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10 Tips for Staying Productive When Facing Small Business Challenges

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By Annie Pilon

Even though many businesses are operating differently than usual these days, productivity still matters. Whether you’re working remotely or trying to make up for lost revenue, your business will be in a better position if you’re able to stay on task each day. To help you and your team get as much done as possible, check out these tips from members of the online small business community.

Keep Your Remote Marketing Teams Productive

Your team’s productivity can ultimately make a huge impact on the success of your marketing efforts. If your employees are currently working from home, read this Search Engine Watch post by Ann Smarty for tips on how to keep them productive.

Create a Crisis Marketing Plan

Marketing during a crisis is different than marketing during normal times. If you want your business to succeed through the current pandemic and economic downturn, check out this DIY Marketers post by Tiffani Wroe for tips on marketing during a crisis.

Consider Hiring a Virtual Receptionist

With so many businesses currently operating remotely, handling basic logistics can be a challenge. However, a virtual receptionist may help you restore some normalcy and functionality to your operations. Learn more in this Biz Penguin post by Neil Duncan.

Learn How to Work from Home with Family

Working from home is challenging enough when you’re doing it on your own. But many people are currently navigating this new situation with other family members at home as well. In this Strella Social Media post, Jennifer Hanford discusses the challenges and lessons she’s taken away from this time. The BizSugar community also hosted a discussion on the topic here.

Adapt Your Business During Quarantine

Quarantined employees and customers make it harder to operate small businesses in many industries. So the ability to adapt is key during this time. This UpCity post by Jaques-Corne Botha offers tips for making the necessary adjustments.

Build These Essential Sales Funnels

Sales funnels can help you filter in customers no matter the current situation. If you want to run a successful consulting business, the funnels outlined in this Duct Tape Marketing post by John Jantsch can help you keep those clients constantly rolling in.

Create Your First TikTok Video

With so many small business owners now staying at home, it may be the perfect time to try new things. Especially if you market to young people or want to create viral content, TikTok may be a platform worth exploring. Check out this Social Media Examiner post by Rachel Pedersen for a guide.

Make Money Using Sponsored Blog Content

Whether you already run a blogging business or are looking for ways to increase your income during these uncertain times, monetizing your blog may be worth exploring. In this Blogging Brute post, Dario Supan offers tips for using sponsored blog content to bring in money.

Create a Happy Workplace That Fosters Productivity

If you want your team to get more done each day, you need to create an environment that supports them. In this Process Street post, Jane Courtnell dives into the idea of work anxiety and how companies can create a positive atmosphere. Then members of the BizSugar community discussed the post further here.

Avoid These Stumbling Blocks of Innovative Business Thinking

Innovation is a key to navigating the ins and outs of running a business, especially when circumstances you can’t control start to impact your operations. In this Startup Professionals Musings post, Martin Zwilling discusses some of the most common stumbling blocks that prevent entrepreneurs from innovative thinking.

Feature Image Credit: Depositphotos.com

By Annie Pilon

Sourced from Small Business Trends

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In Jobs

Senior Advertising & Sponsorship Sales Executive

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Hot Press, 100 Capel Street, Dublin 1

Hot Press has just published it’s 1,000th issue. Following that major landmark, Ireland’s most influential and widely acclaimed magazine is on the lookout for hot new talent to work across all of our projects and platforms.

 

Hot Press is seeking an experienced advertising and sponsorship sales executive, to work across the full range of our titles and platforms.

 

This is a really exciting opportunity for people with sales ability and the ambition to make their mark and establish themselves in the entertainment and media industry in Ireland. For over 40 years, Hot Press has been at the cutting edge of Irish media development, establishing a reputation as one of the leading entertainment and music publications in the world.

 

In 2020, we are responsible for the following publishing adventures: – Hot Press, the magazine – Hotpress.com, the website – The Hot Press Yearbook – The Hot Press Annual – Go Rail, the magazine of the train service in Ireland – Enterprise, the magazine of the Enterprise Express – Best of Ireland, a superb glossy annual guide – Best of Dublin, its acclaimed sister publication – and a variety of one-off consumer, b-to-b and bespoke books, titles and initiatives.

 

In addition, we organise a range of events, exhibitions, music partnerships, online activities, mobile applications, social network campaigns and national competitions, in music, media, fashion, design, writing, film, sport, education, photography and more, all driven by our unparalleled access to, and understanding of, the Irish youth, entertainment and student markets.

We are currently seeking people with some – or all – of the following qualities:

  • Proven sales know-how and ability
  • An awareness of the importance of meeting targets
  • The drive to really contribute to the future development of an exciting media business
  • The ability and attitude required to work effectively as part of a team
  • The independence necessary to take on personal responsibility for clients
  • An understanding of the potential of the internet and social media in a wider promotional mix
  • The imagination to come up with new ideas and concepts
  • The commitment to get the hard work done
  • Managerial potential or experience…

This role suits someone who has over 3 years

  • Media Sales Experience

If you truly believe that you can generate substantial sales and be part of a winning team apply now!

We do not require the assistance of recruiters for this role, thanks.

Click HERE to apply for this job

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In News

Looking for Side Gigs? This Curated Jobs Site Takes the Stress Out of Your Search

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Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

Don’t let the coronavirus outbreak bring down your small business.

You worked hard to launch your small business and deserve to see your dream through to the end. The coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in the modern world and the resulting economic downturn has derailed many peoples’ goals and dreams. Now, there’s an unfortunate reality beginning to take shape. In order to keep your small business dream alive, it may be necessary to find another job. FlexJobs takes the stress and hassles out of going through the job hunt all over again.

FlexJobs is a repository that specializes in remote and flexible jobs that are typically harder to find on other job boards. With FlexJobs, you get access to 30,000 hand-screen remote, freelance, part-time, and flexible jobs in more than 50 career categories. Their trained researchers scour hundreds of online job resources every day, identifying promising jobs for its clientele of busy people looking for a side hustle. Every job is subject to critical evaluations and, if it passes the tests, it’s added to the site along with staff-written job summaries, company descriptions, and other useful information. With your subscription, you also get access to job search checklists, award-winning career content, 1:1 career coaching, resumé reviews, expert skills tests, and more.

Some of the categories on FlexJobs include Account Management, Business Development, Customer Service, Sales and Marketing, Writing, and much, much more. They also offer information on more than 40,000 organizations in their database.

Keep your business dreams afloat by discovering a lucrative side hustle. A one-year subscription to FlexJobs is currently half off at just $24.95.

Feature Image Credit : LinkedIn

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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In News

What’s the Skincare Equivalent of Your Favorite Fashion Brand?

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By Garrett Munce

Self-quarantining and social distancing have taken a toll on the business of fashion, and on a personal level, many of us have swapped ready-to-wear for loungewear. In a lot of ways, fashion’s taken a back seat to the booming world of self-care — and topping our list is skincare. To transition from style snob to beauty snob, we’ve enlisted the expertise of grooming connoisseur Garrett Munce, who cleverly compares your favorite fashion brands to their skincare equivalent.

Skincare is like fashion in a variety of ways, and not just because they’re both aesthetic pursuits. First, it’s a personal journey. The same products that work for your friend might not work for you. Second, both skincare and fashion are about branding.

Think about it: what makes you pick up one item off a rack packed with others? The label plays a big part. The same goes for why you pick a certain skincare product off a crowded shelf: you’re drawn, know it or not, to the brand. And, these days, guys want their face cleanser and moisturizer to do more than just cleanse and protect their skin. We want products that fit into our lifestyle, that we’re not embarrassed to leave out on our bathroom counters, that have vibes instead of just ingredients.

If you know fashion, you’ll understand skincare. These are the brands you should know, alongside their fashion equivalents.

Bode = Vintner’s Daughter

Highsnobiety

Bode represents a world where people are willing to pay huge sums of money to feel like they’re acting sustainably, and those people are also using Vintner’s Daughter. One of the brands that launched the current Green Explosion, Vintner’s Daughter only has two products: a serum and an essence made from all-natural ingredients, both of which will set you back a couple of hundred dollars. A cult following of green-minded fancy people has popped up around both brands, who believe that conspicuous consumption and harsh chemicals aren’t necessary to be cool.

Chanel = La Prairie

Highsnobiety

Like the storied House of Chanel, favored by fancy grandmothers and young hypebeasts alike, the skincare “house” of La Prairie has a long history. The brand extends back to 1931 with the opening of Clinique La Prairie and the cellular rejuvenation research of Dr. Paul Niehans. Like Coco Chanel, Dr. Niehans had a vision, and almost a century later that vision is still something you want to put on your body. Nowadays, also like Chanel, La Prairie is expensive AF, but completely worth it, according to brand acolytes. The rich moisturizers and silky eye creams might have a decidedly old lady scent, but if you ask us, that only adds to the experience.

Goyard = Biologique Recherche

Highsnobiety

Even when Goyard wasn’t at the front of every stylish dude’s mind, it was still churning out luggage for those in the know. You’ve probably never heard of its skincare equivalent unless you follow beauty influencers on Instagram: Biologique Recherche. Its hero product, an exfoliating toner called Lotion P50, has been referred to as “Jesus in a bottle,” and seems to be the desert-island product of anyone serious about skincare. It’s expensive and hard to find, but using it means you know something your friends don’t.

Tom Ford = Tom Ford

Highsnobiety

OK, this is an easy one, but think about it: can any brand get to the level of Tom Ford without actually being Tom Ford? The notoriously well-groomed designer first extended his taste level to fragrance, creating an extensive line of instantly iconic scents and, just last year, came out with a new unisex skincare line to match. Tom Ford Research isn’t going to set you back as much as a sharkskin suit, but in skincare terms, it comes pretty close. There are only three products: a moisturizer, serum, and an eye cream, but if we’re to learn anything from Ford, luxury is in the details.

1017 ALYX 9SM = The Nue Co

Highsnobiety

The whole point of 1017 ALYX 9SM is to blend what we know — streetwear, tailoring, and technical fabrics — to create something surprising. The same ethos goes into The Nue Co, an innovative grooming and wellness company from the UK. All of the supplements are fused with the combination of nature and science, and can combat everything from bloating to skin issues. Teaching us that better skin is possible from the inside is the type of out-of-the-box thinking that The Nue Co is best at. Plus, the bottles fit perfectly in a 1017 ALYX 9SM harness pouch.

Snow Peak = SK-II

Highsnobiety

Japanese brand Snow Peak is the gold standard of design-minded functionality, even for people who have never built a campfire in their lives. Knowing about Snow Peak gives you instant cred, and the same goes for its skincare equivalent SK-II. The products themselves, like the essence and mask, are beloved around the world because they’ve been perfected over the years to not just work, but make life easier. But more than just using the products, both SK-II and Snow Peak are about a lifestyle, and actually owning a piece of the brand signals that you value functionality and design (and are willing to pay a premium for it).

Jil Sander = Dr. Barbara Sturm

Highsnobiety

The similarities between Jil Sander and Dr. Barbara Sturm go beyond just the founders (both are blond, German ladies). While Sander made her mark on the fashion world with her minimal designs and created a global brand founded on a “less is more” attitude, Dr. Sturm’s ethos comes from using scientifically-proven ingredients to perfect your skin. The simple, minimal packaging is one thing, but inside the bottles are advanced formulas that work to rebuild skin and attack a variety of issues, including some you can’t even see (like pollution). A Dr. Barbara Sturm serum is the Jil Sander white button-down of skincare: not everyone will get it (or understand why you paid so much for it), but the trained eye can tell you’re onto something.

Supreme = Glossier

Highsnobiety

Every hypebeast waiting in line outside the Supreme store in Manhattan has a girlfriend waiting in a similar line a few blocks away: outside Glossier. Are the logos similar? Yes. Have both brands mastered the art of the drop? Yes. Can people get enough? No. Where Supreme constantly reinvents classic garms like tees and sweats and makes them cool just by slapping on a logo, Glossier has done the same to easy, no-fuss skincare. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every face serum, they say, you just need to put it in a slyly designed bottle and give it a great marketing campaign (or lack thereof). For the record, both brands are unisex, and in the case of Glossier, there’s even an Instagram account to prove it.

J.Crew = Kiehl’s

Highsnobiety

Peek into the closets of half of America (and most of the Brooklyn dad population), and you’ll find at least one item from J.Crew. Peek into those same dudes’ medicine cabinets, and you’ll likely find Kiehl’s. Both classic American brands are now mainstays of any red-blooded guy’s style. Thanks to both brands’ availability at malls, they’re easy to find and meet a need that most guys have: to look put together without necessarily standing out or opening their wallet too much. Like J.Crew’s democratic, slightly-elevated basics, Kiehl’s has an extensive line (and sub-lines) of skincare products that work for every type of guy and make you look good without going over the top.

Gucci = Buly 1803

Highsnobiety

Did Alessandro Michele directly reference Buly 1803 when he took the helm of Gucci? If we were to take that bet, we’d put our money on “yes.” Now, it’s easy to confuse the packaging of the two-centuries-old French apothecary brand with what we think of as Michele’s signature style: maximalist, ornate, and vaguely mystical. Lotion tubes with tarot hands printed on them, face cleanser bottles with script words you can’t quite pronounce, hand soaps that smell like a grandma but in a good way — they’re all at home in the print-crazy, layered, cartoonish world of Gucci. Is it something you stole from your grandmother or something you bought from Mr. Porter last week? In the case of both brands, it’s almost impossible to tell.

Nike = Unilever

Highsnobiety

While global force Nike has gradually taken over closets and decided what we wear in and out of the gym, another conglomerate has taken over our personal care: Unilever. What it lacks in name recognition, Unilever makes up for in reach: it’s the company that owns Axe, Suave, Noxzema, Dove, Vaseline, and tons more. Walk down any men’s grooming aisle (or look in your own bathroom) and half the products are made by Unilever. It even has its own version of high-end NikeLab: a luxury portfolio that includes brands like Dermalogica (a science-backed, very high-end skincare brand), REN (cutting-edge, clean skincare), and Living Proof (guy-friendly, solution-based haircare).

Acne Studios = Aesop

Highsnobiety

Acne Studios’ clothing signifies a certain commitment to an art degree (or anyone who wants to look like they have one). The clothes are minimal, sure, but hidden in the details are codes that the wearer might be wearing a T-shirt, but their T-shirt is cooler than yours. It’s a similar ability to build a lifestyle through subtlety that makes sustainably-minded, minimal-but-not skincare brand Aesop so desirable. One of the OG natural-inspired grooming companies, Aesop is all about effective ingredients in easy-to-use formulas with just-advanced-enough sounding names to confuse those left out of the loop. Everyone who’s anyone can identify a bottle of Aesop soap or hand cream sitting on a sink counter (and if they can’t, it’s lost on them).

Uniqlo = The Ordinary

Highsnobiety

From its innovative technology, like Heat Tech, to the consistent roster of surprising artist collabs to its high-end collabs that sell out in seconds, Uniqlo has cemented its place as a fashion force, price point be damned. Similarly, when The Ordinary launched in 2016, skincare pros were left gobsmacked at how such great products could be sold at such low prices (many of the products have a single-digit cost). And, like Uniqlo, The Ordinary prides itself on its ability to infuse its products with technology and craftsmanship more commonly found in products with much higher price tags.

By Garrett Munce

Sourced from HIGHSNOBIETY

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Have Marketers Given Up On The Job Of Keeping Customers?

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By Paul Talbot

When customers are taken for granted, they have a knack for vanishing. So it seems strange that as we move into an era of vanishing, or at best, shrinking marketing budgets, attention paid to existing customers appears to be eroding.

I recently asked Lana Busignani, EVP of U.S. Analytics at Nielsen, to shed light on recent research which reflects the waning importance of marketing built to keep current customers active and engaged.

Paul Talbot: Survey respondents indicated, by a fairly wide margin, that acquiring new customers was more important than retaining existing customers. Do you have a sense as to why?

Lana Busignani: One potential explanation is the distortion of attention and energy to mastering the capabilities being enabled by the digital, addressable world. The growth and sophistication of the digital advertising ecosystem has enabled marketers to target audiences and buyers more precisely with the objective of converting interested/engaged buyers within the category to their brands.

Talbot: Little interest was expressed in reducing churn. The report states, ‘This lack of focus on churn is a missed opportunity for marketers.’ Can we quantify the size of this opportunity, and why doesn’t the tactic of reducing churn generate the focus you believe it should?

Busignani: Perhaps some may be chalked up to how marketers define churn, whether they are concerned with it or not. Is it a completely lost buyer, a lost trip to a competitive brand, or a reduction in brand loyalty? Any lost sale should be considered churn and for consumer brands could drive a 10-20% reduction in sales among current buyers which would need to be offset by new client acquisition or switchers from competitive brands.

Marketers should balance client acquisition with activities that remind buyers about their brand and keep their brand top of mind for when consumers are making buying decisions.

One potential explanation as to why reducing churn is rated lower among marketers, is that some marketers have adopted philosophies which prioritize penetration and brand popularity over activities designed to drive brand loyalty or customer retention. The philosophy accepts consumer switching and lack of loyalty as a dynamic prevalent in the marketplace and so these marketers focus their activities on driving new buyers and penetration among consumers.

Talbot: Do we have any historic context for these viewpoints? Do we know if customer retention and reducing churn was any more or less important to marketers ten or twenty years ago?

Busignani: While we don’t have historical figures to cite as our CMO survey is only a few years old, there is evidence to support that customer retention was an important priority for marketers in the form of loyalty programs which proliferated during that time frame.

Markets were also less fragmented at the time, with fewer competitors and consumer choice so perhaps retention, or protecting established share of wallet was more achievable for marketers or was considered a more worthwhile investment than it is today. We do see great examples of modern loyalty programs designed to drive customer retention with the proliferation of apps designed to offer convenience and rewards to consumers such as Starbucks and Target’s shopper app.

Talbot: The classic marketing rule of thumb that suggests an investment in creating a new customer is greater than an investment in keeping an existing customer. Has this been relegated to the quaint thinking of a bygone era?  What do the media investment numbers actually reveal?

Busignani: Marketers are under increased scrutiny to prove the value of marketing investments in driving growth for brands to justify marketing spending.

Given the amount of wasted marketing dollars, reaching wrong audiences with irrelevant messages, products and offers, we do see marketers increasing investments in new digital ad vehicles which offer the promise of growth and the ability to reach consumers with relevant, personalized offers.

Traditional vehicles like television, which reach broader audiences, are more difficult to tie to sales outcomes today. However, as television becomes more addressable, it will enable marketers to more directly prove the value of their marketing investments in driving consumer action and purchasing.

By Paul Talbot

Minus strategy marketing staggers. I am a somewhat reformed ex-media business executive, with tours of duty at AOL, CBS Radio, and Nationwide Communications. I’m a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Boston Red Sox, the Principality of Liechtenstein, fried clams, fog, and prices that end in the number 7.

Sourced from Forbes

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The Many Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

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By Anders Hjorth

Social media can empower small businesses and provide access to markets, clients, insights and advertising capabilities you wouldn’t expect.

Social Media empowers small businesses and opens opportunities formerly reserved for large corporations. It can feel overwhelming and scary, but do you ever hear of a small business experiencing social media downfalls? Not really.

Social media for small business makes complex business processes accessible, gives you direct access to market research and opens up world markets for you. Let’s look at the advantages of social media.

Here are some advantages for businesses using social media:

  • Social media empowers your marketing
  • Events can be held online
  • Sell direct to end users with higher margins
  • Advertise at a lower cost
  • Get direct user feedback
  • Extend your business reach

Marketing benefits of social media

Social media empowers your marketing and puts you in direct contact with end users. You can reach out, you can interact with them, and you can collect their feedback. You get insights into audiences you are targeting, helping you build an effective social media marketing plan.

Let’s go through some of the advantages of social media for the marketing of your small business.

1. Build a community

Social media brings people together via direct relationships. Your social media presence creates a community of users around your brand or your products. And this community can create user generated content (UGC) and strong ambassadors for your brand.

Microsoft uses the community approach for end-user support on a dedicated technology platform, but using social media, you can start building a user community at no cost.

Microsoft User Community

Microsoft has created a user community as part of its support. Source: Microsoft

2. Word of mouth

A Nielsen report shows people trust “recommendations from people I know” at a rate of over 83%. With TV advertising, it’s a much lower 63%, and online advertising only 48%.

Word of mouth is more powerful than advertising and much easier to activate via social media. Your business can use the power of social media communications between people to be seen, heard, and observed online.

You don’t need a full-fledged social media strategy to enjoy these benefits. Just ask questions like: “What do you think of our product?” and “If you liked this, would you mind sharing?”

Blog on sustainable development

Suggest that people share a post on social media as in this blog on sustainable development. Source: ICLEI

3. Content marketing

Social media existed for a number of years before content marketing concepts and inbound marketing appeared ten years ago. Both are based on search marketing and social media.

With content marketing, focus on creating remarkable content which resonates with your target audience. It builds awareness and engages users.

Inbound marketing takes this engagement as the first step in a user journey that draws the user toward your commercial offering. Valuable content and experiences have that power. Social media is a key component in content marketing and allows you to market to your audience without advertising.

Tableau sign up form

Software sales often uses inbound marketing, as in this example. Source: Tableau.com

4. Advocacy

Your brand and reputation will exist in the market whether you are part of the conversation or not. According to Jeff Bezos “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”

David Brier, a branding authority, puts it this way: “If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.”

A large part of this conversation happens on social media, where you must create that brand positioning story. Use one of the most powerful mechanisms on social media: advocacy, where a person talks favorably about your brand. Advocacy is used in two distinct ways on social media:

  • Employee advocacy
  • Ambassador advocacy

Employee advocacy uses employees’ personal voice and network to weigh in on a brand conversation. Employee advocacy testifies to a strong corporate culture and sense of belonging. It can be very effective and generate a lot of natural engagement.

When community members act as natural brand ambassadors, they can be powerful advocates for your brand and product. Brand ambassadors sometimes receive some type of free product, service or privileged access to information.

Majestic Brand Ambassadors

Ambassadors for

SEO software company Majestic represent a geographic region and act as spokespersons for the product. Source: Majestic

5. Social media influencers

Social media influencers are similar to brand ambassadors but are typically paid to present a brand or a product to their audiences. They come in many forms and shapes and can help access niche markets. Using them isn’t simple or straightforward, but can add social media power to a small business.

AspireIQ homepage

AspireIQ helps brands find influencers who fit their requirements and can increase their exposure. Source: AspireIQ

Travel destination promoters use social media influencers a lot. Inviting an influencer on a trip and having them share the experience with their audience makes the destination tangible, accessible and attractive. Search a travel destination on YouTube to see this in action.

Extended benefits of social media

Social media has expanded marketing by creating person-to-person communication, allowing your brand to enter into conversations with end users. Another dimension of social media disruption lies in dematerialization, or doing more with less.

There are no physical limitations on social media, and technology enables a business to do more at a lower cost, like creating live events or extending their business hours and international reach.

6. Live events online

Today, any company can stream a live event to their user base to showcase new products and services. They can even have one-to-one exchanges, at a low cost with tools such as Facebook Live or one of the many online conferencing platforms.

Jessica Uhl, Shell CFO

Dutch Shell Plc uses their chief financial officer to broadcast their quarterly reports. Source: Youtube

7. International reach

Social media has no geographical barriers so the world is your audience. Social media does, however, have language barriers. Your reach will be limited to the languages you communicate in.

Although automatic translation is improving, you probably need native language skills to persuade and sell products. Your international reach could be limited by local regulations and taxes, but once you cover them, you can market to the world.

List of Weber international sites

The internet lets you offer your barbecues worldwide. Source: Weber.com

8. Extend your business hours

Brick and mortar business and their owners have limited hours, but your social media profiles never sleep. They’re always open and make your business a 24/7/365 non-stop selling machine.

If you have an e-commerce business, your shop doesn’t close at night, and your audience is global. Program automatic responses and chatbots, and your social media profiles can be your customer service when you’re not available.

Eiffel Tower's Facebook page

Book your trip to the Eiffel Tower on its Facebook page. Or you can contact it via Messenger. Source: Facebook

Advertising benefits of social media

The internet has had a powerful impact on the value chain in many industries: shopping centers are disintermediated by e-commerce, insurance agents are disintermediated by online insurance, travel agencies are disintermediated by flight sales and online hotel booking.

Social media has eliminated your need for an advertising agency for much of your promotional activity.

9. Social commerce

Social commerce combines capabilities of e-commerce with the human interactions of social media. Consider Amazon.

It integrates several media aspects into the user experience: user reviews and ratings, recommendations based on users’ preferences, and the possibility to find Amazon products on social media outside the Amazon platform itself.

At the other extreme, we have Instagram. It integrates e-commerce directly into social media by product tagging and direct checkout without ever leaving Instagram. Social commerce may be the future of shopping, especially impulse buys.

Instagram Shopping Post

Products that appear in photos on Instagram can be tagged with their price, and the user can click on the product and buy out without ever leaving the app. Source: Instagram

Social media is a great place to showcase your products, in the form of images, videos or descriptive texts. More than just a showcase, social media is a great place to advertise.

10. Powerful targeting

It’s easy to access Social media advertising, and you can use it in sophisticated ways. The first step for many advertisers is to simply “boost” a publication to get more exposure.

This multiplies the number of impressions of a normal publication. No need to do artwork or write ad copy, simply use what you have and expand the exposure of something that has already proven successful.

Facebook Ads offers incredible targeting capabilities because of the extensive user data it holds. Facebook lets you target users via geography, demography, interests, behaviors and more.

11. Scalability

You can scale advertising campaigns almost endlessly, reaching audiences across the world with complex ad sequencing and retargeting setups. This can be part of a wider social media campaign, spanning several social media platforms and reaching your target audience in different ways.

Use this scalability to your advantage, reducing risks while increasing profits.

12. Measurability

Social media analytics lets you measure almost all social media activity, especially advertising. Master the four basic social media metrics and you’ll be able to interpret and optimize everything you do on social media.

Social media process and metrics

Measure your performance on social media by looking at your input, engagement, following and reach.

Customer service benefits of social media

Social media profiles, always on and easily found, make it easy to contact a brand for after-sales service. Many companies use Twitter and Facebook for customer service. Users post direct feedback via reviews and post comments. Read and analyze their comments to tweak your marketing message.

13. Direct user feedback

With Twitter, you can allow any user to exchange direct messages with you, and Facebook has an inbox system to receive messages, feedback and questions from your users. Some social media management tools centralize messages from various social media platforms and post them in one place.

DHL's Twitter account

DHL has created a dedicated Twitter account for customer service.

Chatbots are another way to initiate and extend the user feedback loop automatically.

14. Reviews and ratings

Users can review your products and rate your company on social media. Many companies worry that a few unsatisfied users could make their overall service look bad.

In reality, most reviews are positive, and they have a positive effect on companies who provide great user experiences, which will generate great reviews.

Cafe Zen Paris Facebook Page

User reviews reveal what users preferred and what they didn’t like. Source: Facebook

You’ll inevitably find some fake reviews on rating platforms. If you want to increase your reviews, simply solicit feedback from more users, and improve the things your users are unhappy about.

So many benefits but you can’t have them all

Limited time won’t let you plug into all these social media benefits. Social media is work intensive and results come from hard and consistent work. Not so different from the offline world, is it?

Be selective and invest in social media actions which offer the biggest payback for your business. Set long-term objectives and work consistently toward them to extract significant value from social media.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

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Branding Is Storytelling

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By Marshall Bowden.

A great brand doesn’t start with a product.

It doesn’t start with a business plan.

Every big idea, every legendary brand, begins as a story. The story is sometimes deeply entwined with the personal story of the founder/owner, but the brand’s story is a distinctive story all in itself. If you don’t know the story, if you haven’t spent time thinking about it and working it into a narrative that explains what makes the heart of your business beat, then you really don’t understand your business at all.

Good marketing will bring people to your product or service, hopefully in sufficient numbers to keep the doors open. But marketing alone will not keep them coming back. It won’t create a bond between you and them.

Solid branding will. Branding animates your product, your company, your employees, and your clients or customers. When branding is strong and a company consistently focuses on the values that their story embodies, their products or services can become part of people’s lives. In the best cases, those companies can actually influence the culture of an entire business sector and beyond.

Author and social researcher Brene Brown says that “maybe stories are just data with a soul”. Businesses are driven by data, and the collection and analysis of ever-increasing amounts of data has become a huge part of any business. But without branding, without a compelling story, how do you even know what data is going to be most valuable to your business? How will you focus your marketing if you can’t articulate what’s important to your business?

How will you convey the soul of your brand? With a story that gathers the threads of core values, uniqueness, and style your brand will show that it understands both itself and its customers or clients.

Core values are important to your brand and they help drive your story. Core values are the DNA and foundation of your business. Other things about your business change with conditions and markets and data, but your core values do not. They dictate how you will conduct business and react to change, but they don’t keep you from evolving.

Core values are important to define and for those within the company to understand, but they are not always explicitly stated. Instead they are frequently demonstrated by the company’s product, service, innovation, etc. But the stories the company tells about itself — about its workers, about its way of doing business — help to define these values in the minds of clients and customers.

Some companies will have core values that customers are willing to pay higher prices to support. At other times their values will be simple and straightforward because their business is that way. For example, customers look to a bank to be dependable and keep their money safe, not to be especially innovative.

Key to the importance of core values is that customers and clients will look to see themselves reflected in the values of companies whose products they use. If customers see themselves as dependable providers for their families they will respond to products and services that reflect a belief in dependability and security.

Your unique selling proposition is something you want to identify within your brand. What differentiates your product or service from those that have gone before? Why is your business worthier of your customers’ money than your competitors?

According to this article by ConversionEngine’s Joe Putnam:

“A unique selling proposition is what your business stands for. It’s what sets your business apart from others because of what your business makes a stand about. Instead of attempting to be known for everything, businesses with a unique selling proposition stand for something specific, and it becomes what you’re known for.”

He goes on to say that companies and their brands need to decide what they are going to be known for. Being too general, trying to be good at everything, leaves a company without a competitive advantage in this area.

Put another way, a unique selling proposition defines your brand’s niche. In simple terms, when you decide to offer low prices, you will not offer other services that would raise prices. When you decide to offer the highest quality, you will not compete on price because that’s not possible based on your selling proposition niche.

If you are operating in a crowded market or have a product or service that is difficult to differentiate, your brand provides the key to the niche that you alone can occupy.

Your brand has a style. Identify it and align it with your story. The style can be visual, as in a logo, or a concept such as “relaxed” or “flexible”. It may be certain colors or a signature theme song, or a certain way of communicating.

Consider the visual and written style of the J. Peterman Company’s catalog. Their catalogs differed profoundly from others being printed in 1987. They used long copy that didn’t merely describe the article of clothing they were selling, it told a story about it. And instead of color photographs, the catalog utilized simple but artistic line drawings of the clothes.

J Peterman Company

J Peterman Company

Their original motto was “People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them.”

That’s a core value that directs the company’s story and expresses itself in the uniqueness and style of its products as well as its presentation. That is a brand.

The story is the central element in the J Peterman brand. The company’s website still uses drawings, now with color added, and photographs, which are necessary to sell products online.

Although the more florid descriptions have given way to a more practical product description online, the site contains a blog entitled ‘Peterman’s Eye” which covers all manner of topics under subjects like Americana, Curiosities, Adventure, and Travel.

So yes, they’ve evolved in their look and feel, but the story is the same.

Branding and marketing are ritualized forms of storytelling that form an epic saga about a company and their products or services. This constant need to continue telling the story is one reason that the need for so many content providers has evolved. Writers, content marketers, SEO specialists, social media marketers and influencers, and even customers all participate in the storytelling, compelled and guided by their understanding, both explicit and subconscious, of the brand’s core values, uniqueness, and style.

By Marshall Bowden

Sourced from UX Magazine

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How to use business emails as an additional marketing channel

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An email has long been the most efficient way to communicate in business. This channel has numerous advantages comparing to chats, phone calls, or live meetings. An ability to exchange any kind of content is arguably the most valuable aspect here, which is what makes email a productive marketing channel.

However, many business people don’t know how to implement marketing messages into their email communication effectively. With up to 25 emails sent every day, how do you make them all promote your product or service?

Problems with using email signature marketing channel

Email signatures have long been used for achieving greater results with email marketing campaigns. However, according to Newoldstamp’s business email marketing report, 41% of email signature users install them for branding and increasing business visibility only.

Why is it so? Well, an email signature is usually considered a nice addition to business correspondence. You can create a professional one, adding your company website and logo, as well as social media pages. But does it really amplify marketing efforts?

Marketing vs. Branding

Surely, branding is an essential part of marketing. But it doesn’t end there, not with email signatures. In addition to simply having your company information dangling at the bottom of every email, you can use email signatures to promote content or bring value to the recipients.

This implies updating signatures more than once in a while, which seems to be a problem for 35% of users (according to the same report). People simply don’t know why they should update their signatures more often.

What makes email signature marketing difficult?

Among the biggest difficulties that people face when setting up email signature marketing are generating leads, tracking the performance, and setting marketing KPIs. Which means they don’t consider email signatures a converting channel.

Learn to use the most of your email signature marketing

So, how can you make your business email signatures perform as a part of the marketing strategy? Actually, it’s not that hard. The first thing you need to do is realize that this small addition to emails is a complete marketing tool.

The obvious aspect of setting up an email signature is branding. Your logo, company colours, website link, and social media icons are essential. Once you have that added to your signature, as well as your employees’, you can proceed.

Set up email signature banner campaigns

Many email signature marketing tools allow users to choose a special promo banner or upload one. But what makes this whole banner routine really worth the time is scheduling and changing them according to specific variables.

For example, you can have a default banner that will always be in your team’s email signatures. And when you have a new feature or a nice blog post that you want to promote, you can set a banner dedicated to this matter. In this way, you get an advertising element right in your emails.

Create different signatures for different departments

Email signature management does not necessarily end on setting up identical signatures for everyone. Separate your marketing, sales, HR departments and create unique signatures for each member of the specific group.

Obviously, sales and HR have different things to promote. For instance, any sales manager should have a call schedule button in their email signature while HRs could link new vacancies to the banner in the email footer.

Email signature marketing and business correspondence

Now that we’ve mentioned all the benefits of email signature marketing, you might be wondering how to use it effectively in your daily communication.

The most important takeaway is that you should update your email signature regularly. There’s always going to be some content that you will need to promote. As email signature marketing takes little to no time and resources, use it to its most.

Change your email signature banner to keep it up-to-date. Every single email sent may result in a conversion. So, help your recipients by guiding them to the content you need them to see.

In addition to all that, you can try A/B testing different variations of signatures. Sometimes a CTA button will be enough and other cases might require a distinct email signature banner. Try to find out what fits your style of communication.

Conclusion

Email signature marketing is a powerful yet underrated channel. As the Newoldstamp business email marketing report suggests, too many people don’t use its full potential. Hopefully, this small guide will help you realize how beneficial an email signature can be and how to utilize them efficiently.

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Sourced from TechGenyz

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How to kick-start your first data blog?

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This is probably the most common question I got asked beside “How did you land your job in Data Science/ Data Analytics?” I will write another blog on my job hunting journey, so this will focus on how to get the industry exposure without that gig yet.

I gave a talk on this topic before at DIPD @ UCLA — the student organization dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in the fields of Product and Data that I co-founded. However, I aim to expand this topic and make it accessible to a broader audience.

And there it goes, I hope this post will potentially inspire more and more data enthusiasts to start their own blogs.

This may be a tough time for many of us, but it’s also a prime time to turbocharge and level up your skill sets in data science and analytics. If your employment got impacted at this time, treat the unfortunate as a great opportunity to take a break, reflect and kickstart your personal project — things that are luxurious when time does not allow.

“When one door closes, another opens” — Alexander Graham Bell

Hardship does not determine who you are, it’s your attitude and perseverance that define your values. Let’s get right into it!

Where to start?

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl via Unsplash

Start small and scale up

Before we start any project, first narrowing down your interests. This is your personal project so you will have full autonomy over it. Find something that makes you tick and gets you motivated to devote your time!

There will be a lot of challenges along the way that may discourage or sidetrack you from accomplishing the project, the thing that keeps you going should be the analysis topic that strongly aligns with your interest. It does not have to be something out of the world. Ask yourself what is important to you and why should we care about it.

When I first started, I knew that I wholeheartedly care about mental health and the ways to gain more mindfulness. So I dug deeper into analyzing the top 6 guided meditation apps to understand which one will be most suitable for my preferences.

Getting inspirations

Photo by Road Trip with Raj via Unsplash

Read, read, and read!

One of the most important key factors that I learned through my research assistant position at CRESST UCLA is to balance the workload between analysis and literature review. What this means is that we need to find what has been done in the past and figure out which additions or unique aspects you can contribute on top of the findings. My reading sources vary from Medium, Analytic Vidhya, statistics books to any relevant sources that I can find on the internet.

Take my Subtle Couple Traits analysis for example. There has been some work done in the space of music taste analysis via Spotify API, but no one has really delved into movies yet. So I took this chance and discovered the intersection of our couple’s cult favorites for music and movies.

Finding the right toolbox

Photo by Giang Nguyen via MinfulR on Medium

Now you get to this step where you need to figure out which data to collect and find the right tools for the job. This part has always resonated intrinsically with my industry experience as a data analyst. It’s the most challenging and time-consuming part indeed.

My best tip for this stage of analysis is to ask a lot of practical questions and come up with some hypotheses that you need to answer or justify through data. We have to also be mindful of the feasibility of the project, otherwise, you can be more flexible in terms of tweaking your approach towards a more doable one.

Note that you can use the programming language that you are most comfortable with 🙂 I believe that either Python or R has its own advantages and great supporting data packages.

An example from my past project can crystalize this strategy. I was curious about the non-pharmaceutical factors that correlate to the suppression of COVID-19 so I listed out all of the variables I can think of such as weather, PPEs, ICU beds, quarantines, etc. then I began massive research on the open-source data sets.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” — George Box

Since I did not have a background in public health, building predictive models for this type of pandemic data was a huge challenge. I first started with some models I’m familiar with such as random forest or Bayesian ridge regression. However, I discovered that pandemic typically follows the trend of a logistic curve in which the cases grow exponentially over a period of time until it hits the inflection point and levels out. This refers to the compartmental models in epidemiology. It took me almost 2 weeks to learn and apply this model to my analysis but the result was extremely mesmerizing. And I eventually wrote a blog about it.

The process

If you are working in the Data Science/Analytics field, this is not new to you — “80% of a data scientist’s time consists of preparing (simply finding, cleansing, and organizing data), leaving only 20% to build models and perform analysis.”

Photo by Impulse Creative

The process of cleaning data may be cumbersome, but when you get it right, your analysis will be more valuable and significant. Here’s the typical process I take for my analysis workflow:

1) Collecting Data

2) Cleaning Data

Many more…

3) Project-based techniques

  • (NLP) Sentimental analysis, POS, topic modeling, BERT, etc.
  • (Predictions) Classification/Regression model
  • (Recommendation System) Collaborative Filtering, etc.

Many more…

4) Write up insights and recommendations

Connecting the dots

This is the most important part of the analysis. How do we connect the analysis insights into a real-life context and making actionable recommendations? Regardless of your project’s focus, whether it’s about machine learning, deep learning or analytics, what problem is your analysis/model trying to solve?

Photo by Quickmeme

Imagining that we build a highly complex model to predict how many Medium readers will clap for your blog. Okay, so how’s this important?

Link it to potential impacts! If your post receives more endorsement from claps, it may get curated and featured more often on Medium platform. And if more paying Medium readers find your blog, you can probably earn more money through the Medium Partner Program. Now that’s an impact!

However, it’s not always about profit-driven impact, it could be social, health, or even environmental impact. This is just one example of how you can make the connections between technical concepts with real-world implementation.

Roadblocks

You may hit a wall at some points during the journey. My best piece of advice is to proactively seek help!

Besides from reaching out to friends, colleagues, or mentors to ask for advice, I often found it helpful to search or post questions on online Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, StackExchange, Github, Quora, Medium, you name it! While seeking for solutions, be patient and creative. If the online solutions have not yet solved your problems, try to think of another way to customize the solution for the characteristics of your data or the version of the code.

The art of writing is rewriting.

When I first published my first data blog to Medium, I found myself re-visiting my post and fixing some sentences or wording here and there. Don’t be discouraged if you notice some typos or grammar mistakes after releasing it, you can always go back and edit!

Since it is our personal project, there’s no obligation on whether you must finish it. Hence, prioritization and disciplines play a crucial role throughout the journey. Set a clear goal for your project and lay out a timeline to achieve it. At the same time, don’t spread yourself too thin since it may cause you to lose interest.

Understand your timeline and capacity! I often push my personal project in a sprint of 2 to 4 weeks to finish during break or the weekends. In order to organize your sprint and track your progress, you can refer to some Agile framework that can be found through collaboration software like Trello or Asana. As long as you make progress even the smallest one, your success shall flourish some day. So keep going and don’t give up!

Closing Remarks

The first step is always the hardest. If you don’t think that the project is ready yet, give yourself some time to fine-tune and share it!

Nothing will be perfect at first. But by shipping it to the audiences, you would know what to improve for later projects — I adopted this principle wholeheartedly from product management perspectives.

I used to be not good at communicating my thoughts structurally and clearly (which I’m still trying to improve), but by pushing myself out of the comfort zone, I have gone extra miles from where I was. I hope this will, to some degree, inspire you to start your first data blog. Believe in yourself, be brave and reach out to me or anyone in your network if you need help along the way!

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King

Photo by Glen McCallum via Unsplash

By Giang Nguyen

Sourced from towards data science

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The why, what and how to building a better future for programmatic

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By Damon Reeve

With Isba’s study revealing that 15% of digital ad spend is unaccounted for, a statistic from the PwC-produced report that prompted headlines, Damon Reeve, chief executive of The Ozone Project, offers his first-hand insight into what this means for the programmatic sector.

The results from Isba’s Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study, carried out by PwC and in association with the AOP, have practically self-penned the industry’s headlines for the past few days.

“Missing billions”, “big holes”, “the unknown delta”, “mind-boggling” – perhaps not the usual words used to describe a positive first step, yet that’s exactly what this report represents. If, as an industry, we want to create a more sustainable, future-proofed environment for digital advertising we must first acknowledge that things aren’t working as they are. These results certainly speak to what many people already know, and reinforces the need for change.

As we look to create a blueprint for that change, it is a great step forward that it has been driven by advertisers and publishers – as the principal architects – alongside their respective trade bodies. Reversing the trend of disintermediation by programmatic tech vendors, and working together to find their voice, albeit of frustration, is one of the best outcomes of this study, and why it must be a first step and not an end in itself.

In the interests of disclosure, The Ozone Project is an advertiser-led business created by publishers and was developed to tackle many of the issues highlighted in this report. We see ourselves as a significant catalyst for the shift towards a more grown-up advertising environment, one less willing to accept the past shortcomings of programmatic.

The answer is not just what to do next, it’s how we do it

As we entered the 2020s I was convinced we would see an adult programmatic self emerge; still with lots of growth and development ahead, but also less wild and irresponsible than the younger child of the 2010s. Given some of the research in this report was produced in Q1 2020, it’s clear there is still much to do before a more mature self emerges. Nine weeks of Covid-19 isolation has given much time to reflect, and it seems how we go about change will be as important as what we change.

Firstly, collaboration must be front and centre. Through their trade bodies, advertisers and publishers have highlighted some of programmatic’s most persistent problems. An astonishing insight from the report is the confusion over whether advertisers and publishers have the right to access the log data for campaigns they are running. The answer to that question should not require consulting a legal department.

The programmatic supply chain should genuinely work in the best interests of publishers and brands. Together they must build on this work to address one of the critical recommendations from the report; standardising terms and conditions for buyers and sellers, while creating consistent data taxonomies and data sharing rules. This first step will help close the somewhat unhelpful gap that has developed between advertisers and publishers within programmatic advertising.

Secondly, while transparency is at the heart of this study, it isn’t something to fix, it is a way to behave. The ‘opacity by design’ approach that has challenged the sector for years represents institutionalised behaviour that will require a concerted effort to correct. Being open, authentic and human in terms and conditions will be deemed important qualities, rather than hiding the ‘unknown delta’ in technical terms and jargon that almost no one understands. Patience has been worn paper-thin amongst advertisers and publishers, and in this new future we will see vendors and partners selected on operating principles as much as technical capabilities.

A starting point for what to do next

The insights and recommendations from the report itself provide a framework for where future focus must be directed.

As already mentioned, standardising terms and conditions through Isba and the AOP is an obvious next step to remove much of the friction and confusion that exists today. It took PwC more than nine months to receive the information for its analysis, with an often ‘round the houses’, confused approach to who could give permission to use the data.

Brand safety has been high on the marketer agenda during these challenging times with a specific focus from Newsworks’ #BackdontBlock campaign. This new analysis should enable further grown-up conversations around brand safety generally, particularly as the study’s advertisers appeared on an average of 40,524 different domains. That’s not a misprint. 40,524 different websites. How many websites do you visit on a regular basis? Even looking beyond the first page of the Comscore top 3,000 yields some very random websites. Only 19% of campaign impressions were delivered on premium publisher domains, with the vast majority appearing on other websites and the unregulated long-tail of the internet. Responsible advertisers will no doubt be asking questions about where their advertising is going, and what exactly it is funding.

Next, the ‘unknown delta’ needs to become known. In an automated world, one would expect any margin for error to be reduced, and therefore any major gap is concerning. While many have offered thoughts as to why – from currency fluctuations to the compound impact of rounding through the supply chain – it’s important to remember that this 15% ‘unknown delta’ appears in the very small proportion of data that could be matched for the purposes of the study. If this reflects the ‘best of the best’ – major advertisers working with the most premium publishers – the 15% delta will be significantly bigger with smaller sites and smaller advertisers that weren’t measurable.

A final point not specifically called out in this report but to me is inferred in every insight and recommendation, is aligning incentives for each participant in the supply chain to the value they provide. And this extends to the agreements brands have with their media agencies. It will be very difficult to move to a trusted grown-up programmatic ecosystem if each actor is trying to game the system, whether through opportunity or necessity. Remove the incentive for opacity and we build an advertising environment that we all want. It’s on advertisers and publishers to build on this study and remove these incentives.

“The market is damn near impenetrable.”

In last week’s Financial Times, the frustration of Phil Smith, Isba’s director-general, regarding the programmatic world couldn’t have been more obvious. Yet with some time to reflect and digest, what is becoming increasingly clear is that this first-of-its-kind collaborative study has already laid great foundations for building a better future for digital advertising.

By Damon Reeve

Sourced from The Drum

 

 

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