CMO Insights with Ian Cleary from RazorSocial

Online tools make running a business in the Internet much easier. We have recently proposed some effective online tools, but today we asked an expert in this field about his favorite solutions.

Our guest in CMO Insights, Ian Cleary is the founder and CEO of RazorSocial, a comprehensive source for information about tools and technologies that help you achieve better results and become more productive with social media. Ian has strong expertise and rich professional experience in building influence online, developing social media presence, social media optimization and much more.

You have evaluated hundreds of different tools, but I can assume that you do not use them all on your blog. What tools do you find the most effective and useful for your website? What are your favorite ones?

As we are in the tool business we are constantly changing tools that we use.  Here are 3 recent tools we have used on our blog:

Optinmonster – This is a lead generation plugin (collects emails) and we use it for the popup that is provided.  It works on exit intent so that a browser will only see the popup when they attempt to leave the website.

Hotjar – This is a tool currently in beta that provides a broad range of functionality to analyze visitor behavior.  For example, you can view heatmaps, visitor recordings, run survey’s and ask questions for your visitors.   All this is useful to understand more about visitor behavior.

Flare – This is a social sharing plugin that provides really great and useful statistics on what sharing is happening on your content and who are the influential people sharing it.

How to effectively optimize your content for search engines?

It’s not all about having keywords in your meta title, description and content. You now have to engaging content that is grammatically correct. Google wants to see your visitors staying on your site, scrolling through your content and clicking on your results in search results.

For the optimization of the content I currently use InboundWriter which is excellent for helping with keyword research and finding content ideas that have a good chance to rank in Google. But you still have to write great content and promote it!

What are the best tools and solutions to increase the number of subscribers?

Optinmonster is a really good tool for building email subscribers as it provides a variety of options for building subscribers on your site including split testing functionality so you can optimize it.

I also use Leadpages to create high converting landing pages and leadboxes which allow visitors to subscribe for content without leaving the page they are on.

How do you ensure you get good email conversion on your site?

You need to provide a good ‘lead magnet’ which is a guide, a free training course or something similar that will strongly entice people to subscribe.  You also need to make the subscription options very obvious on the site and have them in multiple places.  Finally you need to constantly split test to improve results

What do you think about tools that have application to “everything”? Is it better to have more different tools for different purposes or maybe you know some good solutions that serves well for many activities?

It’s great if you can find a tool that does a lot but typically they are strong in some areas of functionality and weaker in other so you need to assess the tool.  Having these type of tools reduces on interoperability problems if they can found. Hotjar is a tool that provides functionality of several tools and this makes life easier.

What tools help in communication clients? Both potential and existing ones.

We sell online training so we have many clients.  We use Facebook Groups to engage with them in a community.  If you have a smaller number of clients there are tools such as Slack that are really useful.