Month: December 2021

Digital Branding

Tips to Shift Your Company Brand

These days, branding is such a huge part of business. Between social media, SEO website building, and blogging to inform and engage customers, keeping a consistent brand can help you find your target demographics. Yet sometimes you need to change your brand message and pivot to avoid a slump and create new demand for your products and services. Whether you’re an established brand or are still finding your brand message, making a shift can refresh your employees and your customers alike. Below are some tips to shift your company brand and gain more success.

Take a Class

Not Creating Clear Brand Guidelines

One thing you should think about doing is taking a class. If you want to learn something new to bolster your business model and shift your business branding, try taking a course. You will find that the more you learn about a particular subject, the more ideas you will have about the branding and direction of your company.

If, for example, you want to reframe your business as an academic endeavor and need to learn more about math, taking online college algebra courses will open up doors to calculate variables into your company and use this mentality in your branding. Whatever it is, taking a class to learn more about an area of expertise you want to brand your business with is only helpful. You won’t regret learning either way.

Relocate

Not Protecting Your Brand’s Image

Another thing to think about when you are rebranding your company is where you are set up. So much of your business’s identity has to do with where you are. The taxes and regulations will also be affected. Whether you’re in an expensive city or want to set up shop in a place that suits your sensibility, relocating is a great way to rebrand. You don’t need to stay in the United States also. Setting up your business in another country isn’t easy, but there are paths and steps to moving your company abroad. If what you need is a complete rebranding that includes moving to another country, it isn’t so far-fetched.

Change Your Look

Whether you want to shift everything about the business or not, changing your look can get the job done. What kind of graphics do you have now? How have you been advertising? What about your website? Could it use a new vibe? Changing the look of your company can facilitate the branding process. You could do it before you change anything or as a big reveal that you are doing something completely new. Wherever you’re at in the process, changing the look and atmosphere of your company will get things going and provide the ability to pivot.

Find a New Name

When you are going through big changes in personnel, investors, or direction, finding a new name for your company is a great way to facilitate a rebrand. This is usually a total shift in branding, but it doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing the same basic work. It just depends on how far you want to go with the rebrand. A new name will differentiate your company from any bad press that has been generated by someone who is no longer a part of your company. Whether you’re avoiding the perils of bad press or simply want to show your new direction, finding a new name for your business is huge.

Cultivate a Vision

Being Too Complicated

Perhaps the most important thing to do in a rebrand is cultivate a new vision. You should also make this vision known. Whatever you are doing next, showing your new vision to the world is incredibly important. If you aren’t clear about what you are doing now, people won’t know what to expect from you. Cultivating a clear vision is imperative to your next move.

Shifting a company brand is never an easy thing to do. Luckily, there are a lot of options to move forward. Whether you’re avoiding heat connected to a person who is no longer with the company or want to show that you are doing something different. Everyone’s goals and ambitions are different, but if you are trying to shift your branding there are plenty of ways to get it done. You got this!

Local Branding

Top Local Search Ranking Signals Businesses Need to Know

Most customers prefer searching for nearby local businesses for products and services. This latest search trend has made local SEO more important than ever. 

No wonder businesses have started investing in local SEO.

How can SMBs achieve top local rankings in colossal competition?

The simple answer is Google’s Local Pack.

Google’s Local Pack highlights the top three search-related businesses, as shown in the shared screenshot. It helps customers find business details in one place, which boosts the chances of conversions.

Hence, we have shared top local ranking signals to help your business appear in Google’s Local Pack and hit top local SERPs.

1. Google My Business

Google My Business is a free-to-use platform that lets you connect with your potential customers across Google searches. Add your business details, upload photos, and write a description stating your products and services. Attract new prospects by explaining what makes your business unique.

2. Listings on Review Sites

Business listings on popular review sites help boost the local SERPs. Some of the top review sites include – 

If you haven’t claimed your business listings on these review sites, do it at the earliest.

3. NAP Citations

NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) citations depict the websites and places where your business name, address, and phone number are listed.

Google uses NAP citations to check and confirm whether your business information is accurate. This attribute has made NAP citations one of the vital local SEO ranking signals.

4. High-Quality Google Reviews

High-quality Google reviews significantly improve the online visibility of local businesses.

Reviews with relevant keywords send Google signals stating the business is trustworthy. So, always request your customers to leave genuine feedback on your services on Google.

5. Responses to Reviews

Reviews with response counts also contribute to improved local SERPs. 

As an SMB owner, make sure you respond to every customer who’s taken time to write a review for your services. 

6. Business Website Optimization 

Optimize your website for local searches. Include meta titles, descriptions, keywords that help users explore your business and its location. 

For instance, instead of optimizing for ‘the best laptop repair services,’ optimize for ‘the best laptop repair services, Pune.’

7. Content with Local Keywords 

Make sure to write and publish quality content on your website that speaks about your local events, community, services, or anything relevant to your products and services. Use local keywords to help Google discover and rank your business fast. 

Wrapping Up

Local SEO can be a gamechanger for businesses, especially SMBs aiming to enhance their ROI.

If you are one of them, the list of specified top local search ranking signals will serve as a quick guide to increase your performance in local SERPs.  

You can also refer to the insightful infographic by Ronkot for all the latest updates on local SEO practices. It will help your business be a part of Google’s Local Pack and let your customers find you with ease. 

Local Branding

Unique Ways to Build Customer Trust and Loyalty

To run a successful business, you must harbor a loyal band of customers who are there with your business every step of the way. If you want to venture out in a new direction or expand your company, having a dedicated customer base would help. You might have noticed that big conglomerates often launch new products, and quite successfully so. Even if they go to a wholly different route with their approach to product marketing, they always maintain one golden rule: the customer comes first. With the benefit of customers in mind, they strategically plan their advertisements. Continue reading this article to learn practical tips for building a loyal customer base. 

Customer Service: 

The motto of every company should be to serve the customer first. Be sure to offer excellent customer service. And it is only possible when your staff is trained properly on how to deal with demanding customers or tricky situations. Everyone can be polite and handle situations well without challenge, but only the top firms know how to handle a crisis with grace and dignity. When in doubt, remember: The Client is always right. Whether you sell a product or provide services, it would help to have 24×7 customer service available for the clients. 

  • Ask the clients to review the products and services they’ve purchased. Asking for feedback (without being pushy about it) is a standard business strategy. The online review can very well boost your sales by attracting the attention of other clients. 
  • If, however, you receive a negative review online, be sure to rectify your mistake as soon as possible without being defensive about it. Again, it is not the mistakes that make a company look bad, but how the firm handles a challenging situation gets everyone’s attention. 

Keep In Touch: 

When a customer buys a product from you, you get information about that client. Be sure to use this information to keep in touch with them so that they know you care. You get emails or phone numbers from your clients; you can easily send personalized advert based on their previous purchases. Or you may send gifts to your selected clients who bring business to you on a consistent level. For example, many firms distribute customized calendars to clients and staff to build goodwill. Calendar printing doesn’t cost much, but it is a fantastic way to let the clients know that they matter to your firm. 

Separate Goals:

You want to keep your old clients and at the same time, add new ones to the list. Therefore, your approach to these two client bases should be separate. It would help if the business formed a personal relationship with individual clients by creating a remarkable social media presence and sending personalized emails. 

Technology:

There are various tools and software that help you analyze sales. You can quickly learn relevant information about a customer that can boost your product sales. For example, you can categorize the buyers into age groups, gender identity, and even pin code areas. Suppose you find that certain ethnic groups or people from certain income areas purchase your products more than others. In that case, you can modify your advertising strategies to target that specific group. Or you may also target a different audience base to expand the business. Let technological advancement help you grow your business exponentially.

Partnership with Other Businesses:

An innovative way to grow your company is to partner with businesses that complement yours. For example, if you are a greetings card company, you might partner with a local café or cake shop to get more clients. If you run a YouTube Channel, teaming up with similar channels will automatically grow your audience base.

Local Branding

7 Basic Steps to Setting up Business in Another Country

These days, the world has become a global village. With that in mind, choosing to shake things up, move abroad and start a business far from your native country does seem like a  very reasonable idea. However, no matter how the rise of digital technologies made the world smaller, the national borders, different cultures, and various regulations are still there to make the life of expatriate entrepreneurs very challenging.

Sure, things may look the same on the surface but it takes only one ill-advised business move to prove us wrong. But these obstacles are far from impossible to overcome and the success of your ex-pat company will ultimately depend on your strategy, knowledge, and good decision. Let’s see if we can help you along the way.

Research the local business environment

Running a company means leveraging countless different factors most of which are not under your direct control. Understanding these circumstances will help you articulate your portfolio and business model and adjust them to the local political and economic environment. So, put as much effort as you can into understanding the local regulatory climate, political history, economic potential, cultural differences, and the previous COVID-19 containment measures. Knowing these things will help you anticipate the moves of the local government and set up the contingencies for the eventual fluctuations.

Turn your anticipations into clear actionable objectives

First and foremost, you need to have a clear idea about why you are exactly moving abroad and what do you want to achieve once there. Once you determine these overarching goals, you will have a much easier job identifying short-term objectives that will, step-by-step, lead you closer to the finish line. Also, being aware of these objectives will help you make more informed decisions in regards to the tasks like narrowing down the business location, deciding on the business structure, crafting a branding strategy, etc. All these moves need to be driven by the goals you have set before moving.

Set up the infrastructure for effortless collaboration

Taking into consideration you are probably close business ties with the native country and hire labor all around the world, you need to have the tools that will render regional differences nonexistent and allow effortless collaboration. Be sure to pay attention even to the smallest details. For instance, the Gmail CRM famously doesn’t have a feature for mass-sharing the Gmail contacts across the profiles which is essential for effective CRM. So, you will probably need to get a third-party plugin that makes it possible to share Google contacts between users. The more details like these you manage to cover, the better.

Figure out the financial infrastructure

Depending on the country where they moved to, the expatriates may have a legal status that cuts them off from the traditional financing channels. Although these problems can be solved by partnering up with the local entrepreneurs or relying more heavily on investors rather than financing institutions, you need to have these foundations laid out before moving on to any legal procedures or immediate plans. The same can be said about taxes, payroll, and other important business facets. If possible, you should leave these tasks to local third-party vendors and focus on the tasks that are making money.

Set up the startup budget

Now that you have all these things covered, it is finally time for putting together the startup budget. To do that you will need to take into consideration the following factors:

  • Available financing options
  • Liquid and non-liquid assets
  • Expenses you need to make before launch
  • Fixed costs (mortgage, payroll, benefits, etc.)
  • Variable costs (raw materials, equipment, utilities, etc.)
  • Estimated monthly revenue

If possible, your budget should cover the six months’ worth of expenses to make sure your company has enough time to branch out and establish an initial customer base.

Assemble a team of prospective local talents

Like all other companies, your startup will probably heavily rely on outsourcing and foreign labor. Still, if you want to truly make an impact on the regional market, the core of your company should be comprised of prospective talents with good connections in the local business community and excellent knowledge of the local climate. Also, assert strong leadership and fill in the senior positions with people who will be able to inspire loyalty, lead by example, keep an honest, transparent relationship with lower-level employees, and take into consideration the specific needs of the local labor. 

Look for the support of the ex-pat community

Although you should avoid making your future company needlessly “ethnic” or oriented towards a narrow audience, spreading the word across the ex-pat community and making it a launchpad for your future efforts does seem like a natural move. Depending on the time you have spent abroad you have a reasonably developed list of contacts you can leverage for securing financing and establishing your initial customer base. It only takes a couple of clever guerilla stunts, strong social media calls to action, referral strategies, and similar marketing moves to turn this narrow pool into a fully developed customer base.

These few examples should give you a general idea about the obstacles you are going to experience when starting your future company and hopefully outline the steps you need to take to avoid them. Moving abroad always presents an excellent opportunity for a fresh start but the life of an expatriate also comes with various challenges. The success of your company will depend on your ability to find a path between these two extremes.

Local Branding

Discover the Benefits of Field Service Automation

While field service is as old as the business world itself, there’s been a massive expansion of the field service management industry lately. At this rate, it is expected that the field service management market might reach $5.1 billion by the year 2025.

The reasons behind this sudden boom are quite numerous. A good field service allows businesses to meet and exceed the expectations of their customers, reduce operational costs, and become more competitive. With all of this in mind and without further ado, you should definitely be aware of several benefits of field service automation.

Higher Level of Professionalism

Response time and adequate feedback are key factors in determining your perceived level of professionalism. There are other things that come hand in hand with field service automation, like giving everyone the type of treatment they deserve by automating the process itself. You see, once this type of process gets automated, it becomes far more systemic. By being thorough in your field interventions, you will be deemed as both more professional and attentive.

Digitalization, alongside automation, also leads to the availability of information on any location. If all the data – including the customer ticket, can be accessed in real-time by the field team, they’ll be more informed, and their actions on the spot will be far more effective. This will be evident even to your clients. As an end result, your company’s representatives (in this case, your customer support and your field team) will seem more competent.

Resource Optimization

Highly accurate field services will inevitably lead to much greater resource optimization. With better response time and route optimization, the fuel economy of your field teams will get a noticeable boost. It’s not just about the number of resources spent but the utilization of available resources. This too is something that great field service automation can help you with.

Second, the fact that the diagnostics will be automatic, your team will carry all the necessary equipment for the task at hand. This means that there’s a reduced likelihood that a repeat trip will have to be made. In other words, operational costs involving work-related commutes are far lower. Most importantly, this reduces the time between the client reporting the problem and your field team resolving it, resulting in a massive reputation boost.

Superior Coordination

Your field teams are just a tiny cog in a much greater machine. In order for your field team to do their job, your management, supply acquisitions, production team, and customer support need to do their job as admirably as possible. In other words, a lot of things need to come together in order for field service automation to give the desired effects. With field service automation, this becomes a lot easier to achieve.

One of the reasons behind this is the fact that the majority of field service platforms are cloud-based. This means that your field teams and those coordinating them can access the data they need and edit tasks from their personal devices. This global access makes communication, cooperation, and coordination much organic and nips the majority of logistical issues in the bud.

Greater Customer Satisfaction

One of the first benefits of field service automation is that it provides a much quicker response. As a result, you get better customer satisfaction. Sure, your field team might not be available right away, but just by providing your customers with an accurate ETA of the team, you’ll already ensure a great start. Adding to this, field service automation usually implies better diagnostics, and the successful resolution of the problem becomes even more likely.

There are several reasons why customer satisfaction is so important. First of all, it’s essential for your word of mouth (WOM), including the reviews and ratings you receive online. Second, it builds up customer loyalty. After a single successful interaction, 27% of customers are bound to return. If they’ve had a positive previous experience, chances are that they’ll come back for more. Even more importantly, 20% of your regular customers make as much as 80% of your profit.

Record Keeping

In order to improve your field service, you need to have some data that you can start working with. For instance, you need to have an estimate of the average time it takes your team to get to the target destination, the average cost of the intervention, and some specific feedback about these operations. Remember that a single intervention might not be representative, but you can start drawing conclusions once you have enough data.

Another benefit of field service automation is that it makes storing client history easy and systemic. In fact, when using the right field service automation tool, you can rely on this data to be delivered on-demand. This means that the next time you have to “activate” your field team, they’ll have the previous client data available, which will make this intervention more effective. Moreover, it will help them boost customer satisfaction even further (by giving the client what appears to be preferential treatment).

Insight Into Field Teams

For a lot of entrepreneurs, the question of what field teams do when they leave your premises is no short of a mystery. After all, while you can monitor your staff members personally or by using a remote employee monitoring software (remote workers), it’s quite difficult to make an estimate of the work done by a field team. With the help of field service automation tools, even this is made possible and with much better KPIs.

The majority of these tools have GPS trackers pre-installed, which is necessary, seeing as how fleet management is one of the essential field management aspects. Other than this, the above-mentioned reporting and record-keeping system also do a great job at improving your evaluation efforts. The collection of on-field data with mobile devices carried by your field teams will further enhance your ability to develop a much deeper understanding of the work they do.

Everything On a Single Device

Finally, in order to get more control, you want to centralize your workplace. This can be quite hard when a part of your team is in the office, some are working remotely, and you also have a field team. The collaboration tool might be the right way to go, but field teams definitely need the support of their own. This is why, while you want to keep everything on a single cloud-based platform or collaboration tool, you also want to have service automation software.

Most importantly, you need to adopt a new mindset when it comes to field service automation. You see, when accessing all of these platforms from your mobile device, they are all just a click away. In other words, you don’t have to keep everything on a single platform. Having it all on a single device is good enough. This is especially true if you already use private IM tools to communicate with some of your team members.

In Conclusion

In the end, field service automation is crucial for both your branding and your operational ability. As such, finding a way to improve it and make it more efficient is bound to result in the improvement of your overall business efficiency. While there are a lot of specialized tools to help you out, it is also important that you put field service automation as a priority when restructuring your organization. This way, the results are bound to follow.

Local Branding

Top 5 Tips to Make Your Online Business More Profitable

A good idea and an online store are not enough to make money. Given how large the eCommerce industry is, it is natural to see various entrepreneurs and well-established businesses do their best to get a larger share of the market.

Even if you were to take a look at niches that might seem uncompetitive, the perspective changes once you do a quick search on Google and go through all the online stores that appear in the results.

From small stores to known brands, there are a plethora of different options, and consumers have plenty to choose from.

Of course, for someone who aspires to start an online store themselves, this competition indicates hardship, and overcoming other enterprises that had a head start could be so hard that you might lose motivation before accomplishing anything.

Having said that, others managed to start from scratch and create a source of income. And since there are plenty of examples of success, it means that you should be able to do it as well.

Once you have an idea and an online store up and running, you can move to what matters—advertising and driving traffic to the website that will hopefully convert. For that, you will need a strategy and some ideas.

Publish Customer Reviews

Drive social proof and convince shoppers that your goods or services are worth it by providing customer reviews.

In case you are selling your own product, you will need to encourage customers to leave reviews. 

And in case you are dropshipping, you can look to import reviews from other stores using import tools. Look at a detailed comparison of Opinew vs Fera and decide which of these two solid plugins suits you the best.

Now, as for those who do not dropshipping, getting customer reviews can become easier by:

  • Offering them incentives, such as free shipping or discounts on the next purchase after submitting a review
  • Sending follow-up emails asking for a review
  • Providing review templates and letting upload video recordings

Create FOMO

The fear of missing out is one of the oldest methods to drive more sales. People are programmed in a way that they do not want to miss out on good deals, and FOMO drives the impulse to purchase something before it disappears.

Imagine someone visiting a product’s page and seeing that there are only 5 items left in stock. In addition, there is a message saying that the last purchase was made 10 minutes ago and that there are 3 other people viewing the same product. 

It is most likely that this person will not take a risk and add the item to their shopping cart so that they can complete the transaction.

Running discounts for a limited time is another example of FOMO. Announce that there will be a sale on certain goods or services in the next 24 hours, and you are bound to notice a significant increase in website traffic.

Offer Flexible Shipping

Flexible shipping is another aspect of an online business that you can utilize to your advantage. Shoppers who see free shipping next to a product are more likely to buy it. There is a negative psychological effect when you have to consider shipping fees. After all, who wants to pay for shipping and a product at the same time?

It is common to play with prices so that you do not lose profits even if the shipping is free. Compare having to pay 10 dollars for a product and 10 dollars for shipping and having to pay 20 dollars for a product. Naturally, the latter option looks more appealing.

Simplify the Checkout Process

Overcomplicated checkout processes are a hindrance, and they should not exist if you want to make more sales. 

One of the primary reasons behind abandoned shopping carts is the time it takes to go through the checkout.

For one, do not force registration when shoppers can complete the transaction as guests. Also, do not ask for random registration details when an email account and a password are often enough.

The less time people have to spend at the checkout, the more likely they are to complete a transaction.

As a side note, do not limit available payment options if possible. Flexibility is also key, and an online store stands to gain more if it provides multiple payment gateways to its customers.

Promote on Multiple Marketing Channels

The last bit of advice is pretty straightforward. Whether you are serious about making a lot of money or creating a side hustle, you should not expect to profit without promoting the store.

Social media, PPC marketing, emails, and cold outreach, influencer marketing, search engine optimization, guest blogging, and other methods have their pros and cons. Test different approaches and see which work and which do not.

Once you get a better idea, you can build your marketing strategy around a couple of methods and focus on those. 

Local Branding

Tips for Sticker Design

Printing stickers for your business or art is a quick and relatively cheap way to get your brand out there. Customers and clients love getting stickers and putting them on laptops, bags, or even cars to show their support. But a sticker needs to be designed well for it to succeed in the marketing world. If you’re looking in the L.A. area for stickers on-demand, you’ll want to have a ready-made sticker to print. Here are a few design tips for your stickers.

Use Different Shapes

Stickers typically come in two shapes, square or circle. And while something a little off-shape, such as a diamond or oval, may work to catch the eye, non-standard forms work better. Attention is drawn to the unusual, so making a sticker with a unique shape will get your sticker seen more.

If you have a mascot, or your art is of a person or animal, design the shape of your sticker around the shape of your subject. The curves and contours of the art will make the sticker stand out and will invite fun placement on different objects. In a sea of 90-degree angles and perfect circles, your unique shape will stand out.

Keep Font Readable

Nothing is worse than having to squint or tilt your head to read something. Stickers are, by nature, small and already a little difficult to see if there’s text. But using a font that is hard to read or doesn’t allow for more than two words without getting all squished together makes for a terrible sticker design.

If you’re using text on your sticker, either as a full quote or just your/your company’s name, make sure you pick a font that is legible and easy to read when small. It’s best to steer clear of any overly decorative or curvy fonts unless you’re only using one word or your text makes up the majority of your sticker design. Using simple and clean fonts helps your sticker stand out and gets your message read.

Maintain Color Coordination

Chances are if you’re making stickers, you’ve already got a brand for you or your company. Which means you have a logo and most likely a website. This means there are colors and designs already associated with your brand. If you’re printing out any marketing material, you want to make sure you keep cohesion with the rest of your brand. Printing out a lime-green sticker may seem like a good idea to attract attention, but if your logo and website are dark blue and silver, you’ll lose the connection, and your sticker won’t be recognizably yours.

Getting your stickers printed on demand is an excellent tool for keeping up with your marketing. But if your sticker isn’t designed well, it can be a futile effort. By utilizing unique shapes, with readable text and colors that match the rest of your brand, you can make quality stickers that represent you and your company.