Part Two: Essential Software to Help You Run Your Business

So you’ve got a beautiful website, with stunning images which load like a dream and all of your copy optimised for SEO. Now you’re ready to see those sales rolling in. But sadly in a highly competitive market, a beautiful website alone just isn’t enough.

There are a huge number of tools to choose from out there – including email marketing tools, social media scheduling tools and sales tools.

Here we are going to share with you some of our favourite tools for scheduling your social media, sending out great customer emails and optimising your website, whether you are a brand new business or about to make your millionth sale.

We will share some of our other favourite software, including organisational tools to help run your business effectively and advertising and sales tools, in our other articles.

Your website looks great, but is it really doing its job? Your landing pages are key to making sales, building trust with your audience and boosting your ranking in searches. Landing pages should include a single message or promotion to make visitors really take notice. These tools will help you make the very best of your landing pages.

Having brilliant landing pages is really key to increasing your sales. Unbounce is an easy way to build landing pages that work for any campaign, with a simple drag-and-drop builder and no coding skills required.

Unbounce has over 100 templates to choose from – or you can create your own from scratch. And once you’ve created a page that you’re happy with, it’s easy to clone it or copy and paste to build additional pages.

Unbounce also helps you create eye-catching pop-ups with targeted offers to boost sales – and you decide how and when they are triggered.

The basic plan, priced at $79 per month, lets you build 75 landing pages and eight pop-ups. You can also try a 14 day free trial.

Adpage is useful for companies responsible for managing websites for clients. It is a solution for building landing pages when you have a lot to build and are working with a range of companies.

A good landing page really helps boost sales, and as a web developer, you need to be sure that a website will help your clients to make sales. Each landing page is optimised and tested for your target audience.

Adpage has fully customisable designs which allow you to create projects in a few minutes. And once you’ve created a page that works, it’s very easy to do it all over again in a few clicks.

Priced at $45 per month for the basic package, you can also try a free trial.

Whether you are looking for quick and easy design fixes for your website, you want to improve the look of your social media accounts or even go offline with some fliers, this range of easy-to-use design tools will give your brand the professional edge, without having to fork out for a designer to do it for you.

Canva is a popular and simple online tool that allows you to design something beautiful in minutes, using templates and images.

With over two million images and icons and thousands of templates, your designs will look far from generic. Canva isn’t just for web pages – use it to design posters, fliers and presentations too. It includes lots of time-saving features, whether you are a freelancer working alone or part of a team of hundreds of people.

Canva allows you to keep your brand consistent by storing colours, logos and fonts in your Brand Kit. Team templates and design folders mean your team can work together on designs, while saving time on duplication.

Canva Pro is priced at £10.99 per month and is available on a 30 day free trial. Canva also offers free subscriptions for not-for-profit companies.

RelayThat is a design automation app that can cut your workload. It can help you create and manage visual content for all your channels easily, with no technical skills at all.

From creating a unified and consistent look for your brand, to generating copy from your keywords and recommending colour and font combinations that work, RelayThat can do it for you. If you can’t find the perfect image, RelayThat has three million to choose from at no additional cost.

The basic ‘entrepreur’ package costs a one-off payment of $49. There is also an ‘agency and enterprise’ package with additional features.

With more and more businesses relying on video content to attract customers, InVideo is a versatile editor for creating quick and professional videos for your website. With InVideo, you can create a video in minutes, whether for your website, Facebook ads or simply for Instagram stories.

InVideo gives you a range of templates to choose from, or you can use your own. It is continually updating its features and provides 24/7 support.

The business package costs $10 per month, or you can use the basic package for free.

When you put so much hard work into your content, it is important to share on social media to reach a wider audience. Social media is a great way to build brand awareness and bring customers to your website. Regular posting to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is essential to get the best results, but if you’re not careful, posting to social media can become a full time job in itself.

Social media scheduling tools can make a real difference and give you the best of both worlds – regular social media posts and plenty of time to focus on your core business and making sales.

Buffer is an intuitive, easy to use social media scheduling tool. Post to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, all from one simple dashboard.

With Buffer, you create your own unique publishing schedule for each account, to make sure you reach the right people at exactly the right time to build your audience and grow your brand on social media. You can also reply to all social conversations and support requests from Twitter, Instagram and Faceook from one shared team inbox.

Buffer’s analytics and fully customised reports help you grow your reach and track your engagement and sales though social media.

Buffer has a basic free plan, which is great when you are starting out, which allows you to manage one Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile, with up to 10 updates scheduled. The Pro package for one user lets you run eight social media accounts and schedule up to 100 posts at a time, for $15 a month. The Premium package is suitable for growing brands and allows up to 2000 scheduled posts and two users. Pro is available on a free seven day trial and Premium is available on a 14 day free trial.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools. Use it to post to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest, to give you a social media presence 24/7. If you manage numerous social accounts and want to be able to engage directly with your followers, Hootsuite could be the tool for you.

Scheduling is slightly more complicated than with Buffer, so will take a bit longer to get to grips with. Hootsuite includes monitoring and analytics tools, so you can keep track of the effectiveness of your social media.

Hootsuite has a free plan, then a range of paid packages, starting at £25 per month for 10 social profiles and one user, through to a £520 per month business plan for 35 social profiles and five users. Free 30 day trials are available on the professional and team packages.

SocialPilot is a social media scheduling tool to manage social media, improve engagement and analyse results. It can be used to schedule Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram posts, at a time when your followers are most active.

SocialPilot includes a calendar so you can clearly see your schedule for the day, week or month. You can also easily re-share evergreen posts through the calendar. SocialPilot can easily be integrated with Canva to create beautiful posts that stand out and get more engagement.

Analytics tools help you see what sort of content works best, know your audience are and find the best time to post.

The basic ‘professional’ package costs $25 per month and includes scheduling for up to 25 social media accounts and three team members. The most popular package – ‘small team’ includes 50 social media accounts and five team members. All packages are available on a 14 day free trial.

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool, which describes itself as ‘social media on auto-pilot’.

It gives you the option to upload posts manually for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn or to set up an RSS feed to automatically import blogposts and articles. With MeetEdgar you set your own schedule of what you want to post when – such as motivational quotes on Mondays and conversation starters on Fridays - and it does the work for you.

MeetEdgar gives you access to a library of text, images and video for your content and unlimited categories to organise your social media posts.

MeetEdgar has one standard price package of $49 per month for all of its features, with an introductory offer of $29 per month for the first four months.

SocialBee is a social media scheduling tool, which allows you to share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. With SocialBee, content can be placed into categories to save time when creating posts and to give you the best mix of content across all of your social media profiles.

It gives you the option to post your evergreen content again and again, without needing to craft new posts.

With SocialBee, Instagram posts rely on the user having either Buffer or Hootsuite, while Pinterest posts through SocialBee need Hootsuite.

The basic ‘bootstrap’ package, best for freelancers, for up to five profiles and 10 categories is $19 per month, while the ‘accelerate’ package for small businesses with 10 profiles and 50 categories is $39 per month. All packages come with a 14 day free trial.

Although it has slightly more features than Buffer, SocialBee is a bit more expensive, so it is worth considering which features you really need.

Most customers and potential customers trust email more than any other form of contact from a business. So it is important to get it right! There are a range of tools out there to help you stay in touch with people regularly by email – and to make sure you are sending them the content they are interested in.

Mailchimp is a popular tool for emailing customers and subscribers. It helps businesses find new customers and build stronger relationships with them.

A big advantage of Mailchimp is its free package – for businesses sending less than 12,000 emails a month or with less than 2,000 subscribers.

Mailchimp offers email subject line testing, so you can be sure you are targeting your emails in just the right way, plus templates and tips on creating your email.

If you need to move to a paid plan, packages start at $9.99 per month, moving to $14.99 per month for growing businesses.

Constant Contact is an email marketing tool which is a good choice for businesses with a bigger subscriber list than MailChimp users.

Mobile-optimised templates and a drag-and-drop editor make it easy to create, customise and send professional emails with no coding skills required.

Constant Contact users get good support, online training and access to webinairs to maximise their success.

Pricing is based on number of contacts – at £15 per month for the email package and £30 for the email plus package. Reduced pricing is available for not-for-profit organisations and the first month is free on either package.

If you need to contact someone who isn’t already on your email address list, Hunter is a useful tool.

To quickly search for an email address, type the company’s domain into Hunter and it will find the address pattern for you. It also includes a confidence rating to let you know how likely it is to be right.

With Hunter you can request up to 50 email addresses for free per month. If you want to request up to 1000 email addresses a month, it is priced at €49 per month.

Want to search for leads on LinkedIn? AeroLeads is business to business lead generation software, which provides a Google Chrome plugin to help you search LinkedIn and other networks for leads.

It will help you find business email addresses, job titles and phone numbers of the people you want to get in touch with, so that you can make contact directly for marketing, sales and recruitment.

Voila Norbert is another tool to help you find business email addresses, including searching for addresses in bulk. It has an accurate and up-to-date database of B2B contacts, whether your priority is sales, recruitment or tracking down the right reporters for a PR campaign.

Voila Norbert integrates with a wide range of CRM software, making it easy to keep track of your lead generation work.

You can search for 50 emails for free, once you create an account. The basic package is priced at $49 per month, for up to 1000 leads per month and access by unlimited team members.

OutreachPlus is a multi-purpose lead generation tool, which lets you create and send personalised emails, but with the advantage of automation.

Creating personalised emails can reduce your number of unsubscribers, get you more positive replies and increase sales. It helps you send the right email at the right time to your prospects, with the help of split testing to increase opens and clicks.

OutreachPlus has a free package for users with a single email account and a database of up to 100 contacts. It has three paid packages, starting at $18 per month for a database of 1000 and a monthly email limit of 1000. A free trial is available.

There is a range of tools available to help you turn contacts into leads and sales, whatever the size of your business and whatever your target market. These tools are often automated and do the work for you, leaving you plenty of time to focus on running your business and making sales.

For tech businesses, Datanyze is a useful tool for finding out what technology your target customers are already using – meaning you can target them with the right products.

It monitors the web and mobile technology choices of over 35 million companies, to help you find and reach your best prospects when they are looking to buy. Datanyze can alert you when a key account has added or dropped a piece of technology.

Once you’ve identified the accounts you are interested in targeting, Datanyze can help you find the right contact and email address.

Datanyze will provide you with a free technographic analysis to help you build your ideal customer profile. Other packages are bespoke to a team’s needs and priced accordingly.

D & B Hoovers is another tool for businessto business companies. It claims to be the world’s biggest commercial database,with more than 120 million business records, which makes it a very useful toolfor building targeted lists of new prospects.

Hoovers includes company information, soyou can be sure you are sending the right information to the right people,helping you turn more of your prospects into potential sales.

Business and industry updates mean yoursales team can monitor prospects, tailor their pitches and act when the time isright.

A free trial is available. Currentlyinformation on pricing seems to be hard to find!

There are times when you might miss out on great leads just because you don’t know who has visited your site. Lead Forensics aims to solve that problem by getting the contact details of anonymous visitors in real-time, so you don’t miss out.

It also gives you the option to rate these visitors, so you can spend your time targeting those who are most likely to buy from you. Defining your own criteria of a top lead will trigger a report to make sure you can act fast to make a sale.

Pricing is tailored to the individual company, following a free trial in which Lead Forensics monitors the traffic and business opportunities to your site.

If you know which market you want to target, Growbots is a great tool for business to business companies to track down prospects from a database of over 200 million contacts.

With Growbots, you can build your own tailored list of potential customers, making sure you reach the real decision makers within a company. From there, you can send personalised emails and schedule automatic follow-ups.

Growbots also allows you to test different elements of your campaign, from the email template to the time you send your emails, to see what works best for you. Monitoring reports include open rates and click-through rates to help you identify what works well, so you can replicate campaigns for the future.

Growbots’ pricing is available on demand.

Prospect.io helps you find and verify emails for the people you want to get in touch with. Information is added automatically into your own CRM (customer relationship management system), with no need for data entry.

Its Drip Campaign feature allows you to set up a series of emails, including automatic follow-ups. Emails can be sent through Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange or your own server.

Prospect.io will track email opens, clicks on links and replies.

Its package for small and medium sized companies, which includes unlimited prospect lists, campaigns and emails is priced at €35 per month, with a 30 day money back guarantee.

Albacross is a sales intelligence software that helps businesses learn more about their anonymous website visitors and convert them into leads.

This software is well-suited for those who want to be very proactive with their lead generation and sales efforts.

As soon as you identify a potential lead, you need to add quickly and use all the data provided by Albacross to personalize your messaging to them and increase your chances of converting your prospects into customers.

With Albacross, you can nurture leads that have been on the particular web page and fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). Based on their relevance and behavior on your website, you can send those leads to numerous CRM systems via its Zapier integration.

Your leads can be automatically added to any number of outreach tools. This will enable your sales team to close more deals with less work.