“How do I grow my business?” “Why isn’t my marketing campaign working as well?” “How can I coordinate my sales and marketing teams?”
We hear these questions regularly from the business owners we work with. Our clients want more sales, more effective campaigns, and are increasingly willing to use technology to solve these issues. So we have identified the most common problems our clients face, and prepared a list of free and paid apps that help to solve these particular pain points.
Has your marketing strategy shown a steady decline in new leads and sales? Are you looking for a new marketing approach that is less expensive and more effective?
Smartify offers an all-in-one platform to improve your marketing campaigns. Each app in their arsenal includes deep analytics that help you personalise campaigns.
2015’s consumers are shying away from mass impersonal sales campaigns, and looking for stronger connection with the companies they patronise. Smartify provides a variety of tools to achieve more connection with your target customers in your marketing campaigns. Plus, they offer a satisfaction guarantee: if it does not bring your opt-in rate to 30%, you get your money back.
Do your sales and marketing teams operate in a coordinated way? Are their activities sometimes disorganised, or even in conflict?
Marketo offers a collection of paid apps that integrate and automate sales and marketing campaigns. Your team remains in control of the overall campaign, and Marketo’s technology puts this campaign into action. One such app is the Marketo Calendar for coordinating your sales and marketing teams’ campaigns.
Box.com provides secure, on-demand content stored in the cloud. It allows your entire team to access information about your overall campaigns, while maintaining data security. You can even share selected information with customers, all inside of Box.com’s customised app. It offers a freemium (free premium) version and an upgraded paid version.
Mindmeister allows you to create and share elegant mind maps. It’s an ideal way to organise your team’s collective knowledge and input into a visual format. It offers a free trial version and a paid premium version.
Looking for more, and higher quality, customers?
A good starting point is to examine the experiences and opinions of your current clientele. MyInsights provides a customised app to help with this. You can collect qualitative information from your customers and use this to devise a marketing plan to attract new customers. People love to share their experiences, and MyInsights allows you to get solid information about your customers, directly from their mouths – or in this case, smartphones.
Is distraction or ineffective use of time hindering your business progress? A new field called neuroergonomics builds tools to maximise work efficacy, using the latest knowledge from neuroscience. Focus@Will is one such app. It generates a playlist of music that automatically, subconsciously, puts your brain into a state of “flow”.
The music it plays – channels include ‘Classical’, ‘Alpha Chill’, and ‘Drum Zone Beta’ – help to enhance your focus, reduce the intrusion of distractions, and maintain a state of concentration for the duration of a 100-minute work period. It is based in hard science and ongoing studies confirm its efficacy. Focus@Will has a free 30-day trial period, and paid standard and professional subscriptions after that.
Has your business growth come to a dead-end, a block you can’t get around? Zoho Creator allows you to build a customised app for your organisation’s exact needs. You can use Zoho to create apps that help with in-team needs, such as team management or sales reports, or to create a customised new app your clientele can use to connect with you. Its drag-and-click design requires no more expertise than you used to open this page, and the possibilities for apps are limited only by your imagination.
Can any of these apps help address your business’ current major progress block?
We will be producing periodic updates full of the best tips for how to maximise your business’ potential in 2015. Contact us and let us know the problems your business is facing, and we will customise these posts to address your needs.