15 Awesome Business Tools to Use for Your Beauty or Hair Salon

While we stick by most of our choices below, we have updated this blog post to reflect changing trends and updates to some of our favorite awesome business tools.

Canva

Canva is hands down the simplest and best online graphic tool out there. It makes us mere mortals look like design geniuses and is a great way to help show off your beauty business! Brilliant to add flair to social media profiles and postings, images on your website, any marketing materials and it goes on and on and on. Their free edition can get you a long way, if not all the way! 

Oh, and they have the most brilliant blog and an online Design School to help you get even better at making gorgeous designs!

Did you know that you can store an unlimited amount of photos for free with Google Photos, as long as they are under 16mp and 1080p HD – and that’s plenty for most of your needs. Set your phone to automatically upload to Google Photos and never have to worry about running out of storage space again – or even worse, something happening to your phone and all those photos being lost!

Photos are key in promoting and showing off your beauty or hair business, so you want to make sure they are perfectly safe – and they are with Google Photos.

Buffer

Buffer.com

Keeping those social media profiles active can be a huge task. But with Buffer, it becomes easy as pie! Link your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+) and then just send all your posts to Buffer and they will queue them up and post them for you at optimal intervals.

We love Buffer and use it to schedule posts and things way into the future – there’s even a post in there to be posted in 6 months time from the time of writing this blog post! And whenever we find interesting stuff to post we just throw it into Buffer knowing that they will take care of the rest.

Start with the free plan that can store up to 10 posts, but you’ll probably find the reasonably priced Awesome plan will be plenty to do the trick for you.

Update from our first edition – you can now schedule most picture and video posts through Buffer. There are still some restrictions, you can’t schedule personalised account posts or images in extreme proportions (extra-long and thin, or short and extra-wide). You still need to do those directly through Instagram, but we think this is a great improvement on before.

Zapier

Who doesn’t want to save time? If you don’t, you’re probably reading the wrong blog post 

With Zapier you can connect all sorts of apps and software and stuff and set up automated workflows. Want your Instagram pics to be automatically pinned to a Pinterest board – done! Want to post the images you like on Instagram automatically to your Facebook page – done! Buffer your Instagram photos to other social media – done! You get the idea. 

Zapier is free for simple zaps – oh, and did we mention that Zapier works with SimplyBook.me?

While Zapier worked with SimplyBook.me before, the newest version of the Zapier integration has more triggers and compatibility with more app

G Suite (formerly Google Apps) is basically Gmail and all that good stuff but for business, so you can use it on your own domain. Like us – rather than have gmail addresses, we have @simplybook.me emails, but it all runs in the same environment as if we were using Gmail.

It’s probably the most affordable and reliable email solution for small businesses that you can get and has a lot of other tools and perks. For example:

Unlimited, (almost) email addresses (they charge per user/inbox – not per address)
Google Drive is your cloud storage for anything and everything, so things are safe in Google’s cloud and you can access stuff anywhere as long as you can get online.
They have a great online calendar (which, incidentally syncs with SimplyBook.me)
Their docs, spreadsheets, forms etc. are brilliant and you can make an unlimited amount of them, share them with whomever you want (and keep them from whoever you want  ) – oh, and collaborate on them in real-time (we particularly love that feature – couldn’t live without it!)

The annual fee is very reasonable and we find it’s well worth it.