Episode 42 My Agencies Software Stack

Show Notes

00:11

Hi, I’m Rob Cairns here. I’m the CEO and Chief Creative, amazing ideas of stunning digital marketing Comm. A Toronto based digital marketing agency, that I’m going to talk to you about the software stack that runs my agency business, have some new things, give you some ideas on how you can run your business better. One thing worth noting is, I am so not into the shiny tool syndrome, jumping on appsumo deals and getting the latest and greatest and tools, it just doesn’t work for me. I strongly suggest to get to know your tools, use them well. And master them and all the ins and outs of them. As you talk to different people, they’ll all say use this tool, use this to find a tool that works for you. Member opinions are suggestive, these are what we use just to give you an idea. But if you find a tool that works better for you, by all means, go for it and dive in. So let’s start the now and see what tools stunning digital marketing comm use email. For email, we use G Suite. And which basically allows Google to host our mail with our domains. We’ve done that for a number of years, along with email G Suite also hosts account. So we use Google Calendar basically branded as our domain name. That’s the easy thing there. Frankly, is reason for using G Suite a it’s easy to set up and be it as the best spam filters route. So keep that appointment booking. We’ve tried many systems and we said a long time ago an appointment plant, love the software easy to set up easy for video conferencing really is zoom and zoom all the way before we use them a couple years ago, it was really Skype. But frankly Skype is doesn’t have a built in recorder isn’t as easy to use the chats not as good. And there’s a number of reasons here. So we really really love the folks at zoom, and all the great stuff that they’re doing. So for that it’s no question. It’s zoom all the way for web development. We’re a WordPress shop. So I make no bones about that. That’s their CMS of choice. But again, it’s something else works for you use web hosting, it’s almost always siteground among them, which he posts and domain registration means cheap.com all the way. Notice something here, there’s no AIG companies, one on ones or GoDaddy listed then through all those had bad experiences. And I’ll go so far as GoDaddy that means we won’t use trickery in our business. And we will not use managed a BP for both GoDaddy subsidiaries not happening for multiple website management, or big friends The main WP been using it for a long time. Shout out to those guys. And shout out to my friend Todd Jones who does writing for main WP well done for project management quicker. I’ve tried multiple tools, including notion Trello, Asana, and many more. And here’s the one category has kind of waffled in the last couple years I’ve gone through tools. They don’t work. Well. I go back. And a big factor for us is what works well on mobile. And frankly, quick up on mobile is stellar on an Android tablet I often use it on when I’m out and about with clients or on my phone well done to the folks who are getting mobile.

03:54

CRM HubSpot. We actually switched away from HubSpot tried a couple other serums didn’t like them and ended up back at HubSpot. They’ve been around a long time. Well, kudos to the guys over at HubSpot, communication beyond conference calls and email, nothing there in our agency. We don’t use teams, we don’t use slack. We don’t use any other variants of it. Because we believe everything can be answered in a zoom call or email. Those are our processes. And frankly, adding more communication methods was a rabbit hole that I as an agency owner didn’t want accounting. This one might surprise you. Way back. We were using QuickBooks, and we were actually under the QuickBooks partner program. And long story of it is the folks who have QuickBooks gave us really hard time in the fact that they originally offered me the partner program and I just basically said, Okay, I’ll export my data, I’m gone. And my accountant doesn’t really care. So for him, as long as he can do my books, he’s good. So you We made a switch to wave apps about six months ago for email marketing mailer light. Before that, we were on MailChimp. I really liked the wiziwig and mailer light and the automation, I’m actually on the page here. So it’s not a case of the free care of not being enough. But for what I’m doing, it’s good enough. for clients. I use everything from keep Infusionsoft to Active Campaign to drip to your name. And we’re pretty capable of doing anything in our agency operating system on our computers for window shop. for video editing, this one’s a good one, it’s DaVinci Resolve. Frankly, I don’t like the Adobe space. Many people certainly said that I don’t like what they’ve done with their subscription model. And you know, at the end of the day, it’s not what we want it. And for video editing. So that takes away premium aspectual I on the graphic editing in Photoshop. We also for a long time, we were using curl Visual Studio. And frankly, the upgrade path is awful the last couple times we’ve actually emailed support, and they’ve been so not helpful. So we made the switch to DaVinci Resolve never back. For audio editing, we use the open source audacity is probably the best piece of package out there for graphics, Canva, affinity and Pixlr. And for some small stuff like image resizing, we’ll use a free tool called pay dotnet as well but get paid dotnet.com for general document editing, Google Docs and office 365. We use both for Cloud Storage OneDrive, Google Drive and wasabi. Now the reason wasabi over s3 is it uses the s3 API. And also you don’t pay for regress. So the only pay you actually pay for storage. a terabyte of storage on wasabi is 499 US dollars, really cheap. for note taking Microsoft OneNote. We moved away from Evernote a long, long time ago, much happier. And we get that with Office 365. And in fact, we have the OneDrive to store we can use OneNote on our tablet or phone and our PC. To actually throw hot key text snippets we use a program called phrase Express. Love it. Shout out to those guys for podcast hosting like that hosts this podcast anchor.fm

07:33

Now,

07:34

one of the knocks I’ve heard is anchors not professional enough. I don’t agree. What I wouldn’t do with anchor is record my podcasts direct on anchor, we either record them on zoom or on acity and then edit them and then import them into anchor. And all these podcasts we do we actually record the podcast. Some episodes I drop a header on I certainly drop header music on and I dropped a trailer on where if you’ve been a longtime listener, you know the trailer is the same every episode because frankly, we recorded once we edited in after them we got one thing I liked about the anchor. It pushes out to all the other platforms including pocket cash, iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, and more. So check out anchor recording quick clients. videos, we use loom for doing automatic transcripts from audio which we do a lot for pod casts a site called otter.ai. And for social media management, we use Hootsuite, we’ve been a Hootsuite fan for a long time, that works out great. So these are kind of the stack that we use in our agency. I’m always testing new tools. But as I say, I don’t change tools very lightly. In a future episode, I think I’m going to take over next couple weeks on WordPress stack and break it down for you. Some of that might surprise you, but we use insert is great. This is what we do. And I might also break a couple other things down for you. So as always, Rob parents, the CEO and Chief Curator of amazing ideas of stunning digital marketing.com. If I can help you anywhere you have an opinion. Drop a comment on the post on our blog. Hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, be glad to talk to you guys. I just want to help you make your business succeed. And I love you all you have a great day. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to the SDM business marching WordPress podcast. The show’s hosted by Robert Cairns CEO and Chief Creative mazing ideas that stunning digital marketing outcome. This podcast comes out every week. It’s available on all podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest on this podcast, please email us at podcast at stunning digital ping.com if you’d like to find out more about the digital marketing services we provide, please go to stunning digital marketing. com. This podcast is dedicated to Robert slay father whose parents have an amazing week. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. Make your business succeed.