Image by Tammy Duggan-Herd from Pixabay

By Rosana Beechum                                    

It takes a lot to run a small business. There are a thousand different aspects that need your attention, some big and some small, and some fill you with dread. Lucky for us, some are routine elements that don’t need as much attention as you are giving them. There is a wealth of advantages out there to use help you keep your head on straight when managing a small business. Take a look at our picks for tools you should incorporate into your business to make things easier.

Management

Managing your employees needn’t make you out to be the bad guy, nor does it mean you need to be Big Brother, watching every move. There are a lot of apps online that can help your team communicate and divide up the various aspects of any project, allowing you to track the progress of the project and see who is contributing the most.

Software like Asana will allow you to streamline the more tedious aspects of project development with features that are designed to boost productivity and track progress. It comes with to-do lists and reminders to make sure you and your staff hit your deadlines and employees can be assigned tasks within ongoing work or bigger projects.

Packaging

An often-overlooked aspect of selling products, packaging is as vital as marketing. Once you’ve got every aspect of your product finessed into perfection, and its seen enough that everyone wants it, your next issue is actually getting it to the customer. Some smaller companies like Etsy creators like to give every package some TLC and personal touches, but it can take a weight off and save you money to outsource the most tedious aspect of selling products.

Take a look at blueprintautomation.com to make packaging your products easy and affordable. The process on their website allows you to design the exact packaging you need with ease. You can choose from a dozen packaging shape options like cartons, pillow bags, cups, and trays, then in what container they’re transported in, and even how they are arranged.

Tedious tasks

As a business manager, you will have a lot of spinning plates going. Letting go of some of the more tedious tasks you have to deal with will allow you to focus on more important aspects of running a business.

Streamline everyday tasks with Computer Aided Facilities Management applications that can make everyday tasks easier, or outright take over for a few things. They will allow you to manage your organizations buildings, assets, and employees from one device, meaning less lengthy journeys from location to location.

Eliminating the routine and small things will allow your staff to focus on what is important and will boost productivity and moral, as well as allowing you to avoid hiring someone to do them.

Marketing

Digital marketing has forced businesses around the world to rethink their approach to reaching their customers. Brand deals, affiliate links, SEO, website footfalls: they all need to be researched and managed. But it needn’t be as daunting as you would think. There are various software applications online to handle most of it for you.

For example, Hubspot is a great application that will offer contact management, supervised business task assignment and deal creation. There is split testing and content hosting offered, as well as communications within a sales team as well as track goals and targets. In one software you can get basic marketing, sales and service features which can be expanded with paid plans.

There are also applications like Buffer and Hootsuite that offer scheduled posting to social media so you can create your content and get on with your day, knowing it will hit screens at a peak time.

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Rosana Beechum is committed to helping small business leaders to understand the ever-evolving corporate landscape and adapt to the developments they notice in their market.