in Tailwind. 1) You can download the Tailwind widget to easily start pinning anything and everything you see online without having to exit out of a window or tab. 2) It makes scheduling a breeze. You can schedule pins throughout the day, any day of the week. Did you know that SEO increases more when you post 10 pins/day over a week rather than 40/day. 3) We love the loop feature. Do you have a pin that is highly viewed? Make sure to continue sharing the content using the SmartLoop feature; you’ll increase exposure and continue to gain visibility from that single piece of content.
LINKTREE
When managing your brand’s Instagram account, it can be a challenge to post links and stay on top of linked content. Do you still upload a new link to your Instagram bio each time you need to post a new URL? What if your reader wants to access a link from a previous post? That’s where Link Tree come in. Link Tree lets you post one bio link in your profile. That one URL acts as a landing page for all of your followers. There, they can choose from a list of your links. Link Tree helps your followers discover all of your recent content from multiple destinations. You can send followers anywhere: blog posts, published articles, your online store, booking link, RSVP link for events, your portfolio, and more. It’s simple to manage, and you can easily paste in new URLs, then drag and drop the links to reorder in your tree.
Linktree Pro is a paid subscription in which we’ve recently invested. For $6/month, we are able to customize our Linktree to match our brand colors and we can schedule the time and day when our links go live. This is perfect for if you use a social media scheduler since you can align your #linkinbio to be updated at the appropriate time.
Manage Your Billable Hours
TOGGL
It’s time to ensure you’re getting paid for the actual amount of work that you are doing! If you’re a freelancer or a contractor, you’ll love Toggl because it makes tracking your hours spent on a project easy as pie. You can categorize your clients and projects and track your time using the app or the browser extension. You can take the guessing game out of creating your invoices and pricing your projects.
Design the Ultimate Workspace
SHIFT
Are you guilty of having dozens of tabs open on one device, and your email, calendar, and Slack open on another? Really, what entrepreneur isn’t, though? If you’re anything like us, you’ve struggled with tab-hoarding and task switching, and sometimes it’s really challenging and time consuming to re-enter credentials and switch between profiles, accounts, and platforms. For the multi-taskers among us, Shift is a tool that can help you...er, shift between tasks and projects. Shift allows you to toggle between all of your tools (Gmail, Boomerang, Toggl, Slack, Asana, Dubsado, and the list goes on…). The Shift software essentially allows you to have multiple tabs open in several workspaces at one time. This is perfect for the multi-tasker or project manager that manages several accounts as you can log into multiple profiles of the same program (i.e. Asana or Gmail).
DROPBOX
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that makes it easy to save and share important documents and files. It’s been around for years, so you likely already know of Dropbox. If you haven’t yet tried it or upgraded to a professional plan, consider doing that soon. When you use Dropbox, you and your team can easily access files and folders at any time from any device that’s connected to Dropbox. You can set up public-facing links or private links to share with clients, prospects, or collaborators. We love Dropbox because we can easily save and share large files that are too big for email or Google Drive.
Ready to get organized?
We hope this list of resources gives you some inspiration to try something new. After all, trial and error and a healthy dose of experimentation are what make building a brand so exciting.
What resources have you tried? What would you add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Happy organizing!
