One of the hardest things about being a small business owner is that you typically wear many hats and need to manage all types of tasks. For example, you might have opened a business selling art print t-shirts, but now you need to handle accounting, marketing, product development, and other capabilities.
As well as using global talent marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork and others to find people to help you fill these gaps, you also need the right tools.
At our recent Beyond 24-hour global virtual summit for digital business, we held an insightful panel to discuss the challenges facing small business owners, freelancers, and eCommerce sellers, and the best tools to use to overcome them and scale your business.
Nathan Archie, Payoneer’s Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand, spoke to Rosalind Gladwin, from Gladwin Legal; Adam Noonan, marketing director at Envato; Jason Leong. CEO and Co-founder of PocketSmith; and Duncan McIntyre, Senior Sales Executive at Canva, to ask them about their favorite tools.
The COVID-19 crisis clearly pushed more businesses online. Freelancers and eCommerce sellers who already had an online presence also moved to focus on new, digital ways to communicate with customers and work with remote teams.
All of this makes it even more important to use tools like Envato and Canva to create appealing digital assets and help you communicate more clearly. Envato is the place to go for original, attractive digital assets like stock audio and video that aren’t the same as everybody else’s.
Canva is a great choice for templates, fonts, and visual elements to keep your social media posts consistent and make sure that you always stay within the guidelines for different social media ads. You can also use Envato’s video, graphic, and web templates to keep your website looking professional.
Our panelists also saw a surge in the number of people opening new businesses in the last few months. They pointed out how important it is to start on the right foot by using online accounting, finance, and legal tools to manage your business and personal finances.
Keeping good records of all your receipts and expenses is a must, and tools like Xero or QuickBooks make it easy. Pocketsmith is valuable for creating projections of future income. so you can make data-based decisions about the future of your business.
Switching to the legal side of things, many new business owners invest a lot into branding, logos, and design, only to find out that someone else has already trademarked their new business name or slogan. Use WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, to check whether your branding ideas have already been taken, and to register them as trademarked if they are original and distinctive.
If you’re a freelancer, you need project management tools to keep track of your assignments and deadlines, while small and medium teams in any business need project management tools to assign responsibilities, share resources, and track progress. Trello is a favorite with our panelists because it’s so easy to use and share. Evernote is also popular for taking notes and keeping all your ideas in one place.
Whether you’re a freelancer, online seller, or online service provider, you need to keep up with every aspect of digital marketing, which includes email marketing, social media marketing, SEO for your website, and more. It’s really important to build your marketing stack.
Hubspot has an excellent CRM to help you manage your long-term customer relationships, with a broad knowledge base that helps you learn the basics of marketing even if this isn’t really your area of expertise. SproutSocial is a good choice for social media analytics so you can see which types of posts get the most attention on different channels. Other helpful tools include email marketing platforms like MailChimp, and SEO plugins like Yoast for WordPress websites.
Starting a new business or working the gig-economy is always uncertain, and you have to handle all the vital business tasks yourself until your team grows. However, with the right tools, you’ll be able to effectively manage important tasks like accounting, marketing, or project management with a tiny (or non-existent) team, so your business can survive and thrive without taking over your life!
To learn more on which tools can help you boost your business and drive more sales, watch our full session below.