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Improving Quality Assurance During The Software Development Process

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Quality assurance (QA) is a crucial part of the software development process. Regular testing ensures that applications are not filled with bugs and they operate as they should. Unfortunately, a lot of companies have trouble with their QA process because they think that throwing money or more people at the problem guarantees results. However, that’s not the way that it works and if you want to improve QA, you need to adapt your strategy and change the way that you approach it. Here’s how you can improve quality assurance in the software development process.

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article | Improving Quality Assurance During The Software Development Process

Improve Project Management

One of the biggest ways to improve QA is through project management. If you want to make sure that QA is working, you need to make sure that it’s an integrated part of the development process and not something separate from everything else. So many companies make the mistake of thinking of QA as an afterthought and that’s when the process suffers. Everyone has to have clear roles and responsibilities in testing as well as communicating with each other about what’s going on. It’s important that you have a good project management team to help integrate QA and ensure that it is a priority throughout the development process.

Implement Automation Tools

Another way that you can improve QA is through automation. With automation, it’s going to be a lot easier for people to do their jobs and test applications because they have tools at their disposal that make testing much more efficient. Using automation tools (like this one at testRigor.com) allows you to automate a lot of the time-consuming aspects of QA instead of testing everything manually. You can create detailed reports so you know exactly where the issues are and they can be resolved quickly and easily. Many people make the mistake of expanding their QA team instead of improving efficiency with automation tools. The problem is, more people complicate the process and increase the chances of mistakes. Automation tools solve this problem and save you a lot of time and money, while also ensuring that your QA processes are working as they should.

Test Throughout The Development Process

Another way that you can improve QA is by testing throughout the entire development process. Instead of waiting until everything is more or less completed and then testing, you should be constantly testing as things are added to applications. This ensures that new components and features don’t throw off the balance of what’s already been created and that there aren’t any crucial components that are overlooked. The more you test, the easier it is to fix issues when they arise and improve production quality. It’s always more effective to deal with small issues as and when they come up instead of trying to iron out complex problems at the very end of the development process.

Quality assurance is so important during the software development process and if you don’t get it right, the user experience of your applications will suffer. By making these simple changes, you can drastically improve QA in your business.

Top Business Tips for Hiring the Right Salesperson

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Top Business Tips for Hiring the Right SalespersonHiring the right people is one way to encourage long-term business success and also reduce employee turnover, saving your business time and money. Hiring the right people can seem like a highly daunting prospect for many businesses, especially for entrepreneurs looking to build a solid team for their new brand.

Ensuring you hire the right person for the job is critical, no matter whether it’s a marketing assistant, a receptionist, a customer service contact, or an accountant. One area where it’s particularly crucial nonetheless is with a salesperson. This person — or team of people — is going to be responsible for chasing leads, driving sales, and ultimately succeeding in making a profit.

With this in mind, here are some top tips to get it right.

Set Your Wants, Needs, and Expectations

With sales comes a lot of potential, which means a high number of applicants and the need to wade through a great number of applications. While interest in the position is, of course, a good thing, you need to make sure you’re not wasting valuable business hours looking through candidate resumes that simply aren’t a good fit.

Setting strict requirements of what you’re looking for before advertising and interviewing will help you to stay focused and only receive applications from those people who fit the bill. Not only will this help you to preserve business time, but it’ll also prevent you from wasting the time of candidates too.

Experience May Not Be Everything

Of course, the ideal candidate might be someone who understands the sales cycle in detail, has a lifetime of successful sales experience, and is an exceptional people person. However, if you’re setting too much store by experience, you may be missing out on a compassionate people-person who has a great rapport with customers and the potential to shine with the proper training.

All of this will depend on the time and resources you have for training up candidates with less experience, but if you do have the resources, you may want to be flexible about experience and think about people eager to develop their sales career who have great personalities (compared to someone with 30+ years sales experience whose personality may not fit your brand).

Look for People Who Understand Your Brand and Fit Your Ethos

While the ability to make sales and work hard is naturally key, you want your salesperson to be the perfect fit for your brand — both for the success of your company and to ensure that they can have a job they’re passionate about too. Sales work more easily when the brand representative truly believes in and aligns with what the company and product is all about. You could have a highly experienced and likable salesperson who simply doesn’t understand your brand’s mission, and this could be a problem over time.

If you want your potential clients to get excited about your product and invest in you, then the salesperson needs to be someone who genuinely feels that way, too.

How To Maximize LinkedIn Ads

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |LinkedIn Ads|How To Maximize LinkedIn AdsLinkedIn is the most organic social network for B2B businesses. Therefore, business owners readily use LinkedIn ads to target decision-makers and make sales. Although social media ads are promising, not everyone gets their desired results. Usually, this results from a missing mark on critical factors, including audience, visuals, and messaging. This is why businesses work with B2B LinkedIn agency for expert help in getting better results.

This article discusses five ways you can maximize your LinkedIn ads strategies, especially if you are doing a DIY LinkedIn Ads setup and management.

5 Hacks For Maximizing Your LinkedIn Ads

1. Defining Your Target Audience

LinkedIn ads with proper targeting deliver effective results just like other paid advertising. A question that pops to mind is, how can you target the right audience? Identifying your target audience can significantly improve your marketing strategy.

When setting your LinkedIn ads targeting, consider professional interests, job titles, industry focus, education, and location. Afterward, you can use filters like industry, seniority, and job title to narrow your audience.

Defining your Target Audience helps provide solutions to decision-makers that most likely will take action through your ads. After narrowing your audience, the next step is to identify the LinkedIn groups they most likely spend their time on. Afterward, include such groups in your search parameters.

2. Selecting the Right Visuals

The human brain processes images about 60,000 times faster than text. Visuals, including photos and videos, are essential in LinkedIn ads. Fortunately, there are various text and visuals features that can enable businesses to craft the perfect ad. In addition, LinkedIn does not limit the text performance compared to other social media platforms

Studies show that LinkedIn ads containing larger, bold text have higher conversions. When creating your ad, you can add colorful, bold background to your graphic and a call to action of about four to five words. In addition, you can capture your audience’s attention by adding catchy photos and short videos to your ads. The most important thing to note is that using eye-catching content in your ad is more important than the visual because only eye-catching content can make users stop scrolling.

3. Crafting A Proper Message

Selling your product via LinkedIn ads may not produce the desired results. Your focus should be on solving a specific problem. Most businesses use blogs and eBooks to educate audiences while drawing their attention back to a website. This type of content helps with starting conversations on LinkedIn and collecting prospects email addresses for further discussion in a private environment

Furthermore, it is best to ensure that your visuals and messages work hand in hand. In this case, creating an objective regarding texts and visuals helps. Afterward, you can craft your ad. A defined purpose ensures that your ad copy and visuals are delivering the same message.

Keep in mind that you can’t create the perfect LinkedIn ad overnight. Although you have to understand your audience to create an engaging ad, it is more important to ensure that such ads fit your overall marketing strategy goals. Also, regardless of the channels you are using, all your content should pass the same message.

4. Nurturing Leads with Follow-up Email Automation

Sometimes clocks on a LinkedIn ad do not convert immediately. Therefore, you should aim at nurturing leads via email once a lead opts in. You can schedule the first emails to be sent an hour or a day after resource delivery.

Automating a natural sales process rather than hard-selling should be a primary focus. It is best to open up communication channels just as you would in a sales conversion. In this regard, it is best to ask your prospects questions regarding their businesses. Pertinent questions include the type of businesses they work with, the number of stores they manage, and the number of salespeople in their showroom.

Your leads are the prospects that respond to your messages. After creating your content, setting up your landing page funnel, and email automation, you are ready to target your audience.

5. Monitoring And Analyzing Ad Performance

The metrics you monitor are primarily dependent on your campaign goals. Monitoring clicks, impressions, average engagement, and click-through rates are necessary if your campaign goal is to gather views and interest. However, monitoring conversion rates and their corresponding costs are essential for campaign goals that involve driving leads.

You can monitor other factors to increase ads performance, including checking if the CPA is within target, identifying top-performing campaigns, and checking if you are targeting users in the right industry.

We can help!

If your marketing strategies are not giving you the best results, it is time to contact a LinkedIn ads agency. Professionals can utilize their experience in efficiently maximizing LinkedIn ads. At Getuplead, we are experts at creating awareness and increasing traffic and leads.
Reach out today!

6 Handy Tips To Create The Best Website For Your Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website for Business|6 Handy Tips To Create The Best Website For Your BusinessA robust website is vital for the success of any small business of any industry, whether you run an ecommerce business, freelancing, or a traditional brick-to-mortar company. It takes substantial effort to develop a unique and engaging business website that will help your business reach a wider audience, increase revenue, and experience growth. But, where do you start from? Here are some effective tips to help your small business website give you all the benefits of a business website.

1. Create an outstanding display for your business description

When your potential customers visit your business website, it’s critical to let them know who you are and what you do immediately to spark up and retain their interest. Make sure your main homepage banner (sometimes called a “hero picture”) and succeeding banners visually represent your services. You should also include an introduction text snippet that conveys who you are and what you do. Ensure that your “About Us” page is easy to read and in both your main and footer navigation menus so that visitors may click them and learn more about your company.

2. Use a content management system

A content management system (CMS) is software that lets you produce and manage digital material- allowing you to edit, publish, and create content. You won’t need any technical skills to use a solid CMS to help you maintain your website. You will want to use a CMS that is tailored to your particular requirements. You can use several systems to meet different purposes, including user-friendliness, extensibility, and cost. A widely used CMS is WordPress.

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. It offers a large active support community and numerous useful plugins (read more about the Best WordPress security plugins) for extending the functionality and security of your website. A WordPress developer can create a plugin for you if you don’t find one that suits your website needs. Additionally, WordPress is also free and straightforward to set up. The popularity of this software makes it a pleasure to work with developers as many are experienced in using it.

However, in using CMS, you should pay attention to issues of security. Seasoned cybercriminals know the flaws in these softwares and can easily use that as a point to attack your website. Therefore, it is vital to conduct ample research and read through reviews before using a CMS. You should implement security measures and update them regularly.

3. Use a secure and dependable website hosting

A website hosting provider is a business or venture that provides the technical assistance and services needed to help companies create websites and allow their targeted audience to access these websites. When users put in your website address, they are sent to the website you have stored on your server since you have linked your name to your hosting account. Depending on the technology and support you choose, hosting services might cost anywhere from $2 to $100+ each month. You can purchase a “shared server” hosting package for as little as $2 per month, but this is usually not what you want. This option involves sharing a server and its resources with other users, which can slow down the speed of your website. If one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, yours is likely to be as well. In the case where you have an issue, be sure to contact your hosting service provider immediately. The longer the problem persists, the more adverse effects it would have on your website and business.

It would be best if you also examined the server’s security. You’ll need Secure File Transfer Protocol access to connect to your server (SFTP). Backups of your server’s contents should be taken daily. Installing SSL certificates should be straightforward, using a few clicks to process. Make sure the hosting business maintains security regularly. Ideally, your hosting business should have a public security process that you can view to determine how they maintain the security of their servers.

4. Pick a good ecommerce platform if you want to sell products

You’ll need the right technologies if you wish to sell products or services through your website. If you aren’t already doing so, you should think about it because e-commerce can help you grow your business revenues. You’ll need to choose the correct platform if you want your clients to conduct financial transactions with you online.

5. Create quality content

Search engines value both the amount and reliability of the information, so make a plan to publish high-quality articles or blog posts on your site and on external sites that connect to your site. If you want to rank well in search engine results and entice people to return to your site, you must update it as often as possible with new and relevant content. Testimonials, in addition to static page content and articles, are a great sort of content to provide on your website.

6. Optimize your business website for search engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques you use on your website to guarantee that search engines correctly index and rank it and then display it to users. When a search engine “crawls” your website, it competes with other websites with similar material. The higher your site’s design and content rank on search engine result pages, the better. The following are the main components of SEO: Research and implementation of keywords, having an SSL certificate installed, and being secure; SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a standard security protocol that protects the privacy of data transmitted between web servers and browsers.

A mobile-friendly website, the existence of high-quality backlinks (links to your site from other websites with similar content), and a large number of positive online reviews are essential. To keep visitors clicking and reading, add internal connections across your site and link the business’s social media accounts to the website.

With these simple tips, you should create an excellent website and significant growth in your business.

The ultimate guide to starting a science-based business using lab lasers

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Science-based business|The ultimate guide to starting a science-based business using lab lasersIf you have a passion for science, expertise in a specific scientific area or you have a burning curiosity for solving a particular scientific problem, then you may want to start a science-based business.

There is no shortage of options for creating a science-based company. Whether you want to create products intended for use by scientists or use your scientific knowledge to benefit wider society, there are an infinite number of different commercial avenues you can take.

Of course, if you want to make a commercial enterprise out of science then you are going to need the right equipment – which is where lab lasers come in.

Lab lasers are, as the name suggests, lasers that you can use in the lab. They can be used for a variety of mind-blowing purposes, from fusion to levitation, as well as a number of more conventional tasks if need be, such as welding or cutting.

This is the ultimate guide to starting a science-oriented business using lab lasers:

Science-based businesses require a lot of equipment

Naturally, if you want to combine the worlds of science and business, then you are going to require a lot of specialist equipment.

This will likely include a lab where you can base your scientific processes, a variety of specialized scientific equipment, and even a production line if you are mass-producing products.

Of course, a tool that can help you in both the laboratory and the production line is a laser, because they are able to perform a range of highly useful functions.

These functions may include concentrated scientific processes, such as manipulating individual atoms (called optical tweezers), or optical levitation.

Alternatively, you may want to incorporate lasers into your production processes, using them to perform tasks like welding, soldering, cutting and engraving, among others.

Of course, if you are going to incorporate lasers, then you need a laser module, which is responsible for turning electrical energy into concentrated light.

Always start with the ‘why’

As with any business venture, you need to have a clear reason why you are doing it.

This ‘why’ doesn’t need to be complicated or overly dramatic – in fact emotional decision-making is never advisable – but it should speak of a rational ethos behind your company.

Perhaps you want to help solve a desperate need that your customers have, which hasn’t been solved before, or you want to further the fight against a scientific emergency, such as climate change.

The simpler the reason the better, because the last problem you need is a confused or conflicting brand identity.

Having a clear ‘why’ also helps attract customers and talented recruits towards your company. If they align with your ethos then they can quickly become passionate supporters of your business, eager to contribute, whether by buying products or working for you.

Aim to solve one problem

Leading on from the question of finding your ‘why’, it is crucial that you refrain from trying to be a jack of all trades. No businesses thrive on trying to please everyone, but science-oriented companies are particularly well-suited to concentrating on a single problem.

This is because your aim should be to solve one problem, or provide a single solution. If it is a difficult scientific challenge, then it will require all of your concentration and resources.