Starting a business can often be quite daunting. When you’re not a natural entrepreneur or you’ve not had much business experience, you can be fearful of it. But you needn’t be. There’s a lot about business that you can learn as you go along, and this definitely applies to marketing. When you start a small business, you really don’t have to be an expert of professional in order to get results. You just have to be willing to learn and grow. Because as you’re starting to absorb different ideas and tactics, you can try them all out for yourself. Most of the time, you just need to drop the fear and have fun with it instead.
Yet, even when you know you need to do this and you feel willing to step up, you won’t always know how to get started. And that’s only natural – because you’re brand new. So, you’re not expected to be a marketing master right now. But you can be soon. You just need to try out some different ideas, work with different tactics, and get creative too. And you really do need to let it be fun. So, take a look at some of these ideas and see what works for you.
Set Goals
To start with, you need to make sure that you have goals in place. We all need goals. And you need them for different parts of your business – but you definitely need them for marketing. So, ask yourself – what do you want to achieve with your business? What do you long to create? When you write this all down, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to come up with the most suitable campaigns.
Know Your Audience
But then also, you need to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because you have to remember that your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. Serving them, creating something for them. And if you’re going to be able to promote what you do and market to your audience effectively, you’ll need to know your audience well. So make sure that you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what they need.
Do Some Research
From here, you then need to make sure that you’re doing research – and enough of it. You don’t have to spend weeks and weeks on this, however. The aim is to just get enough knowledge of the areas of marketing that you know nothing about. You don’t need to become an expert, as you’re going to learn a ton as you go along.
Consider Working With Professionals
Next up, you may want to think about working with different professionals to help you here. Maybe you don’t want to do it all alone, or you feel as if you could use the help of experts in your industry. Whether this is finding a specialist PR person, a team that knows franchise marketing, or a consultant in your field, take a look around. You may find that working with professionals is exactly what you need here.
Identify The Right Platforms
If you’re going it alone, or even if you’re working with a few professionals, the next thing that you need to do here is work out which platforms you’re going to be on. And this isn’t about the ones you want to be on. But rather those that you know your audience is on, and that you feel you can connect with them on. Because that’s the winning formula here. Remember, it’s about them.
Set Up Social
When you’ve made that decision, you need to set up your social profiles. And there’s a way that you can go about it. You could think about setting up the bare bones of the profiles on each platform, then creating your strategy. Or, you could look to master one platform first, find your feet with it and connect with your audience, and then move on to the next.
Aim For Engagement
But now you need to make sure that you’re using your social platforms properly. It’s not enough to just get set up or to start talking. You need to be doing more than that. You need to engage your customers on social media, and connect with them. You need to get in front of the right people and start to build relationships with them. It isn’t a numbers game. It’s a quality over quantity thing every single time.
Master Your SEO
If you’re not already concentrating on your own SEO, it’s time to do exactly that. Because it’s simple, especially with an SEO guide. Sometimes, something with a fancy title can scare you. But when you step back and learn the basics of SEO, you’ll realize that things are starting to come together. By just using the right words and aiming to get your best content out there on the web, you’ll start to appear in searches properly.
Try Something Paid
At some point, you’ll also want to try out something paid. And this can be fun. You may often find that there’s only so far you can get with your organic activity, and that at some point you’ll need to run ads. But whether you do this with paid search or paid social, it’s down to your own data.
Push Your PR
The next thing that you’ll want to be able to do here, is really push your PR. And no, you do not need a PR professional to support you here, you can absolutely do your own PR. You just need to be consistent with it, know what constitutes a good story, and start to put things out into the media. Stay on top of it, and watch buzz for your business start to grow.
Harness WOM
From here, you’re then going to want to make sure that you start to harness the power of conversation. Never underestimate the power of recommendations. If you do a good job and you know that your customers love you, they’ll be more than happy to recommend you. And there are plenty of strategies that you can go for here, but you just need to be authentic and truthful to yourself. And your customers will start to do the rest.
Work With Your Data
Above all else, you need to make sure that you’re always checking in with your data. If you know that you want to go with decisions that’ll pay off and allow you to connect more, you need to look at your own results and data, and go from there.
Be Creative
Finally, you’re then going to want to make sure that you’re being as creative as you can when it comes with your different ideas. Don’t just follow the crowd. It’s cool to come up with different campaigns and to go with new and exciting tactics to get your business out there. Try to let yourself be as creative as possible and come up with fun ideas because of it. You’ll see you get better results when you do.
To summarise, when you’re new to the world of business marketing can seem confusing. It’s also something that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable. However, it doesn’t have to. Because as you can see, there are a wealth of ideas that you can turn to in order for things to work out for you. Just handpick some of the different options and see what kind of success you can make because of it.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/you-x-ventures-Oalh2MojUuk-unsplash.jpg8001200StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2019-07-29 17:00:262019-08-29 22:52:15How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand New
Many organizations experience employee turnover. Replacing competent and experienced employees is a challenge for many companies. Most of them struggle to retain their staff. New Jersey businesses can give their employees annual leaves to rest. They can visit the Resorts Casino during weekends to get an online welcome offer. It helps them relax their minds and improve their productivity at work. Employers can minimize employee turnover in different ways.
Give Competitive Wages and Benefits
Everyone has basic needs such as food and housing. Most employees try to earn extra benefits to increase their savings. An employee might leave your organization if you offer low wages. It is prudent to research the current wages which similar businesses offer to determine the right salary for your wages. For example, Colorado tech-firms offers similar benefits to their IT specialists. Offer competitive benefits to retain experienced staff.
Appreciate your Employees
Most organizations encourage and recognize hard-working employees. It motivates them to perform their roles diligently. For instance, you can congratulate a certain department once they complete a difficult project. However, it isn’t necessary to compliment them at all times. Instead, it is prudent to create a friendly environment to make your staff feel acknowledged and appreciated. You can make annual performance analysis to promote devoted staff.
Project a Career Path for Your Employees
Many workers apply for jobs in other companies when they stagnate in a certain position for long. They strive to increase their knowledge and expertise in a certain field. Show your staff a clear career path to instill a sense of purpose and direction in them. You can change an employee to a higher position or another department to hone their skills. Nevertheless, it is important to inform your employees before you switch their positions.
Set Flexible Work Schedules
Create flexible work schedules for your employees to allow them to adjust their location and work plan. Everyone needs a work-life balance to remain healthy and productive. Flexible schedules allow employees to spend adequate time with family and friends. However, some organizations have strict work schedules. They have fixed work hours which all workers must adhere to.
The current job market is highly competitive. Companies with high employee turnover experience numerous financial constraints. They spend a lot of time and money recruiting and training new staff. Organizations can offer flexible work plans and benefits to minimize employee turnover. Also, they can assign new roles to employees to help them advance their careers.
As a leader, you are constantly trying to maximize the magical effort to effectiveness equation (a.k.a. efficiency). You can see this play out in your daily operations and ultimately in the P&L. However, there is an intangible asset that is very difficult to quantify — but without it you cannot ultimately succeed. This asset is, of course, alignment.
Alignment matters because it is an amalgamation of understanding, agreement, buy-in, engagement, empowerment, and accountability.
It amazes me how few leaders understand how to harness, measure, leverage, and ultimately achieve true alignment behind their strategies and objectives. Too many leaders assume that just because they have spoken, their teams are all on the same page with them — and everything will proceed from there. Achieving true alignment takes a significant allocation of effort. But there is a direct correlation between the extent of alignment and the results achieved.
Therefore, it is in your best interest as a leader to focus more on achieving, gauging, and calibrating alignment than almost any other executional activity. The good news is that achieving alignment is more science than art — meaning that there are tools that work nearly every time in getting people behind an idea, strategy, or mission. Below, allow me to present three of my favorites:
1. Define and Drive organizational culture. Culture is the glue that holds an organization together. It’s often the reason behind why people choose to stay with your company over jumping ship to a competitor. As a leader, it is your role to create, foster, and harness culture against organizational objectives. Conduct focus groups, one on one’s, and surveys to get a strong grip on the current state of your business culture. Then define a desired state for the values and behavior you expect to see on display daily, and embody them in everything you do.
Once you are well on your way towards your desired cultural state, you need to then define your business’s hedgehog concept. This is time very well spent because it takes your underlying culture and applies it to specific business problems. By deriving the intersection of three key questions: what are we wildly passionate about, what can we do better than anyone else, and what drives our economic engine, you set a direction for people that is easy to align with. Ask the three questions at all levels of the organization, calibrate the responses, and then package the inputs into an easily digestible reason for organizational being that relates to the majority of your enterprise. Then you can focus organizational attention on how you are doing, not on what you are doing — or even worse, why you are doing it.
2. Don’t just communicate, connect. When you give a presentation on your business strategy, key priorities, and other initiatives, how often do you check (either via polls, surveys, show of hands) what people understood from your communication, what they are taking away, and whether or not they agree? Many leaders are scared to ask these types of questions because they don’t like being second-guessed. Still, it’s better to be second-guessed than to be zero-followed! Taking the time to gauge the degree to which key messages are landing, as well as whether the audience is aligned, is probably the most important investment you can make as a leader.
Once you know where your participants are on a given issue, the next step is to connect the dots for them. Do the hard work of helping them see what you see and understand why you are making these choices. Allow them to question, build on, and enhance your ideas. And finally, move forward, together.
3. Keep it very simple. It is relatively easy to stick to one road, drive the speed limit, buckle up for safety, and arrive at your destination both on time and with all passengers on board. Once you start introducing shortcuts, detours, scenic routes, and bypasses into the mix, you are almost destined to lose some people along the way. No one (besides Forrest Gump maybe) meanders their way to success. You pick a destination based on the best available information (expected weather, road conditions, permitted speed), calculate the mileage, gas expense, and time to arrival, and then start driving in as straight a line as possible until you reach your desired location, or in this case desired mission, goal, or objective.
Leaders who jump from highway to highway, seemingly without rationale, are leaders who lose the power of an organization primed and focused on achieving results. You have to know when to forge ahead, when to change course, and when to abandon ship — but at each inflection point, the more important concept to remember is that you need to reengage the enterprise when change is afoot, and never assume that people know the key why’s and what’s and how’s behind the new direction.
About the Author
Omar L. Harris is Associate Vice-President and Country Manager for Allergan PLC in Brazil. He is the author of Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams available for purchase in ebook or print on Amazon.com. Please follow him on instagram, twitter, LinkedIn, and/or his website for more information and engagement.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/dylan-gillis-KdeqA3aTnBY-unsplash.jpg36485472StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2019-07-28 20:00:372019-07-27 15:27:03How to Keep Your Team Agile and Aligned Under Pressure
One of the biggest questions people have is: Why should I use WordPress? If you wonder the same thing, you are in the right place. In today’s article, we share with you five important reasons you should be using WordPress for your website.
Let’s dive deeper into what makes this platform perfect for your business or hobby.
1. WordPress is Free
WordPress is a free and open-source platform. You don’t pay anything to download, install, configure or use it.
Still, you will need to pay for your web hosting and a domain name, but you need to do that anyway. It doesn’t matter what platform you use.
Before we go any further, it’s important to say something. Just because the platform is free isn’t reason enough to use it. It’s only one perk of many.
2. WordPress is Simple to Customize
Most people using WordPress aren’t programmers or web designers; they are just average people like you and me. What makes WordPress ideal for non-techie people is that there are thousands of free themes to choose from.
There’s a theme to fit any business site, online store or blog. These themes come entirely customizable, so you can change the colors, upload your logo and create sliders easily.
Plugins also create additional functionality, and many of them are free. These app-like platforms add features such as backups, analytics contact forms and more.
3. WordPress is SEO Friendly
While there are other platforms to use, nothing is as SEO-complaint as many of the WordPress themes, even if we’re talking about a single page WordPress theme. The platform itself is written with code that utilizes semantic markup. This allows Google to take notice.
4. WordPress is Manageable
You don’t have to worry too much about complex coding when using WordPress (though the option is available). You receive a built-in update management system that makes sure the software and plugins remain updated.
Anytime a new update is available, WordPress notifies you. Then, you click a button and install it.
While this isn’t hard to figure out, we do recommend going through the Green Geeks WordPress Tutorial to learn more about how the platform works. The tips you learn from a small amount of training go a long way to helping you produce a high-quality site.
5. WordPress is Secure & Safe
WordPress puts security first. It’s safe and secure for running any type of website. Let’s face it; the Internet isn’t a safe place. According to WebARX, there’s an attack on a website every 39 seconds.
Intruders seek to get their hands on all of the websites that they can. With a WordPress site, it’s easy to make things secure for additional peace of mind.
As far as the WordPress Core is concerned, an expert team of developers maintains the foundation. They continuously work to keep WordPress safe, which is why you want to perform any updates as they become available.
As far as your themes and plugins, WordPress isn’t responsible for the security of those, yet they still have teams working on it. The regularly check the themes and plugins to look for vulnerabilities. To further protect yourself, make sure you choose plugins and themes from reputable sources. If they offer regular updates, that’s a good sign that it is secure.
How to Use WordPress
Now that you know the WHY you’d want to use WordPress, it’s time to consider the HOW. WordPress is the perfect platform for a variety of websites. You can:
Create an eCommerce marketplace
Begin a blog
Create a business website
Construct a membership site
Sell your online courses
There are no limits to what your site can accomplish. The key is to begin. Every success has to start somewhere.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Lao Tzu
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Effective allocation of resources is what forms the crux of a business organisation. There is no way a business can thrive without having the right skills to manage whatever resources it has at its disposal. The scale of operation does not matter; however, what matters is how well you allocate each resource to put them to its best use. Some of the biggest business enterprises have faced catastrophic downfalls owing to their inability to handle the immense bulk of resources. On the other hand, the ones starting from scratch, with nothing but scraps have made it big only with their sheer skill of resource management and colossal intelligence. At the end of the day, there is no point cutting sizable profit if you do not know how to churn the cream to make something more out of it.
What Is an Efficient Allocation Of Resources?
Efficient allocation of resources, by definition, is the process of analysing all the available resources at any given point of time, and devising effective strategies to make the most out of them, keeping in mind short-term as well as long-term goals, in a way that there is minimal wastage and an optimal usage of all the resources.
There are different types of resources, and the knowledge of each one of them is crucial for a business to blossom. These resources could be related to something as complicated as finances or something very human as the workforce. Also, when we talk about allocating resources, it is not just the duty of the management to chalk out efficacious plans that would cater to the topic at hand. The onus of resource building, management and allocation is upon every individual working within the firm.
What Are the Most Important Resources?
It is difficult to place resources of an organisation into watertight compartments of classification because anything and everything really can be seen as a resource as per the requirements of the company. However, the most important ones, which are more like umbrella terms are- finance, time and workforce. Every business needs trustworthy financial advisors and a team that handles every aspect of it. You need to have the perfect knowledge of where and how your cash flows in the organisation. You need to have all your queries related to your accounts resolved, like what exactly Accounts Receivable Financing is, or how to deal with taxes. Only then can you understand where to allocate the money and how to do that efficiently. The same holds true for time and workforce. Time is precious, and every minute is supremely important. Therefore, you need to divide the work hours in such a way that every minute is utilised to its best. Coming to the workforce, they can easily be termed as one of the biggest assets of your business. Machines can do your job, but human beings are irreplaceable.
Therefore, hire the right team and use every individual’s talents the way they were meant to be used. You cannot use a legal advisor to pose as a psychologist and counsel them for better productivity. Everyone has their jobs cut out for themselves, and it is an inane allocation of the workforce to use people of the wrong profile for a particular task.
How Do You Allocate Resources?
There has been enough talk about what resource allocation is and why it is crucial for the future of a business organisation. We shall now move on to understanding how one could go about identifying their scope and using the same to their favour.
Gauge Your Situation
Everything starts with a holistic understanding of one’s situation and acknowledging it, no matter how arid your resource pool might look. Analyse what your scope is, where your resources come from and flip through the ways you have been utilising these resources for years or months. Once you have clarity of your situation, it is easier to act upon it.
Come Up With a Contingency Plan
An elaborate and extensive planning process is necessary for your business to score well and chart monumental heights of success. You need to plan everything-from hiring the right people for your job to handling finances; everything has to be hassle-free. However, one thing that several of these organisations miss out on is a sound and sensible contingency plan. There has to be a plan B. This might not look like a resource allocation strategy, but think about it before passing a verdict. Having a contingency plan is an assurance that your business will not perish at the face of adversities. You might plan your allocation since day zero, but if one those plans fail, you need a cushion that will absorb the shockwave. Also, discussing contingency plans is a way to segue into the next effective resource allocation strategy.
Be Wary Of Over Allocation
You might have this vast pool from where you draw all your resources, but that does not mean you have to place all of them in one project or person. Distribute them equally and in the amount necessary. Learn the art of making use of all that you have optimally and without overusing them. Saving up on resources will help you build a contingency resource reservoir from where you can draw if your principal plan fails.
Wield the Power of Technology
Technological mushrooming has made it so much easier to forecast your financial year or predict doldrums in sales. Use the power of technology to your benefit. There are tools and software available that can tell you the exact amount, quantity and time you need to allocate for a particular project. Therefore, it would do you good to be smart enough to seek refuge in the innovations of technology and use the same to predict your growth curve using the resources you have at hand.
There are hundreds and thousands of ways to use your resources effectively. The strategies you follow for a certain type of business might not sit well with a different kind of business. Your genius lies in understanding your situation and implementing ways that should work like a miracle for the growth of your business.
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How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand New
/in Marketing & Sales/by StrategyDrivenYet, even when you know you need to do this and you feel willing to step up, you won’t always know how to get started. And that’s only natural – because you’re brand new. So, you’re not expected to be a marketing master right now. But you can be soon. You just need to try out some different ideas, work with different tactics, and get creative too. And you really do need to let it be fun. So, take a look at some of these ideas and see what works for you.
Set Goals
To start with, you need to make sure that you have goals in place. We all need goals. And you need them for different parts of your business – but you definitely need them for marketing. So, ask yourself – what do you want to achieve with your business? What do you long to create? When you write this all down, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to come up with the most suitable campaigns.
Know Your Audience
But then also, you need to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because you have to remember that your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. Serving them, creating something for them. And if you’re going to be able to promote what you do and market to your audience effectively, you’ll need to know your audience well. So make sure that you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what they need.
From here, you then need to make sure that you’re doing research – and enough of it. You don’t have to spend weeks and weeks on this, however. The aim is to just get enough knowledge of the areas of marketing that you know nothing about. You don’t need to become an expert, as you’re going to learn a ton as you go along.
Consider Working With Professionals
Next up, you may want to think about working with different professionals to help you here. Maybe you don’t want to do it all alone, or you feel as if you could use the help of experts in your industry. Whether this is finding a specialist PR person, a team that knows franchise marketing, or a consultant in your field, take a look around. You may find that working with professionals is exactly what you need here.
Identify The Right Platforms
If you’re going it alone, or even if you’re working with a few professionals, the next thing that you need to do here is work out which platforms you’re going to be on. And this isn’t about the ones you want to be on. But rather those that you know your audience is on, and that you feel you can connect with them on. Because that’s the winning formula here. Remember, it’s about them.
Set Up Social
When you’ve made that decision, you need to set up your social profiles. And there’s a way that you can go about it. You could think about setting up the bare bones of the profiles on each platform, then creating your strategy. Or, you could look to master one platform first, find your feet with it and connect with your audience, and then move on to the next.
Aim For Engagement
But now you need to make sure that you’re using your social platforms properly. It’s not enough to just get set up or to start talking. You need to be doing more than that. You need to engage your customers on social media, and connect with them. You need to get in front of the right people and start to build relationships with them. It isn’t a numbers game. It’s a quality over quantity thing every single time.
Master Your SEO
If you’re not already concentrating on your own SEO, it’s time to do exactly that. Because it’s simple, especially with an SEO guide. Sometimes, something with a fancy title can scare you. But when you step back and learn the basics of SEO, you’ll realize that things are starting to come together. By just using the right words and aiming to get your best content out there on the web, you’ll start to appear in searches properly.
At some point, you’ll also want to try out something paid. And this can be fun. You may often find that there’s only so far you can get with your organic activity, and that at some point you’ll need to run ads. But whether you do this with paid search or paid social, it’s down to your own data.
Push Your PR
The next thing that you’ll want to be able to do here, is really push your PR. And no, you do not need a PR professional to support you here, you can absolutely do your own PR. You just need to be consistent with it, know what constitutes a good story, and start to put things out into the media. Stay on top of it, and watch buzz for your business start to grow.
Harness WOM
From here, you’re then going to want to make sure that you start to harness the power of conversation. Never underestimate the power of recommendations. If you do a good job and you know that your customers love you, they’ll be more than happy to recommend you. And there are plenty of strategies that you can go for here, but you just need to be authentic and truthful to yourself. And your customers will start to do the rest.
Work With Your Data
Above all else, you need to make sure that you’re always checking in with your data. If you know that you want to go with decisions that’ll pay off and allow you to connect more, you need to look at your own results and data, and go from there.
Be Creative
Finally, you’re then going to want to make sure that you’re being as creative as you can when it comes with your different ideas. Don’t just follow the crowd. It’s cool to come up with different campaigns and to go with new and exciting tactics to get your business out there. Try to let yourself be as creative as possible and come up with fun ideas because of it. You’ll see you get better results when you do.
To summarise, when you’re new to the world of business marketing can seem confusing. It’s also something that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable. However, it doesn’t have to. Because as you can see, there are a wealth of ideas that you can turn to in order for things to work out for you. Just handpick some of the different options and see what kind of success you can make because of it.
4 Ways Reduce Employee Turnover
/in Talent Management/by StrategyDrivenGive Competitive Wages and Benefits
Everyone has basic needs such as food and housing. Most employees try to earn extra benefits to increase their savings. An employee might leave your organization if you offer low wages. It is prudent to research the current wages which similar businesses offer to determine the right salary for your wages. For example, Colorado tech-firms offers similar benefits to their IT specialists. Offer competitive benefits to retain experienced staff.
Appreciate your Employees
Most organizations encourage and recognize hard-working employees. It motivates them to perform their roles diligently. For instance, you can congratulate a certain department once they complete a difficult project. However, it isn’t necessary to compliment them at all times. Instead, it is prudent to create a friendly environment to make your staff feel acknowledged and appreciated. You can make annual performance analysis to promote devoted staff.
Project a Career Path for Your Employees
Many workers apply for jobs in other companies when they stagnate in a certain position for long. They strive to increase their knowledge and expertise in a certain field. Show your staff a clear career path to instill a sense of purpose and direction in them. You can change an employee to a higher position or another department to hone their skills. Nevertheless, it is important to inform your employees before you switch their positions.
Set Flexible Work Schedules
Create flexible work schedules for your employees to allow them to adjust their location and work plan. Everyone needs a work-life balance to remain healthy and productive. Flexible schedules allow employees to spend adequate time with family and friends. However, some organizations have strict work schedules. They have fixed work hours which all workers must adhere to.
The current job market is highly competitive. Companies with high employee turnover experience numerous financial constraints. They spend a lot of time and money recruiting and training new staff. Organizations can offer flexible work plans and benefits to minimize employee turnover. Also, they can assign new roles to employees to help them advance their careers.
How to Keep Your Team Agile and Aligned Under Pressure
/in Management & Leadership/by Omar L. HarrisAs a leader, you are constantly trying to maximize the magical effort to effectiveness equation (a.k.a. efficiency). You can see this play out in your daily operations and ultimately in the P&L. However, there is an intangible asset that is very difficult to quantify — but without it you cannot ultimately succeed. This asset is, of course, alignment.
Alignment matters because it is an amalgamation of understanding, agreement, buy-in, engagement, empowerment, and accountability.
It amazes me how few leaders understand how to harness, measure, leverage, and ultimately achieve true alignment behind their strategies and objectives. Too many leaders assume that just because they have spoken, their teams are all on the same page with them — and everything will proceed from there. Achieving true alignment takes a significant allocation of effort. But there is a direct correlation between the extent of alignment and the results achieved.
Therefore, it is in your best interest as a leader to focus more on achieving, gauging, and calibrating alignment than almost any other executional activity. The good news is that achieving alignment is more science than art — meaning that there are tools that work nearly every time in getting people behind an idea, strategy, or mission. Below, allow me to present three of my favorites:
1. Define and Drive organizational culture. Culture is the glue that holds an organization together. It’s often the reason behind why people choose to stay with your company over jumping ship to a competitor. As a leader, it is your role to create, foster, and harness culture against organizational objectives. Conduct focus groups, one on one’s, and surveys to get a strong grip on the current state of your business culture. Then define a desired state for the values and behavior you expect to see on display daily, and embody them in everything you do.
Once you are well on your way towards your desired cultural state, you need to then define your business’s hedgehog concept. This is time very well spent because it takes your underlying culture and applies it to specific business problems. By deriving the intersection of three key questions: what are we wildly passionate about, what can we do better than anyone else, and what drives our economic engine, you set a direction for people that is easy to align with. Ask the three questions at all levels of the organization, calibrate the responses, and then package the inputs into an easily digestible reason for organizational being that relates to the majority of your enterprise. Then you can focus organizational attention on how you are doing, not on what you are doing — or even worse, why you are doing it.
2. Don’t just communicate, connect. When you give a presentation on your business strategy, key priorities, and other initiatives, how often do you check (either via polls, surveys, show of hands) what people understood from your communication, what they are taking away, and whether or not they agree? Many leaders are scared to ask these types of questions because they don’t like being second-guessed. Still, it’s better to be second-guessed than to be zero-followed! Taking the time to gauge the degree to which key messages are landing, as well as whether the audience is aligned, is probably the most important investment you can make as a leader.
Once you know where your participants are on a given issue, the next step is to connect the dots for them. Do the hard work of helping them see what you see and understand why you are making these choices. Allow them to question, build on, and enhance your ideas. And finally, move forward, together.
3. Keep it very simple. It is relatively easy to stick to one road, drive the speed limit, buckle up for safety, and arrive at your destination both on time and with all passengers on board. Once you start introducing shortcuts, detours, scenic routes, and bypasses into the mix, you are almost destined to lose some people along the way. No one (besides Forrest Gump maybe) meanders their way to success. You pick a destination based on the best available information (expected weather, road conditions, permitted speed), calculate the mileage, gas expense, and time to arrival, and then start driving in as straight a line as possible until you reach your desired location, or in this case desired mission, goal, or objective.
Leaders who jump from highway to highway, seemingly without rationale, are leaders who lose the power of an organization primed and focused on achieving results. You have to know when to forge ahead, when to change course, and when to abandon ship — but at each inflection point, the more important concept to remember is that you need to reengage the enterprise when change is afoot, and never assume that people know the key why’s and what’s and how’s behind the new direction.
About the Author
Why You Should Be Using WordPress for Your Website
/in Online Marketing and Website Development/by StrategyDrivenOne of the biggest questions people have is: Why should I use WordPress? If you wonder the same thing, you are in the right place. In today’s article, we share with you five important reasons you should be using WordPress for your website.
Let’s dive deeper into what makes this platform perfect for your business or hobby.
1. WordPress is Free
WordPress is a free and open-source platform. You don’t pay anything to download, install, configure or use it.
Still, you will need to pay for your web hosting and a domain name, but you need to do that anyway. It doesn’t matter what platform you use.
Before we go any further, it’s important to say something. Just because the platform is free isn’t reason enough to use it. It’s only one perk of many.
2. WordPress is Simple to Customize
Most people using WordPress aren’t programmers or web designers; they are just average people like you and me. What makes WordPress ideal for non-techie people is that there are thousands of free themes to choose from.
There’s a theme to fit any business site, online store or blog. These themes come entirely customizable, so you can change the colors, upload your logo and create sliders easily.
Plugins also create additional functionality, and many of them are free. These app-like platforms add features such as backups, analytics contact forms and more.
3. WordPress is SEO Friendly
While there are other platforms to use, nothing is as SEO-complaint as many of the WordPress themes, even if we’re talking about a single page WordPress theme. The platform itself is written with code that utilizes semantic markup. This allows Google to take notice.
4. WordPress is Manageable
You don’t have to worry too much about complex coding when using WordPress (though the option is available). You receive a built-in update management system that makes sure the software and plugins remain updated.
Anytime a new update is available, WordPress notifies you. Then, you click a button and install it.
While this isn’t hard to figure out, we do recommend going through the Green Geeks WordPress Tutorial to learn more about how the platform works. The tips you learn from a small amount of training go a long way to helping you produce a high-quality site.
5. WordPress is Secure & Safe
WordPress puts security first. It’s safe and secure for running any type of website. Let’s face it; the Internet isn’t a safe place. According to WebARX, there’s an attack on a website every 39 seconds.
Intruders seek to get their hands on all of the websites that they can. With a WordPress site, it’s easy to make things secure for additional peace of mind.
As far as the WordPress Core is concerned, an expert team of developers maintains the foundation. They continuously work to keep WordPress safe, which is why you want to perform any updates as they become available.
As far as your themes and plugins, WordPress isn’t responsible for the security of those, yet they still have teams working on it. The regularly check the themes and plugins to look for vulnerabilities. To further protect yourself, make sure you choose plugins and themes from reputable sources. If they offer regular updates, that’s a good sign that it is secure.
How to Use WordPress
Now that you know the WHY you’d want to use WordPress, it’s time to consider the HOW. WordPress is the perfect platform for a variety of websites. You can:
There are no limits to what your site can accomplish. The key is to begin. Every success has to start somewhere.
How to Allocate Resources Effectively In a Business Enterprise
/in Resource Management/by StrategyDrivenEffective allocation of resources is what forms the crux of a business organisation. There is no way a business can thrive without having the right skills to manage whatever resources it has at its disposal. The scale of operation does not matter; however, what matters is how well you allocate each resource to put them to its best use. Some of the biggest business enterprises have faced catastrophic downfalls owing to their inability to handle the immense bulk of resources. On the other hand, the ones starting from scratch, with nothing but scraps have made it big only with their sheer skill of resource management and colossal intelligence. At the end of the day, there is no point cutting sizable profit if you do not know how to churn the cream to make something more out of it.
What Is an Efficient Allocation Of Resources?
Efficient allocation of resources, by definition, is the process of analysing all the available resources at any given point of time, and devising effective strategies to make the most out of them, keeping in mind short-term as well as long-term goals, in a way that there is minimal wastage and an optimal usage of all the resources.
There are different types of resources, and the knowledge of each one of them is crucial for a business to blossom. These resources could be related to something as complicated as finances or something very human as the workforce. Also, when we talk about allocating resources, it is not just the duty of the management to chalk out efficacious plans that would cater to the topic at hand. The onus of resource building, management and allocation is upon every individual working within the firm.
What Are the Most Important Resources?
It is difficult to place resources of an organisation into watertight compartments of classification because anything and everything really can be seen as a resource as per the requirements of the company. However, the most important ones, which are more like umbrella terms are- finance, time and workforce. Every business needs trustworthy financial advisors and a team that handles every aspect of it. You need to have the perfect knowledge of where and how your cash flows in the organisation. You need to have all your queries related to your accounts resolved, like what exactly Accounts Receivable Financing is, or how to deal with taxes. Only then can you understand where to allocate the money and how to do that efficiently. The same holds true for time and workforce. Time is precious, and every minute is supremely important. Therefore, you need to divide the work hours in such a way that every minute is utilised to its best. Coming to the workforce, they can easily be termed as one of the biggest assets of your business. Machines can do your job, but human beings are irreplaceable.
Therefore, hire the right team and use every individual’s talents the way they were meant to be used. You cannot use a legal advisor to pose as a psychologist and counsel them for better productivity. Everyone has their jobs cut out for themselves, and it is an inane allocation of the workforce to use people of the wrong profile for a particular task.
How Do You Allocate Resources?
There has been enough talk about what resource allocation is and why it is crucial for the future of a business organisation. We shall now move on to understanding how one could go about identifying their scope and using the same to their favour.
Gauge Your Situation
Everything starts with a holistic understanding of one’s situation and acknowledging it, no matter how arid your resource pool might look. Analyse what your scope is, where your resources come from and flip through the ways you have been utilising these resources for years or months. Once you have clarity of your situation, it is easier to act upon it.
Come Up With a Contingency Plan
An elaborate and extensive planning process is necessary for your business to score well and chart monumental heights of success. You need to plan everything-from hiring the right people for your job to handling finances; everything has to be hassle-free. However, one thing that several of these organisations miss out on is a sound and sensible contingency plan. There has to be a plan B. This might not look like a resource allocation strategy, but think about it before passing a verdict. Having a contingency plan is an assurance that your business will not perish at the face of adversities. You might plan your allocation since day zero, but if one those plans fail, you need a cushion that will absorb the shockwave. Also, discussing contingency plans is a way to segue into the next effective resource allocation strategy.
Be Wary Of Over Allocation
You might have this vast pool from where you draw all your resources, but that does not mean you have to place all of them in one project or person. Distribute them equally and in the amount necessary. Learn the art of making use of all that you have optimally and without overusing them. Saving up on resources will help you build a contingency resource reservoir from where you can draw if your principal plan fails.
Wield the Power of Technology
Technological mushrooming has made it so much easier to forecast your financial year or predict doldrums in sales. Use the power of technology to your benefit. There are tools and software available that can tell you the exact amount, quantity and time you need to allocate for a particular project. Therefore, it would do you good to be smart enough to seek refuge in the innovations of technology and use the same to predict your growth curve using the resources you have at hand.
There are hundreds and thousands of ways to use your resources effectively. The strategies you follow for a certain type of business might not sit well with a different kind of business. Your genius lies in understanding your situation and implementing ways that should work like a miracle for the growth of your business.