We’re in a business where doing our digital marketing, creative, and everything else is possible from afar. We’ve been able to maintain productivity and continue to work during these times of social distancing. While we can’t wait for our teams to be back in the office and have all the desks filled once again, we know that we have to wait until the time is right.
Now that we’ve spent a few months working remotely from home, I thought it was a good time to share a couple of the tools that we’ve been using to make a really, be really more productive in terms of doing our work and feeling we’re still connected in side by side. And so I’ve got a few tools that I wanted to share with you that I think can help most businesses, just to help them with your processes and keeping in touch and being able to be just more productive. And hopefully, as we hope too, that it’s going to translate and continue to make us more productive when we get back to working together. But in the meantime, it allows us to serve our clients locally and from afar without having to have face-to-face meetings. So we are looking forward to seeing everyone in person and having a big high five when we see them. But in the meantime, being able to service them from afar is something that is required.
#1 Slack
So for many companies, I think the top of the list is being able to use Slack, we use it on a regular basis. We have it set up in a manner that allows us to have every single project and every single client in a defined channel, to actually help make the chats a little bit more on point. We had things being spread out a lot more before, and it didn’t help to keep chats organized and be able to actually find different threads.
We’ve started to use Trello a lot more and have actually linked that with Slack, in order to make communication a lot easier, keep on top of projects, deadlines, and they’ve actually rolled out a few new, really, cool features, that are things we didn’t ask for directions, but certainly are helping our causes. And so that’s having more detail-oriented timelines and by that, I mean deadlines when it comes to checklists, and with different cards being able to be set up to have multiple deadline dates within the checklist that you set up. So that’s been a big help for us as well.
#3 Loom
Another is one of my favorite tools and I use this for all of my webinars and I was introduced to this product a while ago from one of my friends, who’s another digital marketer, as a training tool and that’s Loom. It’s a great, very light, simple, easy to use video screen recorder, and it allows us to do demo videos, which we’ve been doing for a while. It also allows us to do followups to meetings and video walkthroughs for training in tutorials. We’ve been using it for our onboarding processes, of how to find different places to add new people and give us admin access to do our social media campaigns, to share their access for their WordPress websites, and how to set up the Shopify partners, and it’s been really cool to be able to visually show someone how to do those walkthrough videos.
And I’ve actually been asked by a few clients to do more of those tutorials from an expanded perspective and actually upload them here on our YouTube channels. So that’s something that I’m thinking about as well, for what might be relevant and let me know in the comments below, if there’s something that you would love to see, and that could be beneficial to you.
#4 Google Meet
Another one is being able to use Google Meet, formerly Hangouts, for our video chats. The reason that we’ve done this, as much as there’s so many amazing different tools out there and so many people are using Zoom and Meet is something that we love. We typically are very unbiased and we’ll take meeting requests from any platform that people come in, but what we found with Meet that works the best is, frankly, being integrated totally with Gmail is a breeze. It’s also really easy to use on mobile, we haven’t had any issues with that. And it’s been something that I know is also being used as Google Classroom for bigger stuff, but Google Meet for us is fantastic, so that’s been really good.
#5 DataBox
Another thing that we’ve started to put in place, which is really helpful is live dashboard analytics, using DataBox. I think that they’re a fantastic tool for anyone to be able to watch what you’re doing with particular metrics on your digital campaigns, whether that’s watching your analytics, looking at how things are working with your funnel with HubSpot, how your social media is performing from organic and paid, and being able to look at some of the SEO metrics as well.
So we’ve been able to set this up for all of our different campaigns, with a couple of different custom dashboards that are available in there. It’s a free tool that we have found super helpful and as we start getting into more complex stuff, then we get into the paid version, but there’re tons of stuff in the free version that allows you to really showcase your stats and be able to see what’s happening in today, instead of having to wait for a monthly report or a weekly report, it’s something that’s live and gives you 90 days of history. So it’s something that we find really helpful to pull up and show during update meetings, and also being able to have that is something a client can access at any time, which is super helpful.
#6 Mobile Monkey
The other one that is a really fun one is we started to really use MobileMonkey a lot more. It is an automated chatbot platform that is super easy to use and intuitive for our Facebook messenger. As we’ve seen during COVID, it has been a major increase in the amount of people who are doing Facebook ads, as well as the amount of people who are using Facebook messenger. I don’t know if this is a trend across the entire industry, but it is certainly been the number one communication platform for customer service, it has been the number one Q&A and FAQ for prospects, and for our clients, it has been a big plus being able to have Facebook messenger activated and be able to not have it eat up all of your day, because we can do some automation to make a lot of those simple questions, at least buy you time to respond if not start answering everything directly. So that’s been another big tool that we’ve been using more to scale.
#7 Teachable & #8 ClickFunnels
And this is the last tool that I should mention, which is, we’ve been doing a lot more for online learning and online courses, and that’s been a big part of how we’re able to scale. And the most exciting opportunity that is also the most frustrating is actually, that there’s a lot of people who want to be working with an agency to grow their marketing, but haven’t been able to put the budget together in order to do so. They’re still trying to do things by themselves and I think that is exactly where they fit in. And so we’ve actually turned our service packages and how we train our employees on how to run the campaigns for social media, content marketing, and growing eCommerce websites, into courses that are available. So we’ve been able to build those on the Teachable platform and build the funnels for the webinars to get people excited through ClickFunnels, and so those are two things that have helped us scale and get more people doing the right things as they’ve had more time.
And a lot of these companies as they’ve had their businesses closed, have started to work on their websites, have started to work on their digital marketing, and we’re happy to be helping to support them do that, while they have the time to do so without ramping up and having a huge budget to put into a digital marketing agency like 323 Media.
Chris is a driven marketing pro, entrepreneur and impact player.He is a founding partner of a hybrid marketing agency that is focused on Real Estate, Sports & Entertainment, Health & Wellness, and eCommerce. The agency, 323 Media, creates integrated marketing packages catered to specific industries that have measurable results.Leading up to this is a journey of sales, marketing, and utilizing technology. Learning his sales chops while working retail for Nike, Chris thrives in high growth and performance environments.His experience is highlighted with stops in Sportswear, E-commerce, Tech, Food & Beverage and Real Estate Development. Seeking to understand businesses from the inside-out, Chris adds value to clients by looking at how the entire business will be impacted by marketing, technology, and operational initiatives. While business is his game of choice and he often is asked to speak on his experience, his wife, daughters, and dog are his favorite topics of conversation.
