Running a business of any size is taxing. It requires superhuman levels of attention and energy, as well as an incredibly broad skillset, and it only gets more difficult as your business scales. Minor tasks that don’t even contribute to your bottom line pile up, not to mention the major moving parts–your content marketing needs, IT problems, that new landing page for your website, SEO analytics, and the very core of your efforts, your employees–that require the majority of your time every day. Even iconic businesses struggle to scale during their push towards greater growth.
Luckily, in 2016, there is also a plethora of readily accessible, economical apps and services that automate and assist with every vital part of growing a business: hiring, marketing, accounting, and beyond. Below are 5 effective and affordable tools to help scale your business and manage the growing pains in 2016:
MailChimp
Despite all of the attention paid to new social media platforms, email is still an extremely effective marketing tool. MailChimp helps you to automate emails effectively by sending out welcome messages, segmenting subscribers via e-commerce and behavioral data for better targeting, and helping you personalize email marketing campaigns. Their analytic tools for tracking overall performance in terms of engagement and ROI help you understand your campaigns’ success rates, and their automated delivery system will figure out when is the best time to send out emails. MailChimp will also scale alongside your business with affordable, fixed monthly rates for different amounts of subscribers. Under 2,000 and it’s free!
Hootsuite
In 2016, content marketing and expansion into social media is a must for a business of any size. With Hootsuite you can oversee all of your social networks, schedule posts, and analyze their reception with analytic reports and audience monitoring tools to see who’s engaged and how for only $10 per month. To stay on top of demographic shifts and burgeoning trends, Hootsuite will help you expand your social media reach via their App Directory, a collection of apps you can easily add to your dashboard with minimal disruption to your workflow. Hootsuite boasts over 10 million users worldwide, from small businesses to major enterprises, and has become the most trusted name in social media management.
Toptal
As your business scales in an increasingly digital world, you’ll need to create a professional, fine-tuned online presence to best attract and keep consumers. But do you think you can find the best possible developers and designers within commuting distance? In a world with an increasingly mobile workforce, you don’t have to. A hiring platform for the top 3% of remote developers and designers, Toptal takes pride in vetting the very best and connecting companies with professional, experienced freelancers on a global scale. A team of experts at Toptal works with each client to understand the client’s needs before putting together a curated list of candidates, each of whom has earned a spot in Toptal’s network after a rigorous screening process that includes English-proficiency and first-class technical skills. With a no-risk trial period and competitive pricing, Toptal is the go-to tool for businesses looking to scale online with the help of quality talent.
ClearVoice
You’ve established a broader social media presence and marketing strategy. Excellent. Now, you need a better handle on content creation and amplification. ClearVoice is a one-stop shop software suite that helps users discover trends, create concepts, and plan an editorial calendar. Then, ClearVoice acts as a freelance platform for content creators. You’ll provide details for your content creation plan, and ClearVoice will put together a batch of freelancer profiles from which you can choose your team. Through the software, you can manage your campaigns and teams, and once the final product is ready, ClearVoice will help push it through their network of paid media outlets. With a tiered pricing system, ClearVoice is an affordable tool for businesses to create brand awareness and reach a broader audience.
Dasheroo
Now that you’re scaling up and investing time and energy into 3rd-party apps like the ones listed here, you’ll be struck by a new hurdle: with most apps providing you with performance data, it’s easy to get lost in all the numbers. This is where Dasheroo comes in. Dasheroo aggregates all of your apps’ business performance metrics on a single, free dashboard where users get access to breakdowns of the most important metrics. Interested to see how your Facebook and Instagram posts have fared in order to better understand what kinds of posts work best on each platform? With Dasheroo you can combine the data from two apps in order to better visualize trends and correlations. Dasheroo will grow right along with you with pricing options geared towards businesses just starting out and those already established.
Source: smallbusinesscan.com
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