9 ESSENTIAL GROWTH TOOLS

to help you become more SUCCESSFUL at small business management

As your business grows, you’ll need to scale up. With more tasks, more sales, and more customers, you need all the help you can get! Use these 9 essential growth tools to hack your business and surpass your competition.

I have put together a list of the most essential growth tools that every business should have in order to create awareness and build an audience to convert to more clients in the online space.

And that’s the end goal right? More clients and more revenue!

Competition is fierce in the online marketing industry especially for competing keywords that get a lot of traffic.

Much research goes in to find the right keywords to compete for, using the right tools and developing the right strategies.

Many things need to be taken into account, including the industry you operate within, the culture of your company, the image you want to portray and of course, the goals you want to achieve.

Content marketing isn’t condensed to one single entity; rather, it encompasses a whole range of services like the list listed outlined here as some examples.

Here are some of the best and essential growth tools out there, to help you grow your business that we also use here at BigThink Digital.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Tracking your metrics is a very essential part of growing any business, especially in the online space.

How do you know if your business is growing without tracking metrics?

Google Analytics measures the following:

The building blocks of Google Analytics reports are dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are the attributes of your data, such as the city where traffic is coming from, the page you’re measuring, or the social media channel you’re evaluating.

Metrics are the quantitative measurements for those dimensions. For example, if you’re looking at how your ads are performing in Paris (the dimension), the 2,000 paid sessions you’ve recorded would be your metric.

Metrics and dimensions make up every single report in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics offers more metrics than any business can use. You can create customized reports that tell you exactly what’s working and what isn’t.

In short, Google Analytics helps you make decisions based on data. You can justify spending more on your advertising, discover where you should be advertising, and even determine what types of content you need to be putting out there.

Google Analytics categorises data into the ABCs:

• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

Additionally, you can use it to break down your Audience & Real Time traffic.

Google Analytics is free, but there are also premium programs you can use if you want more options. By far though, one of the leading and essential growth tools you will use in your Business online.

EMAIL AUTORESPONDER

Setting up an email autoresponder is one of the most essential growth tools for your business in my opinion and many businesses are still not utilising this amazing platform.

Building an email list of prospects and clients could literally become one of the most valuable assets you will ever grow in your business.

An engaged email list can honestly help your scale your business to new heights you ever imagined.

You can use your email autoresponder platform to do more than just manage your list and send emails. Some things you can do include:

• Segmenting your subscribers and send different offers to different groups
• Tagging for different offers and interests
• Asking a question or running a survey to get feedback from your list
• Integrating with social media so that you’re sending your email subscribers there and your social media followers to your list
• Many platforms even have integrated upgrades to landing pages and webinar hosting

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

As your business grows online, you’ll have a great deal of content to create – blog posts, landing pages, websites, social media content, and more.

A content management system, or CMS, helps you manage all of it and a must on our list of the essential growth tools for your business online.

These programs also offer additional tools to help with content marketing. Popular low-cost platforms include WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix to build your website which I like to call your online HUB.

Your website can truly become your home base and a place where you can drive traffic back to your best content, build your subscriber base and host your own videos.

ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE

Now will all the exciting strategies you will learn about the world of online marketing for your business, running the backend of your business ie. accounting/taxes will probably be the most boring, but unfortunately it has to be done.

The best way to manage all your invoices, payments, bank statements, gst and taxes is to start off on the right foot and invest in some accounting software.

For us here at Digiton Media, I have always been a lover of MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) there are many other great competing software systems on the market that are great also but I just like to stick to what I know and have used MYOB for all our businesses the past 15 years.

Other great platforms are XERO, Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Zoho Office suite etc

Bookkeeping is a skill not every business owner has and it can get more complex as your business grows but there are many tutorials online with all the leading software and pretty easy to learn.

Outsourcing and hiring a bookkeeper is another option to keep away the headaches of the paper trail.

CLIENT SERVICE AUTOMATION TOOLS

With more clients, you’ll spend more time on perfecting your client/customer service. If you can automate some of the routine tasks, this can help to free you up for more important things like your income producing activities.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing an organisation’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. ACRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

Examples of these essential growth tools include a chat bot on your website (check out our integration of Facebook Messenger on this website) or an interactive FAQ. AgileCRM, LiveAgent, HubSpot, and NetSuite are good CRM programs.

When people talk about CRM, they might mean any of three things:

CRM as Technology: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.

CRM as a Strategy: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed  

CRM as a Process: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.

SEO TOOLS

SEO tools, are marketing tools that help you manage your search engine optimisation.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is basically optimising your website content for the search engines ie Google.

Optimising the articles and content on your website is actually a lot of work, from doing ‘on page’ SEO on each page or post to building backlinks from other sites back to yours to give your website more authority and move up the search pages in Google.

There are tools you can subscribe too or use that help us with our SEO strategies. They offer features such as insights, keywords, analytics, content management, research, and more, all in one package. Some good SEO tools include MOZ, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

If you have a team working with you, project management software can help keep you on track.

When building a big business online, more than likely if you don’t have employees to help do the online type of work you will need to hire a Virtual Assistant or Digital Marketing Agency for help.

Project Management Software is a program that integrates all of your systems, facilitates communication among team members, helps to set and reach goals, and manages busy schedules.

This is going to be a program that you will really find useful to keep track of all your projects and everything that needs to be done.

You can also assign tasks to team members and mark off checklists as all the tasks have been completed. You can also track your team members time and when they have been working.

Software programs include Wrike, Asana, Airtable, and Zoho Projects.

Personally I love Asana and you can start off using it for free for all the basic tools and it is also a great place to outline systems and processes. Asana is one of my essential growth tools that I use in my business every day.

The beauty about having systems and processes outlined in your Project Management Software is when you onboard new team members, they can go into the program and start working straight away.

SOCIA MEDIA MANAGEMENT

For the majority of businesses today, social media is an important part of growing and engaging in the marketplace. However, it can be a lot of work to juggle many social media profiles all at once.

Social media management programs allow you to put everything on one dashboard, and offer additional tools for research, automation, keyword optimization, and analytics. Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer are three of the most popular options.

These essential growth tools can allow you to create some content (a post) and post it out to many social media channels all at once, slightly automating the process.

ONLINE BOOKING SYSTEM

Online booking systems are essential growth tools for your business that allow clients to book, reschedule, and cancel appointments through a web interface.

When clients want to make an appointment, they go to your business’s website, Facebook page, or anywhere else the technology is supported, and choose an available date and time. It’s just like making a restaurant reservation online.

The difference, from the business’s point of view, is that restaurant booking systems work specifically for restaurants, whereas if you run a salon, medical office, or consulting firm, your needs will be quite different.

On the back end, you enter parameters about when people can book certain services, based on business hours you set as well as the times and dates that your staff or other resources are available.

The app also prevents double booking and over booking. Additionally, it gives you flexibility to block off times when certain services may be unavailable.

Say you run a personal training business and your leading personal trainer takes a two-week holiday. You can enter his days off in the appointment scheduling app ahead of time so that your clients won’t be able to book any personal training sessions with him time during the days that he’s away

Some popular Online Booking Systems include MindBody, GetTimely, Shedul, The Fork Manager, Acuity Scheduling, Appointlet, Calendly, SimplyBook.Me, Super Saas, Pike13 and Booksteam.

I hope this list of the 9 essential growth tools to scale your business helps you in your search, and with these tools, coupled with a ‘comprehensive business growth plan’, is exactly what you need to achieve your growth goals and to scale your business faster.

Wondering how to go about the planning you need to get started?

If so, I’m offering a full comprehensive coaching program on growing your business strategically step-by-step online. We can offer done-with-you or done-for-you options.

These options will guide you with either our ‘one on one’ or ‘group’ coaching by packaging up your own knowledge, skills and expertise to create a more automated system creating a 6-7 Figure Business.

I literally hold your hand and walk you through the process and we will be implementing most of these essential growth tools as we work together to scale your business. If you would like to learn more, simply make your booking below at a time that suits for your FREE 30 minute strategy call.

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