15 Best Online Business Tools That Will Accelerate the Growth of Your Business

Understanding the secrets of growth in business is the beginning of success. Small businesses and startups aim to sore to greater heights by taking advantage of the most common elements of today's world: technology.

Successful businesses keep abreast with the digital world and remain in sync with technological innovators. As a tech-savvy business owner or leader, you don't have to move mountains or break down walls in order to ensure your business thrives – you just have to use the best online business tools.

In fact, it’s amazing how using the right tools for business can make a difference. Below you'll find a list with tools used by entrepreneurs and teams for customer service, communication, accounting, project management, and more.

15 online business tools to consider

1. Acquire.io

Acquire is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that helps you enhance customer experience. Through the platform, your customer-facing teams can handle a higher volume of requests and customer queries, as well as have better sales conversations, quicker and more effectively.

What can this tool do for you?

Talking to customers about the right product or service at the right time is key for online business growth. For example, Acquire's conversational sales chatbot helps your team by drawing website visitors in and gathering information. This helps you to save time and resources and eventually have more targeted and relevant sales conversations.

Also, Acquire can boost customer support and make sure your customers stay with you. With pro-engagement features like cobrowse and live chat, your customer support team is better positioned to resolve customer requests. Acquire's tools for building knowledge base and support chatbots are also an asset to your customer support operations.

2. Bit.ai

Documents these days need to be more flexible and multidimensional than ever before. And, as the information around us keeps growing, we need more powerful tools that can adapt to our needs.

Bit.ai is an all-in-one document collaboration platform that offers a smart editor for creating interactive live docs – a robust content library and document tracking that allows sales and marketing teams to see how people interact with their documents after they are shared.

What can this tool do for you?

Bit documents are built for teamwork and collaboration. Considering over 75 percent of employers rate these two factors as “very important”, it makes sense to invest in business tools that supports them.

With Bit, multiple people can collaborate simultaneously, creating a smart document in real-time. It’s a wonderful way to manage projects, create proposals, share meeting agendas, generate client-facing material, brainstorm ideas, and more. Bit’s smart editor makes the process of documentation and content creation quick and easy, too.

3. ZipBooks

Do you have a hard time reconciling your financial records? You're not alone. Many business owners and operators share this experience; dealing with large numbers can be hard. And that's where business tools like ZipBooks come in. ZibBooks is a free accounting software that takes care of every number-related need in your business.

Reliable for fine-tuning checks and balances, its intelligence-driven software takes it up a notch by providing insights on performance to guide your interactions with customers.

What can this tool do for you?

Human errors are inevitable. Checks and balances are too delicate to be totally left in the hands of employees.

Businesses are unable to stand the test of time when tracking expenditures, revenue and profit becomes a problem. With ZipBooks' automated bookkeeping, you can make sure that recurring expenses, accounts payable and other financial transactions are recorded properly.

4. Basecamp

You would not be mistaken if you referred to Basecamp as an online “organizer” as it basically helps you put your office in order. Basecamp creates an opportunity for team members to work closely, executing both individual and group tasks without unnecessary hassles. It is indeed a vital tool as research shows that being organized at workplace increases productivity.

What can this tool do for you?

Effective communication enhances performance. When you inform team members about what they are expected to do and provide all the resources needed, they are most likely to deliver great results. Basecamp builds strong communication ties between team members by facilitating instant communication.

Big on delegation, it allows you to assign tasks to the most suitable team members based on their expertise. Employees are motivated to excel in their areas of specialization. Other team members are not left in the dark about the progress of projects as they are kept in the loop, and can follow the conversations – this creates room for learning, and promotes team spirit.

5. Todoist

As an entrepreneur, you might often have a ton of things to do – and 24 hours in a day may not seem like enough. So, how do you make the most of your time? Business tools that help you organize your tasks can resolve many of your time issues. Todoist, for example, helps you to organize your to-do lists and plan ahead.

What can this tool do for you?

Contrary to popular belief, multitasking reduces productivity. To get the most of your efforts, you need to execute tasks one after the other. Todoist helps you organize your activities. You can create a to-do list, prioritize your tasks, and get overviews every day. You can even share projects and track progress.

And Todoist is also suitable for teams, making it a nice addition to your company tech-stack. With it, you can plan projects, assign responsibilities,
share files, and more.

6. G-Suite

Google must be doing something right to be a leading name in technology. The famous G-Suite consists of business tools that are essential for growth, in areas such as communication, management, cloud storage, and control.

What can this tool do for you?

Emails are still very important when it comes to professional business communications. Even if you don't have a Gmail account, you probably know people who do – and many of your customers, too.

G-Suite takes it beyond regular email service provider by giving businesses the opportunity to have a business identity. It also boasts several features that facilitate business functions in the areas of documentation, survey, presentations, mobility, and more.

7. Zoom

Face-to-face meetings are still common, but digital meetings are on the rise. Even after the 2020 pandemic, people will still work from home, or from different locations and time zones. That's why you need to be equipped with an effective video conferencing tool – in other words, when you can't meet in-person, just Zoom it.

Zoom is a video collaboration tool for real-time communications. Its clear audio and video quality as well as smaller features like polling and sending emojis allow good and personable communication from afar.

What can this tool do for you?

You no longer have to worry about projects falling behind due to distance or remote working. You can have meetings, trainings, video webinars etc and stay connected.

Related: Why the time for video chat tools is now.

8. Optinmonster

When it comes to your website, your goal is to convert as many of your visitors as you can into customers. A business tool like Optinmonster is an ally to conversion optimization and can be used to grow email lists and launch campaigns for continuous customer engagement.

What can this tool do for you?

Optinmonster helps you get more leads and increase sales, as well as generally capture the attention of everyone who visits their site. You can send personalized messages to new and returning visitors to encourage them to buy or subscribe to your services.

9. Ahrefs

Identifying ways to beat the competition has become a matter of survival. And a great part for today's battle for market share happens in search engines like Google. Customers are frequently looking for solutions in search, and getting your website in front of their eyes is critical. That's why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools are essential.

Ahrefs is one of those business tools – and a pretty powerful one.

What can this tool do for you?

When you know your competitors’ secrets and you can get into your customers' minds, you have powerful knowledge in your hands. Ahrefs has a wide range of features that give you insights on what your competitors are doing, what people are searching for, which of your pages are performing better, and more. Content research, backlink research, web monitoring, competitive analysis, are all at your fingertips.

10. Buzzsumo

Content is king. And putting out the right content is a business necessity. Online business tool Buzzsumo helps you determine what content to product (and what not to) and also gives you the knowledge you need to forge content partnerships.

What can this tool do for you?

With a gazillion pieces of content on the internet, how do you know which ones truly resonate? Buzzsumo’s analytics tools can give you the answers. You can explore high-performing content, conduct data analysis, identify influencers, and monitor social activity.

11. Slack

Organizational goals are more attainable when team members work together to actualize them. Slack is a collaborative online business tool that brings team members together and empowers them to be fully productive.

What can this tool do for you?

Slack provides multi-channeled communications such as video calls, audio calls, integrated file sharing, and group discussion among others.

It also offers advanced security features to protect data; confidential files can be shared between parties involved without third-party interference.

12. ProofHub

Businesses today have a lot of projects going on at once, sometimes even projects within projects. ProofHub is a web-based project management and collaboration solution that helps teams to organize projects and get them delivered on time.

With an emphasis on simplicity and an array of scalable features, ProofHub stands out as a business tool for nonprofits, universities, freelancers, and large enterprises.

What can this tool do for you?

Instead of using several different business tools to plan projects, assign tasks, track time, or proof files, you can use a single solution – ProofHub. From initial planning, actual implementation, and final invoicing, you can use this software to cover almost every aspect of project management.

Online business tools are essential for growth

Growing businesses aspire to be the next big thing in their fields. Unlike some years back, this can't happen without the right online business tools. Choose from the list above and enhance it with other software providers to build an efficient online suite that can help your business thrive.

Sam Suthar

CMO, Acquire.io