10 Amazing Apps That Your Small Business Needs for Great Customer Service. Forget the old days of huge customer service operations. These ten technological innovations are empowering even the smallest businesses with the highest quality customer service tools. Check out these game-changing small business apps worthy of being explored in online MBA programs at the best universities. Grasshopper Grasshopper is a virtual switchboard for small businesses.
Employees collaborate from anywhere. Customers choose an extension, and the call gets directed to the corresponding cell, home or office phone number. Zendesk Zendesk is very popular because it empowers small businesses to offer great multichannel customer service 24/7 via email, Web, social, phone, chat and now Facebook Messenger. Desk Desk by Salesforce provides customer service support for small businesses, as well as performance tracking and measures. ClickDesk ClickDesk features live voice and video chat to enhance customer service experiences for small businesses. Helpshift Loop Parature Brandify SmarterTools. 8 Ideas to Jumpstart Your Content Creation. Content marketing is a powerful marketing tool that companies are using to attract prospects and generate leads online. But in spite of its growing popularity, producing enough quality content remains an ongoing challenge for marketers and business owners alike.
Marketers are well aware that their websites need a steady influx of fresh, quality content to keep the visitors coming and the search engines happy. Content is after all the heart and soul of any successful lead generation, inbound marketing, SEO or social media strategy. But producing magnetic content, and enough of it, is much easier said than done. So here are a few ideas to help you jumpstart your content creation. 1. Planning plays such a critical role in the success of your content marketing program and your content creation efforts. 2.
It’s incredibly helpful to keep a running list of topics that you might want to cover in the future. 3. Don’t create content in a silo! 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Don’t do it all by yourself. How to Overcome the Top 3 B2B Content Marketing Challenges in 2014. Content marketing continues to dominate more of B2B marketing strategies and budgets everywhere. But while adoption of content marketing is on the rise and confidence in its effectiveness is growing, B2B marketers still face some major ongoing challenges. In October, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs released their fourth annual B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report. Included in the report is a list of twelve content marketing challenges that B2B marketers face. In this post, we’ll address the top three major B2B content marketing challenges and share a few ideas on how to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Lack of Time At the top of the list of content marketing challenges that B2B marketers face is the lack of time to “do” content marketing. Make it a bigger priorityAs the old saying goes, you make time for what’s important to you. Better time managementWith limited time, you’ve got to make sure you use the time you have wisely.
How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free. Webinar Marketing: 15 Steps to Revenue Generating Webinars. Oli and Ryan in our “studio” for one of our first Unwebinars. Maybe you think webinars should just die already. Be thrown on the content scrapheap along with 99% of infographics. I hear you. When Ryan, our Director of Customer Success, and I first considered hosting webinars, the horribly dry, technically adequate pitch sessions I’d attended were fresh in my mind. I think it’s time to start taking webinars seriously. We did, and our webinar registrations grew from 190 to nearly 3200. (PSSST! In this post I’m going to give you a really powerful step-by-step formula for marketing webinars using 4 landing pages and 3 emails (no big deal, right?).
Before you start coming up with topics to cover, you’ll want to get clear on what your goals are. For us, giving our community an opportunity to learn and ask questions in real time was really exciting. But the true objective of our webinars from a marketing perspective was to increase interest in Unbounce and ultimately, increase revenue. 1. 2. 3. 15 Essential Software, Apps and Tools for Small Businesses | Capital Solutions Bancorp. Hundreds of thousands of software, apps and tools simplify and speed up tasks for small business owners and their employees.
However, finding the right tools can be overwhelming for even the tech-savviest people. Many tools are available as monthly or yearly subscriptions, and those can add up fast. Your small business’ need may not need feature-rich and expensive tools to get the job done when free or low-priced alternatives will suffice. This list contains free and affordable options. Most commercial and freemium software offer a free trial. Should you decide to try out a tool, pay attention to how much of its features are available in the trial. Also, check how long the trial runs and when it starts. This list contains products from 15 different categories.
Accounting and Invoicing Wave Wave is a free, ad-supported and web-based accounting and invoicing service. Business templates and tools Zoho CRM Diagramming Draw.io Email marketing MailChimp File backup and management Dropbox File recovery. Standout Social Proof: 3 Keys to Amazing Testimonials. Welcome! If you're new here, don't forget to grab your FREE CD!.
Thanks for visiting! Testimonials are so important because prospective clients and customers are always looking for “social proof” before they pull out their credit cards! It’s one thing for you to talk about your clients’ results, but it will never be as powerful as what they say about their results. Social proof can take the form of case studies, success stories, testimonials, endorsements, press mentions, and even social media “kudos.” In today’s social world, information travels faster and reaches further than ever, and happy clients and customers are your best, unpaid sales force. Testimonials also provide an excellent opportunity to answer customer and client objections before they buy. They want to see success stories… but do you have amazing testimonials to share with them? Here are three simple keys for getting incredible testimonials about your products, programs and services. 1. 2. 3.
5 Personal Quirks Employers Hate - OppsPlace. Mar 15, 2013 By Mark Anthony Dyson A job seeker's quirks can very well keep him or her from ever being a serious job candidate. Who can say that snorts and unusual sneezes can't be scrutinized? There are quite a few quirks that friends and family tolerate, but employers are not having it. 1.
People like to laugh and cry, but neither one incessantly. 2. Ask for a second opinion if you are constantly told, "You stink! " What you do, not the words, could be the reason for a lack of success: Speaking too fast or slow is a communication problem. 4. Do you test well? 5. No one likes someone who carries a conversation with themselves, often offering too much information. Many find critique the hardest part of the job search and perfecting interviewing skills, but an effective network brings the best out of you. 9 Ways to Lose the Trust of Your Audience. 10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life. Stop taking so much notice of how you feel.
How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order. Read full content. A 3-Step Alternative to a Machine-Like Workday. The Daily Leap: Four Ways to Earn Workplace Respect...and Career Happiness. It should come as no surprise that respect is important to professionals, but a recent study by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley indicates that they key to career happiness and social well-being at work isn't money: it's the respect one feels from one's peers.
How does you cultivate respect at work? Follow these four best practices to earn the admiration of your peers and make your work-life more satisfying: Stay true to your word: One of the most significant ways to earn respect is through integrity. Sticking to your word speaks volumes about your character, shows reliability, and lets people know what they can expect from you. Resolve to more closely correlate what you say with what you do.Practice courteousness: People are emotional creatures, and how you treat them conveys a lot about you. What Multitasking Does To Our Brains. I can definitely understand how focusing on one task at a time allows you to be more productive. However, I also believe that you can benefit from taking a break after ~an hour of working on something, and then doing something else.
Making progress on multiple different tasks in this way provides a similar feeling of high productivity, but also allows you to get a feel for exactly how much work you have on your plate. Obviously, not every task can be broken up into hour-long work sessions, but if I can diversify what I'm working on, I won't get bored of my work.In terms of making to-do lists, I've found that just making the old-fashioned, linear lists don't quite cut it for me anymore. One method I've found quite useful is the Eisenhower method, which is a 2x2 matrix that organizes your tasks by urgency v.s. importance. It's a nice, visual way to look at your tasks and choose which one to work on based on how necessary it is to complete at that point in time. Are You Heading Towards Career Burnout? Courtesy of onlinegrad.marygrove.edu Career burnout is a real thing.
And when it comes to the topic of career burnout, some concur while others feel it doesn’t even exist. For those of us that plan events for a living finding that perfect balance between life and career is important. These days’ companies seemed to demand so much more from their people. Expecting them to take on more and more without any kind of increase in compensation. A tale we’ve all heard a time or two. Longer hours and multitasking continue to be on the rise. Burnout is caused by stress. Career Burnout and Doing it All! In an era when we are expected to do it all. The impact and effects of career burnout can be hard hitting and unyielding. Three Ways to Help Avoid Career Burnout Career burnout not only effects our work life it overflows in to our private time as well.
Learn to Delegate – If your job and responsibilities allow…delegate. Put Technology on Hold – Set boundaries when it comes to technology.