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The Importance of Effective Communication Within Your Business

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Picture this scenario; you have an employee on their way to a business meeting in Dubai. He’s currently in the taxi on his way to the airport, but sadly his work phone is out of battery and you have no way to contact him about the cancelled deal. He boards the plane, heads off to Dubai, and it’s only once he lands that he gets your message about the deal being cancelled.

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
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This example highlights just one of the many uses of an effective communications system. The ability to contact the people you need to in an urgent manner is incredibly important due to how time-consuming and money-wasting a delay in communications can be. Yet, unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with traditional systems such as emailing and messaging. If there are other business emergencies, such as a fire breaking out at the office or your business premises being burgled, then you need a quick and swift way to notify everyone within your company because every second counts.

Emergency Notifications System

Let’s pretend one of your employees has come into work early. He’s the first one at the office and he enters the premises to find that your entire office has been trashed, the computers have been stolen and the security system smashed into pieces. With no way to contact everyone in a short time span, the employee isn’t a hundred percent sure what he should do. This is just one of the many emergency notification use cases. Giving your employees the ability to make a company-wide emergency notification is a great way to alert all of the staff about a pressing issue that needs to be sorted out immediately. Instead of relying on a chain of command that they have to climb up for their message to reach someone, they can simply tell everyone in the business with a simple message.

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
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Building Team Efficiency

If your team are able to easily contact each other with an effective communications system, then it helps to make the team more efficient. Whether there’s an important change that needs to be made or some hardware that broke which was critical to their project, everyone in the team needs to know so that they can adjust their working schedule to either fix the hardware, prepare a replacement or work around it. If your team is unable to communicate effectively, it will lead to delays, disputes and other problems that are going to slow down your business.

Employee Management

Managers are usually quite effective at communicating with their employees, but there are going to be times when having social skills isn’t enough and you need software or technology to improve the way a manager contacts an employee. For instance, if there’s an easy way for your senior members to keep a track of their team members and record their progress, then it makes your business more productive. By having your managers communicate effectively and inform staff of their daily tasks, goals and issues, it creates a workplace that runs smoothly.

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Make Your Marketing Personal (Without Looking Like A Creep)

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As we go forward, the world of marketing online is going to change again. Companies are not only going to want to get their ads in front of their customers, but they also want them to be more personalized.

Why?

Essentially, it’s because personal ads help to develop brand loyalty and make the customer feel like the company cares. Behind this new wave of customization is a whole raft of digital technologies that are allowing it to happen. But some customers aren’t too keen about the trends that are in the pipeline. This is why companies need to be especially careful when using personalized ads: the last thing they want is to look creepy as if they are stalking their customers online.

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We all know how using customer information can sometimes backfire, so how should we go about making our ads more personal?

Collect Data

Tom Caulton, an expert in digital marketing, says that the first place companies need to look are their data. He says that it is important for businesses to create “buyer personas” or descriptions of certain demographics that are visiting their site. From here, he says, it’s possible to do things like create better content and make more targeted ads.

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To find out more about your customers, sometimes you’ll have to ask questions. But spamming customers with 25 questions all in one go is an excellent way to make them groan and close the questionnaire. Caulton recommends, therefore, that businesses ask questions periodically, one at a time, and spread the work for their customers over a longer period of time.

Create An Amazing Interface

Of course, collecting data is nothing without the right interface to back it up. This is why so many companies are now using custom software development to build things like mobile and web apps. Rather than interfacing with customers through generic browsers, companies are seeing the benefits of using their own targeted apps which offer more functionality and help keep customers inside the barriers of their business. Apps allow businesses to offer customers personalized content, as well as personalized offers, based on their behavior and preferences.

Map Out Your Content

Funneling customers is an incredibly important concept in the world of marketing. The idea is to slowly draw them in through multiple stages and get them to convert. The top of the funnel is simply about getting people to your website. You do this by producing things like webinar, ebooks, and whitepapers. You also do it by using PPC and SEO. The next step is the middle of the funnel where you nurture your leads, providing them with tailored content and buying guides. The bottom of the funnel is the offer stage: you might get your customers to try out a demo or give them a free trial.

At each stage of the funnel, companies are personalizing the experience. They’re creating personas of their customers and then delivering the right content, marketing or special offers that those particular personas will find attractive. Caulton says that this will boost conversions significantly.

Driving Sales: What it Takes to Make it Happen

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Running a business means having to hit sales targets. If you keep falling short and making fewer sales than you would ideally like to, you should try to rethink your strategy. Sales don’t need to slump and decline for your business. You just need to learn more about what drives sales and what you can do to get your approach to those things right. Below, you will find information on the four most important things for your business to possess as it strives to drive up sales.

Products You Believe In

Before anything else, you need to have products that you truly believe in. If you don’t really believe in the things that you are trying to sell, it won’t be long before your sales figures fall. So, this is always the thing that you should try to get right first of all. People will only believe in what you’re trying to sell if you do as well. So, try to make sure that your products are as strong as they possibly can be. Test and prototype them until you’re happy that they are ready to go to market and be sold to the public.

A Talented Team

Next, you will need to think about the team that you have in place. If you have a team of talented individuals who know how to sell products to the public, you will have an advantage over the competition. When your team is weak and inexperienced, more mistakes will be made, and that will make it much more difficult for you to make sales and achieve more for your business. You can improve the selling skills of your team by using sales enablement techniques. These should make life easier for the people in your team when it comes to selling.

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The Right Message

The message you get across to customers is also very important. You need to be willing to deliver your message with confidence and conviction. When you do this, you will show the world that you really mean business. A big part of your messaging should focus on telling the public how your products or services can help them and improve their day to day lives. The messages have to be relatable and easy to digest if you want people to get hooked by them. Keep this in mind when you are formulating your approach to things like advertising and marketing.

Good Targeting

Targeting refers to the people you target with your adverts and marketing material. You need to carry out some market research so that you can be sure exactly who you need to target and why. You then need to think about what the best methods are for reaching the kind of people who make up your target audience. So, if you want to target young people, you would have to place a focus on social media engagement and things like Facebook ads. If your target audience is older, then your approach will have to be entirely different.

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How Health Practices Find New Ways To Expand Their Revenue

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If you run a private practice and you’ve done for any serious amount of time, then you have probably already realized that you need to think about medicine as a business. Not just in how you maintain professionalism, effectiveness, and efficiency. You also need to think about profit, which many treat as a dirty word in the industry. However, getting more tight-fisted is not the only way to ensure you see more money. Instead, you should consider looking at just how your business could offer more and thus make more.

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Make use of that expertise

Besides thinking like a businessperson, to succeed in running a practice, you need real medical expertise. That same expertise could be the very same tool you use for finding new opportunities for bringing revenue into the business. Not only are blogs good ground for monetization through advertising and affiliates programs. They can also be a tremendous way to build your visibility and your personal brand online. You can also look into providing your advice as a premium product, by producing eBooks or getting into hosting webinars. At the same time, getting more involved in the community around you can help, too. Lots of experts find paid speaking opportunities to share their knowledge at seminars and other live events.

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Reach new patients

Naturally, trying to get as many patients into the business is the most obvious way to try and expand your ability to gain revenue. But you shouldn’t just think that outreach and marketing are the only ways to reach more patients. Instead, you should think about what might be preventing certain portions of the market from reaching your services. For instance, for some the barrier is physical. Some people are not mobile or well enough to reach your practice. To that end, some practices are starting to expand their services to those who need them not only by visiting more patients. Many are using more time-effective telemarketing methods from services like Chiron Health. Not only can you improve your patient portfolio, but you could be providing your services to those who have in dire need but lacking this whole time.


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Finding new niches

You might also be able to get more business from existing and new patients alike by simply offering them something that you weren’t able to do so before. When starting a practice, it’s a smart move to ensure that you’re spending on the essentials, investing in the equipment that can supply you with a steady enough flow of work to keep the doors open and the lights on. However, there are ancillary treatments that require more specific equipment or training. If you’re in a position to grow the business, then it might be time to invest in changes to the business that could open you up to extra services such as allergy testing and treatment or urgent care without an appointment.

As the practice grows, you may want to think about branching out into another location. However, that is a significant cost, so for those who want to grow without going to such lengths, the three strategies above can be tremendously helpful.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Taxing: Simplifying Your Business Tasks

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Think of everything you have to do in your day as a business owner. Think of the mass of tasks and work you have to perform. Think of the systems you rely on.

When you stump it all together like that, running a business seems like hard work! And it is. There is no doubt about that whatsoever.

Now, technology moves at such a fast pace in the modern age. If you want your business to succeed, you’re going to have to build a good relationship with tech and understand exactly how it all works. You’re going to have to appreciate that your gadgets and computers are going to be outdated. You’re going to have to adapt to thrive and the future is now.

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Now, let’s return to the beginning. If you are adapting so your business can thrive, you’ve still got heaps of tasks to complete. It is now time to knit everything together and see how we can simplify your business tasks.

Let’s talk money first. Accounting software like Sage accounting online is going to save you a lot of headaches. Not only can you keep yourself in the know with your finances with some simple data entry, but it’s also going to be automated and can save you the hassle of replicating invoices and calculating your tax. What does this mean? Well, it means you can spend more time on your actual job than counting coins!

What more is there to know about money? Well, payment is crucial! Sites like Paypal can offer you a cloud-based payment solution that automatically exchanges payments into a currency of your choice – meaning you’re not the one heading to the exchange! This is an amazing solution whether or not you have a lot of overseas customers.

With accounting and currency exchange out of the way, there are already two heavy tasks dealt with. Now, it’s time to talk communication.

Basecamp is an amazing software package that can do it all for you. Basecamp’s Campfire organizes your internal communication and projects in a single dedicated place. The advantages of this are too often underestimated and having a single platform for multiple, yet linked, subject matter (like work) is a brilliant way to increase the productivity of your staff. The campfire app within Basecamp allows you to communicate instantly, like an old school instant messenger app, and in-real time and you can even link to work. This cuts a number of steps out the process and allows your workflow to be centralized with a single piece of software. There are no more messy and long email chains between staff members. Instead, Basecamp offers topic based message boards, instant chat tools, to-do-lists, staff check-ins and instant work reports. Not only can you simplify your staff’s communication process, but you can get everything moving forward in the same direction.

Communication, work flow, accounting and payment – four huge tasks have been broken down and simplified with technology – find out what else you can simplify and launch your business forwards.