Online Business Tools We Use To Run Our Business

Maybe you’ve already given thought to your online business and the tools you need? You might be brand new to the space and unsure where to start. Regardless of your experience or business age, everyone needs to be using tools for small businesses to help their businesses flourish! Tools such as email marketing, project management, making your landing pages, managing team members, and customer relationship management software are all important tools for entrepreneurs to know about and utilize! 

Best Online Business Tools

A lot of software and platforms offer a free version of their tool for you to access and give it a try! We always recommend this to see if this online tool is a good match for you. For some programs, the free plan gives more than enough, and you might not even need to spend a dime! 

We wouldn’t be digital strategists if we did not have a big love for tools that make us better at our work. Maria and I love to test out different tools, learn new strategies, and try our best to make everything super streamlined for our clients. We recommend tools to our clients all the time, but we always test them first to make sure that they work well, are trusted, and are easy to use!

Trello

Trello is our home base for our business. I am a long-time fan of the in-person KanBan approach, so Trello made natural sense for us. We have a board for each of our clients where we plan out their social media, track their progress, divide up tasks amongst ourselves, and usually share a board with our clients so we can all be on the same page. Transparency is key with working with any vendor, we know that, and so we want to ensure everyone has access to what we are working on so they can ask questions. Trello keeps us on task, and we love it! 

Trello is a great space to connect with team members, share content, make plans for social media marketing, plan skype web meetings or just keep track of your own tasks. It updates in real time when sharing a board with multiple users and is an idea for small businesses. The free version of Trello provides a lot of great options and we encourage you to check that out if you’re looking for organization! Trello makes outsourcing a breeze with being able to connect with others too who you are outsourcing a project or work, to ensure things are remaining on task and timely.

Wave

We are business owners as well, and we totally understand it can be overwhelming to know which system or platform for collecting payment from clients. For us, one of the best online business tools has been Wave. It allows us to create easy invoices, offers customer support, and allows us to see per month what happening in our business. 

In my other business, I used Honeybook, however for our current business we’ve found Wave is perfect for simple transactions and accounting. It has low fees, looks professional and direct deposits all of our client’s payments right into our bank account. If you are new to running a business, it is so perfect and has been a wonderful alternative to collecting e-transfers.

Squarespace

Are you new to want to make a site? Or want to update and refresh your current website. Be sure to check out Squarespace. Squarespace offers completive pricing and has several plans so you can only pay for what you really need for your site and business.

We love Squarespace for ourselves and our clients!  We love the simple templates and outlines that you can throw onto a domain and have a website in hours. I have loved using Squarespace and find it so user-friendly over other types of websites I have tried to build. 

Squarespace is a fantastic online business tool as it allows users to really customize and design their website to their wants and needs. It interacts well with having an email list sign up and marketing your business! 

DollarEighty

If your someone who doesn’t want to spend hours and hours on Instagram but knows the benefits of engagement and wants them with little hassle, then DollarEighty is for you. You can sign up for a free account that includes smart hashtag search, hashtag collection, and strategy tracking. They also have a premium account where you can access all the free features and suggested hashtags, and niche groups. 

It’s one of those small business tools that are so easy to set up and helps you with growing your account without all the hassle. This is a great way to connect and grow an audience of your ideal customers. Just think about that. Getting more leads, more engagement on content, and overall, more people seeing your awesome business! 

Our clients find they can grow about 100 followers a month using 1.80, and usually, these are high-quality individuals who are looking to engage. It is a great way to engage digitally!

Canva

When it comes to making our Instagram stories or posts, Facebook posts, making graphics for our website or, just simply creating graphics for our clients we look to Canva. 

Canva can make anyone a graphic designer. Even though Maria is naturally talented with graphics, I am not, and Canva allows me to produce materials for clients that bring them so much joy! Canva has tons of easy-to-use templates to help even those who don’t have an eye for design. 

Canva has two options for their accounts. You can use their free account which gives you access to the basics, or a pro account which unlocks all Canva’s many features. When managing your own or many social media accounts Canva is a must to help size and design your posts optimally for each platform! We, here at The Social Snippet, use Canva for all our social media platforms and it’s one of our favourite online tools for business. 

Depending on what type of online business you run you might have a different top list of online business tools! If so, let us know either in the comments or send us a message – we always love learning about new tools that can help us! 

These are just some of the tools we use, and we added some affiliate links in here (so we may get a kickback if you sign up!). If you have questions about any of them, don’t hesitate to reach out – we love seeing folks utilizing incredible tools for success in their business.