Welcome and thank you for joining us as we discuss the most effective digital tools for business to help your company work better.

Hosted by Reema Doshi-Lewis (Ardy Marketing), and Eunice Nyandat (MyBizAfrica), this webinar aims to help you learn what types of tools and automation strategies you can use in your business to become more effective and focus on growth.   

Why Do You Need to Use Digital Tools For Business? 

Businesses in this age cannot survive without technology. It is used for different reasons including; 

  • Helping to identify competitive advantages
  • Measuring the success of corporate-level initiatives
  • Creating organizational structures that support initiatives

Before deciding which digital tools are best for your business, it is important to look at the market you are working in. We have identified Porter’s Five Forces as a way to begin your market research, or conduct a comprehensive market audit. The forces include, 

  1. Competition in the industry
  2. Potential of new entrants into the industry
  3. Power of suppliers and supply chain
  4. Power of customers
  5. Threat of substitute products

With these reasons in mind, it is clear why you need to digitise your business, so let’s show you some of the most popular digital tools available online. 

We have divided them into the various sections that may be relevant to your business – especially as a start-up or small company. 

From finance tools to HR, we’ve got you covered! All entrepreneurs would like to spend more time focusing on getting clients and servicing them, while obviously making a profit, so there’s little time to spend manually logging in menial details. 

Save time and focus on your core work with some of our recommended digital tools…but for more options, we answer all your questions and give details on other impressive tools in the webinar

Let’s look at some of the best tools on the market;

Finance Tools

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Source: www.rawpixel.com

Any business without a way to monitor its finances is heading for failure. No matter how small your business is, you need an efficient finance tool. This will help you keep track of income, expenses as well as generate invoices. 

There are hundreds of tools including complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that integrate all of the organizations financial reporting, from order tracking & management, inventory, accounting and distribution. 

As a small business, however, we recommend using a simpler, free tool such as WaveApps. It will allow you to email invoices, record payment, send receipts, and even give access to your bookkeeper as you grow. 

Unfortunately, new accounts are only available for users in the US and Canada. 

Outside of those regions, ZipBooks is a cloud-based tool where you can easily create invoices, quotes, for free. For only $15 per month, you can also access additional features such as time-tracking, scheduling recurring invoices, automate reminders, connect multiple bank accounts and add up to 5 team members. 

There are many other financial tools that you can take a look at here

HR Tools

Sage is a great tool for small businesses to help you with payroll. If you have a team to manage, you don’t want to be manually processing employee payroll as it is time-consuming and prone to errors. 

This software offers an intuitive interface that will improve productivity with automated processes such as payslips and tax calculations. Using a reliable payroll system will also increase employee trust and confidence meaning they never have to worry about delays or avoidable errors.   

Marketing Tools

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Source: www.hubspot.com

Hubspot is one of the best tools for marketing automation that also offers a free option. Their marketing hub software will help you;

  • Attract the right audience through blogging, social media engagements and online ads.
  • Run inbound marketing campaigns
  • Convert visitors into leads and customers using landing pages, email, marketing automation.

If you need to create designs to market your business, Canva is one of the easiest digital tools for business to use for graphics. Offering templates for social media images, marketing flyers, web banners and brochures, this is a complete one-stop design shop.

Email Marketing Tools

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Source: www.rawpixel.com

One of the most well-known digital tools for business to help with email marketing is MailChimp. You can manage subscribers, send hundreds of emails at once, manage your mailing lists and newsletters, automate email marketing campaigns, collect leads as well as track results.  

GetResponse does everything you can do with MailChimp, but it has the added advantage of sending automated responses from your pre-set templates.  

Sales

Making sales is the ultimate goal for every business. You will need to know if your marketing strategies are generating any leads. Are your emails being opened? Are readers clicking on your website links? Are they reading your newsletters? How many customers are making enquiries? 

All this data will help you track where in the sales funnel your potential customers are, and you can then follow up the hot leads, and convert them into a sale. 

Hubspot once again offers a basic Sales Hub tool that lets you manage your deal pipeline, pending quotes, meeting schedules, live chats and all business contacts. 

For a small business with big ambitions, Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM with a simple user interface designed for sales experts. This platform is designed from a salesperson’s point of view even being named “Easiest to Use” CRM solution in online reviews. 

It lets you manage leads and deals, track communications and access insights and reports. It also allows for integrations with other tools such as MailChimp and various mobile apps.

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Source: www.g2.com

Customer Service Tools

A customer’s experience with your business can be the difference between repeat sales, or returns and bad reviews. Coming back from a bad review is no easy task, and it requires the use of reputation management, so the easiest way is to avoid them altogether. 

One of our recommended digital tools for business is Zendesk with more than 200,000 customers across the world. This cloud-based helpdesk management tool lets you create online communities, a customer service portal and a knowledge base.

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Source: www.zendesk.com

You can add messaging and live chat to your website or mobile app as well as provide instant support on social media sites. By linking your communication channels, you will not miss out on important messages from clients. 

Ongair is a Kenyan made customer service platform to help you reach your customers on all major messaging apps including Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp and even SMS. It is also integrated with Zendesk, meaning you can integrate instant messaging into your Zendesk dashboard. 

Customer Relations Management (CRM)

Trusted by more than 60 million users globally Zoho is an end-to-end CRM solution for growing businesses. Their range of products can help you with sales & marketing, email & collaboration, finance, IT, customer service, HR and business intelligence.  

Our recommended CRM tool is Bitrix24 that has received impressive reviews from leading companies such as Forbes, Google Play, TechRadar and PCMag, this platform helps any type of business organize and track interaction with clients, partners and agents. 

Previous interactions are stored and all new events are recorded and logged. Some more of the tools’ numerous features let you plan future emails and calls, create reports, view your sales funnel, view dashboards, create quotes and invoices, set targets and create free websites and landing pages. 

Productivity Tools

We all aim to be more productive, especially now as many people work remotely, it is imperative for teams to work together and increase overall productivity.  

If you often share excel spreadsheets between team members, there’s no better time to ditch them and use Airtable instead. This is the perfect business tool to collate a lot of information into convenient databases. 

It lets you add fields for attachments, long text notes, links and checkboxes to make sure you are on track. You can filter, sort and group content to arrange and view your work exactly as you want to. 

Airtable is also great for collaboration as you can share databases from anywhere to both synced devices using mobile and desktop apps.       

Team Tools and Communication

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Source: www.rawpixel.com

As seen above, remote work is the new norm, so communication no longer happens face to face. It is necessary to keep everyone up to date as well as check the progress of various tasks and projects. Some commonly used tools are WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack. 

A new player in the game is Flock that allows you to connect all the apps used by your team so you do not have to keep switching between apps. It integrates channel messaging, video conferencing, voice notes and search capabilities. You can also share files in real-time, create to-dos, polls and reminders. 

The best news is that it is completely free for up to 20 team members with 10 public channels, 5GB of memory and 10,000 searchable messages. An upgrade is also affordable for only $4.50 per user each month.  

Calendars

Scheduling meetings are made easy with calendar tools such as Calendly or Hubspot meeting scheduler. We recommend Setmore to manage all your appointments on one online planner and run your business like clockwork. 

Additional features include optimising online payments, including video meeting links, branding your virtual office and integrating it with your website and social media pages.  

Are You Ready To Upgrade Your Business to the Next Level?

We have given you our recommendations about the best digital tools to help you to up your game in today’s volatile business environment. 

For our complete list, and expert advice, this interactive webinar gives you all the information you may need in a mere 90-minutes. It is time well spent and could be one of the most valuable resources to propel your business’s growth.    

If you would like more information about the best marketing strategies, keep reading our latest news or get in touch for a free consultation about your marketing requirements.

We have worked with many happy entrepreneurs and helped them with reputation management, SEO optimization and product marketing

customer-review

Our hosts for the webinar were, Reema Doshi-Lewis of Ardy Marketing (with over 17 years of marketing experience) and Eunice Nyandat of MyBizMarketer (with over 20 years of marketing experience).