6 Easy Tools to Help Small Business Owners Succeed

Small businesses, startups as we call them, are prone to fail. According to recent research, only 10 percent of the startups survive and make it to maturity.

The causes of these high failure rates? Well, more than 40% of the entrepreneurs consider the lack of market need as the main cause of a startup’s failure. Almost 30% of them run out of cash, and almost a quarter of them said their team was not fit for the job.

During the following article, we will focus our attention on tools which could help small business owners succeed. We will take an in-depth look at the three topics mentioned above, your company’s market, your team, and the lack of funds.

Research, PR, and Advertising

1. Competition Research

All companies should know their whereabouts. Am I the leader of the pack, am I the follower? If I am a follower, how can I get to be first? If I am the leader, how can I consolidate this position?

According to Danielle Roland, CMO at Rush My Essay Service “First, for defining your ranking, you can take into consideration your company’s and your competition’s net worth, revenues, and, of course, profits. Then, you could do more in-depth research and compare your products and services with your competition’s. Last, but not least, you should consider doing research on your competition’s online presence.”

You can use Alexa to check your competition’s traffic values, and BuzzSumo to research their social media channels.

2. Client Feedback

Valentine Duane, Online Marketing Specialist at Essay Writing Help UK adds “Once you know your whereabouts in terms of competitors, you need to know what your customers are saying about you and them. For this research, you need to use online PR tools, such as Brand 24.”.

Basically, all you have to do is to add relevant keywords into the Brand 24 applications and you will get all the mentions your company has online. Keep in mind that, you should also use adjacent keywords. For example, if your company is selling smartwatches, apart from your company name, you should also add the smartwatch keyword to your query.

3. Advertising Tools

Right, now you know your market whereabouts, you know what your clients are saying about your company and your competitors. Now, it’s time to get going and win more clients.

For this, you should use a wide palette of advertising tools, such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, or even AI-powered digital advertising tools offered by companies such as Ve Global.

If you will use Google Adwords for search ads, Facebook ads for marketing your products on social media, and the marketing solutions offered by Ve Global, your numbers will skyrocket.

“A very important aspect of online advertising is the multi-channel focus. If you stick only to one channel, you will reach only a certain percentage of your market. For example, not all of your possible clients use Facebook. Engage your clients on multiple channels, search engines, social media networks, follow them using display advertising. This will increase your conversion rates.” concluded Wilford Catherina, CMO at Best Essay

Project Management & Cloud Storage

In the first part of our article, we’ve been talking about marketing oriented solutions. Now it’s time to tweak your team’s performance. It’s important to keep in mind that there is no perfect team, but with the right attitude, skills, and tools, your company can go through troubled waters.

4. Project Management Made Easy

As the CEO of your company, you need to be able to keep track of your team’s progress. If you are looking to add new functionality to the smartwatches you are selling, the entire project needs to be split into edible bits, then allocated to your development team according to their skills.

For this, you should use project management tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira tool. You can use it do delegate tasks, keep track of their progress. Also, your team can communicate easier, keep track of changes in the development of the functionality, and, of course, report bugs.

5. Cloud Storages

Alissa Jenna, CTO at Rush My Essay emphasizes “You are about to enter an important meeting with a possible client, but you need some extra documents and presentations. What are you going to do? Well, you should go to your Google Drive and get them. If they are not there, you can ask your assistant to upload them there. In less than 2 minutes you’ll have them on your smartphone, laptop or memory stick.”

Whether we are talking about documents and contracts you need, bits of JavaScript code your research & development team uses, or even bills, cloud storage is meant to ease the access to them and their security. You never know when your laptop goes haywire and you lose the valuable information.

Financing

We’ve been talking about marketing and management, now it’s time to talk about another important aspect of a company, funding.

6. AngelList

If you are a startup looking to develop and launch to market a new product angel investors and venture capitalists are the persons you should get in touch with. If you already have a minimum viable product, or MVP as it is called, the chances of getting more funding for your company increase. Create an exhaustive presentation of your product, what needs it covers, its market potential, your competition, your product timeline, and, of course, your company and start pitching it to VCs. If you want to find such VCs, you should search them on platforms, such as AngelList, or Crunchbase. On the latter, you can find large VC funds, such as Y Combinator, which funded companies like Airbnb and Dropbox.

If you are looking to start your own company or you already did that, for you to succeed you should take into consideration these 6 tools we provided. They cover three very important parts of the business, management, marketing, and funding. Apart from them, you should also keep in mind that, every project needs perseverent and patient leadership.