Ask IH: What's your dream-come-true marketing software?
I have seen small tools people use to create and measure engagements. As a marketing lead or team member, what kind of software or tool do you wish for that will make daily life simpler?
I have seen small tools people use to create and measure engagements. As a marketing lead or team member, what kind of software or tool do you wish for that will make daily life simpler?
(I edited your title a bit to make it more clear, hope you don't mind.)
• Some sort of marketing-consultant-in-a-box product. Input: a brief description of my product, my goals, my current marketing strategies and hypotheses, and my URL. Output: high-quality feedback and ideas from expert marketers.
• A perpetually updated list of the most promising marketing channels for my particular product (I might settle with picking a product category), with notes on the best approaches for each channel.
• A quick and reliable service for getting custom quality illustrations done for long-form content that I write. Or finding existing illustrations.
• A professional tweeter in a box. Someone who can send out tweets on my product's behalf, combined with software that lets me approve each tweet before it goes out on an individual basis (or in batches).
• Affordable PR. Someone who will constantly keep up-to-date with what's happening at my product, and pitch the press about it without making me look bad.
• Tiny marketing tips emails. I don't have a ton of time to read all the marketing blog posts I want to read. I think it'd be interesting to subscribe to a service that sends me very short educational tips/stories via email every day. Maybe 10 sentences long, max. Something I can read in a second, then move on to the next email. I'd hope that they're all broadly applicable, too. It'd be useless if most of the emails were too specific to apply to me.
Those are great ideas - though I see the automation being tough to curate to exactly what you'd want.
This "pro tweeter in a box" raises an interesting idea. A possible collection of product tweet templates. I mean you can pre-set with Buffer or other software, but they still require you to enter in the copy.
PR is a big one. Seen a TON of different PR projects, all offering leads and blah blah blah. The idea of having a sort of PR mini team, almost automated to the fact you can input the communities and sites you want to target. Emails, influencers, etc.. than are able to set some rules.
Regarding #1, I found someone on UpWork that is solid and doing exactly what I'd expect of a "marketer-in-a-box". They aren't cheap, but I don't think you'll get a good ROI going cheap (i.e. you'll have to put too much of your own time into it to make it worthwhile). I'll let you know in a couple of months what the ROI looks like.
For product are you referring to IH articles, similar to what you tweet from the @indiehackers Twitter now?
If so, the latest version of Cloud Campaign could help. It takes an RSS feed and reads in each new article, uses NLP to pull out quotes as captions, and adds them to your content library to be published to social media.
Not exactly. I spent some time last year really digging in to what made some Twitter accounts very successful. Sending out articles is fine (we have a huge backlog of ~300 article tweets in MeetEdgar), but that automated component is not enough.
The best Twitter accounts were often very humorous and personal. They tended to be helpful to their followers, to aid in the discovery of interesting and related ideas via retweeting, and to engage in real conversations with people. They were also big on variety — sending out the same kinds of tweets all the time gets boring. Of course there exist exceptions to each of these rules, but… they're exceptional.
So my conclusion is that nobody can quite run a Twitter account like a human. Ideally someone who's knowledgeable in the space, amiable, and/or comedic. Hence, I want a pro-tweeter-in-a-box, because I don't have time to do all this tweeting myself!
(I suppose a close second would be a tool that makes it much easier for me to do this tweeting myself.)
I just started using https://missinglettr.com/ a few days ago for my personal project and a client. It's by far the easiest tool I've tried, and (I've tried all the major ones out there).
It pulls engaging quotes from the content and schedules 9 social posts over a year. You can edit each one as needed, but the defaults were pretty good.
They had a deal through AppSumo for lifetime access to the Team plan ($65/month) for $49. Not sure if they're still open to that.
So far, completely worth it.
Re: tiny marketing tips emails. I've been thinking of testing a service like this as it's something I would personally find useful.
Would you like to be able to specify areas/topics of interest, or just a random selection?
Also, would you like it to include links for further reading? (i.e. it provides the tip, but gives links to relevant content if you want to go deeper on the subject).
The further links sounds interesting, although as an MVP I don't think they'd be necessary.
On the illustration idea, I once wondered about a service whereby as you wrote, you added image placeholders with a descriptive alt-tag. They'd have a source URL like illoservice .com/s/a9b5f597-0315-44e4-b358-f2ce886ef08c. An alt tag might be "An illustration in 2:1 proportions of two programmers fighting over a bone, with a blue-green colour scheme." Or "A black and white photograph of a young entrepreneur with her head in her hands." These would stay hidden to begin with. At the illustration service site, you'd have an existing account with a typical budget.
The service site would recognise new UUIDs and throw them into a queue as a job. Illustrators might apply for that alt tag and budget combination, and you'd pick them based on portfolio. Or you might have a preferred illustrator that completed all jobs.
The illustrator would then complete the job and upload the artwork. Optionally, you'd review and approve it. Many of these steps from your side could be done with very quick email replies to a bot. Once approved, the illustration would begin being served. You wouldn't have to return to the article and edit the code or go to the service site to copy and paste anything.
Take away a lot of the hassle and it'd probably be affordable for an illustrator to take on loads of little, quick images rather than having to do 20 emails fine tuning with a picky client.
I'll give a personal example - one of my clients is a local Absinthe & French Cusine bar.
When I initially closed the deal, (in person meeting, yes these are still an extremely important part of business - will do a separate post on that) I told the owner I would get him metrics - but the end goals was to get people inside the bar.
So far, I haven't sent metrics - but I have them. From Insta + FB, I have how their ads have done, how many followers, and who has responded to what CTAs. I will say however, I find difficulty in truly delivering a well crafted metrics based report. Complete with all social networks, combined analytics, where we are lacking in terms of audience, what content does will in similar markets, etc.
I personally like creating content myself or having a team do it. Automation can create problems in the marketing + PR world.
Hi Kevin,
I am available at gaurav@chartpoet.com, would love to know more about your usecases.
Thanks,
Gaurav
Looks good - just seems like it's only Google based. This would need to be a bit more specific.
You have the right structure going and base to build that, at least imo.
Answering just in case someone knows what I'm gonna suggest already exists. It has to because it's so basic.
The word doesn't seem to exist but I need a Marketer Relationship Manager. Like CRM where my contacts are marketers, bloggers, influencers, journalists I need to contact for my PRs.
Ok, the previous paragraph was just fancy wording for you to understand, but what I need is some sort of MINIMAL contact manager where I can tag contacts, know when's the last time I wrote them, what's the last email I sent them aka campaign, the % of reply rate.
Yes I know I can do this on an Excel (it's what I do) but I'd be willing to pay for something that automated parts of the process like last email/date and tagging. Google Contacts is decent for contacts, but it's very cumbersome to connect with GMail when adding new contacts on the fly, or tagging new contacts. Yes, I could use things like Mailchimp which provide campaigns and some of the data requested. But mailchimp isn't really thought for this, I don't need 99% of what it brings. I found some browser plugins that enhance GMail, but they are all too advanced, like sales funnels and stuff like that. I dn't do sales I just contact people of several different categories and want to have some data before approaching them again!