7 essential tools to create a business and succeed in its digital transformation

 digital transformation When you want to create a business or want to succeed in your digital transformation. Choosing the right tools to digitize your activity. Optimize your time and your budget is one of the keys to success. Fortunately, there are simple tools that can automate many actions and digitize its activity. In order to free up time for actions that ensure the growth of the company and create added value. These digital solutions make it possible to gain autonomy and agility

 

and to be visible on the web (SEO, Social Networks, Ads, etc.). To guide you in choosing the best solutions, here is a list of 7 essential digital tools. To use to succeed in your digital transformation or create your business online. These tools will serve you both in your day-to-day management. But also to animate your presence on the web (creation of the logo, illustrations, etc.). For a few tens of euros invested per month, you will ultimately save dozens of hours of work.

 

1 – Intuit QuickBooks

If there is one task to automate as quickly as possible. It is accounting and business management. You will not only save time (eg automatic entry of expense reports, recording of accounting documents, etc.). But also have professional and efficient invoicing. The other advantage of management software. Is that you will have precise monitoring of your finances, whether on your cash (in particular the money that your customers owe you), but also your main items of expenses (to identify potential savings to be

 

made). One of the best value for money billing solutions is QuickBooks from Intuit. This accounting solution is available on the cloud, which makes it possible to use it from any PC or Mac. Thus, there is no more loss of time, you can make your quotes, invoices, accounting entries… from any place, even while traveling thanks to the mobile application. Quickbooks in particular offers a synthetic dashboard in which you have a clear and precise view of how your business is performing. The mobile app is also practical for scanning your expense reports so that they are immediately integrated into your accounts… For example, with the dashboard, you can see in real time

 

your intermediate result with your expenses / income: This software will help you easily monitor your cash flow, and check that payments are made on time, and if necessary follow up on bad payers, send them a PDF invoice by email… With the edition of personalized invoices you will also also give a professional image to your company. The advantage of Quickbooks is to also have a technical support that can be contacted in order to have help for the use of the product (nb: this does not replace an accountant, because the assistance only concerns use of the software). The software offers accounting export functionalities in order to send your accounts to your accountant to let him carry out the VAT declaration, the balance sheet, etc.

 

Logo design with Tailor Brands

 

When you start your business, one of the most important things is the brand and the graphic identity of your company. Indeed, the smaller the company, the more the brand must be original, impactful and memorable. However, due to a lack of resources, few entrepreneurs take the time to have a quality logo and graphic charter, and they settle for a very basic design. Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to create good quality logos for your business in just a few clicks.

 

One of the most simple and practical online tools is Tailor Brands: it is a very easy to use logo creation and graphic design tool. In a few minutes you get a turnkey logo to put on your site, your quotes & invoices, your email signature, your business cards, on your letterhead… This tool allows a neophyte to have a logo very easily that responds to his project, to the image he wants to give… with a professional rendering. You don’t even need to have graphic design experience, Tailor Brands asks you a few questions, offers you a choice of fonts, typical icons for your logo… to generate a unique design that best suits your project (with the name of your company and your slogan). You can also choose the color, the spacing of the texts…

 

to have a design that suits you. With a custom logo, you will give a professional image and improve your credibility, two essential qualities that any business must have, especially when starting out. With its online logo creation tool, Tailor Brands helps you in a few minutes to have a professional logo, for a price 100 times cheaper than if you go through a graphic designer.

HubSpot – Marketing

 

HubSpot is one of the most powerful CRM and Digital Marketing solutions for SMBs. Its strength lies in the fact that it encompasses several tools (CRM, Digital Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) that will help your business grow in terms of lead generation, sales follow-up, etc. With HubSpot, you can centralize your marketing actions and manage your sales. It’s a scalable tool that will grow with you, so you can start with the basics (eg marketing or sales), and gradually build your skills. At first you can just launch simple marketing campaigns and have a global vision of your current business,

 

and then move up a gear (marketing automation, sending personalized content, chatbot, inbound marketing, etc.). HubSpot pricing is based on the number of contacts and features.The free version is enough to get started (eg: contact and business management for CRM, and form, email and chat for marketing), and as you grow you can upgrade to more complete versions.

 

HootSuite – social media management

 

To make yourself known, it is now essential to have a minimum presence on social networks.

And unless you have a Community Manager to take care of your company’s social media presence, you’re initially going to have to do a lot of your actions on your own… However, this can quickly become tedious and time-consuming if you don’t automate things a bit, such as posting on several networks at the same time, scheduling posts for the week, tracking interactions to quickly respond to requests on different networks… Luckily, there’s software like Hootsuite that lets you manage, plan, and publish content across all social media, while monitoring and evaluating the success of your marketing strategies.

The most useful function on a daily basis 

All you have to do is use the editorial calendar with the content to be published, filling in the text, the link, the photo… and that’s it. So in less than 30 minutes, your visibility for the week is assured. You can also do industry or brand monitoring via a keyword system. You will have a personalized dashboard according to social networks (eg: monitor all publications concerning growth hacking on Twitter, etc.). If you work with a community manager, an associate… you can share notes between you with actions to perform. You also have precise statistics on the performance of your actions on social media (subscribers, clicks, etc.)

Mailchimp – emailing and marketing automation

 

Mailchimp is the best-known emailing and marketing automation tool.

The reason for their success lies in having a free version (for 2000 contacts) but above all powerful emailing features (newsletter, etc.), the availability of an easy-to-use email template editor, as well as very powerful functionalities to create scenarios for sending messages. It is a software which allows to start simply (ex: a simple newsletter), then to increase in power. In a few minutes, and without great computer knowledge, you can create simple and effective e-mails from the proposed templates. Following the sendings, you obtain very easy to understand reports with the openers, the clickers…

which will allow you to identify your best prospects

digital transformation to contact the people who are interested in your offers. Another important point is that Mailchimp is compatible with many other marketing solutions on the market. For example, you can link Mailchimp to your eCommerce solution to send emails to your customers, or to follow up with people who have not finalized an order… Similarly, you can use Mailchimp with tools for creating forms, landing pages… like Sumo.me, Thrive Themes…

Mailchimp also has advanced features that you can unlock as you grow, such as:

• AB testing, which allows you to test 2 variants of an email (sender, subject, etc.) in order to see which one works best.
• The optimization of the time of sending in order to send the message at the best time according to the behavior of the subscriber (ex: he opens his emails in the evening).
• The retargeting of your inactive subscribers (non-openers of your emails) on Facebook Ads to reach them via another communication channel.
• A Mobile App to see how many subscribers you have acquired every day, the performance of your emailings…
• The creation of landing pages to improve the relevance of your offers.
• Tracking your contacts’ activity on your website.
• Tags to segment your contacts according to their actions.
• Satisfaction surveys

6. .SEMrush, monitoring the performance of your website on Google

 

 Google is the number 1 search engine in France, because Internet users immediately have the reflex to use it when they are looking for a supplier, information, etc.

Hence the importance of optimizing its visibility on Google, with both the evolution of its traffic, but also knowing “how Google sees your site”.

SEMrush offers essential features to optimize its natural referencing by telling you:

• The keywords on which Google shows you, with the position in the results page and the evolution over time.
• The performance of your competitors (keywords that generate the most traffic for them, etc.)
• The quality of your site’s referencing via an audit function.
• The estimate of the number of visits via google for a keyword, with related expressions (in order to choose the best keywords on which you reference on your site).
• Inbound links to your site (backlinks).
• Your competitors’ Google Ads budget and their ads.

Semrush allows you to know what is the most interesting keyword to position yourself in natural referencing (or identify expressions with underexploited potential).

Here is for example the analysis of the traffic potential for close keywords such as “payslip”, “payslip”. “Salary slip” and “payslip”.

Within seconds, SEMrush shows that the most important keyword is “payslip” with 27,000 searches / month.

We also see that Salary slip makes 9,900 searches / month, and payslip 8,100:

And conversely almost no visit for “pay slip”

7 – Zoom, the video conferencing platform

digital transformation In the current health context, videoconferencing solutions are essential. Both to exchange with customers, but also with colleagues and suppliers.

The industry leader is Zoom, with a simple and powerful solution.

The advantage is to be able to create a meeting very quickly. And to send invitations to guests in a few clicks (via a meeting request or via a link).

The other interest of Zoom is to offer to use the telephone. Which allows to have a sound quality much better than that of the PC.

Some of Zoom’s unique features:

• Collaborative Whiteboard mode for writing and sharing ideas.
• Subgroups to create small separate workshops during videoconferences.
• Recording sessions so you don’t forget anything.
• The “background” function to hide the frame of your home.
• Managing passwords or waiting rooms to secure meetings.

In conclusion, how to succeed in your digital transformation?

You have seen with these 7 tools that ensuring the digital transformation of your company is not a problem of tools. But rather of an awareness that digital has become essential.

Digital or digital transformation tools are within the reach of all companies.

It is no longer a question of budget or computer skills. But simply to take a step back and choose the tools that will allow you to be more efficient on a daily basis. Whether for graphics (logo, etc.), marketing actions (Google referencing, etc.) Or the monitoring of your commercial activity.