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“Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn’t happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find will find credible and aligned with their values.”
Simon Mainwaring
Social Media Expert and Advertising Creative Director for Mashable
The internet allows companies of all sizes in all industries to reach new customers, connect with new suppliers, and increase recognition. So, even some more niche businesses could benefit greatly from online advertising.
It’s time for conventional companies to look beyond traditional marketing tactics, such as newspaper ads and flyers, and start focusing on online marketing campaigns. Here are three businesses that can benefit from moving online.
1. Recycling Company
Many businesses wanting to flourish and grow must start adopting modern technologies and marketing tactics. For example, there are new technologies on the market that are simplifying tasks, which can increase onsite productivity. This can apply to the recycling trade.
An online presence can, however, be beneficial to any business, as it allows them to reach a larger audience. It can also personalize a business, which can prove you provide a valuable service to the community. Professional blogs and web content can also add value to your produce, which will make people more likely to turn to your shipping business. Also, use the internet to improve your operations by researching into the most appropriate equipment, regardless of the goods you are recycling. For example, you could take your pick from reputable suppliers online, as you could buy high-quality, affordable cardboard baling wire from Baling Wire Direct.
2. Real Estate Agents
No longer are people looking through a real estate’s windows to find their dream property. Nowadays, house hunters or property sellers want to find or promote a listing online. This allows prospective buyers to easily browse through multiple properties, so they can make an informed decision and choose their new home at their own pace. If you want to compete with more forward-thinking real estate agents, you must develop a website and social media profiles, or you’ll be forced to watch potential customers turn to your competitors.
3. Retail
The rise of e-commerce has posed a serious threat to bricks and mortar stores. Unfortunately, even the most established stores are not safe without an online presence, as more and more people are choosing to shop online. If you’re a retailer without an online store, you may lose out on sales and can witness a drop in loyal custom, as consumers will choose to shop with a more flexible, helpful, and forward-thinking brand.
To survive in the modern marketplace, you could offer an e-commerce website with a fully-optimized checkout, and informative customer service and contact information. It will allow customers to shop at any time of the day, rather than being limited to opening hours at a physical store. So, an online presence could help you to generate money 24 hours per day, seven days a week.
Conclusion
There is absolutely no reason why traditional businesses should avoid moving online. By launching a website, creating social media profiles, developing content marketing strategies, and utilizing pay per click advertising (PPC), you can connect with people not only within your local community, but across the globe. It could help you to become a leader in your industry and generate a great return on your investment.
Just a few years ago – certainly within living memory for most people in business today – there were no smartphones. There were no tablets either, or any other kind of mobile device except, perhaps, for standard cell phones that did nothing except make and receive calls, and perhaps send and receive text messages. However, technology has advanced hugely, and now a smartphone or tablet can actually enhance our businesses in many positive ways, giving customers more choice and adding more profit to the bottom line of your company. Smartphones used to be just for fun, but today they are an essential business tool; here are some of the reasons why that is.
Keep Track Of Your Expenses
Running a business can cost a lot of money, and if you aren’t keeping track of your expenses, it can cost you even more than it should. If you have a smartphone or a tablet, you can download one of a number of apps that means you can keep all of your outgoings in one place. You may be able to upload images of receipts and organize them in a cloud-based system, for example. This makes getting your taxes done a lot quicker and easier than dropping into your accountant with a bag full of crumpled receipts.
These apps are also useful for budgeting as they will be able to tell you – once you have pre-determined the limits – when you are spending too much. This way you can re-assess your budget or your spending before it becomes a problem and you could potentially prevent a serious issue from occurring.
Present To Your Customers
Sometimes a business owner will need to make presentations. This could be to gain a big, new corporate client, or perhaps to explain a product to end users. Carrying a lot of equipment to your meeting and wondering how to set it all up can make your company look more amateur than it really is, but taking a tablet (or even a smartphone) that is easy to set up and, thanks to intuitive apps, easy to create presentations on can make a big difference. This can show your clients just how professional you really are.
If you have the right apps, you can even make a presentation on the move, so that if you find you are coming face to face with someone who needs to know more about your business, with a few taps you can create something not only informative but personalized too.
Spread Your Message
Our smartphones go everywhere with us, and many people feel lost if they happen to leave the house without their mobile device, even if they don’t intend to use it. Since our smartphones are going to be everywhere with us, it makes sense to use them as some advertising space too. Order a personalized iPhone case from new startup Indkly with your logo and website on the back, and every time you use your phone, you will be letting people know more about you.
Be Responsive
A responsive business is a successful one a lot of the time, which is why it pays to answer phone calls, emails, and reply to comments on social media as quickly as you can. You may not always be in the office in front of a computer, however, especially if your business is a mobile one. Therefore, you can use a smartphone or tablet to keep on top of customer questions and answer them much more quickly than if you had to wait to get back to the office. By that time, especially if you have a full day ahead of you, the customer who had the question may well have found another company who answered them more quickly and therefore secured the sale.
Take Orders
A mobile device can be used to take customer orders, and you may well have seen it happen already. It is becoming more and more standard to see waiting staff using mobile devices to take their customers’ orders and send it directly to the kitchen. This speeds up the entire process and gives customers a much better experience. Tapping the order into a smart device leaves less room for error than writing it down, or even simply remembering what was said, plus the servers can engage more with their customers which makes for a more pleasant experience all around.
Order taking devices don’t have to be limited to restaurants and bars. With the right equipment, they can be used in almost any sales situation. You can have an app designed for your business that means you can process orders there and then, rather than having to go back to the office or asking your clients to fill in long-winded paperwork. As a bonus, this means that less paper will be printed and used, which can benefit your business as well as the environment.
Accept Payment
What if, as well as taking orders from your clients, you could even process their payments should that be necessary? There are many apps that allow you to do this, and the money will appear in your bank account straight away. This means you can take credit and debit cards without the need for a special merchant machine, and that means you don’t have to turn away prospective buyers who don’t have cash on them – they can still pay you. If you give each of your salespeople a tablet that is designed to take payments, they can make more sales because they won’t have to go back later to process the payment.
Obtain Signatures
In some industries, particularly in sectors such as real estate, the signing of the contract can take a long time, delaying all the other parts of the transaction. However, with a tablet or smartphone, the contract can be signed immediately through the app, meaning that everything can be speeded up and become a lot more efficient. You will get paid more quickly, and your customer will have a better experience because their order will be processed speedily.
While your company may have a think tank of brilliant strategists devising new inroads into your market, what you will soon learn is that any strategy is doomed to fail if it isn’t executed as brilliantly as it was conceived. It is at the point of execution that most strategies begin to fall apart, and a huge part of the problem is a lack of strong leadership. If you have sat by while strategy after strategy failed to hit the mark, perhaps you failed to recognize the importance of leadership training.
Do you have strong leaders in key areas within your organization? If not, it’s time you invested in your key players to raise up a leadership team by department. This is where you can see the benefits of several leadership courses that will offer a bigger return on your investment than you can imagine. Don’t let another strategy fall by the wayside when it may only be a matter of giving your team leaders the training they need.
Great Managers Are Not Always Strong Leaders
One of the problems which many corporations encounter is in thinking that great managers are also strong leaders. Actually, the two are not always synonymous. A manager is able to deliver results but isn’t always going to offer any major breakthroughs other than an occasional new product line or finding a new market.
A great manager will also be effective at reducing production costs, but they aren’t necessarily strong leaders. Leaders, on the other hand, are able to drive strong performance at all levels of the operation and that is what fuels a strategy forward – performance. Bear in mind that great managers are not always strong leaders and every company should have a good assortment of both.
Leaders Are Needed at All Levels
Another key area which is often misunderstood is that leaders don’t reside only at the top of the corporate hierarchy. Strong leaders are needed at all levels of an operation because each level is a link in the chain. In fact, any company should have approximately 5 percent of their employees in leadership positions. These are the key players that will drive performance upwards and onwards to bring strategies to fruition.
This is why you are apt to hear so much emphasis being given to appointing team leaders. These are the key people who are able to motivate their teams. Why settle for team building exercises and events if they return to their posts without a strong leader to guide them ever forward? It makes more sense to budget some of that money towards professional leadership training courses once you’ve identified your employees with the potential to be strong leaders.
Who Are These Future Leaders and How Can You Identify Them?
A big part of the problem in trying to identify future leaders is that management tends to look at performance rather than potential. While past and current performance are, indeed, an important factor, there is much more to leadership potential than historical data. The first thing to be accomplished is to define specific roles your company needs leaders to fill. Then you can begin matching skills and personality traits to those roles.
Assessing leadership potential should always be focused on the future and whether the individuals you are rating have the ability to execute strategies within each predefined role during the assessment period. It is suggested that you use an assortment of personality assessments, questionnaires, and simulations which can help you replicate a variety of scenarios a leader might be confronted with on the job.
Coaching Skills Are a Top Priority
In her book, Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others, Cheryl Bachelder says that coaching is one of the most important competencies for today’s leaders. Since Millennials are looking to leaders who are able to coach them along to success, this is a skill which every leader should exhibit. As the CEO of American chain restaurant, Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, Bachelder found that today’s leaders are often looked to as mentors.
Is there anyone in your company not already in a leadership role that other employees seem to seek out for advice or help when needed? These are often the people with the inherent coaching skills who can benefit from leadership training. These are the ones you will surely want to assess going forward for leadership potential and will offer a high ROI on the cost of training them for their future roles as leaders.
In-House Talent Is Where Your Search Should Begin
Another of the major problems many companies face is employee retention. This is one area you should take the time to analyze. Sort through your HR records to find those employees who have been with the company for any length of time and exhibit a high level of loyalty in keeping with the company’s mission.
Not only is it cheaper and more cost effective to train in-house personnel for leadership positions, but they have already proven to be valuable company ‘lifers.’ These are the leaders who believe in what it is you are doing and are willing to bring others along with them. Leaders need to be loyal to the company’s goals.
Interview Anyone Who Has Worked Closely with Your Potentials
As you begin to identify those employees who you believe have the potential to be trained as leaders, it’s always a good idea to see what others say about them. This is the time when you speak with present and past team leaders, bosses, managers and directors who have had direct contact with your prospective leaders. Also, talk to their peers who have worked side-by-side with them over a period of time. You are looking for honest input from those who know them best.
Give Them an Opportunity to Expand
One of the ways in which many of the major corporations assess potential leaders is to give them the chance to prove themselves on the job. These possible leadership candidates are rotated through various departments and jobs within the company.
Not only can you see how quickly each person adapts to new roles and tasks, but you are also giving them a better background into the corporate machine. Few departments really understand what it is that a company does as a whole, and since they are only one cog in the wheel, it pays to show them other cogs in a well-oiled machine. This can be huge in driving them forward as future leaders.
Seeing Leadership Training as an Investment in Your Company’s Future
In the end, it is surprising just how many companies out there have all the talent they need to raise up a team of leaders from within their own walls yet fail to see it. Altogether too many seek outside talent who may be better educated but don’t have what it takes to step into leadership roles in line with the company’s vision.
Many of these new recruits will leave within the first few years while there are key people from within who could easily step into leadership roles with a series of leadership training courses. If you are seeking to grow your company beyond your current capabilities, you might look in the direction of investing in leaders from within. They are there. Isn’t it time you sought them out?
Augmented reality (AR) is on the crest of a wave these days. If you haven’t heard about it yet there are only two possibilities: you either have lived under a rock for the past two years or you are simply not interested in the latest tech trends (AT ALL). More and more industries and people are incredibly excited that their science fiction dreams born from iconic movies are finally becoming reality. That I can tell you!
But how is society going to change once we manage to implement augmented reality in every aspect of our lives? How is this going to impact our way of living? To one’s mind, used wisely, this new technology can certainly help us improve and ease the way we learn, work and even have fun. Here are five industries that are definitely changing due to AR.
1. Education
It’s no secret that children love technology. Some of them use a smartphone before learning how to speak or walk and that points out something rather important about our relationship with technology.
Probably the best example in this particular case is Mondly, the app that allows users to learn languages in augmented reality. Just imagine how cool can it be to have your own virtual teacher that brings animals and other objects to life in your living room. Learning that “elephant” is “elefante” in Spanish because an actual size elephant is roaming around in my house!? Yes, sir! I’d very much like that!
2. Healthcare
Healthcare is definitely the first industry we should try to perfect when a new kind of technology emerges. It’s needless to say that we have come a long way since early centuries when doctors would experiment on human beings to discover new cures and procedures, but this is just the beginning.
Augmented reality, the newest and coolest kid in the yard, now allows doctors and nurses to locate patients’ veins more accurately for injections. Other AR apps on the market let physicians show their exact plans for surgeries or visualize detailed bone structures and organ systems. How awesome is that?
3. Architecture and construction
At this the point you can’t be surprised anymore. Yes, AR will also influence the way we build our houses! The market already offers a lot of apps that help constructors visualize and interact with architectural three-dimensional models. Based on the same principle as the language learning app mentioned in the first bullet point, these apps allow users to superimpose virtual buildings, models or projects wherever they want in their environment.
Material selection, real-time shadow analysis, structural layers observation and scaling are also sci-fi features possible with just a simple touch and scroll.
4. Marketing and sales
This one is downright inevitable. When given the chance, brands will use new tech to increase brand awareness, loyalty and, unavoidably, sales! Sales could go through the roof with the right strategy.
Ikea and Amazon give the best example yet. Using augmented reality, these two giants give customers the possibility to visualize exactly how a product would look in their home. This new feature eliminates the drudgery of buying a sofa and discovering it simply doesn’t fit in your living room. At the same time, it increases the quality of your daydreaming by showing how that home cinema you’ve always wanted looks like in your bedroom.
5. Gaming
Saved the obvious for the last. The gaming industry always keeps up with tech trends and integrating AR in the game is no surprise! People chased pokémons in augmented reality before it was this cool.
Nowadays however, gamers can bring small battlefields into their living rooms, look for portals around the city (if they don’t like chasing pokémons anymore), destroy strongholds or investigate crime scenes at home – nothing too special (yet) if you take in consideration the examples from the other four industries mentioned above. Nevertheless, there is one example that might get you super excited. Ready? How does “exploring the wizarding world of Harry Potter” sound? In AR! Because apparently someone is working to release this bad boy. Can’t wait!
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