Running your own business is no 9-5. More likely, even when your shop is closed, you’re still working behind the scenes:
If only you had a helping hand sometimes to make entrepreneurial life a little easier. Well, there are! We’ve compiled a few apps that will take care of all the little details so you can focus on doing what you do best.
Whether you need help planning your social calendar, implementing a smoother booking system, or creating a concise brand kit, we’ve got you covered in this post.
The only social media scheduler you will ever need.
Later is a social media scheduler that allows you to plan your feed from your desktop, phone or tablet. Planning posts out can be tricky from your phone, especially when making sure there are no grammar or spelling mistakes. With Later, you can dedicate an hour a week to schedule all your social posts. The app will even analyse the engagement you’ve had on your previous posts and advise you on the best times to post. Think about all the time you can save!
Another great feature of Later is the capability to visually plan your Instagram feed. It sounds like such a minor feature, but the ability to move around upcoming pictures for a more cohesive Instagram feed is worthwhile!
Social media is the 2022 equivalent of a shop’s storefront. Your potential clients are very much judging your business by the cover. A cluttered feed will likely make your business look unorganised and unprofessional, whilst a well-blended grid screams professional. Especially as someone offering a beauty service, you want your Instagram feed to be beautiful. Later’s visual planner will ensure that you have an aesthetically pleasing social media profile that will at least start a conversation with potential clients.
Create easy yet aesthetically pleasing images.
Gone are the days when you needed to be a Photoshop professional to create stunning visuals for your business. Canva hosts thousands of templates for you to use, making creating those social media posts a little easier. We mentioned just above, the importance of a cohesive Instagram feed, and Canva makes that more straightforward. On the app, you can create your own brand identity. Your brand identity will feature your business’s colours, themes and font choices, making it easier to apply these settings to any template on their website. Everything you use on canva can be made unique to your brand.
Canva goes beyond social media posts, as you can create logos, flyers, website images and more there. It will be the only image editing app that you need!
A booking software that helps you run your business.
Struggling to find new customers or even manage the customer base you already have? Fresha is a booking system app that allows you to schedule appointments in an easy-view calendar, but the app doesn’t stop there!
Using Fresha, you can virtually increase your marketing efforts. The app features auto campaigns in which you group your current customers into different groups to target them more effectively. These customers are categorised based on their loyalty, spending power, frequency of use, and recent use of your services. You can then send out automatic email campaigns to the various segments. For example, you have a client who hasn’t visited in over 6 months, and you want to get them back? You can send inactive customers a discount voucher if they book a service with you over the next month. We think it’s a brilliant feature that all beauty businesses should take advantage of.
Fresha also offers your customers the chance to leave reviews of your business after their appointments. A good review will show potential customers that you are reliable and worth choosing over your competitors. Fresha is definitely one of the best beauty booking systems out there.
The most popular video-sharing app to date.
TikTok is probably one you’ve already heard of and might even use personally. We’re mentioning it because the impact TikTok can have on businesses given the right exposure is tremendous. Honestly, businesses have blown up overnight with just one viral post.
To successfully take advantage of TikTok and its organic growth, you must be consistent. Don’t be discouraged if your first few videos don’t get a lot of views, it will happen eventually. Choose popular sounds to put over your videos and create content that you would enjoy watching yourself. Maybe you can do transformation videos? Or a satisfying video of the process behind a treatment? Your videos don’t have to be perfect. Instead, they should capture the aspects that make your business unique.
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