The emergence of digital marketing has changed the way we communicate with one another. As we all consume a lot of content on a daily basis, there are plenty of easy tools to use to connect with your team, touch base with your clients and share information or ideas.
We've selected five of our favourite B2B SaaS marketing tools and outlined the different ways that we use them.
B2B SaaS refers to software-as-a-service and allows users to access an application as a service by just simply connecting to the internet. The benefits of SaaS applications is that many of them are free to use and they are easy and effective.
The feature that we love the most about Slack is open channels. Open channels is a way of organising the topic of conversation with your team. These channels can range from a topic, a project name, an event, or even the name of a specific team. You can also chat with individual members of the team by directly messaging them, or starting a voice and video call.
At Connect Labs, we have a variety of different channels that we use regularly as a team. An example is our social media channel. We use this for posting images and content that we can potentially publish via our social media.
Slack also allows you to keep all of your teams in one place. By logging in you can access the name of the team that you want to communicate with and easily switch between teams to view your notifications from your different channels. We maintain our customer relationships by setting up different teams based on the businesses that we are working with.
Slack helps us stay organised as we can get in contact with our team and our clients and we know that we can easily access information in the one spot.
So, you're trying to plan an upcoming project with the team and you've run out of post-it notes. What can you do next? Create a Trello board. This feature allows you to organize all of the information about your upcoming project by using specific Trello boards. You can create a board with a list of all your ideas, next steps to work on, what you're currently working on and what is already completed.
A board that we use regularly is our Content Workflow board. We have a list of themes and ideas for upcoming content, and are able to clearly assign tasks and deadlines through a clear content creation process from the conception of an idea, through to researching and writing, editing, scheduling and publishing.
Trello helps us keep on top of the projects that we are working on with our clients by letting us assign tasks to our clients by adding them onto specific cards. We can also create checklists on certain cards so that our clients are aware of what they need to complete or bring before our next meeting.
Trello is an organising software and is the easier and more interactive way of planning projects and personal tasks with lists, cards, ideas, checklists and deadlines.
As a marketing automation software, HubSpot has lots of different and useful features that can be used in the one place. Along with a user friendly website builder, HubSpot allows you to manage social media, CRM, email marketing, landing pages, analytics, blogging, SEO and more all in the one platform.
Have you heard about the growth stack? So useful to have Sales, CRM and Marketing Tools in one system that really help with top-notch reporting.
Every interaction you have with a lead is important and therefore Hub Spot records every interaction and stores all of the relevant information such as calls, emails, meetings and notes so that you're aware of where you last left off with your new lead. Using this platform saves us lots of time and gives us an understanding of what content our lead has viewed and how we can personalise our approach.
You can share your personal calendar with any of your co-workers using any Google Calendar account. Once you open Google Calendar you select the calendar you would like to share and then click on share this calendar. In the settings you can then decide on what details you would like to share and who you would like to share your calendar with. This is very handy for us at work as we are able to view if our team is free prior to scheduling meetings and other events.
Sharing Google drive folders as a team helps us to remember where certain documents and files are and it makes it an easy process for everyone. You can enter your group email address to share the files with everyone in the team if team drive hasn't been enabled, or select individual email addresses to share the files with. The advanced link also allows you to optimise your settings and share certain files with your co-workers for a specific period of time. This can be useful in the lead up to a project.
Bitly allows you to create your own shortened custom link with your company name that you can use on Twitter and Instagram. This is also very convenient if you are tweeting, as Twitter has a limit of 140 characters.
Using a Bitly link in your Instagram bio is vital when trying to drive traffic from your Instagram page. Adding a trackable Bitly link in your bio allows you to view your traffic but also view which platform people are using to get to your website.
Using any or all of these B2B SaaS marketing tools can help you improve your productivity as they provide easy and efficient ways to communicate. So go ahead and use some of these tools to get productive!