Tag Archives for " team "

Prioritizing Team Connection During a Pandemic

According to the 2021 State of Marketing report, 75% percent of marketers say the pandemic has permanently shifted how they collaborate and communicate at work. Now whether this is good or bad is what I would like to share and discuss with you.

In life, I naturally chose the positive side of things and live my life as a glass-half-full type. I temper my optimism with a healthy dose of realism too – nobody benefits from toxic positivity.

Even through the pandemic, I’ve primarily been choosing to see the small upsides of the situation, although some days that’s been tough (even for me). (Multiple rounds of home school quarantine, anyone?)

So, let’s take a look at the positive impact that the pandemic has had on team alignment.

 

Remote Work: Forging a Culture of Connection

C&C has been a virtual firm since Jay Baer founded it in 2008. We’ve had team members from NYC to LA, Portland to Orlando and many stops in between for the last 13 years.

We thrive in a work from home arrangement, across multiple time zones, while only seeing each other in person ONCE per year.

We’ve all entered the C&C family knowing this setup and while some folded right into the work-in-your-slippers mentality, others had a more steep learning curve on self-discipline ahead.

One commonality across the decade and more while we’ve been WFH is that we each still crave and seek out connection with our coworkers. We have slack-style chats, personal text threads, and monthly virtual happy hours.

Even across the miles, pandemic or not, we have established a culture of connection. It takes intention and effort to keep that connection, but each team member wouldn’t be here without it.

 

The Intersection of Professional and Personal

We recently conducted research with Ascend2 on team alignment and I was shocked in the best way possible. The stat that struck me the most was: 76% of our respondents are strongly integrated or totally integrated.

To me, the word “integrated” has importance here. Has the perception of “integrated” changed with the pandemic? In my past corporate experience, integration equated to one hour a week around a conference table where an agenda was followed and updates went in order.

It ended up sounding like Charlie Brown’s mom “waaaa, whaaaa, wa, waaaaaa, wa, wa.”

Now, through the broader application of work from home, for better or for worse, everyone is literally IN each other’s home via video conference.

What used to be possibly a passing “hi” in the hallway is now an introduction of a child who enters the frame or an apology for a pet barking as the doorbell rings.

We have all been forced to integrate into one another’s home settings.

75% percent of marketers say the pandemic has permanently shifted how they collaborate and communicate at work.Click To Tweet

We have seen a new side of coworkers. We have met more of their life outside of the office, and have all been impacted at the same time by a global change in how we work, shop, visit and view our health.

This intersection of our personal and professional lives has never existed as collectively before, and I truly believe for many teams it increases their integration with each other for the better.

 

Empathy Brought On By The New Normal

The humanity of team members has become more tangible in this new world. With COVID involved, people are more empathetic towards each other. We all had to adjust our lives at home and at work.

Every organization has been forced to “figure it out” – figure out how to communicate, connect and keep working among office shutdowns. Each person has had to reconfigure their home into a workspace at some point in the last 18 months. And we did it.

What I appreciate very much is that working from home can often give a deeper understanding of each other’s ability to relate and integrate.

We witnessed how each of us managed our at-home work space and new outside interruptions during a history-making, life-altering pandemic.

I understand that our culture here at C&C is different and special. But I have heard from many clients that they are proud of their team, that working from home is going to continue because they are being successful and the alignment of the goals is better than before.

 

Prioritize Your Team’s Connection

We’ve evolved from a question of “how do you integrate two teams” to optimizing and using technology to increase integration with other teams in the organization.

In my pre-pandemic work life, we discussed things like “lunch and learns” and “ride alongs” as well as “mutual goal setting meetings” around team alignment.

Now we are finding much more common ground among us and a more genuine “how are you?” and “is everyone healthy” has a new meaning to mankind – therefore bringing us together and teams together.

If this sounds like Utopia to you – a foreign space that is nowhere close to the reality of your professional experience – I’ll offer some advice.

What I am describing is not fictional or only associated with our wonderful C&C team. There are hundreds of open positions at organizations who are aligned in goals, believe in a people-first culture, and support connection. I urge you to seek them.

If you lead an organization, you must be the model. You owe it to your staff to connect and align them as well. You owe it to them to be genuine and carve out time for 1:1 and team interaction.

The world is still hurting and keeping your best team members connected and not feeling alone, will increase your productivity and success by more than your bottom line.

If you are wanting this type of connection among your team but are unsure how to make it happen, our team would be happy to help.

The post-Prioritizing Team Connection During a Pandemic appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

Struggling With Customer Acquisition?: Fix This One Alignment Issue

You are struggling to hit your acquisition targets—the marketing team is bringing in lots of hot leads but the sales team is struggling to convert them. Yet your marketing team is an award-winning one and your sales team is world cup worthy.

Where is the problem with your customer acquisition strategy? And what can be done about it?

Let’s dig a little deeper to understand what is making your team of A-players struggle to hit your acquisition goals?

 

Why Does Your Customer Acquisition Strategy Seem Broken?

There are many reasons why your customer acquisition strategy may not be working. But deep down, it’s due to one thing: the misalignment between your sales and marketing team.

Here’s how it translates into the organization.

 

Gap 1: Your sales and marketing teams are working on different funnels

In most companies, the marketing and sales teams work separately. Too often, marketers know too little about the customers and their dealings with the sales team.

SDRs work on cold emails and cold call random people, and marketers run campaigns to their target persona. As a result, each of these departments ends up creating an acquisition funnel based on the persona they have identified as their ideal customer profile.

This strategy is still used by many companies, even by some industry leaders, and it enables them to fuel their year-over-year growth.

Now, I bet you’re wondering what the problem is since this strategy seems to work.

Well, a study by the International Data Corporation revealed that B2B companies’ inability to align marketing and sales teams around the right workflows and technologies costs them about 10% or more of revenue per year.

In fact, when your sales and marketing departments function as standalone departments, efforts are put into tasks that are not very productive. For example, one study found that 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting—either chasing unqualified leads or trying to convert leads that aren’t yet warmed up.

Another consequence of sales and marketing teams working with different funnels is a lack of understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile to target. For example, a lead that the marketing team deems qualified may be seen as unqualified by the sales team. A study by ReachForce showed that sales reps ignore 50% of marketing leads.

Other studies have shown that 60-70% of B2B content created is never used. In most instances, this is because the topic is irrelevant to the buyer’s audience.

As you take it a step ahead, you realize that if the marketing team and the sales team worked together, it would have been easier for them to determine what content the marketing team should produce for lead nurturing and how to use it to warm leads.

 

Gap 2: Your sales and marketing teams are chasing different results

How can you achieve a shared goal if each team measures its success in different ways?

For clarity purposes, let’s assume you have a SaaS, and your annual goal is to grow sign-ups by 45+ percent.

Now imagine that the sales teams measured their success based on new free trial accounts, closed deals, and upsells. Meanwhile, marketing teams measured their success on lead quantity, quality, and brand awareness.

In this particular case, saying that you will fall short of your annual goal is just an understatement.

If there was alignment between the two teams, they would have agreed on what a quality lead means for the company and what is the average number of leads marketing needs to bring in before sales convert X amount of users.

If, for example, the metric shows that the sales team needs 15 leads to close 5 deals and that each of these leads should be SaaS companies with teams of 50 to 300, the marketing team will know where to focus their efforts and what to do in order to reach the common goal.

Similarly, the sales team will know better how not to fall short of the 5 out of 15 deals closed.

 

Why Aligning Sales and Marketing Is The Only Way to Fix Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

So with the gaps identified, it has become increasingly clear that the solution to bridging the gap is to align your sales and marketing teams.

Here are some reasons why.

 

It helps keep business to customer communications consistent

It happens more often than you think—the sales team calls the product one thing, but the marketing team uses another term to describe the same product.

For example, the sales team calls it a “Chatbot,” while the marketing team calls it a “Conversational Marketing Platform.”

Here is another example. The marketing team talks about “Collaborative Growth Platform”, while the sales team talks about “CRM”.

Admittedly, this can be confusing for potential and even existing customers, and it’s a living example of mismatched messaging.

Not surprisingly, it can cost you your first good impression and, as a result, a prospect may be less likely to trust you.

In fact, 21% of B2B marketers cite “giving the prospect a bad first impression of our company” as one of the most damaging factors resulting from misaligned marketing and sales.

That’s why one of the biggest benefits of aligning sales and marketing teams is consistent messaging.

The messaging used by your marketing team can now warm up prospects and set them up for the sales team to further reinforce those same messages. If the marketing message strikes a chord, the sales team can use it to close more business.

Failing this, you may end up with a siloed message, which can lead to a very confusing and inconsistent journey for your prospect.

21% of B2B marketers cite “giving the prospect a bad first impression of our company” as one of the most damaging factors resulting from misaligned marketing and sales.Click To Tweet

If your prospects think they’re getting one thing based on what marketing is saying when the sales team is selling them something completely different, it will definitely hurt your bottom line.

So it’s important to make sure your message is consistent and relevant to your entire customer journey.

 

It creates a single customer journey

We discussed earlier that the foundation of the sales-marketing relationship is the conversion funnel.

So when it comes to getting everyone on the same page, the best place to start is to get them to agree on the structure of the entire customer journey.

By doing so, you save your prospects from having a single branded customer experience instead of separate siloed experiences.

As a result, everything is tied together as an experience—from the awareness stage at the top of the customer journey funnel to the brand loyalty stage.

 

It fosters a “marketing first” approach

Each department plays its own tune when your sales and marketing teams are misaligned. In such scenarios, prospects are less likely to respond positively to a cold outreach if they’ve never heard of you, and that can harm your reputation and your chances of closing the deal later on.

If both teams are aligned, it encourages a “marketing first” approach—meaning that marketers find prospects who have a specific problem and create content to help them solve that problem.

It all starts with the marketing team warming up and nurturing new leads by creating informational content about the product and selling the features and benefits by creating transactional content to fuel conversion.

Then, when the potential customer prepares to make a decision, the sales team can take it from where the marketing left and close the deal.

 

It leads to a better way of assessing results

By aligning your sales and marketing teams with a common goal and the same KPIs, you have a great chance to see the synergy behind their work and analyze how your organization is stacking up in both sales and marketing.

In addition, you will be able to detect the shortcomings of your customer acquisition funnel and adjust not only certain parts but the whole funnel.

The post Struggling With Customer Acquisition?: Fix This One Alignment Issue appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

Fuel Marketing Transformation with Team Alignment

The Pain Points of Misaligned Teams

Anyone who’s worked on a team knows what it feels like to be part of a team that isn’t aligned, and this can have a real impact on your ability to make strategic improvements. Does this sound familiar?

• Your organization has invested in and developed strategy after strategy, but none of them are sticking; execution is a real challenge.
• Teams aren’t working well together and the silos between teams are cementing into territories that are heavily guarded – resource and information sharing is forced, rather than the norm.
• Leaders keep getting feedback from their teams that they need more headcount to do the work.
• Team members aren’t bringing their best –  no breakthrough creative ideas, less innovative problem solving, fewer examples of working “above and beyond.”
• It seems like team members don’t enjoy coming to work – there are complaints that the day-to-day work is frustrating, a total grind, or unmotivating.
• Teams are experiencing high turnover from people that seemed at least moderately satisfied at work.

I imagine you’re nodding your head and also feeling a growing apprehension about the big plans you have for the coming year.

For many of you, a new strategy, campaign, or initiative is on the horizon and success is the only acceptable outcome. You’ve likely tried implementing change in the past with less-than-ideal results.

The issue is likely a mix of individual motivations, team culture, tools, and resource gaps that internal leaders are having difficulty parsing out and addressing.

But there is a better way: when team members actually trust their team, know-how to point out flaws, and learn from each other to co-create the strategy, inevitably objections and silos dissolve, enthusiasm skyrockets and entrepreneurial thinking abounds.

 

Team Alignment is a Predictor of Success

This just in: Leading business researchers have discovered a revolutionary new approach that makes any business more profitable. It reduces costs and increases productivity and profitability. It increases lead quality, pipeline velocity, leads to happier customers, and more repeat business.

Companies using this approach also have more satisfied employees, are willing to work harder (often for less money!), and have higher overall employee retention. It has no hard costs and you can do it internally, with resources you already have. Are you interested?

Any business leader would be negligent not to at least open that link and try to figure out if it was too good to be true.

When they come to realize the research was conducted by Google, Harvard Business School, and dozens of reputable sources consistently since the mid-1990’s you’d expect that they’d be adding this new approach to the very top of their to-do lists and retraining managers to incorporate the findings.

Team alignment, and its the underlying foundation of psychological safety, is not something that should be relegated to HR or written off as “soft skills.”

In almost two decades of writing and overseeing strategic marketing transformations, I can say with confidence that team alignment is the number one indicator of whether a new initiative will succeed or fail.

Unfortunately, it’s also a topic many leaders would rather gloss over when they get ready for a big strategic change – they want action plans, not “warm and fuzzy” team alignment plans. I’ve had pushback more than once from clients who would prefer we “stay in our lane” and just focus on research, metrics, and action plans.

 

Research Shows Aligned Teams Are Critical

When you ask most business leaders about team alignment and psychological safety, they often point to the HR department, mumble something about the culture, and shrug their shoulders. This is too bad because the research is clear:

• Companies that successfully align sales and marketing retain 36% more customers, generate 32% higher revenue and achieve 38% higher win rates. (Source: Ascend Ebook)
• A study of 1,000 professionals across a range of industries found teams with cross-functional collaboration and an openwork style are 60% more likely to achieve more, faster. Plus, they’re 80% more likely to report high emotional well-being. (Source: Ascend2)
• More than half (54%) of employees say they’re willing to stay at a company longer than what’s in their best interest due to a strong sense of community. (Source: Ascend2)
• Google’s “Project Aristotle,” explored over 250 team-level variables, found that psychological safety is the most critical factor and a prerequisite to enabling successful teams. (Google, 2015). Team psychological safety is a shared belief that people feel safe about the interpersonal risks that arise concerning their behaviors in a team context (Edmondson, 2018).
• Despite the importance of psychological safety, only 47% of employees across the world described their workplaces as psychologically safe (Ipsos, 2012).

 

What’s Team Alignment and Psychological Safety?

Team alignment can feel hard to pin down if you’re new to the topic but here’s a simple definition: team alignment is the team’s ability to work together and learn from each other.

As researchers have tried to study and measure this trait, they have settled on the term “psychological safety” and defined it as having four key domains or areas that can be assessed:

1. Attitude to risk & failure: does the team see failure as a necessary byproduct of growth and innovation? Or is it punished and avoided at all costs?
2. Open conversation: do team members feel comfortable expressing concerns and reservations as they work together? Can they learn from one another and hear constructive feedback in the spirit it is intended for?
3. Willingness to help: Does the team have a spirit of being “in this together” and do they easily pick up slack for the benefit of the whole? Does this shake out fairly or do some team members take advantage of others?
4. Inclusivity: Does the teamwork hard to ensure all perspectives are represented, even from those who are not always first to speak?

 

Roadmap for Successful Change

Let me give you the shortcut formula to planning your success. Every single business transformation comes down to two simple questions:

1. What exactly do we need to do differently?
2. Who is going to do it?

The first item is your strategy, and companies are always paying for more and better strategies. Unfortunately, all too often they completely ignore the second item, assuming that once the WHAT and HOW are clear, the WHO will fall into place.

A plan can be strategically sound, backed by data, and make perfect sense on paper but that doesn’t mean the team will get on board. Considerations like who gets credit, who will benefit from less work or more resources, job security and perception of rank, and how success is measured all inherently affect the buy-in for any new plan.

STEP 1: Strategic Alignment – What exactly do we need to do differently?

• Define what you’re trying to achieve, clearly, concretely, with metrics.
  • Link the change to a larger organizational vision
  • Specifically define the change: current state, target state, the gap, and what is NOT changing.
  • Identify past lessons learned. What has been tried before and how did it go?

It’s worth noting that most teams are pretty good at step one, but they stop there.

STEP 2: Stakeholder Analysis & Team Alignment – Who is going to do it?

• Ensure the team agrees on the problem and its urgency
• Confirm the team believes change is possible in this setting.
• Ask whether the team has the time, energy, and willingness to change. (Change fatigue is real!)
• Uncover whether each individual believes they can personally succeed with this change

 

Team Alignment In The Wild

For the last couple of years, Convince & Convert has worked with a large national association ($1.7B in revenue, 38 million members) on a wide variety of marketing initiatives. One change, in particular, was in process when we started working together, and the outcome was anything but certain.

A new project management system was intended to be a centralized place for updates and tracking, intended to increase collaboration, reduce meetings, and allow workloads to be distributed more evenly across the team.

Unfortunately, team adoption of the new tool was low and falling farther – the grumbling was increasing over time. Leaders in charge of its success were struggling to come up with a way forward. Confidential interviews with individual team members uncovered some real and specific challenges, both with the actual tool and how the change was communicated.

Owners of the tool went back to developers to overhaul the tool and improve functionality, and are in the middle of a much more successful rollout with an enthusiastic reception from previously reluctant team members.

 

Setting Up New Norms

In another example, a nationally-recognized, top-50 university we worked with was struggling after some changes to the marketing team organizational chart and reporting structure. Two teams that had previously been independent were combined, but the merger was not a smooth one.

Assessments of the team showed that each smaller team felt psychologically safe to communicate openly. However, when the teams combined to collaborate, that index score went way down. The norms of each smaller team were different.

They needed to be revisited to openly agree on what type of feedback was preferred, how to run meetings, and a number of other patterns that develop almost without noticing but need to be identified, agreed upon and communicated to new team members.

Once new norms were established, the teams were able to work together fluidly and begin finding the synergy that was intended with the original combining of teams.

 

“What’s in it for me?”

It’s important to dig in here and get curious to understand team strengths, weaknesses, passions, and drains. This often means closed-door confidential sessions where team members have a safe space to talk about their ambitions and concerns, what skills they do or don’t possess, and where they might like to grow.

The effort is not the same for everyone; work to understand perceived effort with perspective taking, empathy, mentoring, coaching.

Smart leaders understand that all change in responsibilities comes with a power shift across a team. When changes are on the horizon, the first question everyone wants to be answered is, “how will this impact me and my job?”

• Who on the team will have to learn new skills?
• Whose job might be in jeopardy after the change?
• What new resources will various team members get? How do I get my share of the pie?
• Will the extra responsibilities be rewarded fairly?
• If the new work sounds fun, can I get rid of some old tasks I hate?
  …and dozens more

Answering these questions in advance, equitably, and with your individual skills and goals in mind is the core job of a great manager. Allowing the team to negotiate among themselves, speaking honestly about their strengths and weaknesses, skills they have or want to develop, and how they’d like to see the change unfold is the gold standard.

 

How Does Your Team Rank?

These areas are so critical to navigating change, and more and more of our clients are interested in getting better, not just at the “what should we do to innovate?” question but also understanding the people and motivations that will make or break the strategic plans they’ve laid out.

A seven-question assessment that takes under 3 minutes can help teams understand their ability to bring new ideas and challenge each other, essential qualities of a successful organizational change process.

Benchmarking the team’s score and growth over time can provide tangible, actionable goals for managers and teams to work towards. The Convince & Convert team has strategists trained to conduct these assessments and facilitate improved team alignment, and we’d love to help your team on the next stage of your journey.

The post Fuel Marketing Transformation with Team Alignment appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

How to Align Your SEO and Sales Teams

Have you figured out your marketing strategy for 2022 yet?

Here’s a great idea for you: Embrace collaborative marketing. Aligning your different teams is likely to open up many new opportunities for your business.

According to the recent research by Convince and Convert and Ascend2, 50% of marketers claim that integrating marketing and sales teams has proved to be very successful at achieving strategic goals.

This is huge.

Here’s how to align two of your most isolated teams: Sales and SEO.

 

Foster Content Marketing Collaboration

All marketing is driven by content and that includes SEO and sales. For both teams, content is fundamental. Without content, there are no rankings or sales:

• Google relies on content to identify if a page is relevant to a search query and if it satisfies a searcher’s intent. Relevancy and search intent are two key ranking signals.
• In sales, content is the most important driving force behind buyers’ journey. Content can directly impact purchasing decisions, as many studies confirm.

According to Forbes, more than 60% of B2B buyers say they are able to make their purchase decision exclusively based on digital content, without talking to sales reps or going through demos.

So why is there such a huge disconnect between SEO and sales content? Why do these two content strategies often exist separately without informing or helping each other?

“Content is King” has long been a marketing buzz phrase, especially in the B2B industry. However content is only King if it enables sales.

Too often there’s a discrepancy between those producing content and organizational teams who are trying to leverage it.

The resulting problem is two-fold:

• Sales reps lack the right content they can use to effectively engage with prospects
• SEO content creators lack sales reps’ insight which would enable them to create content that addresses the real struggles of their target audience.

 

Ways to Integrate SEO and Sales

Content can be the driving source for removing your organizational silos and encouraging cross-team collaboration.

How can SEO and content marketing teams collaborate on creating an integrated content strategy?

• Encourage the two teams to brainstorm on content ideas together
• Let the customer support and sales teams keep a shareable record of questions your actual customers are asking them. Any of those can and should be content ideas for the SEO team to research in terms of demand (search volume) and difficulty.
• Foster creativity from both of the teams: What are their thoughts on content promotion opportunities.
• Do they have any viral content ideas?
• Let both the teams explore further opportunities. For example, let your SEO team figure out ways to reuse sales enablement content for ESP purposes. Many of those sales demos can be used as public content that can target all kinds of long-tail ranking opportunities.

 

Help Them Understand Your Customers Better

When you work on traffic numbers all day, it is too easy to forget that there are real people behind those numbers.

Both SEO and sales team have unique access to valuable insights on who is your business’s target customer and how to serve them better:

• Sales teams talk to your current and future customers on a daily basis. They know their struggles and what they are looking to solve. Sharing this information with the SEO team will empower your SEO strategy with more data your competitors have no access to.
• Your SEO team knows exactly what your customers are searching for and which questions they are asking. They know the demand behind each search term and they can report on how your competitors are targeting each search query.

Text Optimizer allows you to better understand concepts behind any search query and help you find the ways to meet your customers’ needs easier:

 

Share Your Web Analytics Insights

Let the SEO team share their web analytics insights: What are the effective paths that bring those leads through the site down the conversion funnel? What works best in terms of engaging your site visitors and turning them into leads?

All of that information will help your sales team focus on what works best and nail their lead generation and onboarding strategy.

Encourage your SEO team to create custom analytics dashboards and hold regular meetings to give. This will give your sales team access to web analytics data they can understand.

Google Analytics is the first option that comes to mind. But there are also web traffic statistics solutions offered by your hosting provider, as well as many Google Analytics alternatives.

Whatagraph is an easy way to create custom reports that are delivered weekly and are very easy to understand even for a non-technical person:

You can also integrate your web analytics into your website dashboard using these templates to let your whole company access it at any time.

 

Open up More Business Opportunities

The cross-team collaboration will likely discover more unexpected opportunities for you and your business. For example, letting your sales team access your SEO data may help them identify industry gaps and define your product’s unique value proposition.

You can also discover new product or service opportunities. For example, this SEO lead generation tool can help you expand your services pretty easily.

Widgets like this help integrate SEO into the sales process in the most efficient way.

 

Conclusion

The power of cross-team collaboration is almost limitless. SEO and Sales collaboration can give you that competitive advantage your business needs. By combining numbers with actual sales experience, you can empower both teams.

The concept of unified communications has become even more important for business survival after COVID hit and many teams moved to work from home.

Finding more ways to let your (remote) teams keep in touch and collaborate is more important than ever.

Hopefully, the above ideas would come useful!

The post How to Align Your SEO and Sales Teams appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

How to Keep Your Marketing Team Together Using Calendar Apps

To manage my projects, I work with a team of five people, including myself. It’s not a big team, but it took us time to set up an effective marketing routine among the 5 of us.

Every month we take on a series of tasks for our brand, working to increase exposure, solidify social presence, enhance the authority and generate leads that become conversions.

This is difficult, not only the tasks we set for ourselves but also coordination among five people, three of whom live outside of the country and three who handle matters on a local and national level.

Add to this struggle the recurring need to include other people into the mix. We have premium members with whom we need to schedule support calls,  #vcbuzz hosts with whom we need to coordinate weekly Twitter chats, and influencers and partners with whom we need to meet.

We have been through every possible productivity tool, team management platform, and task manager known to man. We sat through demos of major SaaS solutions that offer task management features and even got their help in setup.

It wasn’t until we had been working together more than a year that things finally clicked into place. Which calendar apps actually worked for our ragtag team of global misfits?

 

Google Calendar App and Emails Notifications

You see, it came down to simple convenience. Having these fancy platforms would work for a while, but it was a hassle. No one used them for any other work, and they didn’t want to stop using what they had been using before.

Some of my team used Evernote, Trello, or Producteev. I use Zenkit. Getting on a whole other dashboard just for our projects and being unable to integrate them into our wider ones made it a chore that no one wanted to deal with.

Google Calendars and emails became the most effective solution for us. It was not only easy to integrate into different platforms but also familiar in that we already used both tools on a daily basis. They were easy to sync up on any device and could be shared and worked on with others.

Different calendars could be made, and mass emails could be sent with a record of the conversation.

To this day, we use this combo for our task list and conversations, which includes links to event announcements and necessary pending items on the to-do list in emails.

First, you will need to create a dedicated calendar for your in-team tasks and meetings. Once it is created, you can grab your link by:

1. Clicking on “Settings” in the top-right
2. Selecting your new calendar in the list
3. Clicking “Access permissions”
4. Setting your calendar to “Public”
5. Clicking the “Get sharable link” button and copy your link from there

Once you share this link with your team members, friends, and community, they will see your newly added events without you having to manually notify anyone.

From there:

Step One – Create Event

To create an event in Google Calendars, sign in to your account and go to the main Calendars page. There will be a big button that says “Create”. This is where you can put your event details (name, date, involved people, etc.).

The event name should be something relevant, such as the project name, and then add events in there.

What makes this convenient is that you can choose to see only that calendar by clicking on the little arrow on each individual calendar. That will show you events related only to that set.

Step Two – Double Check Details

In the popup that appears when you choose to create an event, you will be able to select your details. These include name, date, time, location, description, who is invited/has to be notified, who can make changes to the event, and if/when it repeats.

One of the most important tasks is to double-check these details before sending the notification! While it might not seem like a huge deal, you can send a notification to everyone signed up for the event when you make a change). Be cautious though, since it gets annoying really quickly if multiple changed events are going to your email. Trust me.

Step Three – Use Your Link Everywhere

Finally, you need to hyperlink the event entry in your emails. This is pretty self-explanatory.

Following the link will take them to the Google Calendar entry or will allow them to add it to their own calendar by clicking on one of the button options. They will find all of the information you included there.

Depending on your event, there may be different places you may want to include your link, for example:

• Embed your calendar on your master page. If you have an internal page that you use for cross-team updates, you can embed your whole calendar there. This is what we did on our Twitter chat page.
• The beauty of this method is that you need to do that once: The embedded calendar will update itself.
  Import Google Calendar events to your Facebook page using this Zapier integration to alert your fans or team members of each newly added event.
• Include your calendar link in your email signature. This will automatically update everyone who receives your email. You can use these email signature examples to set up yours, so it is highly informative, yet usable.

You can add your calendar link to your email signature using the “HTML” app from the “Add-ons” tab inside the WiseStamp dashboard

All in all, Google Calendar is free, extremely flexible, and easily integrate into other Google products including my favorite one, Google Spreadsheets, which makes it my preferred scheduling solution.

 

ContentCal and Campaign Calendar

While Google Calendar is great for all kinds of scheduling and organizing workflow, we had to find another app for content and social media marketing.

When you work with remote employees, you are facing two main problems:

1. Keeping everyone on track and productive.
2. Keeping everyone motivated (It is too easy to focus on your current tasks and never look out of the box when you are isolated from the rest of the team).

I think we have solved both of these problems with ContentCal, a collaborative social media sharing platform that unites your whole team around building up your brand-owned channels.

ContentCal is pretty lightweight: There aren’t hundreds of task management and reporting features to manipulate. But it does its job very well, without taking lots of time on set-up and training.

• Add your team members as contributors (can contribute social media updates) or managers (can edit and publish).
• Create a system where every team member is responsible for their own piece (for example, if someone is working on a chat schedule, they are tasked with publicizing and promoting each event).

Once set, your calendar will build itself with everyone participating on a daily basis.

Furthermore, you can schedule upcoming campaigns for your whole team to see what’s coming. Each campaign can have a brief, and your team members also can contribute to it to share their research results and ideas.

Campaign briefs are minimal, but they work great for storing ideas and organizing your upcoming plans:

Use campaign briefs to put down your ideas for keywords, assets, etc.

It’s Easy!

I am in love with these calendar apps, and, of course, we all use email. So using these apps for task management, team management, marketing, and audience reach makes perfect sense. Add in the fact that both are free, and you have a powerful reason to give it a try.

The post How to Keep Your Marketing Team Together Using Calendar Apps appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

10 Sales Tools for Boosting Results, Efficiency, and More

Without customers, you wouldn’t have much of a company. For this reason, spending time and money on sales and marketing-related tasks is never time wasted.

In this post, I’m going to examine some of the top sales tools for boosting results, improving efficiency and organization and helping you generate more revenue.

Let’s get started!

 

10 Sales Tools for Boosting Results, Efficiency, and More

1. HubSpot

Are you seeking a sales platform to handle all the needs of your sales process?

If so, HubSpot fits the bill. When it comes to sales and marketing tools, HubSpot is considered the cream of the crop.

From a sales perspective, there are three distinct solutions:

• HubSpot Sales Free
• HubSpot CRM
• HubSpot Sales Professional
• HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise

With the free solution, which is a great place for everyone to start, you gain access to tools that boost every aspect of your inbound sales strategy.

For example, there are a variety of email tools, such as access to email templates and sales content.

For those who want to learn more about their prospects, locate the decision-maker, HubSpot once again has you covered.

You can collect data related to visitors, broken down by company, as well as the pages that they are viewing. This gives you a better idea of who’s interested in your product or service, thus allowing you to target the right type of prospects who are the decision-maker in the sales process.

HubSpot has a tool for every type of sales team, sales manager and sales professionals. With the ability to poke around for free, there’s no reason to put off dabbling with this tool.

 

2. LinkedIn Sales Solutions

Did you know that LinkedIn has more than 450 million registered users, scattered all over the world?

As the largest professional network, by far, it only makes sense that it’d be full of sales opportunities in digital marketing.

While you can mine for prospects on your own, you’re better off considering the many sales professional tools provided by LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

Comparing available products will open your eyes to which approach is best for you in social media and digital marketing.

For example, Sales Navigator is a popular choice. With this tool, LinkedIn hopes to make sales prospecting easier than ever before and that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

This tool helps in many ways, including:

• Receive custom lead recommendations.
• Access to an advanced search to find the right leads for your business.
• The use of InMail to contact any LinkedIn member.
• A dashboard for measuring and tracking your social selling results.
• Real-time sales updates for customers and prospects.

With a free trial, you should give the Professional Edition of Sales Navigator a try. Even if you’ve never used LinkedIn for a sales process in the past, this could be the push that you need to take full advantage in the future.

3. InsideSales.com

When it comes to sales lead management, there aren’t many companies that do it better than InsideSales.

There’s more to this company than meets the eye, thanks to its large list of features within its Playbooks offering.

The product manages leads, automates admin tasks, and uses data from 27 billion sales interactions to predict who, when, and how to engage with prospective customers to get the best outcome.

If you’re anything like me, you dig through mounds of data, in an attempt to learn more about your prospects. With this tool, you can better understand how leads are interacting with your business and empower your sales team to say the right thing at the right time.

4. Marketo Sales Connect

Are you interested in turning more sales prospects into customers?

Of course, you are. With the help of Marketo Sales Connect, you can equip yourself with the sales tools that you need to reach all of your sales team goals.

One of my favorite features is the ability to create a “pipeline playbook,” complete with all of the data that you and your team need to stay in touch with a contact throughout the sales process.

This feature provides several ways to improve your pipeline, such as:

1. Integrated email and phone activities. With email and phone system integrations, it’s easier than ever for sales professionals to schedule meetings and communicate with other team members.
2. Sales campaigns. Do you have trouble remaining consistent with your approach to prospecting? Marketo allows you to stay in touch with sales campaigns that include email, social media and phone, ensuring that everything and everybody is on the same page.

Also, Marketo offers email, website and document tracking tools. This allows you to track engagement, based on every type of communication including social media platforms.

Not only is this done in real-time, but it provides you with actionable data that will help you make more informed sales decisions.

Last, but certainly not least, this is one of the top tools for sales team collaboration. If you have more than one person working on sales and marketing, you need a tool that keeps everyone on the same page. Marketo makes it simple to share updates with others in real-time.

At first, you may not use all of the tools provided by Marketo. However, as it becomes a bigger part of your sales strategy, you and your sales reps will turn to it more often.

 

5. Yesware

Have you set the goal of selling smarter? Do you even know what this means?

There are tools that are meant to save you time and money. Yesware is one of them.

There are several reasons why I recommend Yesware to entrepreneurs who want to sell smarter, but it all begins with its analytics tools.

You probably have what it takes to collect data, in regards to your prospects, the decision-maker, and the sales cycle, but, do you know what to do next?

This is where Yesware steps in, to make your life easier.

With access to high-level, actionable insights, you’ll never again wonder what you’re supposed to do with the data that you’ve collected. Instead, you can share it with the appropriate team members, to ensure that everyone’s making the right moves.

The only downside of Yesware is that it can be difficult to fully understand its power and functionality until you have first-hand experience. Fortunately, once you get started, there’s no looking back with this sales process tool.

6. Calendly

What process are you using to schedule meetings with prospects?

In the past, the preferred option was email or a phone call. While there are still times when this works, you don’t want to overlook the power of an appointment scheduling tool, such as Calendly.

The nice thing about this tool is that it can be used to schedule anything and everything. From sales calls to sales meetings, from interviews to demos, it has all of the features that you require.

Calendly has several high-level competitors, but this solution remains my favorite, because of its ease of use for a variety of sales reps.

It all starts with setting your availability preferences. This shows others when you’re available to meet.

From there, all that you have to do is to share your personal link with your contacts or the prospective decision-maker.

For example, if you want to give somebody a sales demo, you can send them your link and ask that they select a time that works for them. This goes a long way in avoiding the traditional “back and forth,” often associated with scheduling a meeting.

One last thing worth noting is the team scheduling feature. With this, your team’s availability can be viewed from one page.

In addition to a free 14-day trial, there is a no-cost package that provides basic features.

With no money out of your pocket and a variety of high-level features, you should look into using Calendly. It will save you and your sales reps time in the sales process.

 

7. Zoom

Do you remember the days of meeting with prospects in person to conduct demos?

If you want to leave this experience in the past, at least to a certain degree, you should become familiar with Zoom.

There are many video and web conferencing services to compare, but through my experience Zoom is one of the best digital marketing sales tools.

With more than 461,000+ customers, you know you’ll be in good hands if you rely on Zoom for your remote conferencing needs.

If that’s not enough to convince you, let’s examine some of its many features:

• Ability to host a meeting with or without video, or with screen share only.
• Mobile screen sharing for iPhone and iPad, making it easy to conduct meetings on the go.
• Webinar capabilities.
• Easy to share a meeting with one or more contact.
• Group collaboration.

On this page, Zoom lays out its many cloud video conferencing features, all of which you’ll enjoy. Some of my favorites include:

• HD video and voice
• dynamic voice detection
• full screen and gallery view

Another key feature is the ease with which the other party can join a meeting. Once you create a meeting, it’s as simple as inviting the other person. He or she can then access the event by entering the Meeting ID or Personal Link Name.

The process is simple and the technology is advanced. That’s what makes Zoom a top dog in the video and web conferencing space.

 

8. ClinchPad

Do you find yourself struggling to use your CRM software? Have you turned to a more simplified solution, such as a spreadsheet?

When the sales process is on your mind, the last thing that you need is trouble with your CRM solution.

ClinchPad is an online CRM, built for small teams that crave big results.

Not only is it easier to use than a traditional CRM, but it’s more advanced than a spreadsheet. Lying somewhere in between, many sales professionals find that it has all of the features they need, without overdoing it.

It’s hard to pinpoint one feature as being my favorite, but the Sales Dashboard is on par with the best that the CRM industry has to offer for sales professionals.

With all of the necessary data in one place, you’ll find that the Sales Dashboard feature saves you tons of time, while also helping you to stay up to speed with the sales cycle.

From prospects at the beginning of the cycle to deals that are about to close, everything that you need is right in front of you. And, best yet, you don’t have to jump from screen to screen to stay informed.

You can create a free account to get started. From there, if you like what you see, paid accounts start at $9/month.

 

9. Proposify

What is your current process for creating sales proposals?

Believe it or not, many companies are still using Microsoft Word, or a similar solution, to create proposals.

Even if this has worked for you in the past, you should consider a change. A switch to Proposify, or a similar solution, could do wonders for your close rate.

With this software, you can share beautifully created proposals with prospects in the cloud. In turn, you hope to close more deals in a more time-efficient manner.

Here are some of the many features that I like:

• Access to a variety of professionally designed templates.
• Drag and drop library for ease of management.
• Access to an online preview tool.
• Use of electronic signatures.
• The ability to track everything, knowing exactly where things stand in the sales pipeline.

The last feature is one of my favorites, as I always like to know what’s going on with a proposal.

You’ll gain access to metrics, such as how many proposals you’ve created, how many you’ve closed, and your overall close rate.

If the lack of proposal software is holding your business back, let Proposify step in and be your guide. With a free trial and pricing starting at $25/month, it’s an affordable solution that can help boost your bottom line.

 

10. SalesLoft

Much the same as HubSpot, SalesLoft offers many tools to sales professionals and business owners.

In an overall sense, this tool is built to help you “increase qualified demos & appointments.”

While this sounds good, you need to learn more about its many options, to see what best fits your business.

Some of the features include:

• sales conversations
• deal forecasting
• analytics and reporting
• dialer and messenger
• cadence and automation

Thanks to a large selection of features, SalesLoft is one of the more advanced tools for a sales team on this list. However, even if you’re only going to use one of its products, there’s a good chance that it can do wonders for your sales strategy.

 

Sales Tools FAQ

 

Conclusion

Just as there are many marketing tools that can help you reach your goals, the 10 sales solutions in this blog post will have you on a better path in the months to come.

As you know, the sales process is full of challenges. If you want to achieve more success than your competitors, take advantage of every tool and solution that is available to you.

Do you have experience with any of these sales tools? Would you add any others to the list?

Source: neilpatel.com

12 Marketing Tools We Are Thankful for This Year

At Convince & Convert, we are thankful to have so many awesome marketing tools at our disposal. Let’s dive in now to our list of 12 marketing tools we are thankful for this year.

Back in the early-ish days of marketing technology in 2011, there were about 150 martech solutions available.

But now, there are a seemingly endless number of marketing tools. In fact, according to Scott Brinker’s most recent Marketing Technology Supergraphic, there are around 8,000 martech solutions, up from about 7,000 in 2019. Incredible!

Image courtesy of ChiefMarTech.com

 

At Convince & Convert, we are thankful to have so many awesome marketing tools at our disposal and to work with so many amazing marketing technology companies (check out our content marketing creation services when you have a sec).

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we asked our team to share some of their favorite marketing tools this year. This list is in no way conclusive — if it were, we would be writing a book and not a blog post. A few of the tools are from C&C clients (accessiBe and SharpSpring), most are tools we use daily, and all are tools we love!

Let’s dive in now to our list of 12 marketing tools we are thankful for this year, plus a few additional shoutouts for marketing solutions we love but just didn’t have the bandwidth to cover in this blog post.

 

List of 12 Marketing Tools We Are Thankful for This Year

#1: SparkToro

Audience intelligence platform

“This is a relatively new tool from Rand Fishkin and his associates that is an easy and illuminating way to find circles of influence online. I use it to find possible collaborators, websites to sponsors, podcasts to sponsor, and even search terms and hashtags of interest. It’s a flexible tool that should be part of every project and program.”

 

Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert

#2: Miro

Visual collaboration software

“Miro is my favorite new tool for visualizing content like org charts, content workflows, brainstorming, user stories, whatever. It’s basically an online whiteboard for collaborating visually, which is so helpful now that the entire world is remote.”

Fun Fact: The Miro template library has hundreds of layouts just waiting for you to try them out!

Jenny Magic, Strategist

….and Anna Hrach loves Miro too!

“I’m with Jenny on this, and she was the one that brought it to my attention. I love Miro for visualizing information and content and remote/virtual collaboration. Plus, they have a ton of existing templates (over 150+) to work from that are all easily customizable.

The free version of Miro is also fantastic, so it’s easy to try out and see if the tool is a good fit for any organization. Miro also has over 70+ integrations, including Slack and Google Drive, so it fits into a lot of existing virtual workflows.”

Anna Hrach, Strategist

#3: accessiBe

Automated web accessibility

“Over my twenty-year career in digital, I have learned A LOT from web development teams and website requirement documents. What I love about the approach accessiBe has developed is there is virtually ZERO code changes needed to ensure your site is not only ADA compliant but also a positive experience for visitors.

The dashboard is simple to configure, allows for your branding to be matched, and adjusts to the needs of each site visitor without sweeping code changes. At an affordable price, this tool is a win for site visitors, a win for site developers, and a win for marketers. The legal team will likely find it a win as well!”

Fun Fact: accessiBe estimates that “the disabled population in almost every society is about 20% of the residents.” This has a huge impact on the function and services your website can (and should) be offering the entirety of your audience.

In addition, check out our recent technology tour of accessiBe, with special guest Rafi Glantz.

Kelly Santina, Director of Operations

#4: RivalIQ

Social media analytics

“It’s vital to be able to monitor your social media performance and compare it to your peers or competitors, so you can continue to learn, iterate, and improve performance. RivalIQ is one of our go-to tools to benchmark our clients’ competitors on social media.

Not only can we monitor growth rate, breakout posts, and look for boosted posts, we can also use RivalIQ’s ability to tag content to analyze the best performing types of content by medium and content.

RivalIQ also makes it easy to bring data from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms into one place to create attractive, easy to use dashboards to share with clients and internal teams.”

Fun Fact: Highly data-driven organizations are 3X more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making, according to PwC research.

Side note: Our founder Jay Baer is an investor in RivalIQ, but our team would still use the solution, even if he weren’t.

Zontee Hou, Director of Strategy

#5: ScreamingFrog

SEO spider tool and crawler software

“Despite the odd name, this SEO spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently while allowing the user to analyze the results in real-time. It gathers key onsite data to allow SEOs to make informed assessments, both on your own internal site or a competitors’ site.

This is primarily used to identify SEO best-practices and shortcomings (there are always more than one would think), but also helps in content identification that may be difficult to find via main navigation options.

They offer a free version (limited to 500 URLs) and a paid license option.”

Anthony Helmstetter, Strategist

#6: Airtable

Cloud collaboration

‘” As the resident Airtable queen at C&C, I have both convinced and converted the consulting team of the power of Airtable. A cloud-based DIY software solution uses tools we’re familiar with, like databases, spreadsheet grids, and calendars, to create unique ways to get work done.

Airtable offers flexibility and an ecosystem for pulling together any project. In the past year, Airtable has super-powered the product with pro-level automation, apps, collaboration, and integrations.

At C&C, we use Airtable for a range of client and internal tasks and project management. My favorite use cases bring together audience journey maps, content gap analysis, and content marketing production into a single (massive) tool, as we did for clients like Oregon State Ecampus.

Tracking the team submissions for our ‘People We Love’ series is emotionally rewarding and brings our team closer together.

To get started, check out the numerous base templates Airtable gives away for free. Then go deeper into the Universe to see how others use this powerful tool to manage their professional and personal lives.”

Fun Fact: Over 15 million bases have been created on Airtable. And their content is also awesome.

Lauren Teague, Strategist

#7: SharpSpring

Marketing automation and CRM

“When I joined Convince & Convert, we were using a simple email solution to deploy blast-style emails. No lead scoring. No drip campaigns. No automation. No A/B testing.

As we ramped up our efforts, we quickly reached the limits of our previous solution (we were actually A/B testing emails by uploading our email list to Google Sheets and random sorting—not good!), we evaluated a few marketing automation solutions and finally selected SharpSpring.

Like all marketing technology transitions, there were a few bumps along the way, but within a few months, we got into a good rhythm and really ramped up our efforts.

The automation is really easy to set up, and unlike most of the solutions we evaluated, SharpSpring has a built-in CRM, which was key for us. We are a lean sales & marketing team, so we don’t have the resources to manage a standalone CRM.

We’re now 18 months into our initial setup, and we continue to grow and optimize our efforts. Plus, the support team is only an email, phone call, or chat away. Big fans!”

Megan Leap, Director of Content

#8: SEMrush

SEO and content marketing

“The other tool I love geeking out in is SEMrush. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing our rankings improve for key terms! The Keyword Magic Tool is ridiculously useful — especially the ‘Questions’ tab. I get a ton of inspiration for our content in SEMrush, and it’s helped us achieve big gains in our SEO.”

– Megan Leap

#9: Litmus

Email testing & analysis

“I first was introduced to Litmus over 12 years ago when the web developer I worked with used it to test and check the rendering of HTML on emails. Since then, I’ve signed up for it in every single digital marketing position I’ve had.

It’s easy to sell a solution to your boss when it makes your job easier, your marketing more effective and keeps your brand on-point. I even used it for browser testing, but Litmus has since retired that feature in order to focus on email. If you’re sending emails, you need to make sure they render correctly on all browsers and in all email clients.”

– Megan Leap

#10: AgoraPulse

Social media management

“AgoraPulse is our go-to tool for social listening and engagement. We use this tool daily to monitor brand/name mentions and to engage with our community. We use the browser-based dashboard during normal business hours and the mobile app when on the go.

Three standout features of AgoraPulse are its ability to gather comments and activity on Facebook and Instagram ads, its ability to monitor YouTube comments, and its insights on Instagram Stories.”

Christin Kardos, Community Manager

#11: CoSchedule

Content marketing management

“I probably use CoSchedule more than anyone on our team. We use it for planning social media content, sponsored content, podcasts, and more. There’s no better way to manage and plan multiple types of content across business units and virtual teams (both internal and external). I love it. It keeps me sane.”

Side note: Our founder, Jay Baer, is an investor in CoSchedule, but we’d still use it regardless.

– Christin Kardos, Community Manager

#12: BuzzSumo

“BuzzSumo offers a great place to start when thinking about content planning. It offers effective ways to stay on the pulse of what is trending in traditional media and in social. It also provides a great place to identify influencers and get new ideas for different topics within your planned content pillars.”

Mary Nice, Strategist

Notable Mentions

This wouldn’t be a “marketing tools we are thankful for” post without a few other shout outs. In no particular order, here are a few more martech solutions we love that you should check out too:

• Ceralytics (content intelligence platform)
• NetLine (B2B content syndication)
• Oracle Marketing Cloud (integrated digital marketing solutions)
• Cisco WebEx (video conferencing and online meetings)
• Podium (messaging tools for local business)
• Calabrio (workforce optimization)
• Cision (cloud-based communications/PR)

The post 12 Marketing Tools We Are Thankful for This Year appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

Top Social Media Listening Tools to Turn Followers into Customers and Brand Ambassadors

Social media listening has come a long way in the past decade. These days, every brand is using brand-name monitoring. Yet, few brands take full advantage of social media listening.

While it is great for improved customer support (for example: helping unhappy customers via social), there’s much more to social media monitoring. Today, you can:

• Find and connect to niche influencers (especially those active social media users with an engaged following who are currently interacting with your competitors). Social listening is one of the most effective steps to a successful influencer marketing campaign.
• Spot your competitors’ unhappy customers and win them over on your side.
• Turn your happy customers into brand ambassadors.
• Identify your product or service weak points so you can fix them.
• Understand your current customer base and target audience better.
• It can be a powerful lead generation tool for your business.
• Collect feedback on your product or content.
• Find engaging content ideas — discover your customers’ interests and struggles.

All in all, social media listening can provide you with a huge amount of insight, provided you are using the right tools.

5 Awesome Social Media Listening Tools

With that in mind, here are 5 awesome social media listening tools to consider for your martech stack:

1. SentiOne: AI-Powered Social Media Listening Tool

SentiOne is a dedicated social media listening platform that really gets the real power of social media monitoring and takes it to a new level.

The tool implements artificial intelligence to:

• Prioritize social media messages that need your (or your team’s) immediate attention and response
• Help your team to compose replies faster by suggesting possible messages which would work best for each mention
• Talk to your customers on your behalf through a smart chatbot

SentiOne can make your customer support team much more efficient and productive.

The cool thing about this platform is that it keeps a record of those interactions, so next time you have an encounter with the same customer, you will have all the background information.

SentiOne can make your customer support team much more efficient and productive, which is likely to result in many long-term benefits, like higher customer satisfaction and more positive mentions (from customers who get help immediately).

2. Agorapulse: Collaborating Social Media Management and Listening Tool

Agorapulse is a multi-purpose social media management tool that helps you create your social media editorial calendar by scheduling updates to multiple channels. It also comes with a powerful social listening feature that is perfect for cross-team collaboration.

Let’s face it: your brand mentions on social media are not created equal.

• Some of them are from customers who are currently in the buying process and need help immediately.
• Others are generic complaints that may not even require an immediate reply but need to be forwarded to product or site development teams.
• There are those mentions that can be turned into testimonials (to use on your site as social proof).
• There are social media messages that your outreach team may use to get some links to your site (similarly to how you’d use Google Alerts for those purposes).

How can one person handle this process if there are so many elements to it?

Well, it is quite doable if you treat social media listening as project management (which often involves many teams as well).

AgoraPulse enables your social media manager to assign different social media mentions to different teams or people. Once assigned, this team member will receive an email notification, as well as a reminder if the status of the assignment remains untouched.

AgoraPulse enables your social media manager to assign different social media mentions to different teams or people.

This is a great way to make the most of social media listening.

3. Tweetdeck for Real-Time Interactions

Because of its real-time nature, Twitter is where customers expect to get an immediate response.

Tweetdeck is a Twitter management and monitoring tool that is free. It can also be used to manage multiple social media accounts (like your personal one, your business one, etc.)

I use Tweetdeck in combination with more advanced social media tools because it is so easy and fast to use that sometimes it’s just easier to quickly check Tweetdeck to see if there’s anything that needs your attention.

Tweetdeck integrates with Twitter lists, so it is perfect for quick interactions with niche influencers or your brand ambassadors throughout the day.

Check your list of engaged influencers to interact with their recent Tweets.

Here’s how I use Tweetdeck:

• I add people I want to regularly interact with to separate Twitter lists (those may be “Bloggers”, “Journalists”, “Brand ambassadors”, etc.)
• I create separate columns in my Tweetdeck to pull tweets from those lists
• When I have a minute or two, I open Tweetdeck and reply to recent tweets in those tweets.

This way, I keep interacting with my friends and niche influencers on a regular basis while keeping those interactions natural and meaningful.

4. Bonus: Keep an Eye on Your Social Media Traffic

There’s no perfect way to measure the effectiveness of your social media listening efforts. There are so many long-term goals (brand loyalty, trust, etc.) that are not easy to measure.

With time, what you to see in your analytics is the following:

• An increase in type-in traffic (those people that type your site address directly without searching your name)
• The gradual growth of your brand-driven search queries (those queries that contain your brand or product name)
• The steady growth of on-site conversions (as customers see you on social media responding and interacting, they will start trusting your brand and buying more from you).

You can track all (and more) of that by using Finteza, an independent web analytics suite with a strong focus on conversion optimization.

Conclusion

If you’re already doing some type of social media listening, invest a little more effort to achieve longer-term and more important goals. At the very least, it’s worth a try.

The post Top Social Media Listening Tools to Turn Followers into Customers and Brand Ambassadors appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

The 5 Best Marketing Automation Companies of 2021

Don’t just look for a marketing automation tool, find a marketing automation company (agency) that can help you with everything.

You could get a marketing automation tool and try to figure it out yourself.

Or you could get a marketing automation company to do everything.

Look, marketing automation gets crazy complicated.

Lead routing, lead tracking, campaign measurement, all the emails, and landing pages, lead nurturing, dozens of segmentation lists, it goes on and on.

Not to mention a deep integration with your CRM which has to work flawlessly.

Your entire marketing program depends on getting marketing automation right.

The best sales teams already work with top Salesforce partners to get everything set up from the beginning.

It’s about time that marketing teams followed their example.

Don’t just look for a marketing automation tool, find a marketing automation company (agency) that can help you with everything.

 

The 5 Best Marketing Automation Companies

Some of us in that marketing automation companies are:

• Neil Patel Digital – Best for Content Marketing Automation
• LeadMD – Best for Tech Stack Integration
• CS2 Marketing – Best for On-call Marketing Operations
• Bluewolf – Best for Salesforce Automation
• Perkuto – Best for Marketo Automation

Let’s dive into each.

#1 Neil Patel Digital – Best for Content Marketing Automation

If there’s one digital advertising channel that cuts across all others, including automation, it has to be content marketing.

I’m not here to remind you that content is king. You already know!

Even with marketing automation, content marketing drives everything. You need the right content in the right emails to keep leads moving down the funnel.

Tons of billion-dollar startups have built their sales and marketing process around content. And it works beautifully.

And it’s an area my team at Neil Patel Digital shines the brightest.

How? 

We’ve rolled out content programs for the entire sales cycle across many Fortune 500 brands.

I truly believe we’re one of the best companies at content, period.

If you’d like content marketing and marketing automation working together seamlessly, we should chat.

#2 LeadMD – Best for Tech Stack Integration

Marketing automation frees you (and relevant people on your team) from mundane tasks.

For example, say someone signs up to download a whitepaper on your landing page.

They fill out the form fields, your CRM collects this data, creates tags based on the info provided, and segments them into relevant email lists.

That email sequence could include 180 days or branching email logic based on their actions and sales stage.

For this to work well, you’ll need tight integrations between your:

• Marketing automation tool
• CRM tool
• Landing page tool
• Software trials and accounts
• Ecommerce accounts
• Subscription settings
• Customer support toolsDeduplication tools

And dozens of small tools that impact your users.

If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

These systems get extremely complicated very quickly.

You’ll need a team that knows how to get everything working together. One broken link in the chain could dump thousands of leads by accident, costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’ve seen it happen countless times.

LeadMD specializes in setting up these types of integrations:

LeadMD is the go-to marketing automation company for integrating your tech stack.

If you feel really good about the rest of your marketing strategy and just need help with getting all the infrastructure working correctly, reach out to them.

#3 CS2 Marketing – Best for On-call Marketing Operations

Once you get your marketing automation fully implemented, that’s not the end.

New marketing operations projects come up all the time.

A hot new campaign needs to get added to your automation. Sales want to tweak the lead scoring or MQL definition. IT changes one of your tools and you need to re-implement that part of the stack.

Lots of projects (large and small) will come up.

One option is to hire a full-time marketing operations person. That’ll easily cost $100K fully loaded with benefits, taxes, and marketing rate compensation.

Or you can find a marketing automation company that specializes in scaling up and down as you need them.

That’s exactly what Cs2 Marketing does.

First, you can sign up for a contract to get ongoing consulting. This is super valuable to make sure you’re not accidentally lighting your whole marketing stack on fire.

Then, when you have a project some up, they have a whole team that can execute it for you.

This is perfect for mid-size companies that need to keep every dollar focused on customer acquisition for as long as possible.

#4 Bluewolf – Best for Salesforce Automation

I’m going to say something controversial.

Oftentimes, how your marketing automation tool integrates with Salesforce is more important than the marketing tool itself.

After all, your business lives and dies on your CRM, which is usually Salesforce.

One way to get everything working right is to work backwards. Get your CRM dialed, then force your marketing automation tool to work the same way.

So before jumping into a deep marketing automation tool implementation, consider getting a top CRM agency to help with Salesforce.

For this, check out Bluewolf.

Bluewolf is an IBM company, and that alone speaks volumes about this agency’s reputation. They mostly serve enterprise brands and are prepared to handle anything that you can throw at them.

Bluewolf is also global. They have about 24 offices spread across different continents.

#5 Perkuto – Best for Marketo Automation

Marketo is one powerful tool. If you’re already using it and want to go really deep with your implementation, check out Perkuto:

You could say that Perkuto is THE top-most Marketo expert, having achieved the “Marketo Engage” status and works with a team of over 50 marketing automation strategists and hardcore engineers.

If it can be done in Marketro, Perkuto can make it happen.

I’d definitely reach out to them if you have a Marketo implementation that’s gone haywire and you need serious expertise to fix it all. In those cases, you want a top expert to get you back on track. They’re worth every penny.

5 Characteristics That Make a Great Marketing Automation Company

When looking at marketing automation companies, what should you prioritize?

What are the red flags?

What signs tell you that someone is one of the best?

I start by looking for these characteristics.

1. ROI Before Tech

Some engineers and infrastructure folks love tech for tech’s sake.

Not all, but some do.

In marketing, that’s super dangerous.

You need a marketing automation implementation that generates real ROI. You spend $X. It needs to generate more than $X. That’s the whole point of marketing.

Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.

When looking at marketing automation companies, they should have an extreme focus on driving ROI. It should be the lens that they filter every recommendation.

Even better, they should talk about revenue growth and ROI naturally. You shouldn’t feel like you have to push them here.

2. Experience With Companies Bigger Than You

When working with any marketing automation company, make sure you’re not the biggest customer.

The last thing you want is for a vendor to patch your implementation together because it’s the first time they’re handled your complex use-case.

You don’t want the marketing automation company to learn on your dime. Your implementation will suffer. Tech debt will pile up and you’ll end up paying to fix it later.

Ask the company for case studies and a list of clients in a similar industry as you. Many of them should be larger. If not, treat it as a red flag.

3. Deep Experience With Your Marketing Tech Stack

In any marketing automation tool, there are dozens of different ways to set up any workflow or feature.

You don’t want it to just work, You want it set up so it has that perfect balance between scalability and flexibility.

That’s not easy to do.

To know what option is best, it takes a lot of trial and error with every tool. And experience across dozens of clients and implementations.

So even if a marketing automation company has a ton of experience, make sure they have experience with your marketing tech stack.

Otherwise, keep looking.

4. Expensive

A marketing automation (and CRM) implementation is one area you do not want to cut corners.

We’re talking about foundational infrastructure that routes every lead of your business.

Any leaks mean you’ll lose serious money.

And since these systems get extremely complicated, it’s easy for stuff to fall through the cracks.

So when you’re shopping around with different companies, look at low prices as a red flag. The experienced folks will know their value and charge accordingly.

Spend the money to get your marketing automation set up correctly. It’ll instantly pay for itself.

5. A Desire to Coach

As you start talking with companies, the best ones will have an innate desire to coach you and your team.

Even if they handle 100% of the initial implementation, they know that your team needs to manage and operate it all.

Communicating best practices, guiding your team, and empathetic coaching will make sure that your implementation stays clean for years to come.

On any given call, you should feel like you’re learning. That’s a good sign they’ll continue to coach your team throughout the entire implementation.

 

What to Expect from a Great Marketing Automation Company

Once you start to reach out to marketing automation companies, expect to go through these steps.

1. Filling out the contact form

Since marketing automation projects are major rollouts, expect an in-depth sales process before getting started.

The marketing automation also needs to do a deep dive on your needs before being able to come up with even a general price range.

Look for the contact form of their website and use that to get started.

2. The discovery call

After filling out the contact form, you should receive a reply pretty quickly.

Any great team will be crazy responsive to any new prospects. Expect a reply within 24 hours.

If you don’t get a reply, that might be a sign that you’re a poor fit for that company. For example, the companies that specialize in enterprise clients will probably ignore smaller startups that need a basic implementation for a marketing team of 2-3 people. It’s just too small for them. In these cases, they typically don’t respond at all.

So if you don’t get a response and you’re a smaller company, look for folks that feature clients on their site that are closer to your size.

Once you get a reply, you’ll usually get asked to jump on a discovery call. There won’t be much pitching on this call. Instead, the marketing automation company will want to learn as much about you as possible. They’ll ask you things like:

• BudgetTimelinesYour marketing tech stack
• Company size
• Key stakeholders
• Hard requirements for the project

I recommend that you sit down and come up with clear answers to these items before the discovery call. That will keep the process moving quickly.

The clearer you can be with the partner, the more likely they’ll be able to deliver what you want.

3. The Proposal

Depending on the complexity of your implementation, you might have several calls to scope out the full project.

Once everything has been clarified, expect to get a proposal that breaks down the full cost, timelines, and deliverables of the project.

If you wince at the price, it’s probably in the right range. Implementation fees for CRMs and marketing automation tools are pretty high.

One other thing, really double and triple check all the requirements with your team. Look for holes and items that you missed in the spec. Changing requirements later will get really difficult. Best to get any changes added to the proposal now.

Also, ask the company how they handle mid-project scope changes in the event that it happens. Usually, they’ll have an hourly rate that they charge for any additional work.

4. Sign and get started

Once you’re ready, sign the proposals and get the project going.

After everything is signed, the marketing automation company usually takes the lead. As long as you’re responsive on your side, things usually stay moving without you having to push on them.

The initial process usually starts with:

• Introductions to the whole implementation team
• A kick-off call
• Scheduling for regular check-ins
• Calls with internal experts to go through all details

 

Are the Top Marketing Automation Companies Worth it?

I believe so.

Any serious marketing team will need a fully operational marketing automation tool.

And marketing automation tools have gotten so complicated that it’s unwise to muddle through them yourself.

You want an experienced team to roll out your tool the right way. It costs a lot more upfront but it’ll save you a ton of money in the long run.

I was speaking to a VP of Marketing the other day. He worked at a top-tier marketing team, managing hundreds of thousands of leads. He turned to me and said “You know, the other day, we discovered 100,000 leads that got lost in our marketing automation tool. They were just sitting there. For like a year.”

That’s nuts! Think of all the lost revenue.

And it happens all the time.

Look around, reach out to a few experts in this space, and get it done right.

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