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Microsoft’s Productivity and Collaboration Tools for the Modern Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Microsoft's Productivity and Collaboration Tools for the Modern Business

Whether you are a small business or a global enterprise, Microsoft offers a ‘productivity and collaboration’ toolkit for your organization at every stage. Starting at just $5.00 per user/month, Office 365 lets you tap into new opportunities to work better together, inspire new ideas, raise productivity, and empower greater insight throughout your journey to the top.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the company’s flawlessly executed attempt at unifying its various communication and collaboration tools. If your company is struggling with microsoft implementation be sure to find a microsoft integration consultant and partner. And apparently, it is working.

The app is so popular and well-integrated within Microsoft’s ecosystem that competitors are finding it difficult to keep up with it. A cloud-based collaboration tool, Teams allows users to create teams and workflows, assign tasks, chat with other team members, share documents, and host video conferences, among more.

Teams is available as a standalone app and integrated with Office 365. So, even if you don’t purchase the suite, you can use the app free of cost forever. And with the new Praise update, which allows employees to celebrate each other’s work, it is certain that Microsoft Teams is the only collaboration tool you need.

Microsoft To Do

To Do is the easiest task management app that you will ever use. Of course, there are more advanced apps, such as Asana and Trello, but you need to spend some time understanding their functions to unlock their true potential.

Microsoft To Do, on the other hand, can be downloaded and incorporated into your workflow from the first minute. You don’t need any practice or manual to use it because you already know how.

The app allows users to add tasks, set reminders, and manage daily tasks by groups. It also lets you prioritize important tasks and share your lists so that anyone can see and edit them – making micro-collaboration extremely easy.

Since the app is cloud-synced, you can access your to-do lists on all your devices. Simply sign in to improve your productivity.

Skype

Skype is a powerful business tool. It is easy-to-use and has a better interface than its competitors. The best part is that the messages you exchange during the video or audio calls get stored and you can access them any time. And it is free, so there is no reason not to use Skype.

Here are some ways to use Skype for your small business –

  • Save time and money with online conference calls. It is easy to set up a meeting using Skype, and with one click, you can have up to 100 people on the line. You don’t need any codes or complicated passwords.
  • Keep your team on the same page with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s answer to Slack, and it is integrated with Skype for Business – making it easy to share files, work on projects and keep in touch with your team. It integrates with Microsoft Office 365, so all your communications are built on the same platform.
  • Collaborate with freelancers or independent contractors. Skype integrates with Word and Teams. You don’t have to spend money to add independent collaborators to your database to share files, edit documents, and collaborate on projects. Once your project with them is over, you can simply remove them from the group and add new people.

SharePoint

SharePoint is Microsoft’s enterprise-level, cloud-based collaboration. Instead of sending emails back and forth and passing around files, SharePoint has two main components: a content management component and a collaboration component.

The content management component is designed to simplify document and information management. It makes finding, editing, sharing, and assigning documents simple. Whereas, the collaboration component includes features like document libraries, discussion boards, and team sites.

PowerPoint

Anybody who has used a computer ever knows that PowerPoint is the industry standard for presentations. Businesses around the world use it because making professional-looking slideshows is a cakewalk in this app.

You can collaborate on a presentation by inviting people to co-author a presentation with you. And while they are working on it, they will see a notification on their desktop that will tell them when someone’s updating or making changes.

PowerPoint also allows you to control people’s actions on the presentation. You can allow certain members to only see the presentation and some to actually make changes. This can be a perfect arrangement for remote teams.

Even Apple’s Keynote fails to deliver the level of performance that PowerPoint does.

Why You Should Manage Personal Debt Before Starting a Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Manage Personal Debt|Why You Should Manage Personal Debt Before Starting a BusinessStarting your very own business can be an incredibly exciting time in your life. It is an opportunity to bring your wonderful ideas to life and to share your passion with the world.

When you are getting ready to launch your business, there are many different considerations that you will have to keep in mind. A number of these considerations relate to actions you should take before you actually start the business. In contrast, others relate to actions you will have to continue to take moving forwards.

Is Personal Debt a Problem?

When you are getting ready to turn a brilliant idea into an actual business, you should first spend some time going through your personal finances. This might be a task that you have avoided in the past, but it is important for you to do this before you go ahead with your business plans.

It is not uncommon for Americans to have personal debt. In fact, the average person living in the United States has over $8,000 in credit card debt.

It is important to note that it is perfectly legal to start your own business while you carry debt, but it might make the situation more complicated for you. This is because the first few years of operations for a new business are unlikely to be consistently profitable.

If you are going to be relying on this business as your sole income, then you may find it much harder to pay your debts while also supporting yourself and your household. Therefore, addressing your personal debt before you get started can be an incredibly wise decision.

Can Debt Consolidation Loans Help?

Debt consolidation loans may help you to streamline multiple personal loans into one manageable monthly payment. This means that the amount you pay towards your debt may be lower over time, making the payments more realistic (note this is for personal, family, or household debts only).

When you improve your financial situation with the help of a debt consolidation loan, then you can free up more money to spend on your business.

The benefits of debt consolidation might include a lower overall interest rate, reduced monthly repayments, and fewer payment requirements to keep track of. These benefits are not only great for your finances but also for your peace of mind.

While a debt consolidation loan may lower your interest rate or monthly payment, keep in mind any origination fees and the length of repayment. These can offset the savings or even increase the total you pay over the life of the loan.

Growing Your Business

When you have more money available from your profits to reinvest into your business, you may find that you can grow at a faster rate. This money is more likely to be available to you if you are not paying off several different debts at a time.
Starting and growing a business can be a very complex process that requires a great deal of your time, attention, and financial resources. It is a huge undertaking and one that you will have to dedicate yourself to fully in order to create ongoing opportunities for your business to thrive.

By conquering your personal debt before you get started, you can ensure that you are able to give your whole focus to your business. This could help to secure your success in the future.

7 Steps To Establish A Strong Brand

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Establish a Strong Brand|7 Steps To Establish A Strong BrandWhen you run a business it’s crucial that you develop a memorable brand. In a world of similar products, your brand makes you unique. To create a strong brand you’ll need a solid strategy to make progress. These seven tips will help you to create a brand that drives success.

1 .Target market research

If you want to establish a strong brand you’ll need to conduct plenty of target market research. You’ll need to figure out who your audience are, how old are they? What are their interests? What are their values and their paint points?

The more that you know about your target audience the easier it will be to create a brand that they will engage with. You can conduct research using a number of methods, from email surveys to in-person groups. It’s vital that you create detailed buyer personas to help inform your branding decisions. Building a brand based around your audience is the key to becoming successful.

2. Research competitors

If you’re keen to establish a strong brand it’s important to research who your competitors are. Look at their product and find out what their unique selling points are. Take a look at the content they produce, and analyze it. Competitor research is all about finding information that you can use to your advantage. You’ll want to figure out what you can do better than your competitors. Thinking about this will help you to create a stronger brand.

3. Establish key messages

It’s vital that you establish your key messages, what do you want your customers to know about you? What’s your mission, and what are your values? When you’re figuring this out it’s worth thinking about your sense of corporate social responsibility. Customers prefer to choose brands who are socially responsible, (particularly brands that care about the planet).

4. What’s your brand personality

Creating your brand is all out determining your brand personality. If your business were a person, what kind of person would it be? Some brands are eccentric and quirky, others are friendly and cute. Your brand might be serious and formal, or casual and laid back. You’ll need to communicate your personality in a number of different ways, from your logos and website to the content you produce.

5. Brand story

Creating a brand story is one of the most important aspects of brand creation. It’s about telling the story of how your company came to exist, and more importantly, why it exists. You’ll want to think about the problems you’ve faced, and also why your audiences need your product. How does your brand contribute to society? How would you sum up your overall mission? When you’re creating a brand story, you’ll need to think about these key questions.

When you’re figuring out your brand story you’ll need to refer back to your target market research. Your audience needs to be a big part of your brand story, everything should circle back to their desires and values.

6. Work with a design agency

Developing your brand means choosing a logo, creating design work, and branding materials that represent you. To create the perfect branding materials you’ll need to work with a design agency. Such agencies can help you to create your packaging, your photography materials, and your brand identity. Design agencies can also help you to work on your branding strategy, from brand positioning to portfolio.

With the support of a professional agency you’ll create a brand that you can be proud of. All of the biggest companies in the world drive success because they have excellent branding. To remain competitive it’s important to develop your strategy.

7. Ensure consistency

Developing an amazing brand is all about being consistent. You’ll need to represent yourself in the same way, across all platforms and channels. Your content will need to have a consistent tone of voice, and your materials should follow a certain look and structure. You’ll need a detailed social media strategy, to ensure that you’re sharing the right type of content. With consistent branding you’ll ensure that your brand can always be recognised. Being recognised is the key to online visibility, growing your audience and driving website traffic.

Developing a strong brand takes a process of trial and error. Once you’ve performed plenty of research, you’ll want to brainstorm and analyse a few different ideas. Using these steps you’ll soon create a brand that drives results.

Ten Tips For Improving Your Online Presence This Year

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Improve Online Presence|Ten Tips For Improving Your Online Presence This YearOnline presence is a big thing for many businesses nowadays and it often contributes to the amount of success the business has, as well as helping sustain the organization for as long as possible. When you’re willing to adapt and change with the times, your company is likely to flourish and grow even more so.

If you haven’t already thought about improving your online presence this year, then now is the time to do so. Here are ten tips that will help boost your online presence.

Figure Out Who And Where Your Audience Are

Firstly, figuring out your audience is the main objective when it comes to improving your online presence. You need to figure out who it is that your audience is and where your audience is in order to properly connect with them and promote your business and its products or services.

There are some great tools and software that you can utilize in order to understand who your audience are, the behavior of your audience and where they’re likely to be. That way, you can direct your content and the right type of content to those that will engage with it the most.

Get On Social Media

Social media is the place to be when it comes to generating more of a reputation and awareness for your business, particularly when it comes to your brand. If you’re not already on some form of social media platform, then it’s better to do so now than to do so later.

There are lots of social media platforms so you may find that it’s useful to experiment with one or two until you find the right ones that suit your intentions as a business.

Hire The Experts

There are tasks and responsibilities that are important to outsource where you can. When growing your social media presence and online presence in general, you may not have all the knowledge available to do it successfully. For some, it might be that you need to hire the experts in order to make it happen.

That’s why having a digital marketing agency for example, is a great opportunity to pull in those resources that you need for certain parts of your online presence that need expert knowledge.

Focus On SEO

SEO is a big part of boosting your presence online as a business. It’s all about knowing the best forms of content, what keywords perform well to rank you higher on the search results, etc. SEO is also changing and evolving as the internet do so too.

It’s therefore useful to have a team member or outsourced agency to help with SEO and making sure it’s being done right. The use of search engine optimization is one that’s becoming increasingly focused on.

Try Out Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is something worth giving a go, especially as these influencers often have a bigger influence on their audience than some celebrities do. From micro-influencers with less than ten thousand followers to those with hundreds and thousands to millions of followers, it’s worth making use of this growing industry.

It’s also a fairly new domain for marketers to utilize and therefore it can be an affordable option for all businesses looking to promote their brand through other influential figures. As with any type of marketing, it’s good to do your research. Whilst some influencer marketing will prove plenty of ROI, others might not.

You want to find influencers who match your target audience, they post regularly and receive plenty of engagement on their posts regardless of whether they’re sponsored posts or not. The more you do your research, the more success you’re likely to have because you end up picking the right influencers for the campaign.

Maintain Your Branding

Branding is an essential part of any business because when you’re consistent with branding, more people will end up recognizing you online.

Maintaining your brand image is important and when you’re building your brand, it’s good to stay consistent. That means knowing what your brand image is from the start and sticking with it. Not many brands have rebranded and when they do, it’s usually very slight differences, especially when they’ve been operating for years. After all, you don’t want your customers to become confused or forget who you are.

Branding is critical to maintain and to continue promoting across all your platforms and channels where possible.

Interact With Your Followers

Followers are your biggest advantage when growing your online presence. The more you’re interacting with them, the more they’ll likely spread the word about your business to others that will also convert to customers. Make an effort to interact whether it’s through the comments section of your social media or from direct messages or enquiries you receive.

Create A Mailing List

A mailing list is another avenue of communication that you want to develop with your audience. There’s an exclusivity that comes with a mailing list and if you can create one and start adding to it now, who knows where it will be in a year down the line. It could become a great source of information for those who are looking for more on your business. It’s also a data source for you as a business to look at ways of interacting and nurturing these leads.

Collaborate & Promote

Collaboration and promoting yourself as a business is a big tick. When you’re working with other businesses instead of seeing them as a threat, you’re going to end up thriving! Network and get out there to help inspire and create connections that could open doors for your business.

Roll Out The Content

Finally – roll out the content. There’s no limit to how much you can be churning out on a daily business and it’s important to do so. There’s so much noise and activity online that it can be hard to stay above it all and to get noticed yourself. Generate content and don’t be afraid of putting too much out there.

5 Effective Ways to Drive Website Traffic

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Drive Website Traffic|5 Effective Ways to Drive Website TrafficThe COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the consumer landscape online more than ever before.
A digital strategy is a must for any business’s marketing efforts. The main goal is to drive users to your website, learn about your brand and make a purchase—ultimately helping your business grow.

In this blog, we’ll touch on the most important components you should add to your digital efforts!

Content

The very first thing you should do to expand your website’s presence is to create content! This could be building out more pages, such as About Us, service pages, and most importantly, blog articles.

Hone in on your unique value proposition when you’re writing. Think about the most common questions you get when potential customers are inquiring about your product or services. Write content directly addressing these concerns. You will be able to build trust by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Your content should be educational and entertaining–all while offering value to your website visitors.

Try to position your brand offering as the solution to your consumers’ pain points.

Don’t forget to incorporate Call-To-Actions throughout your website and blogs–in moderation, of course! It could be a link to another helpful article on your site, download a handy eBook, or filling out a form to contact your sales team.

Note: While you create content for your website, combine it with SEO strategies for better results.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the continuous process of improving your website to rank well in search engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing. SEO will be the primary driver of organic traffic to your website.

It encompasses a lot of items, such as on-page and off-page SEO and technical SEO. We won’t get in the nitty-gritty as there are countless articles online you can find on each of them, but here are some SEO strategies you should be working on to rank higher in search engines:

  1. You should be optimizing for keywords. What are users typing into the search query, and how do you show up for them? Have a keyword strategy in place to enrich the relevancy of your content.
  2. A determining factor of your ranking on search engines is the relevancy of your content. If someone expects a specific topic or answer to their search query and you don’t deliver it to them? They’re going to leave, resulting in a higher bounce rate, and Google will ding you for that.
  3. Ensure your website is easy to navigate and has a fast loading time. People expect a seamless experience on your site, and there’s no doubt they will leave if it’s not up to par.
  4. Set up an XML sitemap. It is a file that shows a list of the most important pages of your website. It helps search engines understand your website structure and can crawl all of your pages (which makes them rankable on search engines).
  5. Work on getting backlinks: connect with trustworthy websites with higher domain authority and ask for a link back to your website. This will increase your domain rating as well, making you more likely to rank on search engines.

You can use tools for your SEO needs, such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. Both are robust, data-driven tools you can use to check the health of your website and how well its SEO performance is and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Paid Advertising

Digital advertising campaigns drive paid traffic to your website. If your website isn’t ranking on search engine results or is has weaker SEO, paid advertising enables you to show up for your desired keywords.

The traffic you drive will be high-quality. This is because you will be able to control your ads:

  • You’ll be able to design and customize the ad messaging
  • Decide which audiences you want to reach
  • What websites or channels your ad should be shown on
  • Where you want to direct the user to (Homepage? Specific product page? Dedicated landing page?)

By building a paid strategy with your business goals in mind, whether to increase brand awareness or drive conversions, you can effectively drive results that will grow your business.

What makes paid advertising effective but complex is, every business’s strategy varies. That’s why it’s crucial to pinpoint which channels your target audience is at and serve your ads to them at the right place and time.

Some digital channels include:

  • Paid Search (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.)
  • Display (across the internet, on millions of websites)
  • Social Media
  • Video (Youtube etc.)
  • Over-The-Top (video streaming platforms such as Roku)
  • Digital Out-Of-Home (digital billboards at high foot-traffic areas)
  • Mobile advertising (app stores, in-app etc.) and so much more

It takes trial and error and constant monitoring and adjustments to ensure your ad dollars are used to their full potential.

We highly recommend you try out more than one type of paid channel to see effective results. A good combination to start with is paid search, social ads, and display ads. You will be able to capture people who are actively searching for you, retarget people who might have visited your website but didn’t convert, and stay top of mind!

Programmatic display advertising is a new form of advertising that businesses of all sizes are jumping on board with. Instead of going to each publisher and negotiating a deal to place your ad on their site, this process is automated through machine learning ad tech. It grants you access to countless ad publishers, widening your audience reach more than ever. Another perk is that it centralizes your advertising channels where all the data can sync together. Consider looking into a programmatic advertising platform or working with an advertising agency to help manage your paid advertising campaigns!

Social Media

Studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has propelled more people online, social media included.

Some of the most popular social media channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. They are great channels to engage with your audience, especially to share the latest news via photos, videos, and captions.

They are also useful to promote your website and branded content. If you have a new blog article, announce it on social! You want to maximize exposure online.

Do note that you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin by trying to be on every channel. Let’s say you’re a law firm. Perhaps having a social presence on Instagram wouldn’t be isn’t as effective as LinkedIn. Think about where your target audiences are likely to be and work on creating content for those channels!

Online Directories Google My Business

Another way to help people find your website is to list your business on online directories.

You will be able to list your business’ contact information (name, address, phone number, etc.), office hours, services, and a link to your website. This enables more people to come across your business online, potentially driving more traffic.

One of the most prominent “directories” is Google My Business (GMB). When people are looking for a product or service, they are likely to turn to Google. By having a GMB listing, your business is more likely to pop up in the search results.

Google My Business also allows you to share updates such as seasonal offers or updates like blogs. Just like social media, you can cross-promote your content and entice people to click through to your website!

It is vital that you continuously deliver a great website experience for your users and amplify your efforts with these strategies, which are meant to interweave. By combining efforts to drive both paid and organic traffic, you’ll be consistently bringing in quality audiences.

We hope these tips give you a better insight into what areas to focus on in your digital marketing strategy!