8 Online Tools Perfect for Supercharging Your Small Business

A small business has it hard enough these days considering it has to constantly compete with big box stores and large chains that have marketing budgets, development teams, programmers and power pricing advantages. As “one of the little guys” it’s essential to find ways to give your business a boost.

One way to do this is by using the various online tools that have been built for the sole purpose of supercharging your small business. From heat mapping to email marketing, the best tools are designed to bring in more customers and assist in boosting your profits. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an online store or a physical retail shop with a small business website, utilizing marketing tools, lead-building software and data analysis applications are all part of keeping up with the competition.

Google Alerts is one of the more impressive, yet simple, tools you can implement for generating effective content and understanding what people are saying about your company online. The premise is simple: Punch in whatever keywords you want to get notified for and Google Alerts will tell you when an article is published with one of those keywords.

For example, if you’d like to find content for your hardware store’s blog, you might have an alert with all articles with “spring cleaning tips.”

You can also receive alerts for mentions of your own company name, allowing you to share the good news when a quality review is posted or reach out to writers who are talking about you. You can also set up alerts for your competitors as well, so that when people online are talking about them, you know it right away.

Check out Google Alerts here

We would argue that SumoMe is an essential tool for small businesses. It provides a suite filled with free lead-generation and analytical tools. One of them provides a website welcome mat for explaining your business and collecting email addresses. Another is a heatmap with the ability to see exactly where visitors are clicking on your website. Along with dozens of other free tools like these, you can’t go wrong with at least trying it out.

Check out SumoMe here

Many small business owners have no idea what to do when it comes to graphic design. However, Canva makes your designs look beautiful even if you’re the worst artist in the world. Choose from a large collection of templates, and design items like social media cover pages, blog post featured images and presentations. It’s the closest thing to Photoshop for the beginner.

Check out Canva here

MailChimp not only helps you collect email addresses, but it has a great selection of templates for email newsletters and easy-to-understand analytics for understanding how your customers are interacting with your emails and newsletters and how you can improve.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to boost your user engagement, and the first 2,000 email subscribers are completely free. As your business grows, your MailChimp package can grow with it. Join more than 12 million people who use MailChimp to connect with their customers and grow their businesses every day.

Check out MailChimp here

Social media is sometimes considered an insurmountable challenge to small business owners. The lack of a solid social media strategy can often cause a small business to miss out on huge segments of the market that their competitors are scooping up behind their back.

A good social media strategy takes up time, and most often requires multiple windows and browser tabs to get a post schedule going and maintained. With Buffer you can manage all of your accounts from one dashboard, and scheduling into the future saves you time and frustration. Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often. And you can even create images with the perfect size and format for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest.

Check out Buffer here

Looking to optimize your customer service experience? You should be. Zopim offers a free plan (along with some great paid ones) for live chatting with your customers while they are online. Reach out and speak to the visitors who are wandering around your website, and personally give them the answers they are searching for. You have the ability to set triggers for when the chat box pops up, and Zopim provides a chat history to go back and see what you have talked about in the past with customers.

Furthermore, you are given real-time analytics to evaluate what users are doing on your site, which can drastically improve the effectiveness of your responses when chatting with potential customers. Finally, Zopim allows you to break your team up into departments so that your customers’ live chats are sent to the right people, at the right time.

Check out Zopim here

Businesses are made up of relationships and those relationships can be complicated. Zendesk helps make them easier by delivering an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module for managing your contacts and providing the best customer support you can.

The help desk software has options for knowledge bases and reporting, and you can setup multiple agents so that you have more than one person interacting with the customers. Community forums, widgets and business rules are all provided for you to play around with as well. It’s no surprise that over 75,000 companies trust Zendesk with their customers.

Check out Zendesk here

It’s nice to see what your customers are doing on your website, but what is making them leave? CrazyEgg uses advanced heat mapping to highlight the buttons and areas people are clicking on your site. It also does a good job of revealing how far users scroll down your page and when they stop. This is an essential tool for understanding the behavior of all your potential customers, since you could quickly find out that your sales funnels or calls to action are not as effective as you may have thought.

Check out CrazyEgg here