StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Leader |Three People Who Can Help Your Business

Three People Who Can Help Your Business

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Leader |Three People Who Can Help Your BusinessEvery single business leader needs help. People don’t become business leaders without being helped to do it, and they don’t get to be respected in their industry without support along the way. Your business may be just fine, not in peril and not failing, but that doesn’t mean that you have to slow down your practice.

What you need is help! Whenever you think things are levelling out and you’re losing momentum on your business growth, you need to reach out and get in touch with people who can help you get back on track. When the office is going into disrepair, you need a commercial electrician and plumbers who can help, and you wouldn’t attempt to fix it on your own, would you? So, don’t try to fix your business by yourself. You need to turn to the right people to ensure that you can get your numbers up and keep growing your business the way that you always imagined you could. Who can you ask for help? Let’s take a look!

Business Consultants.

There are so many people out there who have better knowledge of your industry than you do. These people use their skills and market themselves as consultants who can evaluate your business and learn about what you sell, whether this is a product or service. These consultants can help you to ensure your office processes run more smoothly, and they offer packages that can do just that. They’ll be able to advise you on your marketing strategies and your general business development strategies, too. Contact a business consultant if you’re worrying that you aren’t going to be able to grow and they will be able to walk you through what to do next. There’s no shame in asking someone who’s better than you what to do next.

Expert Accountants.

The one person that you can’t take for granted in your business is your accountant. Hiring an accountant to manage your payroll, invoicing and paying your bills is important. It saves you getting it wrong and it frees up your time so that you no longer have to worry about splitting your focus. You can take the time to do the things necessary for your business, instead. Accountants are the experts in finance and payroll and their whole job is to manage the numbers. They can pay the bills, settle the accounts, pay the staff and ensure you get your cut, too. They can help you with your books and keep everything as balanced as possible so that you don’t make mistakes.

Website Experts.

The most important thing in your business is your website right now. It’s the one area that you need to be kept as up to date as possible so that you can continue to drive traffic to your website. If you have an online store, you need it to run well and you need it to offer your visitors everything that they are looking for. Find the right website experts, and you can ensure that you are running your business properly!

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Hiring |The First Things You Must Do When Hiring Anyone

The First Things You Must Do When Hiring Anyone

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Hiring |The First Things You Must Do When Hiring AnyoneFor most people in business, the whole prospect of hiring and firing is one of the most daunting aspects of running a business at all. If you find that you are worrying about this a little in your own business, then you will probably want to try and do whatever you can to make it a little easier, and that will generally mean coming to terms with what you are going to have to do about it. In particular, it’s useful to know what you are going to have to do when you are hiring someone, so that you can make sure that you do it in a way which is fair to all, useful for the business, legal and above board, and ultimately in a way which provides the best outcome for all. Clearly, that is something that might be very difficult to make sure of for many people, and it’s going to be a struggle.

However, in this post, we will aim to make this a little easier, primarily by focusing on some of the very first things that you should do when you are hiring absolutely anyone at all. As long as you are aware of these things, and you take them on board, you should find that you are going to be able to make much more of whoever you do hire, which is essential.

Check Their Right To Work

First of all, you need to concern yourself with some of the legal proceedings that you can’t ignore. One of the most important is checking that the person you are hiring actually has the legal right to work in the country in which you are operating. It is your legal duty to check that, and if you fail to then you could get in a lot of trouble indeed, especially if it turns out that they are not able to work there after all. It also helps to protect against any inherent or institutional racism, as you are going to need to make these checks on everyone, not just those you happen to know came to the country from abroad.

The issue and practical concern of how to check their right to work is actually very simple. In the case of those from abroad, you will need to check their visa allows work, and you’ll have to take a copy of it. For everyone else, simply take a copy of their ID – passport, driving licence, or official ID card. Get all this down, and you are going to be in a much better situation with the law.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Hiring |The First Things You Must Do When Hiring AnyoneDraw Up A Contract

Of course, you are going to have to make sure that you and your new employee have an official agreement about what you should get from them, and what they can expect from you in return. This is the whole point of contracts, and you will need to make sure that you are working on drawing one up early on so that they can sign it when you take them on board. The contract should involve everything that is necessary to know about the position, and includes a description of basic tasks and responsibilities. It should also outline starting pay, and what chances there are for that increasing. You should also have a section there on the terms of dismissal, so that they know them from the very start and there can be no arguments about it later on. Many people find it troublesome drawing up contracts, but with Agiloft contract management software and a decent HR team in charge of the process, it should be considerably simpler indeed.

Training

In many cases, you will find that there is a need for training. If that is the case for your business and its employees, then this is something you are going to need to arrange straight away, before you actually have them sit at their desk and start working. It is useful and necessary for many reasons, but of course one of the main ones is that it is a reliable way of ensuring that they are going to do the work right. It will also help them to feel much more ready for the work, and mean that they can ease in more successfully, which is definitely something to think about too.

As long as you get all this right, you should find that you are going to be able to hire people much more successful indeed.

StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Start-up|Must-have business services every start-up should consider

Must-have business services every start-up should consider

StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Start-up|Must-have business services every start-up should considerBritain is, according to a report in The Telegraph, “a booming nation of start-ups.” In fact, around 660,000 new companies are registered in the UK every year.

Starting a new company is hugely exciting. It is also a risk. The fact is, as many as 60 per cent of new businesses go to the wall in the first three years, and 20 per cent fail within just 12 months.

Making a success of a start-up and growing your idea into a viable business can be achieved if you embrace two rules.

Firstly, learning from mistakes is key (including learning from the mistakes of other start-ups) – there will be blunders and you’ll have to learn how to be agile and recover from them. The second and equally important part of any successful start-up journey is knowing when to invest in help.

Here I’ll be focusing on the five must-have business services every start-up should consider.

  • Funding and business planning
  • HR advice
  • Digital marketing and SEO
  • Intellectual Property rights
  • Business coaching

Let’s take a look at each of them in more detail.

Funding and business planning for start-ups

Researching possible funding avenues and finding an investor isn’t easy, especially when you are starting out and have a huge number of tasks to complete in order to set up your venture. Seeking the advice of a business adviser could be worth the investment. A business adviser can help you with your business plan, and give invaluable advice on possible funding avenues.

Business advisors and chartered accountants, Wellden Turnbull, say that it is astonishing how many start-ups set out without a well-thought out plan. They say that 1.5 million SMEs do not have a business plan and that it is often the lack of a plan that catches small businesses out.

HR Advice

As soon as you take on your first employee, you will need to ramp up your understanding of HR – that’s human resources. You’ll need to know which HR regulations you’ll need to adhere to and how to deal with all sorts of employee-related issues, such as absenteeism and sick pay, paying a fair wage, calculating holidays, overtime, dealing with staff complaints and much more.

Your employees are a precious resource – get the management of them wrong and you could lose them or worse find yourself at a tribunal. Every start-up needs a minimum level of HR knowledge – if you don’t have clue, you’ll need to learn fast or seek some professional HR advice.

Digital marketing and SEO

Getting noticed online is now more important to business success than ever before. Why? Nowadays everything happens online. Digital marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your business and can put you in a position to compete with established businesses which are much larger than yours.

While setting up a website, email marketing and social media are perfectly do-able in-house, optimising your website to move up the Google rankings is quite involved and requires a certain amount of technical skill.
Seeking help from an SEO professional to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, fast-loading, and has backlinks from authoritative sources is worth the investment.

Intellectual Property rights

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) defines Intellectual Property rights as “the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds.” Also known as IP rights, Intellectual Property rights give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a set period of time.

IP is protected by extensive laws and disputes are common – in fact, there are specialist lawyers who only work on IP cases. There are two main categories for IP protection – Copyright, and Industrial Property (which includes things like trademarks and patents).

Why is IP important for start-ups? When you have a unique idea for a business, there will always be people who will want to steal your idea, so it is important to protect them. In order to prevent your IP being exploited by others it would be prudent to seek specialist advice. For a checklist on protecting your Intellectual Property, see here.

Business coaching

One-to-one coaching or mentoring when you are setting up a business may seem like an extravagance, but it could actually be the best investment you ever make. Research suggests that working with a business coach can increase your profit margin by an average of 46 per cent.

While there is plenty of information out there to help you get your business started, there’s nothing quite like personalised custom advice. Business coaches are usually expert entrepreneurs who know what it takes to make a start-up succeed.

A business coach will train you in the skills you need and teach you how to set goals and grow your brand.
Choosing the right business coach to work with is obviously important. Get this right and your start-up could be catapulted to success.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, How to Boost Your Website Traffic Organically

How to Boost Your Website Traffic Organically

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, How to Boost Your Website Traffic Organically

The most important challenge, and usually the biggest, for any business, is to make sure they stand out from their competitors. This is especially true in the digital landscape today because consumers are constantly bombarded by content and different marketing messages from brands. You want to make sure that when people are searching for a service or product similar to what you offer or sell, they find you and not your competitors.

Sure, you can engage in paid advertising like pay-per-click and search engine marketing, but there are plenty of excellent SEO strategies that can help boost your website traffic organically. When your website traffic increases, your sales increase as well, so of course it’s in your company’s best interest to engage in organic strategies in addition to any paid strategies.

Here is a how-to guide on how to boost your website traffic organically.

Write for humans, not robots

Assuming you know exactly who your target audience is already and you have taken the time to create buyer personas, you should write all of your content on your website and blog for readers, not search engine algorithms. If you’re spending all your time crafting content for search engines, your content will read poorly, will be full of keywords, and will ultimately turn customers off.

Instead, focus on writing for your audience and speaking to them as if you were having a conversation in real life. Be personable and offer them information that they can use, instead of trying to please Google’s algorithms. If your audience finds value in your content, the search engines will automatically take notice.

Create a website blog

If you haven’t already, what are you waiting for? Blogging is one of, if not the most, effective way of increasing organic website traffic. It fosters better relationships between you and your target audience, it builds trust between your brand and your potential and current customers, it improves brand awareness, and it can even help establish you as an industry thought leader or expert in your niche.

Regularly publish content

Maintaining an active presence on both social media and your own company blog is an essential way to maintain good SEO and boost organic traffic. Having a consistent posting schedule will reinforce your brand as a strong voice and a good place to find solutions among your audience. Moreover, your content should always be high quality, so don’t sacrifice quality for quantity because this can do more harm than good.

Use the right keywords

Choosing the most popular keywords in your market is not always the best way to go about this practice. Instead, you should focus on the keywords that are most relevant to your audience. This usually means using more long-tail keywords than short keywords, especially in the age of voice search, since that’s what audiences are shifting to when they’re searching for solutions online.

Your use of keywords is important because top search engines will use them to recognize your website as the right destination for specific questions in a particular subject or niche. Over time, your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) will increase, making it easier for your audience to find you instead of finding your competitors.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | 3 Strategies To Build Brand Awareness

3 Strategies To Build Brand Awareness

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | 3 Strategies To Build Brand AwarenessBrand awareness is crucial to any business, particularly when launching a new product or service. Think about it – customers aren’t going to buy from a company they don’t recognize or believe is trustworthy and credible. Hence why you must focus on brand awareness in your marketing campaigns and consider innovative ways to introduce customers to your products and services. Brand awareness helps attract new customers, secure valuable repeat business, and boost sales and profits. With this in mind, here are three effective strategies to build brand awareness.

1. Collaborate with influencers

Collaborating with influencers is an excellent way to build brand awareness, increase organic traffic to your site, and boost sales. Influencers have a large audience who follow them and trust their opinions. Having an established influencer recommend your product or service to their followers can instantly improve your brand image, expand your reach, and attract new customers to your business. However, investing in influencers can be wasted expensive if you don’t choose the right ones to work with. Here are some useful tips to help you choose the right influencers for your brand:

  • Find an influencer who posts content in your specific niche. Their posts need to be relevant to your brand and align with your values.
  • Make sure their audience is actively engaging – are they liking, commenting, and sharing their content?
  • Check they are posting consistently and have an active presence on social media channels. Advice on coschedule.com suggests this should be – “one post a day on Facebook, one to two posts a day on Instagram, and approximately 15 tweets a day on Twitter.”

2. Use video marketing

Video is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to build brand visibility and establish you as an authority in your industry. A recent study suggests that a massive 84% of internet traffic will be video by 2020. Video is one of the most engaging, interesting, and popular methods of content with consumers. These statistics clearly demonstrate why all businesses should be using video media as part of their marketing campaigns. Fortunately, there are many companies offering videography and editing services – For example, Its Bernard has worked with many companies to build brand awareness and increase sales through effective video marketing campaigns.

3. Do SEO research

Most people don’t look past the first few pages of search engine results. This means consumers are unlikely to even see your website if you don’t rank highly in search engine result pages. Finding ways to improve your SEO strategy is, therefore, an effective way to build brand awareness and increase traffic to your website. Start by researching ways to enhance your SEO. For instance, identify which specific keywords and phrases are most effective in your particular niche, then find ways to include these naturally within your content. Keep in mind that search engines like Google are constantly updating the ways they rank content. Hence why it’s so important to stay up to date with the current SEO trends. If you’re struggling to improve the SEO ranking of your website, then consider outsourcing this responsibility to SEO specialists.