VE Digital

Day: December 28, 2022

  • 10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    Having a startup is gonna get you busy and while that’s a good thing, you’ll need to make that busy-ness into productiveness that will meet your vision and goals. If you are looking for the best productivity tools to help you out, you’re in the right spot.

    There are plenty of great tools available to help you manage your business and reasonably priced as well. The challenge is to find those that will fit and work well for you.

    To save you time from scouring the internet for these, we’ve rounded up a list of 10 of the best productivity tools for your startup business. Check them out below.

     

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools

     

    Asana

    This tool will help your team manage projects, brainstorm ideas, and more without flooding your team with unnecessary emails and follow-up calls. It has templates and built-in to-do lists that you can readily use, and you can assign tasks and responsibilities to your colleagues. Asana has free plan offers for up to 15 team members while the premium (paid) version starts at $10 a month per team member.

     

    Slack

    This is a well-known app that’s widely used among businesses that have remote employees. Slack is mainly used for messaging and document sharing, a great alternative for email. This is definitely one of the best productivity tools out there.

     

    Google Workspace (G Suite)

    This is a great tool for digital enterprise management. Starting at just $5 a month, you can send emails, manage and collaborate on internal documents, share calendars, track website analytics, and more in one place. Whether you’ll be using your computer, tablet, or phone, Google Workspace can make your life so much easier.

     

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

     

    Canva

    Canva is an online graphic design tool that’s super helpful for startups to make their own marketing materials such as brochures, social media graphics, powerpoints, and other graphics-heavy documents. It’s available to use for free but the premium version offers more images and templates that will be helpful for your startup business.

    Read: Using Canva for your business

     

    Wunderlist

    If you are the type of person who needs to jot down the important things that you need to do for the next day, Wunderlist is for you. This is a simple app to keep the daily to-do list that you can share with anybody else. It’s both available on Android and iOS.

    Calendly

    This is scheduling software that will help you manage your appointments. People use this tool to make coordinate meetings and connect business relationships. Calendly integrates, syncs, and aligns everything around the user’s meetings. Users just have to set their time of availability and choose what type of meeting they want. The app will then coordinate everything.

    It also sends automatic follow-ups and reminders to make sure you don’t miss anything.

     

    Upwork

    When you own a business, you should know that it’s just not possible to handle everything by yourself. To become more productive and milk your time as much as you can, you’ll need to delegate tasks. If you need to outsource workloads, Upwork is the biggest freelancers platform that you can sign up in to find other people to help you out.

    Upwork connects companies to freelancers of any field, depending on your needs. If you need a designer, a writer, a bookkeeper, a developer, or anything else, this website can match you up with prospects.

    Hootsuite

    This tool will help you manage your social media accounts, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or whatever. Hootsuite is a helpful tool to manage your content planning, build your brand’s social media engagements, track your analytics, and keep your brand’s online presence alive.

     

    Expensify

    To manage your finances, Expensify is a helpful tool to manage your company expenses. This tool will make it easy to upload receipts track expenses on your credit card purchases.

     

    HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

    This is a helpful daily email that will let you establish yourself an authority in your industry. When you sign up with HARO as a source, you’ll specify your specialty and area of expertise, and journalists will contact you when they need your thoughts and insights for a story.

     

    Once you find the right productivity tools that work for you, you’ll get to focus more on running your startup business. So hopefully, this list will help you through.

  • Conversations on Social Media

    Conversations on Social Media

    Conversations on Social Media

    How do you craft your responses to mentions and replies on your social media that will encourage positive engagements and minimize conflict from your audience? Today’s post will be all about that – conversations on social media. When you interact with your followers, particularly when you’re answering their queries or handling their complaints, you will need to develop skills beyond the copywriting tips we tackled in the previous posts. You will need to have customer service skills in this matter.

    Here are two tips we want to share with you to make your conversations on social media successful.

     

    VARY YOUR REPLIES

    If your brand receives a lot of similar questions and responses from your followers, it can be very tempting to reply to all of them the same way to save time and effort. This is okay, but the problem is that it’s really obvious to everyone looking at your feed and it will make you look insincere. Sometimes, people might even assume that you are using automated bots and that there’s no human being behind your socials. The challenge of having to start from scratch every time is that it will consume a lot of your time and it will very likely have more typos, and sometimes you’re at risk of going off-message especially when you are handling complaints.

    One tried and tested solution for this is to keep your replies varied while also making them free from errors and making your replies quick.

    Here’s an example of what a brand might send regularly for queries or complaints: 

    Send us a DM with your six-digit order number and we’ll look into it.

    And here are some variation: 

    • Drop us a DM with your six-digit order number and we’ll look into it.
    • We’ll look into this for you. Just DM us your six-digit order number.
    • DM us with your six-digit order number and we’ll investigate.
    • Do you have a six-digit order number? Please DM it to us and we’ll investigate.
    • Let us look into this. Please send us your six-digit order number by DM.

    You can slightly vary the wording of your message while keeping the meaning the same. Take advantage of the internet and use an online thesaurus for help. Once you get the hang of the process, it will become easier to do and you’ll become quicker at it.

     

    Conversations on Social Media

     

    When you have your alternatives, you can pick and choose from them for your replies. Your variations can have more or less formal versions of the same message and you can just pick one that best matches the style used by your customer. 

    This is a quick and easy way to make your reply less robotic and more tailored. Another tip is to address your customers by their name. It’s a nice personal touch to include their name on your message and you can use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ or adding your first name or initials at the end of your message to make it more personalized.

    Example: Hi Kathy, send me a DM with your six-digit order number and I’ll look into it. – Renee

    These personal touches, no matter how small, reminds the customer you’re interacting with that you are human because sometimes people forget that businesses are also run by other people when they’re talking to them on social media.

     

    TAKE INSPIRATION FROM THE PROFESSIONALS

    JetBlue is an award-winning airline that’s recognized for its excellent customer service on social media. Every day, they receive thousands of DMs or mentions on their Twitter account, but despite this overflow, they still managed to respond to their customers with conversations that feel natural and organic. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to add value and connect with their audience, not just to respond to every tweet that comes their way.

    Browse through JetBlue’s Twitter replies feed to get inspiration on how they interact with their customers efficiently and effectively. 

     

    Responding to messages, comments, and tweets on social media, it’s important to take hold and improve your customer service skills. These interactions are as much about customer service as it is about copywriting. Vary your replies, add some personal touches, and learn tactics from successful brands to save yourself some writing time and to make your conversations on social media more effective.

    For more posts like this, check out our blog.