Our Top 5 Platforms To Elevate Your Business

June 8, 2021Aleanis Ramos

Entrepreneurship is full of challenges and opportunities. Even if starting your own business is not an easy task, driven entrepreneurs make wonderful things happen through passion and hard work. In addition to a great idea, you need perseverance, planning, and organization. Fortunately for you, we live in the digital age, where technology makes life easier and offers very useful platforms for those who are starting a business.
Whether you’ve just started to develop your idea or already have a well-established startup, you can take advantage of the following online tools designed to help you improve organization and productivity in your work routines. All with just a couple of clicks!

1. Trello

Trello is one of the simplest and most intuitive project management platforms. It is configured as a board where you can organize projects in lists. Each list has cards with the ideas, tasks, or elements that make up your project. Imagine a cork box, in digital format, in which you place and organize virtual post-its.
In each card you can add all of the relevant content to the task: add comments, upload files from your computer or services such as Google Drive, create checklists, set an expiration date, among others. You can use this software for free in your browser or download the application for mobile devices.
In our program, Perspectivas Globales, we use the Trello platform. As a work team, we serve different administrative areas and projects, this platform makes it easier for us as a team to stay connected, organized and synchronized. Being able to put your objectives and goals in a platform, being able to visualize them graphically and categorized, increases your productivity and performance.

2. Canva

Canva is the ideal platform for creating magnificent images in a few seconds without the need for technical or vast marketing knowledge. Its interface is designed as a website builder, with WYSIWYG software which stands for “What You See Is What You Get”.
The best feature of this type of software is the “drag and drop” function, with which you can select an element and add it to the image only by clicking and dragging it to where you want to place it. You can add items like text, photos, graphics, icons, grids, shapes, and even upload your images, like your logo, for example.
In Canva you have at your disposal different templates that allow you to create high-quality visual content such as infographics, presentations, images for social networks, invitations, banners, and much more. Fact: The free version of Canva is extremely broad and comprehensive, which allows for complete marketing with this version.
In our program, Perspectivas Globales, we use the Canva platform and it has helped all of our interns be better at what they do. This platform allows us to manage our marketing area simultaneously since this platform allows you to create work teams. Through the Canva team, different team members can execute, verify, and approve designs to be published, and we keep that group feedback for future occasions.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform with features to help with planning, scheduling, and syndicating social posts. Key features include automatic scheduling, social media monitoring, performance reporting, basic task management, and more.
Hootsuite can save you time with your social media marketing. Instead of logging into each network and posting there one at a time, you can manage Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest all from one place. Its streams feature can help you stay on top of relevant conversations as they’re happening. Again, you can monitor conversions on different networks from a single dashboard. Hootsuite also has a helpful analytics feature for in-depth social media performance reporting. If you run an agency, you know that reporting the ROI of social media can be tricky. Hootsuite’s analytics feature helps you show off your deliverables in easy-to-understand formats.
Hootsuite offers different plans, including the free plan or the professional plan, which we highly encourage our readers to check out. Being able to program the content of social networks of your business encourages better time management and dedication to the marketing area, facilitating this process and ensuring the activity and interactivity of social media, as we do in Perspectivas Globales.

4. Gmail Professional

Gmail Professional is made up of a series of applications designed to increase the productivity and efficiency of companies of any size. It is a communication, organization, and storage platform. In addition to allowing you to use Gmail email with your domain name provides you with solutions to manage your agenda, documents, forms, and more
Some of the applications that are included in the Gmail Professional package, in addition to email with 30 GB of storage, are the following:
  • Hangouts: Stay in touch with your team through this service for voice calls, text chat, and video conferencing. One of the main advantages is that you can make presentations by sharing your screen with up to 15 people.
  • Calendar: Efficiently organize your time with your online agenda integrated with that of your team. You can check the availability of people to organize meetings quickly.
  • Google Docs: Create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to share with your team and work collaboratively.
  • Google Drive: Save your files in the cloud to access them from any device, keep them safe and share them with your team.
In addition to all these services, Gmail Professional allows access to the applications from anywhere, through your computer, smartphone, or tablet. Gmail Professional plans start as low as $6.00 per user per month for Business Starter, $12.00 per user per month for Business Standard, and $18.00 per user per month for Business Plus. The most popular plan is Business Standard, which includes: custom and secure business email, 150 participant video meetings + recording, 2 TB cloud storage per user, security and management controls, and standard support, which is the standard need for entrepreneurs. However, if you need more than that, consult the Google page and find the best plan that suits your company.
Having a platform that allows you to have everything in one place, optimizes operations and the time invested in them. It is important to document and store important information about our business and keep operations connected for better internal management. When we start a business idea… we don’t spend money, we invest in future profits.

5. FreshBooks

Freshbooks is a cloud accounting software specially designed for entrepreneurs and freelancers. With it, you can manage your business accounting without having to be an expert on the subject.
The purpose of this online platform is to offer a complete solution for you to keep track of business expenses and send invoices to your clients. You can create invoices, track expenses, send follow-up emails, and manage sales taxes. In addition, financial reports can be generated, essential to obtain information on how your business is doing and how it can grow.
The platform also allows you to automate various tasks such as organizational expenses and follow-up time in the collection process. This will allow you to spend less time on these activities and invest the surplus in serving your customers and formulating new strategies.

Choose yours wisely!

We hope these online platforms help you take your business to heights. What did you think of these platforms? Do you already use any in your business?  If you want to elevate your business, even more, take a look at How To Set & Achieve Goals For Your Business In 6 Steps and How to Develop your Brand’s Mission, Vision, and Values.

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