3 Ways to Keep Your Small Business Running Smoothly
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This month we’re finishing our series of marketing strategies and tools small business owners should have in their small business toolkit.
You’ve mastered the tools that help simplify your branding and design, establish social media growth and engagement, build your community with email marketing, and launch a website that converts — what else could you possibly need for your small business?
You don’t have to struggle to maintain the new tools and skills you’ve learned to apply for your brand’s success!
Tools for Keeping Everything Running Smoothly
Now that you have all the tools to ensure your marketing is on-point for your business, here are some tools that will ensure the rest of your business runs smoothly:
Client Management, Contracts & Invoicing
Free & Paid Versions
At VVITCH, we could not run our business without the help of a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool. CRM tools are software meant to help you automate your client contracts, invoices, and communication and using one of these for your business could save you hours each week.
Here are a few of our faves:
Wethos - Designed for agencies and freelancer teams, with tons of templates and data around what the market price is for a particular type of service – a monumental tool for helping creatives charge their worth. Their platform also has team/project management, client invoicing, and branding features to help you limit the number of platforms you use when running your business. Best of all, it’s completely free and offers an in-platform bank account if you need one for your business.
Dubsado - Dubsado is the CRM that is probably the most flexible when it comes to what you can automate and the ways you can simplify getting info to and from your clients. This platform is great for all service-based businesses.
Honeybook - Originally designed for those in the event industry and catering, this platform used to skew heavily towards the wedding industry. Nowadays, their platform is intuitive and useful for service-based businesses across multiple industries.
Project Management
For service-based businesses, once the contract is signed and the invoices are paid, how do you ensure all of your client work is delivered on time?
Or, for retail and ecommerce small businesses, how do you keep your small but mighty marketing team on track with projects?
At VVITCH, we use Monday.com to ensure distributed remote team productivity and streamline asynchronous communication but there are three total tools we’d recommend depending on your biz preferences.
Monday.com - This platform has a great selection of features for the price. It’s also great for teams and managing lots of projects simultaneously.
Asana - This platform is powerful and flexible because of all of the integrations it has with other platforms that are commonly used for marketing, design, and more — but some of these integrations may have an additional monthly cost, so prioritize which ones you truly need!
Trello - This platform is free, easy to use, and great for people that love having a visual board for your tasks.
Save Time - Send Your Clients a Loom Video
Before Loom, we could spend hours putting together PDF guides for our clients on how to update their new website. Now we use Loom to create video walkthroughs of deliverables and tutorials for our clients so that they can refer to them at a later time.
Some people find it much easier to learn from a video than through reading a document, so offering this to your clients is a great accessible option.
With the many tools we have shared, your small business is definitely set up for success going forward.
Every successful person and business has their established systems and tools. The better your systems and tools, the more likely your business will scale and grow — most importantly, at a manageable rate for you, whether you’re solo or have a team behind you!
Uncertain if you’re ready to apply the small business toolkit for your brand? VVITCH can be a trusted partner for your small business. Learn more about the full services we offer by contacting our team.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen was a former owner of Catalyst Wedding Co. prior to starting VVITCH Digital Agency. Now, Jen is committed to helping small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
