As a small business owner, you don multiple hats – starting from the campaigns that generate revenue for your business to managing your team, prospects, and everything that comes in between.
But what becomes important when you are jumpstarting a small business, or have been in it for quite some time is smartly automating tasks. This is to ensure that you are able to shift your focus to things that actually need your attention. It goes without saying that you need your business to take off on solid footing with the right set of automation tools, and for that, you need to know the best in the market.
In this blog, we have listed the top small business tools that you need to have in your arsenal in 2022 and may I add, beyond. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!
Table of Contents
1. Project Management – monday.com
When your business takes on specialized projects, you need to have a more streamlined way of handling the project during its entire lifecycle. This is where having a project management software in place can be hugely beneficial.
monday.com is an all-in-one digital workspace that helps you manage your projects from a single, easily-accessible location.
The biggest advantage of this software is the agility it provides to the teams to collaborate and stay aligned. It comes with incredible automation that allows you to move tasks along the project pipeline, notify team members of status updates, read more here.
You can also integrate this software with some of the popular tools like Google Calendar, Zoom, Shopify, and many more.
Pricing:
monday.com provides you with four payment plans after a 14-day free trial:
- Basic plan: $8/ month
- Standard plan: $10/ month
- Pro plan: $16/ month
- Enterprise plan: Can vary depending on customer requirements
2. Email Marketing – Mailchimp
If you have to reach diverse audiences and engage prospects through emails, having an email marketing tool can help you do this and more. You can not only automate the emailing process but can also track engagement and behavior.
An excellent email marketing tool, Mailchimp helps you get more conversions with smart automation that targets segmented audiences, specific to your business’ niche/ target audience. This tool also helps you make the email content more engaging with AI-assisted suggestions to optimize your messages.
Furthermore, you can take your marketing efforts to the next level by connecting Mailchimp with popular tools like Shopify, QuickBooks, Canva, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, and more.
Pricing:
The pricing varies depending on the number of contacts you have. A limited free plan is available if you have under 2,000 subscribers.
- Essentials plan: $9.56/ month
- Standard plan: $14.27/ month
- Premium plan: $285.46/ month
3. Website Building and Content Management – WordPress
A software that serves both purposes helps you create a customized website for your small business and also the content that goes up there. It comes with a myriad of features – from third-party plugins to website design options.
There’s more than one reason why WordPress is the most popular website builder around the world. With dozens of free and amazing themes, you can customize your website to match your brand voice. It allows you to connect your own subdomain, and in case you don’t have one, it builds one for you – for free!
With so many developers working at the backend to develop themes and plugins, you may not have to create a website from scratch – something you like might already be in the options to choose from. All you will have to do is implement it and you are good to go!
This is also the most effective digital marketing strategy for small businesses to create SEO-optimized blogs/ content. It is coupled with a collection of web systems and applications that help in content creation, branding, conversion optimization techniques, and more.
Pricing:
Apart from the free plan, you can choose to pay monthly or annually by upgrading to any of the following plans to suit your needs:
- Personal: $3.97/ month
- Premium: $7.57/ month
- Business: $13.03/ month
- e-Commerce: $23.58/ month
4. Online Scheduling – Appointy
Manually setting up appointments can be counterproductive. An online scheduling tool is what you need if you want to make the process seamless. Choosing the right scheduling software would not only help you automate scheduling but also daily admin tasks such as client & staff management, payment processing, and much more.
A cloud-based scheduling software for small businesses, Appointy offers 24×7 booking convenience to your customers. You can set up your services, assign staff to them, set availability, enable prepayment options with Square, Stripe, or PayPal, and you are good to go!
You can also send automated email/ SMS reminders and notifications to keep clients in the loop and reduce no-show rates. It comes with an intuitive calendar that can be synced two-way with your existing calendars like Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook.
Other features like customer database management, reporting and analytics, booking integrations, etc. can help you smoothly sail through your day.
Pricing:
Apart from a 14-day free trial, Appointy offers the following options:
- Basic plan: Free
- Growth plan: $19.99/ month
- Professional plan: $49.99/ month
- Enterprise plan: $79.99/ month
This software also provides tailor-made scheduling solutions for any unique scheduling needs.
5. Team Collaboration – Slack
Owning a team collaboration and communication tool can help in improved team communications and as a result of this, enhance productivity. With highly capable built-in functionalities, teams can be on the same page.
If you want to collaborate and work easily with your team and across cross-functional teams, Slack is the best chat platform for you. You can streamline your workflows by connecting Slack with various productivity apps and departmental tools.
Sharing of files, documents, photos, and videos can be done seamlessly with this go-to team tool. Other than this, you can sync your status with your calendar, create and assign tasks, set up daily quick huddle meetings, create a poll, set reminders, and much more.
Pricing:
You can choose to pay monthly or yearly, and cancel at any time:
- Pro plan: $6.77 per person/ month, when billed yearly, and $8.14 per person/ month when billed monthly
- Business+ plan: $11.65 per person/ month, when billed yearly, and $13.97 per person/ month when billed monthly
- Enterprise Grid: You can contact the sales team for the price estimate.
6. Customer Relationship Management – HubSpot CRM
Building strong client relationships is the foundation of any successful business. If you need to earn back the loyalty of clients, you need to be aware of their needs and cater to them in the most effective manner. A CRM tool can help you do just that.
HubSpot CRM is free to use and includes features that aid you in task management, email creation and scheduling, email tracking, document sharing, meeting scheduling, live chats, and more.
This platform scales with your business needs and is a big plus for teams like marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management. The best part is organizing key customer data and tracking these business relationships from a single dashboard.
Pricing:
With up to 1,000,000 contacts and no limits on users or customer data, HubSpot CRM is 100% free.
7. Document Management – Google Workspace
If you want to go digital in every sense, using a dedicated document management system can help you achieve just that. This system can help you create, organize, share, collaborate, and access files across cross-functional teams.
Google Workspace is one of the best tools for small business owners. It comes with all the tools you need to get more work done and collaborate as efficiently as possible. This is undoubtedly an amazingly lucrative solution that has been specifically designed to streamline the operations of teams of all sizes.
You can store files in one secure place with cloud storage, share files whenever you want, collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations across devices with real-time co-editing functionality, and do much more.
Pricing:
Google Workspace comes with a 14-day free trial. Other plans include:
- Business Starter: $1.55/ month
- Business Standard: $8.33/ month
- Business Plus: $15.63/ month
- Enterprise: You can connect with the sales team for the price estimate.
8. Social Media Management – Buffer
Having social media tools to spread the word about your business and the various campaigns you run is a no-brainer. A social media management system can help you get the necessary information needed to improve your engagement with clients.
Buffer is known to help businesses and individuals build an audience organically with powerful marketing tools. With intuitive analytics, you can measure your social media performance and generate content that easily connects with your target audience. You can also get recommendations on what can boost engagement and conversions, and drive more sales.
Have your campaign planned out but spending your valuable time maintaining a conscious cadence? Worry not! Buffer also lets you schedule your posts in advance so that you can focus on tasks that matter.
Pricing:
Apart from the 14-day free trial and free-for-life plan, Buffer offers the following plans as well:
- Essentials plan: $6/ month per channel
- Team plan: $12/ month per channel
- Agency plan: $120/ month for 10 channels
9. Analytics – Google Analytics
If you have a website and are dealing with content, running reports and drawing insights from client behavior adds up as a crucial factor. Such a system harnesses the power of various in-built reports to help you better understand your audience and their engagement.
Google Analytics is best known for drawing key customer insights based on their activity on your website. This software shows you where your customers are coming from on your website, plus what their behavior is. This allows you to rethink your marketing strategy to generate more qualified leads and boost your conversion rates.
It is easy to use, and the number of reporting options and functionalities that come along with it are exhaustive and intuitive.
Pricing:
Google Analytics is free-to-use.
10. Accounting – Xero
Financial management is the core of any business. A system that aids you in this helps automate the entire process – from invoicing to tax calculations, while accurately keeping a tab on all the financial activities.
Xero is a cloud-based accounting solution that embeds excellently with any small business. It has a host of features that help in real-time monitoring of your financial performance and cash flow.
You can also connect Xero to your bank account to set up payroll, claim expenses, track projects, etc. You can generate customizable reports to stay on top of your business figures, track specific KPIs, send invoices, pull bills and receipts, and more.
Pricing:
Xero offers a 30-day free trial. The premium plans include:
- Early plan: $12/ month
- Growing plan: $34/ month
- Established plan: $65/ month
Wrapping up
We live in a digitally-sophisticated world, and that is certainly the future as well. As a small business owner, your duties and responsibilities don’t end with managing the customers you get into your business.
There are plenty of opportunities out there that can be lucrative for your business, but you need a dedicated amount of time to explore them as well. Managing your business while keeping a hawk’s eye on the opportunities cannot go hand-in-hand. But smartly automating the daily admin can take off a decent amount of workload from your shoulders.
Invest in the right small business tools and streamline your business’ end-to-end operations to remove any process-induced friction. The reliability and flexibility these tools provide can help weather business challenges, and can, undoubtedly, go a long way!
About the author:
Netra is a part of the Marketing team at Appointy. She is a photography enthusiast, loves to doodle her thoughts in an art book (and sometimes, paints it away on a wall), and is mostly found with a book on her week-offs, lost in thought.
