If your business has delved into social media marketing, you’re already cozy with Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps even LinkedIn. You’re not alone. Over 80% of small businesses use Facebook to reach their audience. Many also reply on LinkedIn and Twitter. As the three most popular social media platforms in the world, they’re accessed by millions of people every day. And that number continues to grow. In fact, Twitter celebrated a user increase of 150% last year! Make Your Brand More Visual Just beyond the Big Three is the whimsical, image-driven Pinterest. Once considered to be a glorified recipe book, the [...]
Category: Smart Tools
At The Whole Brain Group, we’re always looking for new tools to make managing our work a breeze, and our latest favorite tool is called Smartsheet! Smartsheet is a great project management tool that encourages collaboration with advanced features tailored to project teams. We like to describe it as “spreadsheets on steroids”. We had previously used Basecamp for many years to manage our projects, but as we started working with more retainer clients we found that the tool just wasn’t working for us anymore. With Basecamp we had to go into each client project to view our individual to-dos, and it was [...]
If you have a successful inbound marketing strategy in place, chances are pretty good that you’re starting to get more leads than you know what to do with. Bottom of the funnel leads are no-brainers: you should always follow up with people who call you, or who submit a web form to request a consultation or a price. But what do you do with all the people who have downloaded your eBooks and checklists? Your contact database or customer relationship management (CRM) system may be full of people who are on the verge of buying, and just need a little [...]
Our mission here at the Whole Brain Group is to help growing businesses develop and execute successful digital marketing plans. Part of that mission involves providing businesses with the tools they need to get started. When we published our first sensible marketing tool on the Whole Brain Group blog, we had no idea what a huge hit it would be. The Sensible Social Media Marketing Checklist for Businesses was so successful we decided to create a series of Sensible Checklists to help businesses stop setting crazy goals for themselves. The new Sensible Social Media Toolkit brings these checklists together for one easy download! It includes: [...]
By now you know your business’ website is critical for promoting your services, gathering leads, and communicating your messages. Rather than annoying your visitors with flashing pop-ups, or failing to get their attention with a “contact us” button, try a more effective design and attractive approach with the Hello Bar. This thin, full-width bar appears at the top of your website on all landing pages and contains a tailored call-to-action for your visitors. It doesn’t seem groundbreaking, but this extra “look at me!” component is a great way to give your audience members a new way to engage while you [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
At The Whole Brain Group, we’re always looking for new tools to make managing our work a breeze, and our latest favorite tool is called Smartsheet! Smartsheet is a great project management tool that encourages collaboration with advanced features tailored to project teams. We like to describe it as “spreadsheets on steroids”. We had previously used Basecamp for many years to manage our projects, but as we started working with more retainer clients we found that the tool just wasn’t working for us anymore. With Basecamp we had to go into each client project to view our individual to-dos, and it was [...]
If you have a successful inbound marketing strategy in place, chances are pretty good that you’re starting to get more leads than you know what to do with. Bottom of the funnel leads are no-brainers: you should always follow up with people who call you, or who submit a web form to request a consultation or a price. But what do you do with all the people who have downloaded your eBooks and checklists? Your contact database or customer relationship management (CRM) system may be full of people who are on the verge of buying, and just need a little [...]
Our mission here at the Whole Brain Group is to help growing businesses develop and execute successful digital marketing plans. Part of that mission involves providing businesses with the tools they need to get started. When we published our first sensible marketing tool on the Whole Brain Group blog, we had no idea what a huge hit it would be. The Sensible Social Media Marketing Checklist for Businesses was so successful we decided to create a series of Sensible Checklists to help businesses stop setting crazy goals for themselves. The new Sensible Social Media Toolkit brings these checklists together for one easy download! It includes: [...]
By now you know your business’ website is critical for promoting your services, gathering leads, and communicating your messages. Rather than annoying your visitors with flashing pop-ups, or failing to get their attention with a “contact us” button, try a more effective design and attractive approach with the Hello Bar. This thin, full-width bar appears at the top of your website on all landing pages and contains a tailored call-to-action for your visitors. It doesn’t seem groundbreaking, but this extra “look at me!” component is a great way to give your audience members a new way to engage while you [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
