When operating a small business, you’ll be well aware of your limitations as well as your strengths. The likelihood is that a lack of manpower compared to larger businesses often presents itself as a barrier to certain tasks. This can lead to you needing more time to complete certain tasks that would otherwise be handled by a larger group or even entirely prevent you from completing that task effectively.
This would instead require you to outsource that task to a larger specialised business so that your team can focus their attention elsewhere. Luckily, technological advancements over the years have made certain tasks much easier and have increased efficiency in the workplace, helping you to grow your success without necessarily growing your team. Here are some simple tech tools that can significantly help your small business.
Time Tracking Software
While time is valuable for all businesses, for a small business, time is much more important, and being able to keep track of your limited man-hours is essential. If you don’t track your time and manage your employee’s hours effectively, you won’t be maximising your productivity, and this can have some seriously negative effects on your business.
At the very least, it might prevent your business from reaching its true potential. There are many great time-tracking apps that small businesses can make use of. Using these may show you where your business is being inefficient and allow you to quickly rectify these issues to improve your success.
Project Management Tools
Like using time tracking software, using things like project management tools should also help you increase your team’s efficiency. Whether you have multiple projects on the go or one large project, it’s important to make sure that you’re managing the whole thing effectively. Suppose you have multiple people working on the same project, especially when they’re working remotely using cloud collaboration software.
In that case, it can be easy for employees to get confused as to who is doing what. But making use of a good project management tool that allows everyone to see what others are working on and what tasks need completing to meet targets is very useful. This will reduce the chances of tasks being forgotten about and help employees avoid taking on tasks that have already been completed by someone else.
Email Management Tools
You and your team will likely receive a huge number of emails every day, and many of these will be useless spam or junk emails. However, there will likely be plenty of important emails from clients and customers amongst these junk emails. Failing to manage these emails properly, responding late or even forgetting to respond at all can be damaging for your business.
As well as using a quality email management tool, you should also endeavour to increase the professionalism of your emails wherever possible. For example, sending an email with attachments is often hindered by file sizes, so you should consider using this Adobe Acrobat online tool to compress PDFs. You can also use file-sharing sites and simply send clients a link to download other files that otherwise cannot be compressed and sent directly via email.
Content Creation Software
One of the highest added costs for all businesses tends to be marketing but for a good reason. Great marketing content can improve the success of a business ten-fold, and businesses that fail to put enough effort into their marketing increase the risk of being outperformed by competitors. One of the biggest hurdles is finding an affordable solution to create good marketing content, and one way of doing this on a budget is to make use of quality content creation software.
It’s also worthwhile having a member of staff dedicated to your marketing endeavours, and providing them with premium access to content creation software that is easy to use can significantly improve the quality of your marketing. There are many content creation apps on the market, and there are also lots of royalty-free media directories too, which you can use alongside premium sites like Adobe Stock.
Social Media Management Tools
As well as having access to good content creation software, you’ll also want to make sure that you have an efficient system for posting all of that digital content on your social media platforms. Managing social media posts can actually be fairly time-consuming and subject to glaring errors without the assistance of social media management software. There are many different tools and apps you can use to manage your social media channels.
You can use these to schedule posts, helping you to plan out your social media marketing campaigns, and manage customer engagement all across your platforms. Many of these scheduling sites can link your accounts together, allowing you to post to all of them from one specific app. This will provide your social media manager with more time to complete other important tasks and reduce the risk of human error from juggling multiple accounts.
These are just some suggestions, and there are plenty of other options including digital business cards.
