Marketing Insider Group's first blog post was How to Set up a Company Blog for Success.

Frequently Asked Questions

What budget should I set aside for my first campaign in digital marketing?

It all depends on what type of campaign you want to launch. It can cost between $50-$100 to launch your first campaign.

To get started, you can buy advertising space on search engines such as Google and Bing. These ads usually cost around $10 per click.

Banner ads can be placed at different places on a website that has a website. This will attract new visitors to your site and help them return.

You can also find a freelancer that will design your banners. Freelancers typically charge between $20 and $30 per hour.

After creating your first ad for the site, you can track its performance. There are many tools for tracking analytics that you can download from the internet.

You can also track data manually. A spreadsheet can be used to track data about campaigns. It will allow you to record every metric (such clicks, impressions etc.).

You can then determine whether your campaign was a success by collecting these data.

You can also try different methods until one works.

What are the 7 steps of internet marketing strategy?

Internet marketing strategies help businesses achieve their goals through online media. The seven essential steps of internet marketing include planning, research implementation, monitoring, analysis and optimization. Each step is essential for effective internet marketing and should be performed regularly.

1. Planning – This step involves identifying your target audience and developing a plan for how you want to reach them. It is important to consider who may buy your product or service, and what it costs.
2. You can use research to understand the needs and interests of your customers so that you can choose the products or services that best meet their needs. You also gain valuable insight into consumer behavior and trends.
3. The first step in implementing your campaign is to select a platform (e.g. Facebook), and then determine where to place your ads. Once you have chosen your platforms, it's important to ensure that they are correctly configured. You can also decide whether you want to spend money or pay per click.
4. Monitoring – Monitor your progress to ensure that you are able to see the results of your efforts. Google Analytics provides analytics tools that allow you to track traffic flows and conversion rates.
5. You can compare the results to benchmarks and other performance levels. This step shows you how to improve areas where you are struggling.
6. Optimization – Optimizing the site is about making improvements to make it more attractive to visitors. For example, you could add new features or change how users navigate your site.
7. Evaluation – Evaluate your campaign's performance to see where it is at the moment. Do you see any areas for improvement? If you don't, then you have probably reached your goal. If you have any questions, it is important to revisit the situation.

What is the difference between marketing and advertising?

Advertising is communication that promotes brands or products. Advertising typically has a clear call-to-action, such as “Buy now!” You can also click here.

Marketing, on the other hand is a way to communicate your company's vision, mission, and values with potential customers. Marketing helps to build relationships with prospects and customers.

Online sales of shoes can be a great example of marketing. You may use marketing to tell a story about you and what you have to offer. Your history, philosophy and commitment to quality could be discussed. You might share customer testimonials. You could even organize an event in which you give away shoes for free to encourage people to visit you website.

Marketing is all about telling stories. Advertising is all about selling products.

What are the primary types of marketing you use?

Marketing is the act of communicating ideas, values, and messages to consumers. We often use the term marketing interchangeably with advertising. But in reality, marketing involves more than just advertising. Marketing can include all communication methods that promote or market a product, service, or idea.

Marketing is comprised of branding, promotion, as well as distribution. A company's branding is the way it represents itself to its target market. Promotion is the act or obtaining attention for your brand using paid advertisements, promotional materials, and public relations. Distribution is how your message gets to your audience. You can do it through traditional media like radio, television, print, or email. However, new technologies make this easier than ever.

Statistics

• From 2020 to 2022, eMarketer predicts that digital marketing will grow by 36% and take up 54% of marketing budgets! (marketinginsidergroup.com)
• Many experts recommend you share 20% of your promotional content and 80% of other valuable content you find. (marketinginsidergroup.com)
• This allows us to deliver CPCs that are 80% less than average and CTRs 4-5 times higher than average. (marketinginsidergroup.com)
• Companies that use personalization are seeing revenue increases ranging from 6-10%. (blog.hubspot.com)
• Today, 81% of brands around the world have affiliate programs. (influencermarketinghub.com)

External Links

influencermarketinghub.com

• Benchmark Report: The State of Influencer Market 2021
  

statista.com

• TikTok quarterly first-time Installs 2021
  
• E-commerce worldwide – statistics & facts
  

moz.com

• SEO Learning Center Moz
  
• [Case Study] How Moz Ranked #1 for High-Volume Keywords in Less Than 3 Months – Moz
  

blog.hubspot.com

• 21 Examples of Co-Branding Partnerships That Work (And Why They're Effective)
  
• HubSpot Blog
  

How To

What's your marketing strategy?

Have you ever heard the expression “If you build it they will come”?

Well, you're wrong.

Building something does take work, but it's not enough to attract customers. To grow your business, you must use Internet Marketing Principles to reach your target audience.

Internet Marketing Principles can be described as the principles that are used by marketers to create websites and blogs, email campaigns, social profiles, etc. that generate leads.

For example, if you're selling handmade jewelry online, you'd better learn to use these Internet Marketing Principles to drive traffic to your site, capture emails, and close sales.

Here are some examples from Internet Marketing Principles.

1. Content is King – You must make your content unique and memorable. You will lose credibility as a source for information if you copy content from others.
2. Establish trust – More people trust recommendations from close friends and family than advertisements or Adsense. So, if you recommend a product, make sure it's trustworthy.
3. Keep it personal. People prefer talking to people and not robots. Make sure your website looks human, not robotic.
4. Give value – People will only give away stuff if they feel that they are getting something of value. Offer something in return for their information.
5. Tell stories. Stories are powerful tools that connect audiences. They help you tell your story and connect with your audience.
6. Giveaways – Give things away to spread brand awareness and build loyalty.
7. It is important to use call-to-action buttons because they encourage users to take action.
8. It is important to test all aspects of your website before it goes live.
9. Keep it simple. Sometimes simpler is better than complicated. Keep it as simple as possible. Your website will be easier to manage and update if it is simpler.
10. Achieve a clear goal. It is easier to measure the results of your efforts if you have a clear goal.
11. Measure everything. This is critical for improving your marketing efforts.
12. Focus on conversion – Conversion means turning browsers into buyers.
13. Get feedback. It will allow you to improve your marketing efforts.
14. Track results – You can track your results and identify areas you could improve.
15. Repeat – Repetition creates momentum
16. Optimize Your Marketing Efforts – Optimization ensures your marketing efforts are efficient.
17. Be consistent – Your brand will remain consistent.
18. Reward yourself. – Rewards encourage you to keep going.
19. Learn from other people – This is one way to avoid making the exact same mistakes.
20. Never stop learning.
21. For sustainable growth, you must think long-term.
22. Trust your intuition – Sometimes your intuition is the best tool to help you navigate your way through life.
23. Every day should be treated as a test. While mistakes are inevitable, they can teach us valuable lessons that we wouldn't otherwise be able to learn.
24. Learn to understand your weaknesses. Understanding your strengths will give you an insight into how you can overcome obstacles.
25. Don't be discouraged. Everyone fails at one point or another. But don't let failure discourage you. Keep trying again.
26. Take risks – Sometimes it's necessary to take chances in order for you to move forward.
27. Enjoy the ride – It's essential to living happy lives.
28. Be passionate – Passion fuels motivation.
29. Remember who you are – Being authentic is vital to building relationships.
30. Self-knowledge is crucial for self-improvement.
31. Find your tribe. It is vital to establish a supportive network of like-minded people.
32. Vision boards are great tools to visualize your future.
33. Ask questions – Questions are the gateway to knowledge.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: How to Start and Set Up Your Company Blog for Success
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/how-to-setup-your-company-blog/
Published Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 16:05:05 +0000

 

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links we may earn a commission.

I’ve been building websites for years. And it’s way easier now than it used to be.

You can go simple and build something lightning-fast or take your tired, old site to the next level. Nowadays, you can accomplish either with no programming or design experience necessary.

There are a handful of popular options that will get you to where you want to go. However, the best options for website builders have distinctly different strengths and limitations.

I use WordPress because I can do exactly what I want and deliver a quality experience to the millions of visitors to my blog each month. It might work for you, but some of my other top picks could work better, depending on what you are trying to do.

Below are my reviews of the six best website builders you can start using today. In each, I go in-depth about why each product is so good for particular needs and use cases.

Take control and manage every detail of your site. Or, use my number one pick to have the website build itself (seriously). It’s your call.

#1 – Wix Review — The Best for General Use 

Wix is a really easy website builder that can help you create just what you want. Start with one of its many, many templates and customize from there.

You don’t need any web design experience to put together a sharp website.

Doesn’t matter your goal… A blog, company page, or online store.

Wix is the Swiss Army knife of website design for anyone who wants a beautiful site with options without hard work. It’s so easy for anyone to use.

In fact, it’s so easy that you can sit back and let Wix build your site for you. If you don’t feel like dragging and dropping site elements into place, simply answer a few questions and Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) will whip up what you need in just a couple of clicks.

Wix really goes the extra mile to enable anyone to build an effective website and offers a lot of extras to help them gain traffic.

Most of the Wix paid plans to give you $300 in free digital ad vouchers so you can market your new blog or eCommerce store with no extra spending on your part.

Plus, there’s a lot more marketing you can do for free to reach the first page of Google through employing my SEO strategies for Wix sites.

On top of all of that, Wix’s paid plans are quite competitively priced:

Pros of Wix 

Here are the best things about Wix:

• Powerful app market – Wix has an enormous amount of add-on features that you can access through their app market. Want to book meetings directly on your site? They have got you covered. Want a live chat pop-up box? Simply click and install it on your site.
• Covers every need – Wix covers most of the needs of people looking to set up a website. This includes setting up an eCommerce store, blog, or even just a simple information website.
• Lots of templates – Wix has a wide variety of templates that you can choose from to get your website up and running quickly. Their templates are well designed and take the user experience into consideration.

Cons of Wix 

Here are the weaker parts of Wix:

• No migration – A huge downside with Wix is that you’re locked in, so you cannot take the code of your website somewhere else later on. This can cause problems if you quickly need to scale your business.
• Jack of all trades, master of none – Wix’s main strength is also its weakness. Although it has many features, it cannot compete with the quality of niche website builders.

Who should use Wix?

• Small businesses – If you are offering a service such as legal advice or marketing, Wix is a solid website builder that will handle all of your needs. If your focus is selling products online, avoid Wix.
• Freelancers and professionals – In a similar manner, Wix is great for professionals who want to showcase their personal brand. It will allow you to cover all the potential bases of highlighting your portfolio, such as taking meetings and even blogging.

Try Wix for free today.

#2 – Zyro Review — The Best for Multipurpose Business Sites

For many businesses, building a useful website isn’t as simple as committing to a web store or a simple one-pager with contact information. It can be frustrating to have to commit to a site builder that has separate plans for standard pages and eCommerce.

Zyro makes it easy to take your business website in any direction you need.

And “easy” is the operative word for the overall experience of building a site on Zyro.

After signup, you can choose to build your website from scratch, work from one of 140 templates, or use their AI-powered site builder.

Once your site is built, Zyro’s pricing plans encompass all of the features you could need. From the basics, like blogging tools and email service, to specialties like ecommerce, live chat, inventory management, and remarketing, you can get it all in one package from Zyro.

If you need something basic with room to grow, you can start on the cheapest plan.

Or, if you want your business website to handle content marketing, online sales, and customer service right out of the box, opt for Zyro’s higher-octane plans, which still come at a price that is near or better than of the other big names in eCommerce builders.

Plus, if you sign up using this link, you’ll get an even better deal to start with.

Pros of Zyro

• Great for novices or those in a rush – With Zyro’s site-building options, you can have AI whip up a site for you in minutes with just a few inputs on your end. Or, start from a beautiful template and make easy tweaks to have it match your brand identity. Plus, you’ll have the benefit of Zyro’s 24/7 support if you ever get stuck.
• Free hosting on every plan – Zyro is a subsidiary of Hostinger, one of the best web hosts available today. So, not only do you get hosting taking care of on every plan, but you get the reliability and performance that Hostinger is known for at no extra cost.
• Constant improvements to the platform – It’s reassuring when you choose a website builder that cares enough to keep adding new features and improving the overall user experience. Some excellent features that Zyro has recently rolled out include scheduling blog posts to publish later, an email linked to your domain, support for multiple authors on a blog post, and improved formatting.
• Helpful growth and customer relationship features – On any of Zyro’s four plans, you can wield Facebook and WhatsApp messaging embedded on your site, create remarketing lists for failed conversions, collect visitor information via Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics and Tag Manager, and integrate apps with ease, such as calendars for appointment scheduling.

Cons of Zyro

• No free forever plan – Unlike some other site builders, Zyro doesn’t have a completely free package to offer. You can build and test your site completely for free with a Zyro account, but in order to publish it to the web and have it available to visitors, you’ll need to pay for a plan. You do get a 30-day money-back guarantee, though.
• Limited products – Other eCommerce site builders offer you a generous or unlimited number of products you can sell. Three Zyro plans support listing products on your site, but two of them cap your allotted number at just 100.

Who should use Zyro?

• Businesses who need more than a web store or contact page – If your company wants an all-in-one solution for blogging, eCommerce, and customer service without breaking the bank, Zyro offers affordable plans that tick all the boxes.

Get started on a Zyro plan today.

#3 – Weebly Review — The Best for Beginners 

Not far behind Wix is Weebly, which is a drag-and-drop site builder that prides itself on its ease of use.

Weebly delivers site-building with a simple user experience and short learning curve. It doesn’t bombard you with features or a complicated interface, making it fantastic for anyone building a webpage for the first time.

Despite being so beginner-friendly, Weebly does not skimp on features. Bolstered by being acquired by Square in 2018, all Weebly plans allow you to add eCommerce features to your website with the same level of ease.

Even its free plan lets you add a shopping cart and unlimited products to your Weebly site. It’s fantastic for local stores because you can also utilize inventory management and in-store pickup on all site builder plans.

Pros of Weebly

Here are the best things about Weebly:

• Simple and easy to use – Weebly has a simple interface with drag and drop mechanics that just work. Everything feels natural and intuitive. It also helps that they have an onboarding mechanic with email and popup explanations when you get started.
• Migration – If you decide you want to host your own website, Weebly makes it easy for you to take your site off their platform.
• Affordable – Compared to other generalist website builders, Weebly has one of the most affordable pricing structures, including a feature-rich free forever version.
• Great customer support – Weebly has a powerful customer support team who are active every day of the week. They typically reply within 1 day by email or even quicker via their live chat or phone lines.
• Online store capability – Weebly allows you to set up a web store powered by Square. If you’re already using Square as a payment processor, Weebly allows a cheap and easy way to start selling products online.

Cons 

Here are the weaker parts of Weebly

• Lacks diversity of function – The tradeoff of using Weebly is that it is not as powerful as Wix. For example, there are fewer features. In addition, some features such as their content management system and analytic tools are much weaker than competitors.
• Limited customization – As Weebly uses a drop-and-drop interface and themes, the customization can be quite limited. Wix also has this problem, but they have more tools at their disposal to solve this issue.
• Scaling problems – Weebly is simply not a great platform if you have plans to grow your website in a significant way: it is just a simple website builder for day to day users.

Who should use Weebly?

• People who need simple websites – As a rule, you should use Weebly if you are not very tech-savvy and want to set up a simple website quickly. One category of users would be associations or clubs who want to set up an information site about their group.

Try Weebly for free today.

#4 – Web.com Review — The Best for Building Landing Pages

Web.com is a lot like Weebly—it’s fantastically easy to use, with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that lets you mold any available template to your needs. And it comes at a great price and with great support.

But I think Web.com’s website builder shines brightest for a particular need: setting up landing pages and single-page sites in a snap.

Seriously, it’s so easy with Web.com—start from one of their 126 templates, then just tweak the colors, swap out some imagery, replace the copy, and add a custom form. Voila, you have a gorgeous landing page, done in about 15 to 20 minutes.

You can build a ton of unique landing pages in one sitting or make simple or temporary websites with ease. And at a competitive price, too.

Pros of Web.com

• Email accounts – Web.com gives you five email accounts to match your domain. That’s a boon for folks building landing pages with Web.com—not only can you get multiple sites up in a flash, but each can have separate associated email addresses for doing split testing or for collecting contest entries in a place where they won’t overwhelm someone else’s inbox.
• Free domain for one year – Web.com will throw in one year of an available domain for free when your purchase one of their website builder plans.
• Very affordable – Everything I mentioned above is in the Starter plan, which starts at $1.95 for your first month and then is $10 per month after that. You can save big, though, if just go for a full year at checkout—that’s just $50 for the whole 12 months, a savings of over $60.

Cons of Web.com

• No building from scratch – You are somewhat penned in by the templates available to start from. It’s easy enough to customize them far away from the original look, but some elements are permanent or at least inflexible, which can make it harder to quickly build the exact site you had in your mind.
• Limited eCommerece features – Web.com also has Marketing and eCommerce plans for their website building service. They’re a little more expensive and more appropriate for standalone business sites, especially for local and small businesses. But more advanced selling features are missing overall.

Who should use Web.com?

• Salespeople and marketers working on multiple campaigns – If you want to knock out landing pages in no time flat and get the useful benefits of email and domain included, go with Web.com and enjoy every bit of value you get from their Starter package.

Get started with Web.com today.

#5 – Shopify Review — The Best for Ecommerce

Whether you’re selling jewelry, electric scooters, or tax preparation services, why would you mess around with a site builder that doesn’t specialize in ecommerce?

Shopify powers over 1 million merchants in 175 different countries, so it’s no surprise that they’re one of the biggest and most trusted ecommerce website builders out there. Only Amazon and eBay have more online retail transactions happening on them in the United States.

The Shopify software represents a complete end-to-end platform that allows you to set up, manage, and promote a store online. You can easily list your goods for sale, take payments, and fulfill orders – all under one roof.

Pros 

Here are the best things about Shopify:

• Ecommerce specialty – The main draw of Shopify is that it is a niche website builder focused on setting up an ecommerce store. This means that all their features and processes are geared toward that end, resulting in a powerful platform that can help maximize sales.
• Security – If you are going to be handling transactions, you need ways to keep your site safe and customer data secure. Shopify stores have strong cybersecurity measures in place which a self-hosted website would typically lack.
• Integrated sales channels – Shopify has strong integrations with other platforms, such as Facebook and Amazon. This allows you to streamline your sales by managing your catalog on each platform under one roof.

Cons 

Here are the weaker aspects of Shopify:

• Niche focus on eCommerce – Because the focus is on eCommerce, Shopify lacks some of the features and finesse of other website builders. For instance, their content management system is very limited compared to WordPress.
• Transaction fees + monthly fees – With each sale, you make on Shopify, there is a transaction fee that ranges from 2.4% – 2.6%. Combined with payment provider fees, this can eat into your margin.

Who should use Shopify?

• Brick and mortar stores – If you have an in-person store and are looking to sell your products online, Shopify will offer you a solid footing in the digital world.
• Ecommerce startups – Entrepreneurs that are starting new brands or drop shipping will also benefit from the quick end-to-end setup that Shopify offers.

#6 – WordPress Review — The Best for Content Management

One of the oldest and most reliable website builders is WordPress. The platform has come a long way since it launched in 2003 and is the most popular content management system on the web today.

In fact, WordPress powers a whopping 37.6% of all websites.

As WordPress was around during the earlier days of the web, its focus revolved around content, which was the most prominent form of website at the time.

It maintains that focus to this day, with WordPress having arguably the best content management system out of all the different website builders.

An important caveat is that WordPress is divided into platforms:

• WordPress.org – This is the open-source (free version) of WordPress that comes with greater flexibility, but is harder for non-technical users.
• WordPress.com – This is the paid version. You can get help with the installation of themes and management but is generally less customizable.

Pros 

Here are the best things about WordPress:

• You have full control – Unlike other website builders, WordPress is fully customizable as the site is developed directly with code, as opposed to drag and drop interfaces. This means that you have much more flexibility in terms of design and function.
• Robust blogging and CMS – WordPress is built front the ground up with content in mind. It has some of the best tools for publishing and managing content including team management, advanced scheduling, and categorizations.
• Lots of plugins – There are over 52,000 plugins available for WordPress. You can measure and boost your SEO with plugins such as YoastSEO, or you could even add a new function such as a shopping cart.

Cons 

Here are the weaker aspects of WordPress:

• You may need help – As your WordPress site is developed with code, you will likely need help to install and update your WordPress theme. This can come with a hefty cost, particularly if you want ongoing changes.
• Learning curve – If you want to manage and update your site yourself, it can take some time to learn how to do so. Managing and scheduling posts are relatively easy, but updating how your site looks or installing a plugin is much more difficult.
• Security issues – As your WordPress site is self-hosted, you are more vulnerable to cybersecurity issues. Some of the plugins for WordPress also can act as a risk as well.

Who should use it

• Bloggers – If writing is your main focus, then WordPress is a great choice. The platform is designed for bloggers, optimizing content management, and SEO. WordPress will allow you to scale and get the most out of your content.
• Content-centric businesses – Likewise, if you are building a business that is content-heavy, such as a new website, WordPress will help you to manage the operational side of content production much easier.

What I Looked at to Find the Best Website Builder

Now it is time to take a closer look at some of the specific features to consider when evaluating a website builder.

Remember that although some website builders may fall into the same category, each may suit your needs differently.

For instance, you may be setting up an online shop and your primary consideration may be a low learning curve, whereas somebody else may be thinking about a platform that can allow them to scale easily.

Here are some features you should consider.

Ease of use 

Things to consider:

• Intuitiveness – Some website builders are easy to use and have simple interfaces with drag and drop functionality. This is useful as you won’t have to Google changes you want to make with the tool.
• Learning curve – If you are not great with technology, it is unlikely you will want to spend hours learning how to set up a website. Some website builders are much easier than others.
• Setup time – Similarly, you may want to get your site up and running immediately, particularly if it is an event you want to promote.
• Ongoing management – Needing external help to manage your site defeats the purpose of a website builder. It must be easy to manage in terms of updates.

If you are new to setting up online or are time-constrained, how easy it is to get started will likely be your primary concern.

Scalability 

Things to consider:

• Custom code – Website builders use standardized code, which are the building blocks of a website. These allow you to easily create a site with various features. In some cases, however, you may need your own custom features and the ability to write your own code.
• Migration – At some point, you may want to host your website yourself. However, not all website builders allow you to easily make this move. In some cases, you may have to redevelop your site from scratch.
• Integrations – You will probably create new goals as your website grows, such as running ads or embedding social feeds. Some website builders are more compatible with other platforms and are easier to integrate.

You should think strongly about scalability if you are already an established business looking to create an online presence. This is particularly true if you are already selling products at scale in the real world.

Startups in the fundraising process and are looking to scale fast or even change core features of their product should also take caution here.

Support 

Things to consider:

• Support channels – You will need to consider the different ways you can get in touch with support teams such as live chat, email, and phone. In-depth FAQ’s (frequently asked questions) are also important.
• Responsiveness – If your site breaks at 5 PM eastern time, but their support only works European hours, then you are in trouble. Some teams may also respond much quicker than others.
• Engagement – Unfortunately, some support teams are useless. Maybe they are being paid very little so they do not care, or they are overworked. Either way, you need support that can actually solve your problems.

If you plan on running a site with a lot of visitors and it happens to go down, the last thing you want is an unresponsive support team. This is especially true if you plan on driving a lot of traffic at a given time.

A website builder with a strong support team is also useful if you are just getting started online, considering you may still get stuck, even with simple interfaces.

Price 

Things to consider:

• Cost – Some website builders can be more costly, with some reaching upwards of $299 a month (for landing pages, for instance). Others are permanently free with the option to upgrade for a small monthly fee.
• Trial – Before you commit, it can be useful to take advantage of a trial offer to play around with the tools. You will likely find that some are a better fit than others.
• Hosting & domain – Most website builders will host your website on the web, which is typically included in the price. Some may also offer a domain as part of the package. Otherwise, you would have to purchase these yourself.

If you plan on making money from your website, either by selling products directly or to capture leads, then price should not be a key consideration for you. Make an investment in the best service for your needs.

However, if you just want to set up a small information site, then you could do with the cheapest options.

Generally, website builders that have feature depth are typically more expensive as they solve more specific problems.

Features 

Things to consider:

• Ecommerce shop – If you plan to sell things online, you need a website builder that allows you to do so. Consider sub-features such as payment processing and product catalogs.
• SEO – Some website builders have tools that allow you to rank better in Google searches.
• Marketing tools – You may also need other marketing tools, such as forms, pop-ups, and chat boxes.
• Community – In some cases, you may want to expand your website into a community where people can communicate and network (otherwise known as a forum).
• Analytic tools – Website builders may also offer analytic tools that help track traffic on your website or at least integrate with other tools that do.
• Niche features – Perhaps there are some special features you are looking for such as the ability to set up a crowdfunding campaign in addition to having a standard website.

The features of a website builder are the main thing to consider when deciding which route to follow. This is because they will have the most impact on your specific goals.

For instance, if you want to set up a landing page for a specific product, trying to optimize with a generic site builder will be a pain. It will probably lack the in-depth analytic tools that a dedicated landing page builder would have.

Also keep in mind that there are some features that you may not need now, but you could need in the future, such as if you plan on running paid ads to your blog posts.

Design 

Things to consider:

• Themes and templates – Website builders allow you to start with a predesigned website that is customizable to various extents. Some themes serve different purposes in terms of branding and utility.
• Mobile-friendliness – You will need to ensure that your website builder automatically makes your website easy for mobile users, typically with responsive design.
• Customization – It is likely you will want to make some changes to your template. You will need to consider the various customization tools available.

Regardless of your goal, you should always be concerned with providing a great user experience to the people who are visiting your site. It simply makes logical sense – if your site is hard to navigate, people won’t get the most out of it.

The actual design and branding are important too. For instance, some designs are more corporate while others are more welcoming. There may be a design template that really suits your particular brand.

And if you are selling something, you need to ensure that the design is optimized to increase conversions.

Now that you have a good understanding of the types of website builders and the features to look out for, it is time to take a look at some of the best website builders on the market.

Conclusion

An important thing to keep in mind is that the website builders listed above can serve multiple functions. Now that you have a solid overview, it’s time to look into the details of each platform.

Use my recommendations as a guide to get started:

1. Wix — Best for general use
2. Zyro — Best for multipurpose business websites
3. Weebly  — Best for beginners
4. Web.com — Best for building landing pages
5. Shopify — Best for eCommerce
6. WordPress — Best for content management

Follow the links to further explore each option. The best choice for you will come down to both your needs at the moment and where you plan on taking your website in the future.

After reading reviews like this one, make sure you take a step back and put your particular needs at the forefront of the decision before you commit.

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By: Neil Patel
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If you are frustrated with your current business phone system, it’s worth checking out your options. 

You could save money, get a more useful set of features for your employees, and deliver a better experience for your customers.

But there are a variety of ways to implement a new phone system. You want to be smart about this. 

To help you understand what’s out there and play the field intelligently, my team reached out to experts who deploy business phone systems for a living and  manage intense call centers. 

You can go anywhere on the web to find generic advice, like “choose a system that has the features you need.” That helps nobody. 

Here, you're going to find insights for buyers from a range of people that know what really matters. I talked with:

• Matt: A network engineer with more than 20 years of experience helping companies manage their IT.
• Nikhil: A founder of two cloud service companies and former managed service provider for unified communications.
• Lawrence: A network operations center engineer working for a cloud business phone system provider.
• Guy: A call center veteran with more than 15 years experience in keeping operations efficient.
• Terry: The head of IT for a midsize software company who has deployed and scaled contact centers for numerous use cases.

We talked in-depth about how the underlying technology actually works to give companies a real-world edge they don’t have today. The end result being my recommendations and this buyers’ guide. You don’t have to be an IT pro to benefit from hearing their perspective on what a “one-click” integration really means, or how to keep a phone system from getting hacked.

Take a break from the run-of-the-mill guidance. Keep reading to find out which business phone systems are really delivering value and how to decide between the top options.

#1 – Nextiva Review — The Best for Remote Teams

Nextiva helped so many companies keep their operations running while offices were closed. It’s a safe, proven business phone system that works as well in an office as it does for on-the-go and work-from-home employees.

Since the platform is entirely cloud-based, it’s extremely easy to deploy. Get set up in minutes and every employee will have unlimited voice and video calling.

You can add texting for a few bucks a month or look into their contact center solutions if you want to unify communications with chat and email, as well. Whatever setup you choose, there’s no new equipment to buy and it’s effortless to upgrade if you want more channels or features down the road.

I like it for offices with remote workers because Nextiva isn’t a one-way street—it will work with landline phones if you need it to.

You have the flexibility for people to be in or out of the office without disrupting productivity or the customer experience. 

New users will have hardly any trouble getting on board. They just download the Nextiva app and they can start making calls.

“It’s easier to just download the app and connect to the servers,” Nikhil explained about why both employees and administrators liked softphone apps. All the security is baked in, and your employees “can work from their mobile, tablet, or desktop without configuring as much.”

Keeping your phone system secure is a huge concern if you have remote workers signing in from home and public networks. 

Lawrence told me you want a provider using TLS and SRTP to encrypt traffic so that no one “can see what you're doing, or listen to any of the calls that go over that line.” 

Nextiva uses both of these protocols to secure voice traffic, and also has fraud mitigation to detect and block suspicious calling activity on your account. 

“A malicious actor can use your phone lines,” Lawrence said, “and you regularly see that there are multiple lines open to a faraway country with an expensive pay phone number.” 

Nextiva constantly monitors your account for such toll fraud and other types of hacks, giving you peace of mind while workers are consistently outside your firewall.

There’s just a lot less to worry about with Nextiva providing your phone service. Your admins won’t have to provision specific phones or ensure that calls get to the right place. Because users are on softphones, that number follows them wherever they go. 

This is important, as Matt noted, because it can get pretty tricky trying to route calls when people are moving around with a number tied to a specific phone. 

Nextiva lets you avoid those headaches altogether. As long as someone is signed into their Nextiva account, all their preferences are stored and they’ll receive calls just fine.

In fact, Nextiva recently redeveloped their extension provisioning so that you can start a call flow from an extension:

This lets you route internal calls without having to pay for extra numbers, which is sometimes unavoidable with other providers. 

Plus, look how easy it is to add an extension—if you can order food online you can configure the Nextiva phone system.

This makes it easier to take advantage of the flexible routing features, like Find Me/Follow Me, and your employees can guarantee that calls find them no matter where they’re working that day. 

As Matt explained, Follow Me features are a big step up from simple call forwarding. 

“Sure, back in the day, you could forward calls to your cell, and you would get to answer,” he said, “but you wouldn't see who it was.” Now that the feature is digital, “it’s just a lot more robust,”

Follow Me lets you set answering rules that redirect your call to multiple places—your office, your cell, your home—before sending someone to voicemail. You can even set rules based on what day or time of day it is. 

“It guarantees that the person on the other end could possibly get you rather than just get your voicemail, which nobody listens to nowadays,” said Matt.

There are other features designed to make the lives of administrators and supervisors more manageable. The admin portal makes quick work of adding new users, and admins can edit active call flows. Switch up your phone menu, greetings, or reroute calls without shutting off your phone system to make changes.

Your supervisors have access to a rich set of team collaboration tools, including:

• Team calendar
• Screen sharing
• Persistent chat (team messaging)
• Multi-site support
• Real-time status alerts
• Video conferencing

Be it sales, service, or just general business needs, everyone benefits with team messaging and an auto attendant that gets calls to the right place faster.

Perhaps the chief reason companies opt for Nextiva is its highly available customer service. You can reach out by email, chat, or phone, 24 hours a day. This is very attractive, as phone support is usually something that only comes with other providers’ premium plans.

On-demand technical support is a boon to teams that aren’t always in the office. Additionally, Nextia offers superior guidance and training to help your team get the most out of your new system on day one. 

Nextiva actually took home multiple Stevie awards in 2020, which recognized the company’s consistently high quality of service. 

The company will also help you migrate your existing phone number to ensure that your entire system is working as planned. With all but the entry-level plan, Nextiva includes professional implementation as part of the price tag.

Let’s take a closer look at how to buy Nextiva, as the company supports a wide range of businesses with their flexible pricing pricing structure:

The above prices are for annual subscriptions. You can opt to pay a little more per month if you don’t want to sign up for a year.

Essential is one of the cheapest plans on the market that offers voice, video, text, and fax. If you are looking for an affordable business phone system that supports multiple channels and remote collaboration, this is it.

That said, the Essential plan lacks video conferencing and many of the integrations that make Nextiva such an easy option for remote work. You get integrations with Outlook and Google Contacts, but you have to upgrade to Professional in order to tie in CRM software like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Salesforce.

The other major perk of upgrading to Professional that makes a lot of sense for remote teams is that you get full 24/7 customer support. With Essential, you are limited to support during business hours.

For companies that don’t have a CRM already, Nextiva includes one for free at the Professional tier, which is only marginally more expensive than Essential.

The Nextos CRM, which is built right into the platform, has special applications for both sales and service. It’s native, so you don’t have to spend time getting the apps to talk to one another.

This is very appealing, because you get the CRM functionality without having to pay for an additional service, or “jump through hoops” trying to make the integration work, which Jason said can be pretty challenging. 

He also highlighted difficulties getting multiple CRMs to work on the same network for different departments. Say your sales team is using Sugar CRM and your service team is using Zendesk. Nextiva has integrations with both of those applications, so you have a lot less to configure on your own.

Enterprise and Ultimate tiers include a longer list of integrations, richer analytics and survey tools, and a deeper set of features with the Nextos CRM platform.

I want to call out the Enterprise plan, which starts at $32.95/month per user, as being extremely affordable compared to similarly feature-rich plans from other providers.

In short, Nextiva is a full-bodied business phone solution that delivers top-quality communications for businesses of any size. In the office, out of the office, it doesn’t matter. Nextiva has you covered.

You can try the Essentials plan free for seven days or request a demo of a premium plan.

#2 – RingCentral Review — The Best for Integrating Phones With Your Business

RingCentral has become one of the most popular service providers in the business communications space. They offer every feature a growing business needs at a competitive price. Unlimited calling, texting, and video don’t hurt either.

It’s my top pick for businesses that want to integrate their existing business software with their new phone system. 

It doesn’t offer a built-in CRM like Nextiva, but it has pre-built integrations with a much longer list of apps. Most users will be able to keep using the software that has helped them get to the point where they are now—you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

And because RingCentral is so widely used, all of these integrations have been tried, tested, and improved under a range of conditions. 

This is really important—not all integrations are equal. As Terry pointed out, some integrations involve a lot of development work on your end, to actually get “the systems to communicate with each other the way you want.” 

RingCentral has taken as much of that work off your plate as possible. There’s still going to be some initial setup, especially if you’ve customized your CRM or ERP to the nth degree already. But you’ll quickly find out why so many users describe the integration process as seamless, and ample documentation online should you encounter issues along the way.

And the benefits in terms of streamlining the workday for your employees are hard to overstate.With Salesforce integration, for example, you can click-to-dial contacts, schedule video meetings, connect the phones to your sales cadence—all within your Salesforce account.

Think of how much time this saves for every call. 

Plus, you're going to be able to track metrics that really matter. With the CRM integration, your analytics are going to reflect information about your customers, not just call times. 

You can get really crafty with the segmentation to look at sales goals in different buyer brackets, geographies, or whatever you think is worth tracking.

That’s just one example, but RingCentral offers far more pre-built integrations than any other platform I reviewed. 

You want to be able to share information throughout the company, and it really grates on employees when they have to manually move data between apps that don’t play well together. 

From my experience and from talking with experts, I recommend demoing these products, if not reaching out to RingCentral to get a reference from a similarly situated customer. This will give you the best possible sense of the quality and depth of each pre-built integration.

But when you’re thinking about connecting your other software, integration is only one part of building out a more efficient process for your teams. RingCentral gives you an extensive range of call handling and administrative features, which will let you tune your system perfectly for each part of your company. 

As Terry explained, customer service CRMs tend to be “a little more complicated from a phone system standpoint” than those for sales. 

Why? Because sales is generally about getting incoming calls to people as quickly as possible. In a support situation, “it’s not the opposite, but it’s kind of close,” he said with a little bit of a laugh.

Terry’s not arguing for service teams to give customers the runaround, but you do need to make sure that the person calling actually has a problem. From there, you want to direct them to self-service resources first. 

Maybe they can reset their password without speaking to an agent, for example. Both parties are going to be happy about that outcome. This keeps your lines clear and lets your service agents focus on customers with really thorny issues.

RingCentral provides everything you need to manage call queues and set up your phone tree to direct customers however you need. 

Integrate your phone system with live chat software and have bots provide automated responses that allow customers to answer a question on their own. Or let the bot triage incoming chats and gather info for when a rep takes over. Incorporate that with skills-based routing that gets a Spanish-speaking caller to the appropriate agent.

There are a ton of opportunities to streamline workflows and improve the overall customer experience because RingCentral is so easy to connect to the other parts of your business. 

Some of the platform’s other highlight features include:

• Single sign-on
• Visual voicemail and voicemail to text
• Team messaging
• Real-time analytics
• Developer platform
• Quality of service reports

RingCentral is cloud-based and hosted, so your agents are going to be able to work from the office and home without much of a hiccup. It’s secure, dependable, and well within the price range for many businesses.

The entry-level Essentials tier is capped at 20 users and comes at a fairly attractive price for very small businesses. But I want to focus on the other plans, which include integrations with the popular software I’ve been describing.

Standard comes with unlimited voice, video, text, and online fax, as well as essential administrative features to stay organized. At this tier, you get integration with productivity suites, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, as well as collaboration software, analytics tools, bots, and more.

Premium includes multi-site administration and management, as well as a multi-level auto attendant to route calls more effectively across sites. You also get advanced in-call features and CRM integrations to help sales, customer service, and general customer success.

Premium is still a very competitive price, and the CRM integration is well worth it. You’ll also get access to industry-specific integrations for healthcare, manufacturing, and other verticals. It’s really worth digging into their extensive App gallery to see what’s available.

The Ultimate tier comes with unlimited automatic call recording, which is a boon for organizations with compliance concerns or potential legal exposure. It also includes device and status alerts to assist admins and supervisors with monitoring critical KPIs at scale.

At the end of the day, companies love RingCentral because it can be molded to suit the way you do business. It makes everyone’s workday a little more streamlined, every interaction a little more productive. 

Try out RingCentral free for 15 days and get access to Essentials, Standard, or Premium. Test the phone system, integrations, and discover why so many businesses choose RingCentral.

#3 – Ooma Review — The Best for Companies That Want Deskphones

Want to keep all the things you like about traditional phones and get rid of all the annoying parts? That is Ooma Office, my number one choice for people who want the hardware without the headaches.

Use your analog phones, mobile phones, computers, laptops, conference phones, fax machines—whatever you have—and Ooma will work beautifully.

The Ooma softphone app can be used as soon as you sign up. If you choose to order desk phones through Ooma or use the ones you already have, the entire activation and setup process takes about 15 minutes.

By purchasing phones directly from Ooma, they’ll come preconfigured. As soon as you plug it in, the phone will automatically establish a secure connection with Ooma and you can start dialing. 

The company actually uses the same technology governments use to encrypt classified data, including a VPN tunnel and SRTP. This is exactly the type of security that Lawrence and Matt told our team to look for.

Go ahead, ditch the old PBX and discover how easy Ooma makes it to personalize your phone system. You get full control over configuration through the Ooma Office web portal. 

It’s not as sleek as Nextiva, but it’s very clean and straight-forward. Most people who switch from a traditional PBX wind up being able to do way more themselves at a fraction of the cost.

You no longer have to know anything about how the underlying technology works in order to set up a virtual receptionist to greet callers and route them to the appropriate department. You can opt for all phones to ring in the department, or have them ring in a particular sequence if your primary contact can’t answer.

Creating a ring group like this used to be difficult, but it’s just a few clicks in Ooma. 

The same goes for hot desking, which allows Ooma Enterprise users to make calls from any phone. Lawrence described how his company—which doesn’t have fixed workspaces for individual employees—really benefited from the ability for employees to go up to any phone in the office, enter their extension, and start making calls.

“Even if you have multiple branches and you work from a different branch,” said Lawrence, “you can just go there, and know that the phone system will work.” Any one of your employees can use any phone and once they connect, all of their preferences and settings will be right there. 

One reason I really like Ooma for small business is that you don’t need to sign a contract to get the best deal. They will port one number per line for free and there are zero hidden charges.

So that’s transparent pricing, no contracts, and access to a robust business phone system with features like:

• A conference bridge for each user
• Call management tools
• SMS messaging
• Ring groups
• Extensions, and extension-to-extension dialing
• Intercom

And that’s not even the full list of what’s included with Ooma Office, which starts at $19.95/month per line.

Like the other providers I looked at, you’ll get unlimited calling in the US and Canada, but Ooma’s unlimited coverage extends to Mexico and Puerto Rico as well. 

The company also has lower than average international calling rates. For example, a call to China would be 2¢ per minute with Ooma Office, whereas the same call would be 3¢ per minute with Dialpad or 3.9¢ with RingCentral. 

That 1-2¢ savings adds up quickly if you have a lot of customers abroad. 

As I mentioned, the pricing is extremely straightforward.

If you choose to upgrade to Office Pro, you get video conferencing, call recording, voicemail transcription, and access to the Ooma desktop app.

Ooma Office is going to be more than enough for many businesses, unless of course they absolutely require one of the key features that come with Ooma Office Pro. 

The price of upgrading is very reasonable, and well below the price of other companies that offer a similar range of services.

Ooma Enterprise (which does require a contract) gives you access to more channels. But it’s not quite as turnkey as other unified communications platforms, like you can get through RingCentral, Nextiva, and Dialpad. 

I say this because a lot of the integration and functionality that comes baked in with those platforms has to be done custom with Ooma Enterprise. 

This could provide a better end result for companies struggling to fit their workflows into pre-built integrations from those other providers.. Ooma has worked with restaurants and retail to streamline order tracking, payments, and reporting through integration. 

As much as I like the pre-built integrations, there’s a “cookie cutter” aspect that comes from trying to make them work generally. So it’s worth giving Ooma a call if you aren’t wowed by the integrations offered by other platforms.

Enterprise subscriptions also come with a greater range of features, like hot desking, advanced call flows, and team messaging. The Enterprise Call Center solution is billed as a complete UCaaS, but neither I nor the experts we talked with had any experience with it, so you’ll have to investigate yourself.

For small businesses, though, Ooma Office is a tried and true way to keep the phones working with minimal complexity. It’s a true plug-and-play solution that works with a wide variety of phones. Analog, IP, wireless, and conference phones are all going to work just fine. 

Keep your equipment if you have it, or buy new phones at a price that often beats the local dealer. Ooma offers open standards phones from manufacturers like Yealink, a favorite among the experts, so you can mix new phones into your old system with minimal frustration.

Hang on to your existing number, pick a new one, set up a toll-free number, connect online fax—none of this takes any time at all. 

Now you have a cloud-based phone system that unites all of your tools within a business phone system that works in the office or on-the-go.

If your current business phone system isn’t getting it done, give Ooma a try, risk-free, today.

#4 – Grasshopper Review — The Best for Businesses That Need Fewer than 10 Lines

If you need a very simple phone system, Grasshopper can provide it for a lot less than some of the other options I’ve reviewed.

It’s not as deep in features as some of the more expensive packages from other providers, but small businesses get the essentials of a modern business phone system. 

Plus, unlike other options, every Grasshopper plan comes with every feature the company offers—so you’re not having to purchase more than you need just to solve one particular issue.

The most basic plan comes with a business number that works on any device and three free extensions. Bear in mind that extensions aren’t always free, especially with budget-friendly options. 

With Grasshopper, on the other hand, you can outfit a small team for the price of a single line.

It’s really a complete package for the small office. Scaling up remains affordable, though I wouldn’t push it too far over ten lines, as the call administration is really geared towards smaller business phone systems.

Grasshopper is a perfect low-cost, all-in solution for a single brick-and-mortar, a small warehouse, a company with a few different locations, or a toll-free number for an ecommerce site.

Grasshopper isn't as elaborate, but that helps teams get comfortable with it more quickly. You don’t have to have an IT wizard on staff in order to add a new user or extension. Because of the simplicity, even your most tech-averse users are going to be fine managing business calls from their personal cell.

Nothing is going to be tied to a hard phone with Grasshopper, so you don’t have all the headaches Matt talked about with regards to people moving from station to station. There’s no backend provisioning necessary if personnel get shifted from one desk to another, which you’d have to do with deskphones in many cases.

Despite the flexibility, you still get the core phone system functionality small businesses need. Transfer calls and set extensions to forward calls to any device with a phone number. Send calls to a landline if you want.

You get the core phone features without the IT drama or security concerns. Some of the most useful for small business include:

• Business texting
• Call forwarding and transfers
• Virtual fax
• Voicemail transcription
• Free extensions
• Simultaneous call handling
• Call screening
• Custom greetings

For someone trying to run their business off a cell phone or struggling to manage an outdated phone system, Grasshopper is a revelation. Instantly, you’ll be able to screen calls and know whether it’s a personal or work call.

On your end, you’ll be able to choose which number you want to call from. No more carrying two phones or anxiety over which type of call you're getting.

And when callers dial in, they’ll be welcomed by a professional greeting. Answer questions about business hours or let them select which department they’d like to speak with.

Because you get free extensions with every line you purchase, you’re not paying for dozens of extra numbers just to route calls.

One of the other features that I think is critical for small businesses today is texting. That’s included with Grasshopper, which makes the system a very cost-effective way to open additional channels of communication with your customers.

Set up instant responses to new callers when you’re on the line or in a meeting. Read a voicemail transcription, respond with a text, and you won’t even have to make a call.

Grasshopper plans include unlimited calling and texting. You’re looking at a flat rate each month. The prices below reflect an annual subscription, and are a few dollars higher if you choose to pay month-to-month.

Since every feature comes with every plan, you’re really buying based on how many phone numbers and extensions you need. Solo comes with one number and three extensions, which can be routed to your cell, home, other colleagues, or different locations.

Partner comes with three numbers and six extensions, which is ideal if you’re trying to grow beyond a single location or manage teams in the field. Small Business comes with five numbers and unlimited extensions.

With Partner and Small Business, you won’t have to ask employees to give you their personal number or buy them a phone. They’ll be set up with everything they need to receive, screen, and transfer calls.

You can purchase extra numbers for $10 per month each or hire a Ruby Receptionist, which is a live US-based agent who can answer calls and speak with customers. It starts at $135 per month for 50 receptionist minutes, and the cost per minute goes down the more you purchase.

This could be huge for a small company that’s struggling to man the phones. For a tiny fraction of what it would cost to hire a full-time person, you can stop worrying about missing calls and know that it’s handled.

I really like Grasshopper for small business. It’s all the necessary parts of a phone system without tons of features aimed at call centers or larger businesses. You can’t get too fancy—there are no direct integrations with other platforms and there’s no easy way to add additional channels—but it excels at the essentials.

OpenPhone is similar, but people that are looking for a more traditional office phone experience will like Grasshopper because it handles things like virtual fax and extensions with forwarding rules.

If you want a stress-free business phone system for small businesses, you should try it out. Grasshopper offers a 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

#5 – Dialpad Review — The Only Way To Deploy A Contact Center in 10 Minutes

I like Dialpad because it takes the complication out of call center work for employees and delivers a great experience to customers. Everything about the platform is streamlined, clear, and made for the way communication happens today.

You can (and should) check out Dialpad for individual channels, but if you’re looking for an all-in contact center system that works out of the box, this is it.

“Nobody goes out of the way and says, ‘Hey, I can't wait to call into this contact center,’” Guy told my team, drawing on years of first-hand experience. “However, when they are going to do it, you want to make it as seamless as possible.”

Dialpad gives you everything you need. Deploy in minutes and continually improve your system over time with Dialpad’s unique set of integrations, AI-powered analytics, and speech recognition technology.

These features deliver meaningful benefits to your agents during every interaction. If an unknown caller says their name, Dialpad will pin it to the call screen and apply it to the real-time transcript of the conversation. 

Agents talk to dozens of people before lunch each day. Having names and a running transcript of what was said is going to make each conversation that much easier. Agents aren’t asking people to repeat information, and they can refer back to past conversations with the same client in a click or two. 

Once the call is complete, Dialpad pulls action items out of the call for review. No more scribbling notes or logging into another platform to check boxes. 

Agents can actually share these call highlights with coworkers or supervisors with a couple clicks, leaving a short note for context:

The entire experience seems like a step forward to me. From the agent perspective, everything is centralized, regardless of what channels they are using. The platform minimizes the number of clicks each action takes, which boosts productivity and resolves problems for customers faster.

When an agent clicks to record a call, for example, an automated message plays that says the call is being recorded. This is a big deal, because companies can face steep fines if they don’t let a caller know the conversation is being recorded. Such violations range from $500 – $2,500, or even jail time.

The laws vary in different states and countries, but agents don’t have to remember to say anything with Dialpad. It happens automatically.

You’re completely covered in terms of call routing and administration features. Get as crafty as you want standing up your call center, tie in every channel, integrate your business software, and Dialpad remains easy to manage.

Reviewing call recordings, for example, is much easier for supervisors when every conversation has been transcribed and time-stamped. Add that to the deep analytics features, and you have a phone system that allows team leaders to take action when they see an agent in trouble.

Guy was long on supervisor features that help train agents. In call centers, employee burnout is a reality. Yes, Guy said, people get tired of taking tons of calls, but another factor is that “agents don't get a lot of very specific, detailed feedback about how they can improve.”

With Dialpad, there are so many opportunities to intervene. Supervisors can listen in to live calls, “whisper” to agents so the caller can’t hear, or “barge” in and take over the call. Alternatively, they could listen in and reach out through the chat app.

“If I'm able to monitor my agent live, and I can see that their handle time is really going past eight or nine minutes, I can drop in and listen in,” Guy said, “and maybe I can co-pilot and help land the plane.”

Another way to increase agent productivity (and happiness) is skills-based routing, which assigns calls to agents based on their areas of expertise. Guy said agents get overwhelmed when their supervisor just throws them on the phone and says, “You need to start knowing a lot about everything.” 

You’ll also see that skills-based routing will increase your first call resolution because your agents that are specialized are automatically fielding calls in their area. It’s a real win-win, and you’re not purchasing any extra hardware or writing complex scripts to get this done.

It’s a really deep platform and you should absolutely investigate the whole of what it lets you do. But let’s quickly highlight some of the other standout features you get with Dialpad Call Center:

• Customer sentiment tracking
• Custom hold music
• In-queue callback
• Manager alerts
• Real-time agent recommendations
• Pre-built integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Kustomer and more

Dialpad acquired TalkIQ, a company that specialized in speech recognition and natural language processing. It’s just a cut above, and during conversations, Dialpad will pull from your knowledge-base to make real-time recommendations to agents. 

For example, if a customer says they want to apply for a loan, all the relevant SOPs and documents pop right up on the agent’s screen. “Yes, I’d be happy to help with that,” a relatively new agent can say, confidently guiding the customer through each step of the process.

You’re going to have to get in touch with Dialpad to get a price for their call center solution, though there is a three-license minimum for the Pro plan and a 100-license minimum for the Enterprise plan.

Dialpad’s basic business communication service is about $5 less per month than both Nextiva and RingCentral. You still get unlimited talk and text, so this might be a good option even if you’re not just looking to use it for a contact center.

I’d take a hard look at Dialpad if you’re having trouble finding a solution that accommodates all the integrations and channels you want. The company has a rich app marketplace, as well as an open API and Zapier integration to connect virtually any tool teams use today.

Request a free trial of Dialpad contact center today.

#6 – OpenPhone Review — The Best for Single Teams and Sole Proprietors

OpenPhone is designed with freelancers, founders, and entrepreneurs working alone or with small teams. It gives you a separate business number on your mobile phone, but unlike other apps that do the same thing, it has very few limitations.

When we’re talking about “second line” solutions like Google Voice, it’s handy, but primitive. You’re not  giving incoming callers a menu of options or the ability to transfer calls. But with OpenPhone, you get both plus so much more.

Instantly, you can establish a professional business identity—no more handing out your personal number. People who call your number are greeted by an auto attendant that lets them press one for sales, or two to hear business hours. It’s easy to configure and a major step up in terms of how your business appears to prospective customers.

OpenPhone will get you a new local or toll-free number, and their team will help you port your old number over if you want to keep it.

Starting at $10 per month, OpenPhone is less than half the cost of other basic business phone systems. You’re not getting video conferencing, sure, but you have unlimited talk and text on any device.

If you have employees or partners, you can set them up with a business number for $5 per month. They’ll be able to use their own number, but you can also set up shared numbers and inboxes to keep everyone on the same page.

This is a big deal and where OpenPhone really stands apart from the competition. There are much more comprehensive (and expensive) phone systems that don’t let you do this. 

With OpenPhone, you get threaded group messaging to communicate within the team, and the ability for multiple users to call and text from a single number.

As David Sacks, the investor from Craft Ventures who led OpenPhone’s most recent round of funding told VentureBeat, “OpenPhone puts the business phone inside a collaborative app that anyone on the team can use from wherever they are.”

For the busy entrepreneur or small business owner, the end result is that it’s much easier to communicate with people in and out of the organization. Everyone can see what’s happening, what needs to get done, and has the tools to respond immediately.

You’re not getting some watered down system with limited capabilities. Attach files and send SMS, MMS, or even GIFs:

I feel like a lot of the budget-friendly business phone solutions leave a lot to be desired in terms of user experience, but not OpenPhone. Yes, it’s just the bare essentials, but the app’s not freighted by legacy phone technology in the slightest—it’s perfectly designed for small business communication in the 21st century.

As Guy pointed out, smaller companies benefit from having the ability to work on multiple channels. “You have to depend on more of your folks to do more things in the smaller desks,” he said. But it’s not enough to simply open up more channels—employees have to be able to “easily navigate in between them.” 

OpenPhone has a simple, intuitive interface that gives your team the ability to chat with colleagues, or text an answer to a customer who left a voicemail about something they emailed you. It’s all right there.

Some of the other features that are going to make a difference include:

• Auto-texting snippets if you miss call
• Call screening
• Setting business hours and do-not-disturb
• Call recording
• Call transfers and forwarding
• International calling
• Zapier and HubSpot integration

To get the full range of features and integrations, you’ll have to purchase an upgraded plan. 

All OpenPhone plans are flat rate with 1,000 calling minutes and texts per month. It’s billed as “unlimited” but, like many providers, this is within the acceptable use policy, so I wouldn’t use this service to run drip campaigns or anything like that.

Standard includes most of the features I’ve described, including Slack, Zapier, Google Contacts and email integration. If you want the ability to transfer calls, a more complex IVR, or integration with HubSpot you’ll have to go with Premium.

Right now, HubSpot is the only CRM integration, but integrations with Salesforce and Pipedrive are in the works.

OpenPhone is a young company that’s constantly upgrading their service and adding critical features. I like where it’s going, but I already like where it is today more than any other lightweight business phone app.

Try OpenPhone free for the first week and never look back.

What I Looked at to Find the Best Business Phone Systems

All my top recommendations for business phone systems are cloud-based, which means you make calls through the internet instead of a landline. They’re also hosted, which means you sign into a service to use the system rather than build the infrastructure yourself. 

For most companies in 2021, a cloud-based hosted phone system is going to be your best bet. Here’s why:

• Unlimited Calling: Say goodbye to per minute charges for calls or a set block of text messages each month. Every provider I’ve reviewed offers unlimited calling in the US and CA. You’ll also get unlimited texting and video conferencing, if that’s included in your plan. Where there are limits (or free calling in additional countries), I’ve called it out in the reviews. 
• Lower IT responsibility: Your provider will host the phone system, so you have a lot less to worry about in terms of security, maintenance, and keeping the network up 24/7. If you host your own system, you have to buy all the equipment and manage the system yourself.
• Remote work ready: People can sign into the system securely wherever they have internet. If you host your own system, there are a ton of security issues that crop up when you have people trying to access your system from unknown or home networks.
• Cost: Running your phone system through the cloud is cheaper per month than using a landline. There’s also much less equipment to buy, which decreases your initial outlay for a new system—no PBXs, routers, switches, upkeep, or need to have additional wires to your location.
• More functionality and control: You get all the call handling features that you get from a traditional PBX—like call routing, conferencing, and voicemail—but these can all be managed by non-technical people. Admins and managers are going to be able to make changes to the phone system themselves, which was not always possible with older systems.
• Scalability: You can add new users without purchasing additional infrastructure. You can also upgrade plans to access new features without any sort of downtime or migration headaches. 
• Future-ready: Nothing is truly future-proof, but cloud-based phone systems are definitely the direction that things are headed. Each year, these systems get less expensive and more powerful, whereas the traditional PBX/landline setup is becoming harder and harder to accommodate.

You can still make calls over landlines or host your own phone system on premises, but I don’t recommend it for most people. 

Landlines make sense if there is no way to get fast internet to your business—but it’s not really a choice in that case. 

In terms of hosting a system yourself, you 100 percent need IT staff to troubleshoot issues and keep it up 24/7. And even then, pulling your IT team away to resolve issues at all hours might end up being more expensive than getting the phone system you don’t have to think about.

Personally, I can’t imagine going back to a landline, trying to run my business off a second cell phone, or hiring a fleet of techs to manage my phone system for NP Digital. You couldn’t pay me. 

But I’ve got marketing ventures and millions of readers in different continents—my communication challenges aren't the same as everyone else. To help my readers, my team reached out to five experts from different quarters of the business phone system world to gather perspective for prospective buyers.

These conversations confirmed for me that cloud-based phones are the way to go, and I learned some really great ways to approach the different decisions that businesses face. 

No one is using landlines any more, according to Matt, a backend IT veteran. Right now, he handles all the communications for a nonprofit healthcare provider that has several clinics spread across a major American metro area. 

Every dollar counts for these clinics, so one of his first projects was helping them switch over to a cloud-based system. “With voice over IP, you can take your existing internet connection and basically slap a phone system on top of it,” he said. “It's just like a layer,” rather than having to find someone familiar with wiring new cables to the office.

Nor are people managing their own phone system as much as they used to. I spoke with Nikhil, who helps small businesses install open-source phone systems that they can manage themselves. He noted that a lot of people who start out managing their own phone system wind up buying managed plans. 

“It’s the support plus SLAs,” he said. Instead of hiring people, these companies decide to let someone else handle the backend. 

“They don’t have to mess with the technology at all,” said Nikhil, “and they’re basically not seeing any downtime.”

Lawrence works for a VoIP (voice over internet protocol)    provider that actually built their own network. He emphasized how you really need to know what you’re doing if you host your own system on premises. 

For example, you’ll have to deploy the phone system behind a firewall, which regularly causes all sorts of trouble for cloud-phone systems, like one-way audio. “This can be fixed by configuring your firewall correctly,” said Lawrence, “but it can be difficult because most of the problems don’t occur all the time—it’s hard to reproduce issues.”

Every phone system is going to have things go wrong—with a managed plan, you’re not on the hook for solving these mysteries. As Lawrence said, people can stop worrying about the phone system and more about taking calls.

But of course it’s not just making calls any more. Guy talked with my team about the “big shift” in how customers are making contact with businesses. He started working in call centers more than 15 years ago. Now the contact centers he manages connect with customers through talk, text, chat, email, and social media. 

Guy’s question for companies is, “Are you gathering demographics about your customer base, figuring out age-brackets and trends?” 

You can do this easily with VoIP, which gives you a lot of ways to connect your communication data to reporting tools and other business software that lets you harness these insights. Doing this with a traditional phone system would be much more expensive, if it is possible at all.

Terry, who ran the IT backend of call centers rather than administration like Guy, emphasized how painful it is to switch from one phone system to another. “It’s worth your time to really weigh your options before making the switch and making sure that it's not just enough.”

It’s probably a lot smarter to get more than you need today, or to find a system that will more likely accommodate future changes. 

You definitely don’t want to find yourself “in a situation where you're on a system that can't handle what you need it to do from day to day,” Terry said. “Trying to find a quick fix to work around that is very hard.”

Running your business phone system on the internet is definitely the least risky, and likely least expensive way to go. But even among this particular type of business phone system, there are things you want to pay attention to.

Here’s how you decide from among the best options.

Requirements for Cloud-Based Phone Systems

Because you are calling over the internet instead of a landline, you have to make sure your network can handle it. 

Now VoIP doesn’t require a ton of bandwidth on its own, but the connection has to be stable. Any delay or issues with the data being transferred and real-time voice/video communication becomes choppy. 

You’ve probably had your internet bug out during a call. It really ruins a conversation, which is a death blow for sales, customer service, or really anyone using the phone system for business.

So what do you need? 

It’s going to depend on how many people are using the phones (or other channels) and what else is happening on the system. 

Nextiva lets you test your internet speed on their website. You can simulate up to 200 phones, and you’ll find out all the important metrics—upload speed, download speed, latency, jitter, and packet loss.

Ideally, you have (or can get) fiber internet as opposed to cable or DSL. The latter two “high-speed” internet options are fine for home users, but VoIP is simply not going to be reliable for business on DSL. 

Cable is better, but you still could run into issues if you have a decent number of people making calls. “For one office it could work,” Matt said, “but if you have multiple offices, a cable modem is just not going to cut it.”

He had to convince the healthcare clinic he worked for to switch to fiber, which was over three times more expensive than the cable service they were using. Yes, it was going to cost more, but both customers and employees were reporting issues with the current service. Call quality was not great, and there were dropped calls from time to time. 

These are important, timely conversations with patients. Matt and his team prioritized voice traffic on the network, which made sure that calls got as much bandwidth as possible, but it slowed down the internet for all the employees. 

“It was ridiculously slow,” Matt said. Although it allowed the phones to work, “the internet traffic was much, much slower until we put the fiber in. Now we have no complaints.”

With fiber, the upload/download speeds are the same, whereas cable they’re different. You may have 100 down, 40 up. So, if people are uploading a lot of documents or using heavy-weight CRM software, trying to make calls over cable is going to get problematic.  This is what happened to the company Matt worked with. Definitely something to avoid.

One other thing to pay attention to, according to Terry, is trying to run that CRM software plus a phone system on low-end computers. 

“You can run into some issues for a computer that's probably pretty good for browsing the web and doing basic stuff,” he said. But once you integrate the CRM, “all of a sudden it’s stretched to its limits.” 

This can cause problems with connectivity and performance loss, “where you get an echoey call or other weird issues that are pretty hard to deal with.”

My advice is to address the requirements of any system head on, especially if you are integrating powerful software with your phones. 

At some point, any savings from low-end equipment or cheap internet is going to start to blow back on you. “Just as people have factored in electricity or insurance, it's a cost of doing business,” Terry said. “You have to have a strong internet backbone if you want to have that stability and uptime.”

Desk Phones, Headsets, and Softphone Apps

You’re going to hear that some of these business phone systems are “no hardware required.” Is that for real?

It’s true enough that cloud-based systems don’t require routers, switches, PBXs, or even desk phones—you just need the internet. With the options I chose, you can set people up with a softphone, which is just an application that allows people to make calls through your system from a tablet, mobile phone, or their computer with a headset. 

A lot of people are using softphone apps these days, Nikhil said, because of the flexibility. 

“It’s easier to just download the app and connect to the servers,” he said, talking about why cloud-based phone systems are so attractive to customers. Their powerful softphone apps offer “flexibility without the maintenance and troubleshooting.”

Still, you have to think about the environment where these phones will be used. As Terry pointed out, you can’t just get the cheapest headset for every user planning to use a softphone.

Investing in high-quality noise-cancelling microphones is really valuable if you have a bunch of sales folks making calls in the same room. Otherwise, “it's harder to build trust with customers” who can hear the other conversations in the background.

For my part, when someone calls me from a number I don’t recognize and I can tell the speaker is sandwiched between a bunch of other folks blasting out calls, my reaction isn’t positive. 

A little bit of extra money on some good noise cancelling headsets is definitely going to increase your conversion rate, whether you’re serving or selling to customers. RingCentral has a great selection of headsets that work really well with their system. So does Nextiva. 

The other big advantage to softphone apps is that they are much easier to configure. For the most part, you are just signing in to access an account—so you can work from anywhere, and your number follows you around. 

Desk phones, on the other hand, “create more headaches for me,” Matt explained. “As people move around, their extension follows the phone, not them.” When staff get shuffled around from one health clinic to another, Matt has to re-provision them on different servers. 

For employees that just use the softphone app, it’s easier because they have a single extension, “and that extension follows them no matter what office they go to, because it only requires an internet connection.”

But some offices still want desk phones, retail stores need wall mounts, hotels have to have a phone in every room, and so on. If you are in the position of needing so-called “hard phones,” there are a few things to pay attention to.

“I would really look at something that supports open standards,” Lawrence said. If you go with phones from certain providers—like Cisco, for example—those phones are only going to work on a Cisco system. 

On the other hand, Lawrence explained that open-standards phones, “can be used with most PBXs that exist, and you can easily switch from one provider to the other.” This is going to give you a lot more flexibility and control, not to mention being better positioned for an uncertain future.

The other big thing that Lawrence said buyers should pay attention to is the provisioning system. You want to make sure that the phone manufacturer offers a provisioning and redirection service that makes it simple to add new phones. “So if you have to configure hundreds or even thousands of phones, you can just plug them in, and they will work.”

Providers like Ooma can be a great choice for companies that still want phones. As people needed to work remotely, folks with Ooma office just took their desk phones and plugged them in at home. Everything worked fine—calls were still secure and all the routing features worked like people were still at the office.

For the most part, the providers I selected will let you keep using whatever phones you have. If you already have IP phones, great. If you have analog phones, most providers will sell you an adapter that will let them call through the internet. 

In terms of manufacturers, the experts consistently cited Poly and Yealink for consistently delivering phones that have good voice quality, are easy to use, and work well with a lot of other technology. Poly (formerly Polycom) received especially good reviews from the experts as a source for conference phones. 

As Matt said, “they just seem to have better microphones.” The standard base conference phones work pretty well for a small room, but you may want to get additional microphones for a room that’s large enough for 12 or more people.

If you still use fax machines, look for a provider that offers that specifically. Fax machines use a different modem than phones, so you can’t just layer it on top of VoIP. Providers like RingCentral and Ooma have all the adapters and capabilities you need for stress-free faxing.

In the end, cloud-based business phone systems require less hardware than traditional set ups—it’s no contest. But at the same time, you may need headsets, desk phones, and conference phones, and you want to get high-quality equipment.

Voice and Unified Communications

Other channels are gaining ground, but voice is still a critical component of business communications.  “I just want to speak with an actual person,” is a feeling we’ve all had as customers. But it’s simply not enough to only have voice communications these days.

A lot of the solutions I like give you multiple channels with your service. OpenPhone and Grasshopper both give you texting with voice to connect with customers. RingCentral, Nextiva, Oooma, and Dialpad support other channels as well—like chat, video, fax, and email—which is why these providers are able to offer truly unified communications.

This is ideal for reps, service agents, and other employees because all of their communications are centralized in a single platform—no switching accounts, forgetting passwords, or losing track of conversations.

People simply aren’t using the phone as much as they used to—although it is still really important—and increasingly using other channels. As Lawrence noted, new research has shown that younger people are especially hesitant. “They'd much rather go to a website and click on a chat button than pick up the phone,” he said.

And it’s not just Millennials who appreciate other opportunities to connect with companies. Over 15 years, Guy watched the call centers he managed become contact centers. He’s noticed multiple age brackets interested in chat, text, and making contact through social media platforms. He said the latter is “definitely something that you want to look at when you're upgrading, changing, or purchasing your business phone system.”

Every business is different, and Guy encouraged companies to use surveys and outbound campaigns to get feedback about how they’d like to make contact. “You have to know your customers’ tendencies and hone in on what they want to do.”

But it’s not just consumer preferences driving the shift towards unified communications. For the healthcare clinics Michael supports, the automatic texting feature is an important complement to phone service. He explained, “Once the appointment is made, we can then automatically text patients, reminding them of their appointment, as well as any future appointments.” 

This ability to automate texting is an advantage to any business that books appointments, confirms orders, or wants to update customers about new offers.

Staying competitive is likely going to mean being available on more channels for your customers. “Make no mistake,” said Guy, “You want to open up other options in order to communicate.” It’s going to come at an added cost, but there wasn’t a person I talked to who thought that the phone alone was going to make companies fit for survival in the 21st century.

Now, what if you’re a company that just needs voice as a way to communicate internally? Or be generally reachable for things like deliveries and meetings? If that’s all you need, the benefit of the trend towards unified communications is that you can get a basic phone system for a steal.

OpenPhone and Grasshopper are limited to talk and text, but they are going to cost considerably less than unified communications products. 

You can also go with basic plans from some of the other providers, which include excellent voice capabilities for a bargain. RingCentral and Nextiva are great for this, and if you ever want to add more channels, it’s as simple as upgrading your plan. 

Integrating Phones With Your Business

A cloud-based phone system can integrate with your other business software. This is an opportunity you should absolutely take advantage of.

Many of the best hosted options include pre-built integrations with popular apps, calendars, CRMs, ERPs, and other tools. This is going to streamline employees' daily workflows and make staying organized so much easier.

Within a CRM like Salesforce, for example, your employees will get click-to-dial capabilities. This saves so much time on every call. On top of that, all call recordings, notes, purchase histories, and so on are stored automatically with the customer account, which makes it much easier to track down info later.

Lawrence said that the CRM integration was far and away the most valuable aspect of their phone system for most customers. 

“When a customer calls, you don't just see a number,” he said, you see everything that’s in their CRM profile. “Who they are, what kind of services they subscribe to, when they last called, and what the call was about.”

Say there’s an ongoing issue and the customer has called five times. The agent picking up that call can see what’s happened already. The customer doesn’t have to re-explain themselves—which everyone hates doing. 

It puts your customer at ease to know that the person they’re speaking with knows what’s going on, and the agent is on a much stronger footing to help.

That's just the basics in terms of what CRM integration can do, and I haven’t even mentioned what’s possible with other business apps. 

Chatbots can start conversations and gather information before switching the conversation over to a relevant agent. Integrating your phone system with your knowledge base software will automatically provide agents with the right script and information, or provide your customer a fast answer without an agent having to pick up the phone.

So there’s a lot you can do, but as a buyer, here’s what you should be thinking about.

Unless you have a team of developers, you are going to want to stick with the pre-built integrations from providers like RingCentral, Dialpad, and Nextiva. 

Yes, some vendors offer an open API that lets you build out your own integrations, but getting these to work properly (and efficiently) is going to be a lot of trial and error. 

This is something where you’d want to use a hosted phone system, Nikhil told us. He has a lot of experience helping companies build out their own phone systems. “With open source it’s kind of a black box,” he said, “so use a managed service provider if they want the integration.”

Finding a phone system that integrates with the tools you use is a critical consideration. But it’s not enough to just confirm that a vendor offers pre-built integrations. 

“Some of them are easy and out of the box,” Terry said. But it’s not always the case. Sometimes, “you have to do a lot of complicated development work, or just jump through a lot of hoops to make systems communicate with each other the way you want.”

You really need to test the integration to see how it drives. But how many integrations are you going to demo? That’s a lot of work, time, and effort.

Terry said it’s definitely worth your time to reach out to your account rep and ask for a reference. If you use Zendesk, for example, ask your rep for the contact of another company that’s about the same size as yours and uses the service platform in a similar fashion. 

“You can have a pretty candid conversation with someone in the exact same position that you’re in,” said Terry. “Generally they’re pretty real about what works and what doesn't work.”

Securing Your Business Phone System

Security is one of the big reasons I’m such a fan of hosted business phone systems. 

When you host the system yourself, you’re responsible for securing everything. This is hard enough if everyone is working in the same office, and much more difficult if people are working from home, multiple branches, or signing in from unprotected networks like coffee shops and hotels.

Why not go with a hosted solution? All of the providers I picked handle security so you don’t have to.

You don’t have to worry about provisioning the phones correctly, ensuring that calls are encrypted, and that your phone system is hardened to outside attacks. 

I really agree with Lawrence, who said that one of the biggest questions you have to ask about any potential provider is, “Do they offer a secure connection for the phones that are connecting to that system?”

This is a must for me. Toll fraud is a serious issue. Nearly every expert I talked with highlighted the importance of security for business phone systems because each year, there are millions of dollars lost.

“There are always systems on the internet that are looking for vulnerable  VoIP systems, and those are actively being abused,” said Lawrence. It’s happened to some of Lawrence’s clients, but fortunately his company has systems to detect and prevent that behavior. “Ideally what you want is a provider that has the phone system in their network, that can do the maintenance and security of that system,” he said. 

This removes the responsibility of security from your plate. All you are on the hook for are the standard security considerations when doing anything online: using strong passwords, enabling two-factor authentication, de-provisioning old users, and so on

Because he’s doing the IT backend for a healthcare provider, Matt has to be ultra-conscious of security and privacy. A single HIPAA violation can cost thousands of dollars or even result in jail time. 

But because Matt uses a secure business phone system, there is a lot less to worry about. “It’s impossible for someone to barge in on a call without somebody knowing what’s going on,” he said. “So there’s no concern of a HIPAA violation.”

For companies with compliance and security concerns, going with a hosted business phone system is going to give you the protection you need out of the box. 

All communications that go through RingCentral, for instance, are protected by TLS and SRTP to prevent a bad actor from listening in. They also manage all the firewalls, session border controllers, fraud analytics, and systems hardening. It’s like you get enterprise-level security simply by signing into their service.

If you deploy on premises or host your own solution in the cloud, all the backend IT legwork is on you. “You're responsible for securing that system,” Lawrence explained, “making sure that communications with the phones are secure, and that no outside actor is abusing your phone system for any kind of reason.”

Security is critical, and you will have a lot less to think about if your users are signing into a cloud-based system rather than trying to connect to a traditional on premises system.

Summary

To say you have lots of options to consider for a business phone system would be a drastic understatement. 

But, by using this guide, you’ll be equipped to make the right decision based on your needs. Use the perspective from the experts I spoke with to round out your search and make sure you’ve considered every angle that’s going to impact the experience for your employees and customers.

By going with one of the above systems, you know you are getting a secure solution that’s built for the way the world works today. There’s no equipment to purchase, and all but the lightest options will work fine with your existing infrastructure.

In a market that’s saturated with phone systems for businesses, I really like the seven options I reviewed:

1. Nextiva — Best for remote teams
2. RingCentral — Best for integrating phones with your business
3. Ooma — Best for companies that want deskphones
4. Grasshopper — Best for businesses that need fewer than 10 lines
5. Dialpad — The only way to deploy a contact center in 10 minutes
6. OpenPhone — Best for single teams and sole proprietors

So start your search there, and use the buying guide I outlined. This will steer you in the right direction. 

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Best Business Phone Systems
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-business-phone-systems/
Published Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Do you want to skip the read and get right to my top pick? The best VOIP phone services for most people are Nextiva, Ringcentral, or Ooma.

Simple tasks used to be really hard with old phone systems. You probably had to call your vendor to re-route a call path or set an employee up with a secure at-home workstation.

With the best VoIP phone services, these actions take a few clicks.

Buying VoIP for your business is going to save you money over a traditional phone line. And if you are using a clunky VoIP service from an ancient provider, you may be able to switch to something sleeker without losing anything except the frustration.

To write a really helpful post for my readers, my team got in touch with leaders who have used VoIP in different ways. You can find about 80 percent of what you need to know about VoIP anywhere on the web—here’s the 20 percent you can’t find anywhere else.

We spoke with:

• Gregg, who manages IT services for a living. He knows the good and bad of different VoIP options and helps businesses stay protected from hacks.
• Jason, who has been working in call centers for nearly 30 years and just bought VoIP for his enterprise organization. He’s attuned to what’s important for your employees, whether they’re remote or in an office.
• Makan, who’s set up dozens of high-volume telemarketing teams. He’s learned how to reduce the risk of regulatory fines and identify top performers in an industry with exceptionally high turnover.
• Sarkar, who manages sales teams in the B2B SaaS space. He walked us through how to sync VoIP and CRM software with the fewest possible headaches.

Look, I know what works for a company like mine. By speaking with a range of experts, I figured my team could help more types of buyers. 

There are companies looking to outfit offices in 20 countries. Others have to protect patient data. Some folks just want to stop using their personal mobile number for work. 

Here are the seven best VoIP phone service providers you can start using right away. After the reviews, you’ll find an in-depth buyer’s guide.

#1 – Nextiva Review — The Best for Offices with Work-From-Home Employees

I hear a lot about the trends of working from home, but I don’t think anyone can say for sure what “office life” is going to look like two or three years from now. If you want your teams to stay functional no matter which way the wind blows, Nextiva is a solid choice.

It’s cloud-based VoIP, so your employees can come into the office, set up a desk at home, or use their phone on the go. Unlike an on-premises phone system, employees can use their phone without a VPN because they’re calling through Nextiva.

So, you have way less to worry about with security—which is definitely on the minds of managers who have people calling from hotels, coffee shops, and their home network.

The experts my team spoke with categorized it as a true plug-and-play system for businesses that want a dial tone without IT headaches. If your system is built on ten phones or fewer, you will have very little trouble getting Nextiva installed. 

One thing that Jason pointed out, however, was that you’ll need to put some thought into compliance if you plan to take credit card numbers over the phone. But, for the most part, security is handled by Nextiva because everything is routed through their cloud.

Nextiva can scale to hundreds of phones if need be. There will be some backend configuration to get everything going, but Nextiva will help you deploy with a guided installation process.

And unlike some of the other companies that offer this type of flexibility, Nextiva can outfit your entire office. Whatever your setup, you’ll be able to transition it to Nextiva’s modern platform. 

Level up your business phone by connecting it with email, text, and video—or centralize every channel within a single window for your employees.

All the call handling and user administration features you’d expect are included. And when I say they are easy to use, check out the Call Flow Builder that lets visualize how routing is set up:

It can be tricky to configure auto attendants in some platforms, but it’s drag-and-drop easy with Nextiva. 

The company has done a lot to make everything as easy as possible on end users. If you’re wondering whether or not you have the necessary internet speed at your office, you can test it right now on Nextiva’s website. Simulate the traffic required for two or 200 phones. You’ll get info on speed, but also jitter and everything that goes into whether or not you can reliably make calls.

You can also use the site to test the speed of remote workers who need to be on call, which Jason highly recommended. If their home network doesn’t support VoIP, you may be looking at an expensive hiring blunder.

Nextiva offers 24/7 support for every plan. That’s not typical, especially for VoIP at such an affordable price:

• Essential: starting at $18.95 per month per user
• Professional: starting at $22.95 per month per user
• Enterprise: starting at $32.95 per month per user
• Ultimate: starting at $57.95 per month per user

These are the annual prices—it’s a little bit more per user to pay month to month, but you don’t have to sign a contract.

The Essential plan is going to work for many teams. It includes unlimited voice and video calling, a free local and toll-free number, and 1,500 toll-free minutes. That’s a lot more than you are going to get with other entry-level plans.

Unlike RingCentral, there’s no user cap for the Essential plan. This means you can offer more people unlimited voice and video at a low price, rather than having to upgrade once you hit 20 users.

For conference calling and business SMS, you’ll need the Professional plan. This comes with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk integration. Essential only has integration with Outlook and Google Contacts.

At the Enterprise tier, you get integrations with CRM software and single sign-on, which is a huge boon to remote workers. 

Nextiva One is the company’s omnichannel solution. If customers reach out to you through a variety of channels in addition to phones, this might be a good idea. 

Your employees can see all communication with each account, which is really helpful if people are logging help desk tickets, chatting, reaching out on social media, and so on. 

Jason argued that omnichannel also makes administrators' lives easier. “I don’t have 10 systems to manage,” he described to us, “it’s all within the same system.” 

You can coordinate ecommerce with a call center or tie multiple brick and mortar stores into a single system.

You also have one bill as opposed to dozens and you’re not chasing down information across multiple platforms. If a customer has an issue, you can go back through the entire record quickly, regardless of how they got in touch.

Organization is just easier with Nextiva. Staying on the same page with customers and your employees is as simple as logging into the system, no matter where you are.

For teams that don’t have an office to coordinate activity, Nextiva is the best VoIP solution. 

It’s a product that employees new and old can start using immediately on whatever device they have. Should they ever have an issue, Nextiva’s reputable customer service is there to provide support.

If you are looking at the way features break down in the different packages and you don’t find a perfect fit, just reach out to Nextiva. You can purchase any feature a la carte. 

Build your system, your way, in less time with Nextiva. Get in touch for a seven-day free trial of the Essential package, or a demo of any other package they offer.

#2 – RingCentral Review — The Best for High-Volume Outbound Calling

RingCentral gives you unlimited calling, texting, and video conferencing at a competitive price. If you just need the phones and texting, you can get an even better deal.

Forget about per-minute charges and set up employees with VoIP that’s easy to use. For call centers, customer service, sales—anyone who has people on the phone constantly will appreciate RingCentral. This is especially true if you have to train new employees all the time.

First off, they’ll be able to use the interface. It’s intuitive to anyone who has used a computer. Administrators and managers will find they can shorten the time it takes to turn rookie hires into skilled ambassadors for your company.

“You save a lot of money because you can identify hires that aren't doing a good job and wasting their time,” Makan told us. He’s set up a lot of telemarketing call centers with RingCentral and has really valued the ability to “tell right away who's worth the money.”

The ability to track calls, KPIs, and listen back to recordings was like night and day for him compared to working on a landline. Teams can listen back to calls that went well (or poorly) to get a sense of how to better capitalize on each opportunity.

The reporting features aren’t going to take a data scientist to glean insights from. Find your top performers and figure out what they’re doing. Identify people who aren’t a good fit and let them go.

I hear a lot of marketing word salad like “this tool optimizes performance,” all the time. RingCentral walks the walk. 

“You can actually predict your sales,” Makan said, “I know it's difficult to fathom, but it’s true.”

He was able to figure out that 2,500 calls lead to one listing. This told him the number of minutes people needed to be on the phone in order to stay profitable. Over time, he could see how many listings an employee should be generating in their first month, second quarter, and so on.

You’re likely going to measure different KPIs, but it’s the same idea. With the kind of visibility that RingCentral provides, you can distill the numbers to simple metrics that hold employees accountable. You know ahead of time what your sales are going to look like, and you can scale up or down accordingly.

There’s a lot about RingCentral that’s well suited for large-scale calling. Admins don’t have to be IT wizards to add new users and give them access to specific resources. They’ll be able to provision new hires quickly. When someone leaves, they’ll be able to switch around accounts and recycle the number, so you don’t wind up paying for lines you're not using.

If you have turnover—as many high-volume calling occupations do—you need to be mindful of your database integrity. RingCentral makes it easy to limit access to resources and revoke it if need be. 

You're definitely going to be using a CRM (or some form of database) to call at scale. RingCentral integrates with a lot of them. You want to keep that information private.

Another liability for call centers that RingCentral helps you navigate is compliance, which is crucial if you are making a lot of cold calls or using an auto dialer. There’s a TCPA safe dialer, which helps agents avoid bringing a “robo-call” lawsuit down on your company. Instead of worrying about messing something up, they can focus on the person they are talking to.

The DNC list features are also easy to use. Integrate with third-party tools to constantly update your list, and quickly show your employees how to maintain your own internal list.

RingCentral is HIPAA compliant, which means the standard for privacy and security is incredibly high. Fines for HIPAA violations are very steep, and that’s not the worst that could happen.

Selecting from RingCentral’s range of packages, you can replace your phones with VoIP and save a little money or completely outfit an omnichannel call center. 

RingCentral MVP (formerly RingCentral Office) has four tiers to choose from:

• Essentials: starting at $19.99 per month per user
• Standard: starting at $27.99 per month per user
• Premium: starting at $34.99 per month per user
• Ultimate: starting at $49.99 per month per user

These are the prices if you sign up for a year of service, which reflect a 33% discount on the monthly rate.

The Essentials plan is capped at 20 users. You get unlimited talk and text, as well as document sharing, which can be helpful for sharing sales and customer service scripts. You also get team messaging, which is especially helpful in the days where not everyone is coming into a physical office.

With Standard, you get unlimited fax, video conferencing and integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365. There’s no cap on users, either. 

But if you are going for high-volume calling, I really recommend getting Premium. You get the CRM integration that is so important for dialing into your metrics and communicating effectively at scale.

At $10 above the average cost of VoIP, Premium is a steal. Remember, that VoIP average is for voice only and with RingCentral MVP you’re getting texting, video, and advanced call handling features that other “average” plans do not include. 

Managers will be able to listen in on live calls and “whisper” advice. The employee can hear them, the caller can not. From what I found, features like this from other vendors were usually reserved for plans that cost upwards of $50. So in that sense, I’d consider RingCentral MVP well below the average price-wise.

RingCentral offers contact center software, as well, which will unify your communications. Your agents will be able to see a complete record of a customer's history. When did they call, when did they chat? It’s all right there. You’ll have to get in touch with RingCentral for Contact Center pricing.

This is my number one pick for people who have to make a ton of calls. RingCentral helps you protect yourself from a number of the liabilities that come with outreach at scale. It also gives you the viability and tools to stay efficient and maximize each employees’ ability to contribute.

Try RingCentral for free today.

#3 – Ooma Office Review — The Best for Adding VoIP to Existing SMB Phone Systems

If you are holding off on replacing that aging phone system, Ooma can help you install business-class VoIP with minimal disruption to your work.

Any phone you have that’s still working—analog or IP—is going to hook right into your new Ooma system. You can also buy phones from them at a great price and they will be preconfigured, ready to go out of the box.

Ooma Office is going to work fine for most users, coming with 35 VoIP capabilities and a really powerful mobile app. Employees can make calls and collaborate with their colleagues in the app, whether they are in the office or on-the-go.

One thing Gregg pointed out was how expensive it can get to customize your setup if you have to pay per extension. With Ooma, every user gets a number of free extensions: one for conferences, one for online faxing, and one for a Virtual Receptionist.

Virtual Receptionist is Ooma’s term for an auto attendant. You can set it to play custom messages about business hours, let callers dial by name, select a preferred language, or route the caller to another extension.

With other vendors—especially ones that cost as little as Ooma—you often wind up paying extra to enable online faxing. Some VoIP phone service providers don’t even accommodate it. 

When Jason sent his business requirement document to vendors, “two companies bailed out right away” because they weren’t able to set up fax machines. Most of the other vendors told him “they don’t really do that,” but they would try in order to get the business.

With Ooma, each of your users can set up their own fax extension for free. Problem solved.

When it comes to integrating VoIP with existing equipment, Ooma minimizes the steps you have to take and maximizes your flexibility. Connect to Ooma Office via WiFi, ethernet, or use the base station to get analog devices on board.

Think of it as a cloud-based VoIP solution that’s really good at accommodating your existing equipment. It might take some time to configure a large office, but the administrator portal is straightforward. It’s not the prettiest interface of all time, but it’s stupid simple to use.

While Ooma offers solutions for enterprise, their VoIP phone services for small businesses really stand out from the pack. There are no contracts, affordable pricing, and the customer service is fantastic.

Usually to get the best price on VoIP, you need to sign up for a year at least. Ooma’s price is what it is. For small business, Ooma pricing breaks down into two tiers:

• Ooma Office: starting at $19.95 per month per user
• Ooma Office Pro: starting at $24.95 per month per user

Upgrading to Pro, you get the desktop app, video conferencing, call recording, enhanced call blocking, and voicemail transcription. You’ll also be able to host conference calls of up to 25 people, whereas Ooma Office has a limit of 10.

You don’t have the choice of selectively upgrading users with Ooma Office—it’s all employees on one plan or all employees on another. But, at just $5 per user to upgrade, you’re still falling in the average range for VoIP.

And, if you upgrade, you can set people up on their computers with a softphone, which means you have less hardware to buy. 

You can avoid buying phones without upgrading by having people call from the mobile app (which is included with Ooma office), though Gregg warned us that VoIP can be hard on a cell phone. “Yes, you save money because you're not buying physical equipment,” he said, “but it can drain the battery life right out of the device.”

Transition to the cloud at your own pace. Keep your equipment and manage it yourself with way less work than a traditional set up. Get a quote, sign up with Ooma, and start saving money today.

#4 – Phone.com Review — The Most Affordable Professional-Grade VoIP

Phone.com is a smart choice for businesses that are looking for budget-friendly VoIP. You can have unlimited calling or pay less for a set block of minutes each month.

One of the really cost-effective features of Phone.com is that you can mix and match plans. Give the sales team unlimited plans and save money on each employee that only uses the phones occasionally.

And, with the Basic plan, you’re still getting most of the standard VoIP features like call handling, auto attendants, hold music and so on. You’ll have to upgrade to get HIPAA-compliant video conferencing, for example, but you can host up to 10 people in a regular session with Basic.

With most other vendors, you have to upgrade the plan for all your users. Phone.com can really help you keep costs down by giving users the features they need. This is one of those licensing irregularities that Gregg told us about, where it can work out well if you know what you’re doing.

Phone.com lets you pick what you need. Call recording and inbound faxing is extra, though you’ll be able to send faxes from your phone with any plan. 

Nextiva and RingCentral are a little bit more robust, especially when it comes to reporting and analytics. In terms of CRM integration, Phone.com is limited to AllProWebTools and Zoho.

But some businesses just need a reliable phone with call handling capabilities they can manage themselves. Phone.com does more than that, and it’s just enough cheaper than those other options to net a sizable savings.

Offer your customers the ability to text when they have questions. Phone.com keeps all of your employees' messages organized. Come for the phone system, stay for the messaging.

To use IP phones, you’ll have to be on an upgraded plan. The company offers really great prices on popular phones of all styles. You can use what you’ve got, too, as Phone.com supports a range of hardware.

Using your own equipment will definitely lessen the initial outlay, but in talking with Gregg we learned that older phones can get hacked. Just make sure that the processor isn’t too far behind what Phone.com is trying to sell you, and get ready to do some of the configuration yourself. You really can just plug and play if you buy equipment through Phone.com.

Pricing for Phone.com is low across the board:

• Basic: starting at $10.39 per user each month
• Plus: starting at $15.99 per user each month
• Pro: starting at $23.99 per user each month

To get these prices, you’ll have to sign up for an annual subscription, which saves you 20 percent of the month-to-month price.

Basic comes with 300 minutes, which are pooled for all your users. This just means Basic users share minutes instead of having to worry about going over individually each month. 

Each user also gets 1,000 pooled text segments. A segment is limited to 160 characters, which is way less than most phones can send in a normal text message these days. So it’s not 1,000 texts per month, unless you like to keep things brief.

Volume licensing brings the price down, both for users and for additional phone numbers. With 25 or more users, the price of Basic drops down to $8.99, Plus to $14.99, and Pro to $21.99. 

Considering that Pro can hold its own with many of the call center VoIP solutions I’ve looked at, it’s worth checking out if you need a lot of phones on a tight budget. With HIPAA-compliant voice and video, it could be a good option for medical practices looking to support telehealth.

You really have to get input from every person and department using the phone system. Figure out the technology and functionality you need to support. If Phone.com fits the bill, it’s going to be a smaller one than you’ll find anywhere else.

Phone.com gives you a low price that scales up much better than OpenPhone, Grasshopper, and other lightweight VoIP solutions.

I wouldn’t use it to set up a call center—you’re going to have to fully rely on your CRM for all but the most basic reporting and analytics—but you’ll be able to get plenty of phones set up for normal business needs. 

If you are thinking about cutting the cord with your traditional phone line, this option is going to save you the most money. Sign up with Phone.com today, no contract necessary.

#5 – Grasshopper Review — The Best If You Need More Extensions than Phone Lines

Grasshopper is a great option for small companies that want to establish a professional identity without buying a very complex system. 

I’m thinking about the restaurant owner that wants numbers for a few locations without having to pay for a traditional phone line going to each one. Or maybe the law firm that wants a few numbers with lots of extensions.

If you outline your business requirements and it turns out you only need the essentials, don’t pay more for things you don’t need. Grasshopper is going to set you up with everything you need for one flat rate each month.

You’ll get a suite of features designed for the daily work of a modern business, without the clutter aimed at larger organizations. There’s no need to upgrade just to access a particular feature. Every Grasshopper plan comes with unlimited calling, as well as every feature the company offers, such as setting up a phone tree, personalized greetings, call routing, and more.

There are even a few features, like instant response, that you won’t always get with other providers. If you miss a call, Grasshopper will automatically send a text message.

Simultaneous call handling and call forwarding lets you pass off calls to teammates when you’re busy. Voicemail transcription makes it easier to catch up on calls after hours.

Manage everything I just listed directly from the mobile app. Route calls exactly where they need to go—it’s just a few swipes on your cell.

You also get unlimited extensions with Grasshopper Small Businesses plans, and several free extensions with their other plans. Route calls to other numbers, mobile devices, informational extensions to answer FAQs, or a polite out-of-office voicemail. 

Getting charged for extensions was something Gregg said people should watch out for in the contact they sign. The total cost can “go up real quick” if you have to pay for an extra line just to set up a voicemail extension.

With Grasshopper, you don’t have to worry as much. The entry level plan comes with one number and three extensions—perfect for the sole proprietor or founder to greet their callers with a professional menu and connect them with the right person.

Let’s take a closer look at your three options with Grasshopper.

• Solo: starting at $26 per month for one number and three extensions
• Partner: starting at $44 per month for three numbers and six extensions
• Small Business: starting at $80 per month for five numbers and unlimited extensions

As I said, it’s really just the basics. There’s no CRM integration or call recording, so think about Grasshopper as a way to replace your phone system rather than revolutionize it.

That said, if you’ve been trying to work magic with free VoIP like Google Voice, the ability to set up call routing may feel downright revolutionary.

It’s also going to cost less and be way easier to set up than it’s more robust competitors. Toll-free numbers might take a day to start working, but typically your number is ready to go when you sign up.

If you want to add an extra line, it’s $10 per month. That’s a lot more than Phone.com for extra lines, which is why I don’t recommend Grasshopper if you need a ton. Plus, the interface isn’t built for handling a big system anyway.

But for the small office, it’s perfect. It doesn’t matter where you or your business partners work—people can be out in the field when a call comes into the office, or in a different city altogether. Grasshopper makes it easy to ensure your calls get where they need to go.

Try Grasshopper for free.

#6 – PhoneBurner Review — The Best Off-The-Shelf VoIP for Sales Teams

PhoneBurner is ready to rock. Are you?

This product is a little different than the other VoIP options on my list. It’s a sales engagement platform, so it’s not designed to replace your phone system. Rather it’s designed to give outbound reps the perfect tool for prospecting, selling, and closing deals.

Is the team remote? Do people like to work out of the office? Not a drama. Your users can phone in from anywhere and start working through your hottest contacts.

It contains a CRM and auto dialer software built into the platform. You’re not trying to make technology play nice—it’s all set up when you open the box. You can integrate with your own CRM if you want, or simply import your leads and start making up to 80 calls an hour.

I don’t know what your reps’ pace is now, but 80 calls per hour is smoking. There’s no “telemarketer” delay when the call connects, just crisp conversation like it’s over a phone line.

And, because the CRM is tied in, reps can see exactly who they’re talking to, what stage of the pipeline they’re in, and any notes left in the account.

Sarkar said that pretty much everyone in the B2B SaaS game is telephoning through sales engagement platforms now. The auto dialer makes your agents far more efficient by eliminating the busy work of dialing. “You barely have to click anything,” he said.

With PhoneBurner, you’re not manual dialing, tabbing through pages to find a number, or copy/pasting emails frantically before the next call. Instead, you can drop voicemails without waiting for the beep, send an appropriate email, or move a prospect to another folder with a single click.

For Makan, auto dialer software was crucial for large-scale outreach in telemarketing, but it was a pain to set up. You have to specifically program the CRM and the auto dialer. From there, it’s expensive to get the CRM software tuned to your industry. He mentioned one popular CRM option that cost $25,000 and $50,000, “just to get you all set up with the phones.”

With PhoneBurner, a lot of that work is off your plate. It’s not going to groom your database for you, but the fundamental CRM/auto dialer integration is already in place.

The company takes it a step further by offering one of the most comprehensive onboarding packages that I have seen for any product. Their team works with you on goals before you set up, runs you through a test session, and then trains your team on how to use the platform.

You also learn how to build reports so you can track performance. It’s easy to do this wrong, on any platform, but your PhoneBurner advisor is walking companies through the process, week in week out. They’ll get you set up with dashboards, leaderboards, and all of it is going to be customized to your goals.

Leads are distributed automatically, based on rules you set. Toggle between pre-set configurations, like Round Robin or First Come First Served, or customize your own settings. Make sure leads get to the right agent every time, with only a small amount of work on the manager’s part. 

PhoneBurner isn’t cheap, but remember that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with the other VoIP providers because you are getting the auto dialer and CRM built in. 

• Standard: starting at $126 per user each month
• Professional: starting at $152 per user each month
• Premium: starting at $169 per user each month

These are the prices if you sign up for a year, which are discounted 15 percent compared to paying monthly. You're getting unlimited dial minutes, which is obviously important if your reps are making a thousand calls each week. With PhoneBurner, that’s not hard to do.

Call recording is stored free for 30 days with the Standard plan, 60 days with Professional, and there’s no limit for Premium plans. There are also limits on the number of contacts you can store, which start at 10,000 on the Standard plan.

You’ll need to upgrade to Professional to get softphone capabilities. It’s not a big deal if you already have phones, but I imagine that’ll bother folks that want to use their tablet or computer.

With Premium, you get a dedicated inbound line, as well as some of the handling features. I would not recommend using PhoneBurner for serious inbound traffic—the other VoIP options are going to be way cheaper—but some teams will appreciate having a custom voicemail and the ability to forward calls.

On average, a rep can make 233 percent more calls with PhoneBurner than they can with a regular line. Does the math pencil out for you? For Makan, it took 2,500 calls to generate a listing. What’s your metric?

If doubling or tripling your rep’s productivity sounds like a good idea, start a free trial with PhoneBurner today.

#7 – OpenPhone Review — The Best Way to Run Your Business From a Mobile Phone

Jason warned us about going with the “newest and cheapest option,” so I was a little bit skeptical when I heard about OpenPhone. It’s only a few years old and it’s $10 per month.

That’s way less than the average cost of VoIP, cheaper even than some of the “budget” options I looked at.

But the more I discovered about the company, the more I liked it. OpenPhone is new, but certainly not fly-by-night. It’s a recent graduate of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that helped launch AirBnB, DoorDash, DropBox, and Reddit.

Like those companies, OpenPhone has come to market with a new set of assumptions about how people are living and working. Instead of trying to replace a business phone system, as many Cloud-PBX’s claim to do, OpenPhone simply turns your mobile into a better phone for business.

It’s really aimed at the modern startup or small business, especially if the owner is one of those people who steers the ship from their phone. You’ll get a business number for your mobile phone. Go local, toll-free, or keep your own number, you choose. Porting your old number is 100% free.

Set up an auto-attendant so callers can get the information they need and connect with the right person. Establish a professional identity for your business in minutes. You’ll be reaching people on a stronger footing because you always know if an incoming call is business or personal.

There’s no hardware necessary and no more giving out your mobile number. Keep your privacy. Get numbers for your team and let them keep their privacy, too.

Where OpenPhone really steps away from the crowd is the shared inbox. You can have multiple people call and text from the same number. They can even make calls from that number at the same time. 

A lot of phone systems don’t include text messaging, let alone allow multiple users text in the same thread. With OpenPhone, you can text the way you normal humans do:

Tag users with @mentions to bring the right people into the conversation quickly. Group messaging is really helpful for collaboration, especially since you can send files, videos, and GIFs.

You’re just not limited with texting the way you are on a lot of other VoIP phone services. You can send snippets from templates as part of a campaign or auto-reply to missed calls and texts.

Managing contacts isn’t hard either, as you get limited CRM integration with Google Contacts or via Zapier. You can use HubSpot for a more robust CRM solution as well, which allows you to store recordings and view message histories with ease. 

Keep in mind this is not going to be a full-blown CRM solution the likes of which I’ve described with PhoneBurner and others. You’ll need to get into HubSpot to make changes to contacts, for example.

Because it’s a young company, there will be additional and deeper integrations “in the future,” which I know can be frustrating. But if you are a young company as well, HubSpot’s free CRM software plus OpenPhone is just about the cheapest way I can think of to deliver the essential benefits of connecting VoIP and your CRM. 

• Standard: starting at $10 per user each month
• Premium: starting at $25 per user each month
• Enterprise: contact sales

Standard has most of what I’ve mentioned already, along with unlimited calling and texting. Bear in mind that it’s unlimited within the fair usage policy. According to the terms of service, for the Standard plan, you’re looking at 1,000 texts and calling minutes per month. 

Though it’s not truly unlimited, that’s pretty generous. Phone.com caps their entry level plan at 300 minutes and 1,000 text segments, which is likely a smaller number of texts.

The Premium plan comes with HubSpot integration and more collaborative features, like the ability to transfer calls and an advanced auto attendant that gives you a wider range of call routing features.

Extra lines are $5. So, for the price of standard VoIP (around $25 pretax), you could get a company of four set up on the Standard plan.

There are other free ways to get a business number for your mobile phone. Go for it. Getting off the ground you need to save every dollar—I get it—but there’s a point where the inconvenience of trying to work around something like Google Voice starts to cost you money.

OpenPhone solves most of those problems for $10 per month. 

How much does a single missed opportunity cost you? For a barber, maybe it’s a call from a stranger who would have spent thousands of dollars as a regular over the next few years. If only you’d been able to catch them.

It’s well worth checking out, and I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot about this company in the future. Try OpenPhone for free today.

What I Looked at to Find the Best VoIP Phone Services

I’ve been a small business owner who needed the cheapest possible business line for the “Contact Us” button on my Facebook page. I think it was still called TheFacebook.com, back then. 

Now I’ve got people reporting to me about our VoIP options in Brazil.

Growing from a one-man show to NP Digital, I’ve been on a few sides of this conversation. We’ve built a marketing machine and I know how we use VoIP—but my team wanted to get a wider picture of what’s going on to help more of my readers.

Some of you have on-call IT support and months to demo the best options. Others are completely on their own running a business and can’t sacrifice more than a weekend in order to find the best VoIP phone service.

Either way, you need to be able to separate the options that are working well for other businesses from the one that’s going to work best for you.

My team reached out to other leaders in the field to see what things looked like from their perspective. We don’t sell VoIP, for example. So, it was really interesting to think through buying VoIP with Gregg, who runs a managed services provider. 

VoIP is just one of the IT services Gregg’s company manages, but over a few decades, he’s seen plenty of things go wrong, helped people out of bad contracts, and restored their business integrity after hacks. He offered a lot of insight on VoIP security and what people can do to make sure they’re not spending money on stuff they don’t need.

Technically, Gregg is a competitor with some of the services I recommend, but he was very frank and offered advice you are not going to find on any review site.

We also talked to Makan, who set up call centers for telemarketing in real estate. These are call centers where each employee is making something like 1,000 calls each week. His practical advice is hardwon in an industry that has a staggering attrition rate. 

“You’re going to let go of eight out of every ten people who work for you,” Makan told us. New hires have to be brought up to speed, coached, and—when they have to go—be safely de-provisioned in order to prevent your database from leaving with them.

And simple employee mistakes can cost thousands of dollars in legal fines because telemarketing is so highly regulated. 

But if you can do it right, the payoff is huge. Makan was able to use call center analytics to surface important metrics that guided his hiring, onboarding, and training. “We no longer have to keep employees for like a year and a half to see if it works or not,” he said.

In searching for the best VoIP provider, you’ll read a lot about using analytics to optimize performance. It’s not just marketing lingo. Makan explained how you can basically predict your sales with VoIP tied to a CRM, and scale hiring up or down accordingly.

Sarkar, a sales manager in B2B SaaS, also pushed the importance of VoIP/CRM integration. We talked a lot about how your sales strategy informs the buying decision. 

Are you in a mature market that needs to handle inbound inquiries, or are you selling a novel product that requires you to hit the phones and educate prospects over a cold call?

Configuring a general purpose CRM to work with your VoIP, can be a ton of work. Sarkar helped us see how some companies save a lot of time and effort by using a sales engagement platform like PhoneBurner. It has all the outreach capabilities built in. That means less setup and fiddling to get up to speed, with a better experience for your sales teams and customers.

There’s just a lot to think about, depending on where you’re coming from. Jason has worked in call centers since 1992. He’s seen the market evolve from deskphones to headsets to AI. His eye for distinguishing meaningful advances from shiny objects that get you nowhere is unrivaled.

Jason also recently purchased an enterprise VoIP system for the company he’s with now. Talking through his experience was extremely helpful in understanding how enterprise buyers have to work through their options methodically and coordinate with multiple departments in order to find a VoIP service that works across the entire organization.

And even though the scale is different, a lot of his guidance serves as practical advice for the small business owner. How do you know if remote workers have good enough internet for VoIP? How do you evaluate the quality of integration between VoIP and your key business software? 

You may not have to buy as many phones or connect as many locations as Jason, but these questions still matter.

We covered a lot of ground in the interviews and research. Here are the three biggest takeaways that I think will benefit anyone shopping for VoIP:

1. The ability to self-manage is crucial: It used to be that you had to call your service provider to make any changes to your phone system. Want to add a user? Change a call path? The options I chose are simple enough to administrate without having to loop in IT. Small business owners without an IT staff can see why that’s important, but large businesses benefit too. It keeps overhead down as they scale. Admins won’t need technical support to accomplish their daily work.
   The problem is that some of the “bigger names” in the industry are stuck in the past. “It's very cumbersome and convoluted,” Gregg told us. “End users are not making changes to it.” Avoid those and go with something you can manage yourself.

2. Identifying all of your business requirements early will save a lot of pain: Check in with every department that’s going to be using VoIP. If you are a small business, check in with every team. What do they need, what would be nice to have, and what’s superfluous in their eyes? Leave no stone unturned. Your solution has to cover executives and receptionists, who will be using VoIP in different ways. You may be able to replace equipment like fax machines and conference phones—or you may have to find something that plays nice with inventory you want to keep.
   Jason created a detailed business requirements document and sent it to vendors. A few dropped out right away, which saved everyone time. Yet a simple oversight by his IT team delayed the deployment of their new system by half a year.

3. VoIP plus your other software and channels is the key: I’m really going to hammer on the CRM integration below because it was so important to almost every expert we talked with. But let me emphasize here the opportunity you have by connecting VoIP to your other business software. You can really dial in with analytics—some providers offer voice recognition technology that pulls all sorts of insights about your employee’s conversations. 
   And if your voice communication is tied in with live chat, email, texting, video, and social media, employees have everything in one place. They are looking at a complete relationship during every conversation, regardless of where it started. It also makes your billing a lot less complicated, especially if you have multiple offices. One bill for all your communications.

I looked for VoIP you can use right away. Admins will be able to make sure everyone is set up, and new hires will gain fluency quickly in the modern system. No more six-month deployments. 

Companies like Ooma, RingCentral, and Nextiva can set up large offices very quickly. And if you have a small office, you may be able to get started this afternoon. 

I wanted to find a few different products that work across every channel. These omnichannel solutions are more expensive, for sure, but they were worth it for virtually every expert my team talked with. It makes everyone more efficient because they're not logging into different accounts and losing track of conversations. 

I also looked at products that have a more limited selection of integrations and channels. These are way cheaper. Not everyone is trying to run a call center with VoIP—it could just be they want an 800 number on their ecommerce website. As long as their callers are routed correctly or greeted by a professional voicemail after hours, it’s all good.

Really, a lot of people get VoIP because they don’t want to give out their personal number for business anymore. OpenPhone will do just that. Grasshopper is perfect for the small office that needs the essentials covered and nothing more.

Alternatively, you can find a great deal on basic plans from some of the larger VoIP service providers. Ooma Office is a good deal no matter how you slice it. The Essentials plan from Nextiva is well within the small business price range, and can completely remove the need for an expensive traditional phone line.

Let’s walk through the big factors you have to consider. Evaluate your options like an expert by taking in the perspective from industry veterans and sales leaders.

Baseline VoIP Features

I want to focus on what makes these products different, not overwhelm you by describing every feature for every product. Once you start digging into VoIP, you’ll find that 30-40 different features is the low end in terms of what you get.

Every option I picked covers what I consider the baseline VoIP features, with some minor exceptions. You won’t hear me call them out unless there’s something superlative about how a vendor does it.

To be make my list of recommendations, the providers had to include:

• Call handling features like call forwarding, call transferring, call waiting, and extensions, so that you never miss a call, no matter where you are.
• Menus and auto attendants that let callers dial a certain department, listen to business hours, and so on.
• Call recording that provides a history and playback of all calls, which is useful for training and sometimes necessary for legal reasons.
• A mobile app that turns your cell phone into a business line
• Online fax to replace the need for traditional machines while also digitizing documents automatically.
• Softphone capabilities to let you make calls from desktops and tablets with just a headset.
• Video calls and conferencing for meetings, webinars, telehealth, and more.
• Voicemail transcription that turns your missed calls into a quick read by text or email

Some of the “entry-level” VoIP packages aimed at companies with five to ten employees only come with limited versions of these features. You may have to pay extra for call recording, for example, or go with a more expensive plan to get unlimited online fax.

Plans vary between basic business phone systems and premium solutions for call centers. The latter come with much more customizable call handling features, multi-level auto attendants, and deep reporting features that a small team isn’t going to miss.

Making a Cost-Effective VoIP Purchase

Traditional phone service, after tax, would be somewhere around $50 – $70 per month. In my research, I found many users switching to VoIP because they were paying a lot more than that.

I think this is how people “cut their phone bill in half” by switching to VoIP. They were getting dragged over the coals by their current phone provider. For people with a reasonable phone bill, the savings may not be so dramatic.

“It's not some magic savings,” Gregg told us. “You'll be saving a little, but not as much as you would think with your monthly phone service.” 

But, since you’re probably going to be paying per-phone, even a $10 savings each month will add up quickly. The more intelligently you can select a provider, the greater your savings will be.

Let’s run through how to assess the sticker price, the real price, and everywhere you can cut costs by finding a system that fits your business.

Gregg said VoIP costs about $25 per user per month on average, which is basically what I found in my research. This is if you are paying for the phones outright or using softphones. If you’re renting desk phones, it’s typically about $10 per month extra, bringing the cost of VoIP to about $35 per user each month. 

Call it $40 per month after taxes and fees. It’s not providers padding the bill, just the unavoidable government-mandated surcharges for the Universal Service Fund, which brings telecom to rural parts of the country and supports 911 emergency numbers. 

Now you are definitely going to see VoIP for cheaper than $25 per line. I’ve included simple VoIP solutions like Phone.com and OpenPhone that are less than half that. 

Typically, the tradeoff with the really low cost plans is that you’re getting a set block of minutes per month, whereas plans of $25+ tend to come with unlimited calling in North America. 

For sales, customer service, and other use cases that require people on the horn all day, unlimited calling is a must-have. When you go over your set block of minutes, your VoIP savings can disappear.

If you are using auto dialer software over VoIP, you really need to avoid per-minute pricing. Makan did the math out during our conversation: if you have 100 employees expected to make 200 calls a day, you're looking at 100,000 minutes per week. That's way too much call volume to survive being billed by the minute.

Some providers, like RingCentral, Ooma, and Nextiva, offer plans in the $20 range for unlimited calling. So you can pay below average, but not have to worry about massive overage charges.

Another factor that can potentially lower the total cost of VoIP is understanding the licensing. For instance, is it going to cost you extra to add an extension? Are you paying per user, per line, per call path? Vendors don’t all charge the same way.

Gregg cautioned us that a lot of people don’t understand exactly how they’re paying in the contract. They go to customize something on their end, thinking it's free, and then get shocked when the bill comes at the end of the month.

With Grasshopper, even the cheapest plan they offer comes with three extensions for free. This is great for a small business that wants one line for a few departments, or a startup that needs a basic phone tree. 

Phone.com costs less to add a new number than Grasshopper, but you don’t get free extensions. The different arrangements can be confusing, but if you take the time to understand what you need, you can play it to your advantage.

If you are really trying to get VoIP on a budget, Jason warned us that you have to be a little cautious. It’s really easy to spin up a VoIP company these days—the technology is not new—and he laid out some horror stories of badd apple vendors pretending to offer reputable service and dropping clients as soon as they get their money.

“And since it takes about 30 days to port over a number, you're kind of out of luck if that happens,” he said. The U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted these cases, clawing back millions of dollars from phony VoIP fraud schemes.

Better to be safe than sorry, and use a VoIP provider like Grasshopper or Ooma that’s been around awhile. Or, a household name like RingCentral that is a publicly traded company. “I can't imagine they would dump you in 10 days or anything like that,” Jason said.

Cloud-Based or On-Premises System

You can get VoIP infrastructure installed in your office (on premises), or use the internet to connect to the service (cloud-based). Either way, you’re paying less than you would for a traditional phone line, but there are important differences to understand.

There is a much higher initial cost of equipment if you go with an on-premises deployment. You have to buy the PBX, phones, routers, switches, etc., whereas a cloud-based provider hosts all of that themselves.

You can buy desk phones with a cloud-based solution and many people do. But, you don’t have to so long as you outfit employees with a softphone or a VoIP mobile app.

“When it’s cloud-based, you don’t have the big outlay,” said Gregg. “But you’re not really missing out by not getting the equipment because these systems come with a ton of functionality.” Some of the key capabilities he talked about were:

• Your employees can work from anywhere in the world with internet 
• You’ll be able to self-manage features menu systems and call routing
• You can scale up without buying equipment, and scale down without waste
• You don’t have equipment to maintain and monitor

These are four of the top reasons why I only recommended cloud-based solutions. 

Like any solution someone else is hosting, you do sacrifice a little backend control. You are limited to the features they provide, whereas an on-premises system can be completely customized to fit your exact needs.

But the end user can do the vast majority of what they need to with Ooma or Grasshopper. A shop-owner with zero IT experience can add an extension for a new employee or make changes to information about holiday hours provided by their auto attendant.

Most people get the control they need without the responsibility that comes with maintaining a system. If you need hundreds of phones and super customized configuration, an on-premises system may be your only option. That’s going to require IT overhead—hiring an MSP like Gregg to install, maintain, monitor, and replace your equipment—or hiring an in-house staff.

For many business owners, it would be a dream not to stress about the phones. The cloud-based providers I looked at offered nearly 100% uptime, and some offer financially-backed SLAs.

Like Gregg told my team, “You’re not so worried about the end at the main office being up at all times because your employees are connecting directly to the cloud-based server.”

The simplicity here is even more important if people are telecommuting or working out of the office a few days a week. It’s much harder to secure communications between external users and an on-premises system.

I’ll say more about that in the security section, but modern employees need access to company services at all hours. As such, cloud-based is becoming a lot more popular. 

Greg told us flat out, “If you’re SMB in the ten phones range—give or take—it’s not worth it to do on-prem anymore.”

Larger companies will have more to think about, but VoIP providers like Nextiva, RingCentral, and Ooma can help you get set up regardless of what kind of deployment you need. With these vendors, you can really get the best of both worlds or make the transition to cloud at your own pace.

What Kind of Internet Speed Do I Need for Clear Calls?

Calls have to be clear. You can’t compromise on that, or you’ll wish you had your landline whatever the price.

So how do you make sure your setup handles VoIP?

Here’s the nuts and bolts of what I found: VoIP is not going to work on DSL. Cable might be okay for a small office, but it won’t be the greatest. 

Fiber is what you want. It has the bandwidth you need and the upload/download speeds are the same, unlike cable. 

Everyone we talked to about VoIP told us that running low on bandwidth is going to start causing issues—dropped calls, echoing on the line, and terrible conversations.

Here’s the thing, VoIP doesn’t need a blazing fast connection. 

Gregg said that 100 kbps is good. 140 kbps is “like the most ideal, pristine phone call.” 

So, if you’re on a 1 mbps line, you could potentially make ten phone calls. “Granted, you always wanna overcompensate for fall offs and whatnot, but that's all you need speed wise,” he added.

Nextiva and RingCentral have VoIP plans aimed at smaller companies that don’t have commercial office infrastructure. They will let you test your connection right on their website. You’ll get all the information you need to figure out if you’re ready for VoIP, or you need to upgrade your internet first.

We’re not talking about a massive pipe here, the problems you run into are the stability of the connection. If you’re downloading a song, who cares if it takes two or three extra seconds? You wouldn’t notice. But when you’re having a conversation, even a slight delay is going to be a huge pain. 

Any delay over 150 ms (that’s milliseconds) and your meaningful conversation is now impossible. For reference, a call over a landline has a delay of about 45 ms, so 150 is definitely the upper limit of what you want. 

Any higher than that, you’re talking over someone or they missed what you said. 

Making cold calls, helping an irate customer—it’s hard enough already. No one wants to repeat what they’ve said. And it’s not going to be good if someone mishears a credit card number.

“Where it becomes an issue,” said Gregg, “is if you have a cable modem that only has 5 mbps on your upstream, and everybody in the office is uploading stuff to Dropbox, OneDrive, and things like that, eating up that bandwidth.”

Remember the dark days where someone couldn’t be on the internet and the phone at the same time? Don’t go back. Make sure you’ve got the bandwidth to accommodate all of your users with all of their tasks.

Network and Hardware Considerations

Now you can have all the bandwidth in the world and still get bad VoIP quality if your network isn’t configured properly. 

Small businesses don’t have to worry so much about this. According to Gregg, “If you only have five phones, maybe even as high as 10 phones, sure you could just dump them in on a network.”

He advised running a separate VLAN for anything beyond 10 phones in a single location in order to avoid quality issues. Separate the phones from the computers and prioritize voice traffic in the routers. This way, whatever your employees are doing won’t affect the quality of your calls. 

Even with the so-called “plug and play” systems, you’re going to want to put some thought into network configuration if you are putting in more than 10 phones. “I mean you can just plug them in,” said Gregg, “but I wouldn’t be too hopeful about the quality.”

But it’s not just phones to think about. “The fax machines in the conference rooms really threw me for a loop,” Jason explained. “I’m like: I'm just buying a phone system!” 

You have to be methodical. Where do the phone lines need to go? Are they connected to the security system? If you have PoE, you can just plug the ethernet cable into the phones, but if not, you’ll have to make sure there’s power running everywhere you want a station.

With a cloud-based service, you’re going to have to let the vendor behind your firewall. 

Jason had an issue where one of his guys missed a key thing about the firewall requirements, and it delayed his VoIP deployment by about six months. “I was not too happy,” was all he said about that.

If you have a lot of traditional phones and fax machines that you want to keep using, I’d recommend Nextiva, RingCentral, or Ooma. They offer analog telephone adapters (ATAs) that allow you to VoIP-enable landline devices.

This allows you to phase out your old system gradually, instead of trying to Hercules your company through a massive (and much more expensive) transformation. It’s going to be painful to switch no matter what, but how long can you justify investing more money in an old PBX that’s twice as hard to use for half the functionality?

One last thing about using old phones. It’s great if you can use what you have or get a deal somewhere rather than going through the vendor. 

Yet Gregg has encountered problems with aging phones. Hackers will try and log into the phones to start making spam calls. “We were seeing upwards of 100,000 attempts a day on a single phone system,” he recalled. The processors on the older phones weren’t powerful enough to withstand all the incoming requests, and the attack crashed the system.

So, definitely be on the lookout for deals and try to make the most with the equipment you already own. But just be cautious about buying a phone that has an older processor, because it might be a vulnerability. 

Plus, when you buy a phone directly from your VoIP vendor, it’s pre-provisioned. It’s got a secure connection out of the box. When you start piecemealing things, you may lose that desirable plug-and-play functionality.

Make Sure Remote Workers Are Up to Speed

Cloud-based VoIP gives you complete freedom to go remote with ease. Connecting external users to an on-premises system has a lot more hurdles in terms of cost and security. 

But even if you go cloud, which I highly recommend, there are a few things to be thinking about.

Remote workers need a solid internet connection for VoIP. When Jason hires someone working from home, the job post says they have to have a locked and secure WiFi. 

He also has them take a speed test to make sure that their connections are robust enough to be able to take phone calls. He requires a minimum of 20 mbps download and 10 mbps upload. 

It’s just a generic speedtest, nothing fancy. He sends them the link, they send back screenshots to verify. Jason said most people “blow those upload/download times out of the water,” but you need to be sure.

With telecommuting employees, you also have to think about training and management at a distance. I know I’ve said that the premium VoIP plans from vendors like RingCentral and Nextiva are aimed at the call center crowd. Well it’s also true that those features become really important for collaboration when there is no office.

Sharing documents within the platform, like phone scripts, or the ability for a manager to listen in on a new hire’s first live calls—you can provide more support to develop your employees, even when people are working from home.

For a small team, OpenPhone can work really well. People can share an inbox, tag calls, leave comments, and ensure that no opportunities are missed.

People love to be able to work on the go, even if they’re not fully remote. One thing that surprised Jason was how important the mobile app was to the executives. They wanted everything forwarded to their cell.

Mobile apps are great, but they’re not without their downsides. Gregg said VoIP on mobile was great for saving money, but he wasn’t so keen on it as a full-time stand-in for using a computer or desk phone. “It’s nice in a pinch,” he said, “but if you wanna watch a cell phone battery drain out before your eyes, that's a great way to go.”

Integration with CRM

My team asked Jason what the biggest thing you can do to help reps and agents is, and he said integration with your CRM. 

This was a tune we heard from everyone, and it dovetails with my own experience. CRM software is a total game changer when it comes to growing your business and providing service to customers.

Look for a VoIP phone service that has integration with your CRM. If you don’t have one, Nextiva and PhoneBurner have one built in that you can start using immediately. 

The technology’s not new by any means, but CRM software has gotten really good in the last couple of years, and a lot less expensive. When you combine a CRM’s ability to track customer information with quality voice communication, the resulting experience for your employees is amazing.

A customer calls and their account information pulls right up on screen. There’s no digging for a file or asking for a customer to provide their name, ID, order number, etc. 

Sarkar talked with us about how it increased his sales reps’ efficiency. “You get to have more conversations by cutting out the extra time you spend figuring out who’s calling.”

Really, every interaction is streamlined, which makes your reps and agents way more productive. If a customer has an order, the rep can see where it is. There are no extra steps to verify who’s calling, or ask them to dig up a purchase order number.

Saving seconds on every repetitive task adds up quickly. Employees can click-to-dial numbers within the CRM. Account information is centralized and agents can leave notes about calls. Everything is stored in a way that makes sense. 

Makan put it well when he said, “Compared to a traditional phone system, voice over IP integrated with the CRM is hands down like: before iPhone [versus] after iPhone.”

The ability to record calls within the CRM was a huge factor for a lot of the people we spoke with. “In the past,” Jason said, “the systems that I've had for recording were kind of separate from the CRM, so I had to go chase that down. If somebody called in, I'd have to be like who do you talk to? When did you call? And that would be kind of a nightmare.”

When Jason moved to a new VoIP provider, integration with their CRM was the deciding factor. His company communicated on so many channels, all of which are recorded. The integration makes the process of listening back much easier. 

“If you complain about a rep or something like that,” Jason said, “I can take your phone number, plug it in, and find every single call you've ever made over the last year, every chat, every email, every contact. It’s super simple. [It] saves me on time tracking down calls.”

For Makan, call recording was essential for assessing employee performance. “Traditionally, you give someone a dummy phone,” he said. “You don't know how many calls they made, who they talked to, or what the level of conversation was.” 

With VoIP, you can do quality control much easier. Listening back to the calls is easy. What went right? What could be improved? Identify who needs training and who’s not a good fit.

Makan explained how it really helps managers conserve their time and energy for quality candidates. They know who to invest in and who to send on their way. “I mean, you can tell in like 60-90 days. Any excuse they give, you can just listen to the quality of the calls.”

Be on the lookout for VoIP providers that showcase direct integrations with your CRM (and other software, for that matter). You absolutely have to demo it to see how that integration drives and works on a day-to-day level. If you want that “super simple” experience Jason was talking about for recording calls, the integration has to be tight. 

Also be aware that the initial setup of your CRM and VoIP is going to take some time, especially if you are tying in multiple channels like talk, text, and chat. You need to customize it to fit your industry and use-case because the software is fairly general purpose out of the box.

“You can really geek out on it,” said Makan, “and that’s the challenge.”

Sarkar was a big fan of sales engagement platforms because they have the CRM built-in and they are already tuned for the job. Obviously you don’t want to use them for customer service, but something like PhoneBurner is going to supercharge a sales team with a lot less configuration required.

Convenient Compliance Tools Employees Can Use Without Thinking

There are a lot of regulations protecting consumers from getting robo-calls or having their credit card information stolen. So if you are making a lot of calls or taking financial information over the phone, there’s going to be telemarketing and privacy laws you don’t want to mess with.

I’m glad those regulations are there, but new hires (or just plain carelessness) can break a law by accident and get your company a heavy fine. I found that a single call to someone on the national Do-Not-Call registry could result in a five-figure penalty.

A single slip up could cost anywhere from $11,000 to $43,000. And that’s per call, as in you could get multiple fines if one of your employees screws up. If it happens multiple times, I doubt the government’s going to hit you with a smaller fine.

Or think about HIPAA compliance for healthcare providers. Accidentally exposing a patient’s protected health information can result in jail time. This is true even if the company didn’t know a violation had occurred.

And yet companies make calls and share private information all the time without going bankrupt or winding up in the slammer. This is because they use good VoIP providers that make compliance convenient for employees. Your agents get the proper tools so that they can focus on the customer instead of how to stay in the clear of arcane compliance laws.

Regardless of how big a business you are, if you are making a lot of outbound calls (especially if you’re using auto dialer software), you need to update your DNC list and use it to scrub those numbers from your call lists.

RingCentral, Nextiva and include easy-to-use features to make sure your DNC list is up to date. PhoneBurner has integrations with DNC.com in order to keep people safe.

Makan, whose agents made thousands of calls a week, said that Zoho CRM in conjunction with RingCentral was the cheapest possible way to set your employees up for success. You just have to keep up on your DNC list grooming, “because that's something you're gonna run into a lot, and they need to scrub the numbers that they call up.”

Recording calls is another area where compliance is important. These laws vary state to state.  In New York, you don’t have to tell people the call is being recorded. In New Jersey, you do. 

Products like RingCentral let you automatically notify people that the call is being recorded, so you’re covered. This allows your teams to think less about how to make legal calls.

Jason told us about one of the features that sold him on going with their VoIP provider. It’s illegal to record credit card numbers, so employees need to remember to pause the recording while they take that information. 

“And as you can imagine,” he said, “if you take 1,000 or 1,500 calls a month, you're bound to forget that a couple of times, or miss it, or forget to pause, or forget to unpause, which is a big no-no in our area.” 

The VoIP service he chose automated this process within their CRM so employees didn’t have to think about it. As soon as their cursor was in the payment info box, the call stopped recording. 

“So my reps don't have to remember to turn that off, and that's just super easy,” Jason said. “I don't have to worry about PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance. I don't have to worry about, ‘Hey, if you forget, tell me so I can go delete the call out of the system.’ What if we delete the wrong call?”

Take every opportunity you can to automate compliance. The potential liabilities from a single oversight are enough to justify the cost of spending a little more each month on your VoIP, CRM, and training.

Security

No one wants to pay for $20,000 worth of phone calls they didn’t make. That’s what happened to a client of Gregg’s before they properly secured their VoIP. Someone hacked it and used it to start blasting out scam calls. 

Security is a major concern for any internet-based service, and VoIP is no exception. 

It’s pretty straightforward for on-premises systems if all your phones are in one location. Set rules in your router so that no one can connect to the phone system except the phone service provider. 

Gregg said, “As long as that's configured you're solid, and you can't get hacked because the traffic can't get there from anybody else.”

Securing an on-premises system gets a lot harder if you have people working from home, which is why a lot of companies are opting to go the cloud-based VoIP route. Residential addresses don’t have static IP addresses, so you can’t set rules in your router. 

“The only appropriate way to do it is using a VPN service,” explained Gregg. “If you leave the ports open so that anyone can connect, you'll see that the phone system will get hammered constantly.”

With cloud-based VoIP, the provider is ensuring that the right people are calling into their system. You still have to maintain good security hygiene at your company—long passwords, principle of least privilege, and de-provisioning old accounts.

These last two points are really important. You need to make sure that employees only have access to the data that they absolutely need. If possible, they should have read-only access. And when employees leave, you have to de-provision them.

For one thing, you don’t want to pay for old accounts that aren’t in use. If you have high turnover, be careful to re-use old numbers you’re already paying for, rather than buying extra ones. You don’t want to be shocked by a bill that has dozens of lines you're not using.

“People need to be aware of sabotage,” said Makan. “If you get a disgruntled employee, they can wipe out the database, if you don't back it up. Or they copy it. Or they just start corrupting the numbers and changing things in there.”

If you adhere to the principle of least privilege and are on top of booting old users out of the system completely, the risk of sabotage is near zero. If not, you’re putting your data integrity in jeopardy.

VoIP phone services like RingCentral, Nextiva, and Ooma make it easy for administrators to keep track of who has what privileges. You won’t need an infosec credential to keep all the accounts locked down.

Conclusion

My top recommendations are Nextiva, Ringcentral, and Ooma. They are affordable, reliable, and easy to set up.

If you need a full-fledged VoIP platform on the cheap, consider Phone.com.

Grasshopper is great if you're more worried about having enough different extensions instead of unique, dedicated phone lines. 

Need something that's more suited to support your sales teams' efforts. Look at PhoneBurner for a sales engagement platform that includes an auto dialer.

If you're a solo operator or just someone who is sick of having to use your personal number for running your business, OpenPhone gives you an easy and cheap way to get a professional number and VoIP service.

So, to recap all my top picks:

1. Nextiva – Best for offices with work-from-home employees
2. RingCentral – Best for high-volume outbound calling
3. Ooma Office – Best for Adding VoIP to Existing SMB Phone Systems
4. Phone.com – Most affordable professional-grade VoIP
5. Grasshopper – Best if you need more extensions than phone lines
6. PhoneBurner – Best off-the-shelf VoIP for sales teams
7. OpenPhone – Best way to run your business from a mobile phone

Regardless of the route you go, don’t forget to consider your requirements, budget, and the criteria we talked about as you go through the process of choosing the best VoIP phone service for your business. 

Have you used a VoIP service provider in the past? What was your experience like?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: The Best VoIP Phone Services (In-Depth Review)
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/voip-phone-services/
Published Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Your business won't succeed by doing the same thing as everyone else. 

Content marketing is powerful, but it’s also hugely competitive. If you’re just rehashing the same points as everyone else, you won't get anywhere. 

Your business is unique and so is your audience. If you want to make the most of content marketing, you need to produce content that is helpful, detailed, and different. 

Below, we'll cover 30 content marketing strategies that will help your brand stand out, but first, let's cover why content marketing matters in 2021. 

Why Is Content Marketing Important in 2021?

What brings people to your business in 2021?

In many cases, it starts with a question and they come to your website for a solution. They expect your business to solve their issue, but it’s not just your product they're looking for. 

They want information. 

In many cases, content is the moment when your relationship with the customer begins, and that content is going to be with them through every step of the customer journey.

Your content marketing tactics are as important in 2021 as ever because the modern consumer craves an experience. It’s not just about your products or service, it’s about how people interact with your business—and your content plays a huge part in this. 

Content marketing ticks nearly every box for your business. It helps: 

• bring people to your website
• engage customers by offering value
• generate leads
• move people through the customer journey 
• drive sales 
• provide post-sale care

Content marketing isn't just good for customers; it drives profits. In fact, the yearly ROI for a successful content marketing campaign is $984,000.  

This is why 70 percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. Really, the number should be higher with all the benefits content marketing has to offer.  

How to Choose Which Content Marketing Strategies Are Right for Your Brand

Every business is unique, and each one will use different content marketing tactics. What works for one website might not necessarily work for another, so what’s important is that you find the blend that works for you. 

When it comes to content marketing, you'll want to be particularly aware of your brand voice. For example, if you’re a highly respected law firm that people look to for advice, strategy number 22, “Be a little weird,” might not be the best option. 

This is where it pays to sit down and brainstorm before you create your content marketing strategy. Understand what your brand stands for, how you want to convey your values, and the goals you want to achieve. 

Once you’ve worked out these details, it’s much easier to pick and choose which content marketing tactics will work for your brand. 

30 Content Marketing Tactics That'll Skyrocket Your Search Traffic

I’ve experienced the power of content marketing first hand. It’s what my entire business is based on, and I want you to achieve the same kind of success through your content. Over the years, I’ve tried out lots of different content marketing tactics, some of which have paid off big time, others that have crashed and burned. 

By trying new things and not being afraid to get creative with content, I’ve narrowed my list down to 30 content marketing tactics that’ll skyrocket your search traffic. 

1. Build More Targeted Landing Pages

My search traffic almost tripled when I created advanced guides for SEO and several other internet marketing topics. Each of those advanced guides has a separate landing page, optimized for the applicable keywords.

Mailshake, a comprehensive email outreach platform, had success with this, repackaging its cold email masterclass into an eight-part email series. This allowed them to create targeted landing pages and offer user-specific content that matched their place in the customer journey. 

In under a year, Mailshake acquired 5,321 email opt-ins for its masterclass.

Or, take a look at Copyblogger Media. Copyblogger has dozens of landing pages, each aimed at a keyword that the target audience is passionate about. That’s a lesson for you when developing a sound content marketing strategy: when creating more landing pages, think strategically about keywords and build your content around the right ones.

The easiest way to start creating high-quality landing pages is to use templates. 

There are plenty to choose from, but I like Unbounce and Instapage. Both are paid platforms, but they're a great way to create effective landing pages quickly.

2. Segment Audience to Increase Engagement

Smart content marketers know they need to segment their audiences based on product need. Segmentation is crucial for one simple reason: some of your blog readers aren’t buyers, but others are.

Simply put, your content can’t suit everyone because people are at different phases of the buying cycle. So, for example, content designed to create awareness with new customers is wasted on loyal repeat customers.

Make the most of your marketing efforts by segmenting customers based on their personas. Remember, a buyer persona is a fully fleshed-out profile of one segment of your audience. It enables you to develop content that speaks to each segment more effectively.

Here's an example of one in action: 

Segmenting your target audience is difficult on your blog or website (though not impossible with content personalization), but email segmentation is pretty simple. 

Email list segmentation is a must if you want to get the most from your list. According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who used segmented campaigns saw a 760 percent increase in revenue. Not too bad!

Check out my article “How to Use Email Segmentation to Increase Conversion Rate” to find out how email segmentation can boost your content marketing.

3. Know Your Audience, and Give Them What They Want

Before you can create successful, engaging, and overall great content, you’ve got to know your audience very well. The first step is to perform keyword research to discover what your ideal customers are looking for.

Start by getting a better idea of the existing demand for your topic through Google Trends. Just type your main keyword into the search box to learn how many searches it received within a specified period.

For instance, here’s the Trends graph showing the popularity of the keyword “content marketing:”

This will give you a rough overview of how people are searching for your keywords, but for more detailed information, you should look at Ubersuggest. 

Follow these simple steps to gain access to hundreds of keyword opportunities you can use to build engaging content. 

1. open Ubersuggest in your browser
2. enter your domain
3. Select keyword analyzer from the left sidebar
4. choose keyword ideas
5. enter a keyword and see related keywords with search volumes

Remember, the more you know about your readers, the more precisely you can base your content creation on them, and the more effective your whole content marketing strategy will be.

If you want to dig in deeper, here's a complete guide to keyword research, including tools, tips, and examples. 

4. Focus on Facts and Data

Sometimes, you need to personally verify results or data through experimentation. What was true five years ago, or even last year, may no longer apply.

Instead of accepting everything you read on other sites and blogs at face value, get in the habit of thinking tactically and critically.

Results are relative. You may experiment and get a different result. Through observation, brainstorming, and A/B testing, you can come up with a new concept that others can learn from. 

That is how you become a content marketing expert; not just following the rest of the crowd. 

5. Target Millennials and Gen Z With Adaptive Content

Millennials and Gen Z now make up a huge segment of the U.S. population. 

There's a good chance these groups make up a large chunk of your target audience, so your content should speak to their needs and values.

Both of these groups grew up with technology as a big part of their lives, and so they have high expectations for how businesses use technology. They also value experience above almost anything else, and this plays right into content marketing. 

While both groups have similarities, you need to target each of them in a slightly different way. Find out more about how to market to Millennials, and target Gen Z.

Adaptive content is one way to go. Adaptive content is simply the content that supports meaningful interactions across different platforms. Think of it like water—whatever you pour it into; it takes the shape of that container.

For example, you might use their name at the top of a booking site or suggest content based on their past interactions with your brand. 

Your readers should be able to access your content on a desktop computer, then continue where they left off using their smartphone or complete their purchases through your mobile app, with absolutely no hassles at all.

6. Leverage the Hedgehog Content Model

A hedgehog is a small mammal with stiff spines and a small, pointed snout. What does a small mammal have to do with content creation and your marketing strategy? (There's a point, I promise!) 

The hedgehog concept is based on an old parable about a hedgehog and a fox. The fox knows lots of things—he's constantly trying new ways to best the hedgehog. The hedgehog, however, stays focused on one big idea. 

What does this mean for your content strategy? 

It simply means you should start where you are and stay focused. Why worry about the fact your blog isn’t generating 1,000 monthly visits yet? Instead, create content consistently and use a content marketing strategy to reach your goals.

Instead of obsessing over reaching 1,000 monthly visitors, for example, focus on 100 each month. Just make sure that your goal is realistic and measurable.

If you’re able to hit that smaller goal, the hedgehog model says to treat them well and deliver great content they’ll share with their friends across their social media channels. 

Apply the same technique to your email list. Focus on getting three to five subscribers every single day, instead of your first 100 subscribers. By the end of the month, you’ll have 90 to 150 email subscribers.

7. Consistently Run A/B Tests

Are you consistent at split testing? A study by AdPushUp showed conversion rates typically range from one to three percent. A/B split testing helps you drive that rate up, and even a single additional percentage point in your conversion rate can be significant.

Whether you’re on a team of B2B marketers or you’re a small business owner, running A/B split tests is crucial to know for certain which headlines, calls-to-action, and types of content work best for your readers. Once you know what strategies work, your work becomes much more effective and your overall content marketing strategy much clearer.

You can split-test just about anything. Since you’re concerned about search traffic, however, you should focus on the elements that impact search performance, such as headlines, site speed, visuals, landing pages, CTA, and so on.

As Rohan Ayyar says,

Instead of a one-size-fits-all philosophy, create multiple landing pages for the same call to action to suit the user’s preferences.

A/B split testing can send more targeted buyers to your product pages, as well. For example, Lyyti.com, an online event management software company, ran a split test on their product pages. They set up a product page variation and tested it against the control.

At the end of the testing, the variation page performed better. It clearly showed the features offered in each plan, while the original design wasn’t quite clear enough. Implementing the results of this test increased visits to their “Free Trial” sign-up page by 93.71 percent.

Mobile testing is also crucial. The majority of search traffic comes from mobile devices now, so you have to offer a good mobile experience.

You can’t afford to run A/B split tests solely on desktop users. If you’re experimenting with mobile testing, look at any key user behavior, especially behaviors related to conversions, such as email opt-in form and landing page preferences.

8. Learn From Topic Training Modules

Content marketing is a lot easier these days, considering all the statistics, data, and content that can be accessed for free.

According to KPMG, 90 percent of corporations use online learning compared to just four percent in 1995. People visit these online training sites in part because they’re effective. E-learning is proven to increase knowledge retention by 25 to 60 percent.

This is good news for content marketers because with online learning platforms like Udemy and LinkedIn Learning, you can benefit from all that useful content provided in their courses and modules.

Essentially, you can pick the brains of experts in different industries to create top-notch content for your target audience. There’s no longer any need to waste tons of time researching your topic because someone with better training, resources, and time has done all that for you.

So, let’s say you want to create an in-depth article about link building. Here’s how to research your topic using Udemy:

• Step #1: Go to Udemy.com. Type your main keyword (e.g., link building SEO) into the search box. Hit the enter button on your keyboard.
• Step #2: Analyze the courses. From the top results, choose one that suits your keyword, then click on it to see the modules.
• Step #3: Extract ideas from the module. You can find the module for that particular topic when you scroll down.

Note: Most courses at Udemy will typically cost you between $15–$199, although there are free courses available. If you have the budget for it, you can buy the course. Here, however, we’re just looking for ideas to organize your blog post from module titles, so there’s no need to sign up for the course itself.

From the highlighted module above, I can create five unique and high-converting headlines for my next blog post.

• 11 Traffic-Generating Links and Where To Get Them
• How to Use Broken Link Building to Create Links Google Will Love
• Traffic-Generating Links: Where to Get Them and Improve Search Traffic
• How to Get Traffic Generating Links with Help from Your Competitors
• The Best Way to Develop a Traffic-Generating Link Building Strategy

Spending just 10 to 20 minutes each week studying Udemy course modules will give you lots of ideas to write about and expand your analytical skills and give you a more thorough understanding of your industry and your target audience. 

Overall, it’ll enhance your content marketing strategy and inform your content creation. 

Just remember, the goal is inspiration; don't copy other people's work. 

9. Craft Content Based on Your Core Values

Core values are the building blocks of every human being—and every business (or other organization).

Personal core values guide an individual’s behavior and choices. The same is true for your business’s values, as well.

For example, if you believe your target audience will benefit from the information you share, then you’ll research extensively and craft the best content possible. 

Take the time to articulate your values in writing, just as Google and Buffer have. Google believes in putting users first. Buffer believes in showing gratitude, which helps make their social media management tool so valuable for content marketers.

There is no single rule for defining your core values. Just make sure each value originates from your deeply-held beliefs. When you start to write content based on what you truly believe in, you bridge the gap between your message and your readers’ expectations. Solid content creation will flow from there.

Storytelling can also help bridge that gap. From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s much easier to tell stories based on what I know and believe, instead of what someone else says or believes. Such a marketing effort will feel, well, effortless to your readers. 

10. Use Native Ads, But Don't Be Deceptive

Native advertising is a form of online marketing in which the “ad” content matches the platform where it’s published.

Although we’re very accustomed to seeing this form of advertising, many people believe native ads are deceptive because they don’t “look like ads.” 

It doesn’t have to be that way. Native ads can still offer value as something more than just a promotional piece.

Whatever you may think about it, there’s no question that native advertising works. For example, Newscred regularly paid for sponsored content on LinkedIn, with an ROI of $17 for every $1 spent. That’s almost six times the ROI you can expect from Google Ads. 

Although the stats point to native ads being an important content marketing tactic.

• Copyblogger Media shared 12 examples of native ads and why they work—ideally, as an integrated part of content marketing.
• A study by Forbes found that people pay 53 percent more attention to native ads than banner ads. Plus, they view native ads 53 percent more frequently than they view banner ads.
• According to Pardot, “Native advertising is actually a form of content marketing.” This means that it should offer some form of unique and useful information to the target audience.

According to eMarketer, native ad spend more than doubled between 2018 and 2020 and is expected to increase by 21 percent in the next year. If you want to join the trend as part of your content marketing tactics, make sure your ad is consistent with your other content. 

Above all, native ads should meet the needs of your readers and engage the audience, just like your other content does.

Bottom line: Native ads work and will continue to work. The best practice is to approach it with your content marketing mindset and ensure that you use only high-quality content.

For example, if you decide to do sponsored posts or paid tweets, make sure that your landing page is well-designed and your content is crafted to welcome visitors and convert them into email subscribers or buyers.

11. Be Ready to Evolve

As Inc.com says,

Content marketing is always changing because the way we interact online is always changing.

You should be willing to change and adapt to the latest developments in your industry. That might mean enrolling in a content marketing course to further your education, or, it might simply mean reading extensively to stay on top of trends.

Business models evolve, and the only way to stay competitive is to always work with the most current information. Never be caught unaware.

As the business and content marketing world constantly evolves, you’ve got to keep your business viable. For example, you should keep abreast of Google’s algorithm updates if you want to keep generating sufficient search traffic.

I’m always ready to change what I’m doing if I find it’s no longer yielding significant results. I don’t throw in the towel and quit. Rather, I stay flexible and continually adjust.

You can do the same. Be prepared to satisfy your customers no matter what the economic situation or new government policy might be. It’s your responsibility to evolve for the sake of your target audience.

12. Conduct a Competitor Analysis and Work With the Data

Competitor analysis isn’t optional these days. You can effectively spy on your competitors to know exactly what they’re doing and find ways to outsmart them.

Industry experts agree that competitor analysis is an integral part of search marketing success. When its results are integrated into your strategy, competitor analysis can improve many aspects of your marketing, including your conversion rate.

The easiest way to know what your competitors are doing, in terms of where they’re getting backlinks and how many quality links they have, is to use the right automated tools.

First and foremost, you’ll want to find out who your strongest competitors are. You can use Google to search for your main keyword (e.g., beginners guide to blogging), then check which sites are competing with you.

Another way to perform competitor analysis is with Ubersuggest. Select competitive analysis from the left sidebar and then enter your domain. 

You will then see a list of websites that compete for similar keywords. You can dig deeper into each competitor to find out which specific keywords you are competing for by clicking “view all.”

This provides an immediate picture of who you are competing with and what keywords you should target. 

13. Get on the Local Platform

Not every visitor to your website is as valuable as the next. For example, if you’re a local brick-and-mortar business in Florida, getting thousands of web visitors from California doesn't do much good.  

A recent study found 46 percent of Google searches are looking for local information, and this is hugely important for your business. Why? Because 78 percent of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase, so local SEO isn’t just a great tool to get your business found—it also drives sales. 

Your content is a great opportunity to drive your local SEO. Create valuable information for people in your target area and make sure you’re focusing on local keywords (use Ubersuggest to discover local keyword opportunities).

Competing for big national keywords in competitive industries may not be possible, but it could be a realistic goal in your local area. Use my guide to local SEO to make sure you’re ranking for those important local keywords.

14. Use Emotional Keywords in Headlines  

The best way to create magnetic headlines is to target emotional keywords. Doing so will supercharge your content. People will not only read it; they’ll be inspired to share it on social media and beyond as well.

For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you’d probably go to Google and search for keywords like the following:

• lose 10 pounds quickly
• fastest way to burn extra fat
• drop 20 pounds in 2 weeks

Here are more variations to the three search terms above:

In our example, if you found an article or video targeting any of the keywords above, you’d respond positively. That's because those keywords mirror what you deeply desire.

The same is true for your target audience. When they’re searching for keywords, and you notice a hint of immediacy, you know that those keywords will convert into clicks, visits, and sales when you eventually rank in Google.

Let’s assume you help companies and digital businesses to grow revenue. Here are some of the keywords you can use to create powerful headlines to grow your search traffic and rankings:

From the screenshot above, you can see the “emotional keywords.” I call them “emotional” because searchers are already pre-sold on the idea of increasing revenue. They’re just waiting for a nudge to take action.

To make your headlines high-converting, include numbers—especially odd numbers because some studies show odd numbers outperform even numbers.

Let’s craft some headlines based on those emotional keywords:

• 7 Powerful Revenue Generating Ideas You Can Use Today 
• 9 Revenue Generating Ideas to Help Your Business Soar 
• 6 Steps to Increase Your Sales Right Now
• How to Increase Sales in Your Small Business

Better yet, you could turn the emotional keywords into data-driven headlines to share your experiments and results:

• How To Increase Sales: An Experiment On How I Generated $25,000
• Case Study: How To Increase Sales as an Ecommerce Beginner 
• 13 Revenue Generating Ideas That Yielded $10,837 Sales and 2,636 Email Subscribers

15. Create High-Quality Content

Worried you aren't a great writer? You’re not alone. According to research statistics from Teach Taught, “fewer than 50 percent of college seniors feel their writing improved during college.”

You can change that, starting today. It begins with fueling your passion for writing. After all, if you’re passionate about what you do, there is nothing in this world that can stop you. Success requires consistent effort, and it’s a whole lot easier to be consistent when you’re passionate about the thing you’re doing.

This simple formula shows you how to find your passion:

With time, you’ll find something you never believed you could do at all may become pretty easy.

Blogging and business require creativity, but it doesn’t necessarily have to come from your writing (it’s just not for everybody). It can also come from the way you manage other people. Modern technology has made it incredibly easy to work with freelancers around the world, and this can make a huge difference in your content marketing. 

There are plenty of talented people that can help you expand your content output while still ensuring quality. It’s about being creative with your processes and putting the right systems in place to get the most out of your freelance team.

I never started as an expert. There was a time when I couldn’t put together a 500-word blog post. I had to continually learn and fuel my passion for writing. Eventually, I got better, learned more, and became the expert I wanted to be. You can follow this path and write your content, but you may have just as much success working with freelance writers.

Listen up: Successful content marketers don’t know it all. They’ve struggled to get things done, too. Because they’ve developed thick skins, they can meet the challenge and come out stronger and more influential.

16. Give Your Audience a Behind-the-Scenes Experience

If you want to attract a loyal audience and boost your site traffic, pre-sell your content and product. For example, if you are going to release a new post next week, tell your readers about the process of writing it before you publish it. 

Behind-the-scenes experiences are welcome moments for your fans.

I do this a lot when I write content. I’ve even started doing it when I reply to comments as well, by telling my readers that I’ll be publishing a new post that will more thoroughly address their questions.

Another example of a “behind-the-scenes” experience is when Michael Hyatt asked his blog readers to help him choose the best cover for Living Forward, a book he co-authored with Daniel Harkavy.

Of course, this is also a type of pre-selling, because the customers and loyal readers now know the book's title, and will look forward to its launch. Now, the majority of them are ready to buy. 

Before they buy, they’ll tweet the page, cite it in their blog posts, recommend it to others on their other social media platforms, and follow the updates. This will increase referral traffic to Michael’s blog and his search performance will likely improve as a result of social signals.

17. Curate Content Like a Pro

The internet is full of brilliant content. 

You don’t always need to create fresh content from scratch because there are lots of other people out there who are also doing a great job at it. This is where content curation comes in. 

It allows you to find the best content and bring it together in one place. Moz does this extremely well with its weekly round-up of SEO content.

Your goal is to bring people the best possible information, but it doesn’t mean you have to write it. As long as you’re crediting the content owners, you can use content curation to engage your audience and help solve their pain points.

This content marketing tactic is a great way to add to your content production, but consider what businesses you are linking to. Make sure you’re only sending your audience the highest-quality information, and be careful about sending people to your competitors.

A few tips to help you drive more traffic and leads from content curation:

• Research extensively for authority blog content. Don’t curate content from low-quality sites.
• Stay relevant. Every content page you curate into your list must be relevant to the topic.
• Design for user experience first, then optimize for the right keywords (but don’t stuff).
• Reach out to bloggers whose content you’ve curated and notify them. Most of them will share it if they believe their target audience will benefit from it.

If you want to give content curation a try, here's a guide that will walk you through the process. 

18. Build Engagement on Your Own Space

Social media is one of the best ways to reach your audience today. If you’re not marketing yourself on social media, you could be missing out on a huge portion of your audience. 

It’s not just about building out your profiles and engaging people through the platform, though; it’s also about what action you want followers to take. One of your goals with social media should always be to bring people to your own space. 

You have more control over your blog and email list than any social media profile or platform. No matter how successful you are on social; you don't own that connection. Make sure you’re not abandoning your blog audience for social followers.

Grow your social media presence, but make sure you’re using it to bring people to a medium you control. From here, you can control the customer journey, build your email list and nurture your subscribers.

19. Create an Editorial Calendar 

An editorial calendar helps make your content marketing strategy low-stress and rewarding. Unfortunately, most people never take the time to craft a plan for creating content, marketing it, and tracking its effectiveness.

The importance of an editorial calendar can’t be overemphasized. You need to develop yours as quickly as possible and use software to guide your process:

• Trello
• Asana
• Monday.com
• ProofHub

The three steps you need to take to make your editorial calendar effective are:

1. know your audience and the content type they’re interested in
2. research your topic thoroughly
3. create content and measure its effectiveness

Remember to keep a steady flow of content going out. That’s the way to generate more leads and indexed pages and improve organic traffic.

20. Get Maximum Mileage Out of Your Content

Blogging can help you reach more of your target audience, particularly if your blogs are frequently shared across social media channels. How do you get more referral traffic from your content, though?

You’ve got to think outside the box. Inbound marketing works, but you've got to diversify your efforts if you want to get outstanding results. The majority of your target audience hasn’t visited your blog yet. They are, however, on Slideshare, YouTube, and other content platforms.

You’ve got to be everywhere they are. Your content should make a mark online. If you’ve spent your precious time creating great content, don’t let it sit there in oblivion. 

It's time to embrace content repurposing.

This content marketing tactic helps you make the most of your content by using it in different formats. 

For example, you could take an article, convert it into a PDF report and offer it as an e-book. You could also create PowerPoint presentations and upload them to Slideshare or create an infographic out of a case study. 

Be very careful to repurpose only your high-quality content that produced measurable results the first time around. Not every piece of content will work for this purpose.

21. Invest in Learning About Your Audience

The web is a virtual university. You can learn just about anything online if you know where to look. Content marketing will continually produce high ROI when you give it time and consistently work to upgrade your knowledge and skills.

According to Bianca Male,

Listening is often the best form of learning.

The bad news is that your competition will continue to get more intense. The good news is that we’ve never had so many effective and affordable tools and knowledge resources from which to learn. 

Using the right marketing tools, developing your skill sets, and networking smartly will get you to the top. If you want to succeed and reap huge dividends, channel your learning efforts towards better understanding your target audience.

22. Be a Little Weird

Everyone loves a company that is willing to go against the grain. There is something about a healthy dose of irreverence and tasteful humor that increases the likability of brands.

It also makes you stand out from your competitors.

Tons of businesses send out the same message, which means consumers notice funny or weird marketing campaigns. They’re a breath of fresh air in a world of cloned marketing tactics.

Dollar Shave Club creates weird, creative, and outright bizarre content. I’ll bet you can’t help but laugh when watching this video. 

If you think this video is funny, but that it couldn’t possibly increase revenue or help business, I understand, but that’s simply not the case.

Dollar Shave Club spent $4,500 to create the video, but they more than made that money back. The video has 24 million views on YouTube. They gained 23,000 followers on Twitter and 76,000 Facebook fans from the campaign, and most importantly, they attracted 12,000 new customers in two days.

It turns out that being funny, weird, and irreverent can pay off.

Dollar Shave Club continues that unique brand identity with its Bathroom Minutes articles, and their customers love it.

Similarly, Denny’s uses its blog to put out content in the same style as Dollar Shave Club. Its content is unconventional as this image of a married couple pulling a morning breakfast with their car shows.

Snickers tapped into the weird trend as well, creating its “You’re not you when you’re hungry” marketing campaign.

It also did an AdWords campaign targeting misspelled searches.

What’s the point of all this marketing weirdness?

People like it when your brand does something different. Don’t be afraid to mix it up and see what happens.

Nothing risked, nothing gained; so get out there and do something weird.

23. Respond to Twitter Mentions

I can’t overstate the power of responding to people who are talking about your brand.

Why?

Because responding to real people’s questions, comments, and concerns humanizes your brand. It tells people that your company isn’t just some inhuman entity. Rather, you’re a company that cares about its customers.

Twitter makes this particularly easy, notifying you whenever someone mentions your company’s name.

If you quickly and consistently respond to your customers’ comments and concerns, this shows a level of dedication that will impress your followers.

That’s good news for your business. Responding to people regularly shows you care. 

24. Inspire People to Share Your Product

The more people tell their friends about your product, the more products you’re likely to sell—and the more successful your business will be.

When a friend recommends a product, they mean it.

By thinking creatively about your product and doing something that no one has ever done before, your product is more shareworthy. Coca-Cola did a good job with this with their Share a Coke campaign.

They put individual names on each bottle of Coke, personalizing the experience for their customer base. They then encouraged people to share a Coke with a friend and post a photo using the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

In the end, the campaign generated 998 million impressions on Twitter and 235,000 tweets with the hashtag. They sold more than 150 million bottles of Coke, too.

When the experience is unique, consumers want to participate, and they want to share it with their friends.

Burberry ran a similarly share-worthy campaign called Burberry Kisses.

By collaborating with Google, Burberry allowed people to send each other “kisses” with digital messages. Since it was new and different, consumers couldn’t help but try it out. Every time someone sent a kiss to a friend, that person saw the Burberry logo, which increased Burberry’s brand awareness and engagement.

When people share your product, more people buy your product. It’s that simple.

25. Pay Attention to Upcoming Tech

Technology moves fast. The newest piece of revolutionary tech seems to hit the market every week. If you pay attention to these interesting innovations, you can hijack their attention.

The New York Times did this when they created NYTVR (New York Times Virtual Reality). The marketing campaign required users to have Google Cardboard and the free New York Times app.

Users could then experience the world in a different and fun way with a 360-degree view of a video. By leveraging upcoming technology, the New York Times positioned itself as relevant and edgy.

Campaigns with modern tech show consumers that you’re listening to trends and keeping up with the times.

26. Tell Compelling Stories About Your Users

People who’ve used your product are the best salespeople. That’s why testimonials on a landing page and social proof on an e-commerce site are so powerful.

Most people want to feel confident about buying your product. They don’t want to be the first one to try it. They need to know that other people like it before they take the leap.

By listening to the stories your customers tell about your product and creating content around those stories, you’ll inspire confidence in your brand. Microsoft does just that with its “Story Labs.”

This blog tells the stories of people who buy their products, make their products, and inspire their products. By sharing these engaging stories, Microsoft is positioning itself as a trusted business and convinces consumers its products are worth buying.

Eventually, first-time buyers will step up to the plate and try out Microsoft’s goods because of this.

27. Encourage User-Generated Content

For some businesses, user-generated content is their content marketing bread and butter. 

When companies encourage customers to create content for their brands, it’s a double win: the company saves time and money, and they distribute compelling content. 

GoPro does a good job of encouraging and posting user-generated content. Consider this video made by an avid “Go-Proer.” Start watching at 1:28 and cringe a few seconds after as you see what happens.

This video has over 13 million views, and it generated a ton of brand awareness for GoPro. All of that was at no cost to the business. Since the user created the content, the business simply stood by and watched while their product was marketed for them.

26. Use Your Product in a New Way

Can you dream up a new way of playing with your product?

It isn't always easy, but it can be an effective marketing strategy. Take Blendtec, a company that sells blenders, as an example.

They were unsure how to market their blender and stand apart from the hundreds of other options. Then, they came up with a brilliant idea. They started a show called, “Will It Blend?” where they blended everything from marbles to iPhones.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself here:

And here:

By thinking about the blender in a creative and interesting way, Blendtec became one of the leading sellers of blenders and appealed to consumers all around the globe. Millions of people have watched their videos. That last video has over 4.5 million views alone!

If they can do it with a blender, the chances are you can do it with whatever product you sell. 

28. Educate Your Customers

Creating educational content around your product might not seem like the best idea.

Do people really care about how your product works? Do they want to know the ins and outs of how you created it?

It turns out that a lot of times, they do.

It depends on your target market, but people are always interested in learning more about how a device functions. Remember: people love to know stuff that their friends don't know. It makes them look smart, and they'll usually share their newfound knowledge.

Magnolia used customer education to its advantage.

Unsure of how to market their products on a low advertising budget, they decided to create a blog. The blog discusses what electronic products to look for when making a purchase, what to watch out for, how electronics work, and how amazing they are.

What was the result?

Shortly after creating this educational content, Best Buy bought the company for $87 million.

As it turns out, few companies were taking the time to educate their customers about electronics. Magnolia took a leap and went in a different direction and made a massive amount of money from it.

Your customers want you to educate them, especially if there aren’t a lot of people teaching them about a certain product or industry. 

29. Be More Transparent About Your Products

Transparency is scary for individuals and businesses alike. What if people respond poorly to who you are or what your business is?

I won’t lie to you: when you tell people about the real you, there’s a chance they won’t like it. I guarantee that some people won’t like it. You can’t please everyone, but I also guarantee that some people will. 

It won’t just make you more likable. It will allow you to address your customers' concerns and create a bond they will remember. 

McDonald’s is a company that’s undergone a lot of scrutiny for its food’s quality. They decided to increase their brand’s transparency with their bold, “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign where they answer questions customers have about their food. This campaign gave them the chance to debunk particularly heinous rumors about their food.

One rumor, for example, was about “pink goop” in McNuggets. In response, McDonald’s eradicated the myth by creating this video that shows how they make their McNuggets.

When you take the time to listen to and answer customers’ questions honestly, people will trust your company. Rumors spread about every brand; creating content around frequently asked questions is a great way to debunk revenue-killing myths.

30. Hijack Trending Topics

There is always something trending online, and you can use trending topics to your marketing advantage.

How?

By creating content that plays off of them.

Hootsuite made the video “Game of Social Thrones.” That’s right, a social media tool used Game of Thrones. 

How did they do this? It got creative and found a way to connect the trending topic to its brand. 

While “Game of Thrones” is popular, it isn’t always the talk of the town. Other topics often are at the forefront of consumers’ minds so how do you figure out what topics to talk about?

It’s easy.

Go to Google Trends.

Glance through the topics on the homepage. These are topics that are currently getting a lot of search traffic on Google.

Use Google Trends to find trending topics to hijack with your content marketing strategy. Doing so can give your content the same appeal as the trending topic.

It’s always important to remember your brand image, though. There are certain topics you don’t want to be associated with your brand, so make sure you’re hijacking the right trends.

Content Marketing Tactics FAQs

Content Marketing Tactics Conclusion

If you’re not seeing the results you want from your content marketing, then there are lots of different tactics you can use. Not every tactic will suit your business, so test to see which ones work best to engage your audience. 

I’ve grown my brand off the back of content marketing. Using these content marketing tactics will help you do the same thing.  

Focus on creating exceptional content and use these tactics to take your marketing to the next level. If you do this successfully, then you’re likely to reach more people, get more engagement, and achieve more of your marketing goals. 

What’s your favorite content marketing tactic?

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By: Neil Patel
Title: 30 Content Marketing Tactics You Have to Try
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/unconventional-content-marketing-tactics/
Published Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2021 13:00:00 +0000