How Businesses Can Save Money While Boosting Communication Capabilities

Each day, our jobs put new challenges before us. That’s what makes them interesting, and gets our mind going — but communication difficulties aren’t one of those inspiring tasks!

In this blog, we will present you with ways to amplify your communication capacities, while saving some money.

Always smarter, never harder — try working with these tools

Spending money to save money? This does sound like a sham, but that’s only the case if you purchase the wrong tools or don’t use them to their full potential. 

In the long run, the features the services provide considerably decrease the running costs, especially for small and medium-sized businesses who wish to take over the market. 

Just remember Captain Samuel Vimes’ “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness”! 

If you’re not fond of Pratchett, let’s TLDR it: $10 boots will last you a year at best, while $50 boots last for years and years; you end up spending more by repeatedly buying cheap boots, instead of making a one-time investment.

You won’t need to create a decision matrix – we’ve chosen some tools to boost your communication capabilities already. Let’s have a look at GaggleAMP and Expandi, the tools we picked for boosting communication capabilities.

GaggleAMP

Employees are a rich source of influence many companies have yet to consider. With the GaggleAMP employee advocacy platform, you can rediscover the potential that lies within your reach at all times. These neat features help the employees advocate comfortably:

• Customized mobile and desktop versions — platform is intuitive and easy to use on a browser and with mobile app
• Efficient segmentation options — sort the employees into teams where everybody gets specific tasks and roles 
• Precise content distribution — content sharing tools help hit the right spot each time
• Comprehensive engagement possibilities — employees can take more than 40 different actions online 
• In-depth analytics — track what’s going on and improve right away
• Gamification — leaderboards, point system and rewards make each advocacy task fun

What does this have to do with the company’s business communication capabilities, you may ask.

Well — everything. 

This is a form of genuine human interaction between two persons, not a loud commercial screaming at prospects to buy.

An ad will always be just that — an ad, no matter how much you invest to make it inspiring and hilarious. It will never have the authenticity of a personal recommendation. People will always take it with a grain of salt, provided that they didn’t just scroll past your masterpiece of a campaign.

On the other hand, just one heartfelt recommendation from a real person can get you plenty of new big-ticket purchases. Word of mouth is powerful; just imagine what it can do when spread by the people who want the company to succeed the most!

Instead of burying tons of money into multiple tools and expensive strategies — use what you already have. 

If you harness the unused power of your people with GaggleAMP, you can save money by complementing:

• Influencer marketing
• Social media marketing
• Brand recognition strategies
• SEO efforts such as International SEO Delante
• Outreach campaigns

Expandi

Expandi.io is one of the safest LinkedIn automation tools on the market

It is a cloud-based software that takes care of lead generation, contact database, drip campaigns, and campaign management, while the dashboard provides an insight into current works and reports on a single screen.

These are the reasons you might want to pick Expandi.io:

• Mimicking human behavior – in order to avoid being recognized as spam, Expandi.io algorithm is made to copy the way people reach out: a new proxy IP address is assigned to each account, delays between actions are randomized, daily campaign limits gradually increase and smart limits prevent the users to send more than 100 messages per day
• Meticulous personalization – messages are automated but personalized as well – to avoid sending the same, stale and robotic messages to everyone (and getting zero response)
• Thorough and meaningful scraping – acquiring info on everyone who liked a certain post on LinkedIn and importing the CSV list, then getting in touch with them
• It now has Advanced Dynamic Personalization for LinkedIn – a feature unique to Expandi.io, with a dynamic placeholder. It is a custom tag, adapted to the individual you’re reaching out to on LinkedIn

As far as the pricing goes, Expandi.io only has a free 7–day trial, but no free plans; however – for $99 per account, per month, you get access to every feature there is.

When Slack starts slacking, try Social Intranet

Don’t get me wrong, Slack is a great tool for team collaboration! Nonetheless, there are some things it simply cannot help you with, and sometimes it even hinders your performance.

Slack is good for instant messaging, fast conversations in real-time and short, simple requests.

However, your company and team will grow, you’ll employ more people — tech and non-tech, improve technical skills, expand to new countries, even markets. Slack may become a pair of boots that fit no longer (no more boot analogies, I promise).

When that happens, it’s time to consider adding a social intranet.

A social intranet is a service that ties company messaging and social media together. It has powerful sharing and searching capabilities and creates a far better communication hub for employees. 

It also provides an advanced, centralized way to store and organize information. Important stuff cannot get buried under a constant stream of new messages and mentions, only to be forgotten when they get out of sight. Everything you have to revisit, you need to look up first — and there are better things to do with that time.

A well-picked social intranet can replace multiple tools for task management and messaging as well, thus saving you the money you’d spend on them.

Fashion fades, style is forever – in communication as well!

In the end, here are some actionable communication tips to improve your communication style, free of charge:

1. Automate everything that’s possible — let the algorithms do the repeated actions taking lots of your time and attention.
2. Write better emails — go straight to the point with your subject lines and messages, proofread before sending them, limit the number of requests per email
3. Try and have a real-life conversation whenever possible…
4. …but don’t schedule a meeting for something that can be solved via email. Everybody hates that and it will waste at least an hour
5. Use simple words when explaining new concepts
6. Actively listen and look to hear different viewpoints with open questions
7. Keep on educating your team with not only the hard skills but also the soft skills, including the best communication practices and techniques

These tips will save you time, time equals money — you get the gist. By the time you finish that unnecessary two-hour meeting, your agents could have contacted quite a few prospects.

Final thoughts

Boosting communication capabilities doesn’t have to be a nightmare, no matter the size of your enterprise. 

Be ready to constantly improve and adapt. 2020 proved just how important it is to communicate efficiently, and spread your message via digital channels when we have no choice but to stay isolated.

Written by: Stefan Smulders, Founder of Worlds safest software for LinkedIn Automation Expandi.io