Why Your Customers Need Choice

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Consumers|Why Your Customers Need ChoiceThe consumer world today is filled with options. Consumers no longer have to pay with cash or credit card. They don’t have a limited choice of high street shops to get the things that they need. They can choose from countless online shops, offering similar products. Ranges are enormous, and the options are numerous. It can be hard for a small business to keep up. But, you should make some effort to offer at least the basic choices to your customers. Here’s why.

Offer Choice Because Everyone Else Does

Because we’re so used to choice, we expect it, but we also need it. When it comes to paying, for example, there’s no longer just one way to do it. Shops, both online and in-store, give us options. We have different banks and kinds of card. Some people use Apple Pay for all online purchases. Others prefer PayPal. This means that your customers will have their own payment preferences. If you don’t offer them different payment gateway choices, you risk losing custom if they haven’t got what they need to complete a transaction.

Another area that you need to offer choice is the methods in which your customers contact you. Many businesses today speak to their customers via Facebook Messenger, but you may have customers that don’t have a Facebook account. Offer your customers plenty of options, and there’s no chance that someone will be unable to contact you if they need to. This can boost loyalty, improve the service that you can offer, and give you much greater opportunities to keep in touch.

You Need to Offer An Easy Service

If you want your customers to keep coming back, you need to make things easy for them. Offering them choices like how to pay, how to shop, product ranges and different services can make their shopping experience much easier.

More Choice Can Help You To Grow

When it comes to products, giving your customers choices of styles, colours, price points, services and sizes can help you to grow your business. It means that you’ll be able to offer something for everyone, appealing to a broader market. It also means that your customers will keep coming back for more. Say you sell clothes, if they love a dress, and you release the same one in different colors or prints, they’ll buy more, especially if it’s a great fit and good quality.

But There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Choice

While you want to offer exceptional service, an easy experience and enough options to keep your customers happy, you don’t want to dilute your brand, overwhelm your customers or make things confusing. Nor do you want to sacrifice the quality of your products so that you can offer more.

It’s vital that you work to find the right balance. Spend time finding ways to offer your customers the options that they need to make shopping as easy as possible. They should be able to find what they want and buy it easily, without having to worry about how they’ll pay. But, when it comes to products, listen to their feedback. Find out what people love, ask them what kind of options and extras they might want, and don’t offer too much. Make sure quality is your priority.

Essential Tips To Boost Your Crowdfunding Strategy

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Crowdfunding|Essential Tips To Boost Your Crowdfunding StrategyMore and more new entrepreneurs are looking for alternative funding strategies to gather their starting capital. Indeed, money-lending institutions can make it difficult for new businesses to apply for a commercial loan. Startups, especially, have a hard time convincing banks that their innovative idea is going to be profitable.

However, it is in the nature of banking systems to support businesses that can provide solid sales forecast. If you are looking for an angel investor to take a chance on your new business model or your new product, you need to focus your attention on creative platforms that allow you to interact directly with your audience. Indeed, a crowdfunding platform can act as a market research strategy, as you can measure the appeal of your idea through the monetary backing you receive. However, platforms such as Kickstarter or Fundable are busy. Attracting the attention of potential investors can be tricky without a dedicated funding strategy.

Build an SEO-friendly presence to boost your campaign

You can create a landing page and regular updates on your crowdfunding platform of choice. However, your crowdfunding presence is likely to get noticed only by people who are already actively looking to invest in a project. You need to reachout to a broad audience group to maximize your chances. As a result, you need to create a digital presence, including social media profiles and a website, to introduce your idea. Using tracking methods to follow your web visitors, you can not only identify performing search terms – or keywords – but also redirect them effectively to your crowdfunding page. It’s a good idea to work closely with a marketing agency that can assist you in defining relevant data and maintaining consistency when reaching out to your audience.

Personalize your gifts

In a banking or financial environment, investors agree to backup your business against the shares or repayment with interest. On a crowdfunding platform, backers don’t expect a financial reward. However, many agree to invest in your business against a gift. It’s not uncommon for startups to provide a free sample top their most generous investors. Backers who invested a smaller amount are happy to accept a merch gift in exchange for their support. To keep your cost within budget, you can offer a branded t-shirt, using a vinyl laser cutter to transfer the design, for instance. You can use the Boss laser cutter review page for guidance. A laser cutting machine is a fantastic alternative to personalize a small number of items, which makes it ideal if you don’t have enough backers for a large scale t-shirt order!

Show your face

Only 33% of crowdfunding campaigns succeed without a video. However, campaigns that successfully introduced video marketing achieved 66% successful funding according to Drop Studio. If you’re going to appeal to your audience’s generosity, you need to build a trustworthy and engaging relationship. Videos are not only useful to present your business ideas, but you can also use them as part of your marketing campaign on YouTube. Indeed, you can tie them to an advertising strategy to reach out to users within your relevant demographics.

While crowdfunding is the preferred funding approach for small businesses, it remains a challenging environment for new entrepreneurs. You need to build a presence that not only stands out from the crowd, but that can also encourage potential investors to back your business. That’s precisely why it’s essential to focus on your marketing approach, not only in terms of visibility but also merchandising.

4 Rules To An Effective Logo

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Logo|4 Rules To An Effective LogoAnyone who has ever thought about trying to market a business or design a brand will know how important the logo is. And anyone who thinks about this for a moment will be able to determine why it might be quite so important too. Without an effective logo for your business, you can’t really expect it to do what it is meant to. A good logo will draw in attention to your business, make it considerably more popular and make the marketing a lot more effective on the whole. It will have a way of making the brand stick in people’s minds. If you want to make sure that you are achieving all this, then you are going to need to think about what you need to do to make an effective logo. In this article, we are going to look at just a few of the most important rules for making that happen.

Simplicity

One of the most important things you can say about the design of a logo is that it needs to be perfectly simple. The simplicity is what draws people in and it is for that reason that you need to think about working on this as well as possible. The irony here is that simpler designs are often the most difficult to create, and you will probably find that you are going to have to think about it long and hard before you can create a simple logo design which works. At the other end of the scale, you don’t want it to be over-simplified, as that is going to mean that it is completely ineffective in that way instead. So find this balance as well as you can if you want to really make sure that your logo is going to be effective.

Application

The way that the logo is applied is as important as the design, so we’ll take a moment now to discuss this too. Application in this sense means where you put the logo, and how you use it. You need to make sure that it is going to be effective for the branding of the business, which probably means using it wherever you would have your brand appear. But that can be hard if your logo is not likely to lend itself well to various specific kinds of places. You want to try and design a logo, therefore, that will look good anywhere. If you see your logo on a drawstring backpack, you want to feel that it looks right, as well as seeing it on a letterhead, the side of your building, or on the news. Think about the application from the start, and you should be able to have much more success with your logo.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Logo|4 Rules To An Effective LogoOriginality

All of this is unlikely to be effective unless it is also original, so make sure that you are working on that too. Originality is hugely centrally important to your logo being successful, and it is something that can be hard to make a reality. If your logo is not original, then that ultimately means that you are going to have trouble with people considering it to be anything special. You want to stand out, in short, and that is not going to happen if your logo does not stand out from the others as well as possible. The best way to achieve strong originality is to make sure that you are focusing on what it is that makes your business unique, and then trying to introduce those elements into the logo itself as best as you can. You can do this more easily than you might think, and it is going to mean that your logo is much more successful indeed.

Boldness

As well as the above, you are also going to need to make sure that your logo is bold. It is very difficult to achieve this in line with the other rules, especially simplicity, but that is why it is so effective when you make it work: after all, that means that you are going to be able to expect much more from your marketing overall. Having a bold logo that really makes a visual impression in a strong way is hugely important for your marketing and branding, and something that you need to work on as much as possible to make it a reality.

If you can make these things come true, your logo is going to be much more effective, and your business will have much more luck in general, so make sure you focus on these.

What Harms Your Business Budget The Most?

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Every single business out there has a budget. Every single business who wants to survive beyond the first five years is going to listen to and obey their budget! It might be hard going at times, but it’ll be worth any potential risks in the long run.

And because of that, you might want to work out what costs are currently the biggest sucks on your budget. You need to be sure you can provide for them, month in and month out, and always be sure to prioritise them until you feel secure enough to move on. It might just be an example of growth, at the end of the day!

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Advertising Costs

Advertising is a big part of the business process. If you have a company, and that company sells a product, everything from brand name to your finished logo is going to come off as an advertising expense. It’s been found that businesses can spend at least 20% of their total budget on marketing, and that’s a huge chunk of money for one department alone.

As a small business, you’re going to be placing emphasis on advertising, to ensure you get the word out – have you budgeted enough money?

Travel Costs

Ferrying yourself to and from work every day is going to get expensive. Of course, you should be able to claim at least most of these expenses back at the end of the fiscal year, but that doesn’t change how expensive they can be in the meantime. You’ll still have to fork out for the fuel, and the car costs, and the mileage covered under your insurance, and that’s hard on a small business or startup fund.

At the same time, if your business makes use of a company fleet for general employee use, these costs are going to be maximised tenfold. How do you cut back on these kinds of expenses, when every working day is filled with employees going from A to B and back again? You’ve got investors to meet and clients to satisfy, after all.

Well, mandating a policy of writing down time spent with a vehicle, and making sure it’s returned at a certain time at the end of the day can help you to gather control. And with something like a Fleet Fuel Card, you should be able to save on standard fuel costs, no matter how much you need to use each year.

Rent Costs

And finally, you’re going to have to fork out for rent costs month by month too. Even if you’re running a home business, and have a mortgage to pay, you’re still going to end up counting these living expenses as a business cost.

And seeing as lease agreements are usually dependent on the kind of business you’re running, you’re going to be using some very niche and specific calculations to try and factor rent into the budget.

Your business budget can be quite stretched, so make sure you’re aware of sinkholes.

4 Ways To Boost Employee Health In Your Business

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As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to look after your employees. The happier they are, the more productive they’ll be, so everybody benefits if you treat your employees well. But one thing that a lot of business owners don’t put that much thought into is their employees’ health. If they are unhealthy, it impacts your business in a lot of different ways. They are more likely to take sick days and when they are at work, they won’t be as productive. If you offer health insurance, you will end up spending more money because your employees will need treatment more often. It’s for those reasons that employee health should be a priority in any business. These are some of the best ways that you can create a healthier office environment for everybody.

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Keep The Office Clean

A dirty office is not just unpleasant, but it’s also bad for people’s health. If the office is dirty then people will not be as productive because they don’t have a positive environment to work in. But they’re also more likely to get sick because they’re surrounded by bacteria all the time. So, you need to make sure that the office is always kept clean. Get a corporate office cleaning service to come in on a regular basis and give the office a deep clean, but your employees also need to take some responsibility. If everybody keeps their own desk area clean and people chip in to keep the communal areas tidy, it’s a lot easier to stay on top of.

Increase Natural Light

Natural light is important for good health because we need it to produce vitamin D. Unfortunately, vitamin D deficiencies are incredibly common because most people simply don’t spend enough time outside and they sit in a dark office all day, under artificial light. Lack of natural light can also have an impact on mood and productivity as well, so it’s important that you try to boost natural light in the office if possible.

Regular Health And Safety Checks

Health and safety can be a bit of a pain, but it’s there for a reason and it benefits your business in a lot of ways. If you ignore health and safety checks, you just increase the risk of injuries. When an employee gets injured, it’s bad news for you because they could sue you and even if they don’t, you will have to go without a good employee until they are well enough to work again. But that could all have been avoided if you just carried out some regular health and safety checks. And don’t forget to also remind your employees to go for regular check-ups with the dentist, like this Invisalign Dentist in Brentwood CA for example.

Give More Time Off

Stress and mental health issues are one of the biggest health problems that you have to tackle. If your employees are overworked, they will suffer from burnout and they may develop a more serious mental health problem. That’s why it’s important that you give people more time off so they have time to recharge their batteries. They will be more productive when they return to work, so even though they have more time off, their overall output will be increased.

These are all simple changes that you can make in your business to improve employee health.