9 Must-Have Small Business Tech Tools

Today, technology is affecting every area of our lives, making it easier and more convenient with each passing day. From shopping to ordering food to making payments, people are doing everything online and finding new ways to make the most of our various digital tools.

This has presented an excellent opportunity for small businesses to use technology to both scale up their business and create new opportunities for business development. The modern day-customers demand more convenience, and small businesses can provide them by using more and more business tech tools.

As a small business owner, your goal should be to offer a better customer experience and build customer loyalty. This will help you survive and thrive in today’s competitive environment. Not only this, but using the right business tools can also help you automate several tasks and handle your operations with greater ease.

In this article, we will tell you about 9 fantastic tech tools that will make handling your business tasks a breeze. Whether you have just started your small business or are finding ways to level up during this period, these 9 small business tech tools will help you with all your business needs. So, let’s get started.

1. Cybersecurity Tools

Online security has become a huge concern for small businesses today. Research reveals almost 50% of all cyber-attacks target small and medium-sized businesses. A cyber attack can cost you more than just money. It can make you lose your customers and affect the goodwill you have been working hard to build. Customers’ trust, once broken, is incredibly hard to rebuild.

You want to do everything you can to maintain that unspoken agreement with your valued customers, your commitment to always provide superb products and services with rock-solid support. 

Luckily, a reliable cybersecurity tool can help you prevent these nightmares. There is a wide range of business tech tools that designed to help you protect sensitive agency data, like details about your employees, their social security number, and more.

These tools can also help you protect your customers’ information, like their payment details, contact information, and more. Investing in good quality cybersecurity solutions is an excellent way to keep online threats at bay. It can help you protect your servers, computers, networks, and even mobile devices.

2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

If you have been in business for a while, chances are you’d already be using a CRM to handle your customer’s data. For new small business owners, Customer Relationship Management software is the most essential tech tool you must buy as soon as possible.

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. And so, it is important to manage customer relationships with great care. Customer relationship management software is a cloud-based program that allows you to manage business relationships with your customers as well as prospective leads.

A good-quality CRM software can help you in lead conversion, manage customer information, increase growth, and do a lot more. CRM also helps you automate a variety of tasks and streamline workflows. Some of the most popular CRM software programs include, HubSpot, Zoho, and Salesforce.

3. Social Media Tools

Today, if you are not leveraging the power of social media for promoting your small business, you are seriously missing out on something important. Social media has presented an incredible opportunity for small business owners to promote their products, interact with their target audience, publish interesting content, and build a strong brand image.

As a small business owner, it’s hard to find time to handle your business’s social media accounts. This is where social media tools come into the picture. With the help of robust social media tools like Hootsuite or Sprouts Social, a participating agency one that educates themselves to be social media savvy, can keep track of the activities on their social media pages.

These social media tools help you enhance your social media content marketing strategy by helping you automate posts, manage social media interactions in one place, keep track of impressions, and much more.

4. Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing has always been a popular tactic for promoting your business. While crafting and sending emails can be a bit time-consuming, its results are fantastic. Email marketing tools help you automate your email-sending process, optimize emails, track metrics, and other important functions.

A reliable email marketing tool makes your work a lot easier. From designing attractive emails with the help of a pre-built template to generating email reports, you can do everything with just a few clicks. Some of the most popular email marketing tools for small business entities include Convertkit and Omnisend.

5. Customer Interaction Management Software

As we mentioned, managing customer relations and interactions is crucial for small businesses. After all, your success depends on the happiness and satisfaction of your customers. Thus, taking good care of customer interactions is a must.

A good customer interaction management software helps you track and manage your customer interactions. These tools help ensure that you don’t miss anything crucial and are always there to help your customers in case of issues and queries. Some examples of reliable customer interaction management software include Birdeye, and Podium.

6. Inventory Management Software

Next up are the inventory management tools. Managing and keeping track of your inventory manually can be very overwhelming. However, making sure that you are never short on goods is also essential for the success of your business.

Fortunately, inventory management software helps you resolve this problem with great ease. These software programs help users streamline their workflow, record their inventory status, get reports in real-time, and control several other factors within their inventory wheelhouse.

By keeping you updated on your inventory status, these programs ensure you are never short on products and can meet all the needs of your customers on time. Popular inventory management software tools include Zoho Inventory, Ordoro.

7. Payment Processing and Financial Services

Today, customers are using their mobile devices for almost everything, including making payments for the products and services they buy. And so, it’s a great idea to offer them their preferred payment methods to whenever possible.

There are several payment processing choices that work in accordance with the rules set forth by the associated governing federal agency and help an eligible entity to accept online payments from their customers. These include digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay and online payment gateways like SecurePay and PayPal.

8. Project Management Tools

If you want your business to succeed, you need to offer timely delivery of goods and services to your customers. However, managing the deadlines and status of numerous tasks can often become overwhelming, especially if you are managing most things on your own.

This is where project management tools come into the picture. A robust and user-friendly project management tool goes a long way in helping small business agencies keep track of deadlines, manage deliverables, and more. These tools are especially helpful if most of your team members work remotely. Popular project management tools include Trello and Asana.

9. Location Technology

Business participation in mobile technology, like GPS, has enabled customers to find the best business in their area for a variety of functions. If you want your target audience to find you through location-based technology, you need to have a localized web presence. And that is what location technology helps you do.

To make the most of location technology, you need to ensure your business is listed on all primary listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and more. You need your business’s name, correct contact information, and address in the correct format on these listings to ensure that customers can locate you effortlessly.

Companies like Yelp also give awards to the best-rated businesses listed on their platform that offer top-notch guest experiences. Winning these awards can go a long way in boosting your business’s goodwill. Award recipients see an uptick in customer attention and in their online following.

Wrapping Up

Make sure to go through this list once again and check out all the tools mentioned here. We are sure that they will go a long way in helping you improve customer experience and manage your business operations with greater ease and confidence.

It’s unnecessary, and even counterproductive, to adopt every new technology that hits the market. The important thing is to gain a clear understanding of your business goals, objectives, and needs, and choose those tools that support these while leaving out anything superfluous and redundant. Adopting the right technologies can free you up to focus on your core skills and goals, while affording you more personal time. 

Tech Masters helps business owners improve workflow and find new levels of success with top-notch IT support and data-driven analysis. Connect with us today to make a change in the right direction and claim your free business IT assessment. 

To learn more about must-have small business tech tools, check out our frequently asked questions below. 

FAQ

1. What are 5 common business tools and technologies

There are a large number of tools and technologies that modern businesses depend on. Out of these, the following five tools and technologies are the most common:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Business email tools and technologies
• Location-based technology
• Cloud storage
• Business network and internet

2. What business tools are most important?

With the growing technological advancements, businesses are using more and more tools to carry out their daily operations. Here are some of the most important tools that almost every business uses in some capacity:

• Content management system
• Accounting software
• Project management software
• Social media management tool
• Content Management System

3. How can technology help small businesses?

Leveraging advanced technology can help small businesses in streamlining their operations, automating several manual and time-consuming tasks, manage projects, and connect with their target audience through email, social media, and more.

Modern-day customers depend on technology for their everyday needs. It makes sense for small businesses to use the latest business tools and technologies that make sense for their business. It will make things easier for themselves and their customers and offer everyone a better experience.