So let's kick off with Capsule in a moment. Basically, everything in our business does start with a contact, whether it's an informal phone call, an email, a contact made, a brief conversation and we do have to record that information somewhere and for us, that place is Capsule. The capsule is a great CRM contact management application that can really help you turbo boost how you manage your contacts.
You don't need to use it like a glorified list; just listing in names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. It's actually got a huge amount of functionality. You can actually allocate tasks that need to be done, you can put a date next to that task as to when it needs to get done by, you can forward plan your contact management, you can link directly to your invoices and your accounts packages, you can also build your email list within there, create multiple tags if you need to, a huge amount of functionality that you can do. Just a very quick screenshot. It's just obviously a test run with my own details in there. As you can see under my name and obviously where I belong in terms of which contact I am, SF Digital studios.
Potentially I could be under three or more tags so if I needed to find that I'm a lead, yes I could find a list for the lead tags, same with Google Ads clients 2017 and umpteen other tags. We use probably 20, 30 tags actually to be able to have a master list when we need it but also sub-lists when we need to get into there, even down to the nitty-gritty of your Christmas card list, you know, for your business, for your corporates. There are lots of things you can use it for.
Of course, you can also keep a track of all contacts made. As I've said before, I do have a very good memory. I tend to remember where I've met people, what I need to do with them, but certainly, my photography studio running days, that ability combined with the functionality of capsule meant that when someone would tell me which school their children were at or where their husband works or where they work I would keep a track of all this information so when I'm asked to ring back in six weeks time I've got a really good handle as to what's going on in their lives, what might be happening locally at their child's school and it's a really great icebreaker and it just gets that conversation going.
I am genuinely interested in people but hopefully, it just helps to keep that memory in a safe place so that you can rely on it when you need to. The next one I've got on my list is the G Suite. Now, this is quite detailed obviously. We're going to go through just three or four of the main ones. Today we always use slides so there's an example of that one. We can knock that one off the list. Let's go to my first one which is Gmail. My favorite feature of Gmail is probably using canned responses.
If you haven't had a chance to look at that yourself, please do go into there and look into the little button where you get the drop-down list of your canned responses. This is invaluable for saving you time because often we're sending out repeat emails. It might be an onboarding email, (or) repetition of a meeting time. As you can see from my list I had all sorts of notifications: prize draw winners, portrait sessions, retouching, standard emails that are instead of wasting your time continually retyping, you stick them into your canned response list, save it down, every time you want to use it, you pull it up, personalize it again and it does save you a lot of time. Same with your email signature. Do make sure that your signature is as you want it to be. Make sure it's personalized. You've put all the details you can In there.
For a long time now, we at SF Digital have always used our headshots. It does help people to remember you and personalize your emails that little bit further and it's a great way of keeping people in the loop. My next one is Google sheets. So yes, good old spreadsheets. It's a great way of keeping us organized and yes we use lots of other apps and I mention Asana again for how we manage our workflow and our business. You can't beat a good old list on a spreadsheet. Often in our case, we use spreadsheets as a way of parking up the starting point of lots of information. For example, we've got a spreadsheet that is dedicated to leads and conversions, invoicing, quoted value versus actual value, (etc.).
There's a whole series of events that are all related to invoicing and the lead side of things. For example, there's a quick screenshot here of our video content calendar. This is actually an old screenshot as you can see it starts at number one. If I was to take that screenshot today, we're at 570 odd now as of today. That's a very very long list of our content and our videos and again as I've mentioned before, yes we use Asana to manage all our workflow for videos but the core activity begins on a spreadsheet because they all do have to be listed and documented somewhere and that is on a spreadsheet.
Another example of using the G Suite is Google Drive. If you haven't already done so I would really recommend that you spend some time with your naming conventions and your systems of how you park your information within G Drive. There are literally tens of thousands of pieces of information that all of us hold in our businesses and there's nothing more frustrating when there isn't a standard way of how you find that information.
I'm going to refer to historically when we used to have portrait sessions and images for people everything was listed by the client, by job number, by client name within that folder, '01' was always the raw images, '02' with the edited images, '03' could be the selected images, '04' would be edited returned, there was a whole sequence where just the number alone would identify what was happening in that folder so that never by mistake would we be working on the wrong images and the same applies from the screenshot that is on the screen right now.
When we are working with Google campaigns, everything that needs to happen within a job needs to be systemized and logical so it's easy to find and there's just a brief example on-screen at the moment. We come on to another example of G Drive. Moving on... Google Calendar, now even just going back to the time when it was just myself and Uzair in the business, guess who would be the one that would have to move their diary because someone, no names mentioned Uzair, would go and double book the diary.
So for a long time now we've used Google Calendar as an easy way of identifying what we're up to and what we're doing. This whole double booking scenario really should not happen. Occasionally it might happen or it just means that we can see where everyone is and as you can see we're using various colors to identify what we're up to. So we know that you know, who's doing what, where they're supposed to be. This diary again is an old screenshot as you can see but if I was to look at a current one I think we've got about six different colors on the go now for various activities. It just means that everyone has quick visibility of what's going on within an organization and hopefully especially those double booking scenarios don't happen.
Calendly linked to your diary is at the moment especially, when we're trying to set up online meetings, there is nothing more frustrating than playing ping pong across devices as to "When do you think we could catch up?" "Oh, how did you want to do it?" "Did you want it by Zoom?," "Did you want to go on a chat?," "Shall we just have a phone call?" It's become, we spend more time trying to set up the meeting than we do actually having the meeting. A great way of systemizing that is to start using Calendly. All you need to do is basically go in...
You go into the app, you set up a URL on the page model, you can have multiple events and you can group things together, you block off the areas of your diary that you don't want to release as being available, you can even put a buffer either side of any blocks of time that you're issuing and that's it. You send out the URL, the recipient will see when you're available. They don't need to see the actual activity that you're up to when you're unavailable. They just get the available slots and away you go and it's a great way of systemizing your diary times and your setups. We also use it online through our website when we're asking people if they want to have a consultation or an online chat. We're able to again set out the Calendly link and it means that we don't actually spend any time whatsoever trying to set up those online meetings and audits etc. It's a very very handy little tool if you've not used it, do give it a little look.
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