Podcast: 10 Tools for Your Marketing Tech Stack

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10 Tools You Need When Starting To Build Your Marketing Tech Stack - An overview of the different types of tools a business needs

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda chats with Dale Beaumont, Founder & CEO of Business Blueprint to discuss where companies should start building their tech stack.

From CRMs to video editing software, Dale talks us through how to identify the right ABM tools to achieve success. He discusses his experience in helping other entrepreneurs grow and his passion for technology provides a unique clarity among an endless offer of tools. 

Related: Download xGrowth’s Ultimate ABM Strategy Template

This episode’s guest:

• [00:42] About Dale and Business Blueprint
• [01:44] Dale’s transition from tech early adopter to entrepreneur
• [04:40] How Dale keeps up with new product releases
• [05:25] How to identify the tools your business needs
• [09:38] Finding the right CRM
• [13:27] Tools for building a web presence
• [15:55] The importance of considering scaling when selecting a tool
• [17:14] Tools for video marketing
• [22:09] Things to consider for scaling your calls capacity
• [24:01] Content distribution tools
• [27:03] Dale's input on scheduling tools for content distribution
• [29:22] About integration between different tools
• [33:16] Tools for document management
• [36:44] The next steps after selecting a project management tool
• [38:45] Dale's current project

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• Dale’s website
• About Business Blueprint
• 52 Ways Business Workshop
• Mobimag - Made for Mobile Publishing Software
• Product Hunt website

• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools mentioned by Dale:
  • Ontraport 
  • Active Campaign
  • Copper
  • Capsule
• Zapier and CPM for automation 
  
• Dialpad communications manager

• Website building and e-commerce platforms mentioned by Dale:
  • WordPress
  • Squarespace
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • Shopify
  • BigCommerce
  • Unbounce
  • Leadpages

• Video editing and marketing tools mentioned by Dale:
  • Final Cut
  • Adobe Premiere Pro
  • Wistia

• MailShake and Gmass for email automation
• Airtable, Buffer and Woop Social for content calendars
• Google Ads and Facebook Ads as Digital Marketing platforms
• Visual tools: Canva, Design Pickle and ManyPixels
• Proposify and Better Proposals for proposals
• Stripe to take payments
• DocuSign or HelloSign for contracts and documents
• Project management tools: Teamwork, Asana or Monday.com 

About the Growth Colony Podcast:

On this podcast, you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Hosted by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Episode Full Transcript:

[00:22] Shahin Hoda  Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Growth Colony. I'm Shahin Hoda with xGrowth and today I'm talking to Dale Beaumont, Founder and CEO at Business Blueprint about where should companies start when it comes to building their marketing tech stack. On that note, let's dive in. Dale, thanks for joining us. 

[00:40] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, looking forward to chatting. 

[00:42] Shahin Hoda  Same over here, same over here. Tools are always fun to talk about. And I'm looking forward to it. Now, for those who might not be familiar with yourself or the Business Blueprint, can you give us a quick background and intro? 

[00:56] Dale Beaumont  Yeah. So, I've been in a small business for 20 years now, started when I was 19. Building businesses ever since. But for the last 11 years now, I've been running a company called Business Blueprint. And my goal was to teach other entrepreneurs and business owners how to better use technology in order to improve their business. So I started that in November 2009. It's been an amazing journey. 

[01:21] Dale Beaumont  And we've now helped thousands of small business owners across Australia and New Zealand. Make the shift from the old world to the new world. So that involves, like digital marketing and involves, you know, using things like project management sort of tools or CRM systems and doing digital marketing. So it's yeah, it's been a fun ride. And I love marketing. I love technology. So I'm looking forward to this chat. 

[01:44] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, for sure. And we were talking just a couple minutes ago about some of the posts that you have, and some of the discussions that you have around tools. And I was like, you know what, I love it. I love the stuff that you talk about. And whenever I see a post on LinkedIn from your side, I'm like, alright, what is this tool now that Dale is talking about? So so I'm very excited about it as well. How did you get started? How did you get involved with tools and building tech stacks in the first place? 

[02:09] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, well, I think that because I was born in 1981. So it's the first kind of generation that grew up with computers in their home and computers in their classroom. And so, because of that I just kind of like, technology was, I suppose, part of growing up. And so when I started business, someone said, you should have a website. So I was like, okay, I'll figure out how to get a website or I'll want to start selling, I had an ebook, and I want to start selling it online. So I've, you know, figured out how to start selling things online. This is like in 2001. 

[02:39] Dale Beaumont  And so it was just kind of like, you know, came to me Not that I'm a super sort of like, I'm definitely not a developer or anything super technical. But I just basically realised technology was going to be the future. And so I just was just like an early adopter. And then so when I started, you know, doing all these things, like sending out, you know, seems so basic now, but I had an autoresponder, you know, emails in the early 2000s, and being able to later on, you know, embed videos, you know, into sort of marketing people like thought that I was like a magician, like, oh my gosh, wow, how you doing all of these things? Just amazing. 

[03:11] Dale Beaumont  Like, can you teach me and then, you know, there's, of course, you know, Google AdWords, and Facebook and all these kind of, like new platforms and what was kind of, what was back then was the yellow pages, and people were realising the fact that, you know, that was kind of like dying, and those new digital platforms were taking over. And so it had a lot of people like, at the time, I was, like, 27-28, and a lot of people are reaching out to me saying, and these are people that are way older than me, there's people in their 40s 50s and 60s who were successful entrepreneurs saying, hey, can you teach me how to use this technology stuff? 

[03:42] Dale Beaumont  And so I was like, okay, and so that's when I started running an event called The New Rules of Business where I would teach people how to make the shift from the old way of doing things to the new way of doing things. And it just kind of took off. And there were like, thousands of small business owners that were coming along to my events, to hear from this kind of like, you know, young guy about how to kind of harness the power of technology in order to grow, you know, a fitter, faster, more profitable business. 

[04:10] Shahin Hoda  Right? I mean, 2001 autoresponse. That is super power, sir. back then. That is, I love that from 2001-2002. That world was different than 20 years ago. There's a lot of stuff that we use right now. It was not, there was not a thing, right? Facebook and Google and Facebook weren't even founded. That's crazy. And it's crazy to see how far we've come and how mature that space got.

[04:40] Shahin Hoda  I always look at the, I always forget its name, but you know that the diagram of all the tools, all the tools that get introduced every year, and it was like hundred at the beginning and then 200 and then 500 and then thousand, and I don't know where it's at right now, but it's just amazing to see that transition and the growth in that space. And it's, I mean, I feel like today, it's even harder to navigate that space than it was before. What do you think? 

[05:09] Dale Beaumont  It's like a full time job almost like, if you look on Product Hunt, there's like 30 to 50 products launched a day. And that's not even all of them. That's just one website that kind of collects all of these. And so, you know, I go through that website every day, and I sort of like bookmark ones that are relevant for small business owners, and then I kind of will get my team to kind of go through and have a play with them, see, if they work, and they solve a meaningful sort of problem, and then they come back to me, and then I'll kind of teach my clients how to use these tools. So we go through literally thousands of tools every month, to maybe find, you know, five to 10, that we can actually use and, and implement into our business. 

[05:25] Shahin Hoda  I love that. I love that. That just keeps you at the edge frontier of what's coming out, especially Product Hunt, keeping a close eye on that. Okay, let's dive in. You know, let's say I've started my business, or I'm a new marketing hire, right? I need to start to create some order around a company introducing tools, mature the tool stack, what do I need to keep in mind? Like, where do I start? What are some of the key tools that I have to start looking into? 

[06:20] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, this will break them up into different sorts of headings. And then rather than talking about specific tools or have this sort of like the category and then underneath, there's normally three or four options, you know, depending on, you know, your budget, and kind of the type of business that you have with your, you know, ecommerce based business or a service based business, you know, etc. So rather than getting lost in specific, you know, tools, and is first that we'll just look at the overall categories. So I think if you're really trying to market and grow any business, you need some way of being able to capture and then chat leads. Like we call that like a CRM system. That's just fundamental, that's like, you know, you can't really run a business without a good CRM system. CRM system will be able to enable people to, you know, get into a landing page. 

[07:04] Dale Beaumont  And then that's probably the other thing that you'd need is some type of, you know, website platform that could be just WordPress to begin with, or there's other heaps of different landing page builders that are out there, I mean, you're basically going to send traffic to a web page. And that's going to have an opt-in form that goes into your CRM system that will enable you to launch like, have you know, what we're talking about before those autoresponders, those follow up emails, in those emails you probably want to have some videos as well. So then you need some way to kind of store and host your videos. So that could be YouTube when you're starting. So that's not a major expense. 

[07:38] Dale Beaumont  And then what you're going to need to do is probably start, you know, getting people on the phone and making calls, depending on what type of business you're in. Some people can just buy online, and that's great. But then you'll need some type of phone system. And so, now rather than having physical, you know, phones, we've already got a computer, I've already got a phone. 

[06:57] Dale Beaumont  So now we can actually either, we don't necessarily recommend, you know, using your mobile phone number to make and receive calls because that doesn't scale. But you can use a system like a dial pad. And dial pad is a cloud based phone system, which turns your mobile phone into a landline sort of like phone system. So people can call a local number. And you can answer it as local and I'm making outbound calls as well. 

[08:20] Dale Beaumont  And then when you start having a team anywhere in Australia, or anywhere around the world, they can all be networked to your phone system. So definitely need a CRM system, you need some way of being able to make phone calls. And then there's a whole bunch of other things as well, which we can look at, like you know, planning out your content. So this content plan is this social media schedule, is these tools around what you're going to use for graphic design, where you're going to host your videos, you may need two different systems to talk to each other. 

[08:48] Dale Beaumont  So therefore, you might need some type of integration software like automation software, like Zapier for example, document management, lead tracking, and project management as well. So we can kind of deep dive in any of those sorts of topics. That's just the kind of overall categories of kind of like what makes up the tech stack in terms of different layers. And then you kind of need to decide which tool in each of those is going to be right for you. 

[09:10] Shahin Hoda  Alright, so I got about 10 categories over here, right? So we talked about CRM, we talked about web kind of autoresponder, marketing automation, if you want to call it platform for hosting your video, managing your videos, calls, content management, social posts, and social if you want to call it social management, social post management, graphic design, tool for integration, and document management. 

[09:37] Dale Beaumont  Yeah. 

[09:38] Shahin Hoda  Before we kind of dive into some of these, actually, you know what, let's dive into one after another. And then what I like to do is I would like to understand where do you see some of the more common gaps in businesses like you know what, in these 10 categories you like, you know what we usually see this being a big gap. So I want to come back to that later. Let's talk about that. So CRM is kind of the heart of the business, right? So everything kind of revolves around that, you know, what are some recommendations around CRM implementation that you have? 

[10:10] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, there's so many different CRM systems that are out there, and you want to find one that that's going to offer, you know, the features that you need as you're going to grow. Because, you know, it's not just when you have thousands of contacts, and you have hundreds of different fields, you know, it is a bit of a pain to move from one system to the next. Because you've got so much data in that particular system. So it is one that you know, You're not going to think about it for months, but you definitely want to put a few good hours worth of research into choosing the right one for you. 

[10:45] Dale Beaumont  For most businesses, the two that were our favorites that we'd love the most would be, one would be Ontraport and another one would be Active Campaign, there are two really good CRM systems that are really good at all rounders. And those systems are kind of designed if you're doing things at scale. So if you have, you know, say more than more than 100 leads that you are kind of like working at any point in time, hundred up to 100,000, right? You have like building things that sort of scale, then that would be the right type of system. 

[11:19] Dale Beaumont  The other kind of like system would be if you're doing maybe enterprise sales, and you've only got like 30 or 50 potential targets. Like you're doing and everything is very bespoke, everything is one to one, every email you're sending, you know, is kind of customised, you're not sending like these broadcast type messages, then a CRM system like Copper, which integrates really well with, with Google, and GSuite, or another one would be Capsule, which is kind of like the baby brother of Cooper, they would be really good systems if you are doing if you're sort of like a high ticket price, and relatively low number of customers versus a lower ticket price and hundreds or thousands of potential customers.  

[12:00] Dale Beaumont  So they're just a few of the tools that I would think about for your CRM. Not only does it capture leads, knowing does it do all the email marketing stuff, SMS, but also you can then build out. Basically it has like a campaign builder inside. So you can then start to build marketing automation. And so and that's where you set up a whole series of funnels or campaigns. And then kind of like, think about like going to Disneyland, you know, that people will kind of go on rides, and they'll kind of like, have an experience, and then they'll be going on to the next ride.

[12:30] Dale Beaumont  And they'll have an experience or to kind of designed to get people to move further towards making a buying decision. And then once they've bought, you know, you'll have a campaign to actually onboard them. And you might have another campaign if they want to cancel and you might have another campaign if they want to upgrade or another campaign if they refer a friend. And so what you basically do is you go into your CRM system, you click one button, if someone says, hey, I'm, you know, thinking about going on hold you go, okay, look, let me send you some information. 

[12:55] Dale Beaumont  I'll tell you more about that. And what we can sort of do to support you during this time, click a button, and then boom, it fires off a whole series of steps. And what's great about it is it's dynamic. So based on the actions or inactions that determines what happens next, and the whole thing is basically automated. And if they do the action that you want, then the campaign stops, because it has the desired effect. That's obviously a very simplistic version of it. Better CRM system is really powerful. And it can save you, you know, 20 hours a week potentially of kind of manual follow up if you have a good CRM. 

[13:27] Shahin Hoda  Gotcha. Yeah. And that kind of covers, I feel like two points, right? Where we talk about CRM and kind of autoresponders/marketing automation. The other thing that you talked about that I think it's crucial for every small business is their web presence and where that's built. You mentioned WordPress, is there anything else? Or is there any of those sexy platforms that you saw recently come out that people can use to build their websites and basically build up digital infrastructure on? 

[13:57] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, so it depends on sort of how technically-minded that you are, to what you're going to sort of like to build it in, and what type of business that you have. But generally speaking, if your service base sort of like business, or even a low-end product business, and what I mean by that, maybe you've got like 50 products or less, then you can do all of that in WordPress, or Squarespace, Drupal, Joomla, these are all kind of like, these are really good, sort of like website building platforms. Then on the other side, if you're doing ecommerce, then you're probably going to go down the road of Shopify or BigCommerce, they're really the platforms that are specialised now, in doing ecommerce. 

[14:38] Dale Beaumont  So that's probably what you would do. Unless you just need a single page, like a website, there's quite a few platforms out there, like Unbounce is one, another one's Leadpages.net. And these are just companies out there that go, you want a web page, great, we'll kind of give you a web page in like 10 minutes. Now you've got a page, so you can technically drive traffic to that page. And if you have a CRM system, you can capture leads. But you know, you're not going to have like a, this is not a multi page website experience, you can then have an About Us page and then a Testimonial page and Contact page. That's when you kind of jump over into something like WordPress that has like multi-pages that has like a blog that has, you know, you can kind of do lots of cool things there. 

[15:19] Dale Beaumont  But yeah, there's heaps of great platforms that are out there, that's probably a good thing, an easy thing to you can outsource as well, once you kind of make a decision around what platform you want to use. If you stick to those big ones that I mentioned, like Squarespace is pretty easy to do yourself. If you want that even WordPress now, there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of developers out there that can use say WordPress, for example. So it's pretty easy to outsource it to someone else to do that for you. Or there's places you can go now where you can buy templates, WordPress templates. Find a template that you like, and you just drop in your panels and you know, got a website within a couple of days. 

[15:55] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, absolutely. Envato, our Victorian startup, for sure is the place to be, right for that. But what about, you know, on these website builders, do people need to worry about SEO? Because that's a little bit of a concern, right? So or you may disagree that, you know, some of them are not, might not be best suited for a company scaling. You know,  one of the platforms I didn't hear you mentioned was Wix. Right? Or what are your thoughts on that? 

[16:23] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, I look, I think that comes a long way. I still remember Wix sort of, like 10 years ago. And it's very kind of basic and clunky. So I maybe wrote it off a long time ago, but it probably still has its place, I'm sure it's gonna come a long way. So I put that in the category of kind of like Squarespace. Look, these tools are good if you just want something up. But then later on, when you get a bit more sophisticated, you kind of like, you start to become like, I want the space to be this, or I want the, you know, I want the colours to be like this. 

[16:50] Dale Beaumont  And there's certain things that you just can't, you know, you get to these kind of like brick walls, and you just can't change it. Because it's kind of all in the back end code. And because it's written, they're made in such a way that's so super simple for the user. There's trade off with kind of like everything. And so once you start getting really fussy about your brand, then you kind of you can't use those systems because they yeah, they don't let you change certain things. 

[17:14] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, been there, done that. Absolutely. Okay, let's talk about video, right? I think video is booming. It's, you know, one of the main things that we did early on was, we brought when we were very small, and we, you know, probably was hard to afford, but we brought someone who kind of managed video production for us. And we wanted to make sure that we reproduce a lot of videos. So the video is blown up. Tell me a little bit about some of the platforms and some of the tools that people should think about when it comes to video marketing and producing video and hosting their videos. 

[17:49] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, sure. So obviously, you got your, you know, recording, we're not going to get into care equipment, a microphone, all that type of stuff. So you know, you record your content, and you can actually again, outsource that to someone that can come out and film everything, you know, that has all the gear and equipment. And you know, if you're prepared in a few hours, you know, you can maybe pump out, you know, 10 or 15 videos or something along those lines, depending on whether they're content videos, or they're more promotional sort of in nature. But then they're going to need to be edited somehow. 

[18:15] Dale Beaumont  So the kind of like main platform that we would use would either be Final Cut, if you're a Mac user, or otherwise, we would probably recommend like Adobe Premiere Pro, for video editing. The reason being is because it's kind of like, it's kind of operating system agnostic, you can work, use it for Mac and PC, and a lot of our videos are actually edited by people in the Philippines. And so, you know, they oftentimes won't have a Mac, and so we just kind of went with a standard, which is Adobe Premiere Pro, so they do all the editing, and then from there, you need to host it somewhere. And it really depends on a couple of things, generally speaking, that most of the time, you're gonna put it on YouTube. 

[18:56] Dale Beaumont  And the reason why is because there's a good reason why to put it onto YouTube. You know, YouTube is like now the, you know, the 5000-pound gorilla in terms of the video kind of like space. And so the more kind of like, the more that people win. And the other thing that's really powerful about YouTube that I'm seeing more and more is that, you know, because Google and obviously YouTube is now using like their recommendations engines like AI to decide what videos you watch next, the moment that you search, you watch something on YouTube, like a few months ago, I kind of decided that I wanted to buy a cafe racer kind of motorbike. And so I watch one video, and then it's served up over the next week. 

[19:36] Dale Beaumont  It's served up 20 other videos from the same company. It kind of like went back through their archive and some of those videos were like 12 months or two years old, five years old, and it just kind of gave me everything that that kind of just served it up on a planet to me, and it was constantly in my feed. So if you get someone to watch one of your videos on YouTube, they're probably going to see three more which is a super, super powerful thing and this is for Free. So that's why your videos probably should be on YouTube. Because it's then going to, for someone who watches one, then it's going to serve them up more. 

[20:08] Dale Beaumont  The only reason why you wouldn't use YouTube is that it depends on how far sophisticated you want to be with your marketing. Like if you're selling a high end product to, you know, a relatively small number of people. And it's difference between YouTube is kind of still like a dumb player. And then there's a smart player dumb player that I mean, you know that you got 100 views on YouTube, but you don't know who watched those videos, it could be anyone. And but if you use a player, like Wistia. Wistia actually can then talk through Zapier, which is another kind of like connected tool to your CRM system. 

[20:40] Dale Beaumont  And then you can actually know which of your customers watch that particular video. So if you send out a video to like 50 people, and then you can actually say, when someone watched more than 80% of this video, let me know and it knows who's watched it and actually send you an email to say this person just watched 80% of your video. And so that would be a perfect moment to pick up the phone and say, Hey, I just wanted to give you a call just to check in and see how you are. 

[21:07] Dale Beaumont  And they're gonna say, Oh, my gosh, you wouldn't believe it. Like two minutes ago, I was just watching a video and you're like, oh, wow, what a coincidence. That's amazing. Well, see, I've got you on the phone. What did you think? And so this is where you can actually take, like a decisive action. At the very moment that someone is fully engaged with your content. You can't do that on YouTube, you don't know who watched it, you know, people watched it, they don't know who. But if you're using Wistia, you can actually pinpoint the person that tells your CRM system and it fires off an alert to you to take an action when someone's most engaged and most likely to buy. 

[21:39] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, gotcha. And that's yeah, that's so important. And again, today, it feels like the same, the same superpower of an autoresponder in 2001, right? It's in the same category. 

[22:09] Shahin Hoda  The fifth one I got written over here is calls. Hit me up with that. I mean, you kind of talked about that. The fact that you know, it allows you to scale and allows you to do outbound calls and integrates with your CRM and you record everything and everything gets documented with it especially if you have a larger team. Is there anything else on calls that you want to mention? 

[23:08] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, so yeah, you'll need to do obviously pick up the phone and talk to certain people depending on what you're selling. So you'll need to have, you know, a number, you might even want to have different numbers in different countries as well. They're all kind of redirects to one kind of like, you know, one operator. But then if you're not there, you can actually flick a switch, and it can be redirected to someone else.

[23:29] Dale Beaumont  And then you can decide like, you've got all the features to say, I want these to ring three times. And if it doesn't, then call these persons. And then if it doesn't answer, then I want you to take that as a voicemail on that voicemail that gets emailed to you, you can transcribe all of your calls, you can have all of the transcriptions go into your CRM system. So it's just so many really cool things. So yeah, I think we've covered that one. But the system that we really kind of use is called Dialpad, and that's what we use to kind of like scale all of our basically, yeah, our phone calls and inbound and outbound.

[24:01] Shahin Hoda  Gotcha. All right. Let's talk about content and content distribution. So I feel like you told me the content component, social, which is kind of distribution of content and graphic, which is kind of designing the content could go in one bucket. What do you think of those three? 

[24:21] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, so you there might even be a few different marketing tools that you'll use, depending on what your marketing kind of like strategy, you know, is. If it's content marketing, we'll get to that in just a sec. Or sometimes people kind of like finding email addresses through LinkedIn. So there's a thing called wizzart that kind of like you can go through and you can export, you know, data from LinkedIn. There's other tools out there called a Mailshake, where if you have you know, you're scraping data from somewhere, and you've got a list, then it can actually send out these messages to people without putting them into a CRM, which you're not allowed to do. 

[24:54] Dale Beaumont  You can't just scrape data and put it into a CRM and do mass market broadcast, but you can use systems like MailShake and Gmass that actually send out these emails manually. But they are still automated, but they actually are using software to send them out manually. So you're not kind of like breaking any rules there. So there's a whole bunch of different sort of tools that you'll use, you know, PR sort of tools, and things like that as well, depending on what your marketing strategy is. 

[25:19] Dale Beaumont  And now if you're one of the other strategies, content marketing, you need some way of planning out your content that you're going to be sharing. So a couple of ones would obviously got like Google Docs or Google Sheets. But a more sophisticated version of that is Airtable. Love Airtable, it's a fantastic tool, I won't go through it all, you can google up and you can check out that editor, let's be content kind of planning out your content, then once you kind of get your content planned out, then you need to schedule your posts. 

[25:43] Dale Beaumont  So the one that we used to use is called Buffer. Buffer is great. And you can check that out when kind of like explain it here. But the problem with Buffer is it didn't kind of link with Instagram and Facebook stories and stories. And now it's becoming quite big. So we found another tool called Woop Social.  W-o-o-p, and that kind of manages all of our kind of like outbound social media posts. And it can also manage some of the comments and stuff that comes in as well. And then you've also got your sort of like digital marketing platforms as well, if you are starting to do some paid ads. 

[26:19] Dale Beaumont  So you've got obviously the Google Ads platform as well. And then you've got the Facebook Ads platform, if you're doing any form of pay per click, when you're designing ads, of course, you need a copy. So you know, you're probably engaged in some type of copyright out on demand, or you write the copy yourself. And then you need some type of visuals. And the visuals will either be still graphics, so you probably use something like Canva. Or if you want to outsource it, there are services like Design Pickle, or ManyPixels, which do the graphic design for you. And then you also may test between doing video ads as well. And we've already spoken about video before as well. So yeah, that that kind of ties all that stuff together about all of your sort of like outbound content marketing. 

[27:03] Shahin Hoda  I love it. I love it. I feel like some people might be listening, it will be drinking from a firehose, so just just all these golden nuggets being dropped. Okay, that's cool. What about you know, you talked about the challenges with Buffer and scheduling for stories, what has been your experience with LinkedIn, because we tested, I think we tested Buffer, and we were very disappointed about the results of it like LinkedIn, definitely, the prioritise the posts that were coming from a social media scheduler, and we had to go back to manual, and then all of a sudden, our impressions went up again. So have you come across anything? I don't know, if you've played in the LinkedIn game, I know you post a lot, but what is, what are your thoughts on that? 

[27:54] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, it's a really interesting one. Because, you know, sometimes, like, you know, we've found the same thing before in the past that Facebook was de-prioritising things that came from, we used to use Hootsuite, you know, a long time ago as well. But then when, you know, people asked Facebook, Facebook, like no, we don't treat all posts equally. It's like really, so there's definitely something going on. And I think that they want what they all want, they all want native content. They all want content, promoted directly onto their platform, not through sort of like third parties. 

[28:25] Dale Beaumont  But they've copped it. They have copped a lot of like flack for de prioritising, and they've kind of some of these platforms have been kind of like, you know, caught out. And they've kind of bowed to pressure to try and equalise level the playing field and realise the fact that people are using these scheduling tools now, because they have to. Like if you want to, if you want to put up a post, and you need it to go at 10am in North America, and it's just not gonna work, because it's 2am, where you are to wake up in the morning and press the send button. 

[28:52] Dale Beaumont  You know, that's just, yeah, it's just not practical. And so from what I have been told from my team, that pendulum is sort of like swung back, and they are supporting and allowing these third party tools and not punishing people at all or as much. And so then it just becomes a sort of like a time sort of, like, save our answers to say, rather than me having to do all this stuff, if I lose maybe 5% of my reach, but I've saved myself hours a day, and that's a price I'm willing to pay. 

[29:22] Shahin Hoda  You said yourself waking up at 4am in the morning for a post. That's 5%. That's worth it. Okay. All right. Now, let's talk about integration. I think this is also a very sexy piece of tech that maybe not a lot of companies were using. You mentioned Zapier. You meant there were a couple of the ones out there, but tell us a little bit about that.
[29:45] Dale Beaumont  Yes. So when I talk about marketing and these marketing sort of stack or these tech tools, there's always someone in the audience that comes up to me at the end and says, isn't there just a program that does all of this thing, just in one? And it's like, that just doesn't exist, and it will never exist. Because in order for something to do in order for a product to do something really well, you know, it's got to, it can't do everything, otherwise it just would not work. So there is no one system that does it all. So you do have to, like I've said, find 3-4-5-6, you know, 10 things, eventually, when you get big, you probably got 10 tools. 

[30:24] Dale Beaumont  And then you will need to pass data from one tool to the next or to have them, you know, sort of sync up contexts or records or things like that. I mentioned one before, which was a classic from Wistia, which is a video hosting platform to your CRM system. Because we want to say, you know, if John, watch my video, I want to know about it. So I can then follow up, john, it's pretty kind of like an obvious thing that you want. Now you can't have two different systems, your CRM system, say Ontraport. And also Wistia. They That one's a video platform, and the other is a CRM system, but they share this common person, which is John. 

[31:01] Dale Beaumont  So how do I get the details from Wistia into my CRM system? Well, thankfully, now in the past, you used to have to kind of use things called API's, which send it and that would involve you having to know how to code these connections. And that was a kind of a limitation. So some great companies have popped up in the last five years. One of the biggest ones is called Zapier, or Zapier, there's another one called if this, then that, and a few others, but for the more kind of business purposes, we would recommend CPM. And basically, what it does is you just go in set up as a Zapier account, and then all these tools in there, thousands of tools that are already there, and we'll just go, let's just rather than having to all integrate with each other, which is going to take us all forever, that's all integrate with one, which is Zapier. 

[31:45] Dale Beaumont  And then everything can talk to everyone. And so what happens is that you go in and being without being a coder, you can actually make this one talk to this next one. And they've got these little things, think of them like little mini recipes or formulas that are already pre-built, and you select them on the drop down, and it says okay, when someone watches a video over here, fire a tag here, and you go yes, and so you just then you're basically, um, you can pretty much do it yourself, or you can outsource this to someone, you know, for 100 bucks or so they can kind of easily, if they're familiar with that Zapier, they can build this for you very, very easily. 

[32:20] Dale Beaumont  And then once you've done that, there are literally millions of different things that you could do. If you have like transcripts, I want the transcripts to go into my CRM system, or if you know, someone downloads a proposal, then you know, put a calendar appointment in my diary, the next day to follow them up, there's just heaps of different things that you could do, if someone doesn't show up for a meeting, I'm going to fire a tag that's going to send out an SMS. 

[32:46] Dale Beaumont  So you're kind of like, start to then develop this awareness of going, I'm doing all these things, you're not even aware of it, but you're doing so many things manually right now, or you're having to remember to remind yourself to sort of do things and that's just, you know, brain just forgets a lot of stuff. And that means that opportunities, you know, slip through the cracks, and we miss out on that on business. But once you then start building these automations, it just takes the pressure off your brain, and just makes sure that stuff can actually get done. 

[33:16] Shahin Hoda  makes life a whole lot easier. makes life a lot easier. Okay, we got the last one. And you kind of mentioned that, and that's about document management. You mentioned proposals, give us the spiel on document management, like what do we need to think about when it comes to document management in terms of tools? 

[33:34] Dale Beaumont  Yes, so in terms of just all of the internal documents within a business, you're probably gonna be just using Google. Google has Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Forms, and that's all of the kind of the internal stuff, sending out Google Docs to clients as a for a formal business kind of proposal, you know, it's gonna look, it's gonna look like a document, it's gonna look pretty boring. And so, but the internal stuff, that's great, and it's collaborative, and so we love, you know, using Google internally, but for outbound stuff, then you're going to need some type of proposal software. 

[34:09] Dale Beaumont  So one of the biggest ones is called Proposify, or I think another one out there is called Better Proposals. And this is whereby you can kind of go in and put in all of your information, you could have an about us panel, or you could have reasons why panel, you could have a pricing panel and you basically then kind of set up this proposal template. And then when a new client comes in, you kind of go in, you might change the name, and you might go, I guess you want to move this panel up, or I want to change the pricing, or I want to add in a couple of new testimonials that are relevant for them, you know, in their industry, then you click save, and then you send it to them. 

[34:43] Dale Beaumont  And again, what will happen is you can link Proposify to your ecommerce system. And so what will happen is whenever someone downloads your proposal, you get an alert. They've just downloaded your proposal and clicked on it, but you also get some amazing analytics. So they spent 30 seconds on it, or they spent 30 minutes on it, or they opened it one. So they have been there 20 times or and they also know how long they spend on every single page. And so you can start to get some really good insights and analytics around your proposals to the point whereby you can also then have people signing up to join, and then from there even go to an order form where they can punch in kind of like details. 

[35:18] Dale Beaumont  And then, of course, at some point, you need a, we haven't sort of touched on this yet, but you need a way of taking money, which isn't kind of marketing, but it's square kind of marketing ends, which is when you make the sale. And that's why you need a way of being able to get people to buy. And so the kind of the big player in this space is Stripe, and Stripe would be what you're going to do to start sort of take payments and then in terms of document sign off, depending on the kind of level of sophistication that you need Proposify does have people sort of being able to sign things off, but then you might have contracts.  

[35:50] Dale Beaumont  And that's where you could use something like DocuSign, or HelloSign for making sure that people are then agreed to your terms of service or, or contracts and if you have them. And there's the last thing that I quickly want to sort of touch on. Like one thing we that is kind of all this stuff is then somewhere just managing all of your all of this stuff, how do you manage everything, we need some type of project management tool, or task management tool. And so that's where a tool like Teamwork, or Asana, or Monday.com, these are basically the tools that you would need to kind of manage everything every sort of to do in your business. 

[36:25] Dale Beaumont  So that may be even a good place to start, like get a project management tool and the project management tool you put in, get a CRM or get this or get this or get that so that way, because we've already gone through like 30 or 40 things here, how do you remember them all, where you put them all into your project management software, decide on what your priorities are, decide who's gonna do what, and then he does get busy and get them done, and then take them off. 

[36:44] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, that's, that's a really good point, start with that project management tool. And then go from there. Because this is, there's a lot of tools here, right? And one could become especially small business or a small business owner, or, you know, the first marketing hire or wherever it is, could get overwhelmed pretty easily, pretty quickly. So taking that approach of starting with the project management tool, and then go from there. What would you say is probably the next three tools that somebody needs to look at, after sorting out the project management. 

[37:18] Dale Beaumont  Yes, after project manager is probably a CRM system, I just think that you need some way to then put all of your, all of your leads and all their contact information. And so CRM systems are probably going to be the next thing that you're gonna need. And then it's probably getting you're kind of like a website, you know, up and running, you know, as soon as kind of, like, you know, possible because people are going to need to, you know, go somewhere to check you out. And so, you know, if you've got a website, and you've got a way of capturing leads, and then you've just got, you know, even you know, your Gmail and, and a mobile phone number like you can, you can kind of technically be in business. 

[37:54] Dale Beaumont  And you can start and then you'll just start getting smarter over time and going, okay, we need to, you know, this making, getting calls, you know, at 2am, in the morning on my mobile phone isn't working anymore. So now I'll kind of move to like, we suggest the dial pad, for example. And then something else will kind of like happen, where you go, oh, I need to send someone a video, what am I gonna do? And then you might kind of look at YouTube or Wistia. 

[38:16] Dale Beaumont  So, the thing is, yeah, don't kind of get overwhelmed to start with the kind of the essentials. And then you just start bolting on these other things over time when these kinds of problems come up, and you need a solution. Like sending proposals or managing kind of like your social media posts. And, and then yeah, if you just kind of try and master like one thing, like every month, and then get that locked in, like within a year, you know, there'll be 12, kind of like things that you'll kind of have or working in place. 

[38:45] Shahin Hoda  I love it. I love it. All right. Now this is good. This is good. Now, before we wrap up, I also know that you're working on a new tool. Tell us a little bit about that. 

[38:55] Dale Beaumont  Ah yeah, so one of the tools that the web developed was actually a solution to a problem that we were experiencing, because we were sending people sort of documents, and they look great on a computer, but they look absolutely terrible on mobile phones. And if you've ever, you know, received a pitch deck before, or you know, some type of magazine sort of style document on a mobile phone, the text is tiny, you know, you have to pinch and scroll. And it's just like it's a really bad user experience. 

[39:22] Dale Beaumont  So we created this bit of tech ourselves, which is called Mobi Mag. Mobimag.co. And it enables you to create and to basically send people documents so that they look amazing on the most important device, which is a mobile phone and you can so it's great if you have like a digital magazine, or if you have some type of newsletter, or you're sending people proposals. You can also embed videos into them, can embed podcasts into it as well. So yeah, it's a really cool platform. So yeah, check out the Mobimag.co and you'll see all the information there. 

[39:57] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, for sure. We'll definitely include the links of all the tools that you mentioned in the description in the blog post for sure. Because I feel like there's probably going to be some people taking copious amounts of notes, but we will also definitely include it in the blog post. All right. Well, on that note, if anybody wants to know more about what you do, or you know, or business blueprint or anything like that, what's the best way for them to find out? 

[40:24] Dale Beaumont  Yeah, the best way would be to go along to either my personal website, Dalebeaumont.com, or our business, Businessblueprint.com. And then we run a a free three-hour business workshop, which is called 52 ways because I share 52 different sorts of strategies to help your new business and he was focused quite a bit on marketing, which is awesome. But I focus on all these other areas of business as well. So that's yeah, you'll find the links to that on any of my websites. So look out for 52 ways and then just register. It's completely free. You can attend from anywhere in the world, and it will show you how to build a better business. 

[41:02] Shahin Hoda  Sounds lovely. All right. Well, Dale, it's been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for jumping on the podcast. And I'll look forward to more conversations later. 

[41:14] Dale Beaumont  Yeah. You're welcome. Thanks, everyone. Bye.