The famous philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said, “Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing; with tools he is all.” In today’s modern, connected world, tools are more than just inanimate objects we build with, but those we use digitally to improve businesses and connect people around the world.
As entrepreneurs, tools are vital to long-term success. With the right instruments, you can take your business further, get things done quicker, and save money on costly resources. The following tools across three categories — search engine optimization, customer service, and content marketing — help your business do just that.
What makes these tools particularly useful is that they’re applicable to all business types, regardless of size and stature. No matter where you are in the business world, you can use these tools to propel you:
Screaming Frog (Improve On-Page SEO)
Search engine optimization is a confusing ballgame. The rules are constantly shifting with each updated algorithm, and Google isn’t always crystal clear about what’s happening behind their colorful doors. The result? The ability to optimize your website for search engines isn’t a walk in the park. And without the right tools, SEO becomes an even bigger haze.
This is where Screaming Frog comes in. Screaming Frog is a downloadable application that crawls your entire site (much like Googlebot does when a search query is submitted) in search of anything wrong in terms of SEO. It then presents that information through a series of organized tabs.
This is a huge time-saver — especially if your website has hundreds of pages (which is easy to have, particularly if you’ve had a blog for at least a couple months). Without the Screaming Frog application, you might have to resort to using several tools independently to devise a complete picture. This makes it possible to conduct extensive site audits. And because the application stores your data, you’ll be able to compare one site audit to the previous version each time you run a new check.
You can take the Screaming Frog tool a step further with a few tweaks. Users can combine the application data with Google Analytics to see just how popular their pages are. Moz blogger Jim Seward, who considers Screaming Frog his favorite SEO tools, explained just how simple this is in this post about combining data.
Salesforce (Improve Customer Relationship Management)
Business owners looking to improve their analytical data, streamline their sales process, and improve customer service need look no further than Salesforce. Many companies are adopting Apple products into the workplace for their immense capabilities and horsepower, and Salesforce caters to that audience with one of the best CRM for Mac. While there are many customer relationship management solutions on the market, few answer to the trends; instead, you’ll find that other software choices have developed solid products that cater to PC users, despite the decline of PC products in business settings.
In addition to Salesforce being equipped to handle the needs of both PC and Mac, the software offers a comprehensive suite of products and features to help businesses better manage their customer relationships. For example, managing customer service requests is much more refined because users are able to pull all related customer data the minute a particular customer contacts the company. The customer’s past purchases, preferences, and any other data that’s valuable to your business is readily available, allowing you to service them in the quickest and most effective way possible.
Content Calendar (Manage Your Marketing Editorial Schedule)
Every company — whether it’s a startup or a corporation — needs to have a blog. And in order to successfully maintain a blog, you should be using a content editorial calendar. A content editorial calendar helps you manage all content on your site, including the topics, writers, and any other details that are important to your publishing schedule.
Unfortunately, many marketing teams aren’t aware of the content marketing tools out there, and resort to crafting editorial calendars in Excel sheets and Word docs. They build sheet-style solutions from scratch without realizing there are tools available eliminate the guesswork of creating content calendars.
There are much easier ways to manage this, and Coschedule’s marketing editorial calendar gets the job done. Its free package includes printable and editable files, in addition to graphics and research on content publishing. These calendars also helps your team work better cohesively to ensure everyone is on the same page. This doesn’t just go for the writers and marketing team — it extends to the project managers, social media managers, and designers as well.
