The Right Business App Can Save You Time. Buying It on AppSumo Can Save You Money.
The Right Business App Can Save You Time. Buying It on AppSumo Can Save You Money.
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As any entrepreneur will tell you, building a business from the ground up is not easy. If you want sustained growth, you’ve got to build a brand, establish a web and social media presence, cultivate a following, and generate leads. Not to mention the fact that you have to find a way to reach your target audience, sustain engagement, convert your leads into sales, and manage effective ad campaigns. And all that is on top of the nuts and bolts issues of your specific industry. It can all seem pretty overwhelming. But luckily, using the right business app will provide invaluable help with streamlining these tasks, resulting in a smarter, more efficient company. Of course, quality business software isn't cheap. But thanks to AppSumo, you can get all the tools your business needs without busting your budget.
Image credit: Image via AppSumo
AppSumo is a daily deals website for cutting edge business software. They find and partner with innovative tech companies to offer incredible deals on 21st century business tools, helping entrepreneurs maximize productivity while potentially saving thousands of dollars.
Whether you’re a small business owner, content creator, social media manager, marketing manager, sales representative, or growth hacker, the right business app can drastically improve both productivity and profitability. So check out some of the great deals on the ingenious software solutions AppSumo currently has to offer, and take your business to the next level.
SendFox 
Image credit: Image via AppSumo
If you’re a content creator, email marketing is a very effective way to convert fans into customers and keep them up to date on your videos, blogs, and podcasts. Unfortunately it can also be expensive and time consuming. That’s why you need SendFox.
SendFox is an email marketing tool designed specifically for content creators. It lets you create gorgeous customized emails, which you can send manually or schedule for a later date. You can even fully automate the entire process thanks SendFox’s advanced analytics feature. After you create specific templates, SendFox can send customized emails every time you publish new content, or every time a contact performs a specified number of clicks or opens .
Don’t have a subscriber base yet? No problem. SendFox can help you built it. The app lets you create landing pages with built-in subscriber forms. Just put the links in your social media bios, and then sit back and watch your contact list grow.
SendFox normally starts at $240. But right now you can get it for as low as $49 on AppSumo.
Stackby
Image credit: Image via AppSumo
Meet Stackby, the new way to create, customize, and automate your team’s workflows. The app combines the best of spreadsheets, databases, and business APIs in a single platform, allowing you to customize information with more than 25 unique column types. The results can be viewed in multiple layouts — including Grid, Kanban, Calendar, and Forms. You can also sync data automatically by linking columns to third-party apps and keep projects refreshed and up-to-date at all times. It's the perfect tool for marketers, agencies, and small businesses that need a better way to plan, organize, and manage their team's work.
Stackby normally starts at $432. But right now you can get it for as low as $59 on AppSumo.
Switchy 
Image credit: Image via AppSumo
These days, simply promoting your business on social media is not enough. If you want to generate clicks and convert them into actual sales, your posts need social media links with short URLs and stylish eye-catching graphics. And the best way to create such posts is with an amazing new app called Switchy.
Switchy helps you shorten links and customize their appearance for specific platforms. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Switchy lets you add UTM codes and retargeting pixels to your links, which lets you track users’ engagement with your posts and create ads just for them on social media and Google Ads. If all that sounds kinda complicated, don’t worry. Switchy gives you step-by-step instructions, so you’ll be marketing like a pro in no time.
Switchy normally starts at $2400. But right now you can get it for as low as $39 on AppSumo.
RelayThat 
Image credit: Image via AppSumo
Want professional quality graphics without actually paying a professional to create them? Make them yourself with RelayThat.
RelayThat helps you easily create stunning graphics and instantly remix and resize them for banners, ads, and social media. Drag and drop your brand assets (logos, images, colors), or use the powerful “Magic Import” tool to instantly import them from your website. Then choose from thousands of templates, color pallets, and font pairings to create slick graphics that look custom-designed.
Don’t have brand assets? No problem. Just dip into RelayThat’s library of over 3 million copyright-free images and icons. Whatever your design needs, RelayThat has your back.
RelayThat normally starts at $1200. But right now you can get it for as low as $49 on AppSumo.
Related:The Right Business App Can Save You Time. Buying It on AppSumo Can Save You Money.Mailcastr Helps You Manage Your Email and Get More Done12 Ways to Keep Your Team (and Yourself) Energized in 2020
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This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com
How To Start Investing In Social Media Marketing The Right Way
If you have a business, you need to be on social media - it really is that simple. A business without a social media presence is like a driver cruising down the street at night with no headlights. It’s dangerous, and it significantly lowers the probability you’ll end up where you want to be (and even if you do, it’s going to take you a lot longer to get there).
There’s no question that social media is a key factor to success in business these days. But how do you pay for it? How do you find the time to manage your accounts?
First, let’s get one thing straight. There’s a lot you can do on social media for free. You can set up a Facebook account and start posting, just like you can set up a Twitter feed and start tweeting. The problem, of course, is your reach. Because so much information is being shared on these social platforms, the networks themselves have no choice but to filter out some updates to be seen by their intended recipients and to let others go unseen.
Facebook, for instance, states that, “Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.”
Brand messages are more likely to fall into the “less important” camp than personal updates, which has led to increasing interest in paid social advertising. Basically, it’s an “if you can’t beat them, join them,” mentality. If you can’t capture organic reach and engagement on your own, you may want to give paid advertising on social networks a try.
That said, unless you’re blessed with an unlimited budget, you’ve got to be sure you’re getting the most out of the money you allocate to this cause, both in terms of the campaigns you run and the tools you use to manage them. If you aren’t sure how to get started - and you want to maximize your ROI for these campaigns - check out the tips below:
Start for Free
Money is finite, so take advantage of free trials. Use free accounts to learn how the ropes and experiment with different apps and software. Track your projected return on investment before you begin to budget your money as a business expense. You can only spend each dollar once, so make sure to spend it wisely.
A few recommended tools to try for free:
Experiment to Learn More
Once you figure out how you want to approach social advertising (for example, whether you’ll launch a campaign on Facebook, Twitter or some other network), begin to spend small amounts and experiment with different avenues you can take to slowly, but steadily, build your social media presence. Use A/B testing to validate the approaches you’re using on your website and social profiles. As you test, you’ll learn what methods give you the best return on both your time and money.
Grow a Little at a Time
It’s easy to get excited once you learn the basics and find yourself spending money and time in a head-over-heels fashion (just like how you get approved for a department store credit card and wind up going crazy with your purchase). If you max out your card on the first day, you’ll be paying for it long after your presently-new clothes have been donated to a consignment shop. It’s okay to ramp it up, but go slowly, and make sure your returns are growing as you increase your expenses.
Do Not Overspend
A budget is set to keep you from overspending, but we all know it doesn’t work out that way without discipline. Once you’ve set a budget - both with your social media marketing time and money - stick to it. Sometimes, this means not getting as much posted as you wanted to, but once the budget has been used up, it’s time to call it a day.
Use Your Tools Consistently
Don’t be caught underutilizing what you’ve spent your ad budget on. If you’ve bought it, use it. Social media requires a lot of consistency, so don’t skimp once you get started. The same rule applies to your time as well. If you’ve put it on the calendar, be intentional and really use that time to develop your social media presence.
Stretch that Dollar
As in anything, you want to get the best deal for your time and money when choosing social media tools. Every scenario is different. Check out the different options on the market and determine which social media platform gives you the most bang for your buck. Death to the Stock Photo, for instance, is relatively cheap compared to the other online picture databases. For $10.00 per month, you’re given access to a multitude of images you can use in your online content. With any tool purchase, take time to research all your different options before actually making a buying decision.
It Takes Money to Make Money
While you don’t want to spend prematurely, you don’t want to miss out on opportunities because of your scrooge-like tendencies. Yes, there are plenty of free social media options and social media management apps out there, but you get what you pay for; almost to an extreme. Once you’re certain you can get a good return on your investment, don’t be afraid to take the plunge and buy.
Start Now
Remember, it will take some time to get your feet wet and learn the social media game, especially the business end of it. As with your personal finances, you don’t want to wait until you’re well behind the curve in terms of technology or budgeting. Begin today to build a solid strategy that’ll help you properly budget both your time and money as you leverage all social media has to offer. There’s no better time than the present to find the best way to use social media advertising to drive your business forward.
How did you develop your social media budget? Share any tips or tricks you have by leaving a comment below:
How to scale your social media marketing to build traffic and leads
Scaling is all about making repetitive tasks more productive to be able to focus on more creative things and experiments.
I know a lot of people will cringe at the idea of scaling social media marketing because it is supposed to be all about human connections.
There are also many people who don’t believe you can attract any substantial amount of clicks from social media.
Well, both may be true but only if you do that wrong:
That’s not possible to build good traffic from social media without at least some sort of automating / scaling.
And while truly effective engagement cannot be efficiently scaled, you can scale all other parts of the puzzle, at least to some extent:
Let’s see:
Cross-post with calendar publishing tools
Even if you have a dedicated full time social media team at your disposal, constantly publishing on social media is difficult to achieve. Big corporations have rotating shifts that handle it but for most of us we have to operate on a smaller scale, especially budget wise.
We can get around that by publishing scheduled posts, which includes cross-posting from one platform to another. That will cut the time spent on social media in half.
That doesn’t mean that all of your posts should be pre-made and scheduled, or that they should go to every single platform. It still takes intelligent planning.
My personal method is to sit down every month and plan a month’s worth of social media posts based around content that is going to be circulated and is already scheduled to post. Using ContentCal, I get all of those posts ready to go on all platforms.
ContentCal is an affordable social media editorial calendar with some cool productivity features:
From there, my team will dedicate time every day to manage regular social media interactivity. They will respond to posts, find brand mentions using listening tools and searches and do the more thorough work involved in the process.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram
Put your content in front of influencers where they expect it
The power of influencer marketing cannot be overstated. Twitter has become a particular powerhouse for the tactics, but Instagram, YouTube and even Snapchat are gaining a lead. Cultivating a relationship with influential social media users is mutually beneficial and can have lasting effects on your brand.
I have done the long term version of this, which takes a lot of time and effort for both you and the influencer. Viral Content Bee (Disclaimer: This is the project I co-founded) strives to make it easier by connecting you and the influencers straight away.
You share their content, they share yours. Both get some much needed exposure and without shady pay deals. It is easy and effective.
The main thing it eliminates any possible frustration of the “being used” feeling when influencers receive pitches to share something daily. Instead, they join that platform to find your content: All you need to do is to put it there.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Linkedin, Mix, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Track your growth and learn from that growth
Growth for its own sake is important enough and that doesn’t even get into the importance to a brand, organic traffic and profitability. But one thing we sometimes forget is what we can learn from exponential growth and how it applies to future campaigns.
Some things work. Some things don’t. We need to be able to clearly see which is which and change it up accordingly. This is where watching every one of your social channels is critical, so you can respond to every tick up or down you may see.
Over time you will also begin to notice trends that can have a huge influence on your branding. Business can change their entire social direction based on the findings of these types of analytics.
There are endless tools for this purpose. My personal favorite is Cyfe because it is an all in one business dashboard that is fully customizable. You create your own widgets, monitoring whatever you want to and all for $19 per month (they have a free version but if you are going with a higher number of channels you will want to pay the money for the full features).
Cyfe can manage both social media monitoring and growth for you, from one single dashboard.
Furthermore, the best widget I ever created was a Google Analytics dashboard that monitored the traffic that came from each one of my social media accounts. It really showed where my team and I needed to focus our energies.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Google Analytics…
What NOT to scale
Some things you just cannot scale or automate well, so it’s better to stop trying.
Truth be told, marketing is going to be more and more automated going forward. Technology is making authentic and effective personalization possible, so marketing automation (including social media automation) discussion should mature. If you want to see your social media marketing bring any kind of ROI, automate.
And how do you scale social media for it to bring more traffic and leads? Share your tips!
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