Media training 101 for small businesses

-
Image
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
1 comment

How to Automatically Manage Marketing Projects with Coda and Zapier

-

When you run large scale projects, organization is key to success. An organized project means that the folks working on it understand where certain pieces of information live and how to find and interpret them. Plus, it allows the project organizer to express clear and defined goals for the team to rally around.

Often, mission critical documents live in hard-to-search apps, spread out across different folders and even different tools. You can link to important folders and documents within another file, but once you're in the right place, the app might not offer the features you need—and you're back to the drawing board. This makes organization a bit like herding velociraptors.

For Fred Castagnac and Sean Kennedy, product marketing managers at Zapier, this situation is all too familiar. As a completely remote company, Zapier's team works together across the globe; Fred lives in France while Sean's in Canada, and their coworkers live in many disparate time zones. Organization is essential—and they were in search of one app that could help them accomplish it..

After speaking with other professionals who had the same issues, they were both turned on to the supercharged document app Coda. Coda combines documents with spreadsheets, and app-like user experiences, all in one app.

Fred and Sean each decided to implement it with their respective teams based on their current project based needs; Fred for her work on all things user and market research and Sean to track ongoing product marketing initiatives.

How Coda Changed Fred's Approach to Project Management

Before discovering Coda, Fred organized product launches across various apps. She'd house the project's data in Google Sheets and used another document app for content, like each person's role, deadlines, and other information about the launch.

"When you work on a product launch, data and content are the two main things you rely on," she explains. "Every time I invited someone to collaborate, I had to share a bunch of documents."

"What I really like about Coda is that everything is in one place—you can sync an entire team with a single URL."Fred Castagnac, Product Marketing Manager, Zapier

After speaking with a peer at Intercom, Fred tried out the Intercom Product Launches template and adjusted it for her team’s unique needs.

Now, Fred gathers all of the data she needs in one space, creating pie charts that everyone involved can easily read and interpret, leading to faster and smarter decision-making. Sean takes his use of Coda one step further by integrating it with Zapier and adding automated workflows to his repertoire.

How Sean Uses Coda as an Information Hub

Like Fred, what drew Sean to Coda was the ability to house all his information in one space: "If you’re working on a project, you only need the one Coda file, and each section would be the equivalent to a separate doc [in another app]," he says.

"This really appealed to me—it meant all the information I needed was in one place, and I didn’t need to go searching through folders for all the other relevant documents."

"Coda is like having an Airtable inside my text doc; that makes me so happy because I have all the functionality I need in a single file."Sean Kennedy, Email Marketing Manager, Zapier

Coda requires no technical skills, but Sean’s engineering background helped him unlock the advanced power of Coda’s relational database system, so that he can use formulas, functions, and graphs to easily track where things stand in production.

Sean's Tools

Icon: App: Used For:
Coda Coda Supercharged document app
Jira Jira Bug and issue tracking tool
Slack Slack Team chat app

In order to keep Coda up-to-date with the most accurate information, Sean uses Zapier to connect Jira to Coda. Sean's Zap sends Jira updates directly into Coda, where functions and formulas take over to track different project statuses.

Then, another Zap shares notes in Coda to a specific channel in Slack. This Zap means the marketing team can stay up to date in one of the team's normal communication channels, instead of having to poke around in Jira.

In this way, Sean’s approach to Coda has made it a centralized marketing management hub. Here are a couple of the Zaps Sean uses, so you can begin to create your own hub:

Our teams are continually tinkering with and testing Coda’s functionality, but for now, it’s giving our internal teams the best of everything. Power users can leverage its native formulas and functions for more complex needs, while the UX/UI is so easy to use that new users can get it implemented with little ramp up time. Best of all, if they have any questions, Coda’s community is so passionate that you’re never learning alone.

Want to use Coda with Zapier in your own project management? Give Zapier a try for free.

Our stories explore how Zapier's users solve common problems. From marketers to CEOs, educators to real estate agents, millions use Zapier to automate their most tedious tasks. If you haven't yet, try Zapier for free to see what we're all about.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.



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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If Time-Tracking Apps Don't Work for You, Try a Productivity Journal

-
Image
Monitoring how you spend your time leads to a wealth of useful information: It can tell you what time of day you're most productive , help you create better estimates for how long tasks will take, and show you what activities you'd have to cut to focus your energy on a new idea or project. The most precise way to monitor how you spend your time is to use a time-tracking app . But these apps require a lot of overhead. You have to diligently log your hours (or make sure your app is logging them correctly) and sort your tracked time into categories. You have to pause after every task—no matter how brief—to capture time spent accurately. If tracking your time at such a granular level sounds like a punishment, but you still want insight into how and where you spend your time, consider the less menacing sibling of time-tracking apps: a productivity journal. What Is a Productivity Journal? I kept a journal as a preteen, though in those days I called it a diary. Snoopy and Woods
Read more

The 25 Best Productivity Apps for iPhone in 2018

-
Image
The best productivity apps for iPhone make possible something that would otherwise be impossible, or they make something you need to do simpler and faster. Imagine being asked, unexpectedly, for a copy of a tax form from last year as proof of address during an important appointment that you traveled many miles to attend. In fact, it happened to me, and thankfully I had a copy of the document I needed saved to a file syncing application, which meant I could pull it up on my phone and show it to the gracious Customs and Border Protection officer who demanded to see it. If that's not productivity by way of efficiency, I don't know what is. Perhaps a more routine example is keeping track of time spent in an off-site meeting so that you can claim it as an expense later. If you have the right time-tracking mobile app, you can record the time on the spot rather than having to estimate it and remember to record it later. The use cases for productivity apps are infinite, and sometimes
Read more

Forget Folders: The Best Ways to Organize Your Files with Tags and Labels

-
Image
Trying to find old files is like trying to go back in time and read your own mind. Where would I have saved those pictures from Australia?!? you think, before spending a frustrating half hour digging through folders and folders of miscellaneous images. What would I have called that report I wrote in August 2012?!? Tags (or labels in some apps) can eliminate these exasperating and time-consuming mental exercises. With a couple of tags, you can instantly categorize and label files for hassle-free searches down the road, and then find all of those files again easily no matter where you save them. Let's explore why tagging is so useful, and how to set up your own tag system. Then, we’ll dive into how to tag your emails, photos, notes, and files, and glance at the benefits of using tags alongside folders. Intro to Tagging Tagging Best Practices How to Tag Folders How to Tag Emails How to Tag Photos How to Tag Notes How to Tag Files Turn Tags into Actions Intro to Taggi
Read more