This is a guest post by Shareef Defrawi is the President of Bonafide, an inbound marketing agency in Houston, TX. Bonafide helps businesses attract more traffic, generate more leads, and close more customers.
We’re all about WorkFlowy at Bonafide.
Inbound marketing is great in a lot of ways, but nobody ever claimed that it was self-generating. On the contrary, it takes monthly, weekly, daily, and sometimes even hourly attention to detail to create and maintain a successful inbound funnel that helps customers discover our clients online, engage with their companies and complete the conversion from casual visitor to paying customer.
So when our inbound marketing firm discovered WorkFlowy, it was an instant “aha!” moment. We were initially drawn by WorkFlowy’s intuitive “zoomable” note-taking format, but found that the interface was only the beginning of the benefits.
We use WorkFlowy for internal processes across the inbound marketing funnel, from daily checklists to long-term tactics.
Set-up
Hard to believe, but just a handful of years ago most marketing processes still ran on paper – everything from bulky binders to email print-outs to tons of sticky notes. With all that hard copy, it was easy to lose track of where you were and what needed to be done next. We use WorkFlowy to organize our administrative set-up process, which includes integrating background information, creating teams, establishing goals and scheduling kickoff meetings. The app’s zoom-in/zoom-out lists are easy to update, and the iOS functionality ensures that all our team members can check in even when away from their workstations.
Content creation
The heart of inbound marketing, high-quality content is what draws visitors to our clients’ blogs, websites and social pages. WorkFlowy is a natural fit for our content creation, which crosses multiple channels simultaneously. The comprehensive daily checklists help us create editorial schedules; brainstorm ideas for email, blogs, videos, eBooks and other content; assign team members to create, refine and follow the progress of the content; perform quality checks for SEO and call-to-action phrasing; and check for client emails and Google alerts for possible content opportunities.
Outreach
Companies that blog from 10 to 15 times per month average five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog. Guest bloggers bring new perspectives and increased Google credibility to inbound marketing campaigns, and their highly relevant backlinks help boost client web traffic. WorkFlowy lists help us maintain a dynamically updated step-by-step process for prospecting potential bloggers by industry; prequalifying the potential bloggers; determining keywords to use in the content; and determining the response to the guest posts.
Analysis
Organization is key to inbound analytics that track web traffic, landing page response, email opt-ins, Google page ranks and so much more. WorkFlowy allows us to stay on top of the daily process of measuring response. Everyone on our team knows what to check, and when, to find the most relevant and powerful information – data we use to refine and improve our customers’ marketing campaigns.
The WorkFlowy workplace
Our inbound marketing organization represents a diverse mix of backgrounds, approaches and skills – so lively debate is often part of our workplace. But even the logical left-brained and the artistic right-brained among us agree: WorkFlowy gets our office more organized. Even those who always hated taking (handwritten) notes are converts to the app, and why not? It’s easy for everyone to stay on the same page, when there’s no actual page involved.
For businesses of individuals using iPhones and iPads, the iOS app is much better than nothing, but will the iOS app get a thorough-going update any time soon?
It’s weak in comparison to the web app, which is frustrating since I’m living more and more off my iPad lately (with a bluetooth keyboard). The iOS app is, for me, just not very powerful, fluid, or intuitive. Great for limited content consumption and emergency edits, but not even close to the desktop web browser experience for heavier use.
I suppose this can be taken more as a comment on how great the web version is 🙂 , but relatively speaking, iPad and iPhone = pain right now for any but the simplest Workflowy uses.
I think I was a bit harsh in my earlier comments–the problem comes not so much with the iOS app per se (though it is limited), but most of all when trying to use it with a Bluetooth keyboard–it just doesn’t work the same way at all as the web version (e.g., cursor keys cannot move up or down through different items, cursor keys plus modifiers don’t work, shift-tab doesn’t work, etc.)
But using it by touch, while still limited (no stars, no multiple tabs, e.g.) is much better than with the Bluetooth keyboard. Using the iPhone with touch and voice dictation is cool, in fact. 🙂
But I hope full Bluetooth keyboard support is added soon on iOS.
And I wonder if there’s any way to make the user interface more self-evident to those myriad Windows users who are expecting from long experience that a click or double-click on the bullet point will simply expand and collapse the outline instead of rocketing the item to the top of the page. Maybe have a separate “maximize” button to do that instead? Just for the sake of the newbie learning curve? (And then a minimize button for the top item to go back to the previous view? And appropriately different looking buttons for Windows and Mac users? Ideas are easy when I don’t need to implement them or be accountable when they are bad! 😉 )
I suggest this because I know very smart but non-computery people for whom Workflowy is just another thing on the web, and when it doesn’t visually behave as expected–“next.” When it doesn’t behave as expected AND they see a huge list of keyboard shortcuts (that overflows the window on smaller displays)–“next!”