This week we feature Chris Ronzio, Founder of Trainual. Trainual is an onboarding and training automation tool for modern businesses.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Trainual, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

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Your location: Scottsdale, Arizona.

Your favorite gadget: AirPods.

You start your day with: Me time (journaling, meditating, working out).

Your favorite time-saving trick: Get an Uber and catch up on work in the backseat.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: I don’t read blogs, but I listen to podcasts. Bootstrapped Web, SaaStr, Warrior Wealth.

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Describe an average day at Trainual?

As a new software startup, the projects we’re tackling week-to-week vary tremendously, but we’ve tried to maintain a general structure for how our team works each day. Half our team is international and remote and the other half is in our Scottsdale office. We start each week with a Monday afternoon planning session after everyone has caught up on their backlog of emails from the weekend. I carve out all day Tuesday and Thursday for sales since we are doing a lot of product demos, webinars and partner meetings and the rest of the week is filled with developing marketing content and helping with everything from our product roadmap to our help docs.

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As a Founder/ Marketer what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

I get up between 4:30 and 5:30 every day and start my day with at least 3 hours of "me time". If I want to be a good leader, business owner, husband, father — then I think it starts with taking care of myself. I meditate every day, journal, work out, and plan my day before the kids are awake and the emails start flowing.

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As a person who is well-versed with online marketing/ inbound,  I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts.  What are the top 3-5 tools you use?

Zapier

Streak CRM

Design Pickle

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

There’s a couple things — we use Intercom for tracking user behavior and engagement in the app so we know which features our customers are using or which things we’re getting the most customer support questions for and need to explain better. For promotions, we’ve been using YesInsights as a tool to segment our list to tag users with certain preferences or might opt in to certain offers. As a user documents a certain umber of subjects in our system, we reach out with a TypeForm survey to help complete a case study and that’s been a great source of ongoing marketing content.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

First, we’ve produced over 100 videos on how to build processes for different areas of your business which we’re using as free content on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. All of that plus Google AdWords and LinkedIn helps build awareness about our brand and get people to our site. Then we target users who engage and send follow up content and free downloads to capture them as a lead. We nurture our leads through email and with personalized video messages from me on Bonjoro until someone signs up for a trial and lands with our customer success team.

Is there any advice you'd like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

Pick a theme. Initially our content marketing was very scattered, but once we developed a theme — or campaign — around helping businesses think through how to build their processes, our content came together much more easily.

How do teams at Trainual have fun at work/ make work fun?

We try to do spontaneous things — not too long ago, we randomly took everyone to the movies to see The Greatest Showman because it had an entrepreneurial story and I felt we could all relate to the ups and downs of a growing business.

A big thanks to Chris for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Trainual

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