Personal Finance Management: What It Means Before And After You Retire

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Personal Finance|Personal Finance Management: What It Means Before And After You RetireManaging personal finances is one of the critical tasks that every adult must consider. Without effective management of what you have, or what you might have, you’ll always be struggling to make the ends meet.

However, it is noteworthy that personal finance management is not the same for everyone. Particularly, when it comes to managing finances in the present, for the future.

So, how to do it the right way?

When You’re Working…

When you’re young and employed, you can take up much more than you think. To put this into perspective, in younger years you have surplus energy and time to put into strengthening your personal finances. Take a look at some of the tips below to learn how.

Invest and Save for post-retirement

Though it seems difficult, saving for retirement can help you live the life for when you’re not earning. Before you invest in any Risk Management & Insurance, however, you need to know a few things. For instance, you need to assess how much you can spend on these financial investments. In addition to this, you must also try to figure out the returns you can expect when your investments mature.

Create and Scale your Income Sources

Having a primary income source is what you need to stay sustainable. However, if you wish to save and invest for retirement, you need to grow your income. Notably, looking for a secondary income source such as rental income from real estate investments can be a good option. Likewise, you can also invest in mutual funds and reap profits. All of this secondary, or passive income, will help you support better during unlikely times.

When You’re Retired…

When you’re employed it is way easier to earn and invest, as already mentioned. However, when you’re retired, you do not have the same income sources as before. After all, that is what retirement means.

So, how do you manage your personal finances when you’re retired?

Prepare your Retirement Budget

The very first thing that you must do as soon as you retire is assessing your savings and retirement plan’s value. You need to create a budget for your day to day expenses based on the money that you have. If possible you can also think of creating a secondary income source after you retire. For example, you can start offering consultancy services. Or you can scale your rental income during your retirement years. Notably, you should create sources demanding minimal investments.

Optimize your Expenses Efficiently

This might seem a bit obvious, but believe us when we tell you that most people fail to do the same. In most cases, the retirement funds, also known as Provident Funds, are disbursed in one payment. And people usually don’t know what to do with all that money. Perhaps, they end up exhausting their funds before they know. A rather easy way to escape this tragedy is to break your expenses for day to day errands and chores. And the remaining amount can then be used for reinvestments. Thus, creating you a secondary income source too.

The Bottom Line…

Managing personal finances is all about preparing for the future that you don’t know in the present. And only with the right knowledge and skills is it possible to live out a life that you dream of, both pre- and post-retirement.

The Feeling Economy and Customer Empathy

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Artificial Intelligence|The Feeling Economy and Customer EmpathyArtificial intelligence (AI) and automation as a workforce disruptor is a genie out of the bottle. The Brookings Institute, a little more than a year ago projected about 25% disruption of the U.S. workforce – about 36 million jobs – in the coming decades. But at the same time, the needle also is moving on A.I.’s transformation of how businesses and their customers interact.

To give this collective shift more context, AI has moved from replacing jobs associated with inspecting equipment, manufacturing goods, repairing things to replacing humans in thinking tasks–the likes of data dives and calculations. The shift originated in the Industrial Revolution and gave rise to the current “Thinking Economy.” Just as the industrial revolution automated physical tasks by decreasing the value of human strength and increasing the value of human cognition, AI taking over thinking tasks is further reshaping the landscape and ushering in a “Feeling Economy.”

AI in this Feeling Economy is doing more of the ‘brain’ work. Subsequently, humans increasingly are handling the ‘heart’ work, including social interaction, emotion recognition, nuanced communication and genuine care for customers. In the workplace, the feeling tasks of jobs – communicating with co-workers and clients, selling to or persuading others, and building and maintaining interpersonal relationships – are more important than the thinking tasks of jobs.

The rapid proliferation of “thinking AI” also is significantly transforming the goods and services marketplace. The consumer interface to the business often is AI-driven.

Online-connected consumers with smartphones can tap digital assistants — from Apple’s Siri, to Google Assistant, to Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft’s Cortana — to answer questions, order supplies and control home electronics among other capabilities, some of which have not even been thought of yet. As time goes by, as digital assistants become more understanding of such things as context and can do a better job of personalization. GPS navigation systems, such as Waze and Google Maps, simplify the difficult navigation task of finding destinations, even if the consumer has never been to those destinations before.

The machine-to-machine transactions — consumers purchasing via the likes of Amazon Prime through Amazon’s website or app, for example — leaves the emotional connection largely to humans. To match the emotionality of the consumer, the customer-facing personnel must become more empathetic, which in turn makes the consumer even more emotionally driven – requiring greater feeling intelligence on the part of the business.

Further consider the case of the customer service representative, whose easy, repetitive tasks like providing information and making appointments are being taken over by A.I. In this context, a consumer with a non-routine problem is much more likely to be emotionally involved, and the service person to whom AI escalates the problem will need to be much more empathetic than the traditional customer service person. The emotionality of the consumer forms a feedback loop: the consumer is more emotional, so the business must become more emotional, which makes the consumer even more emotional, and so on.

In our new book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy, we describe a real-life scenario reflecting the thinking-to-feeling transition happening in customer service:

A recent doctoral graduate, an African-American man named Jared, was trying to buy a car. He started out with one salesperson, who took a more thinking-oriented approach. This was a good match for Jared, because PhDs are among the most thinking-oriented people on Earth. The salesperson, being good at his job, was trying to match Jared’s interaction preferences. Unfortunately, Jared was then passed off to an African American salesperson, no doubt to try to match Jared’s cultural background and ethnicity. This salesperson, knowing that business needs to be more emotional as time goes by, tried an emotional approach with Jared, calling him “my Black brother,” and using other emotional appeals. Such an approach will work the vast majority of the time as consumers become more emotionally driven. For Jared, though, it was not what he needed. The one thing we know, however, is that there will be fewer and fewer thinking-oriented consumers like Jared.

As thinking AI is making consumers more feeling-oriented—from their product expectations to their everyday life—companies can take advantage of this trend by tailoring sales, marketing and service to meet the needs of these increasingly emotionally-driven buyers.

About the Authors

Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. An award-winning scholar, he has edited several major journals and consulted with American Airlines, AT&T, Dupont, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, and Sony, among many companies worldwide. Ming-Hui Huang is Distinguished Professor in the College of Management at National Taiwan University. A Fellow of the European Marketing Academy, she also is International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, UK, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland Smith and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research. Their book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Springer International Publishing; January 2021), can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Economy-Artificial-Intelligence-Creating/dp/3030529762.

How to Use Video as Business Training Materials

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Video Training|How to Use Video as Business Training MaterialsUsing videos as part of your training resources is a no brainer in this day and age.

Videos can be a great way to increase the retention of information by trainees; in some cases, up to 90% of the information compared to written text alone.

It’s not just enough to film a PowerPoint, though; video content needs to be interesting and enticing to keep your employees on task.

Stick to One Topic

Just as your marketing team will tell you that every piece of content needs one, and only one, call to action, so too does your training video.

It’s better for everyone if your training videos are shorter and designed to tackle one aspect of the role rather than an epic feature-length video that covers everything.

As a business, you’ll want to make your training videos available to your employees to come back to if they’re going to, they are much more likely to do that I the videos are in short and easy to digest chunks rather than hours long and a little on the dull side.

Decide How You’ll Approach It

How you’ll approach your training materials and training videos is very much dependent on your company culture, but it’s important to remember that people learn better if they are entertained rather than just lectured at.

Very few lecturers and trainers can be charismatic and interesting while delivering a talk, but even the most uninteresting of topics can be made better when you spend some time considering how you’d like to present the material.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Bold

Speaking of how you’d like to produce the material, there’s no reason why you can’t be bold with your training videos!

Include some epic b-roll, a few cinematic effects, and maybe even some sound effects to get the party rolling.

Most training videos will be internal, so as much as they need to be on-brand, you can afford to be a little looser with your brand than you would be in public.

Script and Storyboard Your Training Videos

Once you’ve got everything planned out, you’ll need to script and storyboard your ideas.

It’s a good idea to get them down on paper and make them official before you start, as this will be the key to keeping everyone on-task and keep the momentum up when you’re putting together your training videos.

One of the biggest bonuses of scripting and storyboarding is that you can plan exactly what to say and ensure that no important information is left out!

Stay Away from PowerPoint!

If you’ve ever seen the video ‘How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint‘ Ted Talk by David JP Phillips, you’ll know exactly what is meant by staying away from PowerPoint.

In this pandemic-hit era, many of us are used to webinars over Zoom and, although they are useful in these challenging times, it doesn’t mean they are exciting or interesting.

Ditch the PowerPoints and focus on the story of your training videos!

Why Online Reputation Management Is Essential In 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Reputation Management|Why Online Reputation Management Is Essential In 2021The past year has seen our world truly catapulted into the digital era, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Online shopping for groceries, clothes and other essentials has become more prevalent than ever, and remote working with the help of technology is more widespread increasingly widespread.

Most businesses these days have an online presence, whether that is an e-commerce store or social media accounts, to grow their brand recognition. The internet also allows consumers to provide feedback on your goods or services and have the potential to be viewed by thousands of consumers.

The feedback that your business gets online is crucial to how people see you and your company. No business can forgo this in 2021. Fortunately, there are ways that you can manage your online reputation to ensure that it remains positive and a true reflection of your business.

What Is Your Online Reputation?

Your online reputation is made up of reviews and feedback from customers online. It is also impacted by the content you put out and interactions you have on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There are many moving parts that contribute to a business’s overall online reputation. Given that the reviews on sites like Google and Trustpilot are often beyond your control, it can be challenging for a company to ensure that its online reputation remains stellar.

Fortunately, there are a number of tools available to help businesses manage and improve their online reputation. You could consider using a combination of these tools to decide which works best for you.

Review Your Online Reputation

The first step to a positive online reputation is to review what is being said about you online. You can do this simply by searching for your business on Google and seeing what kind of results appear.

Regularly monitoring what is being said about you online will help ensure that you can clearly see where your business’s positive and negative feedback is coming from. It may take some time, but you should do your best to review all of the feedback you can find on as many review sites as possible. Make notes of criticism and praise to see if they have any common themes. Learning from criticism, not silencing it, is essential for a positive online reputation.

Stay In The Know

You will need to take steps to know what is being said about your business in the long-term. There are many places online that you may need to keep track of to ensure you are in the loop and up to date on business feedback. You could consider making use of tools like Google Alert. This tool allows you to set specific search term alerts that will notify you when anything mentioning these terms comes up in searches. This can be an excellent way to ensure you are notified of any criticism or negative reviews as soon as possible and puts you in an ideal position to respond promptly.

Decide What You Want Your Reputation To Be

It can help when considering online reputation management to have an idea of what you want your online reputation to look like. For instance, do you want to be seen as experts, as a fun company or down to earth? Take some time to consider how you want to be perceived online, and then make a plan of how you will make that a reality.

Ensure That You Have Control Over Your Online Branding

It would help if you ensure that you have control over any domain names related to your business. Ideally, you should do this as soon as you form a company to protect your brand and ensure that you have access to all domain names you may need in the future.

It is worth securing domain names even on social media sites you don’t envision yourself using. This can ensure that no one else can use them. Third parties using domain names associated with your business can sully the water and create confusion among consumers. It also prevents any potential nefarious activity from being posted under the name of your business.

Get Noticed

You need to be noticed if you want to grow your online reputation. Having little online chatter about your business can often be as off-putting to potential customers as pages and pages of negative reviews.

To gain an online reputation, you will need to focus on reviews and ensuring that they are positive as much as possible. There are many ways to do this, including sending follow-up emails to ask customers to rate their experience and requesting reviews on social media.

You can also use specialist services and tools that can help to cultivate and grow positive reviews. Online review management is an essential service for any business wanting to get noticed among the crowd of today’s digital landscape. If you’d like to know more about the resources available, you can see this tool for an idea of the quality of services out there. Signpost is an industry leader in online review management and is ideal for helping your business gain the recognition it deserves.

Addressing Criticism

Criticism is a natural part of operating in business. You will never be able to satisfy every customer fully, and sometimes mistakes are made. The important thing is not to ignore or try to hide criticism but instead address it head-on. You should do your best to be open and honest when discussing criticism online and provide clear answers to any questions raised.

You can use online criticism as a way to show consumers that you are learning and growing. Demonstrating that you are taking criticism on board will show them that their feedback matters to them and will show you in a better light. Never respond to customer complaints in the heat of the moment. What goes online seldom can be removed permanently, so your response will be there to be read by anyone searching for your business in the future, so you should ensure that it is calm and measured.

Gaining Credibility And Trust

Credibility is essential to any business’s success, and this is particularly true for companies operating online. People entering brick and mortar shops know the person they are dealing with because they can see them face to face. This is not the case online, so you will need to take other measures to gain consumers’ trust and show that you are a credible and reliable business to deal with.

A great way to gain credibility is to show that you have the endorsement of other trusted entities. This could be by displaying accreditation or trustmarks from well-known organizations such as McAfee or PayPal. Trustmarks are given to businesses that pass specific criteria with the provider, so having these displayed on your website or social media profiles can help to instill trust with consumers.

Credibility and trust are crucial factors that customer use to decide if they are willing to purchase a product. You should do what you can to promote your credibility and trustworthiness, which will help to ensure business success.

Content

Content is crucial to business success in 2021. It is one of the best ways to get your brand noticed and ensure that you rank highly in search engines. Content is also a fantastic way to allow your audience and potential customer to get to know you and your business, enabling them to effectively engage and connect with you.

You should ensure that the content you put out is high quality and consistent with your company’s overall tone. It should be relevant and engaging to your target audience. For instance, if your target demographic is teenage girls, you will need an entirely different tone than if you are producing content aimed at middle-aged mechanics.

It would be best if you tried to have a broad range of content for customers to consume. This should include blog posts, photos, videos and tutorials, depending on the products or services your business provides.

Social Media

Social media can be an excellent way to grow your online reputation. This should be approached with caution, however, as social media users can be notoriously fickle. It can be hard to predict the response to social media campaigns, and for as many positive viral corporate Tweets, there are many more negatively received posts.

Social media interactions should always be polite, friendly and straightforward. Depending on your business’s size and resources, you could consider employing someone to be dedicated to social media outreach. If you decide to do this, you should ensure that this person or team knows how you wish your business to be perceived and fully understand the tone that they should approach social media interactions with. You can use humor in your social media interactions, but it should be done carefully and never at a prospective customer’s expense.

Use Partnerships

As with the use of accreditation and trustmarks, you could consider making strategic partnerships as an excellent way to promote and manage your online reputation. There are many options to choose from when considering a partnership, and who you choose will largely depend on your business and target demographic.

Partnering with influencers can be a great place to start. Influencers are social media users with large followings that use this fanbase to promote and discuss products and services. The most well-known influencers are for beauty, fashion and tech, but there are also influencers that specialize in science, sports and almost any topic you can think of.

Experts are another excellent option for business partnerships. The backing of an expert in your business’s industry can do a lot to increase trust in your brand among consumers.

Continuous Improvement

Changing, growing and improving is crucial for any business to succeed. Focusing your attention on your online reputation can help to foster innovation and bring new ideas to the table. Online feedback is an invaluable tool in business growth and development, and when used well, can ensure that you remain at the top of your game.

It could help to take note of the various criticisms or less positive feedback that you get. You can evaluate these and see if there are any ways that you can change the way your business operates or make improvements to your products. For instance, if you receive a lot of less positive feedback about a specific feature or part of a product, you can take this on board and make improvements.

Recruitment

Another advantage of good online reputation management is that having a positive reputation will make your company a highly attractive place to work for potential candidates.

For many job hunters, the first thing they do when considering a role is to do a Google search of the company. Like potential customers, you will want the results to be positive if you are to attract the best talent.

The best talent is crucial for the success of any business, and showcasing an excellent online reputation can be a vital deciding factor for many candidates. You should ensure that your online presence shines, not only to attract customers but also the best and brightest minds that can help you grow and prosper.

Conclusion

A business’s online reputation is crucial to its success in 2021. The online arena is increasingly crowded, with different companies vying for the attention of consumers. An excellent online reputation is vital to ensure that you stand out among the pack. There are many steps that you can take to manage and optimize your business reputation and ensure that it is healthy and positive.

A clear policy for your tone online is crucial to ensuring that you gain a positive online reputation. You should also ensure that you address criticism calmly, professionally and politely. Where possible, showing that you have learned from customer feedback can do a lot to ensure an excellent online reputation.

It may help to enlist the services of professional online reputation management organizations. This can ensure that your online reputation is in the best hands and that you have the advantage of their knowledge and expertise to grow your reputation. If you decide to use professionals, you should ensure that you do your research and choose a company that can provide you with the best chances of success.

Determining Your Objectives In Digital Marketing

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Determining Your Objectives In Digital MarketingThe world of digital marketing is full of terms, some that may sound completely alien to those who are not used to the jargon of this world (such as, for example, KPI). Others may come from everyday language. If you personally saw a phrase like “SEO Austin,” you would know right away that it has something to do with digital marketing. However, you may think everyone knows what they mean, but many people don’t really understand it completely. This can lead not only to misunderstandings in conversation, but also totally wrong communication policies. That is why today, we want to talk about the differences between the concepts of objectives, strategy and tactics.

Quantitative Objectives

The first thing to be clear about is the objectives. There are two main types of objectives; the first is ‘quantitative objectives.’ Quantitative objectives are always measurable since, as their name indicates, they are set in quantities.

  • Increase our blog traffic by 20%
  • Increase web traffic by 100,000 visits per month
  • Get 1000 followers per month on Twitter
  • Make 200 monthly conversions
  • Increase 25% in annual sales

Qualitative Objectives

Qualitative objectives are more subjective and therefore more complicated to measure. Whenever possible, set quantitative objectives (since they are easier to measure) and use qualitative ones in a complementary way.

For example:

  • Improve public perception of our brand
  • Increase brand awareness on social media
  • Improve the image of our product or service

Establishing Objectives

It is essential, to establish our objectives, to have a great knowledge of your business and its environment (the market, the potential client, and the competition). For this, it is essential to carry out an internal and external analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis).

Smart Goals

These objectives should be divided into small intermediate goals, which are known as SMART goals.

Specific: clear and concrete, all members of the team must understand and be on the same page.

Measurable: it has to be measurable, even qualitative ones. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be reached.

Achievable: if we set ourselves an unreachable goal, the team may fall into frustration.

Realistic: in addition to being achievable, it must be realistic with the means at your disposal and considering the current situation of your company.

Timely (limited in time): you have to set a deadline to reach them.

For example, if you want to reach 30,000 visits to your store per year, they could be divided into 10,000 each quarter. This makes it easier to evaluate the results and maintain or correct the course if necessary.

Conclusion

When you work with SEO and marketing professionals like MOTOZA Digital Marketing, objectives are essential to control and measure both strategy and tactical actions and allow you to achieve larger goals. For this reason, it is vital to define short, medium, and long-term objectives.