3 great tools to help you start your business
By Contributing Author
There are many types of businesses and depending on the industry your business is setting up, there will be different tips that apply to your target market. For example, a B2B business is going to be slightly different to a B2C business, a law firm different from a construction firm, but even so, there are always generic business tips that apply to all businesses no matter the environment!
Below we give you some tips that provide you with 3 great tools to help you start your business!
A Tool To Create Your Brand’s Logo
Branded logos make your business name clear but in a visual and often artistic way. The art often being a key to making your business name and who your business is sticks in the minds of your customers. A logo can also represent your firm’s vision or ambitions.
Furthermore, it differentiates your brand/business from your competitors, which is often key to fostering brand loyalty. Once you commit to your logo, your entire business’s mission, vision, values, and beliefs are all embedded into that logo.
Consequently, a well-designed logo speaks volumes for your business. It will turn up on your business cards, email signatures, invoices, advertising, website, and maybe even on the door or windows of your office location.
While all this may sound a little overwhelming, and one heck of a task to fit all that information into something as small as a logo, what that logo means is larger than ever. So as a small business start-up on a budget, how can you create that perfect all encompassing logo without paying thousands of dollars to a design firm?
Luckily there are tools out there that can help you, and today one of the most popular logo makers out there is the Wix logo maker. You can play around with a variety of logo ideas, wireframe them into your website, letterhead designs, and business card designs until you all agree on the perfect brand logo!
Website Builders
As with logo design, website design no longer needs to be an expensive and time-consuming activity dealing with web designers that may quote sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to create a custom-built website.
The thing is, there are so many website builders out there that the market is now becoming increasingly specialised. When the first website builders hit the World Wide Web, they were generally simple business pages with contact details or blog style sites that limited you to a few blocks of text, an image, and maybe a video on a few service pages. The rest of the sales work still required meetings, tele-sales, and manual bank transfers.
Companies that design website builder platforms have realised the increasing trend for businesses to open more niche specific products and services within their market environments, and so website builders are narrowing their markets too.
For instance, a travel company may have been able to use a one size fits all hotel booking website. Nonetheless, the travel industry is always changing. Now we have vacation rentals, luxury gold tours, diving tours, cabin adventures, home share accommodation, motel, and even accommodation websites that specialise in bed-and-breakfast only. And each one has its unique set of tools required to show off to their potential customers the specifics of what their accommodation types offer.
The same can be said in insurance, finance, sports, health, marketing, and even the website builder companies themselves.
Now the beauty of this is website builders like Wix have spent millions researching each niche, what it needs, and how it can create add-ons and website themes to offer each niche market the tools they need to operate. And to sweeten the deal, you’ll pay less than 25% of the cost of having a web developer create these sites for you and have a website that arguably does more than a custom built site would do.
With all this comes 24 hours support, a mobile site with no maintenance fees (something you would need to pay a custom web development company), and when technology changes, there is a team of IT tech experts making the changes to the template you chose to your website so your website just continues to operate without disruption!
Google Analytics
The very last tool you need if you are going to run an online business is an analytics tool that tells you how many people are visiting your website and the pages they interact with.
Google Analytics is free and a powerful tool. You can track conversions which tells you when someone makes a purchase. You can see how long people read your content to gauge whether the content is engaging or needs changing, and you can track goals. Successful goals would be someone clicking on your live chat, clicking on the ‘call now’ option, sending an email, or signing up to your newsletter.
There is a catch. While creating a logo and choosing a website builder are relatively straight forward, Google Analytics can become quite complex. However, we really do recommend taking the time to learn it or hire an expert to help you. If you happen to have enough time on your hands to learn this powerful tool, then check out Google’s free analytics lessons here at the Google Analytics Academy.
