In the wake of Coronavirus (COVID-19) closures, nearly everyone’s lives have been or will be disrupted in some way. While we continue ahead with social distancing to curtail the virus outbreak, we must also navigate the tumultuous business climate it creates.
Fortunately, we have never lived in a better time to stay connected and to help kickstart support your digital efforts, we’ve gathered a list of some of our favorite tools to meet online, share files, work together, and generally keep the wheels of commerce spinning.
- Teleconferencing
There are many teleconferencing options, but none of them offer quite the depth, feature set, and ease of use the Zoom does. The free option allow you to hold unlimited 1 to 1 meetings and unlimited group meetings (up to 100 participants) in 40 minute increments, while paid versions allow you to create entire events supporting vast numbers of participants.
If you attend any kind of virtual networking events in the coming weeks, it will likely be held on this platform. - Filesharing (Google Drive / Dropbox / iCloud / One Drive)
Sharing files over email sucks. Using a filesharing service is much easier! We use Google Drive in our business because it is operating system agnostic, storage is cheap, it easily allows us to save files directly to our file system and sync to the cloud, and makes sharing files remotely a breeze.
We also interface with Dropbox, iCloud, and One Drive regularly and know they have strong platforms and use cases. - Online Scheduling
When we implement digital scheduling in appointment-based businesses, it increases their appointment load by about 11%.
When applied to other businesses, online scheduling removes barriers to networking and reduces the administration time you spend actually trying to schedule appointments.
Calendly has both free and paid plans available. - Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) / Project Management Tool
We use a Insightly as a CRM and Project Management tool. It easily allows us to keep track of important client information, attach projects to organizations, and stay in touch with everyone we do business with.
Insightly also allows us to automate the process of onboarding clients, setting up recurring tasks, and checking in on different phases of projects we’re working on. - Create A Course
If getting together in person is difficult, creating a course online is easier than ever. You can utilize your knowledge in your field to create a valuable asset that can help connect you to new customers, generate revenue, and reinforce the idea that you’re an expert in your field.
There are many different tools you can use to offer this, but we do a lot of integrations of WordPress and Learndash.
We also have seen people use Kajabi with success. Whatever your choice is, don’t let the technology get in the way of you sharing your insights with the world. - Email
Email is the cheapest form of advertising you can do. Whether sending personal emails, or using a mailing tool to send email to lists, the power to reach out to interested people is an amazing tool.
The power to segment your contacts into groups and send targeting mailings to them is even more powerful.
We use Mailchimp as our newsletter service. We like it because it offers easy integrations with most of our other digital tools, allows us to set up automations, segments our lists into specific targets, and is free up to 2500 contacts.
That’s a good price we’re told.
We’re here to help with any digital questions you may have, to help you strategize new ways to make business connections, or to just remind you that even though we may be in a time of social distancing, we have never had the ability to be more connected to each other than right now.