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Both Sides Now: Finding Like-Minded Business Partners

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Partners|Both Sides Now: Finding Like-Minded Business PartnersEvery company is looking for a way to grow its business. And this boils down to one simple thing, relationships. While often overlooked, finding business partners can yield significant advantages. It gives you the opportunity to increase your customer base, and market your company with minimal risk. But the hard part is finding like-minded business partners. How do you identify the right ones?

The Importance of Common Ground

If you want to create a mutually beneficial partnership, common ground is the best place to begin. Have a look at their values and if they align with yours, but also look at their ideal customers. You should also remember the importance of their journey. When you are trying to work with a company that provides something for you, it’s not just about the service, but understanding their journey can give you significant insight into their process. You can see that entrepreneurs like Haval Dosky, founder of Repeat Consultants, provide support but also understands it from the inside. Common ground, but also perspective, will help to cement the bonds.

Analyze Your Current Relationships

If you have a relationship with a potential business partner, you have to consider how the relationship benefits both of you. You have to remember the importance of forging relationships; it’s a lot of energy and time. Sometimes the best relationships are under your nose. And if you are in the process of taking action, it’s not just about what they can do for you, but it is about what you can do for them.

Find an Alternative Product or Service

When you are partnering up with a business, finding a company that has similar needs to your own is crucial, but it’s about making sure that you provide the yin to the yang. If you are looking for a company that compliments you, it focuses on the mutually beneficial aspects more than it being one-sided. For example, when you are a company that provides health products, finding a company that is compatible with you that ties in with your products are a fantastic way to help both sides.

Partnering With an Established Business

Thoughts may go to partnering with a startup, but it might also be in your interests to work with an established company. By identifying businesses with a strong social media presence or a large email list of clients will give you more suede. But it’s important to remember that you will be competing with other businesses. No doubt, they are receiving proposals on a regular basis. This is why you’ve got to envelop a good working relationship and focus on your networking capabilities. You can do it through a third-party, such as an outside business development firm, but this won’t have the personal touch.

Of all the essentials needed when it comes to developing a business, finding the right working relationships will provide you with the foundation for use to come. Partnering up with another business requires a lot of faith, functionality, and fantastic abilities. And finding a like-minded business partner is not easy, it requires a lot of leg work. But always remember that it’s about both sides now.

6 Winning Traits of Successful eCommerce Businesses

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |eCommerce Business|6 Winning Traits of Successful eCommerce BusinesseseCommerce is one of the fastest-growing industries expected to occupy 22% of retail sales worldwide by the end of 2023. Though there is a lot of potential in the eCommerce industry, there is a lot of competition as well.

Many eCommerce companies manage to emerge as winners, while some show stagnated growth. In this article, you’ll learn about some of the common winning traits observed in top eCommerce businesses and how you can apply them to your own business.

1. Trustworthy Website

In the eCommerce space, building trust with your consumers is very important. Only when the users trust you will they be willing to have financial transactions with your business. So, having a trustworthy website is a common trait observed in most successful eCommerce websites.

Here’s how you can build trust with your consumers through your website:

  • Add abundant social proof in your website homepage, about page, and even product pages. You can add customers’ success stories, testimonials, trust badges, social media numbers, or anything else that will make you look like a trustworthy business.
  • Be transparent with your policies and ensure that the user is clear about your return and exchange policies. Disclose all hidden costs upfront and make your payment process as hassle-free as possible.
  • Display product reviews and ratings for all your products to be more transparent and real.

2. Premium Customer Service

Good customer service is key to running a successful eCommerce business. Top eCommerce businesses focus on providing premium customer service to ensure customer loyalty and increase repeat purchases.

You should try to be proactive with your customer service rather than being reactive. You can do this by adding self-serve solutions such as AI chatbots to your website. This will help clear most of the queries and complaints that your customers might have.

You should also try to use social media platforms for customer service. Create separate handles for customer service and ensure that you offer quick resolutions to your customers.

You can also set up Google alerts for your brand name so that you can monitor any mentions or reviews of your brand. Be it positive or negative feedback, ensure that you are quick and respectful with your responses.

3. Easy Returns, Easy Exchanges, and Quick Deliveries

Consumers today expect easy returns and exchanges from all eCommerce businesses. Statistics show that 92% of consumers will make repeat purchases if the returns are easy. Also, 67% of shoppers check your returns policy before making a purchase. So, having easy returns and exchanges is crucial if you want to improve your conversions.

Try to offer quick returns and exchanges for all the products for which it is possible. Ensure that you offer quick refunds for returns. You should also try to add exchange and return terms in each of your product pages, as this is one of the first things that the users will look for before making the final purchase decision.

Offering quick deliveries can also help you get ahead of competitors and offer a good customer experience. You can do this by ensuring that your eCommerce fulfillment provider has the capacity to offer quick delivery options such as same-day or next-day delivery.

4. High-Quality Product Images and Accurate Descriptions

No matter how good your products are, it is difficult to make good sales without high-quality images and descriptions.

Adding high-resolution images of your products from different angles will help your users get the look and feel of your products. This is one of the most prominent pain points of online shopping, and if you help your customers overcome this, then you’ll definitely see better conversion rates. You can also add product videos to get even better conversions.

It is also crucial that you add accurate product descriptions that state the color, dimensions, material, safety precautions, or any other important information about the products.

This step will make sure that your products look more trustworthy and appealing to your customers. Any objections that they might have that is stopping them from purchasing the products will likely vanish, which will again boost your sales.

5. Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Studies show that 90% of consumers expect to have omnichannel interactions with brands. Simply focusing on one channel is not the best way if you want to expand your brand’s reach and improve visibility.

So, perform thorough audience research and figure out the channels that your customers most use. These can be emails, social media platforms, online forums, marketplaces, or even mobile apps.

You can then devise a strategy that helps you promote your products across most of these channels. You can use these channels to create brand awareness or even for nurturing your existing customers.

Having an omnichannel strategy helps top eCommerce businesses to improve their metrics such as customer lifetime value, conversion rate, customer retention rate, and product sales. You, too, can improve these metrics by having an omnichannel presence.

6. Value-Packed Content

Offering valuable content is one of the best ways to bring your target audience into your sales funnel. When you add immense value to your customers by offering high-quality, relevant content, you earn their trust and become an authority in your niche.

When users start perceiving you as a trustworthy and credible brand in the niche, they will automatically drive towards making more and more purchases from you. So, ensure that you work on your content marketing strategy that exactly fits your audiences’ needs.

You can create content across various platforms such as website blogs, email newsletters, social media platforms, YouTube, etc. This, again, comes to audience research. Analyze and understand the platforms that work best for your ideal buyer persona and offer value-packed content on these channels.

Final Thoughts

Though any eCommerce business’s success largely depends on their products, other factors like their marketing strategy, customer service, and user experience also have a massive role to play in it.

Using the tips in this article, you can start working on the top common traits observed in successful eCommerce businesses, and you’ll soon watch yourself moving in the same direction.

3 Startup Essentials That Cannot Be Overlooked

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Startup Essentials|3 Startup Essentials That Cannot Be OverlookedIf you’re just starting your business journey and you have a company about to be launched, you might be wondering whether or not you’ve got everything in place. After all, you only have one chance to make a good first impression (or a bad one, come to that), and it can feel rather overwhelming when you consider how much you want your business to succeed and how much work you need to put into it.

For many who have never run a business before, it might seem as though there are dozens of different elements that need to come together to make it a success, but in reality, when you’re a startup, there are only three that you really need to be thinking about. Ensure these three startup essentials are in place, and you’ll be heading in the right direction.

Funding

A startup without the right funding is doomed to failure. Even if you start to make money, without having some form of capital behind you, the income will be too slow to make an impact, and before you can really make anything of your business, it will be too late – you will have run out of money. This is why it’s important to have funding in place before you launch. You can then focus on building the business rather than having to worry about keeping it afloat.

When you think of getting money for your business you will probably consider a bank loan first of all. It might even be the only thing you consider. However, there are a large number of different funding methods to think about including finding an angel investor, using your savings, borrowing from friends and family, or even using the money you’ve made through your algorithmic trading. Whatever you choose, as long as you have a plan to pay it back, you can get started even if the bank turns you down.

Customer Service

Most entrepreneurs are looking inwards when they launch their business. They’re interested in their suppliers, their employees, how productive they can be, and, of course, how much money they are making. Although this is important, you must remember that you’ll need to look outwards too; you’ll need to think about your customers.

Customer service is one of the most important elements to get right in any business, and when you’re launching a startup good customer service is vital. It’s what is going to set you apart from the rest, and it’s what will get you noticed. Customers expect a high level of good service, and if you can provide it they will be happy to return again and again. Get it wrong, and you’ll find that your unhappy customer has told everyone they know, and probably used social media to do it. That spells disaster for a young business. Reputation is everything.

Social Media

Speaking of social media, that is another important element of business that a startup is going to need to have in place before they launch. In fact, your social media channels could even help your launch by previewing what you’re going to be selling and making potential customers interested before you even get started.

However, just having an account on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, for example, isn’t going to be enough. Posting once in a while and writing ads when you do isn’t going to be enough. You need to focus on the content and ensure that whatever you are posting is useful information and engaging too. In this way, it is more likely to be liked and shared, and that’s crucial for a business on social media.

Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

Do you know that over 500 million videos are watched every day on YouTube?

Currently, one of the most effective tools to push your brand, generate a skyrocketing ROI, and increase sales is video.

Clearly, you could be missing out on a huge number of customers if you are not using video in your business.  Without high-quality videos, your sales, brand, and leads will keep frustrating you. This is why every business, regardless of size, needs to have video content.

Keep reading to find out why you should use video in your business.

Videos rank well in search engines

Videos appear in 70% of the top search results. Hence, using video comes with huge SEO benefits.

There would be no point in publishing anything online if no one sees it, right? Search engines prioritize high-quality and relevant videos and rank them higher than plain articles. With an optimized video, you can be sure that a lot of online users will see you.

Video is more memorable than written content

The online world is full of marketing messages that get stuffed in there every day. Chances are, you can’t remember most of them.

How about a commercial video?

You likely remember quite a few of them. This is what video does. While you can ignore or forget the written text, you are less likely to forget a good video.

Videos are more personal

Your brand is not a static strategy on paper; it must be brought to life. It must ooze personality too.

While you can inject some personality into your written brand copies, a video does more than that.

It builds an instant authentic connection with your audience.  Videos allow your audience to know you more, connect and relate with you on a more emotional level. As you can guess, you are likely to gain more customers when they like your personality and trust your brand.

Boosts brand credibility

Users trust customer testimonials more than statements from the brand. This is why customer testimonials are a great marketing strategy. They boost your credibility and lead to higher conversions.

Well-thought-of, strategic customer testimonials win visitors over and turn them into customers.

While written testimonials are better than no testimonials at all, video testimonials do the job sufficiently.

Video is popular

Regardless of the social site you use, videos will be the dominating content. Considering the insanely high number of social media users, imagine how many people would see your video.

By posting a video online, you are exposing your brand to millions of users. Better yet, videos are sharable. According to HubSpot, 92% of mobile video audience shares videos. This means that it would be shared to millions of internet users if your video was to go viral.

Clearly, your business would greatly benefit if your videos were to be shared. You can get video experts such as video production company in Toronto to do the magic for you.

Videos are mobile-friendly

Almost everyone owns a phone now. As you can guess, people watch a lot of videos on their devices.  Research shows that more customers are using their mobile phones to search and make purchases. Hence, videos are the best strategy to reach this audience.

4 Benefits of Using Bulk Bags

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article | 4 Benefits of Using Bulk BagsWhen you have products to sell, it is imperative to have the best storage and shipping materials available. Bulk bags- also known as Flexible Intermediate Bulk Containers (FIBCs)- support optimal storage and shipping. The following are just four of the many benefits of using bulk bags for your shipping needs.

1. Versatility and Durability

FIBCs are made from a woven fabric that is flexible enough to hold 500kg to 2000 kg. They come in different sizes and dimensions, making them perfect for toting all types of dry, flowing products. Some industries they work very well for include:

  • Agriculture
  • Engineering
  • Construction
  • Chemical
  • Mining
  • Fishing

Additionally, bulk bags can be custom-made according to your specific needs. This ensures that you get the right type and size storage bag.

2. Optimal Storage Usage

Thanks to their customizable nature and flexibility, bulk bags make excellent storage options. Traditional storage containers and boxes force your product to fit the available space. They do not move or budge, meaning you might be missing out on storage.

On the other hand, bulk bags actually move, stretch, and conform to the products they hold. If you only need to fill half the bag, you only have half a bag taking up space. Other storage options, like boxes, stay the same size no matter how much product is in them.

Skip the boxes, drums, and paper bags in your warehouse. Instead, choose bulk bags that allow you to optimize your storage space.

3. Lower Shipping Costs

It takes a lot of money to run a business, which is why it’s so important to cut expenses wherever possible. Bulk bags can save you money on shipping costs in a few ways. First, bulk bags do not need pallets or any secondary packaging, both of which add extra weight and costs.

Additionally, being able to fit more into a bag means having to ship less overall. For more cost-saving products, learn more here.

4. Reusable or Recyclable Material

Thanks to their general make-up, bulk bags do not easily rip and tear. This means that FIBCs can be reused for quite some time. They are also recyclable due to the materials they are made from. You can use bulk bags without concern about their impact on the environment.

Bulk bags are a great way to take control of your storage space and shipping costs. Visit website to learn more about how such a simple product can make a lasting impact on your daily operations.