5 Must-Have Tools for Small Business Owners in 2025
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if I hear one more person say, oh, but I don't open my emails or I automatically delete them. So why would I send out emails? Y'all? It's what we always say. It's not about you. It's not about what you do. If it was about what we did, we wouldn't be on TikTok. Hey,

Hey everyone, welcome to the SOB Marketing Podcast where we celebrate the SOB that you are and if you haven't figured it out yet, we mean small owned business. We don't mean SOB. Listen, we know that as a small business owner, you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you,

If we're being honest with each other, I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything. Our commitment here at the SOB Marketing Podcast is to give you the real talk

what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, promoting your business, and then what doesn't really work. And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real. Welcome back to another episode of the SOB, Small Owned Business Marketing Podcast. I'm here with my beautiful sister, Chelsea. Hey, Chelsea.

Yay. All right. So before we hop into today's topic, I just want to do a little housekeeping, friendly reminder. If you guys are not subscribed to this podcast, what are you doing? Listen, we love visitors, but we want you to stay. Okay? So go ahead.

hit subscribe so that way you could get notified anytime a new episode drops. We want to be your marketing BFF. So we want to help you guys gain confidence in keeping your marketing in house and being able to grow your small business. One of the ways that you can help us in return for putting all this free, fabulous content out there is to leave us a review. So please leave us a review and let us know how much you are enjoying this podcast. Also, if you have any

any topics that you want us to consider covering in future episodes, you can send us an email to help at theseasonmarketer.com or just go ahead and DM us over at The Season Marketer. So Chelsea, what are

are we talking about today? And y'all, we do have a chapter called TLDL, Too Long, Didn't Listen. So if you don't have time to listen to this entire conversation, we have a chapter that is a synopsis of all the really important information from this episode. So you can head over there. We just ask that, you know, come back and listen to the entire conversation. It is helpful hearing the entire conversation.

But Vivian, today we are talking about the five tools you absolutely need as a small business for 2025. We're at the end of the year. We're about to get into 2025. How are you feeling about the new year?

I am very excited for 2025. It's gone. I mean, this year has gone by way too quickly for my liking, but whatever. I am not the timekeeper, so I don't get to decide that. But I am excited because I feel like every year is kind of like a fresh new start with your business and also a fresh new start with marketing initiatives. And so it's almost like a, I don't know, it's kind of like a permission slip.

to get a little cry cry, try some things that you haven't done before to, you know, it's like new year, new me. Like I get to step out of my comfort zone and just kind of see how we're going to grow this business. And I'm extremely excited about that. So I love this conversation in particular because all of the tools that we are recommending here are tools that we use on the daily. All right. So we don't have anything listed that, um,

We do not use ourselves. So we just want to encourage you to like, hey, give it a look. It may not be a good fit for your business, but most of the time you're probably going to find you're going to be like, wow, like I did not know there was something out there that did this. Exactly. So I want to start, Vivian, if that's okay, with my number one tool. Sure. Which is

If you guys are listeners, avid listeners, then you already know what I'm about to say. Opus clip. Girl, this tool has saved my life. When we first started the podcast...

I would try to create short form clips to upload to TikTok or Instagram from the podcast because we have some great snippets, right? I would be doing that manually. Do you know how long that would take me? It was a nightmare. Now that we have Opus Clip, I can create

between 20 and 30 short form videos in like 20 minutes. Yeah. And let me use this as an opportunity to ask our small business owner friends out there that are listening. You guys tell me in the comments, how are you feeling about AI? Because I want to get your polls on whether

You guys are still looking at AI with like, you know, I'm watching it from a distant. I'm not too sure. Is it going to steal my identity? I don't know. But the reason I say that is because Opus Clip, one of the things that is brilliant on their part, Chelsea takes the link.

to like a YouTube video that we have, let's say this podcast episode. If this video is 40 minutes long, y'all can imagine the amount of time she would spend in picking out 60 second clips that she could use, right? Or 60 seconds worth of stuff she could clip together to make it a video on Instagram, a reel, right?

She doesn't have to do any of that now because literally she takes the link from the long form video and she just pasted into Opus clip. Opus clip generates all of these options for her and she gets to pick which one she likes the best. And it even gives it like a rating on what they think based on algorithms and stuff is going to be a better video. And they tell you why.

Oh, yeah. They give you a score and they give you scores based on the hook, the flow, the value of the content and how within the trends of right now.

the content is, you can edit the video. So maybe you want to take away a snippet or add in a snippet, you can do that. You can also, I haven't tried this yet, but you can now also add B-roll to your short form videos.

which I think is really interesting. I've tried it on some. It's actually, yeah, it's really great. And then now you can do this thing where like you even put a word, a keyword in there and you could tell it like, hey, find the part in this video where we talk about this topic. And then it will focus the videos it creates on that, right?

right, on pulling from that particular portion of the video. But what, the reason I brought up AI earlier is because it utilizes AI technology to really pump out those videos. And so I think

Because we've been using Opus Clip for so long and I've seen how great it is at saving you time. I've seen how great the actual short form videos are that they piece together. I'm like, they may be onto something with this AI technology. Like I'm starting to warm up to it a little more because I used to be extremely cautious of it. I was like, oh, I don't know how I feel about it because it feels a little like, I don't know, like cheating or I really didn't know how good it was.

this stuff was going to be, but it's pretty intuitive. So if you guys, um, throughout this episode, Chelsea, where are you going to put the links to these, uh, resources? I will put it in the show notes. Perfect. So if you want to try any of this out, you want to see what it looks like, just click on those links. And that way you can get all of the details on it. And also if you don't have a podcast, that's fine. If you've done an interview, um,

that you want to create short clips from or if you have maybe a five minute video that you want to pull stuff from like it doesn't have to be podcast related if you have any longer form videos this is a good option for you guys also i feel like ai

can be uncomfy in certain scenarios in like different ways that it's being used. Like AI created art? No. You know, like I'd rather get art from an artist than AI. But in this scenario, it's not creating, like it's taking what you've already created and splicing it for you and doing that work. Like it's not, that's why I feel like

you're more comfortable with this. Yeah, you're probably right about that. Yeah. So why are we bringing this up for tools for 2025? Y'all, video is queen. It's not going away. If anything, it's going to become even more popular. Well, Vivian, today we were talking about how you can now watch videos on Spotify. Video is not going away. And Opus Clips specifically is going to help you

quickly, easily, efficiently create and repurpose your content so that you can get your message out there. Separate us from this though, Chelsea. Okay. Yeah, I get it. You guys are like, uh, your marketers, of course, are going to see a video. We just looked at our Spotify wrapped for podcasting. So Spotify is now doing a wrapped version for their, um, podcasters. And

What percentage of our Spotify followers watched video, it said? Was it 88%?

It was, I think, 81%. Y'all, that's data. That's information. That's not Vivian and Chelsea saying it's our preference. You know, video is queen. You should do it because, you know, socialmediatoday.com said it, whatever. No, this is data that we were looking at today that is telling us, hey, you guys have people that are following you on Spotify, listening to your podcast. 81% of those people enjoy watching the video paired with it.

Yeah. Yeah. Also, another interesting statistic that I saw, social media usage is expected to grow 10% in 2025. As if. As if. Yeah.

That's wild. Yeah, that can continue growing. So shall we move on to number two? Yes. What's number two? So number two is going to be one of my favorites. And if you guys have been around here for any amount of time, you know that I love me some good email marketing. And my preferred platform for email marketing is Flowdesk. Thank you.

And I'm saying this as a professional marketer that has utilized MailChimp, OmniSend, and Flowdesk. Okay. And I'm sure there's been another one in there somewhere in between over the years.

But because I utilize all three of those heavily, I can tell you that my preference is always Flowdesk. And that is the email platform that we use. Part of the reason I love it so much is because Flowdesk does a really good job of integrating new features. So they are a company that is trying to be innovative and stay on top of stuff. And every second that I turn around, they've added something new that I

is under the membership, the monthly fee that I pay. And so for me, that's just great added value. So let me give you an example of that. For one, the difference between Flowdesk is usually

email platforms will charge you based on how big your email list is. So if you have an email list of 100, they might not charge you. If you have an email list of, let's say, 500, they start charging you. If you have an email list of 1,000, they charge you more. If you have an email list of 10,000, they charge you even more. Okay. And so Flowdesk does away with that completely. And they charge you one set fee

And that's it. Like no matter how large your email gets, your email list gets. We love that because as a growing small business, we started our email list from zero and we grew it to like 500. Now it's over 1200. And hopefully in 2025, we hope to get really aggressive with growing our email list. I would like for it to be over 10,000 and I don't want my pricing to change. Yeah.

So that's going to be the reason we stick to Flowdesk. The other thing is you're able to eliminate other platforms that you may be using by just using Flowdesk. Perfect example, they allow you the capability of creating landing pages for your freebies. Okay, so yes, perfect example. Anytime Chelsea says, Vivian, I think we need a free download for this.

That free download allows us to grow our email list and to get new people connected to our business. But usually you have to create something like different, a different landing page in order to get that funneled back into your email. You don't.

Flow Desk makes it very easy for you to do all that. You're able to create sequences. We have somebody that joins our email list. We want to send them two welcome emails, okay? Like maybe seven days apart or a couple weeks apart. It allows us to set all of that up. It allows us to segment the people that come onto our email list. And they recently also added

feature where you can create your own link in bio page. So instead of using something like, let's say, Linktree, you can now do that in Flowdesk. Also, yeah. I didn't know that. If you want to sell digital products,

you can do that through Flowdesk from A to Z. Okay. They will collect the money. You could create the landing page, all of that. They will deliver the digital product. And so you're not having to go out and piece together different platforms. If you're wanting to do that, Flowdesk is basically one house, one umbrella that lets you do all of those things. I'm so glad that this is one of our tools because I,

Y'all, I'm going to preach this to the end of time. Email marketing is not- She's going to have it engraved on her tombstone, y'all. Absolutely. We've had this conversation with so many small business owners. If I hear one more person say, oh, but I don't open my emails or I automatically delete them. So why would I send out emails, y'all?

It's what we always say. It's not about you. It's not about what you do. If it was about what we did, we wouldn't be on TikTok because I don't use TikTok personally. Okay, but it's not about me. And think about all that entire audience we would miss out on just because I personally don't use TikTok. No.

Well, and let me share a personal experience. One of our clients is an elderberry company, and she utilizes weekly emails to stay top of mind with her customers. And I can tell you, because I look at the open rates, she has about like a 40% to 50% open rate, which is very good. So think about that. If she's got a large email list of people who have

bought from her. These are people that are already primed y'all. Okay. They already are interested in elderberry syrup. She's not having to like, you know, try to twist their arm to say like, Hey, elderberry syrup products are great. They keep you healthy. This and that these people already are

know that. So if anything, it's just weekly reminders to the people on this list, trying to give them information of like maybe a new product she has, or maybe a new study that's been released about wild moss. What do you call it? They're now doing sea moss drops. Okay. Okay. Stuff like that. And so there is nobody better. If she has half of that email list,

opening up and reading what she's putting out there, it's converting to sales to some percentage. And I can tell you if she is actively doing this every single week, it's because it shows revenue on the back end. Again, email marketing is not dead. Don't sleep on it. Okay. Third tool. This is one that I really hope

You guys are already using. If you have a website, you need to be using Google Analytics. Preach. Y'all, this is something you should already be doing if you have a website. But I understand sometimes life can get really hectic.

It will help you, okay? It will help you track what your most popular pages are, where your target audience is coming from, what your target audience is interested in. It will help you track conversions, track your customer's journey better. If you listened to last week's episode, you remember we said that you need to be tracking your customer's journey.

It's going to help you be more successful in sharing content that your audience wants to see on your website. And it's going to help you with your marketing in terms of, you know, you can look at these are my best sellers. These are the pages that people are spending the most time on. When you know that information, you can tweak your marketing to focus on that.

And it also helps you if you're thinking right now, I do my website on Wix or I do my website on Shopify. There are plugins. Google Analytics is a plugin because, yes, you have analytics on those, but you also want the Google Analytics portion of it because it's the biggest search engine rate that we have on there. We don't say, oh, you should look something up. We say, oh, you should Google it.

Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing too is if you are planning on at some point running Google ads,

For your small business, the analytics part is definitely something that you want to integrate. So as Chelsea said, there's so much information that Google Analytics can collect for you, whether that's how much time somebody is spending on a particular web page, what your most popular ones are, where the source, where people are coming from. So that way, you know, if you're running any

marketing up against that, like, hey, that's converting, that's working well, that's equaling a click or not, then you're able to ultimately save money, save time and just kind of like, you know, I guess work on your marketing or kind of use the data to improve your marketing. Yeah. And so important for 2025, just because it's important.

Any year in the digital age. Important. Any year in the digital age. If you aren't already using it, we implore you to use it. I do also want us to start focusing more on your customer's journey. Vivian and I were talking about this, and I feel like a lot of small businesses can sometimes forget that

that you want to know the process that your customer is going through when they're making a purchase, when they're interacting with your brand, Google Analytics is going to help you keep track of that customer journey.

That is a great point. All right. So now we are on to tool number four. And this one is going to be a brand new one because we've never talked about this before. It is the School SKOOL. All right. So School is a platform that allows you to build community. And so what it does is you're able to go in there and

you create a group. So think of something like a Facebook group. Okay. Very similar to that. You pay a monthly fee and then you are able to decide if you want to do a free community. So you don't have to charge for it. This could be free community for people to join, or this could be a paid community and they help you from A to Z with this. So let's say if you are a, I

I don't know, let's say you're a personal trainer and you're like, great, you know what I want to do is I want to actually do my stuff online, upload videos, create a community for people to be able to come on there, ask questions, or maybe virtually I can help them one-on-one, but I want to charge $100 for this. You're able to do that in school.

Very easily. So having set up, we have our SOB community or small business community there. That is a monthly membership, $50 a month. You're a small business owner. You could join. We have preloaded videos on there. We have forums on there. We have documents that you can look at, Excel spreadsheets that you can look at for resources. And we also are able through that platform to...

do weekly Q&A sessions with our community members. And so I think it's a really great hub if you are looking to...

implement that, to incorporate that into your small business, definitely go check out School S-K-O-O-L. Can I also say, maybe you don't want to create a community, but you want to join a community. School is an amazing option. All of those things that Vivian just listed about building a community and everything, you can join a community as well. So if you don't want to create a community, but you're still looking for something

That sense of community. I feel like I've said community too many times now, but you know what I mean. If you're looking for that for a group of people, you can also just join a school group.

I'm trying not to say community now. A school of people. If you guys want an example of what that looks like, you can go look at ours. So you would just go to skool.com slash sob. And on there are

our page will pop up, our About Us page. You'll be able to see what the community topic is about, like what the focus is, how many members are in there, and also if there's a price to join or if it's free. So definitely encourage you to take a look at that platform or

or that resource if you're looking to add that in 2025. And why is it important in 2025? Because again, community is a powerful tool, whether you are creating your own or joining one, it's something to consider for 2025.

I'm just grateful that we're not playing a drinking game where I drink every time that you say the word community because I feel like I'd be on the ground by now. I was trying so hard to not say it so many times. I'm sorry, y'all. I do know other words. Okay, I promise. Are you a small business owner feeling overwhelmed by marketing? We understand. That's why we created the SOB community just for you.

Imagine having access to expert marketing advice every week through our interactive Zoom calls. Network with fellow small business owners in our community, share valuable insights and grow together. Dive into our comprehensive training videos covering everything from social media to SEO. And all this for just $50 a month. Empower your small business without breaking the bank. Join the SOB community today.

Okay, so our fifth tool for 2025 is going to be ManyChat, which I feel like we've mentioned before, but we've never really talked about it. So ManyChat is going to be an automated tool.

DM service, so I'm sure you guys have seen the content creators that say Leave this comment and we'll send you a direct link to whatever. That's what many chat is Many chat has two versions There's a free version and there's the paid $15 version which I believe we use I want to clarify I am sure there are people thinking why would I even bother with this? I can just send people to

the link in my bio. People are lazy. I mean, I love that you're coming for consumers, but... Let's be honest, okay? Let's be honest. People are lazy. That's a lot more work. Just leaving a comment and I'll get a direct link. I don't have to go through your bio link. I don't have to find what I'm looking for in your link tree.

That is so much easier. When you cut out extra steps for people, they're more likely to follow through. Let me frame it a little differently so that we're not coming for consumers. Let me say this. Vivian's going to say it nicer than I did. Well, because I'm going to put the onus on a small business owner. As a small business owner, your role in marketing is to create the best experience, okay? Yes.

Which would you prefer, having to do five clicks to get to purchasing a product or commenting one word, having somebody send you a DM with the link and then you being able to click on that? So that's two clicks. Okay, that's you typing a word in and then that's you clicking on whatever link they send you.

Okay, that's the thing is if you are prioritizing your customer journey, if you're prioritizing the experience that a potential customer is having with your business, the key is always going to be make it as easy as possible.

Okay. Not necessarily maybe because they're lazy, but because the more roadblocks that you are putting up for yourself, the less likely they are to, they're going to get lost somewhere in there. Okay. So you're, you're taking, imagine this as if it were a road. Okay.

point A to point B, you're lengthening that point A to point B. They're going to get lost somewhere in between there, okay? Make it super easy. Shorten that length between point A and point B and that way they can, they don't get lost in the scuffle. They don't get lost in that transition and they could easily

very easily just by your product. Make it as simple as possible. Yes. I mean, I feel like we said the same thing, but yours was more correct. Yes, you're correct. I explained it without using the word lazy in there. That's fair. That's a good point. And so why it matters for 2025, y'all, anything to make your customer's life easier is

Any way that you can create the simplest processes is going to be a plus because that means they're more likely to actually follow through with it. I can also make a case that it's simplifying your life. All right. Because let's think about this too. Let's say you don't utilize something like ManyChat. ManyChat, the beauty of it. So

We have free downloads. We want to be able to utilize and leverage those free downloads. We've already spent the time putting it together and it's a way for us to grow our email list. And it's a way for someone to have a first interaction with us where we provide value. They're like, oh, wow, they gave me this roadmap to...

you know, negotiating advertising contracts. Great. I'm about to negotiate my first billboard contract. This is what I need. It's free added value. Then they want to join the email list. It helps our small business. If I have to manually go into our link in bio and update every time we have a new download or anytime we have this, it gets to be cumbersome on my end, which means I'm less likely to do it.

Okay, we want you guys as small business owners to save time and also to be able to leverage the stuff you already have out there. Now, through ManyChat, all I have to do is I go in there, I set it up one time, I say,

Here is the word I want people to comment and when they comment on any of our posts on Instagram, this word, I want this sequence to happen. Basically, I want them to get a response in the comment section from me. I give them three different variations of that response and I then, you know, curate the message that we want to send them. I include the download or the link by

Bada bing, bada boom, it's done. I don't ever have to worry about it again. It's now all automated. So now Chelsea, from our perspective, Chelsea doesn't have to think twice. She wants to promote that particular download now. All she has to do is say, hey, comment this word.

And it's done. I don't have to do anything. She don't have to do anything. It's in there and it's working for us without us having to go update anything. Yeah. Another great thing too is that it's kind of like a set it and forget it thing. So a post that we've made maybe three months ago,

If someone new comments now, they're still going to get that DM. Yes. And I love one of the things I love about ManyChat is they are also utilizing AI technology as we talked about earlier. It's not creepy. It's for good, good stuff. Okay. They're not using it for evil.

But it also, they're also adding and expanding as this AI technology grows and they're consistently adding new features and making it easier for people. And so I do think that if you're looking for an easy way, if you guys have, you sell earrings.

Okay. Let's say that you change your collections every fall, every spring, every, you know, whatever. Okay. Well, great. Now you can say like, hey, if they comment fall, we're going to send them to this particular landing page or we're going to send them these, you know, links. You're able to curate it to however it makes sense for your small business. Okay.

Time for the TLDL. So if you skip to this spot, too long, didn't listen. Here's a quick synopsis, but also please, pretty please, when you get the chance, go back and listen to this entire conversation.

So TLDL, we have five tools that we want you guys to focus on for 2025 to consider using. We have school, which is great for being a part of and building community. We have many chat, which is automated DMs to help create a simpler and easier customer journey. We have flow desk, which is email marketing. Email marketing is not dead.

Also, Flowdesk has a lot of other features as well. Go listen to that part of this conversation. Go back and listen to Flowdesk because Vivian said some really interesting things I did not know. Opus Clip, social media, video is still queen. Video is still important and Opus Clip will help you take long form content, longer videos and create short form content quickly, easily, efficiently.

It's a tool that I live by. And lastly, Google Analytics, which if you are not already using and you have a website, you need to be using it. Let's track our data, understand our website so that we can create a simpler and understand better our customers journeys.

I love it. This was a great discussion. I hope that you guys are as amped up about 2025 and your small business as we are. And I just want to remind you guys, please join our SOB community, small and business community. It is a great place for you to not only meet other small business owners, but to have access to two professional marketers.

You could go in there. You can ask questions seven days a week. Once a week, we hop on an hour-long call, Q&A style. You could bring any of your marketing issues up for discussion, and we discuss it as a group. I think there is a ton of value in it. Well, let me scratch that. I know.

There is a ton of value in it. There is nowhere else that you guys are going to be able to pay $50 a month and be able to talk, stay informed, and also be held accountable for your marketing. So if you're looking to get off on the right foot in 2025 to keep your marketing top of mind, join our community. Go to school, S-K-O-O-L dot com slash S-O-B. Y'all just give it a chance. Because

beginning of 2025 try it out for january i promise you'll fall in love with it just saying you were about to say i promise you're gonna fall in love with us i was like that is questionable yeah maybe not that but just test it out it's 50 bucks that's like a dinner date yeah yeah so consider it and go be the best sob you can be