Startup and small business owners often juggle multiple tasks at once, which makes it hard for them to stay on top of everything. Fortunately, there are numerous digital tools out there that can help reduce your stress levels and ensure your business thrives.
In this article, you can read about 7 tools used by teams and entrepreneurs for communication, customer service, project management, social media, and more.
1. Customer Service
If your goal is to consistently deliver great customer service, you have probably employed multiple channels such as phone, email, and live chat. That’s great, but very often, customers want to attempt to resolve the issue on their own before speaking to a support agent.
Self-service is a very effective and affordable way to make customers happy, so make sure to provide enough helpful content that will help them find the answers they are seeking, without having to leave the page. Knowledge management systems can include CRM databases, a knowledge base, training programs, white papers, on-site FAQ pages, case studies… This information can either provide direct value to the customers or be used by your reps to indirectly improve the overall customer support process.
2. Communication
Today, the workforce is no longer confined to a single office environment and it’s the norm for employees to be working across multiple locations, devices, and hours.
In order to boost productivity and efficiency, regardless of where you are, stimulate employees’ motivation, share knowledge, and simplify management; companies of all sizes have turned to communication tools such as Slack, Skype, Zoom, and RingCentral.
According to surveys, a staggering 97% percent of employees believe communication has an impact on tasks performed every day. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that nearly 45% of them want wider adoption of internal communication tools.
3. Project Management
As your company grows and you take on more projects, managing all the tasks and teams will become increasingly difficult. Project management software, according to PWC, can help increase performance and nearly 80% of high-performing projects use project management software.
Project management tools like HubSpot, Wrike, and Trello, provide small to large businesses, which undoubtedly juggle a number of tasks, plans, and people, with a solution that helps them keep everything organized while planning and running projects in a way that is predictable, profitable, and accurate.
4. Lead Generation
Did you know that more than 65% of businesses struggle with lead generation? If you’re one of them, it’s time to consider automating your lead generation efforts.
Research has shown that 80% of marketers see an increase in leads due to automation. Using an effective lead generation tool can help optimize your lead generation process by decreasing the time needed to manually collect data in order to generate leads. Zoominfo is one of the most widely used lead generation tools but considering the fact it is quite pricey, you should consider taking a look at some Zoominfo alternatives. These tools deliver the key data and contact info of your target audience helping you close them as sales and assist in preparing relevant content to generate leads both online and offline. This way, the role of your sales or marketing team narrows to handling the lead generation tool to get the required outcome.
5. Content Marketing
Creating great content requires skill, talent, and above all, human touch. In other words, content isn’t something that you can automate with little thought. But that doesn’t mean that your content marketing strategy can’t benefit from automation. On the contrary, marketing automation tools can provide a significant boost to your content marketing efforts.
Everything from planning and creation to content distribution and analysis can be assisted by applying automation. Content marketing automation enables you to piece together every aspect of your content marketing strategy, as opposed to a siloed approach where visualizing the big picture can be a bit challenging. Automation software can also calculate and predict the best times to post and promote content in order to reach more users and generate the highest engagement levels.
6. Customer Relations
According to research, businesses that have applied a CRM system have seen an increase in their customer retention rates of up to 27%. Having this in mind, it comes as no surprise that the CRM market is expected to grow to $43.5 billion globally by 2024!
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology has long been considered a vital tool for businesses of all sectors and sizes. It empowers outstanding customer experiences by enabling easy management of relationships and interactions with all your business contacts, while at the same time driving revenue and giving you a significant competitive edge. CRM can help you speed up business growth by allowing you to easily manage your contact records, collaborating cross-team, automate daily tasks, sync data, and more.
7. Social Media
Being present on social media has become a vital part of almost all businesses – and for a good reason. With the majority of consumers active on one of the numerous social channels, there’s a variety of ways in which brands can take advantage of these platforms to grow and expand. While not every social network will be relevant to your brand, chances are your target audience is active on at least three or four of them. That means you’re spending lots of time updating your profiles, posting content, or trying to engage your audience on multiple platforms.
Social media management tools allow you to manage all of your accounts from a single place. They are focused on making all aspects of social media management easier, from scheduling posts and engaging with your audience to generating reports and analyzing data.
Final Thoughts
If your goal is to improve your business efforts and make your brand the next big thing in your industry, you should be aware that it can’t be achieved without the right tools. Select the ones from the list above that best suit your business and build an efficient online suite that will help your company thrive.