Keeping Up with the Tech Revolution: 8 Tools Every Business Needs
Some tech solutions may be passing trends or catering to a narrow niche market, but others are invaluable tools that can make or break your business. It’s hard to know which is which, but you don’t have to sift through the tech market alone. Here are eight tools that can take your business to the next level.
A Data Solution
Every business around today can benefit from more efficiently acquiring and analyzing data. Because data drives every critical decision you make as a business owner, more numbers to crunch mean better outcomes.
However, if you have data coming in from multiple sources, it can be challenging to keep track and use the information to its fullest potential. Fortunately, data streaming and integration tools like Striim Cloud (https://www.striim.com/product/striim-cloud/) will allow you to harness business data to your advantage and stay on top of business intelligence in real-time.
Data Backup
No matter how your business handles data, you need to make sure it’s backed up in case of an emergency or otherwise unforeseen event. Data backups can take multiple forms, but cloud backup is perhaps the safest option.
The cloud benefits small businesses as a cheaper option than onsite servers and makes it easy to access your business’s data from anywhere.
Accounting Software
Accounting software is a necessary tool for any modern business and its software. Having to update financial records manually is a hassle and makes you likely to make costly mistakes. It is a much better idea to embrace the shift to automated bookkeeping.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
CRM software keeps tabs on everything you might want to know about past, present, and potential customers. It might, for example, determine and alert you that you haven’t reached out to a likely returning customer in a while.
CRM software might also tell you where to direct your marketing efforts based on which customers engage with your emails or website. It’s a powerful tool to help you find new customers and bring old ones back.
Communication Tools
Good communication tools are more important than ever for businesses as work culture shifts to primarily remote. You’ll need internal and external communication tools to collaborate with your employees and handle your business’s public relations.
Good communication software should be intuitive, offer flexibility across different platforms, and be secure. It’s much more challenging to work together without a unifying communication platform, and it’s likewise more challenging to send out emails to customers without any automation. The right tools can make all the difference.
Project Management
Project management software simplifies your life by turning what could be a scattered mess of notes, calendars, and to-do lists into a collection of all of these functions. It makes it much easier to keep track of your projects, from planning and prioritization steps to the final stages of meeting deadlines and reminding employees of their duties as necessary.
Social Media Management
A social media presence is becoming increasingly important in this day and age. A well-maintained profile can attract potential customers and keep current ones engaged and aware of what’s going on with your business.
Social media management software can help you stay organized and active on whatever platform(s) you choose, allowing you to compose posts and schedule them for later dates, see all your profiles at a glance, and analyze your social media marketing efforts.
Tools like NapoleonCat, Buffer, or Hootsuite are some of the best available. Some key extra features are automatic comment moderation, a social inbox, and plans with flexible pricing to fit your business’s size.
Your business can be rebranded by the availability of social media, for better or worse. Good management software helps nudge the odds in a positive direction.
Content Management System (CMS) Tools
CMS tools do the most challenging work of launching and maintaining a website for you. Considering the high likelihood that customers will look for your website online before choosing your product or services, you want to make sure you not only have a website but that it looks good and reflects current information.
By handling the backend of webpages and often simplifying it to a drag-and-drop interface, CMS tools guide you through the process of putting content out there for customers to find. Your business can only benefit from getting your name in search engine results.
Before You Go
These tools help simplify your business operations, from number-crunching to publishing content online. Investing in tools like these may prove well worth your money because increased efficiency is genuinely priceless.
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