First of all, yes. Those are real airplane seats. But no, Danny didn’t try to film the latest episode of IndustrialSage while on a commercial flight. He may, be busy, but he’s not that busy.
As it turns out, the Optimum Productions Atlanta-based production studio has been overtaken for a corporate video shoot! What else? The usual desk and set were partially dismantled in favor of a faux-airplane-interior. But the show must go on, right?
And what a show! In today’s episode, we get down and dirty into our personal top five digital marketing technologies. These are online tools that your outreach teams should definitely take for a spin. There are countless marketing and sales tools out there now, but frankly these are some of our current favorites.
- CrystalKnows
- Vidyard
- Hubspot
- Drift
- Terminus
Some of these tools are free, and some are not. But they’ve all been drastically changing our tactics (and our lead generation) for the better.
1. CRYSTALKNOWS
We’ve mentioned this revolutionary sales prospecting program before, but it’s absolutely worth repeating.
Based on the four-quadrant disc personality test, this program tells you the type of language to use when communicating with a prospect.
CrystalKnows can read a person’s LinkedIn profile or correspondence to you, and then tell you how best to respond.
- Do they want to skip the small talk and go straight to the point?
- Maybe they prefer the big picture, or perhaps they’re the type of person who wants to know the minute details.
- Would brainstorming features excite them, or do they prefer setting budget and deadline goals?
This plugin helps you to know the language that will be most effective in an email or written message. It will also tell you whether you should skip the written message and pick up the phone instead. Best of all, the platform offers a free trial!
2. VIDYARD
For all our talk about how important marketing videos and viewer analytics are, we may as well share one of our video-hosting secret weapons.
Vidyard’s platform has revolutionized not only our marketing, but also our sales tactics.
The system can house your entire video library in one place. That means your corporate training, internal communications, company marketing videos, webinars, and the kitchen sink! You can create multiple playlists that contain any number of videos in your library, so you can select the most relevant material to share. Each playlist can be viewed on its own customizable micro-site, or landing page, which matches your website’s brand.
Thanks to the analytics, you can tell who’s really engaged and interested.
Any and every time you send somebody a link to these videos or playlists, you receive an instant notification when they start watching. You can even see a heat map of how long they pay attention or if they re-watch different portions of any video.
Then, of course, there’s GoVideo. Thais is the transformative “video voicemail” tool that has completely altered our sales team’s daily routine.
We’ve touched on this program briefly in previous episodes, as well as in a free webinar that shows the plugin in action.
GoVideo allows you to create a video anytime, anywhere with your computer’s built-in web camera. You can add that video to your Vidyard library, and you can send it in an email instantly. You can also include a customized playlist, and a moving GIF thumbnail of your smiling face!
This means that instead of leaving a voicemail on your prospect’s phone, you can send them an almost-face-to-face interaction that’s exceedingly personal. And the entire program easily integrates with Outlook and Gmail, to boot!
Vidyard can also integrate with other platforms like HubSpot, Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, and others. That means that the analytics about your prospects’ video views will show up in your database to help you calculate their place in the sales funnel.
3. HUBSPOT
If you’ve been in the digital marketing space for just about any amount of time, you’ve probably heard of the powerhouse that is HubSpot.
Whether you want marketing automation, sales, customer service, or CRM software; HubSpot can offer and integrate them all.
If you have ads on social media, for example, HubSpot can track conversions and help you see when those leads return to any of your websites. And you can set up triggers to send emails, messages, or offers with the right content for each person based on their visitor activity.
This way, your outreach team doesn’t have to personally escort every prospect through the sales process step-by-step. You can educate leads and also make sure they’re not getting ads for content that they’ve already consumed.
Automation isn’t instant. It takes a lot of work and time to build. But it makes the marketing and sales process easer and easier.
4. DRIFT
Drift is one of the leading providers of chatbots. At the beginning of the year, we discussed a number of major digital marketing trends taking off in 2018 – and chatbots were one of them. Even if the term doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve probably already seen these assets in action.
Chatbots look like “Instant Message” bubbles. They pop up and allow you to type quick or specific questions while browsing a website.
Chatbots help leads get faster answers without the commitment of sending an email or making a phone call. Visitors appreciate that anonymity. Programs like Drift help you make contact and facilitate a conversation with prospects, which can eventually usher them into the funnel.
5. TERMINUS
Terminus is a stellar account-based marketing platform for B2B companies. It can help you create and direct ads for the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Maybe you’re familiar with the concept of pay-per-click, which we outlined with Lillie Beiting last year? Well, Terminus is what you might call “pay per impression.”
Terminus can help you reach your target buyers wherever they are online, or play your ad before a video begins on YouTube (also known as programmatic video).
But the real power of Terminus is that you can target the entire buying committee at your ideal customer accounts. Even if you don’t have their contact info in your database!
You can import lists of accounts via CSV file, Salesforce, and HubSpot. You can also build lists using a number of other third-party integrations, all to make sure that people in specific positions are seeing your advertisements for events, content offers, and more.
Whether you have an upcoming event or a highly-popular webinar they may like, you can ensure that your content will get in front of the right individuals, with customized messages based on their personas.
You can also serve banner ads to target accounts in a certain geographical location, to drive attendance to an event you’re hosting in that region. Or you can serve ads to open opportunities that are stuck in the sales cycle. By engaging more of the decision-makers than your sales team is able to reach, you can help progress those accounts more quickly.
For those of you looking to get more concentrated results with your advertising budget, Terminus and other account-based marketing platforms are great ways to trade in the buck shot for a sniper rifle.
Of course, there are thousands of platforms you can try…but these are some of our favorites.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!
If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!
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