Boost Your Brand With These 10 Must Have Tools!

20% of businesses fail in their first year. It's evidence of how difficult it is to have a thriving business. More importantly, it shows how difficult to keep a sustainable business, to prevent it from collapsing. Many businesses fail due to a lack of planning or a lack of enough resources. They have an idea of what to do but don't have a plan in place to sustain it.
Understanding why businesses fail, places particular emphasis on the planning process. What part of the planning process do businesses fail on? Small business tools can solve the planning process. They can prevent failure by making things easier and automated. They can be particularly useful when there is a lack of employees or when there are too many manual time-consuming things to do.
This is why it's important to take a look at the 10 must-have small business tools that can boost your business and your brand.

Also read: Improving Business Productivity

The 10 Must-Haves!

Taking a look at these small business tools can help your business with automating finances, scheduling client calls, or something else that can help your business survive its first year. More importantly, these small business tools can take your business from survival to succeeding beyond your expectations.

1. Finance Tools

It's important that you track your expenses as a small business owner, because if you don't, you may find the IRS tracking you down. You'll need to track payroll, expenses, and time management. You can use tools like Expensify, PayPal, and Stripe to generate invoices for clients and help you scan receipts. You can also track expenses this way.
If you have employees, you'll also need to track their pay and give them paystubs. You can find examples of paystubs on our site.

2. Scheduling

If your list of clients is steadily growing, it can be confusing to keep track of when your meeting is, when you have a deadline, and even harder to delegate tasks to keep up with everything. This is why keeping track of your calendar is important for maintaining healthy relationships with your employees and your clients.
If you're looking to find a time to schedule a meeting and want to avoid messaging everyone, Doodle gives you this option. It gives you the opportunity to send out a poll so everyone can cast their vote on their preferred timing. It's that simple!

3. Planning

Planning for meeting with clients, for big ideas, for basically anything is something that needs to be documented. Evernote provides the small business tools that every business owner needs when it comes to writing down notes about essentially anything.

Also read: Best Business To Start With Little Money

4. Slack

Slack is a productivity tool that allows co-workers to engage remotely. Slack can have a group talking about the same conversation in the same group and delegate it so that only two group members are talking. In essence, it manages conversations across devices and accounts for any business.

5. Advertising

Advertising is critical to getting your businesses brand out to your core audience. It's how more people can see what you are creating and how it can benefit them. You can choose Google ads, Facebook or Instagram advertising depending on your business type. Yelp advertising is also another option. Advertising is a small business' essential tool that allows you to communicate with your core audience.
It allows you to reach out to your target audience with your solution to their problems whether it is with your product or service.

Also read: What are the most easy business processes to automate right now?

6. Legal

Having contracts in place for your business gives you some assurance that your customer or anyone won't turn around and file a lawsuit against you. If they do, at least you'll have some protection. You can find law documents on Docracy and even send these documents remotely via DocuSign, which allows your clients to sign them online.

7. Storage

As you accumulate finance, legal documents, and receipts, you'll need somewhere to store them. Storing any kind of document gives you some security when it comes to the IRS or any legal issue. Some beneficial storage tools are Dropbox and Box. They each provide a way to share files between employees or with your clients. You can choose whichever suits you best.

8. Email

Having a business email is vital to any business as clients or customers need to reach you. If an employee needs to reach you via email to send something of importance or a customer has a question about your product, you can easily communicate with them via email. Email is also important to marketing.
You can create automated emails, such as a welcome series or a product launch, or even a round of discounts that gets people interested in your product.

Also read: What Tools Can You Use to Streamline Your Business Operations?

9. Blogging

A lot of businesses have a blog because it helps bring in more traffic. Using a business tool such as WordPress can give you the opportunity to write blogs on a daily or weekly basis, and it helps you reach your targeted audience via specific keywords.

10. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that helps you understand how easily people are finding your website and how well your leads are converting. Analytics is an essential tool to see how well your marketing strategy is working when it comes to reaching your target audience and through which channels they converting so you can increase your marketing efforts wisely.
This is a must-have tool for any website as it not only shows you the number of visitors vs buyers but also the journey which led them to convert. You can also track it by a specific date to see whether your audience or revenue has increased or decreased over a particular span of time.

How To Incorporate Each Tool Into Your Small Business

While adding each of these tools can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you try to add them all at once, you should aim to add each of these over time. You'll find that these tools won't just make the flow easier in your business, it will also help you profit more because you'll find more time to focus on your clients and other important tasks.
As a business owner, you'll have time on your hands to do more of the stuff you love, instead of trying to do everything. In this way, tasks will be automated and you can receive the results you need easily. If you're looking for a quick and reliable way to create paperless pay stubs for your employees. Look no further and create paystubs right here with our check stub maker!