5 Must-Have Tools for Small Business Owners in 2025

Vivian:
Welcome back to another episode of the SOB, Small Own Business Marketing Podcast. I'm here with my beautiful sister, Chelsea. Hey, Chelsea.

So before we hop into today's topic, I just want to do a little housekeeping, a 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 and hit subscribe so that way you can get notified anytime a new episode drops. We want to be your marketing BFF, and 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 topics you want us to consider covering in future episodes, you can send us an email to help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com or just go ahead and DM us over at The Seasoned Marketer. So Chelsea, what are we talking about today?

Chelsea:
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?

Vivian:
I am very excited for 2025. 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. 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. It's kind of like a permission slip to try something that you haven't done before, it's new year, new me. I get to step out of my comfort zone and see how we're going to grow this business. 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 we do not use ourselves. We just want to encourage you to 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 did not know there was something out there that did this.

Chelsea:
Exactly. So I want to start Vivian, if that's okay, with my number one tool, 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. 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 about 20 minutes.

Vivian:
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? I want to get a pulse on whether you guys are still looking at AI from a distant. I'm not too sure. Is it going to steal my identity? I don't know.

The reason I say that is because Opus Clip, one of the things that is brilliant on their part: Chelsea takes the link to a YouTube video that we have, let's say, of 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, or 60 seconds worth of stuff she could clip together to make it a video on Instagram, a reel. She doesn't have to do any of that now because literally she takes the link from the long form video and she just pastes it into Opus Clip. Opus Clip generates all of these options for her and she gets to pick which one she likes the best. It even gives a rating on what they think, based on algorithms and stuff, is going to be a better video.

Chelsea:
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 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. 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.

Vivian:
I've tried it on some. It's actually really great. Now you can do this thing where you put a keyword in there and you can tell it, hey, find the part in this video where we talk about this topic. It will focus the videos it creates on that, on pulling from that particular portion of the video. The reason I brought up AI earlier is because it utilizes AI technology to really pump out those videos. 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. I'm starting to warm up to it a little more, because I used to be extremely cautious of that. It feels a little like, I don't know, cheating. Or I really didn't know how good this stuff was going to be, but it's pretty intuitive.
So if you guys want to try any of this out, you want to see what it looks like, just click on the links in the description and that way you can get all of the details on it.

Chelsea:
Also if you don't have a podcast, that's fine. If you've done an interview that you want to create short clips from, or if you have maybe a five minute video that you want to pull stuff from, 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 different ways that it's being used. AI created art? No. I'd rather get art from an artist than AI. But in this scenario, it's taking what you've already created and splicing it for you and doing that work. That's why I feel like you're more comfortable with this.

Vivian:
Yeah, you're probably right about that.

Chelsea:
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 gonna become even more popular. Well, Vivian, today we were talking about how you can now watch videos on Spotify. Like video is not going away. Opus Clip specifically is going to help you quickly, easily, and efficiently create and repurpose your content so that you can get your message out there.

Vivian:
And separate us from this though, Chelsea. Okay. I get it. You guys are like, "you're marketers, of course you're going to say, video is important. We just looked at our Spotify wrapped for podcasting. So Spotify is now doing a wrapped version for podcasters. What percentage of our Spotify followers watched video it said? Was it 81 %? Y'all, that's data. That's information. That's not Vivian and Chelsea saying it's our preference. This is data that we were looking at today that is telling us, "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".

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

Vivian:
As if. That's wild, that that can continue growing.

So shall we move on to number two? So number two is going to be one of my favorites. 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 Flodesk. I'm saying this as a professional marketer that has utilized Mailchimp, Omnisend, and Flodesk, okay? I'm sure there's been another one in there somewhere in between over the years. Because I utilize all three of those heavily, I can tell you that my preference is always Flodesk, and that is the email platform that we use.

Part of the reason I love it so much is because Flodesk 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. Every second that I turn around, they've added something new that is under the membership, the monthly fee that I pay. That's just great added value. So let me give you an example of that. For one, the difference between Flodesk 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 1000, they charge you more. If you have an email list of 10,000, they charge you even more. Okay? Flodesk does away with that completely and they charge you one set fee and that's it, no matter how large 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.

That's going to be the reason we stick to Flodesk. The other thing is you're able to eliminate other platforms that you may be using by just using Flodesk. Perfect example, they allow you the capability of creating landing pages for your freebies. 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. Usually you have to create a different landing page in order to get that funneled back into your email. Flodesk 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, maybe seven days apart or a couple of weeks apart. It allows us to set all of that up. It allows us to segment the people that come onto our email list.

They recently also added a 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 Flodesk. Also, if you want to sell digital products, you can do that through Flodesk from A to Z. They will collect the money. You could create the landing page, all of that. They will deliver the digital product. You're not having to go out and piece together different platforms. If you're wanting to do that Flodesk is basically one house, one umbrella that lets you do all of those things.

Chelsea:
I'm so glad that this is one of our tools because, y'all, I'm going to preach this to the end of time. Email marketing is not dead. We've had this conversation with so many small business owners. If I hear one more person say, "but I don't open my emails" or "I automatically delete them. So why would I send out emails", y'all.

Vivian:
She's going to have it engraved on her tombstone.

Chelsea:
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. OK, but it's not about me. Think about that entire audience we would miss out on just because I personally don't use TikTok.

Vivian:
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. I can tell you, because I look at the open rates, she has about 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. They already are interested in elderberry syrup. She's not having to try to twist their arm to say, "hey, elderberry syrup products are great. They keep you healthy", these people already know that. So if anything, it's just weekly reminders to the people on this list, trying to give them information of maybe a new product she has, or maybe a new study that's been released about wild moss. Stuff like that. 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. I can tell you if she is actively doing this every single week, it's because it shows revenue on the back end.

Chelsea:
Yeah, absolutely. So 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. 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 track what your most popular pages are, where your target audience is coming from, what your target audience is interested in. It'll 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.

It's also going to help you with your marketing in terms of, 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.

Vivian:
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 that we have on there.

Chelsea:
We don't say you should look something up. We say you should Google it.

Vivian:
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 webpage, what your most popular ones are, where people are coming from. So that way, you know, if you're running any marketing up against that 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 work on your marketing or use the data to improve your marketing.

Chelsea:
So important for 2025 just because it's 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 customer journey. Vivian and I were talking about this, and I feel like a lot of small businesses can sometimes forget 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.

Vivian:
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 Skool. S-K-O-O-L. All right, so Skool is a platform that allows you to build community. You're able to go in there and create a group. So think of something like a Facebook group, okay? Very similar to that. You pay a monthly fee and on there, 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 you're a personal trainer and you're like, great, you know what I want to do is 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 Skool very easily. We have our SOB community, our Small Owned Business Community there, that is a monthly membership, $50 a month. If 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. We also are able through that platform to do a weekly Q&A. sessions with our community members. And so I think it's a really great hub if you are looking to...

Chelsea:
Maybe you don't want to create a community, but you want to join a community. Skool 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 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 Skool group. I'm trying not to say community now.

Vivian:
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/sob. Our page will pop up, our about us page. You'll be able to see what the community topic is about, 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 we definitely encourage you to take a look at that platform or that resource if you're looking to add that in 2025. So why is it important in 2025?

Chelsea:
Because community is a powerful tool, whether you are creating your own or joining one, it's something to consider for 2025.

Vivian:
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 would be on the ground by now.

Chelsea:
I was trying so hard to not say it so many times. I'm sorry, y'all. I do know other words, I promise. So our last tool that we want you guys to consider for 2025 is ManyChat. I don't think we've talked about ManyChat before.

Vivian:
I feel like we've mentioned it maybe in prior episodes, but we've never actually talked about specifically what the platform does.

Chelsea:
Yeah, okay. If you're working on getting people onto your website from social media, this is a great tool. So ManyChat is an automated 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 ManyChat is.

ManyChat 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. 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.

Vivian:
Let me frame it a little differently so that we're not coming for consumers. Let me say this. As a small business owner, your role in marketing is to create the best experience, okay? 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. That's you typing a word in and then that's you clicking on whatever link they send you. 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.

Not necessarily maybe because they're lazy, but because the more roadblocks that you are putting up for yourself, they're going to get lost somewhere in there. Okay. Imagine this as if it were a road. Point A to point B, you're lengthening that point A to point B. They're going to get lost somewhere in between there. Make it super easy. Shorten that length between point A and point B, and that way they don't get lost in the scuffle, they don't get lost in that transition, and they could very easily just buy your product. Make it as simple as possible.

Chelsea:
That's what I said but nicer.

Vivian:
Well, I explained it without using the word lazy in there and so on.

Chelsea:
Y'all anything to make your consumers life easier, 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.

Vivian:
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. 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, wow, they gave me this roadmap to 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. I then curate the message that we want to send them. I include the download or the link. Bada bing, bada boom, it's done. I don't ever have to worry about it again. It's now all automated.

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, comment this word and it's done. I don't have to do anything. She doesn't have to do anything. It's in there and it's working for us without us having to go update anything.

Chelsea:
Yeah, another great thing too is that it's a kind of "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.

Vivian:
Yes, and one of the things I love about many chat is they are also utilizing AI technology as we talked about earlier. It's not creepy. It's for good stuff. Okay, they're not using it for evil. They're also adding and expanding as this AI technology grows and they're consistently adding new features and making it easier for people.

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

Chelsea:
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 Skool, which is great for being a part of and building community. We have ManyChat, which is automated DMs to help create a simpler and easier customer journey. We have Flodesk, which is email marketing. Email marketing is not dead. Also Flodesk has a lot of other features as well. Go back and listen to Flodesk, 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. 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.

Vivian:
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. I just want to remind you guys, please join our SOB community, Small Owned 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 can 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's 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 Skool. Skool.com/sob.

Chelsea:
Y'all just give it a chance. Like just beginning of 2025, try it out for January. I promise you'll fall in love with it. Just saying. So consider it and go be the best SOB you can be.