It’s a new year and there are certain digital tools to set up for your online business, which by the way, are life savers for business owners.
Every online business owner you know can swear by certain tools that help to keep everything together in their business.
The best part about these tools is that they come free, cheap, on a subscription basis (so you can cancel anytime), and in varieties.
For example, there are more than one video editing software available for your use, there are several social media tools for us to choose from.
In 2023, if you are not using digital tools to make your work easy and to transform your business, you’re not helping yourself.
The key to showing up for your audience and clients is to leverage tools that will help you to keep showing up seamlessly.
You can also read my previous post on how to prepare for a better and more productive business year.
In this blog post, I’m going to be sharing with you 6 digital tools to set up for your online business if you want to experience growth in 2023.
An Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is a calendar that allows you to map out your content strategy.
It helps you to plan, manage and coordinate the various stages involved in idea generation, production, publishing, and promotion.
It takes a big-picture approach to create content for your business in the coming months or in a quarter.
The purpose of your editorial calendar is to plan ahead for content material so that you or your team can create, repurpose, or curate relevant content as it fits into the publishing schedule.
It is easy to confuse an editorial calendar with a content calendar but the editorial calendar prepares the strategy while the content calendar prepares for the execution of that strategy.
Your editorial calendar will highlight who your audience is, the categories you want to create content in, the media you’d be using, your content assets, etc.
Take a look at the image below from OnDemandCMO. This is a great visual representation of an editorial calendar
Generally, you can use any social media content calendar software to create an editorial calendar.
You can also use a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google sheets.
Another option is Google Calendar.
In another post, I’ll do a list of the best software you can use to create an editorial calendar.
A Content Calendar
A content calendar covers the day-to-day management of your social media content.
It helps you execute your content strategy by informing you on what to publish, what time to publish, what platform it should go on, and so on.
You can also use it to plan posts, manage campaigns and review ongoing strategies.
It’s typically an overview of your upcoming social media posts, organized by date.
The above calendar was created in Airtable and it’s a content calendar for social media.
The above calendar is a blog content calendar also created in Airtable.
You can get started for free, all you just have to do is to sign up on Airtable, create a workspace, then create a base and finally start building.
You can decide to use a template or start from scratch, the choice is yours.
The point is, you want to get content-ready so that you can consistently show up on your online platforms.
I think the worst thing anyone can do for their business right now is to post spontaneously or post without a strategy.
A Social Media Management Platform
Once you begin to get active on other social media platforms, it will become overwhelming for you and you’ll sometimes find it difficult to manage them.
This is where a social media management tool comes in handy.
A good social media management platform helps you to manage your social media accounts, manage all your messages in one place, and schedule and monitor your content.
When you use a social media management platform for your business, you are able to stay organized.
With a great social media management tool, you won’t need to memorize multiple logins, deal with different interfaces, and so much more.
A social media management tool will make it much easier for you to keep track of all your conversations.
Never miss a notification, monitor keywords for leads, and most importantly, schedule posts ahead of time.
With Facebook creator studio, you can publish to Instagram and Facebook at the same time.
Facebook creator studio is free to use if you’ve linked your Instagram and Facebook pages together.
With Hootsuite, you can publish to your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
You get a 30-day free trial with Hootsuite and then you can start on a subscription basis.
What are you waiting for?
A Template-Based Design Platform
My favourite design platform that I will absolutely recommend any day anytime is Canva.
It’s one of the absolute best digital tools to set up for your online business this year.
Canva is the best, easiest-to-use design platform out there that has been saving the lives of many creators around the world.
The best thing about it is that you don’t need to have any knowledge about design.
Just start creating with their templates. Or better still, take the courses available on their learning platform.
Another cool thing about Canva is, just like a Google document, more than one person can work on it at a time.
So your team can collaborate on designs, create templates or bring ideas to life at the same time.
Canva is absolutely free to use, but when you pay for Canva for Teams, you get access to different templates that will blow your mind.
A Cloud-Based Platform
Your best bet is Google workspace.
Gone are the days of losing vital documents or misplacing your laptop, etc.
You can send all your files to the cloud, if you want to level up in your business, a cloud-based platform is inevitable.
There are different cloud-based platforms, but I can bet my money on Google cloud.
With Google Cloud, you can back up as many files as you can up until you’ve exceeded your 15 Gb free storage.
After that, you pay a sum of 200 Nigerian naira every month.
I recently helped my Lawyer activate cloud computing and we backed up his files to the cloud.
As we speak, my Doctor also wants the service.
If professionals are doing it, why aren’t online business owners doing it?
An Email Service Provider
I have a love-hate relationship with email marketing and this is my story.
When I first started email marketing, I used Mailchimp because it was free to use.
But then I realized that we were only limited to a few features, I would see other bloggers use very beautiful forms to collect emails and that’s when I moved to ConvertKit.
Yes you can create beautiful forms with ConvertKit but there wasn’t any fun or beauty in the backend, also it became super expensive, so I moved to Mailerlite.
Currently, I use Mailerlite, but I recently opened a Substack account which typically operates like an email service provider.
Anyway, the point is, your website needs to be collecting emails because your business needs to build a list.
So the earlier you jump on one, the better it is for you.
Final Words
So, here are the 6 digital tools to set up for your online business in 2023.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s a new year for your business so you want to create new strategies and set new goals.
The earlier you get these tools to work for you, the better it is for your business.
No matter which one you decide to start with, if you’re facing difficulties, that’s where I come in.
I can help you set up any or all of these things and we’ll stay on budget, if you’re in, contact me ASAP.