Imagine how hard it was to start a business 50 years ago without online tools? The big advantage we have over the generations of businesspeople that went before us is technology. You can make tech do an awful lot of the legwork for your business if you know how, writes Beatrice Toh, founder of HeyDoodle.

While there are so many tools you can use, these five online tools can help you start your business and get ahead of the competition.

5 online tools for starting a business

1. Social media

You don’t have to use every social media platform, in fact, it would probably be impossible to try, but you should have identified at least a few platforms that make sense and where your audience hangs out.

This is an invaluable way to create relationships with new customers and nurture those relationships in a fashion that allows you to do this for hundreds or even thousands of people simultaneously.

It’s so much easier than having to go out and talk to each person individually, and social media work is fun too.

2. Klaviyo And Okendo

You also want to automate as much of your marketing efforts as possible; not because you’re lazy, but because you only have so many hours in a day and want them to be as effective as possible.

Klaviyo is the perfect automation tech for email marketing tasks. Okendo allows you to build on the relationships with your customers to ensure that you’re getting bang for the buck out of your marketing activities.

In days gone by, you’d have needed to hire an analyst and a marketing specialist to get this work done. Now, you can do it yourself with a few easy-to-learn tools.

3. Asana

Project management doesn’t have to involve hyper-complicated systems and endless Gantt charts drawn out carefully and stuck to walls. Asana does a lot of heavy lifting on this front.

You can easily create ‘to-do lists’ for the team, share them, and monitor people’s progress in getting through those lists. This means you can step in when you think there might be a problem and get things moving before it creates any delays for your business.

Asana is also cost-effective compared to more traditional project planning methods.

4. Google Analytics

You can’t beat ‘free’ if whatever’s free is also useful. Google Analytics is very easy to connect to your website, and it’s completely free and provided by a trusted name. This package gives you deep insight into who is visiting your website, how long they are staying, what they do on the site, and more.

That means you can easily make data-driven decisions about how you will update your website, create more content for it and ensure that you’re always reaching a larger audience tomorrow than you did today.

5. Microsoft Excel

Excel is now available online, and the price of a Microsoft Office subscription for small businesses has been falling for years. It’s easy to create nearly any tracking system or quantitative measuring system in Excel, and that can help you ensure your business is moving forward in the most effective manner.

You don’t even need to be a spreadsheet wizard, as you can use the help function to look up most of the formulas you need and get examples of how to implement them effectively.

The whole Office suite is invaluable, but it’s hard to manage any business without Excel.

When I started my company, HeyDoodle, I realised I would have to work smarter, not harder, if I wanted to succeed in a highly competitive space.

So, I engaged technology to make that work, and you can too. The five examples above are a great way to start managing a new business with less effort than ever before, but with much better results.

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