“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together”— James Cash Penney. Understanding the secrets of business growth is the starting point to success.
With 31.7 million small businesses in the US alone, it becomes an uphill battle to stand out among your competitors. If you’re a small business owner looking for a magic wand that gives you a competitive edge, you’re likely to end up being among the 80% of businesses that fail within 18 months of their launch.
Do these statistics break your heart? Of course, they do!
So, what’s the solution?
The colossal amount of small business failure has increased the dire need to use technology to reach greater heights. Today, a small business that embraces and keeps abreast with the latest digital innovations witnesses growth and tastes success.
For becoming technological-savvy and ensuring the survival of your business, you don’t have to break walls – just invest in a couple of tools. Choosing the right business tool can significantly impact your business and can accelerate its growth.
To simplify your already complicated life, we’ve compiled a few tools that may prove beneficial for your business growth.
Let’s check them out!
6 Tools to Grow Your Small Business
Use these six tools to accelerate the growth of your small business in 2021:
1. Brand tracking tool
Did you know that a whopping 94% of the world’s population recognizes the red and white logo of Coca-Cola? This is what brand awareness can do for your brand. It can easily embed a brand in your customer’s life and make it their purchase habit.
As a small business, you would wish your brand to become famous so that people can recall and recognize it. But this popularity will not happen overnight. Just like reputation, brand awareness follows the slow and steady growth path.
You may be fueling your efforts to create marketing campaigns, content strategy, and every possible thing to increase brand awareness. But how do you know your marketing efforts are yielding results?
This is why you need to measure brand awareness using a brand tracking tool.
It’s a one-stop destination for small businesses because it helps you make data-driven decisions, understand brand health, track competition, and test various ideas. It ultimately helps you discover where your consumers go for brand information, what motivates them to share information on social media, what topics are trending among your customers, and where your competitors are failing and succeeding.
Everything you need to understand to create a winning brand strategy can be gleaned from this brand tracking tool.
Tools recommended: Attest and Pulsar Trac.
Why use a brand tracking tool? 71% of customers make a purchase only after they recognize a brand.
2. UX research tool
You and your team have probably worked day and night to create a breakthrough product – a product that is likely to create rippling effects in your target market.
But, soon after its launch, your product faces criticism and rejection because it was miles away from the customer’s requirement.
Where did you go wrong? Was it an error of choosing the wrong market size or something else?
You probably overlooked the importance of UX research. The user experience research process helps you understand the impact of your product design on your customers. Today, UX research is the backbone for creating products that makes your customers smile, feel fulfilled, and satisfied.
If you want to build products that align with your user’s requirements, you need to invest in a UX research tool.
A UX research tool recruits participants, plans interviews with them, and shares the results with your product design and development team. It collects both quantitative and qualitative usability data to help you make better product design decisions.
Tools recommended: Maze and Hotjar
Why use a UX research tool? During the first year of Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more in UX than advertising.
3. SEO tool
With the number of websites changing every second, more than one billion websites are on the internet.
Making a mark in this clutter and getting ranked on Google’s first page seems a distant dream for a small business. Without being ranked on the SERP results, it becomes impossible for customers to search for your brand. That’s where an SEO tool comes in.
The tool provides insights into how your website is performing and gives insight into your competitor’s SEO. It ensures that your website is completely optimized for your potential customers to search and reach your website. Furthermore, as Google and other search engines keep altering the way websites are ranked, an SEO tool keeps your business abreast with the latest SEO developments.
Tools recommend: Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Why use an SEO tool? According to research, 75% of customers never go beyond the first page of Google.
4. Productivity tool
For small businesses, time is money but productivity is the duck that lays a golden egg daily – because it has the power to make you the next Elon Musk.
When you and your employees work productively by optimally utilizing every minute of your time, you’re successful in accelerating your business growth. The rule here is simple, the more you’re productive, the higher your profits and growth.
But how do you attain such productivity for your small business?
Solution. A productivity tool.
These tools help project management, improve workflow, ensure unified communication across your business, and adequate time and resource planning. These tools also allow you to manage the productivity and efficiency of remote workers. Furthermore, using a productivity tool, you can assign tasks to different people, upload documents and files to streamline workflow, track time spent on each task, and schedule recurring tasks and automatic reminders.
Tools recommended: ProofHub and GanttPro.
Why use a productivity tool? An average worker is productive only for 2 hours and 53 minutes in a day.
5. Team communication and collaboration tool
Today, with COVID-19 creating havoc and completely changing the way businesses operate, there is an urgent need for a digitally connected workplace. Whether your team works in the same city or employees are scattered worldwide, communication is the key to business success and growth.
That’s where team communication and collaboration tools come to your rescue. These tools provide a hub for document sharing, task management, voice communication, video communication and enhances how your team will work together to achieve a common business goal.
When you reinforce a collaborative work culture, your team successfully brings products faster to the market. It speeds up your entire process, and you can create products that create value.
Tools recommended: Slack and Trello.
Why use a team communication tool? According to 86% of employees, lack of team collaboration and ineffective communication are two reasons for workplace failure.
6. Content marketing tool
In today’s digital space, content marketing is no longer a buzzword. It’s a necessity. From generating higher visibility in search engines to providing more referral traffic to your website, content marketing is all about increasing your web presence and conversion potential.
Even with the internet loaded with tons of content, it’s content that differentiates a successful business from an unsuccessful one. It becomes an uphill battle for small businesses to understand the content that resonates with customers. If your target audience prefers whitepapers over blogs, you will never know it unless you use a content marketing tool.
These content marketing tools focus on providing value rather than using the ‘push’ technique to push the content down your customer’s throat. Rather than asking a customer to buy, it creates and builds a meaningful relationship which ultimately translates to customer conversion.
From content discovery to content research, these tools help you power up your brand’s campaign. They find influencers, track comments about your brand, and analyze billions of data points to increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
Tools recommended: BuzzSumo and Alltop.
Why use a content marketing tool? 71% of B2B customers review a blog in their buying journey.
Become a part of the technological revolution
A growing business often aspires to become the next big thing in its field. While it may seem easy, but the gut-wrenching truth is – it’s not.
But using these six tools, you can lay the foundation of your business growth. Investing in these tools may seem unnecessary, but when stakes are high, this expenditure will turn to profit in no time.
These tools can make every stage of your business manageable. So, start things off the right foot by selecting digital tools as per your business requirement. Instead of retrofitting these tools in your existing sluggish processes, try to use them from day one to witness exceptional growth.
With so many tools knocking on your door, we live in an era where businesses can automate every task. Business owners looking for double-digit growth in 2021 need to jump on these tools bandwagon to avoid falling into the trap of digital Darwinism.
Which tools are you planning to start with right now?
Share your thoughts in our comment section!
Priya Jain is a professional copywriter with 8 years of experience. She has an MBA and engineering degree. When she is not writing, you will find her teaching math, spending her day running behind her toddler, and trying new recipes. You can follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Growth stock photo by NMTD MEDIA/Shutterstock
