Digitalization has taken over the business industry by storm. Monotonous tasks that required hours of mental anguish now stand a click away from completion.
For start-ups, this has changed the entire landscape. You no longer need to climb your way to the top. With the right software, you can fly to the top, scaling your business aspirations to unparalleled heights.
With a few powerful automation tools, you can delegate extremely crucial tasks to virtual employees who don’t even need a day off!
These virtual employees allow you to focus on the big table— where strategizing your business direction is the sole concern.
Below are the top business automation tools for your start-up. We have categorized them according to their application, but a few of them do overlap.
Bookkeeping:
Moneypex: Moneypex is a free accounting software with a seamless design that takes over all your bookkeeping needs. It allows you to create unlimited invoices, manage multiple businesses, and scan invoices. Plus, being a cloud-based software, Moneypex allows you to access your data from anywhere, anytime.
Zoho Books: Zoho is another powerful bookkeeping software providing unlimited invoices, expense tracking, and recurring transactions. Although Zoho is powered by impressive features, the app interface is slightly complicated. The basic version costs $9 per month (exclusive of local tax).
Social Media:
Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management tool dedicated to improving your social media reach over 35 different platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest. You can schedule hundreds of posts at once across different platforms, ensuring your business presence never goes offline. It also provides a crisp analysis of your social media performance, allowing you to make necessary tweaks to improve performance. The organizational system of this app also ensures nothing is sent without the approval of team leaders.
The free version of Hootsuite is extremely limited, only allowing you to schedule posts and add a maximum of three social media accounts. You also cannot access analytics nor connect your team to the app. The professional version is available for US $29 per month and US $19 per year.
All-In-One: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service
Hubspot: Hubspot is a holistic software providing automation facilities in three different ‘hubs’: marketing, sales, and service.
The main features of the marketing hub are access to analytics, marketing automation, and lead generation. The sales hub automates email tracking, scheduling meetings, and sending emails. The service hub helps you connect with customers and receive feedback.
The basic version with limited features is free. However, the paid version with advanced features begins at $50 per month.
Yodle: Yodle has developed quite a reputation for itself after winning multiple awards and also featuring in media giants like Forbes and Fox Business. Specifically designed for small businesses, Yodle offers optimized website, search engine placement, and an automated social media presence. These features blend together to ramp up your marketing aura and drive sales.
Communication
MailChimp: MailChimp offers an “all-in-one” marketing platform. However, it primarily focuses on email marketing. You can target customers based on their preferences inferred through data collection; it is a customized approach to enhance growth. Offering design tools to glamorize your brand, MailChimp adds another dimension to marketing, often left out by other software
Apart from a free version, you can buy the essential one for $10 per month.
Slack: With the advent of communication software like Slack, almost all businesses have fled email platforms to engage in collective communication. Slack knits together different communication channels by creating separate chat windows visible to all members of an organization. You can also make videos calls and share your screen. Apart from a basic free version, Slack starts at $6.67 per month.
Digital Marketing
Needls: Needles, in a nutshell, takes care of all your digital advertising needs. This means creating Ads for your social media accounts, targeting those ads to people likely to be interested in your service, and analyzing trends to improve your posts. Your initial input about your business fuels in this software a relentless drive to find the best way to grow your business.
But this drive comes at a cost: Needles starts at $100 per month.
Sales and Ecommerce
Salesforce.com: The tremendous force of uplifting your digital presence, all in one app—Salesforce using their Customer Relationship Management feature enables you to track customer decisions, make insightful decisions, and provide a seamless customer experience by helping users through a 24/7 customer support team.
Customizing a unique customer experience is the essence of this app, helping you improve sales. USD25 per month is the cost for a small Business Essentials package.
Autopilot: Autopilot is a simple and effective tool to automatically target potential customers for your business. You can customize your strategies based on audience behavior. Performance tracking is another key feature of Autopilot to ensure what and what not contributes to actual sales. Lacking integration with software such as MailChimp and not having a landing page builder built-in are the main drawbacks of this software.
Conclusion
With these automation tools, you can fluidly integrate different aspects of your business and ensure a solid organizational system.
Big companies might have the resources to keep it all together by hiring a dozen employees, but the digital storm has revolutionized the growth of a business
Gone are the days arduous marketing campaigns grew businesses. So, what are you waiting for? Check out these tools to ignite your business engine to a roaring start!
