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...

Turn a contact form into a business growth tool with these 3 workflows

Contact forms provide an accessible, user-friendly way to get info from potential clients. They're useful, but if their responses remain stuck in your form submission tool, powerful information can quickly go to waste.

Every contact form submission is full of potential and is far more than a few lines of information. It could be:

  • A warm lead that just needs the right messaging to convert
  • A customer who needs support
  • The feedback you need to take your product to the next level

If you connect forms to your other apps, you can turn these entries into business growth drivers. Use automation to get the information from your form tool into the places where you connect with customers and plan your work.

Make follow-ups instant

Some of your biggest sales won't say yes—at least not at first.

To keep those leads warm, you can use Zaps—what we call our automated workflows—to instantly follow up, effortlessly update your team, or automatically set up a call.

Once you connect your apps on Zapier, you can automate your form response process, so submitters get a response to their forms as soon as they contact you.

An instant response is good, but it's rarely enough. Customers appreciate an instant follow-up, but a personalized one earns their loyalty. Use automated workflows to connect your form submission tool to communication tools so your team can follow up as soon as possible.

Creating an automated workflow doesn't mean you have to choose between an automatic response and a personalized one. You can add a step to one of the Zaps above to simultaneously send an email to the person who filled out the form. Here's an example of how that could work:

Some leads are so important that you might want to skip right to scheduling a meeting, like if an email marketing campaign is capturing high-value leads. By connecting a survey tool like Typeform with Gmail, Zapier can automatically draft or send an email asking to book a meeting.

Zapier will automatically draft a Gmail message based on information in your form for easy follow-up.

To automatically create an email like this, you'd draft your email in Zapier, pulling in fields like email address or name from Typeform, and dropping in your personal scheduling link.

Add customers to your CRM without data entry

If entering data into your customer relationship management tool (CRM) is the most annoying part of your day, you're not alone.

One study showed that about half of all users find that both keeping data up-to-date and entering data were the two most significant challenges for using their CRM. And, let's be honest, common sense helps here too: No one likes entering data.

By setting up an automated workflow, you can eliminate that manual data entry and enter customers directly in your CRM of choice from your forms.

Zapier can automatically enter contacts in your CRM based on form submissions.

Put user feedback where you can use it

Getting feedback is an important part of building a successful business. Amazon, for instance, is famous for its customer obsession, which has led to its massive growth and notoriously happy customers.

Forms are one of the best ways to get the kind of feedback that can fuel this growth. Simply send a survey to your customers, and in moments, you can get back essential information on what they like and don't like about your product. Rather than rely on your own hunches, you can build real customer insight into your product decisions.

With an automated workflow, you can pipe that feedback right to where you need it. Automatically sending user feedback straight to your project management tool means you can quickly start working on the next iteration.

As you react quickly to customer feedback through your project management tools, automated workflows can also send that data to tools better suited to long-term study.

As form submissions flow in, automatically collect that feedback in tools like Dropbox and Airtable. Without having to enter information, you can refer to continually-updated feedback throughout the length of your project.

Make forms an engine for growth

Forms look simple, but that doesn't mean the value they provide is small.

Zapier can integrate your forms tools into a variety of other systems, enabling one form entry to cause a chain of automatic reactions. These automated workflows turn the humble contact form into an engine for growth. So the next time a prospect or customer clicks that submit button, you'll be ready to impress.



from The Zapier Blog https://ift.tt/3dNeSMl

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