The Business Tools that Every Venture Needs

Let me guess! 

You are an entrepreneur, and you have jumped into an array of digital mediums. 

For starters, you have a presence across multiple social media channels, a couple of blogs, YouTube and Quora account, and a website (of-course). 

But first, learn how to accept payments without a website. 

You want to make sense of all the conversations and insights from social media. Also, improve organic search ranking, maintain SEO hygiene, and run paid campaigns. 

And your best bet to manage, automate and oversee all of the above necessities are marketing tools. 

But first things first. Getting a domain name for your company is of utmost importance as it allows you to create a website with your desired name. 

Even if you have not started your business but have a great name in mind for a potential business idea, the best thing you can do is to buy yourself a domain name. 

With thousands of domain names sold every day, you never know when the name you want gets bought by someone else. To prevent such things, go and get your preferred domain name as soon as you can.

The domain name is the website address of your company and is basically the name by which you will be known in the online market. 

It is the first step in creating your website and thus needs to be something that is well thought out and something that gives an idea about your brand and what you offer. 

Click here for a quick guide on buying a domain.

In today’s digital world, it is absolutely imperative that you create a website for your company. Creating a website could turn out to be an expensive affair. 

However, that does not always have to be the case. There are various online platforms that provide you with enough opportunities to create a website for free.

Whether you are creating a website for free or not, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Here’s a guide to help you build a free website. 

Finally, any business needs the help of tools to ensure that their website works in an efficient manner.

Must-have Google tools for any business

The biggest advantage of using tools is that they provide you with a new set of functions incorporated for your website. 

Tools further improve the logistics and dynamics of the website and in turn, make a huge difference in the revenue of your company. 

So, we have come up with a list of important Google tools that you must absolutely use to create the maximum impact. 

Moreover, since all the tools mentioned here do not cost you a dime, it makes perfect sense for you to try all of them and eventually use the ones you like.

In this world of entrepreneurship in a digital medium, these tools can help you get on top of the results you expect. It is important to make sure that your business, be it small or big, improves and rises above your competitors. 

And there is no better medium than the internet itself to improve your growth. Since the goal for any entrepreneur is to work smart than hard, these tools can help you achieve that. 

Whether your business on the internet is run in the form of a blog, corporate, news portal or an e-commerce platform, these Google tools help your business take a new positive turn. 

1) Google Analytics

The information or data about your business can add great value to your business.

Google Analytics helps you get all the data you need, including web traffic on your website. This makes it one of the best free tools available on the internet to help you understand your growth and online presence. 

It allows you to use online analytics information to help you improve the content you put on your website and thereby improve user experience and optimization for better sales, which is obviously the end goal. 

This tool enables you to find the source or the medium of the user on your website, thus allowing you to understand if your marketing plans have worked or not. By having this information, you can device new plans for your growth. 

2) Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is the younger brother of Google Analytics that’s made for beginners who are new to using tools. At times, you just need data shown in simple pie charts or graphs to give you an idea about your website’s performance.

It is important that you use this data to have a better understanding of your business and its performance. With simple data analysis, you can easily run your small business better.

3) Google Search Console

Once known as Google Webmaster Tools and now rebranded to Google Search Console, this tool is perfect for webmasters. It not only helps you in checking the indexing status but also optimizes the visibility of your website. 

Furthermore, it is the most important tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Any entrepreneur who works with the help of an online website would know the incredible importance of SEO to get prospective customers to your website. 

With this tool, you get the power to track your site’s search performance and thus cater to the needs of your users by providing suitable content. Once Google starts tracking your website, you can get data on the organic search results and their respective performance results. 

4) Google My Business

This tool is perfect for those businesses that work from an office. It allows you to strengthen your website using the best SEO strategies. 

The information you put on this tool is what comes up when a customer does a Google search for your office or business on Google maps or just on Google.

Therefore, all the information you put there must be correct and updated. 

5) Google Keyword Planner

Creating your website content without the use of relevant keywords does no justice to your website in the long run.

To help you create content relevant to specific keywords, you must definitely them using Google Keyword Planner. It gives you a detailed analysis of the average keyword searches on a monthly basis and thus helps you come up with relevant data.

More than anything, it helps you create a new content marketing strategy. 

The virtual world is growing. Digital platforms are swarming over the internet, and the masses want it all. As exciting it gets for the Netizens’, the harder it becomes for brands to target or find their audience. And the arduous task of creating new content regularly adds up to the woes.

The virtual world is growing. Digital platforms are swarming over the internet, and the masses want it all. 

Marketing tools you didn’t know you needed

As exciting it gets for the Netizens’, the harder it becomes for brands to target or find their audience. And the arduous task of creating new content regularly adds up to the woes.

Here are a few tools that will guide marketers to find real value and enhance creativity.

1) Moz

Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig founded Moz in 2004. Moz is one of the prominent SEO tools that use basic and advanced research to improve search engine optimisation.

The platform provides a variety of research tools and tutorials to improve SEO program, all under one umbrella.  

Benefits: 

• Vast selection of tools 
• Flexible pricing 
• Very ideal for small businesses 
• Find traffic driving keyword opportunities and understand the search intent 
• Provides recommendations to boost rankings 
• With Moz Pro, track your competition and ranks 
• Crawls through your website to find and fix technical issues

2) Brandwatch  

The name says it all! Brandwatch allows businesses to analyse and utilise conversations across the social web.

The tool is best suited for enterprises who want to make sense of their social media chitchat. It archives capacious social media data from at least 90 million sources and in 27 languages. 

Benefits: 

• Sentiment analysis 
• Automated reports 
• Integrated with Crimson Hexagon’s widely-respected machine learning 
• Analyse billions of conversations with Brandwatch’s social listening 
• Artificial Intelligence-powered consumer insight 
• Largest influencer database 
• Flexible APIs

3) BuzzSumo

Have you ever run out of content ideas? Or Have you googled long enough to find absolutely nothing? 

Say no more. Your content saviour is here. BuzzSumo helps users pick the best content that is relevant to your target audience, which also answers the most in-demand questions. 

Benefits: 

• Find trendy content by topic or on any website 
• Know what other people are listening to 
• Get alerts: Keyword, brand name, links and domain 
• Competitor analysis 
• Find influencers for related topics 

4) Phlanx

The platform assists brands in their marketing, as well as a two-sided market community where brands and influencers can communicate with each other.

Phlanx’s intuitive and interactive interface allows users to navigate quickly, explore the site and make use of its services in minutes.

With a natural search function and necessary filtering options, it helps users find what they need.

Benefits:

• Provides a rich influencer catalogue 
• Partner with other brands and cross-promote 
• Audit Instagram influencers 
• Measure Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch engagement 
• Generate marketing contracts

If you want to plant a spy on your competitor, here are a few tools that would gain you a competitive edge. 

Tools to keep an eye on your competitors

1) SimilarWeb

It is an online competitive intelligence tool that provides traffic and insights on any website. The tool assesses data and gives a quick overview of a site’s reach, ranking, user engagement. And that’s just for starters.

Benefits of SimilarWeb:

• Provides search, display, content, affiliate and media buying activities
• Identifies trending keywords and most-popular content of any website
• Throws light on what works best for your competitor
• Reveals landing page, ad placement, and strategy of competitors
• Helps track and evaluate investment opportunities
• Helps brands benchmark their market
• Shows global, country and category rank

2) SEMrush

Let’s face it. Today, driving traffic to a website is not an easy task, because everybody wants to be on the top of SERP. 

Usually, when planning for a digital marketing campaign, businesses go through new tactics, methods, ideas with no guarantee of success.

Why spend so much time when you can copy what’s already working?

Benefits of SEMrush:

• Competitive intelligence
• Gain full visibility into the marketing activities of your competitors
• Visualise data by comparing data side-by-side
• Discover new organic competitors
• Uncover competitors’ ad strategy and budget
• Analyse competitors’ display ads

And, if you are a business or brand, it is imperative to spread ears towards the babble.

Top social media tools for businesses

Because, in the world of social media, successful business profiles have figured out their target audience, understand their interests, and have built a relationship.

1) Buffer

From being a side project of CEO Joel Gascoigne, Buffer is now an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by many brands and businesses.

The platform boasts of a clean, simple, minimalistic and straightforward dashboard that allows users to cut through the noise.

Unique features:

• Shared team inbox for social customer care
• Helps assign social conversations to the right person on your team
• Avoids duplicate response
• Add notes for the team to pick up specific tasks
• Custom reports  

2) Sprinklr 

Kickstarted with the philosophy to deliver more human and intuitive experiences, at every touchpoint, for every customer, Sprinklr helps large organisations collaborate in real-time across businesses.

The tool is a good fit for large consumer brands that want to communicate and respond quickly across many digital channels.

Unique features:

• Single unified platform
• Access public data from 350M sources via Sprinklr Social Listening
• Enables one-to-one, human connections at scale across 26 different social media channels
• Brands can turn insights into action via Sprinklr social engagement, social advertising, customer care, and social advocacy

3) Salesforce Radian6 

It’s crucial to know what your consumers have to say about your company, products and competition if you are running a campaign on social media.

Results, brands can run more effective campaigns by driving conversations, and they can also use this information to make valuable decisions about future product offerings.

Salesforce Radian6 is something that most brands would like to have in their arsenal.

Unique features:

• Hear conversations from 650 million sources
• Monitor your channel and participate in discussions at scale
• Manage your social strategy from any device
• Salesforce Einstein helps users make sense of the humongous data

So, if you are an enterprise or an SME here are some other options that would be suitable for your business. 

Conclusion

Marketing tools are essential for businesses, because they help reach the voice of the brand to millions of customers, create awareness, empower marketers to make decisions faster. 

In the digital universe, people talk, about something, anything and everything, and paying attention to make adjustments to your campaign with impartial insights is invaluable. 

As rightly said by David Ogilvy, The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife. A reminder to understand your audience intimately before you jump. So what do you think?