StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article

Every Strategy Is Different

Just like no two fingerprints are the same, no two businesses will be identical. There may only be minor differences, but these can make a big difference when it comes to planning a marketing strategy. What is right for one company can be totally the wrong thing for another, but sometimes you just have to try various things and monitor them to see which is working best for you.

Using An Agency Or Do It Yourself?

You may think that using an agency is outside of your budget although, to be honest, they are usually very good at putting strategies together. Doing it yourself might not be too bad if you have some knowledge about the different areas of marketing and know something about programming your website to do exactly what you want. You may find the website at Javabeat.Net very useful in this respect, as it has a lot of information and tutorials to help you.

There will be some aspects you will find easier than others in any marketing campaign, social media being one of the simplest for you to handle.

Let Social Media Help You

Social media is a brilliant marketing tool and should be part of any strategy to help your business. It can be time-consuming, which is why some people employ others to manage it for them, but nothing else will give you such a large reach or as much interaction with your customers. There are analytical tools to help you monitor which of the social media platforms are working for you as well, and that can be extremely useful information to have.

Emails Could Be The Answer

Sending regular emails is something else that you could do yourself. You need to make sure they are engaging and interesting for anyone to read, which is why many companies use a newsletter format. There are programs such as MailChimp, which enables you to send the same email to thousands of people at the push of a button.

Both emails and social media are strategies that could help your business and that you could do yourself if you wanted.

An Effective Website

Just as Javabeat.Net can help you with many aspects of your website, there are tools on the market that will help you to initially set up a website yourself in about an hour. It is not as difficult as some people think, and although it might not look quite so professional until you have made enough money to pay an agency, it can be a good way to start.

Your website can be the first impression a potential customer has of your brand, so keep it simple in its looks and precise in its content if you want them to stay for more than a few seconds.

The problem that many new businesses have is cash flow, and until the sales start to happen that does not improve. The strategy you use to market your business will not be the same as anyone else’s but should make your brand stand out from all your competitors.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article

Implementing An Effective eCommerce Strategy: A Guide

You’ve done your research and decided that going branching out onto the worldwide web is the best decision for your business. But how do you actually go about implementing that? Building an online store and an eCommerce website requires a sophisticated content management system and a strategy that combines many separate elements. Not sure where to begin? Here is a guide to help you transition to the wonderful world of eCommerce.

Finding your online voice

Firstly, you will need to think about how you want to present your company online. What sort of tone do you want to have? Formal and serious or open and friendly? You will need to consider your product or service descriptions, as your online voice will play a big role in this. If you’re not sure how to go about this, looking at your competitors is a good place to start. How are they presenting themselves? How do they describe their products? Your descriptions will require keywords that online users search for in search engines, as well as being compelling enough to convince your customers to buy.

You’ll also need to take professional quality photos to accompany your inventory, as eCommerce relies heavily on visually appealing interfaces and imagery.

Setting yourself up

The second thing you will need to do is set up your website. This can be done independently, through platforms such as WordPress, or through a professional website designer. You need to ensure that your website is easy to navigate, has a clean and sharp design, and holds all the information your customers might need.

For much large organizations, especially those running ERP, eCommerce will be part of a wider strategy. This is usually outsourced to companies who can implement comprehensive product suites, such as Omnia, which ensure you offer up real time data under the secure umbrella of the ERP infrastructure.

Create a marketing plan

Doing business online comes with many benefits, including the vast array of marketing techniques and tactics for you to utilize, many of which are either free of charge or inexpensive to use.

Take social media for example. Especially due to changing algorithms on media platforms, you should strongly consider paid promotion due to the accurate targeting options on offer. However, you can do a lot for your business by simply engaging with customers on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Regular posting shows consumers you are active and involved with your customer community, and can be a good way of showing your strengths and previous customer loyalty. Many people go straight to social media when checking out a business, as it is the perfect insight into who you are. It will certainly give your brand a stronger, more personable identity.

Focus on customers

In the face of fierce online competition, remember that your strongest strategy weapon is prioritizing your customers. Social media users respond well to brands that build and nurture meaningful relationships, while Google is constantly updating its algorithm to favor those who give greater precedence to the customer experience.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article

Forex Strategies That Still Work in 2018

Trading isn’t an easy game to break into. Like any form of investing, it is not without risk. Most people know this going in, yet they still end up falling into the usual traps. With so much, often contradictory, advice being thrown around new investors, it’s no surprise that there is so much confusion over what the best trading strategies are.

One way that you can improve your chances of success in trading is to find a winning strategy and stick with it. As long as the strategy you settle on is one that is well-reasoned, and has produced proven results, you can be reasonably confident that it is a winning strategy that you can rely on. Having a pre-defined strategy on cfdadvanced is helpful as it encourages you to act with discipline.

Which is the Best Strategy?

The nature of Forex trading means that there is no single best strategy to use. The best Forex strategy to use will depend on you as an individual, your current circumstances, and your short and long-term financial goals. It is important to remember that just because a strategy works for someone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be a good strategy for you.

It is important that throughout the process of establishing your preferred strategy you remain mindful of the above. You may well come across success stories from other traders who have managed to make millions using a particular trading strategy. These stories might not be true, but even if they are, the fact that a strategy has made someone else rich doesn’t mean it will make you rich.

What Are the Options

With the above advice in mind, the following are the most common trading styles. At least one of these strategies will work for most people. Just remember that there are no guarantees!

Scalping – Scalping involves making very short-lived trades, trades that resolve after just a few minutes. The idea behind scalping is for the trader to beat the spread of a bet or trade, skimming (or scalping) just a few points of profit before closing. MetaTrader is a popular piece of software for making this kind of trade.

Day trading – As the name suggests, day trades are resolved before the end of the day, when the markets close. Day traders tend to like the fact that their trades aren’t going to be affected by any large shifts during the night. That means no nasty surprises in the morning!

Swing trading – Swing traders seek to resolve their trades within a week, hoping to make a profit on short-term moves in the market by implementing swing trading strategies to get returns.

Positional trading – This is a long-term form of trading. As the name implies, positional traders are positioning themselves according to where they think it will be advantageous to be in the future.

Choosing Your Style

When it comes to settling on a style, you should do as much research as you can beforehand on what the various options are and how they work. My Forex Chart is an excellent resource for Forex traders, with a variety of articles, news, and other information.  You might also consider taking a Forex course.

Having a trading strategy is a good idea. It will help you to trade in a more controlled and disciplined manner and will lead to more consistent results.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article

Reasons to Have a Newsletter

Although social media marketing is having its moment in the spotlight right now, email marketing is still very much a relevant and a powerful tool for your business to utilise. One way you can really take advantage of email marketing is via a newsletter, something which appears to be a dying trend.

When you consider just how many of us use email and have access to it around-the-clock through our smartphones, you start to see the raw potential of properly using email marketing to reach your customers and subscribers. Although you may be sitting on the fence, unsure whether or not to create a newsletter, we recommend that you just go ahead and do it – you have nothing to lose and it is really something that can pay off.

If you are unsure how to create a newsletter, there are plenty of guides available online which can help you from beginning to end, regardless of your skill level or experience. Creating a newsletter is very simple and you can have one ready to go in virtually no time. If you are still unsure, read on to learn just how beneficial a newsletter can be for your business or brand.

#1: Newsletters Drive Conversions & Sales

It’s very easy to understand just how email marketing and newsletters are effective when it comes to driving up sales. When a subscriber opens one of your emails, you have a golden opportunity to make the sale right there and then — you already have the recipient’s attention and you need to take advantage of this moment to describe the product or service, explain its benefits, and entice them to make a purchase.

As we all know too well, human beings are impulsive creatures and by including incentives such as a coupon, promotion or special offer in a newsletter, you can easily convince somebody to make a purchase. If statistics are anything to go by – where 7 in 10 adults make use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email or where over 40% of email recipients make at least one purchase per year based on an email – there is no doubt that newsletters can have a dramatic impact on your sales.

#2: Newsletters Create Connections

Although you may not believe so, consumers actually want to receive promotional emails from their favourite brands; many consumers go out of their way to sign up for promotional emails. By creating a newsletter which is interesting and engaging, you enable your subscribers to connect with your brand or business on a personal level.

Email marketing and newsletters are about more than just making sales, they are about providing value and utility beyond sales and profits by sending customers interesting, well-thought-out email newsletters with which they can resonate. By building bridges and connections with your customers, you establish brand loyalty, something which, in the long-term, can spur growth.

At the end of the day, your customers buy from you because they are loyal to your brand and can trust you, a trust which is established through building connections with customers.

#3: Newsletters Boost Website Traffic & Social Media Followings

In your email newsletter, you can add social sharing buttons for sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. As you are likely aware, these social media channels are vital to your overall marketing strategy yet growing them can be something of a challenge. Email newsletters are very effective at helping you build up your social media following. For the most part, merely having these social buttons there can be enticing enough to encourage people to follow your social media pages, however, drawing your newsletter to a close with a discussion involving your social media channels can be another way to entice your subscribers to like and follow your pages.

Not only this, but your email newsletter can play a major role in boosting overall traffic to your website or online store. If you want people to come and visit your website, peruse through your catalogue and, ultimately, make a purchase, you need to invite and encourage people to do just that. There are multiple ways you can go about this, including promotional incentives, calls to action and targeted emails.

Although email newsletters have become something of a dying trend with the onset of social media marketing, it is important to recognise the important role they still play for online businesses, especially small-to-medium sized ones which do not yet have much of a substantive following.

Newsletters are a simple way to engage the customers and subscribers you currently have and encourage them to share your business or brand and, ultimately, come back for more. It’s very easy to create an emotive and engaging newsletter which encourages a response from its recipient, and every business should be sending email newsletters often.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article

Predictive Analytics Tools Can Create a Better Workforce

Understanding What Predictive Analytics Is

Predictive analytics (PA) is well known in many business arenas but has never entered Human Resources until recently. PA is a form of technology that learns from other existing data. This process results in predictive results. It is most frequently used to predict very specific individual behaviors in Human Resources.

Predictive analytics examines data or content to answer the question “What is likely to happen?’’ This is important in any business area but is critical to Human Resources who previously depended on intuition to determine future needs of both the company and employees.

With the support of predictive analytics, it’s no longer necessary to make decisions because of intuitive feelings, or ‘’gut’’ reactions to some issue or plan. Data is gathered, analyzed and presented quickly, without stumbling or bumbling on the data or statistics. Intuition or ‘’gut’’ feelings are often unsuccessful, while data mining information that predicts uncertain outcomes is much more reliable and trustworthy.

How Predictive Analytics Affects Recruiting

Applying predictive analytics in Recruiting and Staffing helps companies foresee and enhance several areas, including:

  • Potential top talent is easier to identify with predictive analytics. This makes a recruiter’s job much easier and accurate. Predictive analytics can easily identify the candidates with the most potential, better understand when these talents can be contacted and understand if and why a job opening may be attractive to candidates.
  • Predictive analytics helps companies optimize the responses to their job openings. The analysis can help companies understand how duration, location, occupation and industry will likely affect recruiting results.

Why Companies Utilize Predictive Analytics in HR

73% of companies surveyed said the primary reason they used analytical data was to make the workforce planning process more efficient. 69% believe the main reason to utilize predictive analytics is to more accurately plan for the future and also, create plans to eliminate skills gaps in their organizations. 65% of companies credit predictive analytics as identifying high potential employees.

Other companies indicated that predictive analytics provided better analysis of company needs to align people and company strategy; while others indicated that analysis provided the needed links between performance and compensation; the remaining companies surveyed stated that predictive analytics provided more in-depth knowledge of external talent pools.

Predictive Analytics Helps HR Look Forward

HR has historically been responsible for forecasting the right amount of talent and knowing when to hire additional talent. Unfortunately, before predictive analytics was utilized in HR, the forecasting was more backward-looking than forward. For example, one or more employees terminate, and HR suddenly decides there is talent disproportion.

Unfortunately, few companies have implemented predictive analytics for their HR groups. According to Deloitte, in 2015, only about 8% of global organizations have adopted PA for their Human Resources groups.

The few companies that utilize predictive analytics have had great success and freely share their efforts and results. For example:

  • Google: This company is a strong advocate of statistics and freely admits that it is the most critical tool in their Human Resources group. All interview questions in their hiring process are computerized and perfected to ensure that the best candidates are hired. Additionally, Google’s predictive analysis can estimate the likelihood of future terminations, why they are terminating, and what could have been done to circumvent the termination.
  • Hewlett Packard (HP): HP is also a leader in the HR predictive analytics arena. Recently, HP shared with news media that ‘’when their attrition rates started moving upwards, they utilized predictive analytics to predict which employees were likely to leave by developing a ‘Flight Risk’ score.” This analysis was able to define both the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of their 300,000+ employees who would potentially terminate. For example, higher pay, promotions and better performance ratings were negatively related to flight risk, but the analysis proved that there were strong relationships between these findings. For instance, they were able to analyze that a promotion without a substantial pay increase would likely result in a termination.

“HP’s Flight Risk scores helped managers make better decisions since the early warning signal from Flight Risk allowed time for managers to intervene or if the loss was unavoidable, it prepped the manager to react accordingly. The predictive analysis in Flight Risk allowed HP to save an estimated $300 million.”

The extensive time previously spent on creating charts, reports, quotients, etc., will soon be history because predictive analytics easily allows organizations to analyze the past and predict upcoming trends for both positive and negative analytics.

The end result of having predictive analytics in Human Resources is the ability to predict future needs that are accurate and verifiable. This becomes the organization value to business that Human Resources has long struggled to create. HR has for years attempted to get the infamous ‘’seat at the table’’ and predictive analytics will ensure this happens.