21 Free Tools to Help Your Small Business Digital Strategy

Important Tools to Help Your Small Business Digital Strategy

Entrepreneurship comes with a host of challenges. Even experienced business owners have a tough time maintaining their brand visibility in the market, surpassing their competitors, and remaining profitable. challenges 

Many online tools are available that can help you grow your business and give a boost to your digital strategy. Most companies offer free trials for online products and tools that simplify your marketing and management processes.

Below is a list of 21 free tools for small business owners to choose from to help you succeed online.

Storage and File Sharing

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud-based storage service from Google that allows users to store files in the cloud. The service syncs stored documents, photos, and more across all of the user’s devices, including mobile devices, tablets, and PCs.

Google Drive integrates with the company’s services and systems — including Google Docs, Gmail, Android, Chrome, YouTube and Google Analytics.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a utility that allows centralized storage of files. It allows users to sync their data across an array of different devices automatically.

Dropbox makes it a breeze to access files between different devices and share them with coworkers and clients.   Dropbox supports PC, Mac, iPhone, Android & Windows Phone.

Stock Images

Pixabay

Stock images are costly, and small businesses need stock images for presentations, promotional campaigns, and websites. Pixabay provides over 1 million photos and royalty-free stock images free of cost. When searching for Pixabay, you can filter for photos, illustrations, or vectors.

Pexels

Pexels helps online content creators (designers, bloggers, and everyone) who are looking for images to find great photos that they can use for their projects for free. All images and pictures are free for commercial use. You can use them on your business website, blog, product, or anywhere.

Unsplash

Unsplash 5.0 is an online catalog of the best online wallpapers from top photographers and editors around the world. Importantly, it is available to the users for free.

Social Media

HootSuite

Hootsuite is a popular social media management software. It comes in combination with many collaboration features. The software contains collaborative group calendars, cooperative writing, synchronous editing, content management, contact management, project management, task management, etc. It includes other useful features such as reputation management tools, social media marketing tools, and tools for social media monitoring.

Productivity

Lastpass

If you have way too many accounts on different sites, LastPass will save your life. It is a tool to store passwords for any account you have ever created. LastPass can handle bank account, email, or social media profiles. Losing or forgetting your password is no longer an issue. LastPass uses the latest encryption techniques to keep your passwords safe and adds to your overall online security.

Timecamp

TimeCamp is a free time tracking software. It can be extremely helpful for small business because it helps to develop a habit of productive time and team management. The software automatically tracks the time spent by your team on work and creates detailed and comprehensive reports.

Money Management

Paypal

PayPal is a payment gateway designed to help personal, and business users accept and make payments and remit money without having to provide a lot of financial information.

PayPal used the latest secure algorithms to ensure secure transactions between customers and vendors using all types of credit/debit cards.

This platform also lets you accept payments on all fronts, whether online, through cards, or by the bank. It contains advanced invoicing features that allow you to email invoices to your customers that can be paid online. PayPal is an excellent tool for online merchants and businesses of different sizes. It simplifies the customer checkout process though one-touch operations to speed up sales and opens new avenues for corporate growth.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is a popular tool among businesses for secure client invoicing and time tracking processes. It’s built for small and growing businesses. The software combines a robust set of features that are available in flexible and friendly pricing plans.

Communication

Slack

Slack is a centralized messaging app that gives you one platform for all your communications, offering real-time messaging, file sharing, archiving, and search. It’s built for modern teams and allows all communication in one central online location, instantly searchable, and immediately accessible from every connected device.

Slack works with a host of external apps and services. It’s a very flexible and extendable platform.  Slack allows several internal and external sharing options to enable you to receive and share files with anyone. It offers advanced search, filters, and sorting that makes it easy to get the right files that you need. You can set filters by variables such as recent, relevance, or file type.

Skype

Skype is a web-based VoIP tool that offers video calling, international calls, and texting at super low rates. Users and experts have rated it as one of the best VoIP solutions providers in the world. Skype offers instant messaging, group video calling, call forwarding, video chat, group chat, collaboration functionalities such as document and image sharing. Contacting actual landlines and mobile phones are also offered for super low rates with no peak times. Skype is owned by Microsoft and brings on board all functionality and responsiveness expected from this reputed provider.

Advertising

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the leading marketing service providers that can handle large volumes of emails for big businesses and organizations. MailChimp offers a wide array of plans catering from small and developing enterprises to large corporations. MailChimp also provides business-level analytical features and robust technology tools allowing users to use email to correspond with their clients and leads effectively. It’s a great tool to market new products and services with ease and accuracy. Easy to use and extremely affordable, MailChimp is a powerhouse in the email marketing solutions market.

Google Business Listing

Google provides free of cost listing of businesses on Google search and maps. These listings are a great tool to attract new customers. Listings appear when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours using Google Search or Google Maps. Marketed by the name “Google My Business,” this tool featured a great UI. Creating and update your business listing is very easy, and it allows your business to stand out, and bring customers in.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a popular, free, web-based analytics service. It’s used worldwide by thousands of companies. It was launched in the year 2005, and since then, Google Analytics has been helping businesses with intelligent reports and meaningful data. It provides a variety of premium analytical features for both desktop and mobile users. Focused on quality and functionality, Google Analytics works with several funnel visualization techniques and summarizes data on high-level dashboards from where users can pull off various types of reports.

We hope our comprehensive resource list will help you take your business to new heights! Did we miss your go-to free business tool or resource? Share your comments below. We are a Hong Kong-based Boutique Digital Marketing Agency. Send us your specific questions, and we will be happy to help.