If you’ve got a new business or a new website, it’s worth considering the tools and software that will help you make a success of it. We’ve listed different types and three popular options we recommend for SMEs.
Image Editing
For creating images to be used on your website (such as blog posts), you will need some software to do image/photo editing. Adobe Photoshop is one the best high-end image and photo-editing tools and is included as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. Affinity is a cheaper alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and can import PSD and AI files.
Analytics
To help optimise your website and understand visitor behaviour, analytics tools are essential. We recommend all sites install Google Analytics – it’s free. You may wish to consider other tools, too, to help see more detail about what your visitors are doing and who they are.
Email Marketing / Marketing Automation
Email marketing is still very relevant in 2020. Mailchimp is one of the most well-known tools. GoHighLevel includes a large number of tools and is very good value for money.
CRM
For almost all businesses, a CRM is highly beneficial to help you keep track of leads and customers.
Accounting
Unless you wish to use a simple spreadsheet (which is suitable for some very small businesses), accounting software is essential. Xero is one of the most popular, with bank feeds to help minimise data entry.
Collaboration, Documentation & Email
Having software for collaboration, documentation and email is very useful to keep organised. The two most popular options are Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace – both are full suites.
- Microsoft 365
- Google Workspace (formerly GSuite)
- LibraOffice (plus other tools for IMs, email)
Other Software
If you don’t have a care plan for your website, you may also want to consider SEO software (to help track rankings and help with optimisation). If you have a WordPress (or other CMS with plugins) you will also need to ensure you have a subscription to any paid-plugins on your website – so you get updates.
Many types of business also require operational software – to handle projects, tasks, tickets etc. Some of these systems also include the CRM and aspects of accounting (e.g. invoices to customers).
Integrations
When selecting tools, it’s also important to consider integrations between them. If somebody subscribes to your newsletter on your website, it’s great if this automatically adds them to your email marketing system.
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