It’s great when you can work hard, put in extra hours, and commit to reaching more people with your marketing efforts. But who has the time? In the digital age, there are plenty of tools, apps, and services that can help you automate everything you do to reach more potential leads. Let’s take a look at 10 of these tools that can potentially change the way you live your business life on a daily basis:
Short for “If This, Then That,” this is an app built specifically to remove you out of the laborious digital processes you use every day. For marketing purposes, it’s a great tool to bring together disparate apps (such as an email marketing app) to alert you to new leads. It can also take customer interactions and export the details of these interactions to Google Spreadsheets, saving you a lot of time from having to organize everything yourself.
Sometimes, managing a new campaign can feel like herding cats, particularly if you work with a team within your company or even independent contractors. Slack is a great way to bring everyone into the fold, organizing your chats by topic, and allowing you to search through previous correspondence. There shouldn’t be any more wondering about where people stand after you start using Slack. It even offers limited free use, which means you can hop on board today and start interacting with the people within your organization.
Automating social media should be easy. With Buffer, it’s a cinch to schedule your posts in advance and receive reminders when your profiles need updating. You can also use Buffer to create a “shared inbox” across multiple social media platforms, reducing the overall clutter and the pain of having to log in and out of different accounts.
Buffer also offers statistics for your performance on these platforms, which gives you an edge in analyzing what’s working for you and what needs tweaking.
Want to know what’s going on out there, and when your company gets brought up by someone on the Internet? Mention is an intriguing “social listening” app that allows you to interact with customers online, giving you the wherewithal to handle more interaction between company and customer. This in turn helps you boost your trustworthiness and expand your services to customers and potential leads.
Like Buffer, Mention makes it easy to handle a wide variety of social media accounts from one tool, which means you don’t have to worry about constantly going in and out of existing accounts. You can view all your mentions from one dashboard—including forums, blogs, and even review sites.
If you run active Facebook campaigns, it helps to make sure that you can make tweaks on a moment’s notice. That’s where the Facebook Pages Manager comes in, giving you the ability to manage your pages, view analytics, run promotions, and do just about everything you can do with your Facebook pages from a mobile app. This is particularly great for those who pay attention to their Facebook pages almost every day and need a fast way to monitor everything while uploading new content, especially when on the road.
Facebook also employs another app—Facebook Ads Manager—that has similar goals for your advertising campaigns.
Hopefully, as you use more your marketing apps smartly and improve the quality of your outreach, you’ll discover a completely new level of problem: having too many contacts to manage. That’s what happens when you generate lots of leads, and it’s a great sign that things are going well. But you will need a way to manage all of those new leads.
Nimble is a customer relationship management (CRM) system that can handle tracking of emails, the current status of your sales, and contact management. That means you won’t have to wonder what one customer is saying again, because you’ll know exactly where that customer falls within your sales funnel. This will help you organize your inbox (whether you’re using G Suite or Office 365), as well as stay on top of the latest leads who are genuinely interested in your business.
When you make content marketing a vital part of your outreach campaigns, you’ll eventually run into the need for some creative visual design. Canva makes that possible, allowing you to create headers for blog posts, employ email templates, and build stunning pictures you can use to entice people to click on your social media posts.
Canva may take a bit of poking around at first, but eventually you can get either yourself to use it or assign it to people on your team. It’s easy enough that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to create stunning graphics that help push your content.
As your business grows and the outreach becomes more complicated, it becomes essential to be a diligent time manager. Workflow is an app that allows you to connect disparate features on different apps together, allowing you to easily snap together your regular routines and make them easy to access with the tap of an on-screen button.
The great feature here is customization—you can tailor Workflow to suit your apps, the specific steps you take every day, and bring them all together for one easy-to-use interface.
- Remove featured image Email Marketing Software
Let’s face it—there are just too many good contenders out there to recommend just one. Services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and more make it possible for you to automate your email outreach, leverage your newsletter lists, and gather leads no matter what you might be doing away from the computer. With effective content, a strong landing page, and enough marketing outreach to attract potential leads, the email marketing software can do the heavy lifting of ambitious sales funnels without you having to be physically present. Continue to capture emails and send out newsletters even while you’re away on vacation.
Of course, none of these tools will do you a lot of good unless you get moving. The Getting Things Done app is built on the principles of the popular book, allowing you to keep tabs on all of your to-do lists. It’s also an effective note manager, giving you the option to store notes into individual projects, which helps clarify your thoughts when you record them on the fly.
How to Build an Easier Automated Life
The key to using these tools effectively isn’t to add a fancy new feature to your daily life, but to use them to subtract from what you already do. The best tools are those that help us simplify our lives, making marketing easier and helping us manage our day. If you have existing apps on your phone whose sole purpose is to provide a service that one of these apps can handle, for example, then you can uninstall it and simplify your life with a more robust app.
And we have just one more tool to suggest for you: leadPops. Using leadpops will help you automate much of your sales funnel, improving your outreach and giving you the capacity to handle an influx of leads.
And it doesn’t hurt to utilize powerful tools with free trials so you can give them a spin. Sign up for a free trial of leadPops today.
