Starting a business can be challenging, especially when you have limited resources and budget. However, there are many software products that can help you set up your business quickly and efficiently, without breaking the bank.
This article identifies some of the best software products and tools for small businesses and startups in 2023. These are all tools that can help you to enhance your productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and gross retention. Read on to find out more about how these tools can benefit your business.
1. Search Engine Optimization – Eye10
Price: $39-$99 monthly, 3-day trial for $3
Eye10 is one of the most simplified SEO tools on the market, despite being packed with so many features. It is a useful companion for all business leaders and website owners regardless of the company’s size or the handler’s expertise.
With Eye10, you can analyze keywords in multiple languages, compare your website with how your competitors perform, find missing keywords via gap analysis, and view suggestions for optimizing your page performance.
The Eye10 suite combines various tools that help you to achieve these goals: On-Page SEO, Keyword Planner, Industry Checker, Pagespeed, Backlink Checker, and more. And, compared with similar SEO suites on the market, Eye10 is at least $60 cheaper, making it suitable not just for experts but also for beginners.
2. Web Analytics – Google Analytics
Price: free
When it comes to understanding your website’s performance and user behavior, particularly for the purpose of online advertising, Google Analytics is a go-to tool. It’s powered by the largest search engine in the world and it is completely free.
So, it is a truly valuable tool for getting insights related to your website traffic, visitor demographics, conversion rates, advertising ROI, and more. Plus, there are custom dashboards and reports that you can generate to address your specific needs.
3. Advertising – Meta Ads Manager
Price: free/flexible ad cost
Effective advertising is crucial for startups to reach their target audience and drive growth.
Meta Ads Manager (formerly known as Facebook Ads Manager) offers a powerful platform to create and manage advertising campaigns across Meta’s family of apps and services, such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Audience Network.
It allows you to target specific demographics, track campaign performance, and optimize your ad spend. You can also test different ad formats, such as images, videos, stories, carousels, collections, and more.
4. Website Builder – Wix
Price: $4.50-$24.50 monthly, free trial available
With its drag-and-drop interface and a wide range of customizable templates, Wix empowers startups to create stunning websites without any coding knowledge and all within minutes.
It also offers features like e-commerce integration, blogging tools, and SEO support to enhance your online presence. You can also customize your website with features such as galleries, videos, blogs, online stores, booking systems, contact forms, and more.
More so, Wix provides hosting, domain name registration, security, SEO tools, analytics tools, and customer support.
5. Email Marketing – Mailchimp
Price: 1 month free trial + $13-$350 monthly
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform that helps you connect with your customers and grow your business. You can use it to create and send beautiful email campaigns using pre-designed templates or your own design.
You can also segment your audience based on their preferences and behavior and personalize your messages with dynamic content. Mailchimp also provides analytics tools to measure your email performance and optimize your campaigns.
Perhaps more importantly, MailChimp also helps you integrate with a wide variety of products in order to manage your business tools more seamlessly.
6. Project Management – Trello
Price: $0-$17.50 monthly
Trello is a highly visual and intuitive project management tool that enables teams to collaborate effectively.
With its Kanban-style boards, task cards, and easy-to-use interface, it has become a holy grail for tracking business projects, assigning tasks, and managing deadlines.
Each card allows you to assign members, due dates, labels, checklists, attachments, comments, and so on. More so, Trello also integrates with many other apps and tools that you use for your business.
7. Team Communication – Slack
Price: $0-$12.50 monthly, enterprise pricing available
Slack is basically WhatsApp but for business people; you’ll hardly find a major organization that does not use Slack to facilitate team communications, collaborate on projects, streamline workflows, and share information.
Slack is built for productivity and so it allows you to automate several routine tasks by integrating other office tools such as OneDrive, Zoom, Jira, and so on. Plus, it offers a lot of flexibility so that your team can focus on connecting across channels in their preferred manner.
8. Productivity and Collaboration – Google Workspace
Price: $6-$18 per user monthly, enterprise pricing available
Millennials and even many Gen Z folks grew up with Microsoft Office being the primary productivity and file management tool. However, Google has managed to threaten Microsoft’s monopoly by making collaboration as efficient and as seamless as possible.
Google Workspace includes the regular tools such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides but also applications for broader team collaboration, such as Gmail, Meet (for video calls), Calendar, and Drive (for cloud storage and file management).
9. Automation – Zapier
Price: $0-$1,198.50 monthly, free trial available
There are a lot of boring office tasks that businesses engage in today. If those could be automated, many teams would be able to save time and energy to focus on more important tasks.
Zapier is an automation tool that helps you connect different apps and tools that you use for your business and automate repetitive tasks. You can use it to create workflows called zaps that trigger actions based on certain events or conditions.
For example, you can create a zap that automatically adds new leads from Meta Ads Manager to Mailchimp or a zap that automatically sends a Slack message when a new card is added to Trello.
10. Customer Relationship Management – HubSpot CRM
Price: $0-$5000 monthly
HubSpot CRM is a free and robust CRM tool that helps you manage your contacts, leads, customers, and deals. You can use it to track your interactions with your prospects and customers across different channels, such as email, phone, website, social media, and more.
You can also automate follow-up emails, tasks, reminders, and notifications. HubSpot CRM also provides analytics tools to measure your sales performance and pipeline.
11. Payment Processing – Stripe
Price: starting from 2.9%+$0.30 per card change, custom enterprise pricing available
Stripe provides secure payment processing and offers features like subscription management, invoicing, and customizable checkout experiences.
With Stripe, you can integrate various payment methods such as credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, digital wallets, cryptocurrencies, and more into your website or app.
There are also features for creating invoices, subscriptions, coupons, refunds, etc. For your security, Stripe has a fraud prevention tool powered by machine learning algorithms.
Conclusion
In the end, software products and tools are not a substitute for good business practices. You still need to do your market research, set your goals and strategies, manage your finances, and market your products or services effectively.
Therefore, it is best to use business software to complement the skills and knowledge of your team, as this is how to build a successful company.
