Not everyone is glued to their twitter account, breathlessly waiting for you to announce your latest blog post! If you’re using social media as your only method of circulating your blog content, you may be missing out on traffic from visitors who prefer to receive updates via email. With an RSS-driven email campaign, you can create another channel for people to read & share your blog content, and you can save time & money on your marketing at the same time! Smart Monkeys Use RSS-to-Email Campaigns Using MailChimp, we’ve created an RSS-to-Email newsletter called “Smart Internet Marketing News & Tips [...]
Whole Brain Blog: Smart Internet Marketing Tips for Growing Businesses
Category: Smart Tools
At The Whole Brain Group, we’re constantly trying to reduce the amount of paper we use, so signing documents has always been a source of irritation for me. When we send contracts out, I have a digital signature I embed in the document, but when I have to sign a document I didn’t produce, the steps are time consuming and paper-wasting: Print the signature page Sign it Scan it Email it back Not overly complicated, but annoying – and I have to be at my desk in the office to complete these steps. A more elegant solution for signing documents [...]
In honor of Earth Day, here’s a recap of three Smart Tools we’ve adopted here at The Whole Brain Group to reduce paper waste. Coincidentally, these tools also save you time and effort so you can be efficiency-friendly AND earth-friendly! Harvest Time Tracking Are you still using paper time sheets and sending paper invoices? Check out Harvest’s online time tracking, invoicing, and reporting tool! Team members enter time through the web interface, mobile app, or desktop app Send invoices electronically to clients via email Clients can view invoices online and pay via credit card Robust reporting gives you insight into [...]
If you’re like me, your email is constantly flooded with social media notices, coupons, mailing lists and bill reminders. You can try to set up filters for everything, but it’s hard to keep up, and you might miss things you should pay attention to. Consequently, you either have 800 unread messages in your inbox, or you spend hours reading, filing, archiving, and deleting things. If this sounds like your life, you should check out OtherInbox – a suite of tools that auto-filters messages and helps you unsubscribe from lists you don’t want to be part of any more. I found the [...]
If you’re overwhelmed by the volume of email in your Gmail inbox, it’s probably because you’re one of the millions of people who use your inbox as your to do list. Your inbox is probably full of requests for information or action, messages that you need to refer to later when you’re completing a task, or stuff you want to remember to read later when you have time. Up until a few months ago, I was in the same boat, and I dreaded looking at my inbox because it was impossible to focus on what really needed my attention! Then [...]
Throughout my time working with social media I’ve used and tested several monitoring programs, including Actionly, Sysomos, Hootsuite, and others. The Whole Brain Group primarily uses Sprout Social, and once I had an opportunity to spend time with the program I became a convert, even a champion! Here are our Top 5 Favorite Features of Sprout Social: Sharing Accounts – The WBG assigns two employees to monitor each of our social media accounts. Sprout allows us to share monitoring, assign tasks, and communicate with one another within the platform. This feature saves time and keeps us from double posting or [...]
No, we are not talking about the 6 times platinum album recorded by The Black Eye Peas, but about businesses from large to small, such as The Whole Brain Group and our clients who have subscribed to the MailChimp email marketing service. Who wouldn’t use this tool when it is free and makes all our digital marketing dreams come true? Many of us are going bananas over this tool, like large retailer Banana Republic (pun intended), because keeping your brand consistent in email marketing campaigns is easy. MailChimp allows you to design, send, and track HTML email campaigns with their simple [...]
Getting the right people to join your team is tough when you’re a small company. You probably don’t have a dedicated HR person, and it can be cost-prohibitive to use a head hunter or recruiter to manage things for you. At The Whole Brain Group, we’re in the same boat, and conducting a search for a new “brainiac” is something we all pitch in on. Up until a few months ago, our “process” was pretty rudimentary - we posted our positions on our website, and then spread the word via local job postings, social media and word of mouth. Next, [...]
Time tracking, invoicing, and tracking payments are some of the most important activities in a growing company’s cash flow and bottom-line, but it’s also a pain in the you-know-what. In the early days, we used a spreadsheet for time tracking, and Quickbooks to create invoices and track payments. But as we grew we found ourselves wondering where all of our time was going (hint: more people means more communication and internal projects), and found that our old methods were not scaling very gracefully: 37 clients + 48 projects = crazy messy spreadsheet 37 outstanding invoices + varying payment terms and [...]
Back in the “old days”, the Whole Brain Group proposal process involved duplicating the last one we wrote, renaming it, and making some edits in Word. This worked great with only one person doing business development, but now that we’ve grown things have gotten a lot more complicated! The number of proposals we’re writing has multiplied, and so has the number of people who need to be part of the process. Our old “copy and edit” approach quickly started to cause problems: Our language was evolving, but nobody knew where the “approved” language was We were emailing proposals around to multiple [...]
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The Whole Brain Group is committed to helping growing businesses develop and execute digital marketing plans that complement their strategic visions and provide measurable results using our expertise in web design, development, social media, content, and pay-per-click advertising.
Our favorite clients view us as a partner in their growth, because they know we are passionate about taking an integrated approach to helping them achieve their business goals, and we strive to combine the logical & tactical (Left Brain) with the creative (Right Brain) to achieve Whole Brain Goodness!