As a small business owner, having a digital toolkit to help run your business will not only give you back some time but will ensure that your business looks and runs like a successful business.  These beauties are Connect Plus must-have tools, we just couldn’t successfully run our business without them in fact!

These are our top five favourites mother’s little helpers (gin excluded):

1. SproutSocial – Sprout Social is our go-to platform to manage our digital marketing effortlessly and effectively. From analytics to creating content for various social media platforms, including your google analytics, Sprout Social will be a game changer for your business.
2. MailChimp – A simply fantastic email marketing tool. Free for up to 2,000 subscribers. A total steal and links seamlessly to Google Analytics – I’m in seventh heaven – and don’t get me started on the fabulous data available! When they released automation to free accounts it was a game changer.
3. Survey Monkey –Create online surveys and analyse the feedback.  We use a payment plan version for more intense data but their free version would do the trick for a small business owner.
4. Canva – Designer social graphics for free are at your fingertips with this great little design tool. If you can get your favourite branding guru (we swear by Blackdog Design) to design base graphics and then use Canva you will take your social media pages to a whole new (on-brand) level.
5. Xero – who knew accounting could be fun (ok so that might be pushing it but Xero makes booking keeping fun-ish). The NZ based company is going from strength to strength and it’s easy to see why with their easy to use cloud-based accounting packages.

If you are looking for chrome extensions for your business our top three are - Grammarly (schedule emails and never make a spelling mistake or grammatical error again!), Boomerang (email follow-up with ease) and Rapportive (Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox - a great tool to increase your LinkedIn connections).

Cloud-based digital tools are providing a golden age for small businesses with tools that have previously been out of the reach of the small business owner now are accessible through easier to manage cost structures. If you aren’t already using some of these tools check them out and let us know what you think. And if you have other great digital tools we would love to hear about them.