We thought we'd share some of the tools we use to run our business. You may find them useful too.
Whilst there are lots of products out there for small businesses, we always find it great to hear what other people use and why.
- FOR COMPANY ADMIN
Google Workspace - We use this for the ease of accessing our mail and documents when working remotely. Added to this the fantastic auditing and collaboration tools, this low-cost solution is really great.
Freeagent - We use this for most of our business-critical processes: accounting, invoicing, payroll, time recording. It’s simple to use, cloud-based system with great customer support and online resources. We reevaluated a few months ago and it still came out on top for us.
- FOR SALES & MARKETING
Hubspot CRM - This is our CRM for keeping track of contacts, interactions and deals. We also use the tracking code so visitors to our website can be updated in the CRM. The free resources available for understanding inbound marketing are outstanding.
Hubspot Marketing - This has enabled us to ditch all our other email sending software. We now have everything in one place. It also houses our blog, our content offers and has great analytics and reports. It helping us to be efficient and effective in our marketing efforts and there's loads more for us still to learn.
Google Analytics - This is a must for tracking our website traffic along with WebMaster Tools Search Console, also from Google. We regularly look in to see what our web visitors are doing and adjust our content accordingly.
Sendible - We use this to schedule all our social media posts for clients. You can toggle between calendar view or a list to see what you have scheduled for the week. You can also send content for approval to get another set of eyes on your work before posting.
- FOR MANAGING OUR WORK
Trello - We use this as a quick and simple solution for organising, and keeping track of our project work. We use a few add-ons to make this solution work even better for us and keep it up to date by adding comments, moving cards and reviewing our own lists regularly.
Adobe Creative Cloud - This is used by our creatives for developing their designs whether it be for logos, print or websites. The suite of products allows for a more fluid design process allowing sharing of libraries (which contain everything they create) between teams and apps as well as devices.
Umbraco - This is the Content Management System behind our own website as well as our preferred solution for our clients. The ease of integration with the front-end design as well as the simple layout for adding content makes it a great system to use. Umbraco is open source with a great community and published roadmap of future development. It’s also an easily scalable solution, making it ideal for a smaller website which needs to grow as well as an all singing, all dancing website.
- FOR CREATIVITY
Canva - Who doesn’t love Canva?! The majority of our designs are done on here, including presentations, newsletters and social media posts. We love that you can edit designs within a team and co-create work. They supply a large library of templates, which we draw inspiration from.
AI Tools – This is great for generating ideas when you are having a bit of a brain fog. We will regularly use tools like ChatGPT and Claude to come up with content ideas and re-work so it fits our clients. This means we can spend more time on the personal aspects.
