Must Have Apps for Your Business
Welcome back to The Spa Business Building Podcast. I'm Tiffany, your host, and today I wanted to share the apps that I use in my business to help me stay organized and save time. Because who doesn't want to save time in our business?
These apps help you to create effective, you know, marketing and keep you organized so that you can spend more time doing the things that you love in the treatment room and helping your customers. But first, if we haven't met yet, I am the owner of Spa Business Building, also Solo Spa Bosses over on Instagram, and I help solo beauty and wellness professionals attract clients, boost bookings, and build a profitable business through effective marketing strategies and business systems. So today, we're talking about the apps that I use in my business, and I have several that I wanted to share with you that I think can be very effective.
You may already be using some, and if you're not, you may want to jump on trying them out in your business. So the first app that I recommend is always a social media scheduling app, and there are so many out there. If you are kind of new to the scheduling apps, Meta Business Suite is a great one.
I actually use this one for Renewed Spirit Day Spa. It does have analytics. You can schedule ads.
You can schedule your apps. It's kind of limited when it comes to scheduling reels and stories, but you can set a reminder on your phone to schedule those and just create them through the Instagram app or Facebook app and then schedule them at a later time. But I find that using a scheduling app to go ahead and batch your content and then schedule it to go out later, it's going to save you so much time because social media can take, you know, if you're not great at it, it can feel like it takes a really long time.
So some other apps I use later, which is the social media app. I use a paid version of that. I'm kind of just playing around with it, see how I like it.
So far, I do like it. You can actually create like reels and download them as long as it doesn't have audio from Instagram. If you have your own audio, then you can download it to go out.
It's really nice. It doesn't have stories, but you can set up several different accounts. You can set up Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest.
TikTok and schedule it all to go out different times or however you want. It also has an AI like caption generator, and it has a hashtag generator, which is really nice. I just signed up for Planely.
I wanted to see its capabilities because I like to look at different apps and see which one works best for me because you know, some apps have more capabilities or different things that you may like. There's also Metro Cool, there's Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Canva even has a scheduler. So there are so many scheduling apps out there.
You just have to kind of play around and see which one that you like best. Find one that has like a free trial or you know, has a free version and see what you like. The next app that I suggest small businesses should adapt is video editing, some sort of video editing app.
Now there's CapCut. I really like CapCut because there are templates that have already been created by other creators that you can use and just insert your videos and images into those templates, which is really nice. I use those, and I know some people have, you know, they create their own templates to use, and they learn how to edit their videos from CapCut.
I haven't played around enough with it to know, but I like it so far. I create a lot of funny memes in there, so I recommend trying out CapCut. I like to use another app called InShot.
You can make images, you can make videos for different versions. So if you need like an Instagram or YouTube, it will edit it, format it for those images, which is really nice. They have, I think they have a free version.
I pay for the paid version because again, you get more capabilities. So that is the video editing. I'm sure there are so many others.
I try to keep things simple. So these are the ones that I use. Another app that I recommend trying out, and it may depend on your size of business and how many DMs you are getting, but you could try a DM automation.
I use ManyChats for the solo spa bosses. I believe it is only for Instagram. So if you feel like you are getting lots of DMs from your customers, try out a DM automation, ManyChats.
They do have a free version. I pay for a paid version, because I think you get more comments that you can use. So they just make it so much easier so that you don't have to be in your inbox all the time.
And so if you've ever gone to a post and it says, comment this word, and we'll send you a link for our freebie, that is a chat bot, and ManyChats does that. So if you have customers that you want to send them something, something free, want to try to get people on an email list, then ManyChats is a great one. You can also set it up for automations for commonly asked questions.
Instagram does have a chat bot for commonly asked questions. So you should search for that. If you feel like you're just getting those commonly asked questions, if you want to use it more for sales and like your freebies and getting people into buying your products, then ManyChats may be a good option for you.
There, the next app that I recommend is some sort of graphic creation. So Canva is a big one. If you haven't heard of Canva, they do have a free version.
The pro version is awesome. It gives you so much more capabilities, but Canva is really great. You can create posters and reels and graphics and business cards and just the list goes on and on and on.
They have templates that you can use and drop in your own branding colors into those templates and make it your own. You can start from scratch and build it on your own. And Canva is just so amazing.
I can't say enough. They also have, like I said before, a social media scheduling app. I haven't tried it out.
I tried it a little bit. It didn't seem super easy to kind of navigate how to do that. And I think the capabilities are kind of limited on what you can post or how many platforms you can post to.
So I didn't really like it. I don't use that, but I love Canva for so many other things. So you can give that a try.
Another app that I like to have on my phone is called Photo Room. So you can take an image of a product. If you are selling products, you can take a picture, remove the background and put a background of a beautiful, you know, table or backdrop of any kind, and it looks professional.
It doesn't look doctored. But I love Photo Room for that. They do have a free version.
So if you have products that you're trying to sell, and you would like those beautiful images, you can try Photo Room for free. Another app that I recommend is some sort of content generation app, and popular ones for those are ChatGPT and Gemini. So Gemini is the Google version of ChatGPT.
They're both amazing. I've tried them both. They have free versions and advanced versions, which is the paid version.
But basically, using this content generator app is to help you get ideas. You don't want to use it. Now I know there's been some controversy of people who use it to write reports and full emails.
I think that's cheating. But if you were to use it in a way that is honest, and you are using it to generate ideas, that you then create your own emails, your own reports, or whatever it is that you're using for your own captions. If you have a caption, but it's just not working out, you can put that caption into ChatGBT and ask them to rewrite it for you or give you a list of hooks that you can use for your beauty business or things like that.
It's really great at generating ideas that you can make your own. So I do highly recommend using some sort of content generator app. The next app that I like to recommend is a teleprompter app.
Now, I know that there are several out there. They have free versions. I use Blink.
They have a free and a paid version. But basically, it's really great when you are speaking into the camera and you can't remember what you want to say. You can enter in your content, your script, and it will play over while you're recording the video.
It's pretty amazing. I've used it plenty of times when I can't just get the words right and you don't want to riff it. Use a teleprompter app, I use Blink.
Another app that I really like to use to keep my photos organized is Dropbox. I believe they have a free version. Again, I pay for a paid version because I like to have more space.
I need more space. You can keep your documents, signatures, photos. You can organize everything in files and keep it very nice.
So if you have like holiday graphics that you want to keep the graphics separated so that you can pull out later, you can also use Google Photos, honestly. Keep everything organized. If you have a Google account, I have both because you can never be too organized, right?
So I have Dropbox. I keep a lot of my files and other things, my kids' photos, business photos, all sorts of things in there. But to organize your photos, keep them in files, you can use Dropbox.
Now, if you are looking to keep yourself organized, your tasks organized, things that you need to do daily and weekly, I recommend ClickUp. They have a free version, they have the paid versions, but you can have a task list, project list, keeps yourself organized, you know what you need to do daily, weekly. You can even invite people to come to for your projects and your list.
You can invite people there, like team members or contractors, whoever. You can also track your time. So if you're having a hard time with managing your daily admin tasks and you're wondering how much time you're spending on it because you're wondering if you can delegate those tasks out, a good way to do that is to track your time, and they have a time tracker in the app.
So you can set that, and it will track how long it is taking you to get certain tasks done, like your social media, writing emails, writing captions. And then you can decide, wow, it takes me five hours to do all of my social media for the week. I could delegate these tasks out to a virtual assistant who can do it in less time.
And then that saves me five hours of my week that I could be putting back into something else that's going to make me more money, like services. So that is it. Those are the apps that I like to use in my business, and I will run over them again.
Social media marketing. There is Meta Business Suite I use later. There's also Planely and Metricle.
Video editing apps. There's CapCut or InShot. DM automation, like many chats.
Graphic creation, like Canva and Photo Room. Content generator, like ChatGBT and Gemini, which is Google. A teleprompter app, such as Blink.
Organizing your photos with Dropbox or Google Photos and help you stay organized with ClickUp. That is it for today, my friends. Thank you so much for joining me.
If you found this information to be helpful, please leave a review. I would love to hear it. I do also have a free Facebook community.
If you would like to continue this conversation or if you have any sort of questions about other apps that I use or these apps in particular, you can hit me up over there in my free Facebook group. I will link that in the apps. Otherwise, you can find me on Instagram, solo.spa.bosses.
Just go ahead and DM me there. I'm happy to chat with any of these. Thanks again.
I hope that you will share this with your fellow spa besties because sharing is a great way for me to be found as well. So until next time, my friends, stay inspired, stay fabulous and happy business building.
More ways to listen:
Let’s stay connected!
Join my email list, follow along on Instagram, & keep the conversation going inside my free Facebook Community
