Planning can be exciting for some and stressful for others. Luckily, there are more tools than ever to make streamlining your projects and business easier. PhotoBiz’s suite of tools can help you run your website and business all from one place. Our integrated tools allow you to build and maintain your website, collect payments, manage your contact list, run marketing promotions, and so much more.  

We thought you might be interested to learn about some of our team’s go-to tools to manage your business beyond our suite of tools.

Slack is a collaboration hub that allows you to chat within your team via instant messages. It’s a great replacement for email. We’ve used Slack for a few years now, to help manage all communication amongst our team regarding projects, upcoming releases, and more. You can create channels for anything you are working on to help you streamline conversations instead of a single chat screen for everything. You can share images and documents, plus other tools integrate right in to make all your tools connected.

What’s really nice about Slack is it connects you to your team and facilitates fast responses. With Slack, we’ve cut down on email communications by 70%. No more back and forth and waiting to see responses. It has great resources and is perfect for big or small teams.

It starts at $0/month with options to grow. I highly recommend it if you run a studio with partners and staff.

Grammarly might be one of my absolute favorite tools. I write a lot, like a whole lot, you can see there are 90+ new articles this year on the Growth Hub. What I need most of the time is an editor. I know many people don’t like to write, either because it is difficult to come up with content or just a struggle to write and convey a message the way you want. Grammarly is a great tool to review what you write — blogs, emails you name it. Remember Clippy? Well, Grammarly is like that but not annoying. 

Grammarly uses a fine-tooth comb to make your work shine by providing suggestions to improve your grammar, fix misspellings, and remind you when you have missed a word (or two). They have a free option or you can upgrade to get even more features. The standard, free version acts as an incredible spelling and grammar check. Even better, it has a plug-in option on some browsers to check your writing across multiple online tools. 

Check out the free version for yourself when you write your next blog post, it might make you feel better about your writing or help you improve it.

For any social media user, working with the tools to promote your business can be a struggle continuing to switch back and forth between apps. There are paid tools like Hootsuite to help you schedule posts in advance and for multiple platforms at once, but if you are working with a no to low budget, Facebook has great resources built right in to assist you.  

Facebook Creator Studio and Business Suite both allow you to manage and post on multiples pages or accounts all from one place. They allow you to schedule when a Facebook or Instagram post goes live and get all your analytics, so it makes these tools valuable beyond just for posting content. 

Check out the Facebook Creator Studio and Business Suite, both are free.

Juggling multiple projects and ideas? Asana makes project management easy. It is great for setting up a project to-do list and allowing you and/or your team members to see what projects are in the works, due dates for tasks assigned to that project, and who is doing what. You can then add comments, images, and other documents into the projects and tasks as a resource to make it easy to manage your projects and check off what’s been done.

Their free version allows up to 15 members to work together on unlimited tasks and projects. More features are available in their paid versions.

Google reigns king when it comes to super powerful tools that are free to use. Not only have they replaced Word documents and notepads for me, but they offer collaborative access for people on our team in real-time. I can be working on something at the same time as another team member which saves time and avoids version conflicts that can happen when passing documents back and forth through email. I’ve found this helps streamline our projects.

Even better, you can access Google Docs and Sheets from anywhere. It’s in the cloud! Another perk is they connect to virtually every project management tool. So you can easily connect them to tools like Slack and Asana.

Connecting to customers can be challenging, particularly this year. Schedules are ever-changing and during this pandemic, there are fewer opportunities to see people face to face. That’s why tools to meet virtually like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, & Zoom are so important. If you haven’t heard, the use of virtual meetings is up, like way up, and it might become the norm going forward. These tools are great at allowing you to connect with clients, create presentations, and even host online events. 

As a photographer, you can use these tools to do virtual in-person sales sessions to show your clients their photos and walk them through their proofing galleries and purchasing options.

Just cause we’re not together in person, doesn’t me we can’t still sell or connect with customers.

These are just a couple of our favorite tools we use to help manage our daily projects and business goals. There are thousands of options. Explore a few and see what works best for you.

Need help getting a website up and running for your business? The PhotoBiz website platform makes it easy to run your business online and is a powerful sales tool. Check out all our features and if you need help, give us a call at 866.463.7620. Our team will be happy to help.