We pride ourselves in over the top customer service, lightning fast communications, and superior campaign management. This is quite the feat when every campaign launched has a minimum of 25 steps to go live, coupled with the challenge of team members spread throughout the country. So how do we do it? We use tools to enhance our productivity! Here’s three online tools we couldn’t live without:
- To speed up our communication and reduce our emails, we use Slack. Nothing slows down your workday more than being bombarded by emails, particularly internal emails. One thing we do to reduce clutter is move all conversation into our online communication tool, Slack. Slack is a free online messaging service that brings all our communication together in one place. It’s real-time messaging that even pushes to your phone when your computer is idle. Up to 10,000 messages are stored at a time for searchable chat history (more if you upgrade from the free version). You can split up your communication into channels meant for those who need to see it and it runs in the background of your computer without notifying you unless someone is talking directly to you. Slack allows you to “star” messages that forms a follow up action item list, add “reactions” to a message that allows the sender to know you have received it without the extraneous “got it” and “thank you” you get via email, as well as make conference calls/video chats directly inside of the program. We also integrated our online project management tool, Trello, into Slack that pushes real-time project updates for all to see as various team members check off items.
- To organize complicated projects, we use Trello. The digital campaigns we manage are highly complicated. We buy across many exchanges, create container tags for each campaign, do keyword research, sync campaigns up to our reporting portal and so much more. It’s not uncommon for a campaign to have 40-50 steps just to launch it successfully and that sometimes requires many different people on our team. In order to stay on top of everything, we use the free online tool Trello. Think of Trello as a crazy amazing post-it note system. Trello allows us to create a “card”, similar to a digital post-it, that contains checklists for every product that is sold, assigns project managers on the card, assigns due dates, labels each card to a specific market, and allows us to move the card from Campaign in the Queue, to Launched, to Campaign Completed. Every time a checklist item is checked off or a card is moved, Trello feeds that information to our Slack “Campaign” channel so the entire organization knows what’s happening at any given time.
- To keep markets sharp with up-to-date training, we use ClearSlide. We do 30-minute training webinars every Wednesday in our online tool ClearSlide, which is a paid online platform. We love it because you can have people login to view your presentation, instant message during the presentation to avoid stepping on each other during group calls, and it even allows us to track “engagement”. That’s right. When someone viewing our screen navigates away to look at other tabs or check emails, it shows the presenter you are “distracted”. At the end of a presentation we can tell who was actually watching and those who simply checked out. Clearslide also allows you to protect your collateral by creating links that expires after someone has viewed it or sends view alerts whenever someone opens your presentation or forwards it along.
