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8 Essential Tracking Strategies You Need To Succeed

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In the business world, success is everything. You don’t need to have a capitalistic mind to agree: Without success, your business fails. Costs increase, profits fall, and ultimately the business faces bankruptcy. But success depends on your ability to take strategic decisions that will benefit the company. Most entrepreneurs, when they launch their first business, tend to imagine that the skills of business management come naturally to those who are in the right position. In reality, effective management relies on informed decisions. These strategic decisions we’ve mentioned, they don’t just come as divine inspiration. They are the result of thorough and analytical research, done by experts in their fields. In other words, great business decisions come from using the appropriate business data. You need to track your performance today to find room for improvement and to grow your business tomorrow. Sounds simple enough, wouldn’t you say? Here’s a list of the most important tracking strategies that you need to implement in your company.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article | 8 Essential Tracking Strategies You Need To Succeed

Why do businesses need to track data?

It’s well known that large companies have implemented complex tracking strategies within their structure. Small businesses, on the other hand, tend to reject the idea of tracking as they often consider it a waste of time. Nobody can blame small companies for coming to that unfair conclusion. After all, they don’t have sufficient resources or time to create large-scale data tracking strategies. But becoming a data genius in a small company can still be a useful way to identify useful data for your business survival. Tracking everything is time-demanding. Nevertheless, it’s important to gather knowledge about everything that relates to your business, including employees, customers, and web interactions – assuming you have a website. Thankfully, there are a few useful tools that can be easily implemented, even in small companies, and that are designed to provide you with the necessary knowledge to take informed decisions: CRM tools, task management tools, and web traffic tools are already available on the market.

How is your SEO performance?

When your website is your main marketing tool and the key tool of your online presence, it’s essential to make sure that it is equipped to rank high in the search engine results, which is why SEO for small business is so vital. As a result, most companies need to work on a regular basis with a specialist agency that offers practical SEO audits services. The audit will highlight areas of improvement and identify strategies to improve your ranking scores. It’s also important to stay on top of the Google ranking updates so that your website doesn’t suffer any penalties for not following the latest SEO best practices promoted by Google. As a rule of the thumb, SEO audits, carried out by a leading SEO agency, consider your keyword choices and its ranking in comparison with your competitors. It also helps you to identify further relevant keywords that you might be missing. Additionally, it will highlight technical changes that need to be made to improve your ranking abilities, such as adding micro data and respecting the scheme.org etiquette.

Is your branding consistent?

For businesses, whether online, offline or both, your branding strategy is your identity. Consequently, keeping a consistent brand identity is the best way to convey an image of reliability for your business. If you start by changing your logo and then play with the layout, the color scheme, and the content until you’ve found a brand image that you like, you risk losing a lot of customers in the process. Your visitors want to feel like they are interacting with the same company when they read your online content. This means that the tone of voice in your product pages and your blog articles needs to remain the same; the social media platforms need to promote your business values too; and finally you need to share the same visual look and feel across all platforms – in short, don’t use a different logo or color scheme between your website and your Twitter account, for example. Consequently, tracking your brand online presence is the most effective way to guarantee that you share a homogenous message.


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Are you a social media influencer?

The great thing about using social media platforms is that you can engage directly with your customers, leads, partners, and investors. The problem is that too many companies tend to use social media in a very self-centered manner. They only talk about their brand, but they don’t create any exchange with other social media users. This kind of social media strategy is pointless and doesn’t generate any positive result for the company. Therefore, you should investigate the possibility to track social media engagement, as a way of monitoring the effectiveness of your social media strategy. There are plenty of ways to measure engagement, and the best strategies combine several tracking methods. Monitoring likes and shares on your social media posts indicates how other users reacted to your message. You will need to add audience growth indicators to ensure that your posts are touching a wide group. Finally, keeping track of active fans vs. passive fans is also a solid indication of your performance.

What’s the ROI of your website?

Thanks to Google Analytics and Google Adwords, small companies don’t need to pay to track the performance of their website. Using the Analytics tracking code, you can stay informed in real time of how your website is doing and how people are using it. Additionally, you can create conversion tracking codes, which are used to track positive interactions on the website, such as a customer registering to a membership program or someone committing to purchase. Conversions can help you to give a monetary value to your website. For eCommerce sites, the monetary value is pretty easy to define, as all you need to do is to track the actual purchase value. You can use this value to identify the most valuable content on your site. Pages that receive little views and don’t generate a conversion have no ROI. For websites that don’t offer online products to buy, the monetary value will be defined by combining the digital touchpoints that lead to a business purchase. Pages that are not viewed, again, may not support revenue growth for the website.

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What is the overall productivity in the workplace?

If you’ve heard that your employees are your most precious asset, you might want to measure the truth of that saying in the workplace, namely by monitoring your business productivity. For a lot of companies, the idea of tracking business productivity brings to mind an image from Modern Times with Chaplin running through a factory to finish his task. In reality, monitoring productivity can be done in any line of work and provides useful information for improvement. In offices, it’s about tracking the amount of time spent on each project, using a time management tool. This is extremely useful to identify issues with projects and with work practices so that most the project manager and the employee can think of the ideal solution for their problems.

What’s the employee’s satisfaction?

Using smart and playful survey system, you can track the level of satisfaction of your employees. What this means is that you can very easily identify frictions and pressure points before they damage your team. For instance, this kind of survey is extremely useful if you are implementing a new business strategy. You should run a survey at the beginning of the implementation and a few months later when everyone has got used to the change. This allows you to track good ideas, and change management direction before your employees leave you. Additionally, employee satisfaction surveys need to be run yearly, even if you don’t introduce new strategies. Consider it a checkup on your business health.

Don’t let competitors surprise you

Competitors never stop working on a new service product or way to approach the market. Consequently, you should alway keep an eye on their activities to make sure that you are prepared for anything new. Beware, this doesn’t mean engaging in illegal spying activities. It’s about making the most of useful marketing tools to keep yourself informed! Working with SEMrush enables you to track the keyword ranking of your competitors in any search engines. Not only can you discover relevant keywords but you can also find out their best-performing ones. Ads tracking tools – SocialAdNinja for example – are extremely useful to spy on effective campaigns and eventually learn a few tips from your competitors! The more you know about their activities, the better equipped you are to beat them. But remember: What you do to them, they can do to you too, so be smart with your marketing and don’t plagiarize their ads.

What are the latest digital trends?

The digital trends change and evolve all the time. From responsive design, marketers have now moved to interactive video strategies and virtual reality integration. In other words, keeping track with the market trends means that you can provide your customers with a communication campaign that is anchored in real time and respond to their needs.

Tracking data is the only way for businesses to aggregate knowledge about the performance of their employees, their customers, and their websites. Knowledge is the base to build further successful campaigns and business strategies. But knowledge is only a platform for more creativity. Data don’t provide the solution. They only paint the situation. Innovative thinking and imagination as a response to identified problems are what success is made of.

Improving Your Website For Business Purposes

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Many websites all over the internet start off as hobbies, and thousands if not millions of people around the world have turned their website into very successful businesses. This is a guide on how you can turn your site(s) into a business. The most common way of doing this is through blogging, but in this article, there are going to be ideas for those of us that run different kinds of websites.

The first thing you need to think about is what your site offers your visitors. It’s unlikely that you will be getting many visitors if they’re not coming to you for a particular reason. If you’re not entirely sure on what you’ve got to offer, then you need to sit down and think about what it is that you can offer people, and ultimately, what you’re going to make profit from. Once you know this, you can concentrate on constantly improving the content that you’re providing to your audience.


Photo courtesy of Pixabay

If your site hasn’t been particularly successful so far, there is always a way of changing it around. For example, websites like UNILAD offer comedic videos and pictures for it’s viewers. It started off on a rocky road, and was actually shut down in 2012 due to explicit content that was offensive to many people. The site then thought through what they wanted to offer their audience and relaunched in 2014 as a site where people can submit funny videos, pictures, stories and even heartwarming stories too. Unilad offers its viewers to 15 minutes of fame by displaying user submitted content. It is now the top online video channel in the world.

Some websites offer their audiences products that they have produced that will help with many complaints and ailments around the world. If this is what your website is about, it’s likely that you’re using ecommerce to sell your products on your website. If you’re a blogger that uses the platform WordPress, it’s likely you’ve got the plugin called Woocommerce. Although it is a free plugin, it’s not completely customisable on the free plan. There are in fact many other different ways of selling your products, and here you can read up on the best 5 alternatives to woocommerce.


Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Using social media for your website will be one of the most powerful things you can do to promote your website. Use as many social networking platforms as possible to get your website out there. Many successful business have grown and gotten themselves in the spotlight thanks to social media. Remember to be consistent with how much you post for your audience, and keep it relevant to your website. Running giveaways are also a brilliant way of getting your audience engaged. Another way of gaining money from your website, is through adverts.

To summarize, as soon as you know what you’re going to be offering your audience, you can concentrate on providing consistent content. Remember, the money making isn’t going to happen overnight. Good luck with your business adventure.

Creating a Buzz Around Your Brand: Targeting as Many Potential Customers as Possible

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Generating sales and profit is a challenge for any newly established brand. People are unaware of your existence or wary of your products and services. You haven’t had the opportunity to gain their trust and loyalty yet and competitors are reluctant to let them test the waters with your newly posed competition. So, how do you go about encouraging consumers to take a risk and purchase your products? It’s time to make a name for your company. Here’s how to create a buzz around your brand, drawing the attention of as many potential customers as possible.


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Corporate PR

Corporate PR forges the potential for relationships to develop between your brand and your customers. It opens up a conversation, then leaves you to make sales and prove your worth. A good corporate PR agency will ensure that your company appears in all the right places. It will land you reviews in widely read and influential publications and interviews with widely watched television programs. These agencies place you in the spotlight and give you the chance to really showcase what you’re about. Perfect! The more visible your company is and the more consistently it appears in the public eye for positive reasons, the more familiar consumers will feel with your image and the more likely they are to trust you with their purchases.


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SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a business technique that helps to direct as many people to your website as possible. Every single day, millions of internet users employ the help of search engines to find the pages that they’re looking for. If they want to find the answer to a question, they’ll use a search engine to find a site that will provide them with the relevant information. If they want to know what time a certain store opens, they will use search engines to direct them to the company’s site, preferably directly to the page detailing their store details. If they want a certain product, they will use a search engine to find the brands that supply it. It’s not surprising then, that to turn over the maximum profits possible, you want to be featured high in the search engine’s results. The closer you are to the top of the list, the more likely people are going to click on your link and the more traffic directed to your site. Once consumers are on your page, the products will sell themselves. So, how do you go about directing the maximum volume of traffic to your web page? The answer? By educating yourself. Take the SEO class online to gain a full comprehension of SEO. There are so many more factors that will help you to excel in the field than you could imagine: marketing personas, marketing funnel, search fundamentals, searcher intent, search framework, channel selection, branded searches, document relevancy, URL optimization, link neighborhoods. The list goes on and on. So, it’s time to start swotting up!

Customer Reviews

With increasing numbers of people gaining their information online comes another issue that your company needs to prioritize: online customer reviews. Nowadays, individual, non-professional reviews can have a more beneficial or negative effect on your sales than ever before. The internet has given everyday people a platform to express their love or disdain for a product, service or brand that can reach a worldwide audience. So focus on gaining positive feedback. If you offer high-quality produce and impeccable service, you can’t really go wrong. However, if you do receive a complaint or negative feedback, contact the individual who has made it. Discuss the problem with them. Question what they dislike about your service and how things could be improved. Chances are, you can easily rectify the situation by offering a refund, exchange or other means of compensation. This will ensure that you maintain a good relationship with this individual consumer (they will recognize your company as going above and beyond their call of duty) and encourage them to alter their review. Hundreds of thousands of people will have access to this and trust it, so it’s essential that you put wrongs to right. You can also use the situation to ensure that you don’t make the same mistake again. You will be able to constantly improve, ensuring that you don’t receive negative complaints in the future.

If you follow all of these steps, it won’t be long until your brand is part of the public consciousness. People will feel familiar with your company and place their trust in you to provide them with everything that they expect from their transaction. This means you will have more happy and loyal customers and the increasing profit that comes hand in hand with them.

3 Major Benefits of Effective Web Design

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Web design is about so much more than creating a pretty looking store space. Of course, every brand needs an aesthetically pleasing web page. But there are several key aspects of web design that can make the difference between your online business excelling and prospering or it falling flat on its face in the first year of operation. Remember, the success of any E-commerce company relies heavily on the brand’s visual presentation: this forms the majority of what potential consumers know about you. So make it effective. Here are five benefits of well-managed web design.

Creation of a Consistent Brand Identity

Brand identity is essential to create the impression of a consistent, reliable company. Most people are prone to mulling over the appearance of one aspect of their business at a time. First a logo. Then perhaps a font. Then a color scheme. This is likely to form a rather mish mash aesthetic when all of the different aspects are put together. Professional web designers such as Ignite Digital, however, look at the bigger picture from the start of their projects. They will have an idea of how absolutely every part of your business is going to fit into their design scheme, whether it’s web pages, affiliated blogs, business cards or advertising. Always bear in mind that one, stable and reliable image is bound to make a much more positive and lasting impression in consumers’ minds than five different images that appear as though they could appear to five different companies.

Drawn Out Pageviews

Yes, you want to bring plenty of traffic to your site, so clicks are important. But you don’t make any profit from individuals who click your homepage and leave straight away. You need to keep people on your page, browsing different areas and perusing different collections and products to see your traffic convert into sales and profit. In a world saturated with web pages and web vendors, it will take something pretty impressive to encourage an audience to stay on your page for longer than a few seconds. So collaborate with experienced designers to create an eye catching and engaging homepage.

Content Form and Structure

You need to ensure that your products and collections are presented to internet users in their best light. You want your customer to feel confident enough in the product to invest their hard earned cash in it. Effective web design can help with this. Options such as zoom or rotation on product images, links to sizing information, delivery options and terms and conditions and well-placed product descriptions in an easy to read font all go down a storm with consumers. You also want products displayed on individual pages, allowing customers to focus on the item they’ve clicked separately to all of your other stock. The key to a successful site is simple navigation and minimalism.

These are just three of the benefits that effective web design can bring to your brand. Needless to say, there are plenty more. So get started on creating a brilliant business web page.

Start Spreading The Word: How To Get A New Product Noticed

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If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably noticed that putting your business on the map is no mean feat. There’s so much competition out there, and in a world when 90% of startups fail, it can be difficult to forge a path and get yourself noticed. If you have a new product and you’re desperate to shout about it from the rooftops, here are some tips to help you spread the word.

Your online presence

Many businesses nowadays rely on an online marketing campaign to sell their products and services. In the US, around 70% of small businesses have a website, but over 90% of those that don’t have a site plan to have one up and running by 2018. According to a study by LinkedIn, over 80% of companies use social media in a marketing capacity. If you have a new product, using the Internet is an effective way to both market and sell your product. The first thing to do is set up a brilliant website, which gives people information about the company, the product and the difference it will make to their lives. Ensure the website looks great, it works properly, and it enables a customer to do everything they want to do. If you’re offering the chance to place an order, this should be a seamless, swift process.

You can promote your website by running a blog and using social media. Using sites like Guest Post Tracker enables you to connect with bloggers and increase your number of subscribers, and you can also form relationships, which are mutually beneficial using features like backlinks and sponsored posts. Keep the blog fresh and link your content to your social media profiles. You can boost your number of followers and friends by investing in advertising and by running competitions and offering flash discounts and sales for those who subscribe or like your page.

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Launch events and trade shows

If you’re hoping that your new product will be the next big thing, you need to show it off in all its glory. Planning a launch event and attending trade shows can really help to get your product out there and cause people to take notice. If you are planning a launch, put your guest list together carefully and think about how you can use the exposure in the best possible way. Prepare some demos, check that everything is working properly, and get to grips with your pitch. Show off what you’re selling, invite people to have a look, and be ready to answer questions. If you’re going to a trade show, focus on the visual appeal of your stall, and try and make the experience interactive for your customers. Take advantage of networking opportunities and work on your negotiation skills.

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Photo courtesy of Charles & Hudson via flickr

When you’ve spent time and invested money in a new product, the last thing you want is it to fall flat because nobody knows what it is or how they can get hold of it. If you’re keen to get your new product noticed, hopefully, these tips will prove useful.