Growing Your Business Is Easy with These Three Simple Tools

Would you like to easily grow your small business without the complex processes and costly expenses? In business, as is the case elsewhere in life, there is beauty in simplicity. Growing your business is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The hardest steps of all happen early in the life of a small business – startup funding, staffing, forming partnerships, etc. Beyond that stage, growth happens through incremental tweaking. Though, with that said, there's no reason that a subtle tweak can't have a substantial outcome. Often, it's as simple as upgrading to a new application or replacing an outdated process with a fresher one.

What's most important to growing your business? Ultimately, ensuring profitability and enhancing sustainability are the most important concepts. To get there we must accomplishing three things:

• Saving time
• Saving money
• Retaining customers

Those are three simple ideas that have a huge effect on your business.

To help you do those things better, let's take a look at three kinds of tools available to help you easily grow your small business.

Save Time by Putting Accounting in the Cloud

I once knew of an organization (which shall remain nameless) that had the most shockingly inefficient accounting routine. Each day, at the close of business, every department would fill out a separate spreadsheet that collects sales, costs, and payroll hours, which would then be emailed to the accounting department. From there, the accounting personnel would sync the department spreadsheets with a central spreadsheet and call it a day.

The problem for that company is that, because of the human element, errors run rampant, and the company has to go through a lot of work, going back over the books to fix simple human errors. In short, the time spent in fixing accounting errors is costing the company money and reducing profitability.

So the first tool that can make a measurable impact on your small business is a cloud-based accounting application. The spreadsheet has to go. The spreadsheet has long been a staple of small business accounting, but switching your accounting routine to the cloud carries with it several key benefits, including:

• View and manage accounts payable/receivable with ease
• Automatically import transactions as they happen
• See payroll information using integrations with time-tracking apps
• Quickly reconcile bank accounts
• Generate and store tax/financial reports
• Access from anywhere

In many ways, modern accounting applications have become the hub of small business, since transactions and payroll apps readily “talk” to the current generation of accounting apps. By making the switch to cloud-based accounting, you save time importing data and double-checking accuracy, and more time running your business.

Save Money with Data Analytics

It's hard to separate time from money, since employee hour saved is money saved for the company. But there is one tool that can help you save money, without affecting time, directly. This is where data analytics tools come in handy.

You're probably very aware that your website’s traffic is important. Moreover, you're likely to already be engaging in actions designed to attract visitors to your site, but if you're not sizing them up, you're missing (and potentially misplacing) troves of money.

Even if you're using Google Analytics, you might be surprised to learn that you can get deeper insights into what your Web traffic is doing, specifically. Here are some of the things cloud-based data analytics tools can do:

• See visitor session playback (so you can know what on-page elements caught the visitor's attention)
• Review Web form accesses and abandonment
• See heat maps to help you identify what works
• Connect visitor behaviors with conversions/bounces

It's not hard to see how valuable information such as this can be of value to your small business. Data analytics let you know what elements of your pages work, and which ones don't. Since it costs money to put page elements on the Web, you can save money by shaping your efforts around what is really driving conversions, going forward.

Retain Customers with Social CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is not a new concept. It's a term that's been around for years, though it's changed, and, ultimately, has come full-circle, more recently. The advent of social media as a leading digital environment for business has brought with it an emphasis on social CRM.

It's likely that you're engaging in branding through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And, quite naturally, you've probably noticed that your fans don't hesitate to reach out to your brand's pages in search of help or advice on your products or services. The thing is: they expect to be given an answer.

Social CRM extends the usual channels associated with customer service to include social media mentions and real-time brand engagement. Here are just some of the things social CRM can do:

• Bridge marketing, sales, and support

• Facilitate up-selling, cross-selling, and order fulfillment via social media

• Reduce response time in answer customer queries

• Analyze customer relationships across channels to personalize future engagement

By integrating social CRM into your small business, you connect with customers who expect solutions increasingly on-demand. Social media allows your business to respond quickly to everything from complaints to sales queries, and if you're not using social CRM, you're probably missing opportunities rampantly.

Final Thoughts

There's nothing shocking here, right? Saving time and money and retaining customers are timeless concepts in small business!

You see, growing your business doesn't have to be hard – and it doesn't require you to undo everything you've done up until now. It's about making small adjustments to the way you go about things that have big results. If you're relying on tools or processes other than ones like the three mentioned on this list, you're probably making small business growth harder than is necessary.

Why not make it easy on yourself and make more money in the process by shaking things up – just a little bit?