3 Best Digital Tools for Small Business

by Debbie Fletcher
culled from:http://www.nimble.com

In the words of the great entrepreneur Henry Ford, “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” The time to act is now. Check out these tools to adapt for your small business.

There is no denying that starting your own business is hard work, but the fact is that it is even harder to keep it up and running. For new entrepreneurs trying to get their businesses to take root, a little help never hurt. Sometimes one simple tool can change the way you operate your entire business, and currently there are a ton of tech tools to assist you in digital marketing, advertising and branding. Here are three essential technology tools for budding entrepreneurs on a budget:

1. Hootsuite

For the small business owner on the go, Hootsuite is a great tool to help organize social media posts. It lets you manage your social outreach and schedule messages and tweets. You also can use the dashboard to engage with different people across all of your accounts. Hootsuite has been met with critical acclaim and was crowned leader in social media management by G2 Crowd. In a review, G2 stated, “HootSuite earned leader status based on its high scale scores and the highest customer satisfaction rating reported by users.”

2. Geckoboard

For young, bootstrapping entrepreneurs, budgets are often of the shoestring variety, so every dollar counts. Geckoboard runs about $17 per month and is loaded with features that make this cost worthwhile. You can use this tool to share, aggregate and visualize the main data that anchors your business, and it allows you to pull together data from over 120 different services so you can build your own dashboard. You can use Geckoboard to monitor all of your site’s analytics in one place, and it is viewable on desktop, tablet or even your mobile phone so you can work from anywhere.

3. Mailchimp

One part of small business management that is often overlooked is email. You spend an incredible amount of time sending and reading emails, so as a busy business owner, Mailchimp might become your new best friend. Mailchimp is an email marketing service that allows users to send automated emails to customers based on their individual online behaviors and preferences. Additionally, it generates performance reports on the success of these automated series to determine how effectively they are working for your business. Mailchimp also has built-in segmentation and targeting options to build custom rules. Reviews.com points out that MailChimp has resources to help you minimize the learning curve so you can start creating your campaigns.

No one said that running a business would be easy. Henry Ford certainly did not. The most successful entrepreneurs accept that they can’t do it on their own and know when to ask for help. For modern small business owners like you, many inexpensive, high-performing tools are available to help coordinate your marketing attacks so you can conquer your business goals.