It’s a thin line between love and obsession.
That’s the case for PPC expert and entrepreneur John Rampton when he’s describing his feelings for Raven.
By day, John is part of the Internet marketing agency team at Maple North in Toronto. By night, John works on growing PPC.org, a tips-and-tricks site, and Blogging.org, a content marketplace.
He’s been using Raven for a year and a half—“Basically, I am obsessed with it,” he wrote—and during that time the Maple North team has grown from two to five people with more clients than ever. He attributes that growth directly to Raven, its new social tools, its Metrics section and its fast, flexible reporting.
In his own words, here are five reasons that John loves Raven for his agency work and projects:
1. ‘A huge time saver’
Raven Tools tracks everything out there for me so that I don’t have to spend time checking into all the different platforms and getting numbers. It’s a huge time saver.
For example, I like how I get data from SEOmoz and Majestic SEO all in one spot. I can research a site very quickly in Raven’s Research Central, which pulls all the data from these different tools into one slick looking dashboard.
(Speaking of dashboards, I can create custom dashboards for quick overviews of websites/clients, which makes it extremely simple to get an idea of progress and changes at a glance.)
Also, Raven tracks things like Facebook impressions, how many people saw a post and how many people a brand was exposed to. It sees exactly what you’re doing on Twitter and if it’s effective for your business.
2. ‘One easy-to-read format’
I love the fact that Raven takes tons of information — reports, stats and data — and compresses it into one easy-to-read-and-understand format. It displays the data in a very user friendly manner. It’s a great all-in-one tool.
We work hard at getting interactions and like to know that the work we’re doing for our clients is paying off. It’s really hard to know unless you have Raven’s Metrics tools.
3. ‘Multiple users’
It’s really nice to have multiple users be able to be logged in and know what’s going on with the account at the same time. For an agency, it’s priceless to be able to have many people on your team know what’s going on with all the clients we do work for.
4. ‘Automatic reporting’
It’s a typical agency problem. You do a ton of work and the client never can tell what you’re doing for them. With Raven’s reporting tools, we can show them exactly the impact that we’re having on their website.
It’s simple to set up and white label Raven reports for our many clients. The system will automate everything so that we can focus on our client work. We leave all the tedious reporting to Raven, because we know it’ll always get done.
For smaller clients this is crucial in order to do real work on their account. As an agency we try to focus on $5,000+-a-month clients, but we do work with some clients that are smaller then that. If we didn’t have automatic tracking and reporting for our smaller clients, we wouldn’t have any time to work on their accounts. We would gobble up all our profits in providing them profit.
With Raven’s automatic reports, that doesn’t happen.
5. ‘Keeping clients’
In fact, reporting has helped us keep clients.
We had one client who came to us very upset that we weren’t doing enough social media management even though we were actively, strategically, posting to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and everything else.
With strong Raven reporting we were able to help the client see and understand these social interactions.
We showed them that we were getting a ton of interaction and, in reality, had easily more than 1 million impressions of their brand to potential customers. We were also able to prove that the average person who visited their website via social media stayed on the site for 5+ minutes compared to the 1.5 minutes the average person stayed on the site.
We took screenshots of everything in the back end of Raven and combined it with the Raven reports that we give them. They loved it!
This has helped us retain this client for the past year and a half. During that time, we have seen them grow from a small four-person organization to a 35+ organization with products in every Walmart, Target, Cabela’s and many other big-retail locations.
John has one more tip for anyone considering Raven…
“My secret tip for using Raven would be to actually use it. Take a day and learn it, spend all day in there and learn everything there is to know about it. I guarantee there is something in there that you haven’t tried or looked at. Raven is such an easy system to use, yet there are a ton of complexities to their software. You have to play around with it and get used to it to leverage its true power. You’d be surprised at all the features that they release all the time.”
… and one final thought:
“If you’re thinking about getting Raven, do it. It’s one of the best decisions that I have ever made. It has been part of our business tripling in the past year alone. We wouldn’t be able to scale without its easy reporting and white labeling abilities. We use Raven to save us time to do actual client work, instead of just talking about what we’re going to do. We’re out there doing the work—and Raven makes it possible.”
Want more testimonials? Read other case studies from Raven customers. Ready to test Raven for yourself? Sign up for our free 14-day trial now.
Image courtesy Thomas R. Stegelmann on Flickr
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