Qebot Blog

The Future of Franchise Marketing – Local Marketing; Global Oversight

Franchisees are looking for new ways to market their local stores/offices while their corporate offices want brand oversight to ensure adherence to branding strategy and compliance. It’s the tug-of-war that brands and their local operators have been playing since franchising began. And it’s only gotten worse with the recent and increased prevalence of online and social media marketing. Today there are dozens of marketing channels that these franchisees can use to grow their business, and hundreds of online tools to help them do so – usually not approved by the franchise brand.

It’s becoming harder for brands to keep up with it all, but it’s also not going away (and I’d argue that it’s probably going to become a lot worse).

So what’s a brand to do? Do you continue to try to limit and restrict the channels your franchisees can use (with likely very limited success), or do you buy in and find ways to give your franchisees access to these tools – but in a way where you can monitor, manage, and control on what’s happening online at the local level?

Centralization to the rescue!

This is where centralization of online tools and applications can be a game changer for franchise businesses. Centralized platforms allow you to offer tools like social media management, email marketing, directory listings and review management, website builders, appointment schedulers, and more in a single platform. Moreover, this centralized network can provide corporate a master account to monitor, measure, and manage when needed the local online marketing efforts of all of their locations. It gives your franchisees access to the tools that they want to implement, while also giving you the oversight you need.

Centralization can help you optimize your local marketing

But more than being able to make sure your local operations are staying on brand, centralized technology can help you actually drive better marketing performance and growth at the local level. There will always be those owners that are better at using social media, creating new content, or coming up with new creative offers. What if this platform, which allows you the marketing oversight you’re looking for, could also present local marketing insights that you can use to help other locations grow? You can get a real look at how locations that are using social media to driving meaningful business are doing it. See what type of content they are creating/sharing, what tags they may be using, what content gets the best engagement, etc. You can take those learnings and work with those top locations to create training sessions and templates that other locations can use to drive the same level of success! It’s like crowdsourcing the best tactics and strategies using real data, and helping your entire organization be the best it can be.

Getting started

The agency world is wild. Expectations are sky-high, there are constant budget constraints, marketing channels are ever evolving, and one small mistake could be the end of any agency/client relationship. This is why every little advantage and cost savings can be so important to an agency’s continued growth and performance.

Centralization of the apps and software that are necessary to manage client work can be become one of the greatest assets for any agency looking to save time and money. Having a single platform to access and manage all of your marketing tools can drive down the cost of software, save account managers hours per week on their workload, expand agency offerings to increase retention, drive higher per client revenues, and can even become a valuable lead generation tool.

Driving down cost

Many centralized platforms have the unique ability to spread margins across a number of their different offerings. This allows the technology provider to take a lower margin on each individual tool, enabling the platform to have a lower price than you would get by going to a company that just offers a single tool for example. Moreover, by centralizing all of these tools, platforms also consolidate operational costs such as marketing, sales, PR, support, executive management, office space, equipment, etc. Instead of paying the salaries for the executive team of seven different, a centralized platform has one executive team, marketing team, sales team, etc. – allowing overhead to be lower, and making it possible to again drive deep discounts into their offerings. Don’t believe me? Check out the prices of systems like Qebot vs. the pricing of individual technology providers.

Save account managers hours per week

This one is a testimony directly from the many agencies already using centralized platforms. Here at Qebot, we’ve received feedback from countless agencies telling us that centralization is saving their account managers between two and five hours per week – which makes total sense. Through a centralized system, account managers no longer need to log into multiple applications per day to manage their accounts. They can log into a single system where they can quickly and easily jump between accounts and tools. It helps centralize reporting capabilities, enables easier data sharing between tools or teams, has better support where a user can ask questions about multiple tools at one time, and creates better task management – leading to better time management. Some of these agencies have said they’ve been able to set up two or even as many as three  more accounts per agent on their team, which at scale, allows them to run a leaner account management team, and save quite a bit of money.

Expand agency offerings

This one is all about acquisition cost and return on investment. Being able to offer clients more services allows an agency to become more integrated into their organization. If you are only running social media campaigns for a client, leaving your service to either run it themselves, or try a new agency is rather easy. But if you are hosting their website, managing their reviews, driving their social strategy, sending their email newsletters, helping them with content creation and SEO, and aiding them in their sales funnel management, that makes it a whole lot harder to try to move on. Plus, there is the added benefit of increasing your per client revenues. A higher long term value and increased per client revenue allows you to stretch and maximize your current marketing budget even further to gain more customers.  

Lead generation

Finally, a centralized platform can actually aid your business in both lead generation and revenue growth. This is because centralized platforms like Qebot allow for you to take a fully white labeled version of the platform, and resell it at your own price point. Agencies that use this process drive new clients into a DIY offering of marketing software on the platform. From there, they actually have access real data about their DIY clients marketing efforts that they can report on. This can be used to create custom sales conversations about how adding your managed services could help. Additionally, for those clients that may just never purchase managed services, you can still sell them on the tools they need to manage their marketing, and create a recurring revenue source that requires zero management. A nice way to create a secondary revenue stream for your agency.

If you’d like to learn more about how a centralized platform can help your marketing agency thrive, set up a demo with a partner success manager here. We’ll show you how agencies across the world are using the Qebot platform to stay ahead of the competition, and drive more money to the bottom line!

First off, let’s get to what we mean by “centralizing software.” By centralizing, we are talking about having a single platform that houses all of the software you may need for your business. Imagine logging into one system to make edits to your website, then follow up on your social engagement, run reports from your CRM, check your email and manage your calendar, send invoices, manage suppliers, etc. A single sign-on to manage your entire business.

Now that we know what we’re discussing, let’s talk about how this type of centralization of business software could completely revolutionize the way small and medium size businesses operate, optimize, and grow. Mainly, centralization of these tools will help businesses in three ways – employee management and productivity, cost savings, and automation and optimization of your business operations.

Employee Management and Productivity

This benefit is pretty simple and should be seen right off the bat – especially when it comes to on and off boarding employees. A couple clicks, a single point of data entry, and you can get all of the tools your employee needs to do their job set up and ready to go, fast and easy. What if someone is to leave the organization? Instead of having to go through and deactivate each application and user profile, with centralization you can shut off access to the platform and immediately the user no longer has access to important and confidential information. Moreover, Qebot clients report that because all of the necessary software an employee might need is now in a centralized system, they find it much easier and quicker to jump from one task to another, and with the tools automatically connected in the backend, data sharing between these tools makes automating repetitive operations much more efficient. Plus, with all of our employee’s tools in one place, they are much more likely to adopt and engage with the software you are purchasing.

Cost Savings

Cost savings that comes from a centralized platform mostly stems from two areas – discounted software and a lessor need to engage 3rd party connectors or outside developers.

Discounted software – The platform company partners with top software providers on the market and integrates those tools into the platform. Because the platform takes on a lot of the cost of doing business such as sales, marketing, support, etc., and can offer the tool provider a large scale of new users, platforms can negotiate incredible rates. From these discounted rates, the platform can then turn around and sell it to its customers with a small markup, keeping prices under what you’d pay outside of the platform since the platform can spread its profit margin amongst its long line of offerings. It’s like buying from Costco – they buy in bulk, and can sell many different products to its end user at a discount because it can spread its smaller margins across a larger group of products.

Already connected – The best part of a centralized platform is that all of your tools are in a single system, allowing for the provider to connect the tools and services together in the backend from the start. Software is a powerful ally in helping you achieve your goals – especially when your tools can talk to each other and share data. But for the most part, to get these applications to work together you need to either hire a developer to create the connections for you, while possibly having to set up your own database to manage the connections, or pay for a 3rd party tools like a Zapier to make the connections. This can get quite expensive if you are trying to maximize your tool operations. With a centralized platform these connections are already made since the tools live in the same system. So you can get up and running fast and cheap.

Automation and Optimization

This is where the platform becomes really powerful. When you are using a centralized platform to run all of your business software and applications, all of your data is running through the central system. This not only allows for the connections and data sharing capabilities we spoke of before to help your team be much more productive, but by layering in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the platform can start to help you automate menial tasks, and optimize your business operations. Take this scenario as a possibility through centralization:

You have product A, B, and C – you are spending your ad dollars pretty much evenly across all three products. Now, let’s say you’re using a centralized system that can consume and analyze the data for your entire business. It takes a look at not only the price and market viability of your products, but since you’re using the platform for all of your software needs, it has access to and can evaluate your production costs, average sales cycle, cost of support, and let’s say repurchase or upgrade opportunities for each tool. As it runs models to see what would be the optimal product mix, it shows that product A actually has an overall cheaper production and a shorter sales cycle. It could then assess the market need and potentially give you a recommendation that if you were to divert 10% of ad spend from products B and C into product A, then you could achieve a 6% bottom line profit margin increase (obviously just an example, but based off modeling systems that fortune 500 companies use to optimize their marketing performance). This is just one scenario – could be used to optimize employee management, resource allocation, production, etc. These are things you just can’t get outside of having your data all in one platform, or by paying someone a lot of money to analyze.

Centralization is the future of how SMB’s will be able to continue to compete in the market, and we’re just scratching the surface of what can and will be done with these centralized and integrated systems.

Media publishers – I’m talking newspapers, magazines, and online publications – have built some of the most successful sales organizations on the planet. Especially those selling to local markets. Calling on SMB’s to purchase local advertising in publications can be very lucrative, but also a grind for a sales team needing to prospect quality leads, engage them to gain interest, and retain the business month over month – particularly with a large chunk of the advertising spend moving over to search and social media over the past decade. But the fact still stands that you media publishers out there have built the organization, developed the resources and gained the know-how to sell into mass local markets while the market shrinks. Maybe it’s just time to expand your offerings.

This is where business software offerings could drastically change your business – driving new recurring revenues for your business, and filling your sales funnel with qualified advertising prospects:

Driving new revenues:

First off, offering software as a service to your customers is a great way for media publications to dramatically increase revenues very quickly and easily. Likely your organization is engaged with a large group of business owners, brands, and media buyers. These are businesses that you’ve built a relationship with you and are likely open to purchasing new tools they need from a trusted source. Getting a large bulk of clients on to a new offering for many publications could be as easy as sending out an email with an overview of your new offer and driving them to a landing page where they can DIY purchase and set up these tools on their own – easy money.

Fill your sales funnel with qualified leads:

Moreover, this gives you a new way to fill your pipeline with qualified leads for your advertising products. Say you start marketing a bundle of tools like a social dashboard, email marketing, review management, and directory listings. Business owners that are searching for and purchasing these types of tools are serious about marketing and growing their company. They are in a current mindset of driving more business and customers. These are the exact type of people you want your sales people talking to. Now, not only are you driving recurring revenue for your organization through these new products, you are branding yourself to these businesses as a trusted technology provider, and filling your sales funnel with warm leads that are much more likely to be interested in advertising services.

This is where Qebot can help. Our white labeled, out of the box suite of products allows media publications to build a bundle of tools, or sell software a-la-carte. We’ll manage all of your support and provide you with sales collateral and training. We can even help you set up your entire billing and paywall system, letting you set your own pricing and collect your revenue up front, so all you have to do is start marketing and selling your new suite of tools.

The marketing agency world can be a tough place these days. New agencies spring up on a daily basis with a lack of barriers to entry, and the market is becoming crowded. So how do agencies, old and new, stay ahead of the game and differentiate themselves from the pack? How can you drive qualified prospects into your pipeline and increase your revenues at the same time.

DIY offerings can do just that. As an agency, offering a set of DIY tools and applications to the market allows you to drive new revenue. This might only be a couple hundred dollars per client in your pocket, but through smart marketing and advertising, it should be fairly easy to drive a lot of these to your business (I mean, you are a marketing agency, right?).  Many agencies we work with are seeing a typical cost of acquisition for these types of products sitting around the $30-40 mark – of which they are seeing payback on in under a months’ time.

Let’s say you create a bundle of tools (social platform, directory listings, review manager, email marketing) that closely relate to the services you offer. From here, you are now branding your agency to these businesses as a provider of necessary technology they can use to help market and grow their business. The best part is, if they are in the market to start buying marketing tools, they are serious about growing their business and are likely also ready to invest in higher level services to achieve their goals.

At this point, you’ve gained a paying customer with minimal overhead, driven some monthly recurring revenue, and have created a brand for yourself in the mind of this customer.

THIS IS WHERE THIS GETS INTERESTING!

With customers purchasing tools from your platform, you now have access to their marketing data – allowing you to see how they are doing on social, reputation management, local SEO, etc.. This information allows your sales team to approach businesses that are trying to find new ways of growing with real data and strategy points they can bring to a call – and since they are already buying products from you, they will be more likely to invest in the other tools you offer! A free consultation on how their marketing is performing could easily turn this customer, whom you are already making money on, into a full service client. Then you can simply use the tools that you are selling them to manage their account.

THIS IS WHERE QEBOT CAN HELP!

Let us be your partner in creating a white labeled solution that is tailored to your brand, business and agency that will increase revenue and drive quality prospects over the finish line.

We get a lot of strange looks from clients and partners when they ask what our minimum commitment is, or what our contract length is, and we say “we don’t have any.” Especially in today’s SaaS market, this is almost unheard of. “How do you hedge against churn?” “What bundle of tools do I need to purchase then?” “How do you stay in business?” – all of these are the common follow up questions.

Our answer is simple – we believe we have the best product on the market, the best support to help you be successful, and we are here to prove it. If you aren’t happy with your product from Qebot, then we want you to find something that is going to better fit your needs. We don’t need to bundle or package our tools, or create tiers of offerings because data shows us that once a client starts using one or two tools on our platform, they love the experience and upsell themselves on other tools on the system. Or, if for some reason they don’t like or need a specific tool, they have the flexibility to cancel at any time.

We also put in the work to make sure that our clients and partners get the very best. Our business model is built on partnering with the very best software for each product we offer, and working closely with them to integrate that full functionality of their tool into our centralized system. Through Qebot, you can confidently buy knowing you are getting some of the most top rated software on the market – at or below market price.

Then, we diligently listen to our customers and continue to build and iterate based on the feedback we get from you – the daily users. Our support team, engineering team and partners are all in constant communication getting our client requests and questions into the hands of the people building the systems. We are always getting better.

And that’s why we don’t have contract periods, we don’t bundle, package, or tier our products, or have minimum commitments. We don’t even charge our agency and media partners for white labeling our platform. We don’t want your business to stay with us because you invested all of this money upfront – we want to truly partner with you – and for you to keep using Qebot because you love it. We believe in proving what we can do for our customers, and we’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.

How Centralizing Marketing Software Drives Better Active Usage

Adoption of software can be a challenge for most businesses. Today’s online tools to run, manage, and market a company can do some pretty amazing things. But it also means that with each tool you activate for your business, there is one more task you now have to take care of on a daily basis. Admit it – how many times have you been sold on a technology you thought was the thing to change your whole company (and with active usage, regular monitoring, and continued education, it might well have), but 3 months later, you realize you haven’t logged into the system in the last 3 weeks. Or worse, you forget you even bought into the software, and now you have a recurring charge for something you’re team is not even using… It’s happened to all of us at some point. It’s also ultimately why the SaaS industry has a commonly high churn rate for its products.

This is where centralization can help. By having all of your software in one platform, you get a host of benefits, including saving time on daily tasks, paying a single itemized bill for your software, having a single support channel for all of your tools, and arguably most important – driving active usage!

Here’s how:

You’re reminded the tool is there. Most of us pretty religiously use a few key tools to run our business. Some examples could be your CRM, your appointment scheduler, review manager, or your point of sale system. You log into these systems on a regular basis to do the work important running and growing your company. Through centralization, all of the tools that you use are in one platform, so when you log in to manage a new lead in your CRM, you see your social media tool, or your email marketing tool, or your content marketing tool right there alongside your daily used software. If you see it or are alerted to it, you’re going to be much more apt to use it.

You get better education. Every software company has a newsletter that goes out on a monthly basis outlining the updates, case studies, and tips for using their technology. It’s a smart strategy to keep people engaged with their product, and hence, not give up on the tool. But when you are buying nine different tools from nine different vendors, those newsletters just become a burden. Through centralizing your tools, you’re also centralizing your education material. Imagine being able to get one newsletter per month that you could run through for all of your software updates and tips in a single pass. You’re much more likely to engage with that content and learn something new. Which leads to the next point –

A single support channel. One of the most challenging processes of using software is trying to get support when needed. Every company’s support system is different and unique. What’s the best way to get a hold of support for each tool – submit a ticket? Use chat? Send an email? Make a call? – What does this tool support vs. that other tool I have? You get to know the support documentation of one tool, but it’s completely different from these three other tools you use. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn one support process and have it be the same across all of your technology? What if you could send in one ticket relating to questions on three different tools? Support is the most important part of any software company, and making an easy to use and seamless process helps the user become much more comfortable using their tools.

Easily see what you are paying for. You have debits hitting your credit card multiple times per month from multiple companies. From an accounting perspective, this can become a nightmare. What are you even paying for? What does this company do again? Have I used this tool lately? – There are literally whole businesses built around giving you software to see what your recurring payments are per month to help you clean it up.  –  What if you had a single monthly bill, itemized and outlining what you are paying for. You can take a quick run through, see all of your licenses and payment for all of your software, and keep better tabs on tools you do or don’t need. Single billing helps you more easily realize and get rid of software that you truly are not actively using, and don’t foresee yourself continuing with.

Automation. When your tools are in a single platform, they are more easily connected in the background. With better connectivity, you get better automation. Better automation helps drive down your actual daily tasks, allowing the software to run and do what you need without your help – let the software work on autopilot and remove mundane tasks from your day, and I guarantee you will see the benefits, and love the tools you are purchasing all that much more.

Centralization is the future of software. It just makes sense from a usage, billing, support, and automation perspective. When looking for your next software, look for centralized systems like the Qebot platform, and drive better usage and results by having all your tools in one place.

4 Reasons Marketing Agencies Should Offer DIY Tools

DIY and marketing agency services don’t typically go hand-in-hand. The two concepts are literally antithetical to each other. But the following four points will show you how offering DIY tools through your agency can actually make your sales team more productive, help you more effectively brand your business, create more check in opportunities, and drive more leads to your business.

1. Make your sales team more productive – Let’s face it, not all businesses your sales team calls upon are going to want or be able to afford full marketing services. Not matter how much qualifying you do, a large portion of your sales calls are just not going to buy services. What if you could turn those non-sales over to a DIY set of tools you offer, and make a couple hundred dollars per month, recurring revenue, with no account management or support overhead? Seems like a good way to turn those “no’s” into a recurring revenue stream.

2. Branding – By offering clients that aren’t quite ready to purchase full services a set of branded tools to help them do some of the work themselves, you’re keeping your agency bran in front of them. As they grow, they may eventually want to pass some of that work off to someone else to help manage it. Guess who they are going to go with? Most likely the company they’ve come to trust and are used to seeing on a daily basis. Play the long game without having to do anything.

3. Creates regular check in opportunities – By offering their DIY tools, you can run check up’s of your DIY customer’s marketing success. This gives your team reasons to touch base with them on a regular basis with insights and ideas on how they could be using social, reviews, email marketing, SEO, etc. more productively. Just another opportunity to offer your services – but this time with real data!

4. Drive more leads to your business – By marketing your DIY offerings you can drive prospects that are looking for new marketing and management software. When business owners sign up for your DIY offerings, your pipeline of qualified prospects for service-based add-ons grows. This strategy creates more channels for you to market yourself and fill the top of your funnel.

Most small businesses that we talk to and work with believe that a CRM is something reserved for large enterprise organizations with thousands of clients to manage. As a small business, they’re thinking smaller picture and just need a way to keep it all organized. They have in their minds that a CRM would provide little to no benefit for their small company while costing an arm and a leg to both buy and implement.

This couldn’t be further from the truth! With the functionality built into most current CRM’s, paired with cost savings that have been driven from cloud based computing, CRM systems can operate in some facet for every business, at an affordable price for all. Today’s CRM’s can enable businesses to be more organized, glean insights into sales and marketing to drive more business, and even help with marketing campaigns, inventory management, supplier management, invoicing, sales enablement, and so much more.

Let’s take a look at 5 ways a CRM can help your small business be more successful.

1. Sales Productivity

If your business is running a sales organization, a CRM should be on the very top of your list for implementation. CRM software can help automate the mundane aspects of your sales cycle such as follow up emails and call scheduling, call tracking, prospect priority grading, sales projections, and more to help your team close more business. Through most of today’s CRM’s your sales person can walk the client right through the process from initial outreach, to close, contracts signed, invoices sent, and payment received – all in one place to help them be more efficient with their time – so they can prospect more business! Plus, it gives management clear insight into sales activity, allowing you to track and gauge important KPI’s that drive sales success.

2. Marketing Automation

Most quality CRM’s have great ways of helping create and automate marketing campaigns to drive more business. Walking your potential customers through a channel of proven steps that can create more conversion opportunities is what every marketer is tasked with doing. Automating those processes so that your marketing people can work on optimizing campaigns is the Holy Grail. From drip marketing based on specific attributes of the contact, to creating and tracking promotions, and driving leads into your CRM through advertising and then automatically messaging them pertinent information based on what ad they clicked. All ways to help you and your team drive better results at the end of your sales cycle.

3. Supplier Management

Let’s say for the purpose of this example that you are an ice cream shop that doesn’t have a need for the functionality of items one and two in this list. You don’t have sales reps and your business thrives on walk-by customers. Great! I bet your successful ice cream shop has suppliers that it needs to manage delivering your product. This is where CRM’s have really come into their own in the past few years – being able to help with so much more than just customer management. Many current CRM’s come with great tools to help you manage your suppliers, gauge your inventory, track receipts of products from vendors, prioritize preferred providers, and even pay your vendors. No more tracking supplies and suppliers on spreadsheets. Plus, you can automate a lot of process such as sending orders for more product once supplies get to a certain thresholds. Many systems can even integrate right into your POS systems and help you keep track of your inventory outflow right through the purchase process in real-time!

4. Loyalty Management

The beauty of a CRM is the ability to track what your customers are doing. Through each purchase you can see who your best customers are, and provide them with incentives to keep coming back. You can start to create a database of customers that seem to buy the most often, or purchase the most expensive products. This allows you to create profiles of potential customers that you tend to make the most money from. Take that information to your sales and marketing strategy to understand what types of customers to focus more time and resources on.

5. Project Management

One of the most important aspects of a CRM is helping your manage and align your businesses projects. Assign projects, cases, work orders, etc. to your team, and associate it right with the customer that the work is for. Keep track of time spent on projects so you can run your hourly billing right through the built in invoicing of your CRM. Moreover, if your team works in the field, get them situated with the mobile application of your CRM so that they can report, complete, and bill for projects or work orders for your customers right there on site so you don’t miss a thing.

This really is just a sample of what a CRM can do for small and medium sized businesses. The functionality of the CRM these days can help across your entire company – keeping you more efficient and effective, and allowing you to spend more time on what it is you and your team do best. And with systems like the CRM available on the Qebot platform costing only $25 per user per month, it’s really affordable enough for any business type.

Having the right tools is an obvious must for any quality digital agency. Being able to maximize productivity AND offer unique services, all while keeping overhead low, makes the difference between an agency that drives to the top, and those that stagnate.

Getting the most out of your resources is key to building and growing a marketing agency that not only delivers for your clients, but also allows you do so in an efficient and profitable way.

We ran a survey of our white label agency partners to see what using a centralized platform to manage their marketing software helped them accomplish, and here were the overwhelming four highlights that continued to come up:

Standing apart with differentiated services and more offerings

Increased team productivity

Decreased overhead

Increased sales activity through automation

Let’s break each one down just a bit…

1. Standing apart with differentiated services and more offerings:

With a quality, consolidated platform of tools, you are more likely to find and discover new technologies that could help you offer new services to your clients that your competitors are not. For example, many agencies look to the top of funnel as the area where they provide the most value to their clients. But if you are filling the funnel, and your client can’t close, they probably won’t be relying on your services for very long (whether it’s your fault or not).

Picture this instead: what if you offered sales consulting services, paired with automation that you can set up for your client through a CRM that you also offer, bundle all of it together, and generate increased revenue? With the CRM in the same platform as the rest of your client’s tools, you can help show them how you drive leads from top of funnel, then into their CRM, and finally, help walk them through a productive sales cycle process to close more leads. Good for them; more revenue opportunity for you.

2. Increased team productivity:

This one should be pretty obvious. With all of the marketing tools your account managers need to effectively manage their client’s workload (social, email marketing, review management, SEO, site building/landing pages, funnel creation, etc.) in a single platform, your AM team can save valuable time easily jumping from client to client, tool to tool, all with a single sign on. Moreover, since these tools already connect on the backend, your team won’t have to worry about running arduous, manual processes to get information from one place to another. Even your accounting team can reap the benefits of the platform. You can make their lives MUCH easier by having all of your marketing software purchases run through a single monthly invoice that can be itemized by agency units, brands, and specific clients.

3. Decreased overhead:

By having all of your digital tools in one platform, there are a few significant ways you reduce your agency’s overhead. First off, the tools themselves are typically cheaper – having your tools in a single platform means your provider has a single marketing and sales team that helped onboard you for a suite of tools, and their support and operational costs become more streamlined. This enables your platform provider to save a lot of overhead and pass those savings on to you.

Furthermore, you save money because your team is more productive. If your account managers can save a few hours a week, this translates into potentially managing more accounts - equating to  less human overhead for you, and potentially, more commission for them as they manage more accounts and thus more budget.

Lastly, with an aggregated system of marketing and sales tools that automatically connect in the backend, you don’t need to hire expensive developers to enable cross tool communication, or purchase third party systems like Zapier to get your tools talking. With tools that are already connected you can get right down to work from the start.

4. Increased sales productivity through automation:

Finally, get back to what you do best – marketing for your clients. Let automation take care of nurturing your leads through your sales cycle, bringing you in only for specific communication points, or to close the sale. This allows you to not only ensure you are making the right touch points with your prospects to nudge them towards a close, but also gives you back the valuable time that you’d be wasting drafting all those emails AND scheduling follow up. Now you can maximize your time doing the best work possible for your clients, and closing more accounts. Use these systems to help you market and drive sales at your agency alongside driving results for your clients!

The Qebot Marketplace and Platform is here to simplify technology for small and medium sized businesses

San Francisco, CA. March 8th, 2016. Technology and software for the small and medium sized business industry is getting better by the day. Software companies like Gusto and Zendesk are building enormous businesses by offering powerful, yet easy to use technology for the enormous SMB sector. But with new technologies popping up constantly, where can small businesses go to discover these systems? Moreover, how do they know they are quality companies and if they need eight different platforms, how does a small business owner keep up with it all?

Watch our blogging related webinar to see more tools that make business blogging easier!

We all know the importance of maintaining a business blog. It’s crucial for website ranking and also for converting site visitors to customers. The challenge is that blogging can be a chore to keep up with.

Thankfully, there is a ton of technology available to make your life as a blogger easier. Here, we’ll focus on staying organized. With a couple free tools to plan out a blogging schedule and track the editorial process, you’ll have no trouble consistently publishing great content for your site.

Content: Managing the Editorial Process Using Trello

We love Trello’s simple, visual approach to project management, and running our blog editorial process is just one of many ways we use Trello over at Qebot. Click here for free access to the template used below.

If you’re new to Trello: Trello projects are called “boards" (the template used here is an example of a board). Trello boards are made up of columns, or “lists" (here, Ideas, Writing, Editing, etc.). Lists are made up of individual items, called “cards,” which can be dragged between lists.

This functionality makes Trello great for moving projects through phases: When you’re ready to start writing a blog, move its card from the Ideas list to the Writing list. When it’s read for editing, move it to the Editing list, and so on.

Coming up with new blog ideas

Keep all of your blog ideas in one place! At Qebot, we use the Ideas list of our Trello board. Oftentimes, you’ll be struck with an idea for a blog topic spontaneously. With the Trello mobile app, you can easily add a new blog idea card from anywhere, without the risk of it being lost as a random note.

Trello is also great for fleshing out ideas. Team members can add comments to cards, creating a discussion around a blog topic, and vote on which ideas they like most.

Tracking your blog from ideation through publishing

Trello makes it simple to manage a blog through each phase of the project, from ideation through publishing. Once you’ve committed to a blog idea, simply drag it from the Ideas list to the Writing list, and assign an author by adding one of your team members to the card.

The blog can be project managed right from the card. Authors can create todo lists for researching and writing tasks, and they can enlist the help of other team members by adding them to the card.

Once a blog is written, its author can move it into the Editing column, and assign an editor. Edited blogs get moved to the Ready to Post column, and posted blogs get moved to Published.

One simple template gives you a repository for your content ideas, a platform for team collaboration throughout the writing process, and a way to track your blog from start to finish. Access the free Trello board template here!

The Big Picture: Maintaining a Blogging Calendar Using Excel

While Trello is great for managing the editorial process, it’s also important to maintain a high-level calendar of your blogging activity. A blogging calendar ensures that you have enough content prepared to release regular blogs, and it will keep your authors accountable for writing deadlines.

There are plenty of tools to that will work for creating a blogging calendar, but we love a simple spreadsheet. Download our free Excel template. Or if you’re collaborating with many users in your company, give our Google Sheets version a try. 

When it comes to content marketing, we always recommend businesses set goals that they can realistically meet. For small businesses new to blogging, we suggest starting with one blog a week.

Creating a link between Trello and Excel

Once you’ve committed to one of your blog ideas, move it to the idea column in Trello. Click on the card to open its details, and then click Share and more… Copy the card link to your clipboard and head over to your blog calendar spreadsheet.

Paste the Trello card link in the Trello Link column of your calendar. Now you have direct link to your Trello card as it moves through the editorial process.

Filling out your calendar

Complete the Title and Details columns, so you have a general idea of what the blog will cover. If you haven’t thought of a title, make sure you have the Trello Link field complete, so you don’t lose track of your project.

The Author and Post Date columns may seem unnecessary, but we find them helpful in making clear who’s doing what and when each blog is due. Your blog authors will appreciate it too, knowing there’s a place where all deadlines are laid out.

Remember: blogging is a marketing activity! Use the Keywords and Target Demo columns to make sure you have a clear idea of which keywords you want to rank for and who you’re targeting. Once you’ve decided on targeting, consider how you will convert your readers. Do you want them to download content? Fill out a web form? Include your call-to-action in the CTA column to make sure it’s included in your blog.

Stick to this procedure and you should find it much easier to keep up with your blogging goals. The best part is, both tools are free! Shoot for a blog a week, at first. Before you know it, content marketing will feel like second nature.

Download the templates:

Blog editorial template (Trello board)

Blog calendar template (Microsoft Excel version)

Blog calendar template (Google Sheets version)

Watch our blogging related webinar to see more tools that make business blogging easier!

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT:

Intro

Thank you for joining us today for our monthly Qebot Coffee Break – This is a 15 minute, hyper focused webinar series aimed at providing quick, easy to consume marketing and business operations tips to help you run your business more effectively. Today’s Coffee Break will focus on using technology to help you streamline your business blogging strategy.

Host

My name is Matthew White, CEO of Qebot, and I’ll be your host for today. Qebot consolidates the tools and applications that small and local businesses use to manage their marketing and day-to-day operations into a single portal, decreasing time, effort, and resources necessary to build your business.

How to interact with today’s webinar

Today’s webinar is being run through Go-To-Webinar. Please use the question feature as shown on the screen to ask questions throughout the presentation. To keep our webinar on schedule, we’ll answer the most pertinent questions at the end of the webinar. Question and Answer will be limited to only 3 minutes, so if we do not get to your question, please email us at

[email protected]

, and we’ll respond to you directly. All attendees will receive a link to the recording of this webinar for reference.

Why you should be blogging for your business

Let's start with why you should be blogging for your business.Regularly blogging for your business can be one of the most effective marketing tools you can utilize. Just a few of the benefits of blogging include:

improving SEO and ranking

driving potential customers to your site

showing your expertise in your industry

and, engaging with current and past customers.

So why isn't everyone blogging constantly. The real issue is that it's hard to get started, and keep yourself on a regular content schedule. It's a process you have to start, and then be diligent in continuing, and it can leave a lot of businss owners feeling overwhelmed.

Today, we'll go over some tips and technologies to make it easier.

Creating a blog schedule

First, you have to get organized. Organization is the key component to those that maintain an active blog, and those that give up. Here is an example of a great tool that can help you stay organized, and create a quality content marketing schedule that is easy to follow. If you'd like a copy of this, shoot us an email to [email protected], and we'll email you a link to download it.

Using Trello to manage your blog topics

I'm also a big fan of using a tool like Trello to organize your ideas, and keep a place to put and keep track of blog ideas and topics. As you can see here, you can place your blog topics in the ideas tab as they come to you, and move them along as you decide to write on that topic, and post it. This can be especially helpful if there are more than one person blogging for your business.

Blog topics using the Qebot keyword search tool

Now that have a tool to organize, it's time to come up with topics. The social media tool available in the Qebot platform is a great resource to come up with great ideas for blogging.

Blog topics using the Qebot suggestion tool

Another great tool is the suggested content tool in the social tool on Qebot. This allows you to filter and read articles on certain topics that are relevant to your industry or community. This way you can see what people are finding interesting, and give it your spin.

Writing your blog

So now you have a schedule and a topic. Time to get to writing. The free blogging platform on Qebot allows you to write and post blogs to tumblr, and, if you have a Qebot website, right to your own site. With the simple interface, you can post blogs with images, videos, and compose your text however you want it to look.

Social distribution

Lastly, it's time to distribute your blog to the world. The social media tool within Qebot allows you to quickly post your blog to all of your social channels, and engage with your readers.

Newsletter distribution

Then use that email list that you've been working hard to create to get your blog out to potential and past customers. Reiterate to your contacts how knowledgeable you are about your industry to maintain those connections, and ensure that when they need your services or products again, you're on the top of their mind.

FINALE

Blogging should be one of the top tools in your content marketing strategy. And with technology to make the job easier, blogging can actually be a lot of fun. Start testing out some subjects and work on finding your tone. Remember: blogs are meant to share your voice and your expertise to your readers, so keep it professional, but don’t make it stuffy and boring. Keep your content conversational, so readers will want to continue consuming your content.

Wrap Up

Thanks for joining us today. We hope you found this topic to be interesting and informative. If you’d like to see more Coffee Break topics, visit us on our blog at Qebot.com/blog, or go to our youtube channel by search Qebot. If you’d like more information about how the Qebot platform is helping business owners manage their marketing and business operations in a more simplified way, visit us at Qebot.com to discover the different tools and applications we offer, or email us at

[email protected]

to get a free consultation.

Find Out More

Thanks again for your time today. Please keep a look out for next month’s date and subject for our Qebot Coffee Break series.

Make sure to join us on December 17th at 11am, PST for our webinar Creating a Business Blog. Register here.

Keeping up a regular blog for your business can be one of your most challenging, yet effective, marketing tools. The positives that come out of blogging for your business include improving SEO and ranking authority, providing content that attracts customers, engaging with current and past customers to keep them loyal, showing your expertise in your industry, and simply building a brand for you and your company. But keeping up with the rigorous schedule of continuously deciding on new content, writing compelling copy, distributing your blog on the web, and engaging with readers can leave a lot of business owners feeling overwhelmed.

Here are some tips and technologies to help you stay organized, come up with new content ideas, and more easily distribute your blogs.

Get organized

We’ve mentioned this before about blogging: staying organized is probably the most important aspect of maintaining blog activity. You can read more information about how to get and stay organized here. You can also download our content marketing scheduling tool here.

Coming up with ideas

There are a lot of great tools that you can use to find new content within your industry and community to post about. The Sendible tool, available in the Qebot platform, keeps you up to speed on your industry while providing fresh ideas for business blog topics.

Use the Keyword feature build a keyword-based feed of content useful to your industry. An example of this might be “home health care” in San Francisco, as shown below. This will keep you up to date with the happenings in your community, so you can engage the conversation with your thoughts, perspectives, and useful information you have to share about the subject.

Another useful tool to keep you informed about what’s going on is Sendible’s Suggested tool in the Qebot platform. This tool is extremely effective in showing you news articles that might be great for reposting to your social media, but can also be a great source of inspiration for your next blog. Use the content in the articles to see what people are actively engaging with, and then provide your own insight on those topics.

Time to write

You’ve now scheduled out when you need to post your blog, and you’ve come up with a great topic for your next piece of content. So where do you post?

The most effective place a business can post a blog is to their own website. This is where you want to drive traffic and eventually convert new customers. Make sure that your website provider gives you a simple and effective way to compose and post your blogs. You want your blog to be exciting and attractive, so add some imagery, a header, and valuable links to other content or other blogs you may have written, to keep the reader engaged. Long form text gets boring to most people, so use the blogging tools at your disposal to break it up and add some color and bullet points. Once finished writing (don’t forget to proofread!) publish your blog, and ensure that it has posted correctly to your website.

Distribute your blog to your awaiting readers

The time has come to share your blog! You’ve put in the effort and time to write a quality piece that your readers will love. Now you just have to get it in front of them. Here are two great ways of doing just that:

1. Social Media

By using the Sendible social media tool through Qebot, you can distribute your newly posted blog to the world via all of your social media channels with the click of a button. Simply copy the URL of the blog and paste it into the compose window, along with a fun message to attract readers. Choose the social media profiles you want to share to, schedule a post time, and hit send. Viola! Your blog is now posted to all of you social media profiles, and you can measure and engage your readers right through the portal.

2. Email Newsletter

Have you built yourself a nice customer or prospect list that you would like to share your blogs with? Use the Mailjet email marketing tool on the Qebot platform to compose a beautifully designed email newsletter to drive people to your blog. Put the heading of the blog, as well as the first sentence in your newsletter to catch the attention of your reader, and then include a link to the actual blog to drive visitors to your site.

Blogging should be one of the top tools in your content marketing strategy. And with technology to make the job easier, blogging can actually be a lot of fun. Start testing out some subjects and work on finding your tone. Remember: blogs are meant to share your voice and your expertise to your readers, so keep it professional, but don’t make it stuffy and boring. Keep your content conversational, so readers will want to continue consuming your content.

Happy Blogging!

Make sure to join us on December 17th at 11am, PST for our webinar Creating a Business Blog. Register here.

Join us for our upcoming Qebot Coffee Break webinar!

Please register for Qebot Coffee Break: Creating a Business Blog on Dec 17, 2015 11:00 AM PST at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7398628407990141953

Qebot Coffee Breaks are 15 minute, hyper-focused business tutorials that provide quick tips and insights into local business marketing, management, and operations topics. In this week's webinar, Qebot CEO, Matthew White, will discuss business blogging and show how technology can make blog management easier. All webinars will be recorded and available on the Qebot blog at blog.qebot.com