Results for: business website

E-commerce, Shopify, and Dropshipping: Your Business Review on These Outlets

Steven on September 26, 2018

If you’re looking into making money by establishing a business, you will be surprised and overwhelmed to see the market explode with a ton of options – and we are talking just between physical and online outlets. If you want to get into the online business, you may find yourself having a hard time choosing among building an e-commerce website, using drop shipping, or going for Shopify as a means of conducting business. Being “overwhelmed” is an understatement, given how each platform offers a lot of potentials. If you have to choose one, though, what would it be? A journalreview course and other business sources can provide you with detailed information of each of the three (3), but in this article, we will give you a quick summary for you to have an idea.

The global digital market scene is not a new place for businesses. In fact, statistics indicate that global retail sales for e-commerce can skyrocket to up to $4.5 trillion in as early as 2021, and the spread of retail e-commerce worldwide resulted in “powerhouses,” such as countries in the West, being overtaken by those in the East. The biggest markets today include China ($672 billion), the United States ($340 billion), the United Kingdom ($99 billion), and Japan ($79 billion). A lot of people also go beyond domestic when they order products online, which makes the online shopping scene an exciting venture for you to take.

Choosing Your Business Outlet: E-commerce, Shopify, or Dropshipping

With the above in mind, studying these platforms through a journalreview course can lead you in the direction, especially if you are really serious in this endeavor.

For the meantime, here’s a brief overview of how these three (3) platforms work to serve your needs:

E-commerce

E-commerce is a general term used to describe e-commerce websites, which are platforms that allow you to make a business and provide services and products to a particular online audience. This is helpful, as a lot of consumers prefer making purchases online because e-commerce websites allow them to access products and services instantly and conveniently.
Unlike the other two platforms, e-commerce websites are actually built from the ground up. This means it’s technically your own website, and you play with how it’s supposed to look like. Of course, this also means having to do the work in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), website design, and marketing to get traffic.
E-commerce websites do have a much wider reach, though, as people can now purchase products and services from you any time of the day. Your store can be open during holidays, and you’re as free to provide as many services as you like.
There are management and web development platforms can set up a website for you in no time. This means if you have a product or a service to sell, it’s really as easy as one-two-three. Of course, managing your website by yourself is an entire beast of its own. You may need to hire a small workforce to help you handle your business, but that also means potentially getting a lot of profit in the process.

Shopify businesses

Shopify businesses are good alternatives to selling services and products online, primarily because it makes setting up a platform for your service easier. Unlike e-commerce websites that will require setting up everything on your own, Shopify in itself is a platform catering to the needs of small businesses who want to have a more convenient means of selling goods.
Shopify stores can benefit from a whole host of features from Shopify, especially when they become premium members. Shopify’s features can be integrated easily integrate into your store, which means you don’t need to hire a technical expert for processes that can be accomplished with just a few clicks.
Shopify stores can literally be made in just three steps. Not to mention, with Shopify’s easy-to-use features, you can offer you services without even needing to go through intense technical training on how to handle your data. You just need to add your products, customize the design of your site, and finalize your domain.
Despite the many advantages Shopify offers to its entrepreneurs, there are also risks involved. As your store is dependent on the performance of Shopify, your service is pretty much in trouble should there be a reason for Shopify to close. Moreover, there might come a time where changes in Shopify policies might make it harder for you to sell your services. Being dependent on the convenience Shopify provides can be a disadvantage, so it’s best to use this platform as a stepping stone while learning how to create independent platforms.

Drop shipping

Drop shipping is in itself a new spin on the online service and product selling market, as it essentially tackles a new dimension for retail. In dropshipping, stores don’t have products in stock. They get products from third parties and have these products shipped to customers. This eliminates the hassle of buying products wholesale without being able to sell everything.
When you utilize drop shipping, you will save a lot of time and resources as you will not need any physical stock with you. This is helpful because you don’t need to buy products in advance and end up not selling everything. The risk here, of course, is when manufacturers don’t have what you need yet, so you should pay close attention to the availability of your products and production capabilities of the manufacturer.
You don’t need complicated processes for storage and orders. A lot of e-commerce websites with their own physical stocks need large containers or storage spaces and an organized system for picking orders, packing, and shipping. Drop shipping allows you to outsource these processes, making you earn money without a lot of effort.
Of course, the catch here is that you might lose profit if no one actually buys through your website. This means the crunch to actually get consumers to buy your services is immense, as people buying your products will be your lifeline. Drop shipping also requires making connections with manufacturers and other product providers, which in itself takes time and experience to accomplish.

The Bottom Line: Choosing the Best Business Outlet Takes Time and Planning

Choosing the best platform for your business involves identifying the nature of your business, the functionalities you need, and your own abilities to manage the business. This means the “best” among the three options really depends on what you’re looking for. Review the points above to help you make an informed choice in establishing a successful business online.

Digital Branding

How to Rank A Website Quickly in Google

Steven on August 21, 2018

Everyone who has ever tried it knows that getting on the first page of Google search results is not easy. But, on the other hand, it’s far from impossible. As experts have shown times and times again, reaching the top results can be achieved very quickly if you know which road to take. Just thinking about the need to find the right (meaning unique but still highly competitive) keywords is enough to realize that patience is indeed a virtue when it comes to the search engines, but there are a lot of other tasks you can perform to boost your website and thus increase the speed of this process. The internet is full of highly doubtful tactics that can easily backfire – the only way to rank a website quickly is to do it naturally, with so-called white label SEO. In other words, it’s important to realize what exactly Google wants from you and what is the quickest way to provide that.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship

With all those algorithms changes Google has been announcing it may seem impossible to figure out what exactly you’re supposed to do. As soon as you start adjusting your website to certain requests the new ones seem to appear from nowhere. it almost seems if someone has been intentionally keeping you in the dark – well, it might be something like that. Think of Facebook – if you want to gain access to the information about someone’s page you need to send the friend request, or you are forced to monitor all his/hers posts closely and try to catch every bit of information you can. Same goes for Google – if you want to rank faster you need to make your website become Google-friendly. Google doesn’t accept friend requests, but you can achieve the similar result through Google Search Console. This is a free service designed by Google to make your website’s research functionality more manageable through the collection of reports and tools that will enable you to find and correct errors and create a better strategy to optimize your rankings. Basically, with the beginning of this friendship, Google will be able to find your website more easily, and you can even request for a friendly favour of force crawl every time you make changes to your website.

Every person leads to a machine (and vice versa)

This may sound like a post-apocalyptic setting of some sci-fi movie, but today it’s simply a reality we live in. If you don’t have an account on social media networks it is almost as if you don’t exist. True, you can be a rebel and promote face-to-face conversation values, but when it comes to the visibility of your business you’ll need to make an exception. Google wants to see you on social media – the interaction with your customers through these platforms is a very important factor for your ranking speed. The more links you build, the faster you’ll land on that first page. And while high-quality link building takes a lot of time, linking your content to social media can easily make it spread like fire. All you need to do is to identify social networks your target audience is on and to keep your posts public. That will produce shares and instant traffic which will automatically rank you higher and faster. The level of your engagement on social media is a decisive factor when it comes to the amount of useful linking you’ll get.

Now for the vice-versa part, which comes with few modifications. Maybe every machine leads back to a person, but when it comes to platforms this doesn’t hold water. Today people use various platforms for their searchings, the smaller the better, and being mobile-friendly has become mandatory already in 2015. That’s why having the responsive web design has become a major ranking element. It provides the same quality of user experience on any device and there is no variation in loading time. And you don’t have to ask Google in order to know that your rankings highly depend on whether your users enjoy spending time on your site – finding content and links easily and quickly – or abandon the ship with frustration after it failed to load in 3 seconds.

Word, words, words

And now, back to those keywords. If you ever wondered why Shakespeare’s ‛Hamlet’ has been staged for over 400 years you’ve probably noticed that it’s very opened to various readings even in this modern age. And all that variety comes from a single Hamlet’s line in the second act of the second scene – ‛Words, words, words’. It is not so much about what Hamlet is reading, but how he’s reading it – people interpret words in various ways, having their own associations, and this becomes very apparent in their online searches. Some of them type in very obscure phrases that have low competition levels, and others type combinations with already high search volume. Your goal should be to find keywords that are somewhere in the middle and a tool from Google called Keyword Planner can be your greatest ally in this ordeal. It will also help you with your grammar – yes, if you haven’t noticed, Google is also monitoring your language use and sentence structure. If they have a spammy and wonky ring they’ll certainly not speed up the ranking process, so don’t let bad English stand in your way. Being precise always leads to greater speed, so it would be wise to also include modifiers – even if you’re not tied to a certain state or area branching your pages is certainly a plus.

As the popular saying of a younger generation goes – ‛Father Google knows everything’. So don’t waste your time searching for dubious shortcuts. All you need to do is to ask for a friendly advice, but choose your words carefully.

Digital Branding

A Guide to Boosting Lead Generation With SEO

Steven on November 17, 2022

If you’re a business owner and want to get into the world of SEO to help your business grow and generate more leads, here’s all you need to know about SEO, how it works, and how it can help boost your website’s online visibility and traffic.

What is SEO?

Let’s first discuss what SEO is and how it works. If you came across SEO before, you know how important it is for digital marketing. Some may even say that it’s the most crucial element of digital marketing.

In order to generate more sales, your goal should be to boost your website’s online traffic and visibility. That’s where SEO comes in. It helps you improve your user traffic, website visibility, conversion rate, and return on investment. One of the most useful tools that many successful businesses rely on is SEO lead generation. If you want to see some impressive returns, using this tool can help you reach that goal.

It’s also important to know that SEO helps businesses generate organic lead generation. With improved leads, visibility, and online presence, new customers will be flooding your website thanks to your high ranking on search engines. The best part is that SEO keeps growing every day and with it, new improved methods of generating leads also keep improving almost on a daily basis. If you learn how to keep up with search engines, Google algorithms, and SEO, you will see amazing results.

The following are some of the most efficient ways you can boost your lead generation using SEO.

Website Audit

First and foremost, your business must have its website. Think of a business website as a window to your business. This is where your customers get the first impression of your brand. The website needs to be neatly organized and aesthetic. However, what’s even more important is that your website is SEO-friendly. If you want to achieve better organic lead generation, you need to prioritize website audit as one of the most important factors. It affects your website’s search engine visibility and helps you boost your online traffic. It can also help you sell your website more effectively.

The following website audit tips will help you get the most out of your SEO efforts:

Remove low-quality content from the index
Reduce the loading time for your web pages
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly too
Detect and fix any broken links
Locate and solve indexing issues
Index only one version of your site
Examine your natural online traffic
Increase the number of people who click on your links

Intensive Keyword Research

One of the most important aspects of SEO is keyword usage. If you just use random keywords you think of without doing your research first, you won’t achieve much.

If you want to perfect your SEO strategy and reach a higher ranking, you need to research the keywords you’re using. Keep your target audience in mind as you’re doing the research. Type in different variations of the keyword you came up with and see how they’re performing on search engines. See how your competition is doing when using these keywords. Also, notice how relevant these keywords are to your audience. Lastly, try to aim for the long-tail keywords, since they tend to perform a lot better.

On-Page Content

Speaking of keywords, knowing how to provide on-page content that aligns with your target audience and their needs is also very important. If you want to optimize your on-page content, you have to know how to align your keywords with your headings, titles, internal links, and overall content.

You need to read how to properly optimize your content. You can’t expect to have any shortcuts that will take you to a higher search engine ranking. In order to reach better visibility and boost your rankings, you first need to deliver strong, relevant, and useful content. Search engines recognize the content that online users actively look for and then they push out the content that matches those demands.

So, here’s what kind of on-page SEO practices you should aim to include:

Continue posting new content (be consistent and deliver quality)
Optimize your title tags
Search engine-friendly URL
Optimize your meta descriptions
Optimize your headings
Target your keyword in the first paragraph

Competitors’ Research

You may strive to do things differently from your competition. While you may think that this will help you stand out, it’s not always the case. If you want to boost your search engine rankings and overall website visibility, you need to do your research on your competition. You need to analyze and see what it is that they’re doing that’s helping them reach higher rankings.

In SEO terms, we call this an SEO competitor analysis. Sometimes, it’s also referred to as an SEO competitive analysis. It includes:

Observing the competitors’ content
Examining the keywords and links they use
Looking at how they optimize their pages and content

Overall, it entails comparing your content and SEO efforts to other companies to see how they do things differently. This way, you may discover a new way of approaching SEO strategies that can help your business grow.

Content Strategy

Publishing content is the first step. However, you also need to have a steady content strategy set in place. Instead of going blindly into creating and publishing content based on your assumptions about what your audience wants to see, you need to prioritize doing your research and creating content that your audience actively seeks online.

The content strategy is extremely important when it comes to how your website and your content will be discovered in the first place. Here are some tips on how you can approach your content strategy and boost your chances of getting discovered by the right audience:

Make a list of potential subjects you want to cover
Come up with long-tail keywords that are related to the above-mentioned subjects
Make a separate page for each and every subject
Create a blog
Come up with a regular blogging routine
Make a link-building strategy
Make sure you compress your media files before uploading them to your site
Keep up with the latest SEO trends and practices

Invest in local SEO

If you’re just starting out or you own a small business, local SEO is your best friend. One of the best and most efficient ways to reach your local audience and start expanding your business in your area is to develop a good local SEO strategy. Understanding your local SEO algorithms and knowing how to create content that will attract people from your area is very important.

If you feel inexperienced in this area of SEO, you can always hire a local company that will know exactly how to master local SEO and reach your target audience. Just make sure you find a company that is based in your area. For instance, if your business is based on the east coast of Australia, you can seek local SEO services in Sydney and find experts who will help you handle your local SEO strategies and efforts.

Backlink Strategy

SEO word is written on the screen of the laptop

When a third party links your website that is how you receive a backlink. Most of the time, websites link other sources in order to clarify some information in their content. They also do this to endorse the site they got the link from. By having your website linked somewhere else, you show Google that your content is authoritative and holds useful and relevant information. As a result, this helps you reach higher rankings.

Both the number and quality of the backlinks you receive will determine your domain authority. With a higher link authority, you get higher search engine rankings.

This makes backlinks one of the most crucial elements of a successful SEO plan. This isn’t just a one-time investment. You have to actively work on them to keep up the high link authority. Backlinks can easily become obsolete, vanish, or even lose their relevance over time. So, if you want to stay on top, you need to actively look for new backlink improvement opportunities.

Outreach

Lastly, you also need to take care of your outreach. Outreach is, essentially, how you obtain high-quality connections from off-site domains and redirect them to your client’s website. SEO outreach is basically a part of your internet marketing strategy. If you don’t do it correctly, it can even ruin your whole SEO strategy. Backlinks, previously mentioned, can help you with this and improve your company’s organic ranking.

Conclusion

To sum up, efficient SEO is one of the best tools to help your business grow. This includes boosting your online visibility, traffic, and search engine ranking. If you want to get the most out of SEO, you need to come up with a solid strategy. You need to research your keywords, analyze your competition, create high-quality content, optimize your website and your content, receive backlinks, work on your local SEO, ensure an efficient website audit, and create a successful outreach.

SaaS Branding

Basic Pre-Launch Checklist: 5 Things to Double Check Before Going Live

Steven on May 15, 2021

Before you land your first service contract or take your first product order, you owe it to the longevity of your business to double-check your pre-launch plans before even thinking about going live. While it is true, a soft launch can help iron out a lot of the wrinkles, it’s still a good idea to review certain business details to make sure all the kinks are sorted before going official.

Launching a business is a serious commitment. It’s best to prepare for business success than miss details that could ultimately lead to setbacks or failure before you even get your business off the ground. Here are a few basic to-do’s you may want to check before moving forward with opening, launching, and going live with your business.

Re-Check Your Business Name: This may seem like the most obvious advice in the book, but you might be surprised how many businesses crumble when they realize their business name, website domain, or business slogan is infringing on the preexisting presence of another business identity. You’ve likely done your due diligence and researched to ensure you’re not stepping on any existing business title-holder’s toes. But do yourself a favor and double-check your business name is clear of any competing conflicts before going live.

Get a Second Opinion on Branding: Too often an entrepreneur is so in love with their message or brand, they lose all objectivity. This could lead to big misconceptions from the public and bigger problems after going live. It happens to the biggest moguls in business. For example, Kentucky Fried Chicken once botched its famous bi-line, “finger-licking good” by mistakenly translating it in Chinese to read, “eat your fingers off.” Save yourself the embarrassment and costly mistakes by getting additional opinions about your logo, brand, message, and motto before going live.

Confirm You Are Compliant: Are you sure you’re licensed to sell your products in Alaska as well as Nepal? What about taxes, are you charging the right percentages? If you’ve hired employees, do you have proper OSHA certification for your business and the safety of your staff? You get the idea. Double-check your business is compliant with city, state, national and international standards before launching. There’s nothing worse than tasting the success of a business only to have it shut down due to noncompliance.

Review Your Business Website: If you’re like most trending startups these days, a huge amount of your visibility (and liability) comes directly through your online presence. That means it’s crucial to sandbox your business website to confirm everything is in tip-top working order. Double-check your online order forms. Do testing to make sure the shopping cart works and payment transactions go through successfully. Check your contact page and confirm customers can message you easily to the correct email address. Run a grammar check on all your landing pages. It might seem innocuous, but a sales page with even the slightest typos or grammatical errors can leave a bad impression which could mean the difference between a sale or a click out of your website. Have a neutral party do an audit on your business website so you can rest assured you are making the best online impression possible.

Check Your Backup Plans: Speaking of your business website, make sure you have proper backup systems in place. If you experience a surge of online customers during your grand opening, make sure your site host can accommodate a hefty amount of online traffic to your website. Have a backup server or an external hard drive to back up all your online data so if systems go down, you have everything saved without missing a beat. If you have employees, make sure you have clear instructional manuals available showing them what to do and where to go in case of failures or emergencies. Also, make sure you have financial preventative plans in the event of unexpected overdrafts, and always take measures to prevent cyber hacking with your financial practices as well as your online business transactions.

All of these double-checking tips may seem like no-brainer tactics. That may be true, but you know how the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” When you take the time to double-check these business basics before you expose yourself (and your reputation) to the public, you can save your business a ton of time, money, and headaches in the long run.

Legal Branding

5 Smart Ways to Improve Sales Performance

Steven on March 26, 2021

A B2B company’s profitability and revenue growth are critical to its survival. Both depend on sales. It’s imperative to constantly improve sales performance if your team is to do its part in ensuring a future for your company.

Sales performance is the measurement of sales activity and corresponding results against the goals and expectations outlined in a sales plan. Sales performance measures the ability of your sales team to be effective at selling.

5 Keys to Delivering Strong Sales Performance

Let’s take a look at several proven strategies to drive sales performance.

1. Create sales content that compels prospects to become customers

There are two types of sales content: external and internal. You’re probably aware of internal sales content that educates and equips sales teams with knowledge, strategies, and tools to close more deals or improve sales success.

External sales content is the product or brand-specific content that compels prospects to buy from you. Unlike marketing content that draws prospects in, sales content should help you close the deal. Support your external sales content with hard evidence, statistics, and testimonies to convince prospects that your brand suits their business interests.

Your external sales content should provide prospects with the information they need to commit themselves to purchase. Use simple graphics that include facts and figures about your brand or product, personal testimonials, case studies, or product comparisons as part of your external sales content strategy.

Be sure to effectively distribute your external sales content to ensure it reaches the right audience and secures you a strong ROI. Use a customer-centric content distribution model to touch a wide range of B2B prospects in your target industries. This accelerates your sales pipeline as your content reaches more unique visitors each month. With content distribution services, you get convenient tools to easily measure and track your ROI on content distribution for lead generation and other sales activities.

2. Improve communication for your sales reps as well as customers

Effective communication is a critical link that keeps your sales team intact. Asynchronous communication is a great way to maintain strong communication within a sales team and with prospects or customers.

Remote sales teams use asynchronous communication to effectively communicate with team members working in different locations and time zones. Besides enabling your sales team to communicate with high efficiency and agility, asynchronous communication helps build a resource pool and increases thoughtful communication.

Asynchronous communication adds great value to customer service. It lets the customer decide the pace of the conversation and keeps the conversation transparent and open-ended. Moreover, it doesn’t force the customer to have conversations with you in a specific way. Instead, it allows them to communicate with your brand through different channels and at their leisure.

3. Contact prospects early to increase your chances of closing the deal

The earlier you reach prospects, the better positioned you’ll be to convert them into paying customers. Reaching prospects after they’ve been contacted by your competitor reduces your odds of converting them. It’s difficult to draw prospects in once they’ve committed to your competitor’s brand or product.

With B2B contact data, you can reach the right prospects faster and create an opportunity to close deals first. You can also use other forms of B2B data like intent, firmographic, demographic, and technographic data to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. Then, you can connect with them at an early stage of their buyer’s journey.

Partner with a B2B data company that pays close attention to their data accuracy and hygiene standards. For example, SalesIntel maintains 95% B2B data accuracy. They ensure that their company and contact data are reverified every 90 days. Furthermore, they offer human-verified B2B data apart from machine-processed data to stay on top of their data reliability game and allow their customers to get the best of both worlds.

4. Equip your sales team with tools that give them the upper hand

Sales tools give your reps and SDRs the advantage of knowing prospects beforehand, streamlining their workflow, and gathering sales intelligence. Sales intelligence plays a vital role in improving sales performance by helping sales teams to see beyond what prospects show or signal during their buyer’s journey. Sales results improve when you gain significant insights into the interests, preferences, buying patterns, or online behavior of prospects.

For example, website visitor intelligence tools, like VisitorIntel, let you know who visits your business website and which company they work for. This analytics-driven tool not only tracks website visitors but also allows you to connect with potential buyers before they fully define their needs. It helps you create targeted sales campaigns and identify net new look-alike prospects, so you know the type of companies visiting your business website.

Sales prospecting tools are also frequently used by sales teams to enhance their performance by reducing prospecting time and quickly finding the right accounts to target. RevDriver, a free Chrome extension, is a sales prospecting tool that enables sales teams to directly contact decision-makers, the C-suite, and other accounts in their target audience. RevDriver users can collect accurate, verified contact, and company data for prospects by visiting their LinkedIn profile or company website.

5. Overcome sales call reluctance with proper training and advice

Sales call reluctance is a serious problem that negatively impacts sales performance. 40% of all veteran sales professionals readily admit to one or more call reluctance episodes severe enough to threaten their continuation in sales. Each month, the average call reluctant salesperson misses out on 15.25 pieces of new business opportunities. Whether or not you come across sales call reluctance in your team, it’s always recommended to train and advise your sales reps and SDRs on tackling the problem.

Help your sales team explore more about your brand and product and how they benefit customers beyond financial or other obvious factors. This will help them effectively deal with rejection. Moreover, they’ll be able to dig deeper into reasons for the rejection so that they could work out a foolproof strategy to win next time. That’s how great salespeople do what average salespeople only think about.

Professional sales coaching, willingness to learn and accept feedback, and seeking timely guidance from sales managers are great ways to overcome sales call reluctance. Additionally, you can ask your sales team to track their progress after each call, remove distractions, avoid negative self-talk, pre-qualify prospects, and affirm their role as a salesperson to cope with call reluctance.

Also, working to guarantee that reps are calling prospects that fit your target demographics and have accurate phone numbers helps reps feel that everything is being done to enable their success. No one wants to fight an uphill battle.

The Wrap

The five strategies discussed in this blog are a few of the right moves you need to boost your sales performance.

As a bonus tip, we suggest seeking support from your marketing team to push your sales growth further. There are ways in which you can actually get more sales out of marketing. Sales and marketing alignment is a classic example of how marketing can significantly contribute to sales performance. Statistics show that it helps achieve 38% higher win rates, retain 36% more customers, and generate 32% higher revenue.

Digital Branding

Creating A Web Design That Narrates Your Brand’s Story

Steven on September 22, 2020

Every brand has a unique story, which is something that the audience wants to know before becoming customers and loyalists.

Being able to narrate it well enough is the key to engaging them and winning their trust. The design of your business website serves as the best storytelling platform because this is where most of the potential buyers are bound to come.

However, storytelling through web design takes a lot of creativity, strategy, and clever thinking.

Right from choosing the colors, visual elements, content, and navigation, you need to nail everything to create an impactful storyline. Here are some measures you can implement to do it effectively.

Focus on their problems rather than your company

Although you will be tempted to talk about your offerings, it is far more important to focus on customers’ problems when you weave a story for your brand. Their pain points will have them hooked to your story, which subtly draws them to explore more and know you better.

Take them towards a solution and they will buy it. Moreover, the problem-solution approach shows your interest in customers’ well-being and wins their trust and loyalty without much work.

Accentuate your USP and core values

Before you start designing your website, you need to identify the USP and core values you want to highlight. They should reflect everywhere, specifically the home page where the user lands and gets the first impression. The “About Us” page is another part of the site that needs to accentuate these elements. Everything else has to detail around the USP and core values because you would want them to be the heroes throughout the user journey.

Be consistent with the brand narrative

Your web presence is just one element of your brand because it appears at a lot of other places- print ads, billboards, media ads, product packaging, and more. It is vital to be consistent with the narrative everywhere. Amazingly, you can create your own website for free and share your story just as it is everywhere. No one knows your brand better than you, so go ahead and say it all on your website. Make sure that you follow the same visuals as well, right from your logo to colors and font styles. Similarly, pay attention to the tone of voice and content.

Create navigation for the story

When it comes to storytelling through web design, creating navigation is extremely important. Give the visitor a route to the next piece of information as they would want the narrative to unfold naturally and subtly.

It doesn’t make sense to paste all the information on one page, rather let them explore the site to pick their interest and make them stay. The placement of call-to-action buttons can act as navigational cues. Consider creating a roadmap that makes the journey easy for them and drives them effortlessly towards engagement.

Finally, keep the design simple and human-centered so that the audience connect with it emotionally. The modern website users are savvy and only exemplary designs can impress them, so make genuine efforts to engage them with authentic storytelling.

Digital Branding Legal Branding Personal Branding

Everything You Need to Know about Online Brands’ Path to Profitability

Steven on June 22, 2020

There is a common mistake the vast majority of brands make today — they acquire the funds but have no plan for profitability.

When you start a small business website, you should know that following the practices that most other entrepreneurs follow actually leaves you with a narrow window of success. Operating deep in the red and using that as a sacrifice for quick growth is one of the bigger reasons why many new businesses fail.

If you’d like to know what you need to do to become a profitable business in a reasonable amount of time, keep reading.

Place your focus on margins

Getting to figure out the way to profitability fast begins with knowing the cost variables on an income statement and how you can have them tweaked.

These variables include manufacturing, transportation, employee salaries, office rent, shipping, and marketing. Do know that the most expensive variable for digital brands is usually marketing.

When looking at each unit sold, as a brand, you should find out the total cost of operations and production and compare that figure to what is left. For example, if a brand spends $100 to produce a watch and sells it for $300, its gross profit per product would be $200 and the product margin would amount to 66%.

In order to build a sustainable business, the unit economics on day one should be positive. This is the revenue and cost per item sold. As companies scale, margins usually increase and can vary widely depending on the product type.

For example, apparel brands see margins between 40 and 60 percent. Hence, they need to structure themselves differently than companies selling accessories or prestige beauty where margins can top 80 percent.

Consider hiring a business coach

At this stage, it would be great if you could hire a professional business coach. Sometimes you really need a business mentor you can trust and turn to for advice. It is important to have support coming from a great coach.

This will give you some space to work out challenges that are slowing your confidence down. It is really important in situations where you have to deal with crises or conflicts.

On top of that, a good coach will help you see the forest, not the trees. In other words, a good business coach will always have an objective point of view and the ability to quickly identify problem areas that you couldn’t see.

A good coach will also be able to offer solutions or strategies you might have not considered or push you out of your comfort zone so that you can take your business to the next level.

Finally, experienced coaches are good at helping you triage risks and decide which challenges are worth fighting today and which ones are not worth worrying about until later.

If you are new to the world of business, you should definitely consider having this kind of support along your side.

Do not overspend on marketing

It is easy to get lost when spending on customer acquisition. To be precise, many spend too much on Facebook ads, paid search results, and promoted posts. Unfortunately, that kind of behavior tends to eat up a huge part of the product margin.

As a business owner, you shouldn’t scale unless you are quite confident that you will continue to attract customers without spending irrational amounts on advertising.

Some companies ended in hot waters when it comes to their finances. Various subscription-based services faced this problem when old customers started dropping out, finding new customers became harder to acquire.

So, if you are yet to hit the main growth phase, be very disciplined. Projections for future profitability can be distorted by an unexpected competitor entering the market or by a tweak to an Instagram or Facebook algorithm that raises advertising costs.

Try your best to find a customer acquisition model where you are positive on the first order. That may be difficult, but it is a safe way to play things out.

Your plan should begin with digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. It is easy to experiment with different messages and formats to figure out what works. Once you build a strong community, the ad game becomes easy.

Reduce the number of failed payments

Unfortunate things happen. A customer can have their credit card stolen, their bank can decline a payment due to a network error or exceeded limit.

However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to reduce the churn. You should focus not only on the voluntary churn but on involuntary churn as well. This happens when a customer doesn’t intend to stop using your services and wiring money to your business.

Start tracking involuntary churn and get a sense of your overall monthly churn. This will allow you to determine what portion of it is involuntary and how you should start the failed payment recovery process.

See how many of your customers canceled their subscriptions and see how many stopped paying due to credit card declines.

To find out, even more, take a look at their decline codes. This way you can isolate whether the primary issue is:

Expired card
Outdated billing info
Spendy customers who exceeded the card limits
Something else

The more data you gather, the better your results will be when it comes to reducing this type of churn.

Infographic created by Fiserv

Take good care of your supply chain

Do not get surprised by unexpected surges in purchases. If you have your own production line, be careful not to underestimate the need for your products.

When there is a spike in demand, it is time to profit. However, if you fail to handle all purchase orders, you might get the whole positive trend to backfire.

So, try to be as flexible as possible. Stock up on your products and keep an eye on the statistics. Be prepared in case a spike in demand occurs.

Try to have the best possible control over the supply chain. This will also contribute to the speed of scaling, which enables your company to meet demand and ensure that all customers are happy.

Do your best to react to demand in real-time and control costs. If you manage to do that, you will only contribute to profitability.

Final thoughts

The journey to profitability is unique for every entrepreneur. As the person in charge, you have to balance your investments in growth with efforts to generate cash flow.

However, it all boils down to one basic thing — the quality of your product or service. A product that makes sense and proves to be useful is generally a guarantee for a bright future.

Digital Branding Personal Branding

7 Reasons Why Users Interface Design Plays An Important Role In Web Development

Steven on June 3, 2020

In today’s digital age, having a website is not an option anymore. Every business must have a website and maintain a healthy digital presence in order to attract prospects. When it comes to a business website, user experience is everything. If a user lands on your website and leaves with a bad taste in their mouths due to poor user experience, they will never return to your website again.

Similarly, if a user visits your website and gets a great user experience, they will surely return to your website. User interface of your website can make or break your website because it is what influences the user experience your website visitors will get. If you have not diverted all your energies and resources towards improving the user interface design during web development, your users will always get a below par user experience. As a website developer in New York, your main goal should be to make the user interface a joy to use for your users.

In this article, you will learn about seven reasons why user interface design plays a critical role in web development.

Clarify Brand Vision

Just like your brand vision, your target audience should be the focal point of your user interface design. When you design user interfaces with users in mind, you tend to create user interfaces that your users will love to use. It will also help you to refine your design and make changes based on user behavior and preferences. UI/UX design agencies here actively use this in their work.

In addition to this, design agency also clarifies your brand vision and gives you a better understanding of what your brand is all about and what you are offering to your customers. This will give a clear direction to your branding efforts and will increase your chances of your marketing campaigns to become successful. If you are lucky, you can also gain a competitive advantage over your competitors as well.

Improves Website Usability

To create stunning user interfaces, you need to develop a better understanding of your user preferences and behavior. Once you have done that, it will be easier for you as a web developer to provide them what they are looking for on your website. Moreover, this can also help you decide which features and functionality you should include and which ones to leave out from your website.

When users only get what they need, it will improve their user experience and make your website a pleasure to use. Take user input and feedback and tweak your website user interface from time to time. This will not only give a new look to your website but also sends a clear message to users that you value their input.

Enhance Customer Satisfaction

When you pay extra attention to website usability and improve the user experience of your website, it will directly impact customer satisfaction in a good way. When your website visitors are able to perform the action they want every time, they would surely keep coming back to your website for more because their customer satisfaction level is sky high. All you have to do is to maintain that customer satisfaction level by delivering a great website experience on a consistent basis. You will see a massive improvement in conversions and revenue while your website’s bounce rate will decrease drastically.

Make Website Navigation Easier

What are the main characteristics of great user interface? It is easy to use and has all the elements at familiar places so that the users don’t have to go looking for it. When users get what they are looking for instantly, they will stay on your website longer and explore other pages of your website. Make it easier for them to jump from one page of your website to another by placing a navigation button at a prominent spot where users can easily see and click on it. Avoid hidden and cascading navigation menus as it can hamper the user experience. Hamburger menus might work great for smaller screens such as smartphones but it might not be such a great choice for the desktop version of your website.

Deliver Seamless Experience

Nobody likes to wait, especially your website visitors. If your website takes ages to load and makes your website visitors wait before they can interact with your website, it will destroy the user experience of your website. Even when your website is loaded, make sure that it responds to user inputs instantly. There should be no lag or stutters. That is where website optimization comes into play.

Get rid of extras from your website to make it nimble so it can load up quickly and respond to user inputs without any delays. Use a content delivery network and minify code to improve the website speed. You can also compress multimedia files such as images and videos so they can load quickly even on slow internet connections.

Boost Conversions and Rankings

When users can easily get the information they are looking for and complete the desired action, you are more likely to convert them into paying customers. If you consistently deliver great user experiences, users will start trusting you and will start to show interest in doing business with you. With search engines like Google paying attention to user experience factors and ranking websites based on that, a website that delivers a better user experience will rank higher than a website that doesn’t.

Anticipate Customer Expectations

When users are the center of attention of all your user interfaces and a lot of research has gone into designing those user experiences, you can easily identify user behavior and preferences patterns. This enables you to anticipate their next move and fulfill customer expectations in a much better way than before. This way, you can make it easier for them to take the next step and convert prospects into paying customers.

How does user interface design impact web development in your opinion? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

About the author

Usman A. Khan – Digital marketer at Branex – a website design company. He is a curious soul and spends his time learning and researching new subjects every day including – technology and website design. He regularly pours out his learnings as a blog on various platforms and wants to leave his mark on the digital landscape.

Digital Branding

Reasons to Hire a Web Designer

Steven on June 1, 2020

Have you have found enough reason to set up a website for your business but still do not know whether you should hire a local web designer?

Look out for these four signs that direct that you need to find a professional web designer.

1. You are too busy to build the site

Website design takes a lot of time. You need to go through the fundamentals slowly as you develop a robust site that will aid your business goals. You have to come up with a unique design that speaks out your brand and makes your business stand out from the rest of the competition.

If you are too busy to spend quality time on building your business website, you could miss a golden opportunity to get traffic to your company. People won’t take a second look at your site if it is not aesthetically pleasing.

You do not want to waste the chance to get people on your site. If you are busy with other things, the best thing is to contact a web designer and let them build a proper site for your company.

If you hire the right one, they will dedicate the quality time needed to bring the site of your dreams to life. This way, you won’t lose sleep about fixing time in your busy schedule for web development.

2. You are not an experienced web developer

Your site is a vital aspect of your company. It is essential that you put in the right houses to create a perfect site for your company. If you have never done this before, it can be hard to build a proper site that helps to attain your business goals.

You cannot just build a basic website and hope that it drives results for your company. You need to go through a lot of things in the planning of the process and assess how each element you add affects the user and their experience. If you have never built a website before, you might not be in a good position to create the perfect site for your business.

By hiring a local web developer, you bring experience in building profitable sites. They understand how to piece different parts of your site and how they can individually contribute to your business goals.

3. You are not familiar with driving results through your site

It is not out of the picture for companies to have a starting point for their site. You could have a rough idea of how you would like the website to appear, but you might not understand everything that needs to be done for it to drive the best results.

Various elements can collectively add up to a certain experience for your audience. A simple aspect of a site such as adding a video or a Call-to-action button can go a long way in affecting how people react to your content. If you have no idea about all the things required for a website, contact an expert web designer who will help you to determine all these things that are needed.

By hiring a local web designer, you will work with a seasoned professional that will help you find out what is needed for your website. They will adopt your rough ideas and bring them to life while consulting you along the way to ensure that they create the correct thing. This makes sure that at the end of it all, you get the right site that brings in good results for your company.

4. You need a standout site that differentiates you from the competition.

When bringing up your ideal site, you need it to be above the competition. It is vital to have a special site that is made to create a memorable experience for your audience.

If you decide to make the site on your own, you will most likely rely on a template builder to create it. These builders make it easy for you to bring up the site, but they do not make your site any different from all the others in the niche. You will look similar to all the other sites that have utilized similar templates.

You need to create a site that stands out from your competitors. If you contact a web developer, they will assist you to create a custom site that works for your company. You will get one that gives customers a unique experience and stands out from the rest.

SaaS Branding

A Comprehensive Guide to SaaS Branding

Steven on May 27, 2020

Too many SaaS business owners do not see branding as a crucial segment in the early stages. Especially when there is app development in progress and the business has yet to start growing.

There is one simple assumption that makes them oblivious to the importance of branding — they think that a good product will sell itself. They believe there is no need to invest in marketing campaigns or branding, and all other things that help build a strong company image and name.

However, that assumption is very wrong. And it can be fatal too. If there is no recognizable brand, even a trailblazing app will struggle.

Of course, you can always look for an already established SaaS business for sale, a recognizable brand that already makes a considerable profit. That will save you a lot of time and effort.

But if you’d like to start your business from scratch and build your own brand effectively, you can start so today by taking in as much as you can from this guide.

Before we start — what is branding really?

Branding can be described as an overview of what your target customers think about you and your offer (service/product).

This is the image your company has in the world, and it applies both to how your rivals and your customers see you.

However, when you delve deeper, it is fair to say that branding is a bit more complex. It also includes how the management and team players see and think about the company, its processes, motivation, and beliefs.

This is exactly why you should have your brand in mind before you start creating your business website and other marketing materials. It is this image that will separate your business from other rivals offering similar services or products.

Hence, it is reasonable to say that your brand is a mirror of what customers see and think about your company. And, logically, your goal should be to have a beautiful image in their eyes.

A strong name — a strong brand

The SaaS industry is growing at the speed of light and soon enough it will become difficult to find a unique company that is somehow different from the rest.

Well, the first step towards uniqueness is definitely your domain name. There are quite a few branding benefits of various domain names and extensions.

That is why it is important to learn what the cheapest domain names bring to the table contrary to the more expensive ones. For example, some people think that only an expensive domain name is a good one, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, know that there are hundreds and hundreds of extensions that you can use. These range from specific ones such as .TECH, .STORE, and .PRESS to the more general ones including .ONLINE, .WEBSITE, and, .SPACE.

The benefits of a good domain name for branding are quite significant.

Firstly, a domain name tells your customers whether you are forward-thinking or not.
What’s even more important is that it helps you interact with a niche market. You are most likely dealing with a specific audience and that is why you should create specific domain redirects that point customers to what they want.
Finally, since people’s first contact with your business is your domain name, this makes the name an important factor when it comes to your identity. In other words, the message your brand name communicates is what most customers will see first.

Position

It is important to create a strong sense of what your products offer to the world. Additionally, that needs to be communicated in a way that differentiates it from all other available products.

First, it is important to explain what problems your service/products are solving. This is the act of positioning.

For instance, you could be helping teams become more efficient and avoid bottlenecks when communicating with each other (Trello, Basecamp, and so on).

A good position statement is not there only to place your product in the minds of your users but also to let you define your target audience and differentiate yourself from your competitors. This will also ‘vouch’ that you are on a path where every action is ‘on brand.’

Any decision you make will place you closer or further from where your competitors are located. That is why it may be useful to envision your product’s position as a location on a map.

Utilize emotions

No, you are not taking advantage of anyone’s feelings.

When marketing your SaaS, you have to be able to capture people’s attention fast. This will make them interested in your brand and that means that they will want to know more.

Your branding has to resonate well with your customers’ needs, aspirations, and emotions. That will help your company create a connection with people and build loyalty over time.

See what works best for you. For instance, most companies are used to seeing positive, benefit-oriented imagery and copy that highlight the pleasure to be gained from a product. But, this wasn’t the path for one industry giant — Basecamp.

In 2016, Basecamp changed their visuals to a cartoon drawing of a customer with her hair on fire being chased after by notifications, calls, and emails. Oh, they also tripled their prices.

This wasn’t something people were expecting to see. But, it was captivating and in the end, it worked.

Smart, right?

Social proof needs to be a part of your marketing toolkit

Social proof and testimonials are everywhere nowadays. That, above everything else, is a clear sign of how powerful this marketing tool is.

The most effective testimonials describe real scenarios and situations. These talk about problems your products solve and you need to add them to your arsenal.

For a start, you could start gathering testimonials. These can be conversation transcriptions you have with your customers or direct quotes from them.

Then, you could also introduce quick surveys.

For instance, when sending a survey, ask questions such as:

How did our product change your operations?
Is our product helpful?
How does our product help you get on with your work?
How would you feel if you stopped using it right now?
Would you recommend it to anyone?

When doing this kind of marketing, be sincere, and post honest answers. If your social proof seems staged, well, you have failed.

Add an element or two of reality by guiding your customers to highlight the elements of concern they had before they bought your product. When you clear out all the doubt, you win.

Conversational marketing as a cornerstone

If you haven’t heard of it, conversational marketing is a fresh approach to doing business online. The buyers are moved through marketing and sales funnels by using the power of one at a time questions.

But, why should you care about that? How can conversational marketing help you promote your brand?

Well, first of all, you need conversational marketing to ensure that you are providing value. Since this method revolves around messages, you should think about how your messaging platform can deliver content in a personalized and engaging way.

The customer experience should be thought out well and the messages need to align with other marketing efforts.

However, do not forget that you should avoid automating too much. Since the point is to provide a private messaging service (with the aim of increasing the number of personalized interactions with customers), you shouldn’t overdo it with chatbots.

Having technology at your disposal does not mean that you absolutely have to use it. The messaging platform is reserved for the more fluid, back-and-forth, or Q&A interactions. Do not let the customers feel that you are trying to sell something to them.

When a customer realizes that the goal is to have a product sold to them, your brand will look like it is just trying to take advantage of an honest conversation.

So, make sure to use this method but use it carefully. As you do this with more and more customers, your brand shall grow.