Today, no business can properly grow without the use of digital services.
Various online tools will help you increase your productivity, enhance business communication, and promote your business on the Internet.
Still, beginners in SMB-management might not know which digital features they need from day one.
The purpose of this article is to present five major digital services that every small business can benefit from.
Email marketing
SMB-owners need to know that email is still one of the most convenient and practical digital services.
First and foremost, you can use it for efficient communication with your business partners and employees. Unlike collaboration tools and chat solutions, email messages don’t imply instant replies. Someone who receives an email letter has enough time to think about its content and come up with a proper response.
Moreover, email should be used for sending out various promotional newsletters, discount codes, special offers, and other features that will improve your business services.
Apart from that, email has the powerful function of remarketing. When a user doesn’t finish their registration or purchase on your website, you can send an email – this can be automated – and remind them of their unfinished action.
To top it all off, there’s a high number of free email marketing tools in the market that can help you put all the elements above into practice.
Project management tools
If you want to establish a modern SMB, you need to follow in the footsteps of larger players in terms of business organization.
No matter if your employees come to the office or you have people scattered around the world, project management tools will significantly improve your work efficiency.
Since there are various solutions available out there, new SMB-owners might get lost when choosing the right solution for their needs.
If you want to start with simpler project management tools, Trello or Basecamp are fine options. They come with free and paid versions, which is acceptable for new SMBs.
In case you have more complex projects and tasks, check out some cutting-edge project management solutions to find the one that will suit your needs.
When you can create and monitor all your business tasks within single software, both you and your employees will become more productive. In turn, your entire business will benefit from using such apps.
Social media campaigns
If you don’t exist in social media, it’s as if you don’t exist at all.
Even though this might be an overstatement, it’s clear that SMBs need to be present in social networks if they want to generate more leads and sell more products.
This makes social media marketing an important digital asset.
For starters, specify your target audience and adapt your social media content to them. All social networks have dozens of useful features with which you can aim at specific audiences.
You could use Hootsuite or some other alternatives that will help you plan, schedule and publish your social media posts. With such tools, you can track how your followers and react to different posts on your social media business pages. As a result, you can adapt your marketing strategies to target your audiences even more closely.
When you’re planning to launch a new product, social media need to be your megaphone via which you’ll spread the word about it.
Google Analytics
This tool should be part of the digital business toolbox for every new business.
It will show you what keywords to pay attention to while you’re creating your content marketing strategy.
Google Analytics can be added to every website so that business people and other clients can get statistical data about their traffic and track their visitor’s behavior on the website.
When you see how you generate your leads, you’ll be able to adapt your marketing agenda to the obtained results. Also, you can focus on the geographical regions from which your users come from.
Google Analytics will enable you to streamline your website and blog content towards specific business goals. It will help you make your clients use your online business services so that you achieve those objectives, as well.
Website reporting and analysis
In addition to Google Analytics, covered in the previous section, SMB-owners should pay attention to other practical featuresregarding the functionality of their websites.
As the guys from a web design company in Houston claim, every website needs constant supervision and revision.
If you just place content on your pages and don’t change it, your website will soon become obsolete and useless.
What you need to do is constantly track the results that your content generates.
In that light, mind the elements that will give you a better insight into users’ behavior on the website. For instance, using heatmaps and recording how an average visitor uses the mouse on your website are two efficient ways of realizing how well your website features work.
Also, when you’re introducing new content, track how visitors react to it.
You can see how much time they spend on each section of your website, as well. If you notice that there are some dead areas that don’t appeal to website visitors, turn them into useful content bits to improve your overall website usability.
It’s impossible to run a modern business without digital services. Email and project management tools are here to improve your communication and collaboration with customers and employees. Use social media to notify your followers and customers of your latest business moves and actions. Rely on Googly Analytics to get the general idea of your presence on the Internet. Finally, turn to statistical features to improve the usability of your business website. Most of these features are free of charge to a certain extent and they can significantly improve your business efficiency.
