StrategyDriven Expert Contributors' Blog

How to Build Brand Appeal and Trust in Retail Settings

November 10, 2020/in Marketing & Sales/by StrategyDriven

With more options available to consumers than ever before, maintaining strong connections as a retail brand is challenging to say the least. Ultimately, most consumers feel minimal loyalty to any one retailer or brand; long gone are the days where retailers could rely upon consistent customers in local communities without global competition affecting profits.

Nevertheless, offsetting some of these disruptive trends is possible by focusing on expanding brand appeal, trustworthiness and general authority. What exactly should retailers be doing to maximise these elements in their favour?

Keep reading to find out how additional brand appeal and trust can be earned in retail settings.

Craft a Narrative

One of the most crucial components in retail marketing for brands – both online and local/physical – is to convey a story that humanises them.

Storytelling is powerful – this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Since the dawn of time, stories have been told to inform, persuade and entertain. In the case of retailers, the goal in most situations is to persuade. Humans generally recognise stories and the emotions conveyed within them, whether they be written or spoken. A story can be a powerful component in a broader marketing arsenal with regards to garnering support and loyalty from otherwise fickle customers.

To build a strong retail story or narrative, it is important to consider a few crucial components. First, understanding the product(s) being sold and how they connect with customer day-to-day experiences is fundamental. Next, it is vital to craft a story for why the retail business exists; what purpose does it serve, who does it cater to, and why is it essential to the customer?

Building a brand story definitely takes work, but it is crucial in appealing to customers and building trust among them.

Build a Professional Store Image…

What do people visually see when they enter a retailer’s physical location or arrive at their website? The answer to that question can have more of an impact on brand appeal and trust than many realise.

In a world of flashy aesthetics and professional design, people expect more from retailers in terms of store image. Obviously, the differences between physical and virtual store fronts are notable, but simultaneously have considerable overlap in spirit.

Physical retailers should invest in professional signage, retail display options, quality lighting and other factors that highlight a brand’s legitimacy. This can be done with companies such as CJ Retail Solutions who offer professional and authoritative retail display solutions to their clients. In addition, they also provide assistance with retail merchandising, signage installation and field marketing.

…This Includes Online Retailers

For online retailers, the need to invest in professional design is equally important – though it takes slightly different forms. There are numerous ways to build trust via e-commerce websites, but the gist really boils down to professional graphics, consistent branding, upfront policies regarding prices, shipping and returns, and other trust signals. It is also vital to ensure that the website itself is optimised for users from all walks of life (this means desktop users, mobile users, etc).

Trust has to be earned – and retailers need as much of it as they can get. The single biggest methods through which to earn trust and generate additional brand appeal is to create a professional aura surrounding the brand and cultivate a compelling narrative to persuade audiences. By following these tips, retailers can build a solid foundation from which trust, appeal and reach can grow.

How To Save Money In Your Business

November 10, 2020/in Managing Your Finances/by StrategyDriven

It’s crucial to save as much money in your business as you can when you’re a startup. However, it’s just as important to continue to save money even when you are more established. By cutting costs where you can – without cutting corners, of course – you can have a more streamlined business that can cope with anything the world throws at it. Any sudden downturn won’t impact a business that spends as little as possible half as much as it would impact a business that has many different expenses.

It’s easy to over-spend in business, especially when things are going well. However, it’s not a good idea; it’s far better to save and have money put aside for emergencies. Here are some ways to save money in business that will help you greatly.

Buy The Best You Can Afford

Surely saving money isn’t about buying expensive items? Isn’t that the opposite of what we’re meant to be telling you? Well, partly. Of course, we’re not advocating you go and buy many luxury items, spending all the money you have in your business, and then having financial issues later on. However, we are suggesting that, when it comes to elements that are needed for your business, such as tools, machinery, and other equipment, you don’t buy cheap. Always stick to your budget but buy the best you can with the money you have.

This is, strange as it might seem, is a money-saving tip.

Imagine if you bought a lot of cheap equipment, even if you could buy better. The likelihood is that this equipment would start to break down and need to be replaced, or it would have to be serviced more often than something newer that was in better repair. In the end, if you buy cheap at the start, you will probably spend more on that item through repairs and eventually replacement than you would have if you’d pushed your budget a little higher to begin with.

Outsource What You Can

Again, it might seem as though we are telling you to spend money, and again we are, but – again – there is a reason behind this.

Many people think outsourcing is expensive, especially if they could do the work themselves. Yet you must take into account what doing the work yourself would entail. By working on something that someone else could do, you are using up your precious time, time that should be being used to run the business. When you outsource, you can pick the things you’re good at and leave the rest to someone else, ensuring the high quality of the business you’re running.

You can outsource your accounts, your IT management, your marketing, and any other things that don’t appeal or that you don’t have the skills for.

Work From Home

One of the easiest and most popular ways to save money in business is to have everyone work from home rather than have a central office. If you and anyone else who works for you can work from home, you won’t have business premises to maintain. You won’t have to pay rent, nor will you need to spend money on energy bills.

On top of this, studies have shown that people are more productive when they work from home. If you are more productive, more work will get done, and not only will you save money, you’ll make money too.

5 Great Tips for Starting a New Business

November 10, 2020/in Starting Your Business/by StrategyDriven

Every entrepreneur wants more revenue, qualified leads, and visitors. To achieve this, you have to be flexible, possess organizational skills, and use good planning. Starting a business is not just opening doors or turning computers and expect it to grow.

There is a lot to learn about launching your new business. You’ll need to get prepared for the risks involved. The risks are too high, and your planning and organizational skills will not be enough. For you to succeed, you will also need the following tips:

Handle Legal Requirements

Registering your enterprise is an important step towards making it real. If possible, look for an attorney to help you iron out every detail. This is not something you want to go wrong, especially when matters of business permits and licenses are involved.

However, depending on the state, county, or city regulations, steps of taking care of legal requirements may vary. This means you may need to confirm with the local government office to make sure you get things right.

Choose a Suitable Location

The site of a business is among the important factors when starting a new venture. Whether you’re starting an online shop or launching a brick-and-mortar store, the location of the available warehouses may have an impact on your legal requirements and taxes.

Where you situate your business also depends on your partners and target market. In addition to that, you can also look for a location depending on factors, such as:

Government restrictions
Benefits
Costs

Look for Vendors

Starting and running a business might be overwhelming, so you and your partners may not be able to handle everything on your own. This is where third-party vendors should come in. Businesses in different industries, which range from phone systems to HR are available to offer you help.

When looking for business-to-business partners, you need to choose wisely. These partners will have access to your important and business information, so it may be vital to look for a company you can really trust.

Analyze the Conditions of the Market

The market dictates how successful you will be. For example, if you want to sell bedding, you will not just include every person who sleeps in bed. Your target should be a small group of customers, such as teenagers from middle-income families.
You can also include an analysis of research, which others have conducted, whether through interviews or surveys. This is where you can also include an analysis of competition and strategies or strengths of your competitors.

Avoid Overcapitalizing

A perfect way to start your business is to begin small and dip your toe in slowly. The best thing about testing your market is to ensure you don’t end up in a hole with absolutely nothing to offer. Therefore, a good way is to start out with minimal capital and apply a great strategy.

Final Thoughts!

Starting any business can be an exciting venture yet very demanding. From physical location to business structure, there is a lot to handle before starting your business. Hence, if you have the plans of starting a business, you need to be flexible, avoid overcapitalizing, and analyze the market conditions so as to succeed.

Three Pieces of Shipping Equipment Your Business Should Consider Investing In

November 9, 2020/in Tactical Execution/by StrategyDriven

For many businesses, shipping equipment is an afterthought. They are more concerned with their actual product, that they do not spend a lot of time thinking about the products they use to wrap up, ship up, or transport their items in. As a business owner, there are a variety of different types of shipping equipment and products that can make your life easier and help to ensure your products arrive at the destination in pristine condition. Here are a few of the pieces of shipping equipment that your business should consider investing in and how they can help to improve your business.

Custom Pallets and Skids

Pallets and skids are a base or foundation that you can stack your products on as you prepare to ship a mass load to a business or location. While pallets and skids are pretty standard, not every pallet or skid works for every product. Your products may be extremely heavy, and a traditional pallet cannot support the weight of the items you are placing on top of it. Your items may also be awkward shaped, and you may need something longer or wider than a traditional pallet or skid. Having custom pallets or skids created helps to ensure that you can properly stack your products to preparing them for shipping, without having the pallet break or run the risk of awkwardly sized items tumbling off the pallet during shipping.

Vapor Barriers

Another piece of shipping equipment that your company should consider investing in is vapor barriers. Some items are more susceptible to weather elements, including temperature changes and humidity. The humidity can get in your packaging and cause an item to rust or eat away at the finish. A vapor barrier can be custom made to fully protect your products so that they remain safe during the shipping and transportation process, no matter what type of weather elements the drive runs into.

Custom Packaging Material

The final type of custom shipping equipment that your business should consider investing in is custom packaging material. This includes boxing and foam to properly protect your items during the transportation process. Items that are not properly packaged can bounce around during transport. Your customers may get broken items. Buying custom packaging materials helps to ensure that your item is protected inside the box and the box properly fits the item being shipped or transported, to dramatically decrease the chances of damage occurring during the shipping or transport process.

There are many different types of shipping equipment that can help to make your life easier when you are shipping out the items you make and/or that can ensure that your items arrive at your buyers’ location without being damaged. If you are ready to learn more about the various types of shipping equipment that are available or you are ready to place an order for items that may be beneficial to your business, located a trusted shipping company that can help get you started.

Can You Do SEO on Your Website Without an SEO Audit?

November 9, 2020/in Online Marketing and Website Development/by StrategyDriven

What Is an SEO Audit?

It does not matter if you want to SEO your own website, or if you want to use the services of an SEO agency. In both cases, you will need a thorough SEO audit. But what is that? Well, it is a method used to get as much SEO information about a website as possible. The more information you get from the SEO audit report, the higher the quality of results you will get in the future from the SEO methods. There are several types of information that you should expect to get from this method.

Technical audit. On the internet, you will find agencies that provide different types of audits. But most of them are incomplete, and they provide you with information about only one part of your website’s SEO. The technical audit checks the technical parameters of your website. The main parts that need to be checked are the links on your website, its loading speed, and the device compatibility with other websites.
On-site audit. The on-site part of the SEO audit must offer you information about the content used on the website. Several factors must be verified. The first one is the originality of the content. Every piece of duplicate or plagiarized content will be penalized by search engines. The second factor is the relevancy of the content. It must be relevant to your industry. And the last factor that must be verified is the engagement level. The more engaging the content is, the better the results that it will produce.
Off-site audit. The last part of SEO is for off-site. A reliable audit must check the authority of your website in the industry as well as the renown that it has. To have high authority, you need to have backlinks placed on other websites in the industry. If your articles and links can be found on high-authority websites, then your authority will rise as well. As for your website’s renown is based on the number of backlinks and websites where they can be found.
Business assessment. The last part that needs to be found in the SEO audit report is the business assessment part. Nowadays, SEO strategies must be personalized. So, the agency must learn as much information about your business as possible. And it must also research your competition and the best keywords that you should use. All the information obtained from the audit can be used to create an SEO plan that will take care of every SEO related task for your website.

What Benefits Can You Expect from an SEO Audit?

Now that you have a general idea about what an SEO audit is, you need to know the benefits that you can expect from it. It provides a large number of benefits. But only a few of them are notable and easily seen.

Solve the problems. The first benefit that you can expect from an SEO audit report are solutions for every problem that was detected. Without it, even if you use a top SEO strategy, the results will be mediocre. Why? Because all the problems will drag your website down, and it will not be able to rise even with the best strategy.
Optimized strategy. The second benefit is an optimized and personalized strategy for your website. As mentioned above, every business is unique. And a reliable SEO agency must be able to detect al the unique parts that can be used in the strategy to increase the results that it produces.
Increased traffic. The third benefit will come after the problems are solved, and the strategy is being implemented. Your website ranks in search engine page results will start to rise, and you will get more and more traffic for your website. And the more people are visiting, the higher your chances of getting new clients are.
Increased conversion rate. And lastly, a good SEO strategy combined with high-quality content will also increase the conversion rate of your website. This means that a higher percentage of your visitors will become leads or customers. This is the final goal of SEO. And only an audit can be used to ensure that all the content on your website is optimized. And it produces these types of results.

How to Choose a Reliable Agency Based on the SEO Audit!

Probably the most important use of an SEO audit is to find a reliable SEO agency. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term process. So, you must find a reliable partner that can take care of it for you. So, you can use the audit of an agency and deduce its skill levels from the SEO audit report. But before you do that, you should follow 3 steps to narrow down the options that you have.

Find all the options. The first thing that you must do is to find all the options that you have. So, you can use a search engine like Google to look for all the SEO agencies that you can find on the market. The more options you have, the higher your chance to find a reliable partner at a reasonable price.
Check the results. Next, you need to verify the results produced by the agencies. Most of the time, you can find them on the agency’s website. And you can use the search engine to check the credibility of the results. Also, you should only verify the newer ones. If they are older than 6 months, then they are not relevant anymore. And you can keep in mind only the agencies that produced the best results.
Get some first-hand reviews. The last step is to find the contact information of the agency’s clients. You need to communicate with them and get some first-hand reviews about the agency. This is the best method that you can use to find out how the collaboration with the agency will end. If the clients of an agency are happy, then you will most likely be the same.