Best Online Tools All Local Businesses Should Use

In the past few years, local businesses and retailers in the United States have not been doing well.

We have seen the slow death of iconic retailers like Toys R Us, Shopko, and Sears.

Other retailers like Bed, Bath Beyond and JC Penny are making significant losses.

The untold situation is that many small mom-and-pop stores have been closing at the fastest rate in a decade.

 There are several reasons for this but the main one is Amazon and online shopping. It is a must have strategy to broaden up your customers, especially if you have a store of luxury shopping in Scottsdale, US. 

In the past 20 years, Amazon has grown from an obscure online bookseller to the biggest retailer in the world.

The company has changed the world. In this article, we will look at the tools small companies must have to succeed today.

A Website

Most Americans are spending a substantial amount of their time on the internet. They are either watching Netflix movies, shopping on Amazon, or chatting with friends.

Studies show that most people have the tendency to researching products online before they buy them. Therefore, all local businesses need to have a working website.

This website will help them be found online by internet users. A website with e-commerce capabilities will enable them to sell products directly to their users.

While many small businesses have a working website, most of them are not getting the maximum benefits.

This is partly because the potential users are not finding them online. Alternatively, most of them are paying big bucks to search companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure that they appear high.

Therefore, local companies should invest in quality search engine optimization by contracting a good SEO company.

Ideally, a good website for a local business should have the following features:

• It needs to be fast
• It should be safe
• Optimized for mobile searching
• It should be simple and easy to navigate
• It should be informational
• Having a shopping cart is an added advantage

Social Media

Social media is changing how Americans interact.

Today, companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have millions of users in the country. Most young people are spending hours on social media.

As a result, many small companies have managed to win so many customers by investing a lot of their time in social media. Therefore, as a small local company, it is very important to ensure that you are available where the people are.

There are several benefits to investing in social media.

First, it will help you reach more customers.

Second, it will help you save on customer acquisition costs.

Third, it will help you establish a good brand on the internet.

Here are a few tips for using social media effectively:

• Create good content
• Offer promotions to lure in customers.
• Look for the best time to post content.
• Reply to all comments.

Customer Relations Management (CRM)

Customer relations is an essential tool for all businesses.

Local businesses should invest a considerable amount of resources in customer relations.

Fortunately, there are several affordable tools that will help you with this. Tools like Salesforce and Zendesk will help you reply and communicate with your customers well.

They will help you reply to messages as soon as possible. Fortunately, most of these tools are usually free for small companies.

Here are some of the best platforms to use:

• Zendesk – For customer care.
• Sendgrid – For email marketing.
• Hootsuite – For social media scheduling

Other Tools
There are other email marketing tools that small businesses can use to outreach and take advantage of the changing business environment.

Some of these tools are:

• Square – For payment processing.
• Dropbox – For cloud storage.
• Shopify – For e-commerce website creation

The world of small businesses will continue to be disrupted by many unprofitable Silicon Valley companies.

Many will go bankrupt or remain unprofitable for a long time.

The secret is to adapt to the new era and use essential tools like those mentioned above.

Author: Ravi Verma

He is a digital marketer and creator of Freaky SEO. He enjoys working with words, numbers and the complexities of search engines and their working. You can connect with him on Linkedin or tweet @ digitalverma. Do you have excellent ideas to share with netizens? Come write for us.