Planning and Productivity with Tracey Sweetland

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Email productivity, calendar and cloud storage

GSUITE FOR BUSINESS – I almost forgot this one as I take it for granted, but it’s a massive part of my business, enabling me to use my own domain names for my email and giving me access to Google Drive, which is where I store absolutely every document, image and everything for my business and all my clients. This means I have access to those things wherever I am.

One of the great things about using GSuite is that most other platforms, programmes etc that I use provide GSuite integrations, so I can integrate Agile with my Google calendar for example.

All this for less than £5 a month.

Financial

QUICKBOOKS: Not my strong suit but obviously as a small business it’s imperative you keep on top of the financials. I have someone help me with the tricky stuff, but I use Intuit Quickbooks to send invoices and track expenses. It links with my bank account and is relatively simple to use. Prices start at around £12, but discounts are often available – at the time of writing the Simple Start package is available for just £6 a month.

Project Planning and Productivity

TRELLO: Trello is a new addition to my productivity and planning suite. I’ve previously tried Asana, Zoho and Flow for project management, but am currently loving the flexibility of Trello. I like the visual element of Kanban boards which allow you to create lists and move cards between them.

These boards have so many practical uses, and there is a library of templates to get you started. I have a board to manage my client projects and tasks, one to manage my business, one for goal setting and habit tracking, another to keep track of things to do ahead of the launch of my new project in Spring.

What’s great is that there is a free version for small businesses, which is great if you work alone, although if you need the paid version it is available for around £10 per person a month.

I also love that Trello integrates with a lot of my other apps and you can use IFTTT or Zapier to create all kind of automations for it.

Communication

SLACK: Another relatively new addition, but I have started using Slack to communicate with a few of my clients and we are finding it really useful to keep all of our messages in one place, as well as being able to share documents and so much more.

Again, it integrates with lots of apps, including my Google Calendar and the free version is ample for what we need right now, but if we do need to upgrade it’s just over £5 per person per month.

Social Media

CONTENT STUDIO: This is another one where I’ve been around the houses and come back to. I’ve previously tried the likes of ContentCal, MeetEdgar and SocialPilot and all of them have their pros and cons. Most are on the pricey side, but I guess that’s because if you’re serious about social you kind of need one of these social media scheduling tools to do some of the heavy lifting.

Basically, with Content Studio you can set up different workspaces for different businesses, plan your social media posts and collaborate with your team using an editorial calendar, schedule to all of your channels and platforms, including your blog and Google My Business.

You can also organise content into categories and schedule evergreen content to repost on a schedule of your choosing, as well as keep track of your analytics on each platform.

It does everything I need and allows me to manage a social media calendar for a client as well. Fortunately, I signed up to it when it was just launching and got it for a one-off price and now I just pay for extra add-ons, but the starter price is now $49 a month – so it’s not cheap!

Email Marketing

MAILERLITE: Even though AgileCRM does have built email marketing capability, I still choose to operate my monthly newsletter using Mailerlite.

I moved over from Mailchimp several months ago – although I still use it for a number of my clients – as I felt the free version had been seriously downgraded. I am pleased with how Mailerlite is working. Its free version allows you to manage several separate groups of subscribers, the templates are good and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month to up to 1,000 subscribers. More than that on your list or what to send more emails? The first level of paid subscription is $15 a month, which gives you up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited emails.

I  also use GetResponse because it integrates with the membership plugin I use on The Business Connection, and it also has good templates and is user-friendly.

Design

CANVA: Graphic Design is one of the services I offer my Red Shoes Marketing clients and much of that work is still done in Adobe Illustrator (see below), but nowadays much of my own work for social media or blog graphics, I turn to Canva. I have the paid version, for £11.99 a month, which enables you to create a Brand Kit of colours etc for your business, as well as gives you access to a large library of templates. The brand kit means it’s easy to make sure that every graphic you create is “on brand” and gives everything a cohesive look. The templates mean it’s easy to use for beginners and non-designers while being flexible enough to satisfy more creative types.

ADOBE: In a sense I have left the biggest til last and it’s maybe one that most people won’t need unless you are in the business of design or publishing. My Adobe Creative Cloud subscription is my biggest “app” expense at over £40 a month, but that gives me access to all of the giants in the Adobe stable, including Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator – all of which I use on an almost daily basis. InDesign makes it a doddle to create newspaper or magazine pages, or in some cases brochure and leaflets. Many leaflets and other print materials I create in Illustrator, while Photoshop is the very best for image manipulation and correction.