Running a small business day to day is hard, right? Not to mention expensive!
Here at Sharpmonkeys Digital Marketing we’re huge fans of anything that can make your life easier – and if it’s free, too – then even better!
We’ve put together a short list of our most favourite apps and tools that will take over some key parts of the SME life and reduce your daily stress levels!
Dropbox
I am probably the best in the world at forgetting to attach documents to emails. Seriously, I could enter the world championships and easily bag a silver, if not gold. I know I’m not alone, too – every single emailer out there has at some point forgotten the key part of the ‘Please find attached’ trope.
Dropbox will remove those concerns for you – you set up an online folder system, which you can also share with others. So not only can they find the documents in the exact place you saved them, there’s an online backup of all the important files you need! So the next time you leave your laptop in a taxi will be a little bit stressful.
It also takes away the hassle of those annoying email attachment size limits – a 2gb upload limit means an awful lot of PDFs and big images!
It goes without saying the whole thing is completely secure and will save you lots of headaches when it comes to sharing and receiving files!
MailChimp
Please don’t tell me your still sending out your email newsletters from Outlook with all your customers in the BCC line. It’s 2018 people!
Here at Sharpmonkeys, we’re experts in Email Marketing. And we love, love, love MailChimp (and not just for the monkey-theme!).
MailChimp is the perfect tool for any small to medium business for reaching out to the list of valued customers that you’ve built up.
The design tools are flexible, the data reporting is fantastic and there’s loads of brilliant extra tools, such as landing page creator, ad designer, and signup forms to put on your website.
It really is one of the most flexible, easy-to-use tools out there. If you’re not using it for your email marketing, you should be.
And the best thing? As long as you’ve got 2,000 subscribers or under, it’s completely free.
LastPass
“Please retype a password between 18-19 characters, using upper and lower case, including 3 and a half numbers and a hieroglyphic.” Sound familiar?
LastPass is a brilliant browser extension that remembers all of your passwords for you, so you only have to remember one. It will even generate passwords for you and fill out the password boxes when you return to the website.
But the best thing about this free tool is the fact that you can share passwords with people easily – a must-have when you’re running a business.
Asana
Project management is rarely a simple affair, but this amazing free tool Asana makes everything a hell of a lot easier. The free version is all that most small companies will need and using it is a doddle.
It allows you to track an unlimited number of projects from start to finish, assign tasks to different team members, share documents, create milestones and have conversations between team members within the app.
It’s available on both Android and Apple, and also as a browser-based app for when you’re at your desk. It’s a simple, great tool and it should be part of any business strategy!
Google Drive
Struggling to justify the cost of a Microsoft licence? It’s a very expensive tool to have, especially if all you’re doing with it is writing a few words docs and coming up with a few spreadsheets.
Enter Google Drive, or more specifically – Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, which form part of Google Drive and can replace Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively.
While they are not quite as slick as their Microsoft counterparts (and certainly feel a bit more ‘functional’ rather than packed to the gills with useful tools and shortcuts) the average user will really not feel the difference, and the price speaks for itself!
https://www.google.co.uk/drive/
Sharpmonkeys are Digital Marketing Experts specialising in PPC and SEO. We use all of these tools daily and we think you should too!
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