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Four Ways to Overhaul Your Company Website

If your company’s been around for a while, it’s likely that your website has been, too. If that’s the case, you may well find that design trends, features and styles have moved on from the point at which you dusted off your finished site. The web design world moves fast – and consumer attention moves faster. If customers arrive on your website to the impression that you’ve not updated it for a number of years, they’ll instantly judge you for it. You’ll lose business as a result. As such, here are four ways to overhaul your website in favor of something a little more snazzy, modern and sleek.

Rebrand

While this is not necessarily a web-based overhaul, it is something you should consider if you’re in any case about to entirely change your website’s appearance. A rebrand will echo through-out your website, and as such it’s best to cover both a rebrand and a web redesign at the same time, in the same cohesive process. Get your design team on it immediately, or outsource to de-sign professionals who’ll help you achieve your vision.

Hosting Platforms

The very base – the foundation – of your website is its hosting platform. If you’re about to go through an overhaul, it’s certainly worth considering whether you ought to change hosting providers at the same time. In recent years, cloud hosting has become particularly favored in the web design world – something that you’ll not be using in your current legacy website.

Restructuring

Many companies are so used to their existing website that they fail to recognize some glaring failures in terms of its structural layout. Even if there are no failures per se, the gold standard for webpage and site map layout is always changing, which means your website is almost certainly behind the curve, confusing web users and alienating potential custom. When you overhaul your website, be sure to restructure it in such a way as to smooth all click-throughs and open up pathways for your traffic to pass easily through.

Redesigning

Now it comes to the more visual side of your site’s revamp. Here, you’ll want to go with some of the most exciting design trends to be taking place in 2019. Mini-animations, activated by the scroll function, have become something of a dominant trend for websites in the past year, and continue to dominate the ecosystem for businesses aiming to look ultra-modern and super-slick. Engage with these trends visually in order to bask in the admiration of your site’s visitors.

A Word of Warning

While website overhauls are incredibly important in order to keep your business modern and functional online, you shouldn’t erase your old web pages until you’re sure that your new and revamped website is entirely bug-free. A second word of warning: be sure to bear in mind that repeat customers may be shocked by a very different website appearing when they go to visit yours. Take steps to reassure these customers, and to keep some consistency with the old de-sign.

These four tips – and brief words of warning – should help you conduct a thorough overhaul of your company’s website, updating your appearance and functionality for the trends that are dominating 2019.

7 Tips For Improving Brand Reputation

February 1, 2019/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven +

In the business world, there are few things more important than brand reputation. A company will never succeed and compete with the biggest names in the industry if it is not respected by its target audience. Building brand reputation can take time and experience which is difficult particularly if you are new to the industry, but there are a few strategies that you can quickly use which could help to give your company a boost in the reputation department. It is important to note that reputation is a constant and fluid factor so it will require constant work to maintain.

1. Get Involved With The Local Community

First, you should show that you are not a faceless corporation and get involved with the local community. This will earn the respect of your local community and further afield (by making your efforts visible on social media). You can do this by:

Attending local events
Hosting your own events (workshops, lectures, open days, etc.)
Sponsoring local charities or sports teams

2. Networking

Networking never stops in the business world and it is vital for building brand awareness and reputation. This should involve attending industry events, hosting your own events and net-working online. In addition to increasing brand reputation, this can also open new doors for you as a business.

3. Internet Marketing

The businesses that have a strong online presence and are highly visible on search engine results lists are the ones that command great respect. Internet marketing is the best way to achieve this, so approach experienced and reputable marketing firms to see how they could help you.

4. Influencer Marketing

One of the most effective methods of marketing to emerge in recent times is influencer marketing where an influential figure on social media recommends your brand. This social proof can work wonders for brand reputation as it is a highly influential figure that approves of your company and what you can provide.

5. Customer Testimonials

Another effective form of social proof is customer reviews/testimonials. You should be seeking feedback from your customers constantly and using any positive reviews on your website, advertising and social media.

6. Content Moderation

Content moderation has become incredibly important in today’s digital world, so it is vital that all of your content is carefully checked to make sure that it is suitable for the public to see. This can be a difficult and time-consuming task, but you can outsource content moderation to specialists like Taskeater which can help to keep your brand safe and well respected.

7. Offer An Excellent Customer Experience

Finally, you need to make sure that you offer an excellent service or product along with a seam-less shopping experience and professional customer service for your target audience. This is one of the most effective ways to build your brand reputation but it can take some time to develop.

Brand reputation is vital to success, but it can also be tricky to improve this area of your business. Try one or all of the above and before long you will start to notice an improvement in the way in which you are perceived by your target audience and the wider world.

The Best Ways to Make Impressive Images for Social Media

January 15, 2019/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven +

With the modern craze of social media, several brands are competing to attract more and more customers to their products. In order to improve business, brands want to project themselves as appealing and impressive to society. As a vast range of social media platforms emerges online, businesses are presented with an amazing means to connect to their customers in a casual and relaxed environment. There are several brands that strive to present themselves online, but they may be hardly noticed by their target audience. To improve your brand visibility, here are a few tips that will help you.

Make It Relatable and Fun

Some of the best known brands on the web earn their title by building strong, loyal relationships and earning trust. They are very aware of the fact that by keeping their brand personal, fun, and relatable, they can easily connect with consumers and make a powerful impact on them. Maintaining the human aspect of advertisement also keeps the workplace stress-free. There is no better place to start than with social media.
One of the ways in which you can portray your business as fun to your customers is to be interesting. This can be done by indulging in exciting competitions and quizzes. Do some quirky stuff to express your brand. Stay away from being serious as it will not interest them in your product.

Ensure that Your Spelling and Grammar is Impeccable

78 percent of the US population admit to investigating businesses for an effective language and communication skills before buying a product or service. If you own a brand, you must not make any grammatical or spelling mistakes as these will harm your brand reputation. Use words that will make you look professional to your audience. You will find an abundance of language tools online that can help improve your content quality.

Make Use of Dialog Feed

Dialog feed is one of the amazing applications that enable people to view content that is collected from blogs and social media. All of this content will feed your website with compelling user-generated data. New level of HR management recommends this strategy to be highly effective because of its potential to entice a lot of online users to your business. The best part of this strategy is that you need not worry if the content is inappropriate as it will quickly get filtered out and blacklisted at the time of data collection. Once you receive appropriate content, you can then use it to add, modify, or delete it as per your requirements.

Put Emphasis on Visual Posts

People are often most compelled, attracted, and driven by visual posts. Illustrations and images are much more powerful and effective than lengthy posts of text. Experts also believe that it is wise to use imagery to allure more people and create an effective engagement with them.

Conclusion

Social media provides a lucrative opportunity for businesses to make a powerful impression among online users. But this remarkable opportunity comes with a good amount of challenge to make your brands ads outperform others in the online market. With the use of these expert tips, however, you can easily stand out online among the most notable brands.

The Strategy Driven Guide to Boosting Your Website’s Performance

December 29, 2018/0 Comments/in Entrepreneurship, Marketing & Sales, Online Marketing and Website Development /by StrategyDriven +

Boosting your website’s performance needs to be your number one priority. Without a great site, all of your digital marketing efforts will be for naught. Imagine, as a user, you see an ad on Instagram. You are interested, click it, and are directed to a website that fails to meet your trust factors. Perhaps it doesn’t work on mobile, or perhaps its design is old and outdated, making it difficult to navigate. There are many different trust factors that online users rely on nowadays before they buy from a new company online.

Boosting your website’s performance isn’t rocket science, but it does need to implemented well and to the best of your ability. You need to ensure your website is secure, that its information is correct, and that downtime is limited. Users do not want to be made a fool of, so ensure your website is up to code. To show them your site can be trusted you need to improve your site and its digital presence.

Understand How Users Are Interacting with It

Google analytics or other tracking tools can be incredibly useful in determining where the problem areas of your website are. A high bounce rate indicates that your homepage or perhaps your PPC marketing strategy are in some way failing. A less than impressive home page can have people click off before they even see your product lists, whereas a misguided PPC strategy can have people who don’t want your site click on your ads.

Conduct an SEO Audit

Understanding how users are engaging with your site will help you address the key problem areas first, but that doesn’t mean you should ever stop there. Go through and conduct a full website or SEO audit to clean up your website, ensure there are no broken links, unnecessary redirects, or now black-listed SEO tactics on your site.

Commit to a Strong Content Strategy

Content is king because it is how customers can engage your website in more ways than just scrolling through your product or services pages. It is how you can become a true resource to your customers, and how you can attract new, organic traffic streams.

Create content that is effective and useful to your audience. Post it on your company blog but also across social media. Keep to a consistent plan, such as uploading a weekly blog post every Tuesday, for instance, and make your content interactive.

Hire an SEO Agency

Auditing your website is step one. It is essential if you want any future digital marketing tactics to work well, because if your site isn’t looking great then getting people to your site will result in nothing more than a high bounce rate. If your site needs a huge overhaul, however, it is wise to hire an Austin SEO agency like Creatif Digital that can help improve your site’s design, SEO, and then work with you to bring more organic traffic to your site through search rankings and PPC marketing.

Your website needs to be perfect, because if there is any hitch in its performance, you can turn away a potential customer in a second. Go through and remove any problem areas, improve it with SEO and content in mind, and know your limits. If you don’t have the resources or skill needed to do this, hire a company who can make these improvements for you.

How to Motivate Your Sales Team: 7 Tested and Proven Strategies

December 29, 2018/0 Comments/in Management & Leadership, Marketing & Sales, Talent Management /by StrategyDriven +

Sales is the core of the business and the team behind it drives the company’s growth and success. They are responsible for the 2 most important things in a business: customers and revenue.

Every business owner or executive should acknowledge the critical role of the sales team in the organization. They should be always motivated, developed, and inspired for them to consistently perform.

Here are proven strategies to make your sales team successful:

1. Establish trust

Trust is a fundamental core value of every organization. The business can’t run effectively without it. Teams can’t work together without trusting each other. That’s why it’s important for a leader to establish full trust across the organization.

Offering full trust to your sales team goes two ways:

You will need to win their trust completely
You will need to give them your trust 100%

Establishing full trust with your sales team starts with setting the correct and honest expectations. You need to be clear about the following:

What’s their objective/purpose in the business?
What do you expect them to deliver and in what time schedule?
What are their targets?
How will you measure their success?
How are you going to reward them?

The second step is to let them do their job as salespeople. Lastly, you’ll have to deliver your part of the bargain, which is to consistently work with them to achieve their targets, review their performance and give them their due rewards.

2. Give them visibility to the strategy

Part of what drives the sales team to deliver their optimum performance is to give them visibility of the company’s strategy. It is important that they know where the company is heading and what’s their part in it.

Moreover, enable your sales team to be equipped as they help steer the company’s strategy. You will need to provide them access to metrics, statistics, analytics and every piece of data about the company. This information will help them forecast their output in a timely manner aligned with the company strategy.

3. Establish SMART goals

SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic and
Time-bound

This is a basic methodology for goal setting. It is critical to establish smart goals with your sales team in order for them to know what are you expecting from them.

Work with your sales team to agree on a defined daily, weekly, monthly and/or annual sales objectives. The key is to have a limited number of objectives or goals that are aligned with the company strategy. Then, enable with them tools that will help them track their goals against their performance.

4. Put in place an effective reward system

Sales teams are driven by rewards. They perform more when they know what they’re getting in return. That said, it is highly critical to put an effective reward system to keep your sales team inspired. For example, come up with an enticing commission agreement and/or sales incentives.

Some of the key elements of an effective reward system are the following:

A specific result or quota that will let them earn the rewards
A clear process of how the reward will be earned
Timeline of when they can earn and/or when the reward will be given
Ability for the individual to choose the type of reward they want to receive

Enabling your sales team to choose the type of reward they want will keep them excited. Start by sending out a survey to every individual so you’ll know what their expected reward is.

5. Make your sales team fall in love with the company

This is rather difficult but once successfully pulled off, you’ll have the best succession plan in the company. Moving your sales team away from the employee mindset and offering them the idea of being ‘company owners’ is critical.

Get them involved in building the company’s mission, vision and core values. Steer them away from being stimulated by their paycheck and let them become passionate about their contribution to the company. This may or may not work with all the individuals in your sales team but at least you’ll know who among them is truly involved.

6. Allow them to be flexible and proactive

Your sales team doesn’t become sales rock stars overnight. That said, allow them to be flexible enough in achieving their targets. It will require you to provide consistent guidance and follow through with their output.

On top of that, encourage your sales team to be proactive in all areas. Let them explore new angles and come up with out-of-the-box ideas. Moreover, encourage them to freely present these ideas and implement them.

7. Provide them with opportunities and growth

It is critical to provide your sales team with enough opportunities for growth. This will keep them stimulated knowing the fact that they know where they’re going if they become successful in the company. Keep in mind that a salesperson wouldn’t want to be a salesperson forever.

Putting a clear development and growth plan for the sales individuals is one of the required duties of a leader. There should be a clear and defined path for a salesperson to go to the next level in the organizational structure.

Conclusion

Motivating your sales team is a top priority. It requires diligent thought process and involvement with the team. Moreover, upgrading their performance will require time, consistency and commitment. These effective and tested strategies can help you build a successful sales team that’s always inspired and motivated. These should be an integral part of the core priorities of the company.