48 Ways to Automate Your Workflow with BenchmarkONE and Zapier Posted on June 27, 2018July 7, 2020 by Jessica Lunk With so much on your plate, every second counts. That’s why we love the simple task automation tool, Zapier. With Zapier, you can easily automate pesky, repetitive tasks that eat up a lot of time, create room for error and yet add little value to your day. You already may know that BenchmarkONE automates your marketing by sending super-targeted emails and campaigns to your contacts based on their interests. But when you use BenchmarkONE in tandem with Zapier, you open up a whole new world of automation. Here are 48 simple, pre-built workflows you can use to cut out boring administrative tasks and leverage each and every connection your business has to turn contacts into customers: Connect with Event Attendees Webinar sign-ups and conference attendees are awesome for your list, but what happens when the event is over? With BenchmarkONE and Zapier, you can keep the conversation going long after your event to stay top of mind and turn those top and mid-funnel leads into customers. Collect Contacts from Landing Pages and Forms If your website is built for conversion, you have a steady stream of leads coming in from landing pages and forms. With a simple zap, you can harness the nurturing power of BenchmarkONE to send targeted emails overtime to turn new leads into customers. Easily Manage Contacts Using BenchmarkONE for marketing automation, but storing contact information somewhere else? Zapier can help add and update contacts in other spreadsheets, databases and CRMs for data that is clean, usable and up-to-date. Say it With a Text Message What’s even better than landing in the email inbox? Getting a text message right in the hands of your prospects and customers. Use Zapier’s built-in SMS app to easily send a timely text message as part of a BenchmarkONE email campaign. Pull in Survey Respondents Whether you’re calculating your business’s NPS score, or simply adding new details to contact records, surveys are an easy way to learn valuable information about your prospects and customers. Automatically add and update contacts with a zap. Follow Up with Appointments Scheduling tools are super useful for setting up meetings and appointments on the fly. With a zap you can use BenchmarkONE tag rules to update contact information (like change contact status from lead to hot prospect) or start a follow-up series of emails to keep your contacts in the loop post-meeting. Boost Productivity If you’re anything like the BenchmarkONE team, you live in Slack. Get Slack channel notifications about your BenchmarkONE contacts to keep on top of hot prospects or important customers without logging in to BenchmarkONE. Add Contacts from Live Chat Tools What’s even more awesome than forms for capturing leads on your website? Live chat tools are the perfect way to engage with hot leads. Create a zap to pull those contacts into BenchmarkONE for instant lead generation. Update Contact Data from Charges and Payments There’s nothing better than consistent data across apps. Keep Hatchbuck up-to-date with contact details from your invoicing and accounting software – or vise-versa. Track Who’s Talking to Your Support Team With Zapier, you can enrich your customer experience by keeping tabs on your contacts’ support ticket activity. Leverage Other Email Tools Give your sales team the power to send an email personalized with BenchmarkONE contact data right from their Gmail account – creating that one-on-one inbox experience for your sales opportunities. Connect with Social Media Turn social media activity into sales. Automatically import new leads from Facebook. Send a tweet as part of a BenchmarkONE campaign to keep prospects engaged on their favorite platform. Or, turn social media contest participants into bonafide leads for your sales team. Stay in Touch with Ecommerce Customers An ecommerce sale is nothing without targeted follow-up. Add new contacts to BenchmarkONE from ecommerce apps and keep the conversation going with targeted BenchmarkONE campaigns. Turn one-time sales into repeat business. This is just the tip of the iceberg to help you brainstorm new ways you can be automating your business behind the scenes. When it comes to generating sales for your B2B, you need to take advantage of every opportunity in your pipeline. With BenchmarkONE + the power of Zapier, you can automate your marketing and sales process to swiftly and accurately turn your contacts into new opportunities and new business. Learn more about using BenchmarkONE and Zapier to generate leads and automate sales and marketing with a live demo.
3 Misconceptions About Account-Based Marketing Posted on June 26, 2018June 26, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Many people don’t fully understand just why account-based marketing is so valuable. In reality, it’s a great strategy for engaging with the right customers at the right time – and that’s something any business can benefit from. In our digital landscape, awareness isn’t enough when it comes to marketing. Today’s brands must continuously engage their target customers, and traditional mediums just don’t deliver on that the way customers are expecting. A lack of engagement among customers often arises because marketers focus too much on price, product and promotion – three of the four P’s of marketing. In reality, marketers should really be devoting their attention to an entirely different P – people. Read Jonathan’s full article on Business.com.
The Value of Marketing Automation in Account-Based Marketing Posted on June 25, 2018June 25, 2018 by Allie Wolff If you’re not automating your account-based marketing (ABM), your work cycle probably looks something like this: you first put your initial list into an Excel sheet, manually editing and organizing every cell; then you check your list with others who provide feedback, before manually adjusting the list based on what they say; then you code the settings and routing data into your ad sets; then you upload the list into your marketing channel; and, finally, you review and track each campaign personally, adjusting and repeating as necessary. With marketing automation, most of that list becomes unnecessary. While ABM is inherently a specific, deliberate, finely-targeted approach to B2B marketing, you should not assume that such a level of specificity demands a hefty amount of personal investment in the grunt work. Modern savvy marketers are playing the game several steps ahead by utilizing marketing automation to speed up the process. Marketing automation is typically regarded as a broad-scale strategy for garnering and nurturing consumer leads, but in truth, it’s most powerful when handled intimately and in a personalized fashion. Here are a few ways automated marketing can improve your ABM game, and let you discover a whole new world of value. You’ll spend—and waste—less money. By targeting certain users very specifically, you can create a set of display ads specifically for those few people and improve your chances of getting noticed. You won’t be paying for empty clicks from a broad public, and will instead be able to rest easy knowing your chosen audience is seeing every ad you’re pointing their way. A good follow-up to this is to create customized landing pages to expand your messaging and include a well-designed web form to capture your lead’s info. By studying what people have done before you, you can optimize your efforts and save money and increase conversions, and at the end of the day, that’s what your shift to ABM should be about. Your CRM will be more organized. If your sales team has ever encountered separate lead profiles for “Hatchbuck Corp,” “Hatchbuck Inc,” “Hatchbuck” and “Hatch Buck,” you may roll your eyes at their automatic distinction in your CRM. Most marketing automation software negates the need to manually go into your database for routine cleansing and editing by using logical deductions and keywords to keep your data tidy. And if your leads are high-level and beyond your current CRM, an automated marketing system can automatically aggregate your leads into accounts in your existing CRM. You can enjoy the benefits of effective lead nurturing. The most effective lead-nurturing programs are ones strategically laid out and designed. But manually following up with reminders and information will be a hugely time-consuming effort. You can mine your ABM leads’ info, including their company and demographic info, to create an automated drip campaign and funnel them into your most valuable offers. Bonus tip: Just because your account-based marketing will be specific, doesn’t mean you can’t break your leads down into lists. In fact, here is where your lists can really shine—their purpose, after all, is to create as personalized an experience as possible while staying automated. Lean into the natural agility of your targeted marketing campaign and adjust it to your next account. It will save you time digging through data. Perhaps the most obvious benefit to automated ABM is how much time it can save you. Instead of manually editing spreadsheets and adjusting campaigns, you can automatically set up rules filtering your leads into accounts, connect the dots between marketing channels and your target audiences, set up a series of ABM triggers, and receive automated reports on how the whole process is going. Best of all, you can set up a repeat pattern relatively quickly. You may find there’s more initial legwork to get started on this track, but the time it will free up down the road will be worth it. Combined with account databases that can be updated regularly and swiftly in a single stroke, you’ll be saving your marketing team countless hours—not to mention countless dollars in both their time and extraneous marketing efforts.
How to Use Automation to Fortify Your Account-Based Marketing Efforts Posted on June 22, 2018June 22, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Account-based marketing is the ultimate personalization tool. Instead of incurring the unnecessary expense of marketing to broad swaths of the population, an account-centric strategy isolates key business accounts and markets directly to these individual units. By appealing to specific leaders and stakeholders who can benefit from what your company has to offer, you can make marketing efforts simultaneously more tailored and more effective. This strategy is not new by any means, but it’s gained widespread recognition over the past few years as it’s evolved with the progression of technology. Inherently tech-based, a plethora of marketing automation solutions has made ABM more measurable and affordable for businesses of all sizes. Read Jonathan’s full article on the Marketo blog.
5 Ways To Optimize Your Website From The Ground Up Posted on June 21, 2018June 21, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Your website is your digital storefront, but unlike physical storefronts, you can’t lure people in with an attractive window display. Online, there are no sidewalks where digital content consumers casually stroll by. This means that half a website’s job is to make people aware that it even exists. To do this, business owner’s must optimize their website. If optimization is something you haven’t made part of your regular digital hygiene routine, we’ve got a few tips to help you optimize your website from the ground up. Know your current lead generation numbers. Optimizing your website isn’t something you simply do and forget about. Rather, you should be regularly tracking the impact of your efforts. In order to track this impact, you need to know what your starting point is. Take a look at your website’s current lead generation. How many leads is it producing? How many hits or views does your website get in a day, in a week, or in a month? Compare your different landing pages to see which ones perform better than others. Look at the conversion rate of one CTA against another. Once you have these numbers, record them somewhere so that you know what you need to beat in the future. Understand the conversion paths of your customers. When a customer lands on your website, the hope is that they’ll read a blog post, hop around, and eventually fill out a form that turns them into a lead. Sometimes, this doesn’t happen and the visitor leaves. Take a look at the journey they took through your website to identify inconsistencies or roadblocks. If you’re a yoga studio, perhaps they clicked on a social media link advertising “Yoga for Beginners” only to wind up on a confusing page about every single yoga class your studio offers. Consider how potential customers navigate your website and look for ways that you can create a more seamless, sensible experience. Create thank you pages. Landing pages receive the most love and attention, but there’s another half of the landing page that is very important but often forgotten: the thank you page. Imagine for a second. You’ve filled out your first and last name, email address, and job title in exchange for an ebook. You click “submit” and then…nothing. You’re simply back on the home page. All you’re left with is questions: “Does the ebook automatically download?” “Is it emailed to me?” “I haven’t received anything in my inbox…how long do I need to wait until I receive it?” It’s an unpleasant digital experience that leaves the lead with a bad taste in their mouth about handing over their information. Create thank you pages that tell customers how they’ll receive the offer, how long it will take, and of course, demonstrates your appreciation for their interest in your ebook, infographic, or webinar. Use dynamic content to personalize your websites. With dynamic content tools, you can include hyper-relevant content across your website. Keep in mind that once your website turns someone into a lead it needs to turn them into a customer and one way to do that is by offering a personalized experience whenever they revisit your website. This personalization doesn’t just need to be with profile details like their name. It could also be based on their interests and what they’ve looked for before. Similarly, it could mean offering them a special discount code to entice them to convert. Give your leads some love, a.k.a. nurture your leads. Don’t take your leads for granted. Just because they’ve filled out a form on your website, doesn’t mean they’ll automatically become a customer in the next week or so. They need to be nurtured, especially since there are companies all over the internet vying for their attention, too. Once someone fills out a form, plop them into an automated workflow in your digital marketing tool of choice so that they receive regular (but not annoying) emails relevant to their interests so that your brand isn’t forgotten. This isn’t 2001, friends. It’s not enough just to make a website. You’ve got to make that website work. Set aside time in your calendar to conduct little tweaks here and there to optimize your website so your lead conversion rates skyrocket to the next level.
6 Time Management Tips to Skyrocket Your Productivity Posted on June 20, 2018March 8, 2023 by Jonathan Herrick Being a business owner takes up an incredible amount of time and energy. Making sure everything is running as it should be while having to wear countless hats isn’t for the faint of heart. But not strategically managing your time can leave you feeling frazzled, which means you’ll be much less effective at keeping all those balls in the air. The following time management tips should help you master your daily schedule, maximize productivity and bring your business to the next level. Assess your current time allocation. You can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge, so the first step in getting on track is to figure out how you’re currently spending your time. Are there any activities that may be draining your productivity, such as surfing the web or reading email? To assess this, keep track your daily activities and how much time you spend on each of them for a week. The results may be quite eye-opening. Create goals. You can’t add more hours to the day, so your only option is to commit to changing your behaviors. A great place to start is to set goals that will help you eliminate the activities that are time wasters. For instance, you might set a goal to stop taking personal phone calls or responding to non-work-related messages while you’re working. Start strategizing. For the tasks you cannot eliminate, such as reading and replying to email, setting aside specific blocks on your schedule to complete them can help you avoid wasting too much time. For example, you might set a goal of spending only one hour per day, first thing in the morning, on email. Likewise, you might block out 45 minutes after lunch to check and respond to voicemails. Being strategic about your tasks, when you perform them and exactly how much time you’ll devote to them each day is the key. Prioritize. You can’t expect to get everything on your to-do list done every day, so don’t bog yourself down with unnecessary stress. Instead, make a point to prioritize all of your tasks in order of importance, blocking and mapping out time in your schedule for each of them. If there’s anything you haven’t completed at the end of the day, either move it to the next day or get help completing it, which brings us to our next point. Delegate and outsource. If there are things on your task list that can be handled by someone else on your team who is available, divvying up some of your workload will help free you up to focus on the tasks and projects you can’t hand off. Delegating and outsourcing lets you optimize your time for the benefit of your business. For instance, have your assistant handle the filing so you can work on your pitch to land that big client you’ve been eyeing. Utilize tools and technology. Whether it’s a basic daytimer, a scheduling app for your smartphone or a time management software program, using the various tools and technologies that are available to you is a step in the right direction. An online calendar program, for instance, can help you schedule and manage your time more effectively and keep you on track so you don’t spiral back out of control. Try a few out to see which ones you prefer, and then put them to use in your day-to-day life. Another way to skyrocket productivity is to implement a CRM and marketing software to help you stay organized and automate those non-revenue producing activities. Running a successful business can be chaotic to say the least. Taking charge of your time and putting that time to optimal use will help you keep your head above water and let you stay a step ahead of the competition.
New Ways To Integrate Hatchbuck With Other Apps You Love Posted on June 19, 2018June 19, 2018 by Erin Posey It’s an exciting day in Hatchbuckland. We’ve listened to your feedback and have been hard at work making updates to our previously inbound-only API. Today we’re happy to announce our two-way API integration with Zapier. With the updates, you’ll now be able to not only push contact information into Hatchbuck but also push it out of Hatchbuck into loads of other applications that you love. This means that Hatchbuck is no longer just a Zapier action, but it can also be a Zapier trigger. Whether you want to send a message through Slack, schedule a meeting through Acuity, add a note to Trello or push out a personalized tweet, our new two-way integration with Zapier lets you do it all with a few simple clicks. Webhooks in Zapier can be triggered through our new “Send Webhook” automation in Hatchbuck. You can add the new Webhook automation to anything from email links and campaigns to rules and forms. At the moment, our integration will be strictly focused on contact data. This release is just another step toward helping you seamlessly integrate, and we’ll be working on more enhancements to come. How We’re Using Zapier at Hatchbuck Our team uses Hatchbuck in conjunction with a lot of other fantastic tools to grow our own business. We wanted to share how we’re using the new update: Even More Ways You Can Use Zapier Our marketing team uses a plethora of tools, but we’re not even scratching the surface of what’s possible with our API update. Here are a few more Zapier integration ideas for other apps you might be using: And if you need even more inspiration, here are a few more examples of Zaps you can quickly set up! Add or update Hubspot CRM contacts when they fill out a Hatchbuck form Add new Hatchbuck contacts to your Google Contacts account Create a Zendesk ticket through a Hatchbuck form submission Send an SMS text to a contact when they take a specific action Add new Hatchbuck contacts into Salesforce as leads At Hatchbuck, we’re passionate about helping businesses of all sizes improve their sales and marketing processes. With our new API updates, it’s going to be easier than ever for you to tie together all of the tools you’re using in your marketing stack so that your ship sails even more smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Happy building!
The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Analytics Posted on June 18, 2018June 18, 2018 by Allie Wolff If Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony before Congress proved anything, it’s not that Facebook was complicit in selling data to Russian agents to interfere with the American election – it’s that Facebook is still really influential. I say “still” because there has been some debate about the subject, and it tends to be those marketers who are losing the Facebook game who complained the loudest. “Kids aren’t on Facebook anymore,” they would argue. “Kids are on Snapchat.” In reality, Snapchat is nose-diving these days. And guess who’s thriving? For brands and media publishers alike, Facebook is one of the biggest drivers of traffic and customer engagement. But if you want to succeed, you have to understand how to mine your data and glean the maximum possible value out of your analytics. Thankfully, if there’s one thing Facebook is good at, it’s compiling a ridiculous amount of data on people and providing it to brands at almost no cost. What kind of analytics does Facebook offer? Facebook offers data through three sectors: Page Insights, Audience Insights and Ads Manager. All three are important to understand, but not all three are equally important. One offers the most relevant information for the biggest number of brands. Ads Manager We’ll start with the deepest and arguably most obscure one: Ads Manager. This deals specifically with paid promotions, and some social media managers don’t even know it exists because Facebook tucks it away under a separate URL. Head to the top-right corner of your Facebook page, click the down arrow and scroll down to “Manage Ads.” There are four main tabs here: “Account overview” (top-level reporting on goals, spends and reach), “Campaigns” (collected ad campaigns), “Ad sets” (targeted audiences) and “Ads” (individual advertisements). The amount of detail for each is as deep as you can get. If you find this overwhelming, you can eschew the Ads Manager by boosting posts through Facebook’s primary front-end, but savvy marketers will appreciate the deeper insight offered. Ads Manager allows you to see a more thorough analysis of your results, including cost per click, budgetary breakdowns over time, click-through rate and the data of people viewing your ad. If you’re familiar with Google Doubleclick or AdWords, you’ll feel right at home. And if you’re not spending money on Facebook, you’ll never need to worry about this section. Audience Insights With this data set, you can learn more about your followers – what other pages they like, their demographics, their Facebook activity, their purchase history and some relevant inferences about their households and lifestyles. You can find the Audience Insights tab from the Ads Manager page, heading to the top left menu and expanding into the full menu. Click on “Audience Insights”, then you’ll find three options: “Everyone on Facebook,” “People connected to your page” and “A Custom audience.” Sure, you could look at everyone on Facebook for fun, but the most valuable insight regards people connected to your page. Here you’ll find a wealth of data on your audience, which can be broken down and analyzed ad infinitum. This is all useful data, but it doesn’t say much about your community growth or influence. Page Insights This is probably the most useful data given the simplicity of the data set. Under the tab that says “Insights” on your Facebook page, you can learn about your own development through your total page likes, your individual posts’ reach, the type of engagement you’re getting and how you’re getting it. What’s most useful is the day-by-day breakdown of your page growth. You can see exactly when people followed and unfollowed your page, by week or by month, and whether you can attribute that growth to paid promotions or organic reach. Page Insights also gives you a nice overview of your top posts from a given time period, allowing you to quickly and easily examine what kind of content performs the best for you. What’s more, you can keep track of your competitors by following their pages’ growth rates and seeing their top posts from the past week. There’s no better way to gauge your success than by doing an apples-to-apples comparison. As you examine your engagement and reach, you can determine whether your posts are over- or under-performing within your industry. This analytics dashboard will also allow you to dig into your video numbers: how long people are watching before they drop off, how many total minutes people have viewed, how many of those views last 10 seconds or more, and the audience engagement levels for that video. Page Insights, if used correctly, can be your best friend. And if you need to download them for analysis, you can download a beyond-comprehensive Excel spreadsheet with more data than you can use all at once. And if you crunch those numbers right, you can see exactly, definitively, what’s working for you – and what’s not.
5 Steps to Building a Collaborative Virtual Team Posted on June 15, 2018June 15, 2018 by Lindsey Stroud Huge corporations aren’t the only ones benefiting from the virtual workforce. Thanks to things like cloud technology and the growth of freelance marketplaces, companies of every size and industry are now able to build dynamic virtual teams, tapping into a global talent pool and saving overhead at the same time. Although virtual teams offer a number of measurable benefits, they’re not without their share of challenges. One area in particular that many companies struggle with is creating and maintaining a culture that is truly collaborative. Thankfully there are steps you can take to overcome this challenge and get the most out of your virtual team. Let’s take a look. Break down silos. One of the biggest reasons virtual teams struggle with collaboration is that each remote worker is using different systems, applications and inboxes. This type of disjointed environment makes it difficult to get everyone on the same page. To avoid this, bring everyone together on the same shared platform through which communication, file sharing and other collaborative activities can be carried out seamlessly. A system like Hatchbuck, for instance, can keep everything operating cohesively, regardless of where each team member may be working. Differentiate between tasks and projects. Some business initiatives will naturally require more collaboration than others. For instance, scanning a bunch of documents requires far less brainstorming and coordination than rebranding the company or redesigning the website. Alleviate some of the pressure on your remote team by designating which tasks can be tackled independently and which projects require more of a collaborative team effort. In some instances, projects can be broken down into individual milestones that will eventually be brought together. Make sure employees are aware of the difference and understand their role in the bigger picture. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Being part of a distributed team can make staying connected difficult. That’s why communication must be a top priority for virtual workforces. Make sure everyone on the team is in touch with management and with one another. Utilize technology, such as instant messaging and virtual meetings, to bring everyone together and keep the lines of communication constantly flowing. As a manager, scheduling frequent one-on-ones with your direct reports can also do wonders for keeping everyone in the fray. Free up time for more collaboration. Your team can’t effectively work together if they’re wasting time on manual tasks and processes. Free up your virtual employees by automating as many menial administrative tasks as possible. When technology is leveraged to do the heavy lifting, your team will be able to focus their time, efforts and expertise on completing collaborative projects and reaching company goals. Monitor performance. You don’t have to micromanage (in fact, you shouldn’t), but you should have a good idea of which team member is working on what, where they are in the process and whether there are areas where your assistance could help move things along. Project management systems can provide instant and accurate visibility into what’s going on across your distributed team. That way you can ensure adequate workload allocation and identify bottlenecks that might be slowing down progress. Without question, a virtual team has the potential to add tremendous value to your company. Of course, as with anything, there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach things – and there’s always room for improvement. By knowing how and what to prioritize and leveraging a cloud-based platform like Hatchbuck, you can maximize engagement and bring the value of your virtual team to a new level.