Four useful digital tools for Australian SMEs
Our guide highlights the best apps and services for managing projects, improving your website's SEO, scheduling meetings and graphic design
Updated 12 September 2022
Summary
Our guide shortlists useful tools and explains how they work and how might they take your SME to the next level:
Summary
- Running an SME can be tough and, in recent years, COVID has pushed many SMEs to adapt, grow or disappear. Despite the many challenges facing SMEs, they still make up a significant part of Australia's economy - recently reported as around 98% of all Australian businesses.
- Many SMEs share common challenges. Struggling to find more time in the day, keeping their teams or projects organised, and of course, attracting or retaining customers.
- Fortunately, there are many apps and services dedicated to creating powerful and effective digital solutions that help tackle these time-consuming challenges. Although many digital tools exist, some stand above the rest, elegantly streamlining business operations, raising customer service quality and increasing profitability, all at an affordable, SME friendly, price point.
Our guide shortlists useful tools and explains how they work and how might they take your SME to the next level:
Canva
Know This: Have you ever seen stunning ads from another business and thought to yourself “I wish our brand looked like that”? Every business is in constant competition for their audience’s attention. Often, a customer’s first impression of your business is through your brand’s visual persona. Consequently, it’s also the first chance for any business to capture their customer’s attention or have it snatched by a competitor.
In the past, producing visually outstanding content required skilled graphics designers or talented artists. Finding designers with the right style for your brand, hiring them and providing them with sufficient work requires time, money and energy, all resources which are scarce for SMEs. Innately, this provided an opportunity for larger companies with deeper pockets to get a competitive edge.
Then came Canva, an intuitive and effortless graphic design tool that could be picked up by anyone, anytime. This powerful tool has allowed SMEs to create captivating content in minutes and without years of design experience. It hides tremendous artistic know how, visual marketing research and functionality behind a simple user interface that’s quick and easy to pick up on the fly. Perfect for anyone with limited time or design knowledge looking to distinguish their content from the competition. Perfect for SMEs.
Canva has two main pricing points:
In the past, producing visually outstanding content required skilled graphics designers or talented artists. Finding designers with the right style for your brand, hiring them and providing them with sufficient work requires time, money and energy, all resources which are scarce for SMEs. Innately, this provided an opportunity for larger companies with deeper pockets to get a competitive edge.
Then came Canva, an intuitive and effortless graphic design tool that could be picked up by anyone, anytime. This powerful tool has allowed SMEs to create captivating content in minutes and without years of design experience. It hides tremendous artistic know how, visual marketing research and functionality behind a simple user interface that’s quick and easy to pick up on the fly. Perfect for anyone with limited time or design knowledge looking to distinguish their content from the competition. Perfect for SMEs.
Canva has two main pricing points:
Free Canva
- Starting from the free plan, the Canva toolkit boasts a huge 250,000+ free templates for 100+ design types including social media, presentations, invoices, infographics, websites and more.
- Canva also provides a media library with hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics right to your fingertips. All of these assets can be put together and customised to fit your brand effortlessly using their proprietary online editor.
- For the more frequent users, they also offer their tool as a desktop app.
- If you’re not sure where to start, it might be worth looking at Canva’s supplementary courses and tutorials – helpful video content to make things even easier. Courses are essentially curated video series that teach anything from the design basics, to business branding and social media mastery. We found them to be very thorough, well-structured and fun. Tutorials are also in video format but are smaller and bite-sized, teaching users about specific features or how to create specific assets.
Canva Pro
- For many SMEs the free plan will be more than enough, however, for those that want to go the extra mile, Canva Pro is available for $19.99USD a month (around $24 AUD).
- With the Pro plan, you get all the features in the free plan plus 100+ million stock assets (images, videos, audio and graphics), 610,000+ templates and a bunch of extra tools and conveniences for collaborating, editing and exporting designs.
- Understanding that collaboration is required to produce great work, the Canva team have also built real time commenting, sharing and other collaboration functions. The Pro plan is intended for teams of 1-5 but if that’s not enough, they also offer an enterprise plan.
KWFinder
A strong online presence is made up of many parts but of them, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is high on the list of importance. Roughly two in three SMEs in Australia have a website but a much smaller proportion do any SEO. In a nutshell, SEO is what determines the order (e.g. website ranking) customers see your site versus competitors’ sites when using search engines such as Google. If you have poor SEO, customers may never see you at all. And if customers can’t find you, how can they buy from you?
Know This: Although SEO can be a large and complex beast, KWFinder can help simplify it. To rank highly when customers are searching, it helps to know what search terms or keywords they’re searching for and which of these terms are the most used. Some keywords may have high traffic but are difficult and costly to rank highly against because other businesses are using that word too. Conversely, there are some lesser known keywords that may also have high traffic but are much easier to rank well on and are cost effective. That’s where KWFinder comes in.
Just like the name suggests, KWFinder helps you find keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you have an idea of what search terms are relevant for your business, you can start with the straightforward keyword search which shows you related keywords, autocomplete search words or questions frequently asked by customers.
If you’re unsure what words are relevant but know of a competitor, you can start with a domain search. Just type in your competitor’s website URL and it will show you what search terms are bringing them the most customers. KWFinder even suggests what other businesses you might be competing with and the words they’re using too.
Soon you’ll have a grasp of where your customers are looking and can form a plan to get in front of them. For each keyword or phrase, you find on KWFinder, you’ll also get valuable extra information such as the difficulty to rank highly, the cost to rank, the historical search volume and customer interest over time. All of these results can also be filtered further to eliminate any words that aren’t getting enough traffic and exported as a keyword list which can be used when writing your content or setting up SEO metadata.
Pricing and Alternatives: There are alternative tools that provide similar features as KWFinder but some aren’t as accurate and others offer more functionality for a greater price. KWFinder comes in as one of the most affordable options at only $49 USD p/month for the basic plan (around $65 AUD). Their premium plan is $69 USD p/month (around $95 AUD) and allows 3 simultaneous users as well as bumping up the daily and monthly limit for searching or tracking keywords. When compared to alternative tools, the premium option is still more affordable than similar tools that offer similar capabilities and limits. In terms of user experience, no tool could match KWFinder in its simplicity and beginner friendliness.
Next Steps: For SMEs that want to go deeper with SEO, we’d suggest SEMRUSH or AHrefs. Both tools are featureful contenders that offer the whole SEO toolkit (KWFinder primarily focuses on keyword research). They provide deeper SEO functions such as backlink analysis, site stats, marketing insights, SEO writing assistants, PPC data and more. However, all of these features do come at a steeper cost being more expensive and less user friendly.
Know This: Although SEO can be a large and complex beast, KWFinder can help simplify it. To rank highly when customers are searching, it helps to know what search terms or keywords they’re searching for and which of these terms are the most used. Some keywords may have high traffic but are difficult and costly to rank highly against because other businesses are using that word too. Conversely, there are some lesser known keywords that may also have high traffic but are much easier to rank well on and are cost effective. That’s where KWFinder comes in.
Just like the name suggests, KWFinder helps you find keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you have an idea of what search terms are relevant for your business, you can start with the straightforward keyword search which shows you related keywords, autocomplete search words or questions frequently asked by customers.
If you’re unsure what words are relevant but know of a competitor, you can start with a domain search. Just type in your competitor’s website URL and it will show you what search terms are bringing them the most customers. KWFinder even suggests what other businesses you might be competing with and the words they’re using too.
Soon you’ll have a grasp of where your customers are looking and can form a plan to get in front of them. For each keyword or phrase, you find on KWFinder, you’ll also get valuable extra information such as the difficulty to rank highly, the cost to rank, the historical search volume and customer interest over time. All of these results can also be filtered further to eliminate any words that aren’t getting enough traffic and exported as a keyword list which can be used when writing your content or setting up SEO metadata.
Pricing and Alternatives: There are alternative tools that provide similar features as KWFinder but some aren’t as accurate and others offer more functionality for a greater price. KWFinder comes in as one of the most affordable options at only $49 USD p/month for the basic plan (around $65 AUD). Their premium plan is $69 USD p/month (around $95 AUD) and allows 3 simultaneous users as well as bumping up the daily and monthly limit for searching or tracking keywords. When compared to alternative tools, the premium option is still more affordable than similar tools that offer similar capabilities and limits. In terms of user experience, no tool could match KWFinder in its simplicity and beginner friendliness.
Next Steps: For SMEs that want to go deeper with SEO, we’d suggest SEMRUSH or AHrefs. Both tools are featureful contenders that offer the whole SEO toolkit (KWFinder primarily focuses on keyword research). They provide deeper SEO functions such as backlink analysis, site stats, marketing insights, SEO writing assistants, PPC data and more. However, all of these features do come at a steeper cost being more expensive and less user friendly.
Basecamp
Know This: Over 90% of Australia's workforce moved to working from home during the peak of the pandemic. This helped many businesses realise that a remote workforce could be as productive or more productive than an office workforce. Having passed the peak of COVID, some employees have continued to work from home, others have returned to their offices, and many have adopted a hybrid working arrangement. This workplace flexibility saw increases in employee satisfaction, self-reported productivity and cost reductions for office overheads. It also showed us the challenges of remote working such as managing teams or projects cohesively and maintaining good internal communication.
Amplifying everything that makes remote working great and addressing many of the pain points of a geographically diverse team, Basecamp promises to solve these challenges. Not only that, the creators have literally written the book on remote working.
For the effective management of a remote or hybrid team, Basecamp is structured around two types of digital groups; teams and projects. As many or as few people as you want can be added to each group and users can find an assortment of modules within. For tracking work status, there’s a collaborative “To-Dos” module, eliminating the need to nag each team member about what is and isn’t done. To deliver on deadlines and remind teams of important dates, there’s a “Schedule” module. To quickly find that file you know someone saved somewhere the “Docs and Files” module provides a single, centralised repository where everything can be placed. No longer do you have to dig through emails, chats, paper stacks, Google drives or local files to find what you’re looking for.
For team communication, bulky and disjointed email chains can be replaced with Basecamps “Message Board” module. The message board is a single place where anyone can post a team update and gather feedback. Here, the whole story can be seen from beginning to end and the UI is comfortingly familiar – looking similar to Facebook but more professional and with a clearer chronological layout. For more open conversation, there’s the “Campfire” module – an in-built chatroom for groups/teams. The accompanying “Direct Messages” feature can be used to take conversations 1-1 and avoid the dreaded never-ending notification pings, a common stress point for remote workers.
To make sure your team feels on top of their work and aren’t burning out, Basecamp even offers a “Auto Check-in” function and “Work-life Balancer”. “Auto Check-in” automates prompts to your team for anything you need to ask regularly, and the “Work-life Balancer” allows team members to declare their online and offline hours to help keep work at work or simply block out focus time.
Pricing: If you want to try before you buy, Basecamp offers a free version which is limited to 3 projects, 20 users and has less features. Upgrading to the “Basecamp Business” plan costs a flat $99USD per month (around $135 AUD). With this plan, you get unlimited projects for unlimited users with no additional per-user fee unlike most other tools. We think it’s a reasonable price to pay especially when it can single-handedly replace multiple tools and subscriptions (such as Dropbox, Slack, Asana and others) that would likely cost more in total.
Next Steps: Hear more on how Basecamp might streamline your business by clicking here.
Amplifying everything that makes remote working great and addressing many of the pain points of a geographically diverse team, Basecamp promises to solve these challenges. Not only that, the creators have literally written the book on remote working.
For the effective management of a remote or hybrid team, Basecamp is structured around two types of digital groups; teams and projects. As many or as few people as you want can be added to each group and users can find an assortment of modules within. For tracking work status, there’s a collaborative “To-Dos” module, eliminating the need to nag each team member about what is and isn’t done. To deliver on deadlines and remind teams of important dates, there’s a “Schedule” module. To quickly find that file you know someone saved somewhere the “Docs and Files” module provides a single, centralised repository where everything can be placed. No longer do you have to dig through emails, chats, paper stacks, Google drives or local files to find what you’re looking for.
For team communication, bulky and disjointed email chains can be replaced with Basecamps “Message Board” module. The message board is a single place where anyone can post a team update and gather feedback. Here, the whole story can be seen from beginning to end and the UI is comfortingly familiar – looking similar to Facebook but more professional and with a clearer chronological layout. For more open conversation, there’s the “Campfire” module – an in-built chatroom for groups/teams. The accompanying “Direct Messages” feature can be used to take conversations 1-1 and avoid the dreaded never-ending notification pings, a common stress point for remote workers.
To make sure your team feels on top of their work and aren’t burning out, Basecamp even offers a “Auto Check-in” function and “Work-life Balancer”. “Auto Check-in” automates prompts to your team for anything you need to ask regularly, and the “Work-life Balancer” allows team members to declare their online and offline hours to help keep work at work or simply block out focus time.
Pricing: If you want to try before you buy, Basecamp offers a free version which is limited to 3 projects, 20 users and has less features. Upgrading to the “Basecamp Business” plan costs a flat $99USD per month (around $135 AUD). With this plan, you get unlimited projects for unlimited users with no additional per-user fee unlike most other tools. We think it’s a reasonable price to pay especially when it can single-handedly replace multiple tools and subscriptions (such as Dropbox, Slack, Asana and others) that would likely cost more in total.
Next Steps: Hear more on how Basecamp might streamline your business by clicking here.
Calendly
A widely known and common killer of productivity for any business is death by "over meeting". Having too many meetings, with too many people and as a result, everyone getting less and less work done. Managing time to maximise productivity is valuable for businesses of any size but it’s especially important for SMEs who have fewer people and therefore less time resource.
Effectively evaluating which meetings to have and more importantly, not to have, is an art and a science. To add to the challenge, even when meetings are valuable, there’s an inevitable back and forth to arrange a time that works for all attendees. For each extra person invited to the meeting, this problem gets exponentially larger, at times taking multiple back and forth emails just to find an appropriate time to have the meeting.
Know This: Although there is no magical tool to help evaluate meeting value (yet), there is a magical tool that eliminates the back and forth - Calendly. You can think of Calendly as a digital secretary that helps you, your clients, customers, and team members find the right time to meet, quickly and painlessly. To sweeten the deal, Calendly even offers extra features such as workflow automation and meeting polls. All in all, this tool streamlines the mundane and gives you more time to focus on more important priorities.
If Calendly sounds like a simple proposition that’s because it is. Despite its simplicity, this tool is surprisingly feature rich. To start with, Calendly integrates with all popular calendars (Google, Outlook, Microsoft Office and iCal). Once integrated, you can set up your availabilities and specify which days/times you can be booked and even the duration of meetings you’re open to. If your calendar says you’re already booked, Calendly automatically blocks those time slots so you can’t be double booked. To further protect your time, you could use the buffer feature which prevents anyone from booking you back-to-back and the scheduling conditions feature to set the minimum amount of notice required to have a meeting with you. For international meetings, the smart time zone detection feature takes the headache out of calculating the time difference between you and other attendees.
Too often, we get stood up by our attendees. To reduce no-shows and cancellations, Calendly provides a workflow-automation function that sends text or email reminders to attendees to make sure they turn up or let you know otherwise. It's also possible to embed Calendly directly into your website so your clients or customers can instantly book time in. This might be a great option if your account managers or sales teams are losing lots of time just trying to set up meetings with clients.
Pricing: Calendly offers five tiers of pricing to fit your needs and make sure you’re only paying for what you need. There’s even a completely free basic plan. Of course, that free plan has its limits but it does generously include many of the core functions. The “Professional” plan is the one to choose if you’re after all the functions we’ve mentioned today and that costs $15USD p/month (around $20 AUD). Like many of the tools on this list, it’s also cheaper if you pay annually.
Next Steps: Read more about how Calendly protects your time (arguably your most valuable resource).
Effectively evaluating which meetings to have and more importantly, not to have, is an art and a science. To add to the challenge, even when meetings are valuable, there’s an inevitable back and forth to arrange a time that works for all attendees. For each extra person invited to the meeting, this problem gets exponentially larger, at times taking multiple back and forth emails just to find an appropriate time to have the meeting.
Know This: Although there is no magical tool to help evaluate meeting value (yet), there is a magical tool that eliminates the back and forth - Calendly. You can think of Calendly as a digital secretary that helps you, your clients, customers, and team members find the right time to meet, quickly and painlessly. To sweeten the deal, Calendly even offers extra features such as workflow automation and meeting polls. All in all, this tool streamlines the mundane and gives you more time to focus on more important priorities.
If Calendly sounds like a simple proposition that’s because it is. Despite its simplicity, this tool is surprisingly feature rich. To start with, Calendly integrates with all popular calendars (Google, Outlook, Microsoft Office and iCal). Once integrated, you can set up your availabilities and specify which days/times you can be booked and even the duration of meetings you’re open to. If your calendar says you’re already booked, Calendly automatically blocks those time slots so you can’t be double booked. To further protect your time, you could use the buffer feature which prevents anyone from booking you back-to-back and the scheduling conditions feature to set the minimum amount of notice required to have a meeting with you. For international meetings, the smart time zone detection feature takes the headache out of calculating the time difference between you and other attendees.
Too often, we get stood up by our attendees. To reduce no-shows and cancellations, Calendly provides a workflow-automation function that sends text or email reminders to attendees to make sure they turn up or let you know otherwise. It's also possible to embed Calendly directly into your website so your clients or customers can instantly book time in. This might be a great option if your account managers or sales teams are losing lots of time just trying to set up meetings with clients.
Pricing: Calendly offers five tiers of pricing to fit your needs and make sure you’re only paying for what you need. There’s even a completely free basic plan. Of course, that free plan has its limits but it does generously include many of the core functions. The “Professional” plan is the one to choose if you’re after all the functions we’ve mentioned today and that costs $15USD p/month (around $20 AUD). Like many of the tools on this list, it’s also cheaper if you pay annually.
Next Steps: Read more about how Calendly protects your time (arguably your most valuable resource).
