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A Guide to Marketing Your Business: 2020 Edition

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing Your Business 2020|A Guide to Marketing Your Business: 2020 EditionMarketing is an integral element for any business. From recent startups to long established organizations, continual promotion is necessary for a number of reasons. It allows a brand to become visible to new potential customers, it keeps them in the consciousness of current customers, and it can bring instant awareness to new products or services.

With this importance in mind, here’s a quick guide on marketing your business in 2020.

Conduct market research

Research is the basis for any solid plan. To develop a marketing strategy that will deliver results, you need to gain a deep understanding of your customers. What makes them tick? Which marketing methods convince them to purchase items? How have their tastes changed with current trends?

One of the best research methods is to look at the competition. See what they’re doing right and wrong, and use this information to your advantage.

Decide on a USP

When marketing a business, you have to decide on what to promote. While this can be the brand as a whole, the most effective plans are those that focus on a unique selling point. You have to provide potential customers with a reason to check out the business, and a USP helps to stand out from the crowd.

As for what the USP can be, this could be an affordable service or product with exceptional quality. If you are running an exclusive discount, say 30% off an item for one week only, this could help draw prospective customers in.

Select your tools

Picking the right marketing tools is, obviously, an essential aspect of advertising. Fortunately, there are many options available in that regard. Consider the following picks:

  • Social media
  • Pay-per-click ads
  • Content marketing
  • Email campaigns
  • Word-of-mouth
  • Flyers
  • Exhibit stand

Plus that’s just scratching the surface. Certain picks will require more money than others, and their level of effectiveness could differ on a business-on-business basis. Yet with the right research, you will have a firm grasp of which are the best choices.

Set a budget

Now you have the plan and tools in place, there’s one last element required before you can launch your marketing campaign: the necessary funding. The set budget for a promotional strategy can vary widely. It can cost thousands on a monthly basis, or it might not even require any money at all.

If outside financing is required, however, one of the best options is to acquire a loan. If your credit rating is in bad shape, Now Loans shows you can still acquire funding this way despite the hurdle.

Analyze the results

Even when the marketing campaign is well underway, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. You have to closely analyze your advertising ventures and see what’s producing results – and what isn’t generating conversions.

By studying these marketing techniques, you can constantly refine and improve your campaign. As with any component of business, you need to change with the times. A promotional tactic might become obsolete overnight, for instance.

5 Tips for Achieving a Successful Business Merger

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Merger|5 Tips for Achieving a Successful Business MergerMerging your business with another entity has a number of potential benefits. It could provide you with the chance of growing your market share. You can diversify the range of products and services you offer. A restructure may also result in economies of scale.
While the advantages are clear, there’s just one issue: completing a successful merger is far from an easy task.

As you would expect, a merger is a complicated process. Many different elements need to come together before it becomes a reality, and even then that’s no guarantee it will happen seamlessly.

However, to limit the potential headache, here are five tips for achieving a successful business merger:

What are your overall goals?

Before you go forward with a merger, it’s essential you outline why it is happening in the first place. Do you want to grow your market share? Introduce new products and processes to your business? Eliminate a competitor from the competition?

Whatever the reason, this needs to be clearly defined. This means that, not only will you have a straightforward understanding about where you want your business to go, but the employees involved will also know what’s going on.

Ensure your finances are in order

It’s a simple point, admittedly, but one that still requires plenty of attention. Ultimately, do you have the right amount of money in place to complete a merger?

Remember: you might have enough money in the bank to cover the initial cost of the merge, but that’s only the start of course. You also have to be prepared to sustain the investment, aka covering the additional costs brought on by a merger.

Be clear about what’s happening

Transparency is an important quality at any time for a business, but this is particularly the case during a major change such as a merger.

First of all, this will keep everyone on the same page about the upcoming changes. In addition, it can assist with the transition process. If you put together a team to handle the transaction, the burden doesn’t just rest on your shoulders.

The right platform to facilitate the merger

When you’re ready to complete the deal and facilitate the merger, you will require the right platform to get the job done. This is where a data room m&a can be especially beneficial.

By using a specialized data room, you have the opportunity to speed up the process – a vital component of any successful merger. You can restructure activities across all related documents and transactions, and do so within a secure environment.

Performing the integration

The plan is in place. Your employees are ready to support with the merger. You have the right platform ready to go. Now there’s just one final element to go: completing the merger.

Integrating two companies is a stressful occasion. Nevertheless, careful preparation can ensure it is a smooth operation. To assist with the integration, tackle the entire process with bite-sized milestones. If these milestones are tied together with incentives, employees and managers will be more motivated to get it all done in a swift fashion.

Ways Monitoring Your Competition Can Drive Your SEO and Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Ways Monitoring Your Competition Can Drive Your SEO and Business

What would it feel like to have a competitor beat you to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) after all your effort and hard work in search engine optimisation (SEO)?

What if you’ve applied all the SEO tactics you know, yet a competitor’s web page keeps ranking higher than yours?

You don’t have to hate a website for ranking higher than you or beating you in the SEO game. Hating a competing website is a thing of the past when it comes to the Internet. It’s true that having a higher ranking competitor could lead to not achieving target website traffic, more time, and extra expenses.

However, the online world today has made it possible to use a better ranking site to your advantage. Your SEO drive doesn’t have to dwindle. Instead, you should monitor and analyze your competition to get more benefits from SEO and increase page rank. You should look at their content, keywords, and site optimization. You should monitor your competitors’ social media activity.  You might wonder, “how can monitoring a competing website help me optimize my site?”

Let’s take a look at a few ways that can happen:

It Helps You Create Better Content

Content is king on the internet. Search engines primarily rank web pages and sites based on content. Google rates websites on E-A-T which means expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This rating guideline concentrates on quality and reputation of the entire website content, including blog posts and landing pages.

When a website is consistently at the top of the SERP, you can be sure the site is creating epic content that meets search engine criteria. You can look at such site’s landing pages and blog posts.

However, don’t copy their work and regurgitate it on your site. That is plagiarism. Instead, put a twist on the topic or find out a recurring question by visitors in the comment and write an article to answer the question. This means you can get content opportunities from this strategy. You’ll always have fresh content in the form of blog posts, articles, ebooks, and press releases.

It Helps You Find and Use Better Ranking Keywords

While analyzing the content of competing websites, you can find out their potential relevant keywords, domains’ link popularity, and page result characteristics. You will also need to use the Google Webmaster Tool to research traffic that your site gets for various search queries.

This will show you the most effective keywords that bring in traffic. Find out how your competitor ranks for those keywords. Then, you can use the keywords to create researched, high-quality content. Once a user types in the keyword in search engines, your web page will have a better chance of appearing in the results.

You Can Improve Your Branding

Your branding is what sets you apart from your competition. It can help drive your site to the top of your niche market and create customer loyalty. SEO helps build brand awareness. A competing website will have its own branding and unique selling point too.

First, you need to research their website content. How do they promote their brand in each post? What is their brand strategy? Then, you can research their online presence, content output, and customer engagement. By doing this, you can identify the competition’s target audience, targeted niches, and customer attraction strategy.

With the information you’ve gotten, you’ll know what to do to strengthen your unique selling proposition. You can also find new methods of creating brand uniqueness and making your site more appealing to a shared audience. Through this, your online brand presence and search visibility can increase.


It Improves Your Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing and site optimization are intertwined. Let’s say your website’s profile has millions of followers, and your article has a hundred thousand shares on social media; if this is the case, your search rank will likely improve. You need to monitor your competitors’ social media activity by noticing how they interact with followers and what is shared the most. You can track their posts with tools like Hootsuite.

One way to take advantage of their social activity is to reach out to their followers with your content. Some of them won’t be following you. They can be interested in your content and visit your website, which can lead to increased traffic for you.

Another way is to analyze their marketing tactics and tweak your social media strategy to accommodate the successful methods they’ve used. You can also find out which content does well on social media. A post that’s successful on social media will rank high on the SERP. Once you identify the competitors’ content, write an article with a similar topic and mirror their content strategy on social media.

You Can Gain More Backlinks

Getting inbound links from authority sites can help your SEO drive. A competing website that is properly optimized will be building links, just like you are. You can reach out to those sites to get them to link to similar content. Also, you should track any new backlink they have and find out if they’ve adopted a new strategy.

The most important thing here is not to copy every detail of the competing websites’ link building strategy. Instead, use their methods to strengthen your SEO techniques. You can build on their strategies and incorporate yours at the same time. That way, you can have a better internet marketing campaign overall.

It Can Help You Improve SEO Activities

By examining a competitor’s SEO strategies, you’ll be able to keep up with industry trends and find out when something new is on the scene. For example, higher ranking websites may change their SEO strategy and style suddenly.

This can mean a few things. There could be a new algorithm update, and they’re adjusting their optimization strategy too. They might have found out a better way to make their web pages rank higher in the SERP. They might be trying to avoid a penalty or might be removing a black hat SEO technique. Whatever it might be, you can quickly learn from it and ensure your website benefits from it or avoids disaster.

It Can Help You Avoid SEO Pitfalls

By watching your competitors’ ranking and optimization strategies, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You’ll find out the SEO tactics that are not yielding much result and will likely become obsolete. This takes a lot of effort because you’re recording every detail in terms of their optimization actions. On the other hand, it helps you avoid falling in the SERP ranking because you know what strategies to copy or not.

Final Words 

Winning in SEO means ranking at number one in the SERP, having strategic keywords, and increasing your website’s online visibility. Analyzing a higher ranking website’s SEO style can help you create better content and give you insight into what optimization strategies work best for your industry. You should always research and monitor your competitor from all angles to improve your SEO New Orleans and to stay one step ahead.

Ways To Protect Your Intellectual Property

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Protect your Intellectual Property|Ways To Protect Your Intellectual PropertyProtecting your intellectual property can be harder now more than ever, especially since the avid use of the internet. Intellectual property includes anything from your original ideas, designs, discoveries, inventions and creative work produced by you or a group of people with you in it. Protecting those kinds of things are crucial to the success of your business because it allows you to confidently share your intellectual property without the fear that it will be copied or stolen. Here are some tips you to protect your intellectual property, whether you want to implement a consulting firm like GHB intellect or you want to do it yourself.

Avoid Filing Patents

Patents may seem like the smart idea, but you could actually be setting yourself up. Your patent gives a step-by-step breakdown of how your product or service can be created. When you file something like that, it is published for the public to see. All they need to do is some research. Someone can easily create a homogeneous product with some really clever ways to ensure they are not violating your intellectual property rights.

Register Your Copyrights And Trade

Copyrights are extremely important as they apply to the protection of tangible and intangible creative works. It is something that you own instantaneously. As soon as you create something, no matter what it is, you own the copyright even if you do not register it. Registering your copyright is highly recommended because it will be easier to prove that you own that creative work in court. Keep in mind that copyrights expire 70 years after the death of its creator, but it ultimately depends on the nature of the intellectual property.

Trademarks are slightly different than copyrights. These are things like symbols, designs, logos, catchphrases. Trademarks are typically used in marketing strategies and identifying a brand. These have to be protected at all costs because those are the first things your customers connect with. Be sure to register your trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, though it is recommended that you hire a trademark lawyer. You want to make sure nothing slips through the cracks when it comes to the paperwork. Unlike copyrights, trademarks do not have expiration dates. You own the rights to your logos, symbols and other branding identities in perpetuity.

Implement A Confidentiality, Non-Disclosure or Licensing Contracts

There is nothing wrong with asking employees to sign a confidentiality, non-disclosure or licensing contract as these are imperative to making sure your business does not fall prey to leaking intellectual property. Keep in mind confidentiality agreements have to be prepared by lawyers. They bound your employees to comply with your demand to keep intellectual property private. On the other hand, licensing agreements allow for third-party partners to use your products for branding and distribution.

These few tips will put you in the right direction to protecting your creative intellectual property. Following these tips will reduce your chances of having your IP stolen.

Stay Productive: How to Winterproof Your Workplace

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Winterproof Your Workplace|Stay Productive: How to Winterproof Your WorkplaceThe winter season might be the furthest thing from your mind right now, but it won’t be long until chillier temperatures arrive. As the cold weather can affect your employees’ productivity and morale, you must take steps to provide a safe, warm, and comfortable space for your team.

If you’re looking for tips to winterproof your workplace, read the below advice on how to prepare for colder temperatures:

Avoid Slip and Trip Accidents

Slip and trip accidents are common in the workplace during winter. Rather than risking your employees’ health and opening your business up to a lawsuit, you’d be smart to stock up on various snow, ice, and flood control products.

The supplies can often quickly run out of stock when winter arrives, so buy the following items in advance:

  • Shovels
  • Salt
  • De-icer
  • Sand
  • Snowplow

It will help you to create a safe space for every member of staff or guest on your premises.

Repair a Leaky Roof

Many people make the mistake of ignoring a roof repair, but it can cause various financial and property issues down the road. For example, if you ignore a roof repair during winter, excessive rainwater and snow intrusion will cause a property to lose both hot and cool air.

This could cause your business to spend much more on energy to keep your employees warm. A leaky roof can also cause mildew and mold to develop, which can damage the property’s structure. Prevent the problem from spiraling out of control this winter by visiting a reputable roofing repair company: nextwaveroofing.com/commercial-roofing-denver-co/

Stock Up on Protective Clothing

If your team works outdoors, you have a responsibility to protect them from various arduous temperatures. Chilly weather and drab conditions can not only drain morale and slow down productivity, but could also pose a risk to your employees’ health and safety.

If your team works on a construction site or road maintenance, keep them safe and protected from the elements by stocking up on protective clothing such as:

  • Hats
  • Gloves
  • Boots
  • Jackets

You also should provide them with heaters, shelter from the outdoors, and hot drinks, so they can warm up on their break.

Create a Driver Safety Program

Before winter arrives, take the time to create a driver safety program, which will provide guidelines on how your staff can remain safe when on the road. As traveling in rain, snow or other tough elements can pose a risk to a driver’s safety, you should provide advice for your team to follow when traveling from A to B for their role.

For example, you could encourage them to:

  • Keep at least half a tank of fuel in the vehicle
  • Avoid cruise control on ice or other slippery surfaces
  • Inflate a vehicle’s tires and ensure they have good tread
  • Work from home (if possible) if they will face dangerous road conditions

If you follow the above tips, you could create a safe and comfortable working environment for your team, which could boost productivity and protect your company’s finances.