6 Ways We Utilize *Mostly* Free Tools As a Small Business Serving Small Businesses.
Free tools are an essential part to helping grow a small business. When using free tools and software, they don’t always work the way you want. Some “free” tools will make you upgrade after using them a couple times. Some free software can be glitchy or just limited, and doesn’t work the way you need it too.
We at Pixel Loon use free tools daily to help grow your brand along with ours. In this blog post, we’re sharing how we utilize free tools and what we generally recommend clients spend their money on. It’s important to note that each business is different - has different goals, target markets, etc, so what might be a good place to invest money for one business, may not be the best choice for another. We are always happy to consult, help with set-up and templates, or just manage it all for you.
Our 6 Go-to Mostly-Free Tools for Brand Management
1. Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Slides, etc.)
Google Sheets is something we use to organize our Editorial or Content Calendars. It includes all of our posts for social media, email campaigns, and blog posts. These are easily shared among team members for easy planning and collaboration. There are many paid tools that will make planning easier for you (see Canva below) but this is something we are content to save money on, appreciating it’s ease of use and visual organization.
We also utilize Drive for easy sharing among team members, Calendar for scheduling (and sometimes content planning), and Slides for some client proposals and other presentations.
2. Trello
We love Trello for helping to keep projects straight and our team organized. As businesses grow and people’s task lists get longer and longer, it’s a lifesaver having boards that help you prioritize, delegate and keep track of where projects are at.
The pictures above show two examples of boards that we find helpful. The first is to track our project progress. It lays out projects that are on the back burner, what’s on deck, what’s in progress, projects that are finished and invoiced, and what’s been paid. This helps us to not overextend, manage our time wisely, and follow up on any outstanding work. We can assign projects, attach documents and make notes all in one place.
The second is a board to help organize individual team members’ tasks. Each team member has a list of their projects and can make to-do lists for each inside of the card. This is a great tool for a manager to prioritize projects and tasks for people, and for team members to break down tasks into steps that make sense to them.
There are paid versions of Trello, but the free one works for our needs.
3. Facebook Business Suite
Facebook Business Suite is essential if you want to manage an Instagram and Facebook presence for free. With Facebook Business Suite, you can post to both Facebook and Instagram at the same time. You can also schedule separate posts to include things like hashtags for Instagram or adapt your graphics and messaging for each platform. This free tool is run through a Facebook Business profile and allows us to schedule future posts. Another cool part about this tool is you can schedule Facebook and Instagram stories as well. There are other Facebook and Instagram (and other platforms) scheduling tools out there like Hootsuite, Planoly, Later, etc. but their free versions are limited and sometimes don’t let you schedule multiple photos or videos.
Reach, engagement, reactions/likes, comments, and the number of shares is shown for each post. This free tool offers a lot more than some of the previous publishing tools we have used in the past. We highly recommend using Facebook Business Suite if you like to schedule your posts ahead of time.
4. Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that has templates and tools for everything from social media (size optimized) to other marketing collateral, videos, presentations, worksheets, etc. They seriously have something for just about anything you could need. We use Canva for a majority of our Instagram and Facebook posts simply for the ease of use, quickness, and ability to collaborate. It’s also all online so all those graphics and documents are taking up your computer storage.
Canva has a free option that has a lot of awesome templates, photos, and graphics. We have used the free version for a long time but finally decided to upgrade to grab the advanced tools (hello super easy background remover tool) and collaboration/team capabilities. The costs of Canva Pro is $9.99 a month for one team member and then $4.99 a month for each additional member. The Pro version is definitely not necessary for a small business but since we manage many brands' social media, we wanted to have more variety in our posts.
5. Adobe Creative Cloud (Paid Tool)
Adobe Creative Cloud is a “collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more” (Adobe.com). It includes some of our design favorites like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Rush. While quite pricey at $359.88 per year for an individual plan (40% off right now), the Creative Cloud allows you to create anything. Our go to tools are Illustrator and Lightroom. We create our unique logos through Illustrator and edit our photography using Lightroom.
While unnecessary for many brands, if you have working knowledge with Adobe software it can be a great tool to create unique branding. It’s also an important thing to consider in investing in either an in-house design and marketing team, or bringing on a contracted crew like Pixel Loon. We eat that cost so you don’t have to.
And our last but favorite…
6. Spotify
Yup, that’s right. We operate at our best when the jams are rolling. There’s nothing like a favorite song, or discovering something new and amazing, to spark some creative, positive energy. When we need some good insight, want to learn something, or need a good laugh, podcasts are calling our name. Spotify has a free version that allows you to listen to podcasts and all their music when using it on your computer or laptop. This is something that is always on while working.
Be sure to give us a follow on Instagram and check our stories out from time to time as our team shares some of their favorite bands and podcasts with you!
Your Turn
What tools do you use to help with your business? What are we missing? Let us know in the comments below or leave us a DM. We love to chat to small business owners!