Did you know that any business, any venture, has unlimited scope today to tear down every wall and erase every boundary? The main key to greater success and growth is optimisation — or, put another way, finding the best solutions. And that does not require spending a lot of money on professional services. Online tools for optimising a business and its marketing are a couple of mouse clicks away. Most are free and can make the start of any venture considerably easier without further investment.

The right tools speed up the work, or even do it for you — build Google advertising, write copy, create an artificial intelligence algorithm, or tell you how to talk to a particular customer so that the relationship succeeds and lasts. 

I have tried more than a few approaches myself, so I want to share that experience by presenting 25 effective tools for optimising a business and its marketing, for managing social media, and for marketing agencies.

With the help of online tools, even social media marketing can become a genuinely successful process.

• Viber, Messenger, WhatsApp for desktop. When you are talking to people across different apps, jumping from one device to another is genuinely inefficient. It is far more convenient and practical to have the desktop versions of these messaging apps and see every conversation on one device.
• Getferdi.com. Every chat, messaging and other app in one place. It lets you manage different communication tools from a single platform. 
• There are genuinely ways to avoid expensive accounting software. For a sole trader, programs such as Sąskaita123, Cflow and other alternatives cost a few euros and let you not only issue invoices conveniently but calculate tax. They can also walk you through how to carry out particular payment operations. And some accounting firms — Robolabs, for example — add browser-based accounting software to their standard package. There you can track late payments and watch annual revenue. Robolabs is a primary accounting program that also helps with financial analysis.
• Google Drive, Google Trends and Google Workspace. A Google account gives you free cloud storage (Drive), where you can keep important documents, create them and share them with others. Trends lets you see a year’s worth of search query analysis, the number of searches and how they change month to month. That lets you follow demand and seasonality and plan your Google Ads (formerly AdWords) budgets and strategy. Google Workspace is another genuinely useful tool for optimising a business and its marketing — a cloud-based collection of productivity and collaboration tools. Workspace gives your business a personalised email address. You can connect various apps for messaging and for talking to clients and your team. It also lets you bring project and task management, online meetings and community management into one platform. Workspace can be used for data storage too. Everything you need to work smoothly is now in one place.
• Slack is an excellent alternative for communication, letting you work smoothly with a team or with clients remotely. You can create any number of channels and meeting rooms, along the lines of a forum. The free version is for messaging only; the paid one lets you hold virtual meetings, share files and manage projects.
• Integromat, and automations of various kinds such as Zapier. A tool for more advanced users. It helps automate all sorts of business processes free or at low cost, letting you connect many apps into one system and automate particular processes through logical rules.
• ChatGPT – an especially popular online program right now, an artificial intelligence tool that can write all kinds of copy and generate visuals and images from a description. AI can also be used to build a chatbot. In social media marketing this tool is a genuine discovery, and its potential is only starting to become clear.
• Microsoft To-Do –  a free tool for planning work and your day. It works across every device.
• Trello – goes further than Microsoft To-Do in what it can do. In Trello you can plan work, projects and schedules, and bring other people in.
• Rescue Time + Block Site –  an excellent solution for anyone short on discipline at a computer. Rescue Time analyses what you do on your machine and shows how long you spend on different sites and applications and how productive you remain. Install the Block Site extension in Google Chrome and you can block distracting websites for the length of a work session and get on without interruption. Both are free.
• Grammarly –  a treasury of English grammar. It helps correct mistakes, improve the style of a piece and enrich it with a wider vocabulary.
• Canva and wave.video – almost every business needs some graphic design, from business cards and posters to social media, and the straightforward, free canva.com can help. If you want to make video too, a wave.video subscription costs little. With these tools your social media video content becomes faultless. Is managing Facebook and Instagram something you want to do yourself? These tools let you do it quickly and simply, and the result will surprise you.
• Quora – a tool for anyone who reads English and likes looking for answers online. You can find answers to all kinds of questions here, from curiosities about the world and practical household advice to marketing and business optimisation tricks.
• Udemy –  an online learning platform where you can buy training, courses and seminars on a great range of subjects at a genuinely attractive price. Useful for developing your venture or business, managing social media and growing its marketing.
• Skillshare –  another learning platform, offering training in photography, graphic design, marketing, productivity and more.
• Business Model Canvas – your business model set out clearly and simply, in detail, so that you do not lose direction later and can make decisions more easily and quickly.
• Interneto vizija (iv.lt)  – a website needs a name (a domain) and a server. With Wix you pay a monthly fee and the site is hosted with them, but building with WordPress means buying a server. You can check whether a domain is free and buy hosting at iv.lt
• Wix.com or WordPress – even the smallest business or side venture may need a website carrying everything customers need to know. With wix.com you can build not only the site but a logo, though it costs a little. WordPress is free, but you may need to look up how it works; YouTube tutorials do the job well.
• 1 Page Marketing Plan – both the title of a book and a marketing plan that fits on a single page. Genuinely useful when planning a new venture or business, because filling it in answers the main marketing questions. All that remains is to carry it out — and with a plan that is far easier. Think this is a job for a marketing agency? Not necessarily. Your own contribution when planning advertising is invaluable, so preparing the plan is worth it.
• Versli Lietuva and bztstart.lt  – starting a venture raises all sorts of questions. You can find many answers through Google, but to save time and get precise information visit www.verslilietuva.lt and www.bznstar.lt. Both carry plenty of information about services and events, useful articles, and expert consultations.
• Zenpr.lt  – a service that, for a small sum, distributes a press release to a great many Lithuanian journalists. All you need to do is write the text.
• Esources.co.uk – an online platform of dependable suppliers, many of the best in Europe, from whom you can buy all kinds of goods at good prices. 
• Eshoprent.com – online shop specialists, offering the chance to rent an online shop and leave its maintenance to them. 
• Semrush.com academy – a learning platform that teaches the finer points of SEO.

What matters most is choosing the right tools — and that is the hardest part. It takes not only knowing a great deal about them but trying them in practice.

We have already tried all of this, which is why we are now in a position to share that experience and advise our clients.

Here is our golden piece of advice: let us take care of your marketing from A to Z, and spend your own valuable time on growing your business, your processes and your customers.

Follow our series of articles on getting a business moving more effectively. We will soon have more on other tools, approaches and methods for optimisation.