Danielle MacInnis – Marketing Blog for Small Businesses

This is a guest post by Jane Johnson

Put your smartphone to work in your small business 

Business apps are the next wave of small-business innovation—small businesses depend on agility and responsiveness to stay competitive, and that’s why working efficiently from your smartphone can be such an important boost. If they don’t seem that significant, keep reading; these are the apps that will change the way you do business in 2012.

1. Square (Free – for Android, iPhone)

If you’ve been a small business owner for a while, you know how hard it can be to find a secure, reliable, and inexpensive method for accepting payments. You can take cash or checks (an impossibility for e-business), you could buy a pricey external card swiper, or you could pay a substantial fee to use PayPal. Square allows you to accept Visa, American Express, MasterCard, and Discover using a free card reader that plugs into your iPhone. Square provides the app and reader free, and charges a 2.75% fee from each transaction, so it’s cheaper and quicker than PayPal or an external swiper. The app comes with analytic software to track sales, tips, and tax.

1. Dropbox (Free for 2.25 GB of storage, with a monthly subscription – for Android, iPhone)

Dropbox allows you to share a single folder structure between any number of computers and mobile devices. You can choose who gets to see which folders, so you can securely share and collaborate with employees, partners, or clients. Dropbox really shines in the smartphone version—if a client or employee needs your input while you’re away from the office, you can access your shared folders from the dentist’s office. A word of warning—because it keeps your files in constant sync, you should probably turn it off when you’re not using it, unless you and your employees have unlimited data in your phone plans. It’s cheap, fast, and easy to bring your employees up to speed.

1. Dragon Dictation (Free – for iPhone)

The biggest obstacle to turning your smartphone into a powerful small-business tool is the clumsy virtual keyboard, and there’s no obvious way to improve them, but voice-recognition and dictation software has become surprisingly accurate and powerful. Any task that requires you to produce a lot of text is easier to dictate than to type, and Dragon is the most popular and well-supported free option on the market. Similar apps are available for Android, and you can find more expensive professional options for both Android and iPhone, but the performance isn’t noticeably different.

1. RDM+ Remote Desktop Management  ($9.70 AUD – for Android)

RDM+ allows you to remotely access your home or office computer from your smartphone, enabling you to do pretty much everything you can do at work, as long as you find a way around the limitations of your smartphone keyboard. This app is more expensive than the other apps we’ve recommended, but if you or your employees travel frequently or spend a lot of time away from your desks, RDM+ might allow you to get more work done from your phone than you do in the office.

1. Skype Mobile (Free – for Android, iPhone)

If your business requires you to make a lot of internal or international calls, Skype Mobile can potentially save you a lot of money. Skype provides free, unlimited voice and video chat between Skype users—so if you and all your partners and employees get the app, all your internal communications are now free. Skype Mobile also provides video functionality, so you can provide a personal, direct touch with far-off clients.

Bio: Jane Johnson is a writer for GoingCellular, a popular site that provides cell phone related news, commentary, reviews on popular providers like T-Mobile.

Here is the presentation I gave yesterday to a group of small businesses. This was all about using some low cost marketing tools to generate leads. Tools included:

Email Marketing

Form and Lead Capture

SEO tools

Social Media

Here is the list of low cost marketing apps and tools I have collected that you might find useful.

Enjoy!

My next seminar is 3rd of October in Melbourne. To find out more go here!

Too many small businesses put marketing in the too hard basket. Worse still they take a passive approach and believe that if they just keep doing a good job the referrals will fuel their business growth! When times are good this might just work, but waiting for the phone to ring rarely works.

As a small business consultant, I work with many small businesses that for so long have either had a random approach to their marketing effort, where they don’t know what actually worked, or they have gone for the silver bullet and put all their resources into Internet advertising. Neither approach works. The funny thing is that a simple organised approach to marketing is the best and most effective and it doesn’t have to cost the earth or be too time consuming.

I have developed an online free system for small businesses to get a jump-start on their marketing. I am happy to give away this system for a limited time to help me gather feedback before I make it a paid online resource. As I see it, it is a win-win for both parties. The small business owner gets some tools, templates and resources to help create a simple marketing approach and I get feedback on how to make the system even more effective. Go to The Simple Marketing System to download your free tools today!

Tracey Voyce is all about educating business owners about getting real results online. In my podcast with Tracey she covers the following areas about being successful online.

First I asked Tracey what Bloomtools mission is?

“ Bloomtools is about working with the small business and what they want to achieve online. Your website should be accessible, and you should have a strategy behind your web presence so you get some results.” Tracey said.

Tracey shared with us some of her tips for building a successful online presence. She called it the P’s of a web presence/ online presence.

1. Purpose: What is the purpose? It is no longer just about lead generation. How can I get my existing clients buying more etc.

2.Promotion:How are you going to get people to visit? What tools are you going to use.

3. Persuasion: What do you want your ideal customer to do when they visit? You want your visitors to take action. They need to know who you are what you do and what is the next step? Call, fill out form, download etc

4. Presence online: Build the relationship.

Website building – Tracey shares her advice

1. Find someone that will work on the strategy so you know that the site is going to work and get results.

2. Look for tools that will work with the site as your business grows. You need a system that has the flexibility to grow with you.

3. Understand how much work is involved in choosing updating and maintaining your site, ie WordPress(needs some IT background to maintain) vs  Bloomtools (more manageable for small businesses and less hands on).

4. Small businesses now can leverage CRM, Database marketing, SEO and content management system.

How to Build a website for engagement with Bloomtools?

Tracey explained the process of building and online presence with Bloomtools.

1. Initial consultation – understand where you are and where you need to go. What do you need and what is your budget.

2. Creative brief – then the designers can come up with three unique designs

3. Final Design – is produced

4. Populate site with your content. Optimise pages in your site for SEO

This whole process can be as quick of 4-6 weeks from start to finish.

Bloomtools have a free trial version.

Small businesses often don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing activities, so here are my top 10 suggestions for stretching that budget to get the best ROI. Most are free!

1. Use a word press platform for your website. Why? Because it is free, and it is already search engine friendly. Over 4000 visitors have been to my blog and it has cost me nothing but the time to learn how to use the tool and the time to update it.

2. Install Skype to connect with people all over the world. This helps grow your business (especially if it is serviced based beyond your immediate geography.)

3. Use a tool like Snagit to grab screen images to brighten up your web, blog or visual presentations.

4.Jing is a free software that allows you to record your voice and screen and is great for presentations or podcasts with a visual element.

5. Invest in a database capture system. I am using Microsoft small business CRM that comes with 1 user licence but for others you can even use a excel sheet to start with columns for customer content. Just put it somewhere!

5. Autoresponders. These are tools that allow you to send automated emails to customers. Great tools to build a training program with or touch base with a regular newsletter to customers. I use Aweber but there are heaps out there.

6. You need a survey tool so you can do forms and run surveys. I have tried them all but I think Wufoo is the best. Best reports, easy to use, more flexible and great design.  

7. Vistaprint is a great site to design your business cards, brochures and invitations. It is quick, pretty cheap and easy to use. It also keeps a record of all your creations so you can quickly update or make changes and then get more printed!

8.PRwire is a great tool for doing your own PR. It is free and you can set up your company’s profile quickly and then email blast your release to the relevant media in a short space of time. Also, it works!

9.Use the web. It is great for research. Google yourself and you might be surprised what you find. Or use Bing, another great search engine. There are so many free resources out there!

10. Networking is a big part of marketing and more than ever before you can network effectively from your study or home office. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs. There are so many forums to gather information, test an idea or build a network of possible collaborators and again it is free!

So there you go, my top 10 tools, get going! Another article I did on customer insight has some other good ideas that cost you little and can also help your marketing.