Business Power Tools: Must-Have Apps for Your Marketing Pipeline
Enterprises are always looking for more engaging ways for their employees to collaborate and present information during team and company meetings. Many businesses have begun turning to large, interactive touchscreens installed in conference rooms and offices. Recent such offerings, like the Google Jamboard and the Microsoft Surface Hub, have gotten a lot of attention lately. But digital workplace solution provider Prysm has been building these kinds of solutions for more than a decade for customers, including GE, Sprint, and Under Armour.
Prysm began as a manufacturer of video wall displays for enterprise offices, but has evolved into a combined hardware and software platform called "Prysm Digital Workplace." The offering integrates third-party applications, content, and services into a centralized business dashboard that plugs into everything from Dropbox, G Suite, and Microsoft Office 365 to NetSuite, Salesforce, and Tableau Desktop. The company also still sells in-room presentation hardware.
Paige O'Neill is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Prysm, overseeing the company's marketing and sales campaigns across its product portfolio. O'Neill has more than 20 years of marketing experience across enterprise software, cloud computing, customer experience, green technology, and social media at companies including IBM and Oracle. O'Neill joined PCMag for our latest installment of "Business Power Tools," discussing the communication, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and social tools that she and her team heavily rely upon in day-to-day marketing operations.
Prysm's Marketing and Social App Arsenal
1. Salesforce
Unsurprisingly, O'Neill said Salesforce is Prysm's go-to app for CRM. But that's only half of the equation. Salesforce is one half of the two-headed beast that makes up Prysm's sales and marketing automation funnel.
"I'm using Salesforce to track conversion in my marketing campaigns. So, Salesforce and HubSpot are a tandem team for our organization," said O'Neill. "Where HubSpot leaves off, Salesforce picks it up, and then we can track all the way through to revenue. So [with] Salesforce, I'm looking at our pipeline, our conversions to customers, and the lead source and where it came from."
2. HubSpot
As mentioned earlier, HubSpot is the other side of Prysm's marketing pipeline. O'Neill said HubSpot is her essential dashboard as a CMO for overseeing the totality of inbound and outbound marketing efforts.
3. Social Apps
There are plenty of social networks and buzzy apps available today. But, from a marketing perspective, O'Neill focuses on three networks in particular: Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. From a business-to-business (B2B) standpoint in particular, O'Neill discussed the evolving value of LinkedIn.
"Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are my big ones. From both a CMO perspective and personally, I'm more into Instagram these days. I've always got Instagram going to look at what's trending and what people are talking about," said O'Neill. "Then Twitter and LinkedIn are our two biggest B2B enterprise social apps. LinkedIn has really evolved, I think, from being a networking and job seeking application to actually being a channel for marketing. We see some of our highest conversions of campaigns on LinkedIn. It's also valuable from a recruiting and networking standpoint, obviously."
4. Hootsuite
To manage social media presences, O'Neill uses Hootsuite. From Hootsuite's central collection of curated feeds, it's easier to identify targeted groups of followers to gain audience insights or categorize influencer groups for future marketing campaigns.
5. Skype for Business
Lastly, O'Neill revealed that Prysm has ditched landline phones in favor of company-wide business video conferencing. In place of office landlines, Prysm uses cloud-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) to stay connected wherever employees and managers are and on any device.
"We just, as a company, got rid of all the phones in offices. We've gone to Skype for Business. So, no one in the whole company has a phone in their office," said O'Neill. "Our business is a little on the older side so people are still getting used to it, but it's been interesting because we're using Skype in a very integrated way.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.