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What CRM Tools Are Best Used With Google

Which CRM Tools Are Best Used With Google

17 February, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

As a business owner, you want the best for your sales team. One of the things that you can provide them to help them focus on doing what they do best (bring in more sales for your company) is a Google CRM.

Okay, you might think that it isn’t something new, you’ve heard about Customer Relationship Management software before. But, Google CRM isn’t your ordinary CRM tool as it integrates with Google’s suite of apps smoothly. That said, tracking conversations between the CRM and Gmail, for example, becomes possible.

Instead of bringing trouble, CRM software should help your sales and marketing team close more deals, increasing the revenue of your business in the long run. However, since most companies have dozens to hundreds of sales reps, the CRM keeps up by offering way too many features. Is it a good thing? It should be, but it often ends up becoming more of a trouble, primarily when not utilised properly.

If it’s streamlining the use of a CRM tool that you want, then choose those that you can integrate with Google without any problem. You can start with a Google CRM free tool and upgrade later on as you begin to identify more needs for your company.

This post will show you the top three best CRM tools that you can use with Google. Check them out below.

1.EngageBay

EngageBay is an award-winning product for nurturing and engaging clients of small and mid-sized real estate agencies.
The software provides a seamless experience including online CRM, marketing automation, sales bay, live chat and a helpdesk.

EngageBay makes it possible to automate manual tasks, track deals and sales pipeline, provide real-time assistance that easily converts visitors into customers and prioritise and solve customer support enquiries.

Starting at a monthly subscription as low as $8.99, EngageBay is feature loaded, easy to setup and use and is cloud-hosted. It can be integrated with many third-party applications. Customer support gives you prompt resolutions to questions & issues.

2. Zoho

Social media integration, sales insights, and, of course, G Suite integration, are what Zoho offers. It serves as an all-in-one platform, aligning your marketing and sales team.

Using real-time data coming from different sources, like marketing campaigns, social media engagements, as well as email, your company can target and prioritise prospects. If you want to start closing deals using different channels through an all-in-one CRM tool that can integrate with all Google apps, then Zoho is right for you.

What CRM Tools Are Best Used With Google

You can start with a Free plan with Zoho, which will give you contact management features, 1 GB storage, and social integration. The free subscription also allows three users at max. To enjoy additional features, such as email insights, forecasting, and lead scoring, you have to upgrade to the Standard plan, which will cost your company only twelve dollars a month. Should you wish to avail of the Professional Subscription, you’ll enjoy social-to-lead capture, plus LinkedIn and Twitter interaction for twenty dollars every month.

2.Streak

If you want a CRM tool that’s very easy to understand, Streak is worth checking out. The CRM also features email tracking, giving you the chance to know if someone has already opened those emails you’ve sent or not yet.

Aside from the email open tracking feature, Streak also offers contextual reminders, delayed-send emails to cater to prospects and customers from different timezones, scheduling, templates, as well as mail merges. You can also check the status of your sales process through charts and graphs, giving you useful data visualisations.

Checking emails, even if you’re not part of the thread, is also possible with a collaborative email. Contextual data in your inbox will also let you see notes alongside emails, together with account information.

The pricing for Streak will depend on what level of subscription you choose. You can use its basic functionality using the free personal level subscription. You can pay forty-nine dollars per month for the professional level and enjoy more features. If you want a ton more support, the enterprise level will be a perfect choice.

3.Agile

If you want a contact management system with robust marketing automation, social media integrations, and, of course, G Suite integration, Agile could be the best choice. Aside from managing your leads and contacts, the CRM also allows the creation of customised campaigns and placing event triggers using text and email.

Agile CRM has three subscription plans –the free, starter, and regular. You can have ten users in the free subscription, together with email campaigns, lead scoring, contact management, and Gmail/G Suite integration.

If you’re going to upgrade, the starter plan will cost your company $9.99 every month, while the regular subscription requires a $39.99 monthly payment.

The Bottom Line – Your Choice

Whether you’re in a contact’s record or your email inbox, the Google CRMs mentioned in this post make communication easy by integrating with Gmail and the G Suite applications.

You can sync, track, and schedule your Gmail inbox based on the action of your prospect or customer. You can also enjoy features, such as visitor tracking, lead intelligence, and email automation, among others.

The best Customer Relationship Management tools above, which you can use with Google, will revolutionise your marketing campaigns, increases sales, and improve customer satisfaction in your business.

Become an expert in the eye of the client

2 February, 2018/0 Comments/in Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

Getting recognition for your “expertise” in selling professional services is paramount if you’re to make good profits.

The stages in the process include –

Setting out your credentials
Outbound publicity – demonstrate you know your ‘stuff’
Getting to one on one conversations around the client’s desired future state
Discussing your services, their needs and fees

I was working with a financial services client and recommended he use the Monte-Carlo method to establish the prospective client’s need for advice. (Go to the sub heading on Finance and Business). I think it’s very suitable way to frame a discussion when talking about personal finances

Monte Carlo simulation is commonly used to evaluate the risk and uncertainty that would affect the outcome of different decision options.

First be recognised as an expert

You can’t get these conversations going without first establishing yourself as an expert. Nobody wants their finances managed by an amateur. Nor their marketing services. Just working for a big name firm is no guarantee of expertise – it’s a step in the right direction.

Groups on LinkedIn

Getting in front of future clients is possible via step 1. As you establish yourself as an expert you will get noticed (particularly if you use key words relevant to your expertise and audience. Maintaining your position as an expert in the eyes of your audience can be continued through outbound articles and publicity.

These are best delivered using sites aligned to your industry niche and audience. For my area there’s a great Reddit thread, a couple of Facebook Groups and a Linked In Group which is very active. You need to find the ones suited to your needs. Don’t forget to check out in-person events on places like Meetup.com too – not all communication has to be written!

Finding the right things to say in your publicity and how to start a conversation with your reader are the things you will need to practice. Conversations in a public forum can lead, later, to a private discussion which is preliminary to taking on a new client.

Book a personalised coaching session with the Creative Agency Secrets team – pick the person who best suits your need.

3 Ways to Sell More Products Through Your Website

2 February, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Every business hoping to seriously compete in the modern world needs a website. For some businesses, the website is merely a hub, a way that customers can find out vital information and get in contact should they need to. For other businesses, their website is a vital component of the way that they operate. In many cases, their website is generating most or all of their revenue.

In order to effectively sell products through your website, you need to be able to do more than just generate traffic. You will need to also entice visitors to your online shop and then convince them to part with their money. Selling products effectively through your own website is also not a problem that can easily be solved by spending more money on marketing.

Instead, selling products on your website requires a more considered and multi-faceted approach. In this article, we look at some of the most effective techniques for boosting sales from your website.

Product Reviews

Whenever a potential customer sees a product for sale on a website, one of the first things they will look for is customer reviews. These will give them an indication of what other users and customers think of a product, and research suggests that reviews from other customers are often trusted more than reviews from specialist industry publications. In order to generate as many customer reviews as you can, you should make the process as simple and quick as possible. You should also offer customers an incentive for leaving a review, if you offer any kind of loyalty or rewards scheme, then consider offering some bonus points or discounts.

Streamline Your Website Layout

A well laid out and easy to use website will find it much easier to generate traffic and to convert those visitors into customers. If your website is difficult to navigate and sluggish to respond, then anyone who visits will soon become frustrated and leave again. Not every visitor to your website will have the same idea of what constitutes a streamlined website, so it is a good idea to allow users to customize the layout to some degree.

A good example of a customizable layout would be this page from Woodbury Outfitters which sells, among other things, browning hunting rifles. This page allows the user to arrange items as either a grid or a list; it also makes it easy to see the kind of rating they have been given from other customers.

Don’t Underestimate SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial weapon for any modern website that wants to be noticed. Any fully rounded marketing strategy has to include some kind of SEO component. Put simply, it is a website’s SEO score that determines how prominently it is listed in results for relevant search terms.

A website is an excellent platform for selling your products, but to do so effectively isn’t as easy or straightforward as many people think. You need to consider exactly how you can make your website as simple and inviting as possible for customers to use. If you build your website carefully and pay attention to your user base, then you can quickly make a lot of money from your business website.

The hidden risks of TopBuzz

2 February, 2018/0 Comments/in Advertising, B2C, Case Studies, Digital media, Email, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Social Media /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

With many services out there for marketers, producing content and getting it to your audience has never been easier. However, not all services are trustworthy. We recently came to learn about TopBuzz, a platform that has divided opinions.

All started with an email…

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email out of the blue from TopBuzz, a content distribution platform, claiming to be ‘impressed’ by a video we did for a client. The email content was quite generic and seemed to be automated. TopBuzz said they were able to enlarge our video audience via their platform and we would be compensated for all the views we got.

A couple days ago, we received another email. This time, it was from a person claiming to be from this company, boasting about the number of active users and the number of views that all the videos get that are shared on their platform. She was very forward in her approach and encouraged us to become a ‘premium creator’.

Now, we did a little bit of research on these guys and it was scary to see what would have happened if we signed up with them.

TopBuzz key things we discovered:

According to past users of the platform, the communication from TopBuzz is poor and scarce if you ever try and contact them. If you have a problem with something, TopBuzz are unlikely to help and at best, you might receive template emails that are likely to be irrelevant.
This brings up the next problem. If you are unhappy with the platform…too bad. You can’t delete your account and your content will stay on TopBuzz’s platform forever.
However, it gets worse! TopBuzz can use any videos uploaded to their platform in whatever way they want. Say you work hard and make a viral video. If that video is on their platform, they can publish it as their own and you would get no credit. Unfortunately, most users only realised that this was their fate only after signing the contract without reading the small print in their T&Cs.

We were never interested in using this platform in the first place as the video we created for our client was content produced for a niche segment, it was an hour long and was a face to face interview. Targeting a mass audience and making revenue off views was not on the agenda, therefore, using this platform would have been unnecessary.

If you are producing viral videos, pursuing avenues through social media seems to be a safer option. For example, with Facebook, there are various pages that are dedicated to redistributing content according to different tastes.

Nevertheless, it’s important to be aware of dodgy services like this so be sure to do your research before jumping in!

Sources:

https://medium.com/@attibear/should-you-gin-up-for-topbuzz-ca19d5c1edac

https://digitalfox.media/tech-rhino/topbuzz-5-big-problems-service/

Use Content Marketing to Build Your Brand

30 January, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Every business wants more customers, correct? However, not all businesses have the financial resources to pay for advertising or other costly marketing strategies to get people to their websites.

What are the options if you have budgetary constraints? You can use content creation and marketing to help build your business.

Develop and use a content brand strategy to help spread the word about your business offerings. Building brand awareness takes time, but it will play a critical role in your business success.

Sometimes, you can actually re-purpose content that has already produced results. Why not use the keywords and already proven successful content and focus your energies on promoting that content more aggressively?

Develop a Strategy

You have to develop a plan, follow it, and make modifications where necessary while you work. If you don’t know where you are going, you won’t get there.

Start with determining your “why”. Why are you creating content? Who are you trying to help and how can you help them better than others? Define your goals and make sure your content aligns with those goals.

Be Authentic

Trying to pretend you are someone you not usually doesn’t work out well. People are not stupid, they will eventually figure it out. It is important to develop trust with your readers and potential customers.

If you are not genuine and are being fake, you will lose business.

Build Your Reputation

Reputation is everything. Trust is built with those who have good reputations. Prove your value to potential customers by writing helpful, relevant, and authentic content.

Tell Your Story

People don’t like to be bombarded with sales advertisements or pushy sales content. It is a turn-off to most, so you will want to avoid being too promotional in your content marketing.

Instead, be sure your content is used as a means of communicating with your potential customers without selling.

Writing helpful and valuable content will help you build awareness of your brand by attracting and nurturing. You will be able to acquire new customers and retain current ones.

Your brand is actually your business story so make sure you tell it in interesting, relevant, unique, and useful ways. Share your expertise with your target market to position yourself as an industry expert.

Know Your Target Market

If you don’t know who your target market is, how can you write content for them? Remember, you are not writing content for yourself, you are writing it to your potential customers.

You need to make sure your content is interesting, helpful, and relevant to those will are likely to make a purchase from your company. If you sell musical equipment, it would not be helpful to write a post about knitting. Stay on topic and be sure you are speaking to your desired audience.

Add Value

You want to differentiate yourself from your competition by providing value to your potential customers in creative ways. How about using humor to get your message across? It can be a solution to a problem or anything else that fits into your business model and provides help for your target.

Valuable, helpful, creative, and memorable content will increase the likelihood that people will make a purchase from your company.

Track Your Results

Keep track of your progress. See which content yields the best results, whether those results are views, shares, opt-ins, or sales.

If you don’t pay attention to what is working and what is not working, you will waste valuable time and not get the best results of your content marketing.

Promote Your Content

You can have the best content on the Internet but if no one sees it, what difference does it make? Social media is a powerful platform to share your content.

Use Twitter to share important tips. Post a summary of your post with a link to it on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

The more unique, interesting, valuable, and humorous posts are generally more popular on social media and are more likely to be shared.

There is nothing wrong with asking others to share your content. If you know influencers in your niche, having them share your content with their social media audience can exponentially increase your views.

The bottom line is you should pay attention to the quality of your content marketing to build your brand, connect with your customers, build trust, and eventually make more sales.

My Internship Experience at Creative Agency Secrets — Abigail Mok

21 December, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Hello my name is Abigail. I am a recent Commerce graduate with a major of Marketing and Information Systems. For the past month, I had the privilege to intern at Creative Agency Secrets. I am sad to bid farewell but I am glad that it has been an incredible month working with Rebecca, Conrado, and Tabhitha. I have learned so much within a short amount of time.

What I have learned

Throughout the month, I had the chance to step into the shoes of a marketer. I promoted events across various online platforms such as Facebook and Eventfinda. I created blog posts and mailshots. I completed some marketing research for a client as well. It has been an eye-opening experience to help to update client websites and assisting other tasks. It increased my understanding of the responsibilities of marketers.

Within this month-long internship, I have gained hands-on experience using various marketing tools to promote events and products, which enhanced my copywriting skills. It has been both fun and challenging taking on the role of a marketing assistant. This experience has also boosted my capability to work in teams in a corporate environment. It was great being a part of meetings and observing how marketing teams work together.

A heartfelt thank you

Unsurprisingly, the real marketing world is vastly different from the textbook marketing that I know. Knowing marketing principles and having experiences creating marketing solutions for clients during my undergraduate studies still did not prepare myself for all the challenges in the real marketing world. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside Rebecca and the team. Thank you for your guidance along this exciting journey of mine! Has been a pleasure working here and learning from you. I would also like to thank all the friendly people working at 74D France Street South. You have my best wishes!

For those who would like to intern here, you can get in touch with the team. Don’t worry if you have no prior marketing experience, I am sure the Creative Agency Secrets Team will take good care of you.

Since Christmas is drawing near, I would love to close by wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

3 Unique Ways to Increase Employee Engagement ROI

3 December, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

As a business owner or manager, you have most likely spent a lot of time and money on recruiting the highest quality candidates, and therefore you probably want to get as much out of these employees as possible. However, if you fail to adequately engage with them, you risk losing them to the competition. This is not what you want.

As a rule, there are three elements to employee engagement; realizing employee potential, having a common goal and promoting employee wellbeing. All three of these characteristics must be fulfilled if you are serious about employee engagement within your business.

Fortunately, it is not as hard as it may look to increase your employee engagement ROI, but you do need to ensure that you remain consistent in your efforts and take steps to engage your employees on a regular basis.

1. Discuss your reward schemes

It may not be common practice to discuss your bonus plans with your employees, but if you are unable to offer an annual salary increase or a monthly bonus, it is better than you are open with your employees about this and discuss other financially viable ways in which you can recognize and reward your team. For example, you could have a trained masseuse come in and de-stress an employee who has just completed a high-profile and high-pressured task.

However, it is important to remember that it is not the reward itself that matters the most, it is the fact that you have taken the time and the initiative to communicate with your employees and have actively asked them what they want.

2. Focus on offering a positive work-life balance

You may be surprised to hear that after salary, a healthy work-life balance is the most important driver for employees seeking out new employment. Therefore, if you fail to offer this to your employees, you could be pushing them directly into the arms of your competitors.

It is important that you are able to understand what your employees need from you as an employer; whether that be flexible working hours, the opportunity for remote working or the chance to work for another branch or office within the company. Inpulse employee engagement surveys can provide you with real-time insights into your employees and help you better predict and cater to their needs.

3. Provide our employees with effective technology

Do you know that expression ‘a workman is only as good as his tools’? Well, this is a well-known saying for a reason. How can you expect to get the best return on employee engagement investment, if you do not provide your employees with the tools that they need to carry out their job to the highest possible standard?

Investing in the latest technologies and software solutions is possibly the simplest way to increase ROI by solving practical problems. This can free up more time for your employees to be creative or take a more active role in moving your business forward.

The key aspect to remember is that employee engagement is not something that you can just accomplish and then move on from; you need to consistently and enthusiastically engage your employees in your business if you want them to remain loyal, motivated and driven.

GrownUps NZ, Richard Poole interview

27 November, 2017/0 Comments/in B2C, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Richard Poole founded the website GrownUps.co.nz and has built it up into a significant media propertyfocused on the over 50s market. What we found impressive is the ease with which the site has incorporated native advertising with traditional media as revenue streams.

He kindly agreed to be interviewed by the Creative Agency Secrets team.

What is your latest work?

I’m continuing to work with GrownUps, although the business is now owned by Cigna Insurance, having sold to them earlier in 2016. It’s been an interesting experience moving from being a small business to working with one of the world’s largest corporates, which I’m learning from. It’s been particular useful to have more governance and rigour around process and also risk. Also, being able to work with an innovative marketer and CEO from Cigna in NZ, has been very rewarding.

Since selling the business and taking away some of those stresses that do come with business ownership at times, we’re very proud to have doubled the revenue and also site traffic YOY plus grown membership 30%. It’s genuinely a real honour that each month we get to interact with over 160,000 visitors to the site and each week, speak with around half of our 120,000 members, via their weekly email newsletter. What’s really satisfying is that we have not wavered from our original vision from 2006 when we went live with GrownUps, whereby we seek to make every day better for any visitor to the site, whether by reading an interesting article out of the 8,000 that we now have, meeting an interesting fellow GrownUps members, playing a game on the site or maybe even being inspired to book that overseas trip that they deserve and have read about on the site.
What’s impressed you?

Having never worked in a corporate, it’s been great to see that very large corporates can work well with small businesses that they take under their wing – I think you each learn really. We’ve been fortunate having pragmatic leadership, clear guidelines and an understanding that we’re best to keep the essence of the small business feeling for customers/visitors. It actually can work very well.
What’s the next big thing?

There is no doubt that my mind seldom stops for a break in terms of thinking about meeting people’s needs, which is sometimes a challenge to be honest. At present I’m committed to GrownUps so we’ll just see where that goes over the next while. I’d love to see our ‘baby’ achieve everything that we’d imagined and hope to play some part in that, if that’s wanted.

However, I’m 44 and there are several things that I’m keen to achieve personally and for our family by the time I’m 50. Priorities in life definitely change and so I guess we’re always all weighing up how best to live our lives and what makes us happy.

Want To Grow Your Business Online? Here’s How!

17 November, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Many business owners dream of outperforming competitors through the creation of a strong online presence. If you’re ready to grow your brand online, note that the following strategies can help you do it:

1. Tap Into The Power Of Word-Of-Mouth Advertising

One of the best ways to grow your business online is through the use of key strategies such as word-of-mouth advertising. This form of advertising is empowering because it involves satisfied customers speaking positively about your brand. Because people are much more likely to invest in your brand when other people indicate that it is reputable, you want to ensure that your online marketing process involves encouraging your satisfied customers to speak positively about your product or service line. One great way to put the word-of-mouth advertising process in full effect is by asking satisfied clients to leave positive online reviews about your brand.

2. Build Relationships on Twitter

In addition to tapping into the power of word-of-mouth advertising, make sure that you begin to build relationships with your prospects through Twitter. These days, millions of individuals across the globe log onto Twitter to socialise and shop. By regularly interfacing with these individuals, you can likely gain new clients while simultaneously extending your organisation’s sphere of influence into the digital domain. Keep in mind that there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to interface with people via Twitter. The key to success is doing things that work. Thus if you find that you get a substantive response when you tweet links to your product pages, this is a solid mode of communication.

Another Twitter strategy you might choose is taking weekly or monthly polls. These polls function as a research method through which you can attain a clear understanding of things like which of your products the clients find most useful and whether or not they’re satisfied with your company’s level of customer service. You can ask all types of questions to attain this kind of information, and note that making the poll a weekly or monthly occurrence is desirable because it creates consistency around your brand and keeps prospects and clients coming back to Twitter to see what you’ll be talking about!

Note that Twitter is not the only social media channel through which you can cultivate strong relationships with members of your target market. You can also build relationships with your target market on other channels like Facebook. For example, you might run a contest via Facebook. In addition to keeping existing clients interested in your brand, this social media optimisation technique makes your organisation more visible to prospects, thereby increasing the likelihood of you broadening your base of loyal clients. Note that in addition to offering clients SMO services, companies such as Solid Cactus are pleased to provide people with virtual office services.

3. Begin Using The Right Software

One final strategy you can implement to optimise your online presence is using the right software. This isn’t necessarily a digital marketing strategy, but it is a technique that can clearly take your efficacy in the internet sphere from average to awesome. For example, the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software will help optimise communication between you and clients in the online realm because the staff will have up to date, detailed information regarding former interactions with the customer in question.

Start Growing Your Business Via The Internet! https://stormotion.io/blog/how-to-make-a-software-for-the-internet-of-things-iot/

Three strategies that can help your company cultivate a stronger online presence include word-of-mouth advertising, building relationships via Twitter, and using the right software. Start using these strategies now so your organisation can become an increasingly dynamic force in the digital sector!