Remington BeggLots of people are sharing their listicles this holiday season. We’re taking this holiday themed list a step further. Companies moving into 2019 are needing to keep their tech stack in mind when choosing new software tools to help drive growth for their company. Here’s our choices for the 12 Apps of Inbound: Christmas 2018 Edition
First Day of Inbound: 23 / Twenty Three
Twenty Three is a video hosting platform like no other. The platform gives you every video tool you need to host, post, promote, & measure your video content across multiple channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and your website from one central location. Easily create & host audio and video content for your podcasts, and easily organize your sales, service, and marketing video resource center focused on video retention. Add in the amazing integration with HubSpot and it’s a TKO of your video marketing strategy.
Second Day of Inbound: Pandadoc
On the 2nd day of Christmas my true love gave me to - Pandadoc! (10% OFF with this link) This web-based app allows us to build and send contracts with speed and ease. When you are setting up the system, we highly suggest taking the time to build out your template gallery, content library, and catalog. This will be the most labor intensive part. However, once you get these all lined up, sending out contracts happens in the snap.
As you dig into building out your Pandadoc, we recommend beginning with the catalog. This is where you will create a list of all your product offerings. As you are building out contracts, in the pricing table, you can just type in the service and all the details you have inputted into the catalog will populate the contract.
Next, you will want to create the content library. You can upload images, graphics, pricing and create blocks of content to easily swap in and out of a contract. As an example, we have a services block that includes links out to our website page for each service. Fill this section up with all the juicy bits! Your agreement terms and conditions, your story, etc.
Lastly, create templates using the content library you just whipped up! We know it may feel tedious, but this allows you to now pull a contract for a common service offering and send it out in a flash.
The best part for your customers is the ease of signing the agreement. When you ship out the contract it can be viewed and electronically signed and payment information can be added. To be honest, using a mobile phone to complete the agreement can be way easier than on a computer, but you have both options. Regardless of your method, from a user perspective, it's very smooth.
Third Day of Inbound: Databox
Databox is a super convenient platform that allows you to pull all the insights you could imagine into one spot. From organic website traffic and blog views to email click-through rates and PPC conversions, Databox pulls all these metrics into a visually comprehensive board you can customize yourself.
You can easily connect all of your social media accounts, Google analytics, HubSpot accounts, and more where the platform pulls all the data. You can also select the date ranges to view the insights from, whether it’s from the last 30 days, quarter, year, and more. The charts Databox creates makes it great for sharing with clients, as they can seamlessly view how their website and accounts are performing. SO much easier than manually reviewing and exporting insights from each individual platform!
Fourth Day of Inbound: Asana
The Asana app is my jam! Asana keeps all of us here at Impulse creative organized and our projects rolling. As the project manager, I need to be aware of all the projects so I can effectively communicate with our clients. Whenever I want to know where a project is, I can quickly check the Asana board and immediately know where the team is on the project. Not only can I see all the tasks open and closed, I can also visually see where the project is in an awesome infographic that updates as the team checks off tasks.
The tool also has a great user experience, which helps me easily navigate throughout the platform. The best part is that Asana integrates through slack, so I get all my updates there as well! It also is equipped with unicorns and Narwhals, which will brighten anyone's day!
Fifth Day of Inbound: SEMrush
SEOs everywhere likely have at least heard of the industry-staple SEMrush. Simply enter your domain, press the magic button and you’re instantly served a dashboard fit for a search engine optimization king (or queen!).
Your SEO Dashboard is your one-stop shop for monitoring the improvements of your SEO efforts. The dashboard can be customized, showing your company’s top keywords to strategize a page one takeover. But that’s just the start.
See warnings or errors on your website, track your positions on the search engine results pages (SERPs), become a master of your backlink profile, even do research for new topics for blogs or pages. Get on-site optimization tips, understand your geographic territories, monitor your traffic sources too with this handy marketing program.
-Jenn
Sixth Day of Inbound: Soapbox
Video first! Umm, YEAH! We take a video first approach on our website, for our clients, in our marketing, and sales content. I, the resident biz dev’er, use Soapbox for all of my video needs!
The app sits nicely in my browser and I just click away when I need to record a follow up, hello message or explain something that would be easier to digest in a video rather than an email. “Is it easy to send,” you ask? DUH, it's super easy. You can embed the video in an email, share a link and best of all, track the metrics to see if it was viewed and how far through the video it was watched!
So what are you waiting for? Push that record button and up your conversations to another level.
Seventh Day of Inbound: Drift
Drift is by far the best thing that has happened to my sales process this year! We jumped on the conversational marketing bandwagon real early. Almost 12 months ago. We created videos, we posted blogs, pillar pages, videos, videos, oh did I mentions videos? We have helped our clients see major success in using chat tools and really are changing the way companies are talking to their clients and prospects and moving through their sales funnel faster!
So why do I love Drift so much? Well, it books me sales qualified meetings WHILE I SLEEP. Yes, you read that right. The Drift assistant books my meetings and helps me prepare for them all day long. And if it’s not a SQL, then the playbooks will take them down path to where they need to go... whether that's driving the user to download our latest ebook or check out our careers page-- our bot can do it all!
Conversational marketing is the future--- get on the train now and let Drift be your guide.
Eighth Day of Inbound: Google Docs
I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Google Docs app. If it’s 11 p.m. and I’m on vacation on the moon, within 3 seconds I can see a client making changes or comments on a doc, accept or reject the changes as well as change document permissions and sharing settings.
I don’t really use this for mobile writing much, but I definitely could. And sometimes the nature of our jobs is to write a headline or a tagline or a paragraph that’s needed in less than 5 minutes or something. I can do that literally anywhere I have wifi or service. And unlike notes or any other app, I get the context of the whole document, plus live collaboration and visibility.
Ninth Day of Inbound: Slack
As a remote employee, Slack is my lifeline to the entire team, plus clients. No matter where I am, no matter what time of day it is, I can instantly ask and answer questions, have group conversations that avoid meetings.
The instant communication channel Slack provides helps me to clarify important details about my projects or client content. I especially appreciate the way I can use it to capture the little things that come up throughout a project that are out of the scope of my role, but need to be addressed by other team members.
(And of course the all-day banter can make it easy to feel like even remote teams have a water cooler to gather around when they need it.)
Tenth Day of Inbound: Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a phone service that makes it easy to connect via phone with my clients from out of the office - no wires, no fuss! The app routes all my calls to my personal phone. This makes remote employees working on the road so much easier. Everyone on the team has the same phone number but different extensions. You can choose a local number or a toll-free number. If my client knows my extension, it's that easy to connect! If not, they just have to talk to one more person on our team to get them to the right place.
The app also allows for business text, which comes in handy for those lovable but hard to reach clients. The best part of the app is keeping my personal number separate from our business number. This prevents me from answering the wrong calls at the wrong times. Grasshopper also uses a reporting tool so you can go online to view your call history and voicemails for each extension. If you haven't tried the Grasshopper App for your workplace, I highly suggest you do!
Eleventh Day of Inbound: Zoom
Many companies are no longer making just local connections, meeting people through travel, organic search results and more. The problem is, you can’t always meet clients or your team face-to-face, and we all know email or instant messaging sometimes just doesn’t cut it.
Having an authentic, visual conversation often helps to not only better communicate, but to also foster closer relationships. That’s where Zoom comes in. This popular video conferencing software is making it easier than ever to connect quickly and efficiently with people from across the world.
Simply set up a meeting room, send your contact the link and be connected through your webcam in seconds. This app integrates with Google Calendar to make scheduling a breeze, links to popular messaging platforms like Slack (also mentioned in this article!) for joining and making calls and even works on-the-go on your tablet or smartphone.
-Jenn
Twelfth Day of Inbound: HubSpot
What would we do without HubSpot?! This platform makes the day to day SO much easier, as we use this for basically all of our inbound marketing and sales efforts. Websites, email, social media scheduling, workflows, blogging, conversational marketing, leadflows, pillar pages, reporting, landing pages… the list goes on.
HubSpot puts everything you can imagine under one platform, making it seamless for users to push out content, track insights, gather contact information, and so much more. It is the ideal software for business growth!