This is a guest post by Azat Eloyan. Azat is a digital marketer and mobile marketing enthusiast. With over 5 years’ experience in content marketing and SEO, he believes that valuable and informative content is the key.

He’s currently working as a marketing specialist at SendSMS, which is providing SMS marketing service globally.

We live in a digital-centric world.

There’s no doubt about it.

What’s also true is that the digital space is full of enormous data and content on scales never quite seen before.

According to a report from IBM Marketing Cloud, 90% of the total digital data worldwide was created within just two years, with an upward future trend being almost inevitable.

All this data and content provides a whole host of benefits to businesses, their salespeople, and their marketers. However, before businesses, salespeople, and marketers can truly take advantage of this vast swathe of data and content, they need to manage it correctly.

Which is where CRMs and marketing automation software come in.

But what are the differences between the two? And what will your business benefit from most?

Our digital-centric world doesn’t have to be a confusing digital-centric world.

That’s why, in this CRM vs marketing automation post, I’ll be discussing both CRMs and marketing automation software, how they differ, how they overlap, the benefits that they bring, and what the signs are when your business needs to start using either piece of software.

Navigate through the sections below to get the gist on CRMs and marketing automation software:

• What is the CRM definition?
• What purpose does CRM software serve for businesses?
• Four example uses of CRM software
• What is marketing automation?
• What are the benefits of marketing automation?
• Use Process Street with your CRM software or marketing automation software!
• Conclusion: In a digital-centric world, invest in the right software

Let’s get learning!

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Anastasia Stefanuk is a passionate writer and a marketing manager at Mobilunity. The company provides professional staffing services, so she is always aware of technology news and wants to share her experience to help tech startups and companies to be up-to-date. 

As a business person or a person who owns a computer, how prepared are you in protecting yourself against data loss?

If you lost all of your important files and memorable photos, do you think you would be able to run data recovery to reclaim them?

Data recovery is the process of salvaging lost data from either a secondary storage system, removable media or files.

In this digital era, data has been classified as the new “oil”. In the business world, data is the driving force behind innovation, competition, productivity, and improvement of core operations. Likewise, governments all over the world require data to make vital decisions that will affect their populace.

With that in mind, the convergence of data streaming from billions of mobile phones, digital platforms, virtual-reality applications, and wireless sensors, continue to pile up with each passing day. In fact, it is estimated that the amount of electronic data in existence today is 2.7 zettabytes. This number is expected to grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025.

This presents a humongous challenge in managing and ensuring that such a large amount of data is secure. In addition, the looming question in many people’s minds is; what would happen if all this data magically disappeared? Would the world come to a standstill or are there backup mechanisms where it can be retrieved later?

In this article, Process Street will expound on the main causes of data loss, the importance of backing it up, and tips on how you can successfully run data recovery processes.

This article has been broken down into the following sections.

• Causes of data loss and the impact on your business
• How to avert the cost of data loss
• Best practices to prevent data loss
• Use a professional service to prevent data loss and implement data recovery

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Automation has been one of the key emerging trends of the late 2010s, and will likely be a defining characteristic of the 2020s.

It’s something we’ve covered extensively at Process Street, and something we’ve taken huge advantage of internally as well.

The move from companies only providing enterprise-level API access to their software over to commercially available Internet of Things style mass integration has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace. This has opened up huge potential for individuals and small businesses; you can integrate with thousands of services in just a few clicks.

Now, so many services, SaaS products in particular, provide a means to integrate with other platforms that there are very little restrictions on what you can and cannot automate.

Tools like Zapier, Flow, and IFTTT have made these integrations so easy that anyone can set them up.

But they’re not the only ones – new connectors and middlemen are cropping up all the time, helping people without tech skills connect with APIs or Webhooks of their choosing. The No-Code Movement has gone mainstream and it now has a full suite of tools at its disposal.

Even in 2015, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

For those interested in that kind of thing, you should check out Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey. An illuminating text which is already somewhat out of date!

Here at Process Street, we integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms via our direct, agentic integration framework, we have large customers making use of our API, and we’ve now added webhooks to our array of automation options to try to cover the rest of the use cases our customers tell us about.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What are webhooks?
• What do people use webhooks for?
• What is the difference between webhooks and APIs?
• How do I use webhooks?
• How do Process Street webhooks work?

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Sandra Dufrene is a freelance writer and editor at Essayshark reviews. She has a keen interest in photography and dedicates all her free time to it. Sandra has extensive knowledge in different fields such as marketing, education, and blogging. You can contact her on Twitter.

Google Chrome is by far the most popular web browser with more than a billion users and over two billion installations globally. This is no surprise given the fact that Chrome offers super-fast functions, loading, and web-page display.

Besides that, the platform is free and gives users a number of additional benefits:

• Easy setup
• A minimalistic but user-friendly design
• Simple drag-and-drop features
• Automatic translations for greater convenience
• An address bar that supports direct searches
• A private browsing option called Incognito

The advantages of installing Chrome are evident, but these are not the only reasons to use it. On the contrary, Chrome extensions are yet another detail that makes the platform so useful. The extension gallery contains over 10 thousand tools that can augment and improve the functioning of your web browser.

In this article, Process Street has summarized 30 Chrome extensions that every digital marketer should know and check out. Let’s take a look!

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You click the ‘Contact Us’ page. Nothing happens. First, confusion, then familiar frustration. It was a mailto link. Your computer slows to a grinding halt as a huge, archaic desktop mail app rises from the depths of your hard drive. Checking that the date on your computer isn’t 15 years out, you wonder why mail integration isn’t standard… and what year is it exactly?

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There are many things that Process Street, our process management platform, can be used for including onboarding new clients or launching a website. But an interesting use case that has cropped up recently is using Process Street for managing podcast releases.

Many podcast publishers run a checklist to help them manage the recording, publishing and promoting of each podcast episode. Checklists are a great tool to make sure things get done right, and since Process Street is the ultimate recurring checklist software, it only makes sense that podcasters would gravitate towards our platform.

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The Rise of Instagram

Instagram is the fastest growing social network. It has more users than Twitter and is an amazing tool for driving traffic and sales. Take a look at this guy who sold $4,000 worth of neckties in one day on Instagram.

Photo and Image Credit

Here are some more stats on the rise of Instagram from Search Engine Journal.

• Multi-platform use is on the rise: 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, a significant increase from 2013, when it stood at 42% of internet users.
• For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors.
• For the first time, roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily.
• For the first time, the share of internet users with college educations using LinkedIn reached 50%.
• Women dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men.

If you’re hungry for more data, you can view the comprehensive 4-page report right here.

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Assigning team members to their tasks is a duty which is as vital as it is tedious.

Everyone pretty much knows what they should be doing, so there’s no need to directly assign them to everything when you could be spending time on more important tasks, right?

Wrong.

Human error (of which memory plays a huge part) affects 1/100 routine tasks where care is needed. This means that the people responsible either makes a mistake or forgets what they need to do (hence why documented processes are so important).

That’s why we here at Process Street have a role assignment feature in our checklists.

Role assignments let you dictate who each task in your process checklists needs to be assigned to without fail every time. All you need to do is set up the role which will have the task assigned, then Process Street does the rest.

Ready to assign your tasks without fail, fuss or tedious fiddling? Then let’s dive right in.

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The following post is a guest contribution from Cristopher Burge. He is a full-time writer, passionate about technology and business-related articles. He focuses on everything that involves cloud computing, in one way or another. Follow him on Twitter.

The emergence of cloud computing has changed the way organizations and people buy and use IT services.

Cloud-based HR software is technologically focused, but the impact it has on the business and the people using it is profound. While some companies have not integrated with the cloud due to fear of the unknown and the urge to protect their investments, they are at risk of missing out on the innovations the cloud brings to tphe HR department.

Cloud computing is the simplest way a company can take the advantage of technologies without having to spend money on buying expensive computer parts, an IT specialist, and on-site software.

The problem most firms often run into is the integration of cloud computing into their already existing structure, but this process shouldn’t be a daunting one because it is a change in the way IT services are utilized, requiring a new but better way of doing things and just a little cultural change towards a better result.

This article points out how cloud services provide high value with low risk, as a solution for the HR department of an organization, enabling departments to transform the way things are done — from screening to recruitment and termination. It highlights the importance of moving the HR system to the cloud and the method through which any HR challenges can be overcome via cloud computing.

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Whether you want to reduce your environmental impact, be more efficient, or reduce your expenses to Dunder Mifflin, going paperless is a really positive step forward for your business.

Operating in a paperless office means all activity and work is recorded and can be easily found. It means you can send work over to other colleagues in seconds. It means you don’t need huge filing cabinets taking up valuable space.

It’s just better in many many ways.

Even if you want to keep paper as a small part of your life, taking the necessary steps toward a paperless office will yield results.

So how do we create a paperless office?

The answer is in the tools you choose to use for your business. Any business may have specialist tools specific to their industry, but we’ve tried to pick out 7 tools which can collectively cover almost all aspects of a company’s operations.

You’ve got your email, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, kanban boards, BPM software, accounting, software development, automation, communication, and funny gif sending software. And that’s just the start of what these tools can achieve.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to go through each one by one and give you an introduction. Some tools you might already be familiar with, but I’m sure at least one will be new!

Here are our paperless office quicklinks:

• GSuite
• Process Street
• Airtable
• Quickbooks
• Phabricator
• Zapier
• Slack

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