If you are a relatively new and growing business like us, or are thinking to launch a new business, it can be daunting to review and choose the right tools to manage your business.
Our team spent months researching and testing different tools to manage our business, so we wanted to share our results with you to try and help you in your business startup journey. We have included the tools we decided upon, as well as those that were a close second! We have covered a range of tools from CRM’s to Website SEO & Audience Growth platforms and will be adding more soon.
Jump straight to our recommended tools to manage your business from the links below, or keep reading for some more insights.
CRM Platforms
Digital Marketing Performance
Form Builders
Graphic Design
Writing Tools
Note: This page contains some affiliate links (it helps us to keep the price of our packages low and creating new content for you all the time to help you on your business journey!)
CRM Platforms
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms help businesses manage leads, contacts and deals as well as support you to deliver email marketing efficiently. To be honest, they do so much more than that too, and are essential tools to manage your business, especially as it starts to grow. It is much better to have a CRM set up from the beginning so you are set up to scale, rather than trying to migrate when things take off.
HubSpot’s mission is to help millions of organisations grow better. Comprised of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot’s award-winning growth platform gives thousands of companies the tools to manage their business across a range of areas, from customer experience all the way to brand awareness to advocacy.
With unlimited users on its free plan, HubSpot was our choice of CRM for Chatter Digital. Being a leader in the market, it is well supported when it comes to integrations with other platforms too. We love its integration with Jotform as well or you can use Hubspot’s own form builder.
If you want to see what is under the hood outside of the free CRM, you can get a free trial of their Marketing Hub CRM here.
Agile CRM
Agile CRM is an all-in-one CRM that will help you automate your sales, marketing, customer service, allowing you to provide consistent messaging to your prospects and customers.
It is cloud-based and mobile friendly with a free version, perfect for startups and small businesses.
When you need to upgrade and make the most of Agile CRM’s modern features & integrations, it is easy to implement, has great support and pricing is affordable, making one the the tools to manage your business that you must consider.
Pipedrive CRM is the perfect tool for sales teams of all sizes. With its simple and intuitive interface, you’ll be able to manage your leads and customers like a pro in no time. Plus, Pipedrive CRM is fully cloud-based, so you can access it from anywhere and on any device. Make your sales process more efficient with Pipedrive CRM.
Digital Marketing Performance
There are great platforms that help you to understand what is happening behind the scenes with your online business so you can make changes to your strategy to optimise organic audience growth. Harnessing the power of data from sources like Google and Facebook, tools like these are critical if you are serious about your business. Take a look at these tools to manage your business SEO and organic growth strategies.
diib
What we loved about diib was the fact that you are assigned your own “Growth Expert” to onboard you and get your Google Analytics and Facebook Insights correctly linked to the platform.
Not only that, they work with you over the long term to improve your performance online. The power of automation supported by a real person to help you – we love it!
The platform helps you with automating your SEO, analysing your competitors and much more. You get great visibility on your domain ranking, backlinks, email deliverability and effectiveness of your social media activity.
They have a free version but their Pro is exceptionally affordable too compared to other platforms on the market.
Rank Math
If you run a WordPress site then on-page optimisation is important to help you rank as high as possible for keywords. In addition, you want to gave visibility on how your content is performing in search engine land.
When looking at the tools to manage your business don't forget about these ones. Rank Math is a fantastic WordPress plugin that has rave reviews and really helps business owners optimise their website and their content for maximum results. We use Rank Math and love it.
Another popular SEO plugin is Yoast. You can read this article to compare Rank Math & Yoast.
Semrush is one of the great tools for managing your business when it comes to everything digital marketing.
If you are a business owner with sound digital marketing skills and the time to work on it, the Semrush will help you with measuring the performance of your online marketing activities. It can cover everything from content marketing, SEO, competitor research and pay per click marketing (PPC).
Other Tools To Manage Your Business
We did a lot of research and testing before deciding on our final provider. If you need any of these services then we can recommend them with confidence as a great option.
JotForm is an easy to use online form building that works for just about every business. They have a free plan to get you started and as you upgrade it remains super affordable. We have to say, JotForm is one of the simplest when it comes to creating your form and editing the settings and it has thousands of ready made templates you can use as well.
It has dozens of integrations. You can have completed form submissions saved direct to Google Drive and get your CRM information updated when a form is submitted via their HubSpot integration. You can also get new form submissions pushed through to your Slack channel. Jotform is one of our favourite tools to manage our business workflow.
If you are subscribed to our Brand Leader social media plan or Chatter Pro social media management software then you get the benefit of our Canva integration. This allows you to create stunning designs and add them to your social posts direct from within our platform.
If you want to check our the full features of Canva Pro for yourself, then take a look at the millions of templates that are available thousands of templates that are available to cover just about any scenario – Facebook posts, Instagram stories, LinkedIn cover photos – it is all there! There is simply not better platform for this purpose than Canva.
When you write as much content for social media and blogs that we do, having a tool like Grammarly is essential when it comes to managing our business.
Grammarly helps our writers compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing thanks to its AI-powered writing assistant that compliments the skills and experience of our writers. Even if you don’t write much content, take advantage of their free account to take care of all your basic spelling and grammar errors.
Jasper (formerly Jarvis) is revolutionising content writing. Whether you want to write a fully AI powered article, or use it to assist with elements of your content, this is a powerful tool that you should give a try!
What tools do you use to manage your business? We would love to hear what works well for you, plus any feedback you have on the ones we have listed above.
Our goal of this page is to become a go-to guide on tools to manage your business, whether you are a startup who has just launched or an established business that wants to improve its systems and business workflows.