There are, literally, thousands of productivity, communication, and organizational apps available to help small business owners streamline daily tasks. These mobile apps can help your business run more smoothly and allow you to operate with a 24/7 mentality. The right combination of apps and tools can help you make your business processes more efficient, saving you time and money.
This is an app for organizing and syncing notes across mobile and desktop devices – a sort of digital filing cabinet. Evernote allows you to create, capture and access everyday notes and lists, clip information from the web, and tag it for easy searching later. You can also enhance notes with web links, tables, or embedded audio and video. This app helps you capture thoughts while you are on the move. You can store ideas via voice, text or photo and later search by keywords and tags. All of your lists, reminders and notes are always available on multiple platforms.
Some, however, feel that Evernote is too big, has too many features and some of the features and functions vary depending on the device being used. An alternative app is Pocket, which was previously known as “Read it Later.”
This is an app and web service for managing a reading list of online articles and web pages. Pocket allows you to file away useful articles, videos and other online content for later viewing. It has a clean interface, easy accessibility, and it removes the clutter from articles prior to saving them resulting in an easy-to-read format. You can also add tags and adjust text settings for easier searching and reading. Pocket syncs across your phone, tablet and desktop. It can be accessed from any platform and can be used offline so no Internet is necessary to access saved information.
This is a social media management app that allows you to schedule, publish and monitor from anywhere. It provides one place from which you can schedule posts for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and helps you track and manage all of your social network channels. HootSuite includes analytics tools that let you conduct comprehensive monitoring, influencer identification and also create and export custom reports of your social media analytics.
This is a marketing automation platform that allows you to create and launch automated email marketing campaigns, use analytics to monitor campaign progress, edit subscriber profiles and run in-depth reports all from a mobile device. You can build and manage mailing lists, create and send newsletters and emails with the simplicity of drag and drop email building. MailChimp has excellent ecommerce integrations so you are able to use purchase data to better target consumers. There are also Facebook and Instagram integrated ad campaigns available.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, Nimble is truly a relationship manager. It combines contacts and calendars and directly integrates social media data into the CRM by collecting data from contacts’ social profiles. It also analyzes shared interests and learns which relationships you value, increasing the ability to highlight future opportunities. Best of all, Nimble automatically updates itself with relevant customer and prospect information, providing the context you need to connect and take action from any social site or business app. It displays a dashboard setup with a clear, concise view of events, tasks, and information.
This is a cloud-based instant messaging platform intended for use as a team communication tool. Slack allows you to bring all of your communications together in one place, integrating apps and services you already use. You are able to organize team conversations into separate channels so you can create different communication channels for group messages and one-to-one communications. Team members are able to drag, drop, and share images, PDFs, etc. directly into the chat and all messages, notifications, and files are automatically indexed, archived, and searchable. While it is not the most intuitive app, it does help eliminate confusion by offering easy communication between teams.
This is a credit card processing app that eliminates the need for cash-only transactions. Square provides a free, plug-in card reader that works on a smart phone or tablet. It enables businesses to accepts all major credit cards and has a simple, low rate of 2.75% per swipe. Square allows you to keep track of sales and inventory in real time and view analytics of sales as well. An Internet connection is not necessary for use and vendors are able to email or text receipts to customers. The Square even has the capacity for customers to leave tips.
If you are looking to simplify your life as an entrepreneur and would like to learn more about ways to improve your business processes, contact us today.