As the New Year rings in, small businesses are discovering new and effective ways of achieving their marketing goals. We recently talked about different mobile strategies your small business can use to boost sales and client connectivity. Now let's take a look at some mobile apps your business could benefit from.
Mobile apps are important because they can save your small business time and money. The convenience of mobile apps allows businesses to perform several actions ‘on-the-go' which ensures your business increases productivity. Developers are always creating new and exciting apps that are aimed to simplify the process of running your small business. Check out some of these smart mobile apps below:
Intuit GoPayment: GoPayment allows small businesses to accept credit card payments through their smartphones. Imagine your business is at a trade show and you want to allow consumers to conveniently purchase products. Or maybe your business is mobile, such as a mobile pet-grooming service. Your small business can easily accept credit card payments with one swipe of the card through GoPayment's reader. Another solution for accepting credit card payments on your phone is Square.
Mint Mobile: Mint.com is a budgeting powerhouse that allows users to track all of their expenses. What good would the program be if it didn't allow your business to see all of its expenses on-the-go? With Mint Mobile, your business can easily track and organize its finances right from the convenience of a user's smartphone.
Expensify: Expensify is aimed at giving users and businesses the power to easily upload receipts and track mileage for reimbursement. All employees have to do is take a picture of the receipt, add a comment and then the picture gets uploaded to the Expensify database for simple viewing. Expensify even scans the information on the receipt so users may turn that information into expense reports.
Foursquare: Foursquare is a location-based service that allows users to ‘check-in' to your venue and alert their friends that they have done so. Foursquare can be a powerful location-based marketing tool for your small business so if your business isn't on it, then I suggest your business signs up. It's free, easy and it gives your business an increase in exposure and sales.
Dropbox: Dropbox allows businesses to upload files to the cloud and then view those files on-the-go from their smartphones. Anything from videos to reports can be uploaded to Dropbox for later viewing. Maybe you are en route to a business meeting but you need to take a quick look at last week's performance report, you can do that with your smartphone through Dropbox.
DocumentsToGo: After using Dropbox to take a look at a document, you've realized that there needs to be corrections. DocumentsToGo allows you to not only view Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDFs and Google Docs, the app also allows you to edit them on your smartphone.
Analytics App: This handy application allows business owners to track their blogs performance from their smartphones. We all know the important role analytics play in a website's success. Knowing what's working and what isn't is very important to the success of your company's blog or website. With the Analytics app, users can get up-to-date statistics from their blogs in the form of 29 different reports. This is one of the most powerful apps out there.
Dragon Dictation: Last but not least, Dragon Dictation uses voice-recognition to allow users to speak instead of type on their smartphones. Users' speech is easily converted into text which can be sent to employees in the form of SMS or e-mail messages. Businesses can even use it to update their statuses on Twitter and Facebook.
These smart mobile apps will certainly make running a small business a bit easier. Try using some of these applications and let us know how they work for you.