My Favorite Martech

Alanna Jackson: Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Alanna and Stacy. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.

Stacy Jackson: Hello Alanna, how are you today?

Alanna Jackson: I am good. I was going to say delighted, but that wouldn't have made sense. I guess delightful. I'm delightful?

Stacy Jackson: You can be delightful, but you know, let's not stretch it. crosstalk So guess what we're going to talk about today?

Alanna Jackson: What?

Stacy Jackson: Well, it's not what we thought we were going to talk about. Guys, let me tell you just a little side note. It could be hard to have a podcast, especially during COVID when everybody gets sick. I got sick for a few weeks and we couldn't have a recording. Some of our guests were sick at different times, so makes things a little challenging and that's kind of where we are today. So we're going to talk about our favorite tech tools.

Alanna Jackson: Woo!

Stacy Jackson: And I know this is off the cuff and we didn't really plan it, so we'll see where it goes.

Alanna Jackson: Yeah, we're just kind of winging it this week, but it'll be a shorter episode because we're just each going to talk about one of our favorite tech tools and just kind of give you a little glimpse into what it can do for you and what we like about it. And, so there you go. Hopefully you can check these out and find out if they're good for you.

Stacy Jackson: And if we do have any kind of affiliate relationship with any of these, we will let you know, we won't trick you into buying and getting us some money. So Alanna, you want to go first?

Alanna Jackson: Sure. So my absolute favorite marketing tool, for social especially, is SocialBee, because SocialBee just makes your life easy. You can set up categories and then you can put different types of content in each of those categories. You can tell it to, "Hey, I want it to always repost sometimes, or I want it to just post once, I want it to post at this time of day, I want it to..." All these different things. You can do different variations when you're writing those posts, and so based on those categories, you can have RSS feeds come in. So if you have a blog, a podcast, all different kinds of things, you have all these different feeds. Those can feed into SocialBee and it'll populate certain categories. So it kind of takes out some of the legwork that you might have to do.
And then you can have a calendar that you can set up and you can say, "Okay, on this day, I want a blog to go at this time. I want a podcast to go on this day at this time." And you can set up a calendar and it'll pull different posts from each of those different categories. It is so great for when you want to be able to repurpose some of your content. And if you want to make your life easier with adding in... sprinkling in different things, whether it be the different types of content, things like that. And you can also set it to do short links, you can set UTMs for each of those different categories. There's so much that you can do in SocialBee, and I absolutely love it for scheduling social and doing all that social management.

Stacy Jackson: So one point Alanna, with SocialBee, you mentioned the RSS feeds coming through. So you don't want to be lazy with that. Like if you're putting in an RSS feed, do you go in and update what comes in so that you have a unique message or do you just let it come with the title?

Alanna Jackson: Yeah, if you want to be lazy, I guess you can. But I usually will go in and once it pulls in, I'll just go in and say... change my wording for my post, any mentions or hashtags if I don't have it auto set to pull in certain hashtags. Like if you have a podcast, you may have it hashtag for that podcast that you use. So you can always have it pull in that hashtag on any of your podcasts. So it just takes out little-bitty steps here and there, and it just makes it so much faster to do things and to make sure that you're always going to be sharing a webinar every once in a while. You're always going to be sharing your eBooks, so that they're constantly in the rotation so that you're not losing momentum on those things.
Because a lot of times you share it and then you forget about it if you don't go back and have to recreate the whole thing. And so for these, like I said, you can do different variations for each of those posts right within that one part, and this week it's going to pull this variation. And then the next time you use it'll use that variation. So you have some flexibility to make things not always be the same thing over and over again. I love it. Hands down, one of my favorite. Sometimes it has some glitches, but you talk to the support and they're usually fairly good about helping you get those fixed. But hands down, one of my favorites.

Stacy Jackson: I do like SocialBee too. I don't use it quite as much as you do, but it works great with one of my favorite tools, which is UpContent. And we do have an affiliate code for that I will share. So just FYI, and I'll put it in the show notes to let you know that it's our affiliate code. But UpContent helps you curate different sources from around the web, and then you could take that RSS feed of all your collection and pass that over to SocialBee, and then you have nice curated content that you could share through SocialBee.
But there's a lot more that you can do with UpContent besides just using it with SocialBee. We have it placed on our website so that you have a look at what we're reading. We have a page called What We're Reading, so you can see the things that we've found useful, that we think our readers will find useful too. They also have a cool plugin with HubSpot, which is another one of my favorite tools. If you're using the sales functionality on HubSpot you can have different feeds come in from UpContent as a social icebreaker, so that when you're in the contact feed, there's a little section over here... if you can imagine the board, how I'm miming it here.

Alanna Jackson: I'm doing the same thing. You see what I'm doing here?

Stacy Jackson: Yeah. But you can take that icebreaker and then pull it into an email in the HubSpot screen, and do a little outreach using curated content to help break the ice with someone, or to reinforce something you've already sent. So if you've been curating contents about widgets and you have a hot widget lead, you could always look at your icebreakers in the HubSpot board for that content. I don't know why I keep saying board, you know what I mean...the screen. And you can pull in the most relevant article and then write a little note to your contact and give them a little extra information that's not totally salesy, but helps put you in that thought leader mode or that helper mode. So UpContent and HubSpot and SocialBee are all three some of my favorite tools.

Alanna Jackson: Yeah, and I use both of those... all three of those tools daily. And I can't remember if you mentioned it, but in UpContent you can say, look for certain keywords, you can set up all your criteria to pull all these different types of content in, and then you can move them into what's called collections. And then from there you can feed them into those different areas. It's a really cool tool. And Scott Rogerson, who is one of the founders of it, he's such an awesome guy. If you ever have questions or anything, he's on it, he's like there and will help. I love the tool. I love the person that is behind that tool. He's a really great guy.

Stacy Jackson: And he's been on our podcast a couple times, so we'll link to his episodes in the show notes because he has been a really great friend to us and been on our show, and we really love the software he's put out there. I wanted to say one other thing I love about UpContent, that has to do with another tool that I like, the tool is called rasa.io. It does emails and it builds individual emails for the people in your contact list using AI to pick the best content that will resonate the most with them. But we feed in that UpContent feed into rasa, and that is just awesome too. That is a real time saver. If you're trying to create a curated email, you can also add in things from your own blog or podcast to make sure those are featured, but another great time saver, you can go in and edit it a little to make it yours. But it's just a really awesome tool that also works with UpContent.

Alanna Jackson: So I stuck to my one.

Stacy Jackson: I know, mine had a lot of branches.

Alanna Jackson: You went with HubSpot, you went with UpContent, you went with rasa. Come on, follow direction, Stacy.

Stacy Jackson: Well you know I love marketing technology.

Alanna Jackson: I know, you are a marketing technology geek.

Stacy Jackson: I love it.

Alanna Jackson: You are all about it. You're always on AppSumo, "Let's try this one, let's try this one..."

Stacy Jackson: I'm an AppSumo junkie. That is the best and worst site for me to be a member of.

Alanna Jackson: Yes, and for me because I get tons of invites, I'm like, "Do I need to do something with this or do I ignore it? You're just testing it? What's going on?"

Stacy Jackson: It's the best. Well, Alanna, since I chose like three or four tools, are there any others that you like that you want to touch on?

Alanna Jackson: Well, for me, obviously Canva is another one.

Stacy Jackson: Oh yeah, that's a good one.

Alanna Jackson: I pretty much use that daily too for social, for all different kinds of images and things like that. So Canva is awesome because it has all these templates that you can make your own, or you can see a template and then you want something similar, but it's not really meeting your needs so you can create your own that is almost exactly like the template that you saw, but it does the things that you want it to do. They have so many new things. My favorite thing is the background remover on images.

Stacy Jackson: Yeah, that's nice.

Alanna Jackson: I love that, because then I don't have to go to Photoshop or Affinity Photo and remove the background anymore. It's all right there. And I saw something new on there today. Oh man, I can't remember what it was, but it was something I was like, "Ooh, that's cool." So I'll have to try and think of what that was. But-

Stacy Jackson: We'll add it in the show notes if you think of it.

Alanna Jackson: Yeah. They're always adding new things. Actually. I can pull it up right now and look because I...

Stacy Jackson: And Photoshop and all of those high level user tools still have a place, of course. But when you're doing easy stuff for social, or even a featured image for a blog, I love Canva too. That's great.

Alanna Jackson: It's just so awesome. Face Retouch! That's what it was. I just saw that today when I was creating an image, I'm like, "Oh, so if you have a zit on your nose or something..." I haven't tested it so I don't know exactly what it does, but I saw Face Retouch and I was like, "Ooh, that's cool."

Stacy Jackson: That's neat.

Alanna Jackson: Canva has really upped their game in the past couple of years. They've really added a lot of cool stuff to it. So I love Canva too. So those are my favorite tools-

Stacy Jackson: One thing I like about Canva too, is if you have a team plan, you can set up your logos and color palettes so that it's easy. You just got to look at your color palette and you can create everything to match your brand. That is awesome too. Yes. crosstalk And you have multiple color palettes-

Alanna Jackson: inaudible time, especially if you work with different color palettes, like if you have different clients or something like that.

Stacy Jackson: Yeah.

Alanna Jackson: It just makes it so easy, so easy.

Stacy Jackson: Yeah, it does. Well-

Alanna Jackson: So if you want to learn about some more marketing tech, maybe we'll do another episode of some of our other favorite tech tools. So hopefully you'll give these a shot. See if you like them. If you have any questions about any of them, we'd be glad to answer your questions and tell you what our additional thoughts are if you have on those.

Stacy Jackson: Or hey, if you want to come on the podcast and talk to us about your tech stack, we'd love to have that conversation because we are tech stack geeks. Show me a stack babies! We're ready! That's what we'll call the series. Hopefully you don't get in trouble with anybody-

Alanna Jackson: What?

Stacy Jackson: Hopefully we don't get in trouble with anybody for that.

Alanna Jackson: Well, you never know, you never know.

Stacy Jackson: We mean it in a cool nerd way.

Alanna Jackson: Yes. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find me on Twitter at @Alanna_Jax. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. Or you can look me up on LinkedIn. And for Stacy, you can get her on Twitter at @Stacy_Jax. That's S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And she is also on LinkedIn. So reach out to us, connect with us, follow us, whatever, we'd love to hear from you. We want to hear what your favorite tech tools are. So reach out and let us know or leave a comment.

Stacy Jackson: That's true. Thanks for listening in this week. And we hope to bring you more interviews soon. Thanks.

Alanna Jackson: Bye.

Stacy Jackson: Bye!