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The Best Entrepreneur-Recommended Tech Tools for Business Productivity

Posted: 17 Mar 2019 10:00 AM PDT

While you might not be able to hire enough staff to fill every position at your small business, thanks to technology, you can hand some of them over to business tools instead. Here are my favorite tech tools for keeping small businesses running smoothly.

Accounting

Nobody enjoys having to write invoices, analyze cash flow or complete tax returns. Thankfully, there are online accounting tools which automate the process. I rely on QuickBooks. It creates estimates and turns them into invoices, handles payroll management, and chases up late payment with automated reminders. It also saves your expenses and uses them to auto-populate your tax return, calculates your tax obligations, and produces simple graphs to help you understand your income anda expenditure.

Payments

The more payment channels you accept, the easier it is for your clients to pay you, and the faster you get paid. That's why I like Wave to accept online payments and produce receipts, all through the same platform. It can handle payments in other currencies, which is a godsend if you have international clients. Square is my preference for accepting credit card payments while I'm out and about.

Tracking expenses

Keeping on top of business expenses can be a huge headache, but there are excellent expense trackers to help make it less painful. I use Expensify. Being able to snap a picture of receipts is a massive time-saver. Instead of having to manually enter all the payment details, Expensify codes that information from the image of the receipt. It includes credit card reconciliation, and integrates with QuickBooks to speed up tax calculations.

Task management

If you're as busy as I am, you have a dozen things to remember at any moment of the day. Task management tools like Wunderlist are my external memory. I create to-do lists, make notes, schedule reminders, plan my calendar, and more.

FollowUpThen is another tool that I love. It's really simple: you CC an email to the FollowUpThen email address, and it will send it at the date and time that you requested. It helps me keep on top of emails and makes me look very organized.

Project management

There are so many project management apps, and everyone has their favorite. Mine is Trello. It lets you assigns tasks, set deadlines, attach material in almost any format you like. You can share resources, and hold conversations, all within the same platform.

Customer service support

As a small business, you're both a client and a provider at different times. As a client myself, I'm delighted when companies offer online customer portals. That's one of the things that makes me proud of the services we offer at Next Insurance. Our clients can keep on top of business insurance payments, file an insurance claim, or download a live certificate of insurance through the Next Insurance portal.

RocketLawyer lets me create legal documents, get a new contract reviewed by a lawyer, or access legal help without picking up the phone. MailChimp has an extensive self-service knowledge base and live chat support through its customer portal.

To provide support for my own customers, ZenDesk is top of my list. It lets you automate the most frequent customer support interactions through chatbots, and direct only the more complex issues to human support. With ZenDesk, we integrate all our different customer support channels, including social media support, so that a small customer service team can punch above its weight.

File sharing, storage, and collaboration tools

Evernote is best for securely storing my notes, contracts, proposals, project guidelines -- you name it, it's there. Evernote also lets me take a photo of papers or places to save with the rest of my business resources, organize them using tags and folders, and access them from any device through cloud sync.

When it comes to file sharing and collaboration, I use Google Drive. I can choose permission levels for each document individually, keeping things secure. Google Drive lets me work on a document together with colleagues in real time, sharing comments and viewing changes instantly.

Marketing tools

It doesn't matter what type of business you have, you have to have a marketing department. Even if the marketing department is only you. Here are some of my favorite marketing tools for small business:

  • MailChimp is great for email marketing. It makes it easy to add and manage contacts through the CRM, set up automated drip campaigns, send personalized emails, and convert blog posts into email newsletters so that I can make more out of the same content.

  • Hootsuite lets me schedule social media posts ahead of time and have them appear at exactly the right time. I also use it to monitor social media channels for posts about my business, my competitors, and industry keywords, so that I can take part in timely conversations. This also helps me to find out about trending topics so that I can plan relevant content.

  • I use Google Keyword Planner to set SEO keywords for my content. There are other, more complex keyword planner tools, but I like that this is free and simple.

  • Hubspot is a great all-in-one marketing management tool for small businesses, with a focus on inbound marketing. It includes templates for landing pages and email newsletters, lead management tools, analytics so that you can fine-tune your target audience and see which approaches are the most successful, social media management, marketing automation, and more.

Small businesses can be held back if they don't have enough employees to fill every role, but that doesn't have to be the case anymore. Today's best tech tools let your company reach even higher by helping you carry out vital business tasks with less friction and more speed.

4 Ways to Jumpstart Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy

Posted: 17 Mar 2019 06:00 AM PDT

Search engine marketing (SEM) allows an advertiser to purchase traffic based on a specific keyword or set of keywords on a click by click, fixed impression or pay per view basis. While this cost can add up, it still provides the advertiser with an unprecedented level of control compared to traditional advertising methods. 

SEM also allows advertisers to choose how to target traffic based on an advertiser's specific needs and budget. Companies can even pinpoint exactly who they are targeting: geographic area, age group, hour of day, actions taken on the digital property, even IP address. In comparison, this goes way beyond the targeting options traditional advertising methods have allowed. Digital advertising budgets are variable not fixed. They virtually depend on what the advertiser wants to spend. Smaller advertisers can test the waters on any SEM platform before making substantial investments in their marketing budgets which could potentially bankrupt them. The advertiser has complete control. 

Prior to SEM, one of the biggest issues advertisers had was in determining the effect of their off-page and on-page search engine optimization (SEO) efforts on their bottom line. Search engine marketing has made tracking traffic possible by making it necessary for networks and platforms to develop ways for advertisers to accurately track their return on investment.

There are many niches, keywords and options to invest in when it comes to SEM. However, there are also a wide range of scalable opportunities and highly accurate tracking capabilities available to the small business owner which they can take advantage of when they are ready to dive into the world of digital marketing. If you are looking to jump into SEM, here are some tips to guide you.

Focus on generating data initially, not conversions.

Before you can start tapping into a consistent conversion stream, aspects of your SEM conversion funnel (i.e. keyword > ad > landing page > conversion action) needs to be developed. This funnel should be developed using accurate data. SEM performance is determined by SEM data generated from your SEM campaign. This data takes the form of metric values such as clicks, impressions, CTR, conversions etc.

Without data or with too little data you cannot properly make critical campaign management decisions to manage your campaign, maintain campaign performance or optimize campaign performance. Focus on generating data and on testing aspects of your conversion funnel to ensure you maximize conversion potential.

Maintain control of your campaigns at all times.

Control is important for SEM campaign management. Losing control of your SEM campaign can derail campaign progress and lead to inconsistent results, inconsistent performance etc. So it is important to maintain control of all aspects of your campaign as much as possible. Much like the captain of a ship, you must maintain course if you wish to reach your destination. Review your campaign performance at least twice per day on days when SEM ads are being served.

Confirm all aspects of your conversion funnel work properly.

All SEM management decisions should be based off of SEM campaign data. The more accurate this data is, the more informed your decisions will be. To confirm this, check all aspects of your funnel, including:

  • Conversion tracking
  • Campaign layout
  • Ad copy
  • Keyword copy
  • Landing page

Making sure these SEM campaign elements are implemented and functioning properly is imperative to a successful SEM campaign.

React to your data.

There are some SEM campaign management decisions which should be made proactively such as campaign layout, conversion tracking implementation, targeting setup. However, most management decisions are best made reactively. The biggest benefit of using an SEM platform is the amount of actionable data available to you. Using this data to make timely management decisions where possible is to your benefit. Make informed decisions based on data in a timely manner to mitigate campaign performance issues.
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