It’s December already, which means it’s time for your inbox to be flooded with 2020 roundup emails.
In our end of year email:
- Meet Tricia, our newest team member
- Our most popular content of the year
- Best marketing and sales tools we’ve discovered and used this year
- Plans for 2021
- Xmas closing hours
Welcome Tricia Fallows to the CLCK Team!
Head of Operations & Client Services
Tricia has held senior management roles at several tier one companies including Yahoo!, AOL, and more recently Fairfax Media, where she was Agency Group Director, managing an 8-person team selling advertising and content partnerships. Tricia’s most recent role was Commercial Marketing Director at Sonder Communications, the global authority on owned media, where she worked with businesses to unlock the power of their owned and earned media and marketing initiatives. Tricia brings her enterprise expertise and experience to our SME clients to help them do more effective marketing. She also keeps our team running as efficiently and effectively as possible, enabling us to deliver the best possible results for our clients and help as many people as possible create freedom and security in their businesses.
Our best content from 2020
- Should you show your pricing up front? We asked 24 marketing leaders to weigh in and published the results in this blog post.
- How to create a content strategy that works for your business – in depth article showing how to get started creating a content strategy that will allow you to attract more of your ideal clients and answer their most pressing questions.
- How to accelerate growth with content – half-hour webinar replay with an overview of how to get started using content in your business.
- The marketing funnel for high-ticket businesses – more advanced 40-minute video showing how a content funnel looks, and why it works for businesses selling expensive products and services.
- How a single blog posts we created for a client gets $10,000 of free traffic per month – blog post with video.
- Our HubSpot journey – an honest and unbiased review, 5 years on.
Best sales & marketing tools we’ve used this year
Our two biggest focuses for 2020 were:
- getting more organised with our processes for delivering client success, and
- scaling our agency to help more SMEs do better marketing and avoid getting RIPPED OFF by the numerous wannabes and sharks that seem to gravitate to the digital marketing industry.
So these tools reflect those priorities:
Content planning and creation – Frase.io
Frase is marketed as an SEO tool, but it’s really a content research and writing tool. Entering a topic will have Frase go out and find the top sites ranking for that topic, then suggest all the points you might cover in your own piece of content on that same topic. It can create an outline to brief a writer with, or make suggestions for optimising existing content.
Email outreach
We’re not talking email newsletters here, it’s more about sending personalised cold emails at scale to a list of prospects and making them look like you’ve sent them direct from your Gmail or Outlook, just to them, one at a time (but in reality you can send 100 per day, including timed automated follow ups if they don’t reply).
Several close contenders for best tool here so we’ve grouped them by budget:
- Budget: SalesHandy ($22/mo)
- Mid-range: Lemlist ($49/mo)
- Deluxe: Growbots ($199/mo)
Email prospecting is a crowded space, and most of the tools do pretty much the same thing, with a few extra bells and whistles. Growbots takes the cake in terms of the ability to find prospects, connect with them on multiple platforms (e.g. LinkedIn and email), and manage the replies, with features like an AI that detects out of office replies, and categorises replies based on interest levels it detects.
LinkedIn prospecting – Expandi.io
Again, LinkedIn automation is a very crowded space in terms of apps, and there are literally dozens of tools that automate various aspects of LinkedIn, whether it’s connecting to new prospects, messaging them, or even detecting their personality so you know the best way to engage with them. The tool we’ve had the most success with this year has been Expandi. This will allow you to enter a Sales Navigator search from LinkedIn, connect with the people from that search (100 connection requests per day) and send a sequence of messages to anyone who accepts. It’s easy to abuse this type of automation, but done right, without immediately plowing into a sales pitch, it can be a very powerful way to save a LOT of time on LinkedIn trying to generate new business.
Project management – ClickUp
We have transitioned our internal project management system from a combo of Trello and Basecamp across to ClickUp. This tool is pretty remarkable in terms of features and flexibility. So much so that it can be overwhelming at first. There are few other project management tools on the market that can do all the stuff that ClickUp does. The free plan is very generous too, so if you’re wanting to get more organised in 2021, check it out.
All in one sales & marketing – HubSpot
Of course, HubSpot! Even though we’ve been working with HubSpot as official Partners for 5 years now, ramping up our own sales and marketing this year has given us a new appreciation for how well HubSpot can handle pretty much anything you can throw at it in terms of sophisticated funnels (although often simpler can be better!), content publishing & distribution, automation, and CRM. They have some end of year discounts available for Partners, so if you’re considering become a HubSpot user in 2021, reply to this email and we’ll provide more info.
Plans for 2021
We already have several new clients queued up to start doing better digital marketing using our “done for you” services in early 2021. This will give us the opportunity to help even more small businesses grow into bigger businesses, creating jobs and opportunities in their communities. We’ll continue to systematise and improve on our processes so we can deliver the best results possible for our clients.
If you’d like some hands on help to do better digital & content marketing next year and we haven’t spoken yet, start by applying for a free discovery and planning session. If we have already spoken, then just reply to this email to pick up the conversation where we left off.
Xmas closing hours
Our team will be taking a well-earned break from the 24th December through to the 3rd of January. Any planned content will still be scheduled and published for our clients during that time, but we won’t be responding to emails or phone calls throughout this short break.
Wishing you, your colleagues, and your loved ones all the best over the holiday period.
Best wishes,
The Team at CLCK.
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