Running your business manually will suck the life out of you. You’ll needlessly drain your energy, time, and resources. It also reduces your efficiency and can hurt your productivity.
Running a business nowadays definitely requires a good site. A web developer’s dream is WPMU DEV’s all-in-one WordPress platform that gives you everything you need to manage, update, optimize, secure, and host client sites – all under one roof. Get 20% off any of their plans here. Free trial included.
Look no further if you’re looking for essential #tools to drive profitability and achieve other business goals. Click To TweetHere are the five types of solutions you should get for your company.
Customer service software
Providing excellent customer service is crucial in becoming a successful business. You can properly assist your shoppers in their product concerns, resolve technical issues, and answer potential buyers’ queries through it. In this way, you demonstrate that you genuinely care for your customers and don’t see them as mere cash cows.
However, customer service is often multi-channel. It entails assisting shoppers in various accessible platforms, such as email, SMS, phone calls, and social media.
Managing conversations with hundreds or thousands of shoppers can break your business operations if you use manual approaches. That’s why you must leverage robust customer service software (you can even get free, high-quality customer support solutions if you have a limited budget).
With customer service solutions, you can:
- Streamline buyer communications on several channels
- Collect, store, and organize messages, shoppers’ contact data, etc.
- Trace previous conversations, issues, and resolutions applied
- Help different agents continue the support given by other reps for specific shoppers
Invest in customer service software to boost the quality of your assistance delivery and enhance your buyer relationships.
Internal communication and collaboration platforms
Clear communication and constant coordination are essential when working with teams. Without them, your task and project implementation will be in disarray. You will get inaccurate information and duplicate efforts, making things inefficient and wasting time and resources.
Once you have listed your tasks and can delegate them, you must establish and centralize active team communication.
The best place to do that is an online collaboration platform and powerful project management software, which lets you:
- Assign tasks
- Check the to-dos’ progress,
- Chat with your team members individually or as a group
- View your calendar
- Access and share files
Collaboration platforms are more effective than email because the latter can drown out relevant information from incoming and stored messages. Email also makes file searches and conversation tracing extra tedious.
Alternatively, you can use internal communication platforms like Slack for everyday workplace coordination if you’re not running a project. Using these tools, you enhance your teamwork and ensure everyone is on the same page as you complete your assignments.
Marketing automation technologies
Marketing is an essential but broad business aspect you can’t afford to overlook. With it, you can amplify your company’s visibility, broaden your customer reach, and introduce your brand.
Marketing also spans several channels and involves numerous strategies and tasks. If you mismanage these things, you can quickly get lost in the campaign details and miss hitting your overarching goals.
Manage your marketing assignments efficiently with marketing automation technologies. These tools can mechanically complete repetitive to-do’s so you can focus on more significant tasks and lessen your burden.
Here are some tools to automate marketing campaigns on various platforms:
- Email: Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Drip, Sendinblue, etc.
- SMS: Twilio, Klaviyo, SMSBump, and others
- Push notifications: Parse, Mixpanel, Push Whoosh, etc.
- Pop-ups: OptinMonster, Wisepops, Hello Bar, and more.
You should also use content management systems and content marketing software to automate production, publication, distribution, and promotions tasks.
When building your SEO strategy from scratch, you will need SEO automation tools to streamline tedious tasks. These solutions can do the following work for you:
- SERPs rank tracking
- Crawling websites
- Performance reporting
- Backlink analysis
- Log files assessment
- Monitoring for new links and Brand mentions
- Keyword intent evaluation
- Creating meta-descriptions at scale
- Competitor monitoring, etc.
You can simplify your marketing tasks and better attend to other profitable assignments through automated marketing technologies.
ERP systems
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are critical for overall business and finance management. ERP systems can harmonize and automate your business processes, eliminate redundant assignments, and enhance accuracy and productivity.
ERP systems are also useful when working with third-party services such as a web design and internet marketing agency to streamline your workflows. Plus, they empower you to scale seamlessly and without additional costs. ERP systems help reduce risk and increase data accessibility, among many other benefits.
Departments with interrelated workflows can also synchronize their work for faster task completion and more effective outcomes.
ERP systems integrate these functions:
- Operations
- Financials and accounting (maybe even a paystub maker for your business)
- Supply chain
- Commerce
- Manufacturing
- Human resource activities
- Reporting
You can get cloud-based ERP systems to reduce IT workload and focus better on your primary assignments. User-intuitive ERP systems for small businesses on a budget are also available.
Task management solutions
Every working day, you need a to-do list to guide your daily accomplishments. If you mismanage your tasks (or don’t keep a list), you can easily get swayed by daily unproductive demands. You can also fail to accomplish anything mission-critical and profitable.
Oversee your business to-do’s effectively with task management solutions. These tools help organize your periodic assignments to avoid getting lost and overwhelmed by your workload and targets.
For instance, if you’re organizing a virtual summit, work with your tool in prioritizing tasks by phase and month.
Pre-summit assignments can include:
- Clarifying what a summit is and how it differs from a conference, convention, and other virtual events
- Brainstorming on the theme, colors, target audience, presenters, schedules, marketing tactics, etc.
- Designing invitations, social media images, presentation templates, and others
- Sending invitations to speakers and promoting on email, social media, podcasts, and other channels
Post-event assignments can include:
- Sending thank-you emails to attendees.
- Sharing relevant files.
- Posting photo snippets on social media.
You can better arrange your working schedule and hit your daily targets by organizing assignments with automated task management tools.
Time to leverage these tools for a successful business
These and other solutions can go a long way in helping you achieve your business goals. Start exploring and picking those that best meet your company’s needs and dynamics.
You don’t need to break the bank when using them either. Many of these tools are free of charge and affordable. Check the software’s features and vendor’s packages to ensure they are cost-efficient for your enterprise.