12 Essential Free Tools For Small Businesses
Connect your life - Zapier
What it solves: This is not an extensive list of all the free tools available out there, nevermind the countless paid ones. Many tools solve one problem very well but fail to do much else which is why you’ll quickly find yourself with a pile of handy tools which are not connected in any way. Zapier helps you to bridge this gap between your different tools, it’s one of the best marketing automation tools for small business. Taking what may seem to be a random batch of useful tools, to the next level. Building a comprehensive solution to your specific business case.
How it works: Zapier allows you to connect Apps and tools together to make what they call a ‘Recipe’ or ‘Zap’, this allows you to automate workflows allowing one app to trigger an action in the next, for example, a completed Typeform could create a Trello card. The options are close to unlimited.
Share your monkey business with the world - Mailchimp
What it solves: So you need to send out emails to all your customers and you don’t want it to take forever? Mailchimp is the perfect solution, you can send personalised well-designed emails to a database of contacts and you can do so for free. (Up to 10,000 entries in your database which is more than enough for a small business).
How it works:
Mailchimp allows you to create separate lists (which are essentially databases), email templates so you can send the same message out repeatedly (very handy for weekly/monthly newsletters) and create campaigns. Essentially MailChimp is an email marketing tool for small businesses, that will scale with your business long term.
The world is your canvas - Canva
What it solves: When you’re a small business, springing out hundreds on photoshop or other design tools is just not feasible and though there are other free design tools out there, the learning curve can be quite steep. Enter Canva, it makes designing simple digital and print graphics simple with set templates you can edit but also the flexibility to start from scratch.
How it works: Pick the type of marketing collateral you’d like to create, or set your own desired dimensions. Then move on to select a template design or create your own from scratch, it’s really that easy. As if that wasn’t good enough, Canva also allows you to share your designs with your team allowing you to edit the same file online.
Simple & Elegant forms, for not so elegant folk - Typeform
What it solves: As a small business, creating and collecting the data from user surveys can be key, and there are probably a great many ways to carry this out, but none that look quite as slick or professional as Typeform. The form creation App allows you to create beautiful looking forms with complex logic jumps in minutes and all mobile-friendly. Typeform is one of the few marketing research tools for small business without looking terrible.
How it works: Create a simple form which can include both text, image and video and a number of answer restrictions. You’re able to create dependencies and logic jumps so questions can depend on previous answers or include previous answers. Stylise this to your liking and embed/share wherever you like. You’re able to get the answers in a google sheet or perhaps use a Zap to enable Typeform answers to create Trello cards for easy management.
Organise your hooting and Hollering - Hootsuite
What it solves: Organising social media in a small business is difficult, it doesn’t always get as much attention as it should, and even when it does it can be difficult to synchronise and organise the various channels, not to mention keep track of interactions. Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool for small business that allows you to remain on top of your social media channels.
How it works: Hootsuite allows you to manage your social media channels. Creating and scheduling posts can be done for one or many channels at a time and you can set up ‘Streams’ to keep track of people you’re following, or perhaps a specific hashtag. The only issue with this is the Instagram limitation, however, this is a common issue caused by Instagram. You’re able to schedule Instagram posts but will need to download the Hootsuite app to a phone in order to push the scheduled Instagram posts.
Share the workload - Upwork
What it solves: You’ll probably need some good quality writing or coding, Enter Upwork. Find freelance developers and writers on a mostly transparent platform. You’re able to post jobs and receive quotes pretty simply. Upwork has a lot more than just developers and writers, but this, in particular, is a great use of the platform for a small business which can’t afford the costs of engaging a full time or even long-term freelance writer/developer.
How it works: Post a job description as well as your criteria (which would include hourly/project pay, experience level etc) and interested freelancers can send you a quote as well as a cover letter. You’re then able to ‘interview’ them, which essentially means exchanging a stream of emails to get to a stage of better clarity (this doesn’t take long especially if you’re both online at the same time, which you’re able to see). Once you’ve made your decision, you’re free to hire your choice of candidate and manage the project all through Upwork.
Cheap and Cheerful - Fiverr
What it solves: Need a 30-second ad made; maybe some voice over work done? Fiverr helps with the odd jobs you need to be done whilst bootstrapping.
How it works: You have the option of creating a custom order, detailing what you would like done, or selecting from the categories and finding pre-existing ready to buy orders with quick turnarounds. The key to using Fiverr is being very specific and narrowing the scope of work being done, this allows you to get experts in each field. You will need to manage the process quite closely to guarantee the quality of work you receive, but given the low price point ($5), it’s worth the hassle.
Read Twice...cut once? - Grammarly
By now the puns, if you can call them that, are running dry, but Grammarly really is a time and face-saver.
What it solves: Between all the blog posts and documents being written and bounces around your hectic small business, as well as the countless other outstanding tasks your balancing, it’s easy for things to fall through the crackas and proofreading can go a miss. Grammarly (the chrome extension or downloadable tool) helps with this, picking up on spelling and grammatical errors you, or other members of the team, may miss.
How it works: Download the app for your desktop or add the google chrome extension. In the case of the app, it’s essentially a word processor, you can create your text and Grammarly will actively suggest alternatives or spot spelling and grammatical errors. The chrome extension will pick up on any text being entered and spot spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. The only limitation to this has been G-suite, Grammarly is not compatible with any of the Apps within G Suite.
Share far and Share wide - G Suite
What it solves: Everything. Well, nearly everything, from video conferencing to file storage G suite has a solution. The integrated and flexible nature of G suite means it’s somewhat of a swiss army knife tool. In particular, the ability to share with others and both edit documents and alike, live and chat with each other through the apps themselves cuts down on several layers of bureaucracy. Gone are the days of duplicate outdated copies of documents.
How it works: Create a document, share it with a team member. You can now both edit. It’s that simple. Sometimes the simplest things make the biggest of difference and the ability to have access to all files remotely, in minutes is a wonder for any small business.
There is of course so much more to G Suite, but going through every App would take a complete post.
Organise...so you don’t have to yell..oh! - Trello
Yes, this is getting unbearable, but stick with us here.
What it solves: Project management and organisation. No matter what industry you’re small business operates in, you’ll need some degree of project management. Trello has a simple card and board system that allows a team to keep an eye on the goings-on and the pipeline of projects. To make things better, it’s integrative.
How it works: Create a board for a project and add Cards which signify particular tasks within this. You’re then able to assign these tasks to team members as well as set priorities or add labels for organisational purposes. Trello finds the balance between simplicity in order to not complicate things, and usefulness by offering enough functionality to be flexible in varying use cases, making Trello an effective marketing tool for small to medium enterprises.
Charlie bit me, call human resources - Charlie HR
No apologies for this one.
What it solves: HR is a nightmare, especially in a small business. Somewhere between needing staff to grow, and the team size not being large enough to warrant a dedicated HR person, Charlie HR can help. The small business HR tool can help with managing onboarding, sick days and holidays as well as contracts. It really is on HR tool to rule them all.
How it works: Simply sign up for your business, and create as many teams as you like, these could be broken down to departments or project teams. Each member of the team can input and upload their relevant information and you’re able to select authorizations so only relevant people will have access to important documents such as payroll documents or Identity documents.
Charlie HR essentially takes away a lot of the hassle and disorganisation in small businesses, where senior members of the team, whilst being amazing in their field are doubtful to have serious HR experience.
On top of this all, it’s integrate-able!
Would any list be complete without - Hubspot CRM
It’s a little known fact; if you speak about marketing tools and don’t mention hubspot (or Chuck Norris), somewhere in the world a unicorn loses an eyelash.
What it solves: Deal management and tracking, email sequencing and more. Even free HubSpot tools are powerful. You’ve probably heard this a number of times by now, but it’s worth iterating; Hubspot is one of the best and most essential tools for any small business (for both marketing and sales).
How it works: Simply sign up with your work email address, and download the chrome extensions for mail tracking. You will be able to create deal stages and import contacts you already have at the appropriate stage. The integration with meeting scheduling tools and many others means there is scope to expand how effective this marketing tool is for you.
As you well know this is not an extensive list of tools for startups, but these are tools we use and find helpful. If you have some suggestions why not reach out to us and perhaps we could create an updated list of suggestions from Small businesses in a variety of fields. Contact us, and as always:
