This week we feature, Dimitris Athanasiadis Business Development & Marketing Manager at Megaventory. Megaventory is an affordable, web-based solution for inventory management.

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

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Your location: ​ Athens, Greece.

Your favorite gadget: My 2nd Gen Moto G.

You start your day with:​ Facebook :/

Your favorite time-saving trick: I use Harvest as a time tracker to keep my mind from being distracted by tasks which are not immediate.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Facebook and email and sometimes Feedly with all my sources there.

“Set aside some time every day to identify and automate processes.”

Describe an average day at Megaventory?

One day is never the same as another when it comes to doing online marketing and business development in Megaventory — that’s one of the things I love in this job. In the same day we could be on the phone with a partner, writing a blog post, putting together social media content, answering email or collecting feedback from customers. One thing that’s not really present is meetings — at worst we do quick Skype chats within the team and handle all other communication via email and dedicated tools (e.g. Trello mentions). We do have a weekly steering, all hands on deck meeting though.

As a marketer, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

Being productive and responsive in Quora and the questions users ask there has been a treasure trove of leads.

I also use Sidekick by Hubspot which tells you when an email has been opened. That’s really useful to understand who’s most ‘email responsive’ out of the many people whom I send email to.

The Boomerang Gmail addon is really useful for setting reminders for non-crucial tasks which however must not slip through either and there’s isn’t a specific tool to track them (like a CRM or project management app). Boomerang pushes the email in question to the future conveniently emptying my inbox until it’s necessary again.

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

Hootsuite: I’ve found it the best to bring some order in the social media jungle. It also falls short many times but it’s much better than anything else I’ve tried out there.

Intercom: Still not fully proficient with it but it provides a unique combination of features which are too complicated or require technical help to implement using more established solutions such as Mailchimp and Google Analytics

Pipedrive: Handy for tracking client and partner relations — esp. their feature of scheduling activities to follow up leads with and to take notes after each communication

Zapier: Really useful for automating tasks in a set it and forget it approach. A pity not many companies integrate with it more fully.

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

Intercom helps significantly in this respect along with Freshdesk (which we also use to handle tickets and customer communication). Learning from these tools what our customers want drives development which in turn drives communication back up the client channel.

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

We use most channels available from reaching a good position in organic results to social media along with partnerships and presence in third party sites (via directory submissions, guest posts, etc).

A significant effort has also went in non-site conversions i.e. via partnerships with marketplaces as well as developing integrations which attract traffic indirectly via people adopting these integrations in questions.

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

The piece of advice which is most difficult to follow is to set aside some time every day to identify and automate processes. It’s hard in itself to find the time along with other time-demanding tasks but even if you do and you manage to design a process you also have to overcome the technical hurdle of implementing said process. It’s worth it, if you make it though.

Also, although it’s not marketing related: steer clear of Facebook during the work day and at the end of it before you leave the office leave a note (a post-it, an email draft, whatever works for you) of the first two things you need to be doing right after you arrive the next morning. It works wonders to allow you to hit the ground running once you get back to work the next day.

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

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