A tech thrust to your biz

John Boitnott / TNS

Every new customer converted is a battle won for a small business. It’s no easy task to reach a broad audience and convince strangers to trust your business with their money, especially when you lack the established reputation of a larger company. Luckily, there are many growth strategies for small businesses out there, from segmenting your market to diversifying your company’s services, and there is plenty of room for small businesses to succeed, too.
To aid your company’s growth, it’s important to use cutting-edge technology and tools to make the process of running and expanding your business as efficient as possible. With that in mind, here are six tools you can use to expand your company’s reach.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS
There are many web analytics tools out there, but Google Analytics is one of the most robust, and it’s also free. In essence, this tool gives your business important data about your online presence, allowing you to optimize your digital reach. Google Analytics brings the data you need right to your fingertips by providing a customizable dashboard, so you can track the success metrics that matter most to your business, whether it’s click-through rates, conversions, or sales. You’ll also be able to track where your visitors are, what they view and click on your website, and what ad or content brought them there in the first place. Google Analytics is a must-have tool to bolster your online presence.

MOZ
Another tool to strengthen your business online, Moz is a software that helps you ramp up your SEO optimization and makes sure potential customers can find you on the Internet easily. Moz offers many different products, including Moz Local, which helps you improve the accuracy of your local listings online and connects you with customers in your geographic area. A subscription to Moz also includes access to Moz Content, which helps you optimize your online content for SEO and marketing. Moz’s analytics gives you an understanding of what search terms people use to find your business as well as your competitor’s, and this insight can help you better angle your online marketing campaigns moving forward.

TOPTAL
Toptal is a service that custom-matches its clients with a vetted worldwide network of “the top
3%” of freelance developers
and designers. If you have any short-term development projects, whether you’re revamping your website or building an app, Toptal can connect you with talent strongly suited to completing that project.
With its rigorous vetting process and its matching team of senior engineers, Toptal ensures that you will hire a successful team member that can bring your project to fruition without a time-consuming hiring process.

CALENDLY
How much time have you wasted playing email tag with someone trying to coordinate a meeting time? Calendly removes that hassle with a simple calendar tool.
The software integrates with both Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 and blocks out the sections of your calendar where you have anything scheduled.
You can then set three different meeting length times.
Any time you need to schedule a meeting with someone, share your Calendly link, and then that person can pick one of the three meeting types during an available time slot in your calendar.
After scheduling, both you and the other person will receive email notifications of the new meeting, and your calendar will be updated automatically.

BUFFER
There is no question that social media is huge. By 2017, it’s estimated that there will be 2.39 billion social media users globally. It’s no longer simply a missed opportunity for your business to ignore social media; it’s now bad business practice. More than ever, you need to engage customers where they are. Buffer helps you reach your audience on social media by scheduling posts across all of your social media accounts. Rather than logging onto social media every time you want to share something, Buffer lets you set up all of your week’s posts at once, and then it automatically posts them at designated times for you.

GUSTO
There’s a reason why all large businesses have an entire HR department. HR is a pain to handle. If you’re a smaller business, though, you can’t afford to hire a whole team dedicated to HR. This is where Gusto comes in. It’s a software that takes care of your payroll and benefits for you. Suddenly, all of that paperwork is out the window, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Gusto even automatically withholds local, state, and federal taxes to keep your finances in order. Gusto allows you to spend your time working on the projects that will impact the growth of your company the most, not on the day-to-day administrative tasks of HR.