5 Ways Outsourcing Your IT Will Save Your Company Money

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Outsourcing|5 Ways Outsourcing Your IT Will Save Your Company MoneyLet’s face it: there are tons of web pages that describe the benefits of outsourcing specific functions of your business to external third-party companies. But, when it comes to IT or Information Technology, does it actually save your company money?

The thing is, you could quite comfortably streamline your IT processes and run a lot of them in-house. However, the downside is there are hidden costs to keeping your IT management within your business. Here are five ways outsourced IT services will save your firm money:

1. Staff Costs

As your business grows, you will undoubtedly hire new people to perform various functions within it. After all: you can’t do everything yourself, and telling yourself that you can is both unrealistic and foolish!

How can managed IT services save you money from an employee perspective? Firstly, the fees you pay for outsourced IT means you don’t have to pay for each employee that works on your business networks.
Secondly, you don’t need to incur extra costs, such as arranging tax payments, insurance policies and complying with various employment laws.

2. Training

As you know, the technology world moves at such a rapid pace that yesterday’s innovations could become tomorrow’s obsolete products. Each year, software and hardware vendors release new tools – many of which you use daily within your business functions.

Whenever there’s something new to the market that your business needs to use, your employees will need training, so they know how to manage any new processes. Training is seldom free or cheap, especially when it comes to IT training.
The beauty of using an outsourced IT partner is they incur such training costs. You don’t have to pay any extra fees.

3. Outdated Technology

When you pay a company to handle your organization’s IT needs, part of the deal will almost certainly involve upgrading your software and hardware when they become outdated. That’s because current technology will ensure your business runs as efficiently as possible.

If you handle all your IT, you would need to cover the cost of any software and hardware upgrades separately. However, outsourced IT services management can include provision for annual upgrades, and you’ll pay a fixed monthly or yearly price for those services.

4. Smaller Premises

Outsourcing your IT also means your organization doesn’t have to lease or buy large premises to house various computer equipment and the employees that manage them. That’s because most of the services provided get conducted remotely.
Smaller premises equate to cheaper leases or purchase prices, and that also means your business will have more money in the bank to invest in other areas and grow.

5. Expert Advice

Lastly, the problem with having a small in-house IT team is they might not necessarily know the best ways of streamlining your technology processes and saving your organization money.

Outsourced IT service management providers work with businesses and organizations of all sizes. Part of their job is to research and provide proof-of-concept of efficiency changes and cost-cutting measures to their clients.
As one of their customers, you can benefit from their expert advice and end up with a more efficient IT setup that saves you money.

How Can Influencers Help Modern Businesses?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Influencers|How Can Influencers Help Modern Businesses?Running a business in the modern world will always come with some challenges. Competing with other companies, getting the word out to enough customers, and even just keeping up with the latest trends and developments can feel impossible when you’re running a business by yourself. Influencer marketing can help with at least two of these areas, offering loads of benefits to your business when you decide to take this route. But how exactly can influencers help businesses in the modern world? Let’s take a look at the benefits of a modern influencer to get you started.

Expands Awareness

Businesses will typically choose influencers with large followings when they are choosing people to work with. This will ensure that the posts made by your influencer will be seen by a lot of people, expanding awareness of your business and making you stand out from the crowd. This can be much easier than traditional marketing, giving you the chance to reach loads of potential customers without having to spend loads of time learning about them and their habits, like you would with other forms of marketing.

Builds Trust

Trust is an essential element in business, and you need to be able to build trust with your potential customers, especially if your products or services are expensive. Influencers can help you with this, using the trust they have already built with their fans to convince them that your products are worth their time and money. Building trust can be easier than you expect when you have an influencer working for your brand, but this also means that many influencers are careful with who they work with.

Generates Feedback

Generating feedback about your products can be very useful when you first get started in business, giving you ideas to help you to improve your offerings. It can be hard to find ways to get feedback when you haven’t made many sales, though, and this is where influencers can come in. Stars like Haylee can trigger conversations about your product within their communities, encouraging their users to talk about what they like and dislike about them, while also letting people throw their own ideas into the ring.

Saves Time & Energy

Working with influencers is far faster than working on your own advertising campaigns. You will pay them to produce some content and post it for you, and this can be complete within as little as a few hours. Of course, you will probably want to do more than one post in the future, but this will be a good place to start to see if influencer marketing could work for your business. This will make it easier for you to focus on the work that is really important.

Influencer marketing has been gaining huge amounts of popularity in recent years. People from across the world have started to use this type of marketing to make their businesses soar, and it’s easier to get started than most people expect; you just need to find the right influencers for your business.

Artists, Art Lovers: How To Ensure The Delivery of Your Works

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Art Delivery|Artists, Art Lovers: How To Ensure The Delivery of Your WorksThe Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the order in which the world ran and brought things to a standstill. Unfortunately, the art community was no exception as it suffered greatly. Owing to border closures, artists could not get their work delivered to customers. Art lovers could not update their collections with new works of art. The lockdown meant people could not go to art exhibitions; museums closed down, auctions were postponed, etc. Today, as with the rest of the world, the art community is gradually recovering from the pandemic. Still, there are restrictions on artwork delivery to an extent.

How Covid-19 Affected Artwork Delivery

As stated before, the pandemic affected artists and art lovers in various ways. Keep reading to find out how COVID-19 is changing the rules.

Closed For Business

The pandemic meant a close for all art businesses. This included museums, art galleries, art exhibitions, art fairs, art workshops, and other art events. Pre-pandemic, most of these events held physically. So, the sudden lockdown resulted in a massive loss of customers for artists. For art lovers, this meant they couldn’t attend most of the art events. This is because the organizers postponed most of them.

Artists who ran small art businesses also suffered as a result of the pandemic. They couldn’t display their arts on the streets due to the lockdown and social distancing rules. Customers couldn’t come out to view their work.

Museums Selling Their Work

Museums like the Brooklyn Museum resorted to selling their work. In the past, art lovers would have come out in droves to criticize such action. Usually, when museums sell their works, it is so they may buy new artwork. Unfortunately, the pandemic meant no one came to the museums. Selling their work was the only way they could keep their place functioning.

No Shipping

As a result of the pandemic, the government put many travel restrictions in place. This affected the shipping of artworks as well. Thus, artists whose customers lived in different states or countries found it difficult to deliver their work. In like manner, art lovers could not receive new art pieces for their collections.

Deliver Despite The Pandemic With Convelio

Although the world is gradually combating the pandemic, restrictions still abound on the delivery of artwork. Many top art logistics companies could not deliver no thanks to the pandemic. Indeed, many even closed for business.

However, the Convelio art transportation service remained in business during the lockdown and continues to operate today. They ship artwork within and outside Europe, thus solving the restrictions worry. They have over one thousand four hundred clients who are satisfied with their work. Whether you are delivering simple artwork or high-value pieces, they will handle it for you carefully. Thus, your clients will be getting what they ordered and within the expected time.

Conclusion

The pandemic does not have to stop you from delivering your work to customers as an artist. As an art lover, you don’t have to worry about not ordering artwork either. With Convelio, you can continue to carry out transactions concerning artwork despite the pandemic.

7 Tips for Managing Your Business Data

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StrategyDriven Organisational Performance Measures Article |Business Data|7 Tips for Managing Your Business DataNo matter what industry your business is involved in, it’s likely that you work with significant volumes of data. Customer contacts, payment details, marketing data, product inventories, supplier information, and more. All this data is essential for maintaining your business operations and keeping customers happy, and it has become an integral asset for companies, big and small, all over the world.

But without proper data management practices, you are putting your business at great risk. There is the possibility you could lose data due to mismanagement or improper cybersecurity protocols. You could leak sensitive client information and damage your company’s reputation. In the worst instances, you could disrupt business operations, lose profits, and potentially face legal action from unhappy customers.

To avoid these unpleasant scenarios, any business owner needs to know how to manage their data. The following guide will outline some of the top tips for looking after your information and making the best use of your data to grow your business.

Create a plan

For any business to succeed in any endeavor, it is essential to have a plan. Come up with a comprehensive strategy outlining exactly what you want to achieve from your business data and how you are going to reach your goals. This will keep you focused along the way and will inform all important decisions you make. This plan should feature a data management policy that will help you and your employees follow the same consistent practices at all times.

Be compliant

Data is a sensitive subject in the modern world, and more and more consumers are becoming aware of their need for privacy. As a result, there are rules and regulations when it comes to collecting and storing people’s private information. Make sure you brush up on the compliance laws in your industry and incorporate these into your data management policy.

Collect and use data sensitively

One of the most effective tools in any business’s arsenal is digital marketing. Promoting your products, services, and brand to your ideal consumers through a variety of online platforms including social media, email, organic search, paid advertising, and written content. But to get your digital marketing campaigns seen by the people you want to see them, you need to gather their data. There are many different ways to collect this information. You could ask them to fill in form fields on your website, you can use cookies that track their online activity, or employ surveys and social media monitoring. However you choose to gather data, you must do it in an ethical, sensitive fashion. As we’ve already established, you need to be compliant with industry regulations. But it’s also important that you take the customer experience into account. If a consumer lands on your website and is immediately bombarded with cookie requests, form fields, and other intrusive methods, there is a good chance they will become frustrated and switch off.

To avoid racking up a high bounce rate, be more discreet about your data collection. Offer your web visitors great content or a chance to enter a contest in return for a few significant pieces of information like their email address and demographics.

Once you have collected their data, you can contact them and expose them to advertising and messaging related to their brand. But once again, you should take care not to overdo it. Rather than filling their inboxes with generic sales emails, instead, roll out a carefully crafted email campaign tailored to their specific buyer personas. This will help to maximize engagement and ensure you optimize your business data.

Boost your security

For any business, there are so many potential dangers that could befall your data. You could become the target of malicious cybercriminals who are out to steal your private information, or your computer system could be ravaged by bugs and viruses. Thieves could break into your premises and make off with your hard drives and computers, or a disgruntled employee could attempt to steal sensitive data and take it to a new employer.

As a business owner, you need to take steps to protect yourself against these eventualities. One of the most important things you should do is to install the best possible cybersecurity software across your computers. This will protect your systems and data from cyberattacks and viruses and give you peace of mind that your information is safe.

To keep your business premises safe from break-ins, it’s not enough to lock the doors each night. Most criminals are smart enough to get around a simple padlock or deadbolt, so it’s a good idea to invest in a more advanced business security system. These can vary in scale and cost, but the best solutions will include alarms, motion sensors, closed-circuit television cameras, and digital key codes. Although it will set you back financially, you can’t put a price on security and peace of mind.

Be careful about which people within your workforce have access to certain data, and ensure sensitive files are securely password-protected. It’s a good idea to use password management software for maximum security and change all passwords immediately whenever someone leaves the company.

Train your team

One of the biggest risks to your data is the people within your company. Someone could accidentally misplace a business device with customer data stored on it, or forward a sensitive email to the wrong person. These mistakes happen all the time in business, and although they are usually not malicious, they can be incredibly damaging. The best way to avoid them is to train your team up in proper data management protocol.

Creating a data security policy that everyone must adhere to will instruct your workforce in best practices for compliance. This should outline the proper use of devices, correct storage, and the processes to follow in the event of something going wrong. Provide regular training to keep your team’s knowledge fresh, as well as to update staff on changes around data compliance.

Back up data

If your business was subjected to a disaster and your data was lost, would you have a plan to get up and running again? What would you do if a fire or flood wipes out your computer system, or a virus wipes your hard drive? These scenarios could realistically befall any company, so it’s a good idea to have a plan B in place. If you are not backing up your business data each day, you should start immediately. This way, if something happens, you can recover it quickly and ensure as little disruption as possible. Backup your entire system onto an external hard drive every single day. Rotate between two or three different hard drives and always ensure at least one of these is stored outside of your business premises at all times.

Invest in database management software

For business owners strapped for time and resources, one of the most convenient and efficient solutions to adopt data management software. This could be a customer database tool like Salesforce or a marketing platform that allows you to integrate advertising data to a database, such as Amazon Redshift (https://improvado.io/integrations/amazon-redshift). These tools will allow you to keep all your data in one place and provide a much more efficient and secure business practice.

In conclusion, there are lots of things you can do to improve your business data management, and you don’t need to be a specialist to get started. By following these seven tips, you will improve your security and reap a wider range of benefits from your data.

10 Tips to Help You Avoid a Credit Card Fraud in Future

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Credit Card Fraud|10 Tips to Help You Avoid a Credit Card Fraud in FutureIn this digital economy, credit card fraud is one of the biggest and common threats to everyone. Though it offers convenience while shopping online as well as offline with a bunch of other benefits like monthly payments, easy cash loans, etc., it has become risky. The reason being criminals target banks and other financial institutions to steal the credit card data of millions of people.

Fortunately, it is possible to avoid credit card frauds and safeguard your credit card information from cybercriminals. Everyone must follow proactive measures to safeguard their credit card information and prevent cybercriminals from making payments through stolen cards. On that note, let’s check out the best tips for safeguarding credit card information from attackers and criminals.

1. Do not share credit card information

Though it is a bit obvious, you must not share the credit card information with anyone including customer service representatives of the bank or any financial institution. Also, be careful of phishing scams and do not call on phone numbers listed in a random email or share your credit card number with anyone posing as the representative of your credit card supplier. Last but more important, avoid sharing your card details with relatives or friends as well unless you are sure they are going to protect the card details as well as you protect it.

2. Beware of credit card skimmers

A card skimmer is placed invincibly on top of or inside the card slot. These skimmers allow your card to be accessed by the ATM while stealing your card information. This happens in a discreet manner so victims do not notice that something happened until they look at their bank statements later. Avoid this mishap by carefully looking before using your card in any machine: take good notice of any holes, differences in appearance, or something unusual on the PIN pad. Also, look out for any suspicious devices like cameras around the machine. Once you are thoroughly assured of safety, then only use your card.

3. Secure your passwords and PINs

Do not put consecutive numbers, your name, or birth date as passwords, which can easily be guessed by anyone. Also, refrain from saving your passwords online including on password managers (it is hard to trust them). Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase characters with numbers as well as special characters to make it more secure and strong. Never use the same password for different accounts and avoid sharing it with anyone in any communicative way.

4. Protect your physical credit card

Keep your credit cards safe in public places: carry your cards separately from your wallet and be mindful of pick-pocketers as well. It can minimize your losses if someone steals your wallet or purse. Also, make sure you only carry the required cards. Thieves even tend to take pictures of the card so do not expose or keep it in open places. And destroy the unwanted cards as told below.

5. Always shred your payments data

Do not leave your card receipts or statements around your home or office: shred everything that you no longer need before throwing it all out. When it expires, be cautious with sensitive details on the card: scratch off all such information, then shred it away to prevent any kind of duplication or identity theft.

6. Be cautious with credit cards online

Do not do any transactions with sellers or on websites you do not trust. If an online transaction has to be done on an unknown website, creating a new virtual card with low value is a safer option. Many of the card issuing companies will let you create virtual cards from your credit card portal for a short period of time. Also, avoid sharing details online and stay aware of online shopping scams.

7. Report your lost or stolen credit card

As soon as you report your missing card, your credit card issuer can cancel or lock it temporarily, so as to avoid any unauthorized or bogus charges. This way, you will not be held responsible for any fraudulent charges on your account. That is why it is very important that you report your lost or stolen card as soon as you find the lost credit card, else you may have to pay for bogus charges.

8. Secure your digital devices

Keep anti-virus software updated and run security scans on a regular basis on all digital devices. Always proceed with any transaction only on a secure connection — look for HTTPS or lock icon in the browser’s address bar. Also, never click on any link in an email or on the web until you trust the sender or website.

9. Signature is very important

Always sign the back of your card as it provides double protection from any fraud during a transaction and acts as an additional verification for the same. Some retailers or card issuers also ask for signatures on a credit card for any high-value transaction. Of course, it hardly protects against online fraud.

10. Look for unauthorized transactions

Keep in mind to review and analyze all your credit card statements on time. Never skip going through all your bank statements for fraudulent transactions. If you find anything suspicious regarding any payment, immediately contact your credit card customer service and report the fraudulent transaction asap.

By being more aware and careful, you can avoid any fraudulent charges on your card, otherwise, you may have to pay for bogus charges. With a little extra effort and necessary precautions, everyone can protect themselves from fraud.