Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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How to Take Better Surveys with SurveyMonkey and Zapier

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Conducting surveys at the end of the year, or the beginning of a new one, is a tradition for many organizations. It takes a lot of work to write good survey questions, then design and configure it, send invitations, and conduct a survey, much less compile and analyze the results. If you usually dread surveys, there are a few ways you can turn them into more pleasing projects. The trick is to make some of the work happen automatically.

One way to do it is to use Zapier. Zapier is an online tool that lets you connect SurveyMonkey to other apps and services that it doesn't necessarily connect to on its own. In this way, you can create automations, also known as Zaps, that do tedious tasks for you, whether it's copying and pasting data from one place to another or automatically sending emails to survey respondents thanking them for their time.

In this article, I use SurveyMonkey as the example because it's one of the best survey tools on the market and one of the most popular to boot. You could, however, swap in any other survey maker of your choice, as long as Zapier supports it. Note that you can't do much with SurveyMonkey and Zapier if your SurveyMonkey account is free or Standard Annual. You'll get the most out of it if you have an Advantage, Premier, or any of the Team plans.

Here are four ways to use Zapier to make your process of creating, sending, and processing surveys better.

Thank Respondents By Email

When people complete your survey, this Zap sends personalized emails to them. You can customize it to include their name or other relevant details. Write a note to say thank you or ask for additional feedback about the survey. What you say in the email is up to you.

Add Survey Respondents to a MailChimp List

Sometimes, surveys are the moment of first touch between two entities, whether it's a business soliciting information from potential customers or a researcher making contact with subjects. An easy way to continue the relationship that starts with a survey is to add respondents to an email newsletter service, such as MailChimp. This Zap automatically adds survey respondents to the MailChimp list of your choice. Be sure to ask your survey respondents for permission before subscribing them!

Send Responses to a Slack Channel

Say you manage a small organization or brand and have an open survey for collecting feedback from customers. You aren't flooded with responses all the time, but when they do arrive, they contain valuable information worth sharing with others on your team. Wouldn't it be helpful to direct all those responses right into a Slack channel? That way, anyone who wants to read them or receive notification of new incoming responses can do just that.

Put All Survey Responses Into Excel Automatically

SurveyMonkey has an add-on tool that lets you connect any survey to a Google Sheet and automatically fill it in with the survey responses. But getting the same information into Excel requires more manual work: You have to wait until the survey closes and then export the responses to an Excel-compatible format. Alternatively, you can use this Zap to update an Excel sheet (so long as it lives in Microsoft OneDrive) automatically every time someone completes your survey.

Related Content

Look for new lists of our favorite Zaps each month, and see some of our previous lists, such as:
- Automate Your Slack Status Updates
- Spend Less Time on Twitter
- Manage Your Music and Podcasts

Photo by [photo credit TK]



from The Zapier Blog http://bit.ly/2RikQNZ

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