The Top 5 Software Tools We Use In Our Business And You Should Too

In this episode we talk about The Top 5 Software Tools We Use In Our Business And You Should Too:

1. Slack - Hands down the best messaging and complete project and communication software. Slack was just getting started when we started the company and it allowed us to live in two different states to start the company.
   
   
2. Sumo - The full suite. We use Sumo to collect email addresses and grow our website traffic. We use AppSumo to find out about the latest and greatest new tech softwares at a deal. Lastly, we use KingSumo to create viral giveaways.
   

3. Instapage - This is the best (In our opinion) landing page software that allows designers to create beautiful landing pages and help non-creatives to use a template and generate leads. Instapage integrates with almost everything you can think of and allows you to update and change the page on the go easily.  http://instapg.es/ntC9g
   
   
4. Line2 - allows us to have business phone lines. We can also use them to send text messages. They even have a Mac app to help you respond right from your computer.
   
   
5. ClickUp - This Free tool has been amazing for us. ClickUp is a project management tool that allows you to visually see, work, collaborate on all the projects in your company. The capabilities for this tool are endless.

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Christian: [00:00:15] Ola amigos and welcome to another episode of The Marketing Natives. First of all, thank you for tuning in. Today, we have a good episode for you. We're going to talk about the top five software tools that we use in our business. And maybe you should too? Is that a question mark or a statement?

Aaron: [00:00:31] I said - I didn't know maybe, I said "and you should too". He read it incorrectly.

Christian: [00:00:36] All right let's get into this. Number one: Slack.

Aaron: [00:00:39] And not to be confused with slacker.

Christian: [00:00:43] Is that a thing?

Aaron: [00:00:44] Slacker? Yeah, it is a thing.

Christian: [00:00:45] It's an app?

Aaron: [00:00:48] No. OK.

Christian: [00:00:49] Maybe.

Aaron: [00:00:50] Maybe it is an app. Anyway we digress. All right Slack. What about it? Tell us.

Christian: [00:00:56] I think a lot of people know about Slack already but if you don't know about Slack's is just a communication tool for teams. We use it in our business to communicate internally.

[00:01:05] So to get rid of any e-mails or any other messaging platform or text messages or even speaking in the office, we don't speak at all in the office. We just use Slack. Just kidding, though. We speak a little bit in the office. Yes, but we do prefer Slack because it allows us to I guess quickly communicate and not interrupt. You know, other people who are working in the office. And it allows us to, you know, separate our conversations between clients which is normally what we - how we have a set up which you can set it up however you want. And then obviously we have things for BitBranding for you know internal communication things like marketing or sales or business development. So those are just internal channels inside of Slacj so we can communicate about those things. Slack also has like three hundred-trillion integrations I think? So you can literally integrate it with almost anything out there. So it's kind of nice. And we'll talk about some other apps that we actually have integrated with Slack. And yeah, I mean you can share documents, you can share images, you can connect to Google Drive so you don't even have to technically upload things to Slack it just sort of put the links like it's just really, really cool, really nice. And we've been using this since the very beginning of our company. So it has been definitely a tool that we recommend to every business out there who has a team maybe a remote team also, it will definitely help you out a lot.

Aaron: [00:02:40] Awesome. Yes I think that's pretty much everything with Slack.Go download it right now. It's free for most people.

[00:02:48] All right. Number two is Sumo. So the full suite here, we use Sumo to click e-mail addresses which we need to update ours on our website which we're getting new a website so...be on the lookout for that. But so that will be updated soon. But they allow you to collect e-mail addresses and grow your business that way. There's also app Sumo which is like Groupon for geeks. And it is like really good software - software discounts online. And then you have the King Sumo which is like contest giveaways that could go viral. So the whole suite inside of the Sumo company is a lot of things that we use to grow the business not only for collecting e-mail addresses but just building an audience and then using tools inside of our business right now which we use quite a few tools that we've got lifetime memberships for from apps, you know.

Christian: [00:03:40] Yeah. So I think the biggest thing here - I mean Sumo is great. I mean they have a lot of tools within Sumo but appsumo.com. Is it dotcom? Yes, it is dotcom.

[00:03:51] That's where you get these deals where. I mean, we have some other tools that we use for you know some of our services and things that we paid like a one-time field day maybe 50 bucks and we were able to you know get that literally for the life. So we don't have to worry about doing a monthly fee or anything like that.

[00:04:11] So if anything I think appsumo was like one of the best things in this list, on this list, in this list, over this list, under this list.

Aaron: [00:04:21] Yeah, it's all over the list. It is honestly probably something that - it's not like Slack where not that many people know about it, I guess there are a ton of marketing agencies that may know about it and some of that don't. But business owners have no idea what appsumo is. And so if you're a business owner go check it out. But don't get caught in the "Oh I have to buy everything" because we definitely went through that.

[00:04:45] We were like "Oh it's a new deal it's a new deal.". So don't get caught up in that. But it's it's very valuable.

[00:04:57] All right this is our favorite time of the episode.

[00:05:01] Other than the other parts of it just playing. Thank you guys for listening for one. And if this is your first time, this is the section where we couldn't tell you a little bit about us. We don't go too long into this section because we want to get you guys back to the top five software tools we use in our business and well a little bit about us, I guess. Christian and I over here both founders in the agency that's -two people- we are talking on this podcast obviously and typically we're just talking, we're just going back and forth and giving advice for local businesses. But sometimes we have people who come on the podcast who are experts in their field. So if you are a local business - local to the Dallas area - and you have a cool business or you would love to come on the podcast, feel free to reach out to us. We'd love to have you on. We like having guests. We don't - I think we've had maybe 5-6 guests total in our 70 something episodes, but we're really interested in sitting down with some cool people if you want to come on. So what you do just go to is bitbranding.co and reach to us there or any social platform @bitbranding that's B-I-T-B-R-A-N-D-I-N-G and we look forward to having you on.

Christian: [00:06:25] Nice. You're so good at these commercials. All right. So back to the top five software tools that we use in our business and you should too. Number three Instapage. So actually, yeah we've been using Instapage since the very beginning...

Aaron: [00:06:40] Like January 2016.

[00:06:42] So yeah it was very early on where we started using Instapage. I guess in our opinion Instapage has been one of the best landing page software tools. Just because I guess, visually, good designers can basically create anthing they want on the landing page. You know visually and it's so fricken easy to use. So any business owner can quickly pick it up and create something from scratch or even use some of the templates and even if you use some of the templates you can so move things around very easily where you don't have to worry about like "Okay move this 200 pixels to the left or move this 600 pixels to the right."

[00:07:23] It's just very, you know even like Aaron here, like noncreative people can easily pick it up and create something beautiful that will convert prospects and declines.

Aaron: [00:07:36] Yeah. And to be fair we've used other landing page softwares I mean, quite a few actually, and not knocking anything like click files or any of those other lead pages. Those are probably all great but we've tried those and they're just not as easy to maneuver and not as easily, like if you have a change you need to make a new landing page, you would want to be able to make it pretty quickly and you don't want to have to spend you know twice as long as you did the first time to make it. And Instapage allows you to move pretty quickly.

Christian: [00:08:07] Yeah. And I mean I think the only down...down what?

Aaron: [00:08:12] Side.

Christian: [00:08:13] Downside, there we go. I was going to say downfall, downturn I can't find that word. The only downside. OK. The only down side of Instapage is that it may not have all the features that something like Clickfunnels would have, but again. But again the simple fact that you can easily create a landing page. You know if you have some simple campaigns then Instapage is the way to go. Obviously if we have some more creative and complicated campaigns - Clickfunnels, I guess would be a really good alternative for this although there's just a little bit of a learning curve to understand Clickfunnels.

Aaron: [00:08:52] Yes. All right. Moving on here to number quatro. That's four for the non-Spanish speakers. Line2 we use Line2. Christian's shaking his head because he can speak Spanish so he heard four twice.

Christian: [00:09:06] Well, no it's not that. It's like if you tell a joke, you can't laugh at your own joke. You have to kinda let the audience laugh, you know.

Aaron: [00:09:14] Oh, I'll put a gaggler on here. Don't worry, there'll be people laughing, it's like "Ha ha ha. That was hilarious." All right. So Line2, we use it quite frequently and by frequently - I mean like literally every day this is what we use for our business lines and our phone. Instead of having two phones - cue the music.

Both: [00:09:32] It's got two phones.

Aaron: [00:09:34] Anyway. We use it in our business because it allows us to have one phone and one number for our personal line, number for our business line and the number can be ported over at any time. It also has a Mac app so you can answer all your text and calls on the app. And it has a lot of the same functionality as the regular text messaging software. So for us we use iPhones and the only thing that you can't do on this Line2 is send videos or gifs which is - or memes which is super sad. That;s the only thing that is sad about it but other than that I think it's like night for what we use it for. It's like 97 or 100 bucks or something like that for a year per line, so it's super inexpensive.

Christian: [00:10:22] Yeah. And I don't think you mentioned this but the - you have also the ability to have the app on your computer so you can answer text messages or phone calls from your computer. If you have a Mac App. Not sure if they have it on Windows. They probably do. I mean they're a pretty big company but all that's being said there's also the new iPhones - actually you have the ability to do multiple SIM cards but I still think that it's cheaper to do than Line2.

Aaron: [00:10:48] Right even if you did T-Mobile with both of the lines you would still be more expensive or you'd be paying 20-30 dollars a month.

Christian: [00:10:55] Yeah. All right. So our last app here is called Clickup. We recently started using a few months ago and with Clickup basically allows us to stay on task on everything that we have going on for a company and our clients and even outside. So Clickup is a project management tools that allows you to -tool - that allows you to visually see everything that you're working on. Clickup has been awesome for us because we can actually stay more organized inside of each project. You have again a little bit of a communication tool inside of there. You have the ability to assign tasks to other people have deadlines. I mean there's a million things that you can do with Clickup. We are even trying to use it as a CRM right now to keep track of prospects and leads and future clients, it might be you. So you might be on that list already. No but anways Clickup I mean it's been awesome, it's been really good and we're just sort of tipping the iceberg with everything that Clickup can do for us. We're just, you know, just like I said just started to use it just a few months ago. But it definitely helps you stay organized within your company.

Aaron: [00:12:15] Yeah. And I guess one thing that we should always preface is that anytime we recommend something, we've done our research. So like for Clickup we literally spent time, both Christian and I, hours looking at other project management systems. So we used to use Insightly. We looked at things like...

Christian: [00:12:32] Base Camp.

Aaron: [00:12:33] Asana.

Christian: [00:12:34] Asana. Trello.

Aaron: [00:12:35] And really put up a grid sheet and put up why we chose this and one of it is one of the reasons is that it's so visually appealing. So people who are not like project management gurus or like OPs gurus or anything like that they can look at it. Anybody could look at whether it be a marketing team or a sales team and be like, "Oh, this makes sense or this looks good and it's super easy to navigate." Whereas like Asana or what was the other one - Trello. Like all of those just weren't - they didn't have the same visual appeal, I don't think.

Christian: [00:13:07] Right. And also I think the the biggest factor, while choosing all of these, is the Clickup offer the most the cheapest price point. So right now we're not paid a single cent for for Clickup. So it's basically completely free and we have 5-6 team members in there and we have unlimited tasks and projects and I mean, so yeah it's definitely worth it to get something like Clickup.

Aaron: [00:13:38] Yep, side note. You only have so many custom fields, so we did get notified yesterday that we need to upgrade because I put in way too many custom fields so it's like 5 dollars per person so really - relatively inexpensive for everybody.

[00:13:53] All right thank you guys for listening to a nother episode of the Marketing Natives. We really appreciate it. We know how busy you are so taking time out of your day whether it's on your run or your commute to work and listening to us we really do appreciate it. If you're local in this area please shoot us a message over on Instagram it's @bitbranding. B-I-T-B-R-A-N-D-I-N-G. And just let us know you've listened to the podcast. It really just helps us know that we're reaching people locally and in other locations but just want to chat to some of our listeners because Apple never tells us exactly who it is and we just want to have a conversation with you. So all right, we'll see you guys next week and I believe next week we're talking about why your online business should hire a local website designer. So as the end of this year comes to - or as we as we get to the end of this year. It's going to be a really good episode for you to listen to for 2019. Bye.