Free online tools for running an effective hospitality business
Corona virus has changed dramatically the way we live and work, and this new situation has urged quick adoption from enterprises which are operating in the hospitality industry. In our first blog post on this topic, we gave a bunch of advices about what you can do to navigate your business effectively in this extraordinary period and now we will recommend useful platforms witch can make this even easier for you.
Note: Free version is available from all of the platforms below, but if you need specific features for your business, you can choose from different pricing packages.
Communication Tools
As we mentioned before, try to organize online meetings with your team regularly to show them that together you will overcome this situation. You only need internet access to enable fast and seamless communication within your team and get in touch with your colleagues in a few seconds.
Google Meet is a video-conference-calling platform designed primarily for professional use, which links remote colleagues together for real-time interaction. Up to 25 people can speak and share video with each other at once. Anyone with a standard Google account can join and participate in a Google Meet session. The Meet platform doesn't work on all web browsers. It won't function in Safari, for example, and works best in Google Chrome.
Zoom is an enterprise video communication platform, an easy tool for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.
Slack is an online chat room for your whole company, designed to replace email as your primary method of communication and sharing. Its workspaces allow you to organize communications by channels for group discussions and allows for private messages to share information, files, and more all in one place. Slack integrates with a host of other apps so you can manage your entire workflow through one platform.
Marketing Tools
Be honest: in most cases, beside many operative tasks, marketing is often the last thing you are dealing with, but the time has come to be a marketing professional! Let us show you a few marketing tools with witch you can easily set up an appealing marketing strategy.
Canva is a graphics design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. It is available on web and mobile, and integrates millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations.
With so many different social networks to manage, it can be tricky to plan which content to share at what time, and on which platform. Hubspot (CRM platform provider) put together a customizable social media content calendar that will allow you to organize your social media activities far in advance—making your social marketing more manageable, and more effective.
Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.
WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over 35.2% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes – more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress. The end result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to anyone – even people who aren’t developers.
Once you’ve created an amazing video to share on social media or your website, where will you put it? The default seems to be YouTube, which is quick and easy but comes with less control and potentially some unrelated ads or suggestions. Wistia is made for marketers’ videos because the player keeps people on your page—or sends them precisely where you want them to go next.
Mailchimp is software that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via email. It does this by letting you send newsletters people who’ve signed up for your mailing list. In short, Mailchimp is free software (that costs money once your subscriber list gets larger) where you can create, send and manage newsletters.
Project Management Tools
The following project management tools are here to help you organize work and collaborate with your colleagues on projects. Project management tools are usually defined by the different features offered. They include, but are not limited to Planning, Scheduling Collaboration Documentation and Evaluation.
The boards in Trello are projects and each project has a set of tasks which are then grouped on a board. You can then move the tasks to different progress points, depending on the work that has been done and the tasks that still need to be done.
MeisterTask is an online task management tool for teams. Your tasks, comments, notes, due dates, and more will be set up like Kanban board in one place. It’s a flexible project board and cloud-based project management that goes along with your workflow.
Any.do is an all-in-one productivity platform designed to help people and teams stay organized. You can take your to do list with you and access Any.do on mobile, laptop, desktop, tablet and even your watch! Your tasks are automatically synced across all of your devices. Personal and Team version is also available.
Stay tuned! - Get informed from our new webpage which will be released soon and where we've collected our previous blog posts and other useful information on the COVID-19 topic.