Marketing Tips for Start-Ups

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Marketing Tips|Marketing Tips for Start-UpsMarketing is one of the most important elements of a business. Without it, your company will be lost in a sea of other companies and no one will know about your services. For start-ups especially, putting together a high-quality marketing plan is essential. If you’re new to marketing and are keen to put this into action, check out the tips below.

Find Your Niche

Finding your niche is key when it comes to developing a strong marketing strategy. It’s all well and good to market your services, but if it’s not hitting your target audience then it could fall flat on its face. To tailor your campaign to your intended audience, speak to potential customers and find out about their lifestyles, interests, concerns, and needs. Successful campaigns depend on your ability to connect with your audience, so establishing your niche is one of the most important first steps.

Attend Events

Networking is another vital step in your marketing efforts. Expanding your contacts, opportunities, and potential customers will go a long way. While networking events can be daunting, finding ones that are relevant to your industry can be highly rewarding. Where possible, try to meet new people and grow your network of potential clients and customers. You could even co-sponsor an event within your niche to gain more publicity for your business.

Give Away Products

Products can be a powerful way of marketing your business. Whether it’s pens and notebooks or stickers and t-shirts, applying your brand across merchandise and distributing these at events can be one of the most effective ways to get your name out there. Great Creates promotional products, including clothing, technology, drinkware, and office stationary, allow you to showcase your brand.

Use Social Media

Social media is another powerful platform for marketing your business. Creating profiles on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn is essential if you want your business to be visible. However, to make this more effective, find out which platforms your target audience are using and create content that appeals to their interests.

Do Your SEO Keyword Research

Every business should do their keyword research to target customers. Again, this comes down to understanding your niche and audience. By knowing what these customers do, want, and need, you can then set about finding out what keywords they enter into Google. In other words, you’ll want to tailor your marketing efforts to accommodate the keywords that are used by your target demographic. This will ensure that your services are visible on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and that your potential customers can find you.

Host a Contest

Perhaps one of the lesser-known marketing tips is to host a contest. While contests can seem superficial, some of the most successful companies have achieved growth in this way (YouTube included). Contests are especially great for start-up businesses who are looking to grow quickly. Whether you’re giving away a prize or a service in exchange for sign-ups or purchases from your customers, contests can be a fun and easy growth hack.

5 Tips to Improve Sales Team Performance

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Team Performance|5 Tips to Improve Sales Team PerformanceDo you want to generate more sales? It’s a silly question to ask, admittedly – every business wants to send out more orders to customers. Yet actually making it a reality is a whole different story. If it were easy, you wouldn’t see so many companies fall by the wayside each year.

The good news is there are numerous ways in which you can boost the chances of selling more to consumers. This is particularly the case if your business operates with a sales team. Whether they are out in the field, within your office, or working from home remotely, there are ways to optimize their performance.

How? That’s where this guide will help. Below are five tips to improve how your sales team operates.

1. Accurate sales forecasting

Did you know that most organizations don’t feature a scalable, repeatable method for forecasting sales? If your business falls into the same situation, it’s time to change this process. The reason for this is simple: a lot of critical decisions – from investments to hiring employees – are down to sales forecasts.

As a result, sales forecasting accuracy – where you measure how close you come to hitting your forecast – is necessary. Generally, an accurate sales forecast can be essential in improving your sales team performance. For instance, it allows your business to spend adequate resources more effectively to facilitate a successful sales strategy. It also helps your sales department to attain specific business goals by determining issues with their sales and looking for ways to correct them. Lastly, having an accurate sales forecast can help you make sound business decisions in terms of budgeting, risk management, and planning.

With all these things being said, sales forecasting indeed plays an integral role in the success of your marketing and sales efforts. But if you’re a beginner, how can you create an accurate sales forecast? Well, One way of doing this is by working out the percent difference, also known as the percentage error. Simply put, this is the difference between forecast volume and the actual volume expressed in percentage form. You can learn more online about how to calculate forecast accuracy.

If you’re not good with math and the last thing you want to deal with is a percentage calculation, there is a quick solution available. GIGA Calculator offers a simple yet effective percent error solution for this issue.

2. Implement sales tools

In the sales world, there are plenty of repetitive, unproductive tasks that each employee has to handle. This is why it is recommended to automate as many of these tasks as possible with the implementation of sales tools. When tools like these are used, it helps to save a significant amount of time on redundant assignments like data entry. This means your sales team can then dedicate more time towards tasks that matter most.

To get an idea of what is available for automation, Intercom has put together a list of 45 sales tools worth your time.

Aside from innovative sales tools, there are also other things that can help make the sales team’s work much easier and faster. One of them is the so-called sales playbook. It refers to a document containing your business’s best sales tactics, strategies, and even templates which are based on your sales successes and failures. In other words, it’s a cohesive manual that can guide your company in obtaining an increase in sales over a certain period of time.

Like the other sales tools, a sales playbook can serve as an effective tool to ensure your sales team utilize the best sales strategies. It also helps get your team on the same page in terms of your marketing and sales efforts, thereby making them much easier and more efficient. With a sales playbook, you can ensure that the sales department will properly implement your proven sales tactics. So, if you want to include a sales playbook in your list of sales tools, then you should start creating one as early as now.

3. Establish a schedule

Yes, sales reps are not known for sticking to the most stringent schedules – particularly if they’re working in the field where travel also has to be factored into the equation. However, putting together some form of schedule for your sales team is highly recommended.

When you have structure, where sales reps also know how long each client session should last, it’s easier for them to organize their daily schedule. They will know how much time needs to be dedicated for each meeting, along with other points that may apply, such as travel and preparation.

4. Decide on daily goals

Accountability leads to results. It is a driving force that gives your sales team that extra push to, well, sell your products. To add accountability, one of the easiest methods is to set goals that serve as a form of motivation. They supply salespeople with a plan of action, a sense of direction so they can hit their set targets.

For instance, say an employee is set with the target of reaching $500 in sales for the day. To do this, they need to make five sales. On average, it takes 20 attempts for them to land a single sale. As a result, it is known they need to make approximately 100 attempts to reach their goal of $500.

With this type of information and motivation, they can plan out how to make their goals a reality.

5. Communication is key

Being in constant communication with your sales team is imperative. This point shouldn’t be overlooked. The more you stay in touch with your employees, the more you’ll be aware of their performance and any feedback they might have.

When communicating with your employees, you can start with a quick meeting each morning. Yet, it is also wise to schedule a daily one-on-one check-in with each salesperson. This doesn’t necessarily have to happen each day, of course, but it is a great way to gain insight from employees.

By going with an in-depth interaction like this, it is perfect for getting valuable feedback. You can learn about not just ways to improve your business, but also the morale of your employees and if any steps need to be taken to improve their mood.

Get to know the five latest breakthroughs of the digital marketing world

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Marketing|Get to know the five latest breakthroughs of the digital marketing worldA few years ago, concepts like artificial intelligence, voice and image search, and data-driven actions were incredible. Yet, they were idealistic ideas that would never make it a reality. Now, however, these are some of the most prominent forces shaping digital marketing. These new trends make marketing more targeted than ever and allow you to connect on a much deeper level with your customers. There’s no doubt that the upheaval of 2020 helped accelerate some changes that the marketing world was already seeing. It also helped create a great deal of uncertainty, making marketers realize that they needed to learn how to adapt to a rapidly evolving digital market. With this in mind, we can’t say for sure which trends will reign supreme in the coming years, but some latest breakthroughs do come out on top. Below, we’ll discuss some of the top breakthroughs in digital marketing and how you can incorporate them into your marketing strategy.

Voice over internet protocol

VoIP is one of the most popular digital marketing tools these days, especially given the pandemic’s outbreak. Simply put, VoIP is a technology that turns your voice into a digital signal, allowing you to make phone calls directly from your computer. However, it also comes with a host of other features, including video calls, emails, and text messaging. VoIP can help streamline your business communications immensely by giving you a unified communication service that caters to all aspects of client relations. Going through different communication channels can be incredibly cumbersome for your communications team and can lead to delayed responses. Through VoIP, a centralized system helps you keep track of all queries and lets you address all concerns timely.

It is also much cheaper and easier to install than any other communications software. It doesn’t need any wires or complicated set-up. All you need is a working internet connection, and you’re good to go. When picking a VoIP provider, there are various factors you need to consider. You want a versatile provider who offers many services and can evolve with you as your business needs expand. You want an affordable budget with high-quality service you can rely on easily. However, it can be challenging to conduct such extensive research alone. Instead, you can work with a communication licensed operator like GetVoIP to avail of the best services as per your needs.

Progressive marketing

No matter what your niche is, progressive, inclusive marketing is one of the most pressing needs of the digital marketing world. Your marketing strategies and services now need to accommodate minorities and marginalized groups to create an inclusivity and acceptance atmosphere. Brand discrimination has played a vital role in shaping intolerant societal attitudes previously. Now it’s time for all companies, regardless of niche, to cater to discriminated groups. While this may be more of a social shift, it heavily influences marketing campaigns globally. Most shoppers now refrain from investing with a company that doesn’t reflect that inclusivity and diversity are essential.

By matching with customer values surrounding acceptance and diversity, you are likelier to build long-lasting relationships with your clients. Furthermore, by catering to a more diverse audience, you get the opportunity to bring in new customers too. Even incorporating various faces in your marketing campaigns or speaking about essential issues in your campaigns is going in the right direction.

Visual content

SEO optimization is one of the best ways to get immense organic traffic to your brand and fast. However, SEO rules keep evolving as user preferences change, and search engines adapt to give viewers the content they want. One of the latest breakthroughs in digital marketing is the increasing popularity of visual content. People prefer websites with visual content much more than readable ones, and 91% of all consumers now prefer visual and interactive content over static media.

The increasing rise of image-based platforms is indicative of the popularity of visual content nowadays. Visual content allows you to take storytelling to another level and make your message much more immersive. There are various ways you can incorporate visual content in your strategy.

Images are an excellent way of showcasing your brand’s best features in an attractive, eye-catching format. Infographics allow you to inform your client while retaining their attention. Videos are another beneficial way of giving your client a lot of information in a short time for better retention. However, it’s not just your clients that prefer visual marketing. Search engine algorithms now consistently rank webpages with optimized visual content higher than those without, letting you attract traffic hordes.

Customer segmentation

Customer segmentation has been around for a while, but only now is it emerging as a revolutionary breakthrough. Customer segmentation revolves around the idea of challenging marketing norms. Instead of creating more extensive campaigns that cater to a broad audience, customer segmentation allows you to make smaller campaigns that cater to targeted groups.

Segmentation enables you to understand better the differences in your customer base and better suit their preferences.

You can create separate email campaigns for big and small spenders or create special offers based on gender or age. You can also understand which clients prefer your services and develop tailored newsletters to make more sales. Customer segmentation can help you save a lot of money and guarantees a more significant ROI than traditional marketing modes.

Semantic search

Semantic search is another up-and-coming trend in digital marketing about the study of semantics. Search engine algorithms now increasingly consider the context. To optimize for semantic search, you need first to analyze what your customers are looking for when they discover your brand. You want this analysis to be comprehensive, and you should understand the experience, answers, and content that your audience wants. You want to offer clients content that answers their questions and content that is people-optimized, with no keyword stuffing. Other areas to focus on include topic optimization, which helps organize your website for viewers and search engines alike, and internal linking.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that the digital marketing world is evolving incredibly fast and getting much more sophisticated. These latest breakthroughs allow you to adapt to rapidly changing trends and ensure that you can form long-lasting connections with your clients. Furthermore, these breakthroughs offer a more significant ROI than traditional marketing strategies and prove much more lucrative for your business in the long run.

Mistakes That Can Trip Up Your Small Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Small Business Mistakes|Mistakes That Can Trip Up Your Small BusinessWhen you’re starting a business, it’s easy to start running under your own momentum without really having an opportunity to stop and think things through as well as you should. While having that enthusiasm and energy is crucial for getting things lifted off the ground, you should make sure that you’re not making any of the following mistakes that can trip you up before you even get started.

Forgetting the business plan

You might have a basic plan of what, exactly, you need to do, but a business plan takes things into a lot more depth. It plots out the internal organization of the business, how you carry out work, and what targets you need to reach in order to grow. It can help you set a direction from the business from day one, meaning that decision-making from that point on has a path to follow, making some choices much clearer.

Not separating yourself from your business

You may be the proud owner and operator of your business, including its sole staff member at the start, but you shouldn’t be the business. Look at this Infile LLC Service review and learn about how starting a limited liability company can make sure that you’re both legally and financially protected from any consequences of running your business. Otherwise, you can be found legally liable as an individual in the event of the lawsuit, for instance.

Not knowing your place in the market

Before you start pumping money into marketing and outreach, you need to know where, exactly, in the market your business fits in. This Inbox Insight review can help you find a team that can help you learn more about the market, its availability, and the competition that might be out there waiting for you. As such, if you find a niche that’s uncovered, you can find a place for your business, or you might have to start off more competitive, offering what the others in the market do not.

Not understanding the customer perspective

It’s easy to know what services and products you are selling from your own perspective. However, in order to market and sell it effectively, you also need to see what your customers see in it. As such, you need to think about what basic needs or wants your products and services fulfill, what pain points they hit, and what kind of lifestyle of future they help your customers and clients see, as a result.

Doing everything yourself

At some point, you’re going to need help to deal with the sheer amount of responsibilities you acquire as your business gets up and running and you grow. Employing some team members to work alongside you might be preferable but, if you’re not at the stage of hiring just yet, you might also want to consider outsourcing some of your admin work to a virtual assistant.

Your small business needs every advantage it can get when it first starts off. Consider the potential mistakes above and what you’re doing to combat them, making sure you got your bases covered before you rocket off to stardom and success.

Moore’s Law in Software Abstraction

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Moore's Law|Moore’s Law in Software AbstractionThe future of computing performance lies in software and hardware parallelism. Simply put, application programs must be expressed by splitting work into numerous computations that execute on separate processors which communicate only from time to time, or better yet never communicate at all.

For much of the last 30-years, programmers have not needed to rewrite their software in order for it to get faster. It was expected that software would run faster on the next generation of hardware as a result of the performance gained by shrinking transistors and squeezing more of them on a piece of silicon. Hence, programmers focused their attention on designing and building new applications that executed accurately on existing hardware but — anticipating the next generation of faster hardware — were often too compute-intensive to be effective. The demand for next-gen hardware has been significantly defined by software pressure.

The sequential-programming model evolved in that system as well. To create more capable software, developers relied heavily on high levels of sequential programming languages and software abstraction — reusing component software and libraries for common tasks.

Moore’s law helped to propel the advancement in sequential-language abstractions since expanding processor speed covered their costs. For example, early sequential computers were programmed in assembly language statements, which have a 1:1 mapping to the computer-executed instructions. In 1957, Backus and his colleagues recognized that assembly-language programming was difficult, so they launched the first implementation of Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. The IBM programmers wrote in Fortran, and then a compiler translated Fortran into the computer’s assembly language. The team made these claims:

  • Programs will contain fewer errors.
  • It will take less time to write a correct program in Fortran.
  • The performance of the program will be comparable to that of assembly language.

These benefits of high-level languages are now generally accepted. As computers increased in speed, modern-day programming languages added an increasing number of abstractions. Modern languages such as Java, F#, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript provide features such as automatic memory management, object orientation, dynamic typing, and static typing, among others — all of which reduce the programming burden. They do that often at a performance cost, but companies chose these languages to enhance the accuracy and functionality of their software, which they valued more than performance. While the initial transition from hand-coded assembly language came with performance gains, these higher levels of abstraction often result in performance drawback.

Understanding the “memory wall”

With the programming changes that are required to move from single to multi-core processors, software developers are finding it ever more challenging to deal with the growing gap between processor performance and memory system, often referred to as the “memory wall.”

The memory wall reflects a constant shift in the balance between the costs of computational and memory operations and adds to the complexity of achieving high performance. Effective parallel computation requires coordinating computations and data — the system must collocate computations with data and the memory in which it is stored. And while chip processors have achieved great performance gains from technical advancements, main-memory bandwidth, energy accessibility, and latency have scaled at a lower rate for years.

The result is a performance gap between memory performance and processor that has become more and more significant. While on-chip cache memory is used to bridge the gap partially, even a cache with a state-of-the-art algorithm to predict the next operands needed by the processor cannot close that gap effectively. The aggregate rate of computation on a single chip will continue to outpace main-memory capacity and performance improvements. And thus, the advent of chip multiprocessors means that the bandwidth gap will almost certainly continue to widen.

To keep the memory from strictly limiting system power and performance, applications must have locality and the amount of that locality must increase. To boost locality, it is imperative to design software in a manner that will reduce (1) the communication between processors, and (2) data transfer between the memory and processors. In other words, make data travel less and minimize the distance that data needs to travel.

Mind the Gap

With the benefits of Moore’s Law winding down, the burden of increasing application performance should, ideally, be shared by software developers and hardware designers. But emerging new technologies may obfuscate those responsibilities with an interesting hybrid solution. Recent achievements by companies like SimpleMachines have given birth to new software and new hardware that synchronizes to eliminate this gap – all without the original software developer needing to be aware of the underlying transformation that takes place and without the hardware designer ever needing to know what application will be running.

The keys to these new technologies are two breakthroughs: 1) A new compiler design that focuses on understanding application intent rather than instructions and then converts that algorithm into a series of processes that are each optimized to reduce data transfer, and 2) a chip architecture that dynamically changes the computation flow to address the locality issue based on algorithm needs. These breakthroughs offer a radically new way to efficiently solve a problem that would otherwise be extremely time and capital intensive to address and does so in a way that is future-proofed against future enhancements that would otherwise only continue to increase that gap.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Dr. Karu Sankaralingam Karu Sankaralingam, PhD, is founder/CEO/CTO of Madison, WI-based SimpleMachines, Inc. (SMI). Dr. Sankaralingam started as professor of Computer Science at UW-Madison in 2007. He has 17 patents and has published 91 papers. Founded in 2017, SMI is an AI-focused semiconductor company. For more information, please visit https://www.simplemachines.ai/.