Free Essential Tech For Businesses during COVID-19

Are you currently running your business virtually? Now’s the opportunity to start leveraging off free tech solutions. Some of the big players out there have made free readily available options for you to help maximise productivity, focus on connectivity, collaboration, marketing and improve information access, while keeping you and your staff sane during these unprecedented times.

Below are our current favs for productive remote work experiences.

Zoom Free: One of the leading video conferencing software apps has a free option. Zoom allows you to virtually interact with co-workers or employers, making communication seem much more human. You can hold an unlimited number of meetings and group meetings with multiple participants for 40 minutes in length. Paid upgrades available.

Slack Free: Is perfect for small teams wanting to try out Slack. Providing all of your communication and tools in one place, your remote teams will stay productive no matter where they work from. It integrates with other apps like Google Drive, Office 365 and many more and also offers 1:1 voice and video calls between teammates. Paid Upgrade available

Whatsapp Business App: Free to download the app. This was built with the small business owner in mind. Allowing you to create a catalogue to showcase your products and services, connect directly with your customers by using tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.

Hootsuite: Right now its free access for Hootsuite Professional for small businesses and nonprofits until July 1st, 2020. Hootsuite helps to manage your social media accounts, and stay connected with your customers and communities. It helps you keep track and manage your many social network platforms and can enable you to watch what people are saying about your brand and allow you to respond instantly.

Salesforce: Right now, there is free access to technology for emergency response teams, call centres and care management teams for health systems affected by COVID-19. Read more here

Mailchimp: Are you looking for an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you manage and communicate with your customer/audience. Mailchimp marketing focuses on strong contact management practices, through designed email campaigns, and powerful data analysis. The free package includes all the basics you need to start marketing plus basic reporting tools.

SurveyMonkey: Offers free questionnaire templates written by survey research experts to gather data/feedback from employees, customers and broader groups. Right now a survey could be useful to collect feedback, opinions, criticism and suggestions from the general public and customers while were all impacted by COVID-19

Shopify: Is currently offering a Free 90-day trial for all new customers. It’s a unique platform with all the e-commerce and point of sale features you need to start, run, and grow your business. It’s designed to help people create their own, scalable online store and integrates with most platforms. As a business you can sell products directly on your website, and across multiple marketplaces and social media.

Linkedin: Is currently offering 16 learning and education courses online, to provide tips on how to stay productive, build relationships while being isolated at home, how to use virtual meeting tools and how to balance family and healthily work dynamics. It’s certainly worth a look!

Telstra: Are offering a free Telstra Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) service to Aussie businesses until 30 June. This tool will help keep you connected with your teams through video and audio conferencing. They are also providing unlimited data allowances on fixed broadband and extra mobile data free of charge for our consumer and small business customers.

Google Hangout Meets: Google are rolling out free access to “advanced” features for Hangouts Meet their answer to video conferencing to all G Suite users and G Suite for Education consumers globally until the start of July. Companies can now host meetings with up to 250 members, live stream to up to 100,000 viewers within a single domain, and record and save meetings to their Google Drive.