In this week’s Five on Friday, PR Daily shares seven digital tools perfect for streamlining social media marketing, Search Engine Land explains how Google calculates web page authority, Maximize Social Business offers the five essential elements for a winning infographic, PYMNTS.com interviews Recurly CEO Dan Burkhart on how recurring revenue is no longer a “one-and-done” proposition, and Hubspot offers advice on how sales reps can decide whether to call or email a new prospect.

7 Digital Tools Recommended by Social Media Pros

Technology changes so quickly these days that it’s hard to stay up-to-date on the latest tips, tricks and tools to streamline your social media marketing efforts. PR Daily has rounded up 7 of its favorite digital tools for you:

1. Feedly for content organization
2. PromoJam, a more affordable promotional tool for limited budgets
3. GroupHigh to identify topic-specific bloggers and influencers
4. Followerwonk for analyzing Twitter followers (location, keywords, etc.)
5. Sprout Social for social media management across networks and teams
6. Canva, a free app to design graphics for blogs and social media
7. Camtasia, a video editor

Note: The original PR Daily article, published in December 2014, contained 10 digital tools, but three of them no longer exist, so we omitted them. Read the original article here.

How Google Assesses the Authority of Web Pages

Once upon a time, in the early days of Google, PageRank was the be all, end all. That’s not true anymore. Instead, Google uses a complex ranking system of more than 200 major signals to determine web page authority. Search Engine Land interviewed Google, but didn’t get any specifics from the company on what makes content authoritative.

Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, offered this guidance to help webmasters and marketers make the most of their content to gain authority:

• Authority is done on a per-page basis, not on a site-wide basis.
• “Page authority” and “domain authority” are not Google metrics. They are third-party estimates.
• Some site-wide signals do exist, however. For example, how fast a site loads or if it has been attacked by malware can impact a site’s authority.
• Published content acquires its own unique, page-specific signals that can overshadow domain-specific signals. Sullivan gives the example of an article being published online by the Wall Street Journal versus a more obscure, lesser known media site. The Wall Street Journal’s domain “authority” will influence the article more than the other media site.

Read Sullivan’s article on Search Engine Land here.

Five Essential Elements for Creating a Winning Infographic

Infographics are a powerful way to present information visually, particularly if the information is complex. In a recent article, Maximize Social Business offered these five essential elements for creating a winning infographic that your audience will want to share.

1. A strong introduction. To get your reader’s attention, you need to give them a reason to keep reading, whether it is opening with a question or a startling statistic. Just keep it short and sweet. Maximize Social Business suggests two or three sentences.
2. An organized body. A good infographic needs to be well organized, so that it flows naturally from one section to the next, and it should contain intros, headings and subheadings to make transitions clear for the reader.
3. Professional images. Your audience will judge your brand, in part, by the quality of its visuals. Use high quality stock photos or royalty-free images or an online infographic builder to create a visually appealing, high quality infographic.
4. A consistent theme. In an infographic, every detail counts, so in addition to presenting professional images, you want to use a consistent theme throughout. Maximize Social Business recommends a restricted color palette, for example, to make sure everything fits together visually in a way that enhances the information you are trying to present.
5. Brand yourself. The goal, of course, is to create an infographic that makes your brand memorable and shareable, so be sure that you include your company name, logo and social icons.

To read the full article from Maximize Social Business, click here.

Subscriptions Are No Longer “One-and-Done,” They’re about Long-Term Relationships 

In an interview with Dan Burkhart, CEO of Recurly, PYMNTS.com explains that successful subscriptions no longer follow the “one-and-done” philosophy. Instead, they are focused on developing long-term relationships with their customers and delivering opportunities for upsells at just the right moment. To do this well, Burkhart says that subscription companies need to reach prospects at both the emotional level and the rational level.

“The ability of customers to curate their own journey allows for [a] cross-sell and upsell opportunity. From the post-purchase perspective, it is an emotional response that the merchant is trying to tap into, because they want to make sure that customer continues to be engaged and intrigued by the promise of what they offer – and then inclined to come back again and again because they over-deliver on that original promise. The role and responsibility of merchants is not just at the point of purchase, it also requires a whole constellation of actions to keep customers coming back,” Burkhart told PYMNTS.com.

“This sensitive relationship with the customer requires that the subscription provider must continue to strive very hard in order to keep all of these satisfaction variables in check – which is ultimately a good thing for consumers,” said Burkhart.

Click here to read the full article on PYMNTS.com.

Call or Email? 4 Tips to Determine When to Use Which in Sales

You’ve got a prospect interested in your product or service, but they haven’t committed yet and, as their sales rep, you want to reach out personally. Do you call the prospect or email them, or maybe both? Hubspot offers these four factors to help guide your decision.

Time and day of the week.

According to Hubspot, phone connect rates increase as the day and week progress. A person is more likely to answer a phone call later in the workday and the workweek. The same is true of voicemail responses. You are more likely to get a response later in the day, because people often check their voicemail before leaving their office for the day.

For emails, Hubspot recommends sending them 10 minutes before the hour or 10 minutes after the hour when people are most likely to be going to or leaving a meeting. Why? Going through emails is a good way to kill a few minutes.

Strong ask vs. weak ask

How you approach your prospect will depend on what your desired result from the interaction to be. Hubspot divides them into strong asks and weak asks. A strong ask is a request for a meeting, conference call or product trial. A weak ask is a request for feedback or a referral. For strong asks, use the phone, so you can address any objections personally and in real time. For weak asks, use email instead of taking up your prospect’s time. Hubspot points out that most salespeople do the opposite, but they believe that you’ll get better responses if you try this approach.

Executive or staff?

Managers and executives often have assistants, so if you call, you are more likely to get a person on the other end of the phone, rather than voice mail. Others often don’t answer calls from unknown numbers or they’re in meetings or out in the field. For higher level prospects, make a phone call. For others, use email.

Prospect preference

Different types of buyers respond differently, based on their communication style which can vary based on their age, their job, industry, etc. Millennials, for example, are more likely to respond to email versus a phone call. Others, such as customer service professionals, are more comfortable talking on the phone.

For more tips on whether to choose phone or email for that first touch with a prospect, read Hubspot’s original article here.

We hope you found this week’s Five on Friday articles interesting and helpful. Have a great weekend!