I love two things: Slack and becoming more productive.
Okay, I obviously love more than two things total, but I do love those two things a lot.
And one of the reasons I love Slack so much is because of how much easier it makes…well, everything.
Slack messages and chats can replace (or at least help you cut down on) so much of the inefficient communication at growing companies that it’s hard not to fall in love.
You and your team still arrive at the same decisions, create the same products and campaigns, and run the same business that you otherwise would, but you do it with way less time spent keeping up with confusing “reply all” threads and sitting in meetings that last 30 minutes longer than they needed to.
That means more time spent…oh I don’t know…actually executing marketing strategies. Who wouldn’t want to focus on that?
Slack is awesome for letting us spend less time in meetings and more time marketing, but it gets even better. With their huge directory of Slack integrations and apps, it begins to improve and replace your marketing stack in addition to emails and meetings.
By connecting the tools and apps you already use to Slack, you can have updates from those software come to you. You get a notification when you want to and about what you want to, instead of taking time to go log into the tool and check on things.
And it’s so convenient.
Not to mention how handy it is to have all that data and information stored for you in Slack, with your (hopefully) organized teams and channels and a powerful search that can find almost any message.
So let’s look at some of the specific integrations making life and work easier for marketers. (We’re not including the /giphy command, but we all know that it makes everything else better, right?)
8 Slack integrations making marketers’ lives easier
1. Mention
Obviously ego requires I list this one first. Mention’s Slack integration is the best thing ever in my unbiased eyes. But it’s also the one that saves the most time because of my bias. Since I work here, I spend a LOT of time monitoring, so being able to do it in Slack is crazy helpful.
The integration has two parts: getting real-time notifications about conversations happening online, and getting digests of your alert activity. So if you want to receive the actual mentions for an alert in Slack, you can add any alert to any Slack channel. But if you just want a daily summary, there’s that as well.
2. Trello
Trello and Slack together is like the SaaS equivalent of a crime-fighting superhero duo. Like Batman and Robin if Robin were cooler.
By linking the two together, you get the best of what Trello calls “collaboration and communication combined.” If Slack is where you and your team discuss projects, and Trello’s where you organize them, you need them both at the same time anyway.
Say you’re in Slack discussing next week’s blog posts and decide to move a few around. This changes the deadlines for them, and you need to update your week in Trello to reflect that. But normally that means you need to open up a new tab and go to Trello.
And we all know that when you open up a new tab, there’s about a 25% chance you’ll get distracted and type in Facebook or YouTube instead. (Just me? Oops…)
Instead, manage your boards from Slack. Create new cards, show important card info in your conversations, and update project info without opening a new tab – productivity #goals.
3. Paperbot
Speaking of organization, if you and your team share tons of links and content with each other, you can use Paperbot to organize and keep track of it all for future reference.
Use it to wrangle and catalog all the PR mentions, helpful tutorials, and interesting stories you want to refer back to sometime. Because as good as Slack’s search is, we’ve all had a frustrated moment trying to hunt down a link shared a few days ago among all the conversations you’ve had since.
You can add tags to the links you share to categorize them, Paperbot offers an email digest daily or weekly, and there are apps to view a curated list of all your shared links.
It’s a content-obsessed Slacker’s greatest wish.
4. Growthbot
Growthbot is one of those cool marketing projects that the HubSpot crew (in this case, Dharmesh) is known for, like their Marketing Grader. You can actually add the bot to either Slack or Facebook Messenger to easily pull important marketing info.
You can ask it questions like “what keywords does [any website] rank for?” as well as specific questions about numbers in your HubSpot and Google Analytics accounts, if you choose to connect them.
It kind of reminds me of having an intern or minion that you can Slack any time and ask, “can you check this for me real quick?”
5. Glance
Glance, a social data tool, also has a Slack bot that you can ask questions. But this one can actually go into a bunch of your accounts and pull metrics.
Specifically, it connects to apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, WordPress, YouTube…even email marketing tools like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. And once it’s connected, look at what you can do:
Glance Bot for Slack from Glance on Vimeo.
As shown, you can ask the bot questions to get immediate answers to all your analytic questions, or you can schedule custom alerts and reports to receive automatically. Again, it’s like having an assistant or intern at your beck and call, which sounds lovely.
6. Advocately
If you’re specifically interested in tracking new reviews of your product or business in Slack, customer advocacy tool Advocately’s Slack integration sends them to you as they’re posted. We use it at Mention to track reviews our customers leave on Capterra:
With positive reviews, we can identify our best advocates for future outreach and be sure to build a relationship with them. If any negative reviews pop-up, we get important feedback and can see if we need to reach out and solve a customer service issue.
7. Drift
Finally, we have the Drift messaging platform and their Slack app. Drift lets you chat with your customers and website visitors in real time.
Instead of staying logged into a customer messaging platform all day, this will let you get instant notifications when someone’s trying to talk to you, and you can respond straight from Slack, where all your other work conversations happen anyway.
Stay in Slack and stay productive
These are some of my favorite integrations, and I definitely recommend testing them. But moral of the story? Make Slack work harder for you – it’s pretty easy with the amount of integrations offered. Check to see if any of the tools you already use offer connections to reduce the amount of websites and apps you need to check daily.
We would also LOVE to show you how awesome monitoring in Slack is – to learn more about our own integration, let us know:
