Tag: marketing

SaaS Branding

5 Subscription Services and Why They’re So Successful

on June 10, 2021

These days you can get a subscription service for just about anything. But, not all of them stand the test of time or are worth the consumer’s money, and they’re quick to realize it. There are, however, many that are not only successful, but they’re also positively exploding. Let’s take a look at what they are and why they’re doing so well. 

Beauty and Grooming Subscriptions

If you’re into beauty products, you may not be into actually shopping in-store for these items. Whether you’ve been matched so off-color that you walked out looking like a clown, or you just can’t stomach the strong perfume smells of these types of stores, services like Ipsy or Birchbox are godsent. If you’re more particular about your products like you only use vegan cruelty-free – you guessed it, there’s a box for that. These types of services have even upped their game in some instances and branched out to include health & wellness, apparel, and home decor in their subscriptions like FabFitFun. With a reasonable sign-on price and often promotions for first-time subscribers, these brands’ sales are soaring. Bonus, they all make cancellation a breeze. 

Coffee and Drink Subscriptions 

Maybe you’re the type that wants the perfect pour over coffee every time. Or you need your coffee to be of a single origin. There are subscriptions for that. If you’re a wannabe wine aficionado, there are subscriptions that not only introduce you but educate you on what you’re drinking. Once you figure out your favorites, your subscriptions can be easily tailored to your interests. There are even subscriptions for single-serve bottles of wine, as the subscription Usual. You can customize your monthly shipments from as little as six bottles to as many as 24. One such subscription that’s a splurge but so worth it is the Fat Cork. At $199 a month, the party never stops with a quarterly shipment of Champagne.

Book Subscriptions

Even though a book to read the next day is just a click away nowadays, or the fact that you can read so much of what you want for free online anyway, book subscriptions not only exist, but they’re thriving. If you wish to go the route of The Book of the Month or you’re shopping for children who can’t even read yet, there are subscriptions for them. Books are an appealing subscription for so many people because it does the filtering for you. You tell these subscriptions what interests you and what doesn’t, then voila! You get arrivals that keep you well-read, have things to contribute conversationally, and it’s all worry-free—saving you even more time to curl up with a good book. 

Toy & Game Subscriptions

Maybe you picked up a puzzle addiction during a lockdown or perhaps you just want to make sure your children are getting more time away from their screens, especially since they’ve been schooling virtually all year. Either way, there are subscriptions for those too. The best part is, like most things nowadays, they’re so easy to customize. You can control if the child’s subscription will be more Montessori style or if you want them building things from kits. As far as your more adult toys, you can customize that too. And if you’re looking for a subscription to actual “adult” toys from an adult toy store, those exist too. These are successful for a myriad of reasons, the least of which isn’t the fact that even though we’re all constantly connected to technology, it feels rewarded to be offline and just enjoy games as we did in our youth.

Food Subscriptions

Everyone’s a foodie these days, am I right? Seriously, joking aside – what’s the one thing that brings us all together? The love of food! Not only do food subscriptions make a fabulous gift for nearly every adult in your life, but they’re an excellent present for yourself as well. You can literally get any type of food subscription too. Whether you’re shopping for someone who eats Whole Foods Plant-Based to a straight-up monthly cheese box for yourself (no judgment here), they exist. This market exploded and will continue to do so because, let’s face it, we all need it, and the more options, the better. Having it delivered straight to your door? The best.

SaaS Branding

Best Practices to Drive Productivity

on May 21, 2021

Nothing is more important to a small business than its people. Thus, employees’ productivity will rise if they are happy, which is just what business owners need to drive their company towards growth and development.

Minor modifications in the workplace can dramatically boost a company’s production and efficiency. With this, companies can complete more high-quality work in less time and spend less time on non-essential tasks, a win-win situation for both business owners and their stakeholders. 

With that, here are the best ways to boost business productivity:

Focus on Employee Satisfaction

While increasing employee satisfaction is not a cure-all pill, it can have some remarkable effects on a company. Specifically, a happy, engaged, and motivated employee contributes to the company’s success, positively impacting the rest of your team.

The most important advantage of ensuring high employee morale and overall satisfaction is that people rarely consider quitting their current positions. Veritably, employee satisfaction is critical for employee retention. For long-term growth and guaranteed success, companies must drive to retain deserving and skilled personnel, that is, by upholding employee satisfaction.

Communication is Key

Communication is essential in every aspect of a business. It is also critical that an organization’s internal communication and their employees’ communication skills are effective, particularly now that the economy has driven a rising number of people to work from the comfort of their homes.

Furthermore, a united company attempts to build strong communication among its employees. When everyone understands what their coworkers are working on, they may better assist one another, achieving a common, shared goal of increasing productivity.

Get the Right Equipment  

Nothing is more inefficient and frustrating than wasting time waiting for important documents to print because a company lacks quick printing technology. Thus, it is critical to provide employees with the appropriate tools and equipment to do their tasks efficiently and on schedule. 

Not only do high-quality, current programs and equipment benefit employees, but they also improve how a company gets perceived across different lenses. Companies should seriously consider investing in the correct equipment.

Examples of this are a production printer or an upgrade to the payroll software. Ultimately, you do this by getting equipment that will save employees time and effort.

Become as Efficient As Possible

The best possible utilization of resources is what efficiency is all about. Efficient businesses optimize outputs from limited inputs while lowering expenses. Furthermore, you can reduce a company’s costs and its competitiveness improved by increasing efficiency.

For one, automation minimizes the amount of paper that passes through a company and allows employees to be more strategic in their job. As employees get rid of mundane, tedious tasks, they become freed to devote themselves to higher-value duties essential in company growth.

Positive Reinforcement Goes a Long Way

Every day, small business owners get challenged with their employees’ actions. Thus, it may be time to join the legions of behavioral experts who believe that creating a pleasant workplace — one that encourages positive reinforcement — is just as important as writing a business plan in terms of business success.

Positive reinforcement is an effective, evidence-based method for increasing workplace productivity and morale. Moreover, positive reinforcement always leads to better behavioral results. Bosses must deliver positive reinforcement correctly and immediately to be effective.

Set Realistic Goals

Setting realistic goals will provide companies a firm, clear direction. Business goals provide a tight framework for business owners, preventing them from straying and keeping them focused on a specific path. Moreover, it is common among successful businesses to have started from setting realistic goals that are:

  • Specific: The objectives should be specific, clear, and devoid of ambiguity. You must define the goals in a concise and detailed manner.
  • Measurable: The objectives should be quantifiable. Setting a goal such as “greater revenues” or “better quality” is not a good practice and may not help companies. Rather, goals should be measurable and scalable to allow for progress assessments toward them.
  • Timely: Efficient goals are time-bound, having a clear start and finish date. Company objectives may become redundant if there are no time constraints, and their achievement may never even come to a realization.
  • Simple: There should be no jargon in the goals. They should be simple enough for everyone working in a company to understand, allowing unity to work on a shared goal.

Undoubtedly, it is pleasant – although sometimes ignored – to show employees how much a company appreciates, respects, and values them on a personal level. Thus, if employers want their employees to work to their full potential, they may consider and use a couple of these suggestions and prepare to reap a wealth of benefits.

Work balance
SaaS Branding

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

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.

Digital Branding

6 Best White Hat Link Building Techniques In 2019

on February 6, 2019

Link building is considered as one of the key elements of search engine optimization (SEO). But, many webmasters haven’t yet understood the concept well and go on to make mistakes which hurt the SEO.

Acquisition of White Hat links to your website can significantly boost your search engine ranking, but Google has been changing the link building algorithm over the years. Irrelevant comments on random blog posts to build links, no longer work for SEO.

What is Link Building and White Hat SEO?                            

When you get hyperlinks to your website from other websites, it is called link building. What this means is that you are telling Google that your site is relevant and trustworthy, and other sites are directing their users to you. This not only brings visitors from other websites but also boosts your ranking.

There are plenty of techniques for websites to rank higher, but not all of them work. Some are helpful, while some can even negatively impact the SEO. The SEO techniques that work positively and are done using proper methods are called White Hat SEO techniques.

Link building is done using both proper and improper methods. Proper methods can include guest blogs, while improper ones can include commenting on random posts with the link of your site. The proper method of link building is called White Hat link building.

Source – Pexels

White Hat Link Building techniques:                        

1. Guest blogging

One of the most efficient methods of link building is writing guest blogs for other websites. There are several websites and blogs that allow submission of guest articles. Leverage this opportunity for SEO improvement of your site.

The guest blogging is not only good for SEO but also helps you build relationships with other website owners. If you end up building good networking, chances are that they will allow more submissions from you.

Make a list of the websites that allow guest posts. Explore those websites and ensure that your guest post should be relevant to the niche of their site, otherwise it wouldn’t be accepted. Now contact the site runners and tell them about your experience with their site and your interest in submitting a post.

While writing a guest post, don’t be too promotional about your site. A couple of links in Author Bio and introduction will do. When they publish your work, share it with your customers and social media community. When the guest post publishers will find that your post is also helping them widely, then they would like to publish more of your work.

2. Ask your network for backlinks

As a website owner, you might be having a lot of friends and relatives who have their own websites or blogs. You can connect with them and ask for adding a link to your site in their next blog post.

If you have partners in your business, then leverage the partnership for link building. You can request a link back or do a deal of including a link to websites of each other in the next article. Further, keep on building your network and use it for your advantage.

3. Directory submission

There are plenty of good web directories available on the internet where you can list your website or blog. While listing your site on a directory, you should take care of a number of things, like choosing the right category for creating backlinks, checking the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of the directory site, and whether the directory is reliable.

If the DA and PA of the directory site is not of high quality, or if it contains spam links, then it would be better to stay away from such options. The low-quality directories wouldn’t help your site to boost SEO. Research properly before submission so that you can avoid any negative impact on your SEO.

4. Convert your brand mentions into backlinks

This is another easy method for white hat backlinking. There might be several blogs and websites which have mentioned your brand name in reviews, recommendations, or testimonials without hyperlinking your site. What you need to do is find those mentions using Social Listening tools.

Once you have found all the mentions, build a strategy to reach those mentions via social media channels or contact forms and request a backlink to the mentions. Since there is no harm to those sites in hyperlinking your site to your brand name, they will very likely to do the needful for you.

5. List your business in local directories

If you are a small business, then a business listing can significantly help you. For example, you can easily list your business on Google for free. Other than Google, there are several more local directories, like Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc.

The aim of these local directories is to help local users find the relevant places they are looking for. For example, if someone in your area is searching for places nearby, then you can appear in search results. Since the listing will have your website link, it can work for you.

Source – Pexels

6. Maintain your own blog

Don’t ever underestimate the power of a blog. The reason most of the websites have a blog is that it drives traffic to the site and helps in white hat link building. Maintain a blog and publish posts regularly, which should be relevant to the services or products you provide.

Try to cover everything related to your solutions to make your blog more appealing to visitors. Since the blog posts will be having backlinks to your products and services, it will bring visitors to your site and improve SEO.

Use images and visuals so that the content doesn’t become boring for visitors. Allow users to comment and share the posts on social media platforms right from the same page.

 

Wrapping up

If you apply the above-mentioned techniques to your website, it will surely work for you. But you have to remember that link building is not going to happen overnight. It will take time as you reach other websites, directories and your network.

Also, never go for black hat backlinking techniques, because Google can penalize your site for it.

Know of more white hat link building techniques? Feel free to share via the comments section below.

Author Bio:

Mark Coleman is a passionate writer, currently working as an Editor at MarkupTrend. Markup Trend offers free resources for developers, designers, and webmasters and is updated daily. Mark is available for hire for product and business promotions.