We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of our blog series titled Future-Proofing Your Business, where we share advice on how you can ensure your online business’s longevity. Today’s installment will cover tools that you might want to check out if you’re still in the early stages of your online business.

Make no mistake about it: getting an online business up and running is a tall order. There’s capital to worry about first and foremost. And then there’s the actual business aspect of making sure things are in order.

The early goings can be overwhelming, but you can get past the early roadblocks and run your business more smoothly if you have the right tools to back you up.

For this article, we’ll be going over tools that can use for free considering not everyone has the budget to pay for subscriptions.

ChatGenie: Your Online Store Builder

Of course, we’re promoting our very own product. It would be a crime not to do so given our benefits for fledgling business owners.

Suffice it to say that ChatGenie is designed to be the cornerstone of your online business. Even with just a free subscription, you can set up an online store inside Facebook Messenger. No coding experience is required!

Our online store can be controlled through an all-in-one dashboard that’s complete with tools for you to showcase your product catalog, take orders, offer flexible payment options, automate deliveries, process refunds, and keep track of sales.

Expect higher conversion rates as customers on ChatGenie-powered stores can complete their purchases and transactions within the messaging thread they’re already on unlike other eCommerce solutions that force link-outs to other webpages.

Canva: Your User-Friendly Graphic Design Platform

Great visuals are key to putting your store on the map! This seems easy enough, but you may run into some problems if you’re not a graphic designer.

It’s a good thing Canva exists. This free graphic design platform is perfect for making business cards, posters, presentations, infographics, letterheads, invoices, social media postings, and so much more! It's like having a basic version of Photoshop that's free and doesn't require extensive photo editing knowledge to use.

Whether you’re looking for striking layouts or more minimalistic ones, you’re sure to find a design that works for you as a free account comes with more than 250,000 templates, 200,000 photos, and 57,000 graphic elements.

Canva’s professionally designed templates are easily customizable with beginner-friendly features allowing for basic tasks like replacing images, basic cropping, adding text, and changing colors. The ease provided by Canva in terms of graphic design makes it so that you only have to do the bare minimum of changing templated captions and stock images.

Grammarly: Your Online Writing Assistant

Communicating with confidence is an absolute necessity if you’re running a business. It provides credibility and earns your business a reputation as someone customers can trust.

One way to project this kind of image is by getting rid of embarrassing errors in your copy. Grammarly helps users reduce common mistakes like punctuation errors, misuse of words, and spelling mistakes. It also offers rewording and rephrasing suggestions to make sentences more concise, clear, and correct.

Moreover, this tool helps you properly convey the tone you want in your copy. With the tone detector, you can analyze words, phrasing, and punctuation to achieve either a friendly, casual, or professional tone. The importance of tone cannot be understated because this is something that varies from asset to asset. Memos, reports, or business documents require a more professional tone while social media postings like promo and product announcements are more cheerful.

With Grammarly, you can be certain that you’re writing in the manner that you want to be perceived.

Facebook/Instagram Insights: Your Content Performance Tracker

Analyzing the performance of your posts on social media is vital to expanding your reach, increasing engagement, and getting more customers on social media.

With Page Insights on Facebook and Account Insights on Instagram, you can find out what type of content resonates the best with your target audience.

The Facebook Page Insights tool provides an overview of the following metrics based on a specific time frame: post reach, story reach, post engagement, and the number of times your page's videos played for at least 3 seconds.

Similarly, the Instagram Insights tool gives you a screenshot of overall trends relating to your followers and your content’s performance. For businesses, figures under accounts engaged and content interactions make the most sense to keep track of. Here, you’ll find out the number of accounts that interacted with your content and what actions people take when they engage with your content.

With this wealth of data, you can be more intentional with how you craft your posts so you’re able to generate more conversions.

Google Meet: Your Meeting and Conferencing Buddy

Anyone with a Google account can access Google Meet. This enterprise-grade video conferencing tool enables colleagues to chat over video and text. A free account is enough to meet the needs of small businesses with minimal staff members as it allows 1-on-1 video chats for 24 hours, and 60-minute group calls with a maximum of 100 participants.

Google Meet’s free tier offers more generous time caps for group calls than other tools in the market like Zoom, which imposes a 40-minute limit for such calls.

Users on Google Meet can even share their screens to make their presentations more visual and interactive.

Existing meeting and conferencing rooms on Google Meet are easily accessible via phone through the mobile app and computer through the Google suite.

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These tools are yours for the taking!

Start by subscribing to our free tier here and see for yourself how ChatGenie enables businesses like yours to thrive in this new era of online selling and eCommerce. With ChatGenie’s all-in-one dashboard, not only do you automate your operations but you can also plan the next logical step for your online business with ease.

To learn more about how your business can make the most of ChatGenie, feel free to join our monthly product webinar. For client concerns, feel free to send us a message via Submit a request – ChatGenie.