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4 Ways HR Analytics Help Small Businesses Make Data-Driven Decisions

April 21, 2020 No Comments

HR Analytics help businesses generate insights and make data-driven decisions. The Blueprint explains the benefits of using HR Analytics, and the different ways small businesses can use them.

Data has changed the HR department as we knew it.

Far from being known as the ‘personnel’ department, with its physical folders and paper employee records, technology has turned the modern HR department into one of the most data-reliant departments in the modern workplace. Data analytics, however, has taken longer to catch on.

HR analytics is often perceived as too advanced or complex for small businesses, while the assumed cost of HR analytics has also been a barrier in uptake.

Yet, HR analytics has become an integral part of successful human resource planning, by helping businesses gain a better understanding of their workforce and helping them make more impactful strategic decisions.

If you’re struggling to understand HR analytics, stick with us as we go through four ways it could make an impact on your small business and its strategic business objectives.

Overview: What is HR analytics?

Businesses use human resources analytics (HR analytics) to interpret and analyze HR data to aid decision-making, drive business value, and inform human resource management strategies.

While HR metrics track activity, such as employee turnover and time to hire, metrics alone don’t analyze this data to make meaningful deductions and identify any causal relationships.

For example, your average time to hire may be 45 days, but this figure alone doesn’t tell you how this length of time to hire is impacting the business.

HR analytics uses the results of HR metrics to determine what impact they are making on the business, and what’s causing them. So, when you consider your time to hire, instead of looking at the data in a silo, HR analytics looks at what’s causing the hiring process to take 45 days instead of 30.

Many HR software tools come packaged with HR analytics functionality, but the market has recently seen an increase in vendors offering dedicated and specialized analytics software.

Benefits of tracking your HR analytics

Tracking HR metrics is all but a worthless exercise if businesses don’t know what to do with the data. Every business should be tracking their key HR metrics, but HR analytics takes that data and transforms it into actionable, data-driven business insights.

Let’s take a look at a few of the ways that HR data analytics benefits businesses and decision-makers.

1. Optimization of people costs

Labor is by far your biggest cost, and HR analytics give you the ability to break your workforce costs down into granular detail so that you can better understand how your expenses can be optimized.

For example, HR analytics can help you ascertain if certain employee training activities are providing ROI or how overtime is affecting profit margins.

2. Provides a basis for business agility

A business’s success depends on its ability to adapt its people and processes during periods of uncertainty or change. Many HR software vendors offer predictive HR analytics tools, which allows decision-makers to access real-time data and insights.

Rather than trawling through historical records and data in order to make quick judgments and decisions, HR analytics can provide insight into “what if” scenarios, ensuring that businesses can deftly realign resources when necessary.

3. Future proofs the business

Wouldn’t it be great if you could forecast your staffing needs and budgets while protecting your business’s future? Many HR analytics tools can help you predict trends such as employee attrition, while others can predict what skills you’ll need based on trends and growth.

Using HR analytics means less guesswork, fewer surprises, and more forward planning.

How can HR Analytics help your small business?

These days, HR departments have more access to data than ever before, but many are still challenged by where to start or how to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

Let’s take a look at some of the areas where HR analytics can make a difference to your strategic business objectives.

1. Talent acquisition

Hiring and recruiting is a costly business: one bad hire could set you back $240,000 in expenses. Employee retention is also a challenge for businesses during periods of almost full employment.

Your business needs an informed talent acquisition and recruitment strategy in order to avoid bad hires and to save your business time and money.

During the recruitment and hiring process, several software systems are typically used, all of which gather candidate and eventual employee data. However, when it comes to using all of that data, many businesses struggle with how to link it all together.

HR and talent analytics help you get to the heart of how all of this data can help you strategize when it comes to hiring, recruiting, and retaining top talent.

How to use HR analytics to improve talent acquisition:

Before you get started, you’ll need to know what data you have and what kind of insights you want to glean from it.

Know what questions you want answered: When you’re just getting started with HR analytics, knowing where you want to begin is crucial. Whether you’re looking to find out what’s causing a high turnover rate, or find out what’s causing long hiring times, make sure you’re not overwhelming yourself with answers you don’t need.
Review your sources of data: Along with your Applicant Tracking System and information from employee satisfaction surveys, where else are you drawing essential people data from? Knowing this beforehand will help you select the right HR analytics solution for your business.

2. Performance management

Annual performance management reviews don’t reveal the whole picture about an employee’s overall performance. Often there are performance peaks and troughs, and almost always a reason behind them.

Traditional performance measures and performance improvement plans have been based on these annual reviews, without much extra context surrounding them.

HR analytics can help align the results of performance metrics with other patterns that might not be glaringly obvious. For example, a decline in a usually high-performing department may be due to the effects of a particular member of staff leaving the organization.

HR analytics can also show where there are dips in productivity over certain periods of the employee life cycle, which can help to surface inadequacies in training or development programs, and issues within employee management processes.

How to use HR analytics to improve performance management:

Performance management processes play a key role in ensuring that employees are producing quality work that helps to achieve business goals. Using the following tips, businesses can use HR analytics to help them improve their performance management processes.

Review your existing sources of employees: Check what data you have on your employees, and what systems you’re storing it in. This will range from performance data such as reviews, to absence records, and feedback records.
Always double check your data against your own knowledge: HR analytics can provide “red-flag warnings” on certain low-performance indicators like absence rates and lateness, but make sure this adds up with what you know about your employees as individuals. For example, an employee who has recently been sick might have a high absence rate, but you know their performance is in check.

3. Workforce planning

Many studies have shown that inadequate workforce planning leads to unmet business goals.

Using HR analytics in workforce planning, organizations can calculate how many employees will retire in one year, what kind of candidates would be needed to replace them, or whether at-will employment contracts are impacting turnover.

HR workforce analytics can help businesses analyze talent and skills gaps, solve persistent workforce planning issues, and uncover trends. It can also take into account potential future scenarios to deliver multiple potential planning solutions.

How to use HR analytics to improve workforce planning:

HR analytics can help organizations to address challenges or opportunities in workforce planning. Here are a few points to consider before you get started.

Decide on a time frame: How far back do you want to analyze your workforce data, and how far do you want to plan ahead? Consider any events that occurred that could skew the analysis.
Map your current workforce formation: This includes taking a good look at your current high performing employees and those with potential to be high performers to see how current individuals could be matched to future needs.

4. Employee engagement

Collecting employee engagement data is just as important as collecting customer data. Without it, you’re unable to use HR analytics to make links between engagement, productivity, wellbeing, and importantly, employee retention.

HR analytics combines people data with employee feedback and helps to determine how, what, and why people are doing what they do and how it’s affecting their performance and engagement.

How to use HR analytics to improve employee engagement:

Employee engagement data has a huge impact on being able to attain strategic business objectives. Here’s how to get started with employee engagement and HR analytics.

Start collecting information from employee pulse surveys: Pulse surveys are a great way of collecting real-time, actionable data that can really have an impact on business decisions. The results can also help decision-makers in helping to develop employee engagement techniques to boost and sustain morale.
Determine your key engagement KPIs: What KPIs are most important to measure and help you achieve your business goals? These could range from tenure, retention rates, to sickness rates.

HR analytics drive better business results

Many HR software tools have built in HR analytics functionality, so it’s time for businesses to get familiar with them. Leaders need to encourage HR departments to be making the most of the reams of data they’re sitting on, and drive home the importance of human capital analytics in making strategic business decisions.

The Motley Fool has a Disclosure Policy. The Author and/or The Motley Fool may have an interest in companies mentioned. Click here for more information.

By Rhiân Davies

Sourced from the blueprint

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Acronis: Lack of backup process within organisations causing data losses

April 20, 2020 No Comments

By Shannon Williams

New research has revealed 42% of organisations across the world have experienced downtime as a result of a data loss event.

According to Acronis’ 2020 World Cyber Protection Week Survey, the high number of incidents is likely caused by the fact that while nearly 90% are backing up the IT components they’re responsible for protecting, only 41% back up daily – leaving many businesses with gaps in the valuable data available for recovery.

Acronis says the figures illustrate the new reality that traditional strategies and solutions to data protection are no longer able to keep up with the modern IT needs of individuals and organisations.

In response to this, Acronis has expanded World Backup Day – the annual holiday celebrated on March 31 as a reminder to back up data – to World Cyber Protection Week.

The annual survey, completed this year by nearly 3,000 people, gauges the protection habits of users around the globe. The findings revealed that while 91% of individuals back up data and devices, 68% still lose data as a result of accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or an out-of-date backup.

Meanwhile, 85% of organisations aren’t backing up multiple times per day, only 15% report they are. 26% back up daily, 28% back up weekly, 20% back up monthly, and 10% aren’t backing up at all, which can mean days, weeks, or months of data lost with no possibility of complete recovery.

Of those professional users who don’t back up, nearly 50% believe backups aren’t necessary. A belief the survey contradicts: 42% of organisations reported data loss resulting in downtime this year and 41% report losing productivity or money due to data inaccessibility. Furthermore, only 17% of personal users and 20% of IT professionals follow best practices, employing hybrid backups on local media and in the cloud.

Acronis says these findings stress the importance of implementing a cyber protection strategy that includes backing up data multiple times a day and practicing the 3-2-1 backup rule: create three copies of your data (one primary copy and two backups), store copies in at least two types of storage media, and store one of these copies remotely or in the cloud.

“Individuals and organisations keep suffering from data loss and cyberattacks. Everything around us is rapidly becoming dependent on digital, and it is time for everyone to take cyber protection seriously,” explains Acronis chief cyber officer, Gaidar Magdanurov.

“Cyber protection in the digital world becomes the fifth basic human need, especially during this unprecedented time when many people must work remotely and use less secure home networks,” he says.

“It is critical to proactively implement a cyber protection strategy that ensures the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security of all data, applications, and systems – whether you’re a home user, an IT professional, or an IT service provider.”

Cyber Protection Changes the Game

Acronis says that with increasing cyberattacks, traditional backup is no longer sufficient to protect data, applications, and systems, relying on backup alone for true business continuity is too dangerous. Cybercriminals target backup software with ransomware and try to modify backup files, which magnifies the need for authenticity verification when restoring workloads.

“It makes sense, then, that the survey indicated a universally high level of concern about cyberthreats like ransomware,” the organisations says.

The research found 88% of IT professionals reported concern over ransomware, 86% are concerned about cryptojacking, 87% are concerned about social engineering attacks like phishing, and 91% are concerned about data breaches. Among personal users, awareness and concern regarding all four of these threat types were nearly as high. In fact, compared to Acronis’ 2019 survey their concern about cyberthreats rose by 33%.

The survey also revealed a lack of insight into data management, exposing a great need for cyber protection solutions with greater visibility and analytics. The findings indicate that 30% of personal users and 12% of IT professionals wouldn’t know if their data was modified unexpectedly. 30% of personal users and 13% of IT professionals aren’t sure if their anti-malware solution stops zero-day threats. Additionally, 9% of organisations reported that they didn’t know if they experienced downtime as a result of data loss this year.

“To ensure complete protection, secure backups must be part of an organisation’s comprehensive cyber protection approach, which includes ransomware protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and management tools. This deeply integrated approach also addresses the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, delivering safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) for all data, applications, and systems,” says Acronis.

World Cyber Protection Week Recommendations

“Whether you are concerned about personal files or your company’s business continuity, Acronis has five simple recommendations to ensure fast, efficient, and secure protection of your workloads.”

These include:

Always create backups of important data. Keep multiple copies of the backup both locally (so it’s available for fast, frequent recoveries) and in the cloud (to guarantee you have everything if a fire, flood, or disaster hits your facilities).
Ensure your operating systems and applications are current. Relying on outdated OSes or apps means they lack the bug fixes and security patches that help block cybercriminals from gaining access to your systems.
Beware suspicious email, links, and attachments. Most virus and ransomware infections are the result of social engineering techniques that trick unsuspecting individuals into opening infected email attachments or clicking on links to websites that host malware.
Install anti-virus, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware software while enabling automatic updates so your system is protected against malware, with the best software also able to protect against zero-day threats.
Consider deploying an integrated cyber protection solution that combines backup, anti-ransomware, anti-virus, vulnerability assessment and patch management in a single solution. An integrated solution increases ease of use, efficiency and reliability of protection.

By Shannon Williams

Sourced from IT Brief

In News

High Quality Data is Key to Quality Care

April 20, 2020 No Comments

By Colin Hung

An interview with Charlie Harp, CEO of Clinical Architecture

We have more data than we know what to do with in healthcare. We have clinical data held in EHRs, results from lab systems, images from imaging platforms, as well as wellness data from personal devices and apps. So how do we sift through it all to find the relevant information? The solution starts with quality data.

I recently sat down with (well, maybe not “with” in the traditional sense – it was a virtual meeting) Charlie Harp, CEO of Clinical Architecture to learn about the importance of data quality in healthcare. Harp had some great insights on data – especially the new responsibility we have in Health IT to ensure the data we use is of high quality.

“To do value-based care well,” stated Harp. “You have to be able to communicate how you’re doing, understand how you’re doing, and then be able to leverage how you can improve how you’re doing,”

For years, data was a byproduct of activities in healthcare. Services were delivered to patients and records were kept of those encounters. In the beginning that data was primarily used for billing purposes, but with the growing sophistication of analytics, that data has newfound value. It can hold the key to improved treatments, operational efficiencies, and better patient engagement.

According to Harp, in order to unlock the true value of your collected data, you must first focus on improving its quality. What is quality data? Harp defined it this way:

Current
Correct
Complete
Comprehensible

These four “Cs” are the guiding principle behind Clinical Architecture’s solutions.

I think most of us understand the importance of the first three Cs – current, correct, and complete. Comprehensible, however, was not something I expected to see. Harp explained it simply – in order to leverage data in any software system, that system must be able to not only ingest that data, but also understand/comprehend that data.

In some data repositories, 60-80% of the most valuable information is stored in the form of unstructured text (aka clinical notes). To make this data comprehensible, it must first be codified, then normalized so that it can be made useful for other systems. If a system can’t understand that data, it can’t use the data.

Data can give us a complete picture of a patient, but it is difficult to know which parts of the picture are relevant to the task/problem at hand. A medical record can tell you that a patient broke their arm when they were 16 years old and that they were put on an antibiotic 5 years ago, but neither are useful to help diagnose why they are in your office with a fever and shortness of breath.

Harp would like to see us get to a place where systems know the right contextual information to use from the mountain of healthcare data.

At Clinical Architecture, Harp and his team are helping organizations understand and leverage data. But perhaps most importantly, they’re doing the heavy lifting organizations need to do to ensure the quality of their data. They recently helped an organization normalize medications and labs in over 100 facilities in just two months – a project that would have taken about 5 years to complete had that organization done it with internal resources. They know data, they know how to normalize it, and they know how to help organizations use it right.

Check out my conversation with Charlie Harp, CEO of Clinical Architecture to learn:

What the “informonster” is
How data gives people superpowers
How to avoid “artificial uncertainty”
Why we work in “big pixels” and what it means for bridging gaps in understanding

This interview is part of our #HealthIT100in100 initiative.

By Colin Hung

Sourced from Healthcare IT TODAY

In News

How your data is helping to fatten up big tech firms like Amazon

April 20, 2020 No Comments

By George Storr.

How many times have you been asked to fill in an online survey? Or answer ‘a quick question’ after buying something online? It’s a lot right? That’s because customer experience data is more crucial than ever, in the eyes of growing businesses.

Companies that have seen their revenues grow over the last year collected far more customer experience (CX) data than non-growth companies, according to a new survey conducted by Gartner.

The results of the survey showed that almost 80% of growth businesses use customer surveys to collect CX data, while only 58% of non-growth organisations do the same.

“There is a clear trend among growing companies to actively collect CX data using a wide variety of tools such as surveys, usability testing, focus groups and real-time analytics,” said Jessica Ekholm, research vice president at Gartner.

“This is what we call the outside-in approach — the idea that customer value creation, customer orientation and CX will drive long-term business success.”

Data has been a hot topic in the world of tech for some time, with increasing pressure on giants like Facebook and Amazon to be responsible with users’ data. CX data is slightly different, being sourced mainly via surveys, rather than given to a company when you sign up for their service.

However, both sorts of data are contributing to the huge amounts of information that ‘big tech’ collects from users.

A Guardian report shone more light on this as long ago as 2017. A reporter requested all the data that dating app, Tinder, had collected on her and received 800 pages in response. It’s a figure that puts the importance of data – and the popularity of collecting it – into sharp perspective.

Gartner’s latest findings reinforce the fact that businesses believe your data is crucial to growth. In this case, CX data can offer real insight into what customers want from products and services. However, as Gartner notes – and as internet users well know – the sheer amount of ‘quick questions’ thrown at us online can easily lead to survey fatigue, which reduces the accuracy and quality of responses.

“Despite their widespread use, customer surveys have some flaws that limit their ability to collect quality CX data,” said Ekholm. “Recognizing this, growth companies are beginning to use near- or real-time analytics, to complement or build upon the data collected from surveys.”

“Companies that leverage AI and near- and real-time analytics applications to collect customer data will stand out as CX leaders in the next five to 10 years.”

Between survey fatigue, data breach stories and the slightly scary amount of data that companies hold on their customers, it’s easy to see why consumers aren’t always excited about the subject. However, companies are more enthusiastic than ever to collect consumer data and we shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon.

Feature Image Credit: BERLIN, GERMANY: Symbolic photo on the subject of hackers and data security. Hands write on a computer keyboard on February 02, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

By George Storr

George recently joined the Trusted Reviews team after graduating with an MA in Magazine Journalism from The University of Sheffield. He was previously Tech Editor for The National Student and won ‘BBC…

Sourced from Trusted Reviews

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The far-reaching impact of AI in education

April 17, 2020 No Comments

By Randhir Kumar

With the rise of AI, the Indian learning and e-learning landscape have seen considerable change. Here’s how the power of AI is being capitalised in the field of education.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the major technological innovations in recent times, set to revolutionise industries across verticals. In simple terms, AI is the capacity of a computer/machine to collect, anticipate, analyse information, recognise patterns and, consequently, perform actions as opposed to natural human intelligence.

AI has permeated industries throughout the years, aiding and executing taxing responsibilities such as customer service (voice assistant services), in automobiles, robotics, etc. Its presence has likewise penetrated the education sector, which can be further corroborated by the surge in edtech startups in India.

With the rise of AI, the Indian learning and e-learning landscape have seen considerable change. Here’s how the power of AI is being capitalised in the field of education:

Modernisation of education

AI aids the process of channeling focus on core concepts of all subjects, while embedding interdisciplinary concepts on the same platform. AI has allowed education to be personalised for students to fit their unique needs. It aids the process of designing and developing technology, which facilitates quick resolution of queries with independent support to students as opposed to a teacher teaching a class of 20+ students.

Meeting unique needs

AI also brings value on the table by procuring information on the unique requirements on students, courses, and their syllabi to develop a holistic and robust learning trajectory. Leading and competing players in the e-learning market have harnessed AI’s ability to recognise patterns, and congregate data by mapping online movement/footprints from numerous sources to decipher the finest techniques of learning for students in general and individuals in particular. It has filled the gaps, which a normal classroom lacks, through clever coding, algorithms, and big data, enabling students to choose subjects, concepts that suit them best in accordance with where their interests lie. In this manner, content isn’t imposed on students unlike in schools.

Ultimately, the student excels in their academic goals and paves way for a brighter future. The same ability throws statistics on how quickly or slowly an individual can digest information besides preferences, interests, and degree of involvement to further help e-learning platforms tailor their offerings for them. AI has ensured a personalised learning journey while making education more relevant to students, parents, and teachers.

Feedback that supports growth

AI lends support by monitoring and mapping the learning graph of a student or an individual. Once the data has been acquired on the individual, it’s scrutinised using advanced analytics for insight generation (strengths and weaknesses) to develop tailored plans for an individual to ensure that the person gets the most out of his/her course online.

Learning can be fun

Artificial intelligence can turn learning into an enjoyable experience. One of the newest ways teachers can engage students online or in a classroom is by using simulation. Leading gaming companies have been using simulation to engage their customers for decades. Many medical and flying institutes have started using computer-powered simulations to put candidates/students in a real-life situation wherein students can react and interact, based on which one can be judged.

Breaking geographical barriers

Students can move beyond the geographies of their classroom/room without actually stepping out. AI makes communication with peers on a global scale easier through the Internet. With the help of third-party apps, getting insights on a subject matter of concern to the student is just a click away.

This ability can be further used to enable partnerships on a global scale, similar to an electronic student exchange program, where students or individuals could come together and provide answers to solutions or create a collective craft.

Beyond learning

We have adopted AI in all forms, from chatbots to adtech in our lives, making our life simple and easier. We have embraced a greater scientific approach, which enhances strategy, targeting, insight, creativity, knowledge, and experience. Basic and redundant processes are made easy, like the creation of profiles, which require consolidating information of students, which also, at times requires constant updating. Another understated potential is regular updates to the online alumni community. To that end, a feed framework can be created on a subscription basis, to update students with developments in the field and enable them to take calculated steps to enhance their career curve.

Segmentation framework

Another facet of how AI is used in the edtech industry is in the segmentation framework model. Under this, AI aids the study of different data sources that are available to understand their structures for profiling. The data, which is profiled, addresses different objectives, for instance:

Assessment: Whenever an individual poses a question, with the help of advanced analytics, AI can determine the level of understanding of the student/individual. It helps in assessing whether the analytical intelligence of the student/individual is on par with the level of the concept and whether they have a proper understanding of the subject.

Cross-selling of content: AI identifies the learning patterns of a student or an individual basis, which it provides them with supplementary learning content to ensure that the individual grasps the concept in its entirety.

Dropout: When a student or an individual chooses to opt out of a course or arbitrarily drops out, AI is able to determine the reason by determining how interested the individual was in the subject.

With the baseline data and touch points, educators can then proceed to develop predictive model layers over the data to draw and retrieve inferences, which will form the foundation of all future engagements.

By Randhir Kumar

Sourced from YOURSTORY

In News

13 Simple Website Changes You Can Make To Appeal To Potential Buyers

April 17, 2020 No Comments

By Forbes Agency Council.

E-commerce has taken the business world by storm, with many retailers now getting the majority of their sales online. The “front door” of a business’s online presence is its website.

Despite this, many companies haven’t upgraded their websites in years. The result is that buyers get into the site, notice the design and promptly leave. A website that hasn’t had an update in as little as five years shows its age.

If a business wants to compete with others, it needs to make its first impression on the customer a memorable one. To help, 13 members of Forbes Agency Council suggest a few simple changes that a business can make to its website to make a positive impact and increase the appeal of its brand to potential customers.

1. Create A Welcoming Experience

If a business’s website is the front door, you should make sure to put out a welcome mat. If a potential customer’s first visit to the site is an inviting experience, they will actually seek out those further interactions with your brand. Some ways to make the visit welcoming include putting the important information right up front, offering easy navigation, and writing with care. – Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO

2. Keep It Simple

Too many websites have too many clicks before people can find whatever they are seeking. It boggles my mind how many sites seem to be hiding their address (for physical businesses) as well as customer service numbers. If a potential client has to search to find a phone number, claims of excellent customer service seem incongruent. – Dian Griesel, Dian Griesel International & Silver Disobedience Inc.

3. Post Smart, Personalized Content

Depending on your customer relationship management tool, I’ve seen use cases where the website is personalized based on past visit history, purchase history or personal info that the company knows about you. You no longer have to be an Amazon-like company to utilize these personalized tactics. – Dustin DeTorres, DeTorres Group

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?

4. Use Less Copy

These days, powerful websites have limited copy and impactful visuals. Make sure the visuals match the brand, and only use words that you can’t live without. Too much copy will overwhelm your customers. Make sure it is clear where and how they can contact you without having to go through too many menus! – Michelle Mekky, Mekky Media Relations, Inc.

5. Focus On The Story

Many websites and brand positions focus on what a company does, not how they impact their client. While usability and simplicity are essential on the web, it’s the simplicity of the message and content that many people miss. Creating a valuable web presence is necessary, but it is critical that the audience quickly understand how the product or service is going to make their lives better. – Bo Bothe, BrandExtract, LLC

6. Be Vulnerable, Be Human

Gone are the days of overly polished stock photography performing well. Your customers want to buy from you, not from a faceless company. Use real, relatable images. Have quotes. Highlight employees. Showcase your personality. After all, that’s what makes you unique from the competition. – Damon Burton, SEO National

7. Lead With Benefits

We improve websites and marketing with our services, and the biggest thing I see companies fail at is leading with how great their company is instead of how much the product will benefit the consumer. Remember that nobody cares about features but rather about what those features will do to benefit your customer. – Justin Christianson, Conversion Fanatics

8. Allow Visitors To Choose Their Journey

In order to create a meaningful journey on your website, you should allow visitors to choose their journey. This could be based on their buyer persona, the product or service they want to learn more about, or their life cycle stage. By allowing them to self-select this on your home page and throughout the site, you can deliver them the most helpful content to move them through the buyer’s journey. – Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions

9. Give Them What They Want

When we look at developing new sites for our customers we make sure to identify the important pages and actions the client wants from their visitors. You don’t want to bury relevant information in a navigation menu — instead give little teasers to guide the user to the right pages. – Blake George, BMG Media Co.

10. Try To Give Back Time

The art of a home page is really something that hasn’t changed. Trends come and go, but what is still required for brands is finding ways to give them back time. For websites, that means ensuring that we really understand the user journeys and can get people to the right piece of content in as few steps as possible. If you can give a few minutes back to your guests every day, you win and they win. – Jackson Murphy, Pound & Grain

11. Take Calculated Risks

Too often, businesses try to appeal to a mass audience versus focusing on the true target audience. You only have a few seconds to make a first impression so you need to clearly differentiate yourself. Lead with a hard-hitting, provocative question, or with a powerful statement that shows you really understand the challenges and opportunities. Create a sense of intrigue so they are hungry for more. – Matt Berry, Conversion Agile Marketing

12. Optimize For Voice Search

More and more users are navigating the internet through voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, and businesses will have to adjust their content and search engine optimization efforts in order to rank competitively. Think in terms of long-tail, conversational keywords that mimic natural speech patterns, such as “best vegan bakery in San Francisco” instead of “bakery San Francisco vegan.” – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media

13. Use A Mobile-First Approach

Most web browsing is now on a mobile device. Today’s mobile buyers are doing everything, from product research to looking for contact information. If your website isn’t optimized for them, you’re making it harder for visitors to find what they need in order to convert to a sale or opportunity. Many website platforms like WordPress now make it easy to implement mobile versions. – David Ward, Meticulosity

By Forbes Agency Council

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Global digital video viewership and marketing trends advertisers should know in 2020

April 17, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Business Insider.

As global internet usage increases and bandwidth improves, digital video viewership is quickly replacing traditional TV viewership as the preferred method of media consumption around the world — and digital ad spending continues to grow accordingly.

T10538 — Digital video viewership trends by region Copyright © 2020 eMarketer Inc.

Between social video apps like TikTok and Snapchat, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, connected TVs, over-the-top (OTT) streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu, and live videogame streaming services like Twitch, the digital video landscape has never been so expansive.

But each country is facing its own technological, competitive and regulatory hurdles, resulting in a fractured global digital video landscape. With more marketing dollars going towards digital video ads than ever before, it’s crucial to know whether they’re being put to good use.

To help navigate the broad scope of the industry, eMarketer has published the Global Digital Video report, a comprehensive analysis covering both trends touching the entire global digital video ecosystem, as well as those occurring within specific regions throughout the world.

No matter which major video market you are looking at, these are the global digital video trends to pay attention to:

Digital Video Trends in 2020

Rising Viewership Across All Devices and Platforms
Growing Monetization of Video — including Ad Spending & Subscriptions
Traditional TV Ad Viewing and Ad Spending Decreasing
Video Platforms to Suit All Needs Available in Most Countries
Video Streaming Services Investing Heavily in Original Content

More to Learn

If you are looking to take advantage of the growing digital video marketing landscape, you need to be equipped with the right knowledge. Understanding the why behind these trends will help you adjust to the quickly evolving industry and make smarter decisions for your business.

Get a more comprehensive look at the industry with the Global Digital Video report, covering topics like digital video vs. mobile phone viewers across different platforms, digital video monetization strategies and trends, FAQs, and analysis by country.

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Sourced from Business Insider

In News

How to Convert Someone to Your Cause in 5 Simple Steps

April 16, 2020 No Comments

By David Meltzer

Phillip Stutts discusses the branding and marketing lessons he’s learned from working in politics for the past two decades.

Phillip Stutts, founder of Go Big Media and Win Big Media and author of Fire Them Now, shares his thoughts on why the five-step process for branding a politician is the exact same as branding a person, product or service in any other industry. He also shares why customer data is so essential when putting together an impactful advertising campaign.

Stutts and The Playbook host David Meltzer chat about the importance of testing your advertisements before launching a campaign, why businesses should operate with a giving and abundant approach and why they believe in giving prospective clients a free assessment in order to get alignment.

By David Meltzer

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

How Twitter Dumped Hadoop To Adopt Google Cloud

April 16, 2020 No Comments

By Ram Sagar

Back in May 2018, Twitter announced that they were collaborating with Google Cloud to migrate their services to the cloud. Today, after two years, they have successfully migrated and have also started reaping the benefits of this move.

For the past 14 years, Twitter has been developing its data transformation pipelines to handle the load of its massive user base. The first deployments for those pipelines were initially running in Twitter’s data centers. For example, Twitter’s Hadoop file systems hosted more than 300PB of data across tens of thousands of servers.

This system had some limitations despite having consistently sustained massive scale. With increasing user base, it became challenging to configure and extend new features to some parts of the system, which led to failures.

In the next section, we take a look at how Twitter’s engineering team, in collaboration with Google Cloud, have successfully migrated their platform.

How The Migration Took Place

For the first step, Twitter’s team left a few pipelines such as the data aggregation legacy Scalding pipelines, unchanged. These pipelines were made to run at their own data centers. But the batch layer’s output was switched to two separate storage locations in Google Cloud.

The output aggregations from the Scalding pipelines were first transcoded from Hadoop sequence files to Avro on-prem, staged in four-hour batches to Cloud Storage, and then loaded into BigQuery, which is Google’s serverless and highly scalable data warehouse, to support ad-hoc and batch queries.

This data from BigQuery is then read by a simple pipeline deployed on Dataflow, and some light transformations are applied. Finally, results from the Dataflow pipeline are written into Bigtable. This is a Cloud Bigtable for low-latency, fully managed NoSQL database that serves as a backend for online dashboards and consumer APIs.

With the successful installation of the first iteration, the team began to redesign the rest of the data analytics pipeline using Google Cloud technologies.

After evaluating all possible options, the team chose Apache Beam because of its deep integration with other Google Cloud products, such as Bigtable, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub, Google Cloud’s fully managed, real-time messaging service.

A BigQuery slot can be defined as a unit of computational capacity required to execute SQL queries.

The Twitter team re-implemented the batch layer as follows:

Data is first staged from on-prem HDFS to Cloud Storage
A batch Dataflow job then regularly loads the data from Cloud Storage and processes the aggregations, and
The results are then written to BigQuery for ad-hoc analysis and Bigtable for the serving system.

For instance, the results showed that processing 800+ queries(~1 TB of data each) took a median execution time of 30 seconds.

The above picture illustrates the final architecture after the second step of migration.

For job orchestration, the Twitter team built a custom command line tool that processes the configuration files to call the Dataflow API and submit jobs.

What Do The Numbers Say

The migration for modernization of advertising data platforms started back in 2017, and today, Twitter’s strategies have come to fruition, as can be seen in their annual earnings report.

The revenue for Twitter can be divided mainly into two categories:

Ads
Data licensing and other services.

According to the quarterly earnings report for the year 2019, Twitter has declared decent profits with steady progress.

“We reached a new milestone in Q4 with quarterly revenue in excess of $1 billion, reflecting steady progress on revenue product and solid performance across most major geographies, with particular strength in US advertising,” said Ned Segal, Twitter’s CFO.

The 2019 revenue was $3.46 billion, which is an increase of 14% year-over-year.

Advertising revenue totalled $885 million, an increase of 12% year-over-year
Total ad engagements increased by 29% year-over-year

The motivation behind Twitter’s migration to GCP also involves other factors like the democratization of data analysis. For Twitter’s engineering team, visualization, and machine learning in a secure way is a top priority, and this is where Google’s tools such as BigQuery and Data Studio came in handy.

Although Google’s tools were used for simple pipelines, Twitter, however, had to build their infrastructure called Airflow. In the area of data governance, BigQuery services for authentication, authorization, and auditing did well but, for metadata management and privacy compliance, in house systems had to be designed.

By Ram Sagar

Sourced from AIM

In News

New technology in fight against cybercrime

April 16, 2020 No Comments

By Nick Hourigan.

Financial crime is growing ever more sophisticated, but so are the techniques used to fight and detect it. What are the developments in the crimefighting industry?

Financial crime isn’t isolating. Criminals — money launderers, terrorists, fraudsters — evolve apace or ahead of the institutions and individuals they exploit. Global headlines, encompassing Panama to Moscow and due South, beg the question: “Why can’t we keep up?”

How data experts can help combat financial crime

Nick Hourigan, Senior Managing Director and Head of Data and Analytics at FTI Consulting, is one of the people tasked with fighting this growing problem.

He says that, at the point a regulator is asking really probing questions of a financial institution, “harm has probably already occurred, most likely over the course of years.”

“If there is crime, it’s usually in layers and the extent is often broader than even the regulator’s influence.” While Hourigan always advises his clients to seek objective legal and strategic advice, he emphasises time and attention from senior leadership, compliance and systems owners is vital, but challenging to synchronise.

“These are hard problems that can have major reputational and financial impacts for organisations — but that isn’t always obvious at the outset.” Grappling with vast data is essential to get to the truth. “I tell my teams,” he says, “you make the computer work for you; because you can bet the criminal did.”

The benefits of ubiquitous data

So, what challenges can be met using advanced analytics and process automation? “The response must draw upon a complete picture of events and parties,” says Hourigan. “One of the key benefits of advanced analytics and process automation is the ability to combine, analyse and review information sourced from very different business systems and processes. Historically, you may not have been able to identify that someone’s activity didn’t match up with how they present themselves, because the inconsistencies are scattered across different systems.”

FTI itself aims to combine advanced analytics, e-discovery services and financial crime expertise to fight the growing problem.

“FTI does not have many people who try to be all things,” explains Hourigan. “We have technical and topical experts engaged on a project and we are able to put together teams in which the decision-making process is led by some of the most experienced global experts in the fields of financial services, regulatory investigations and data and analytics.”

Tailored financial crime solutions for large and small businesses

The critical areas of development of advanced analytics and process automation to combat financial crime depend on the size and profile of the institution, says Hourigan.

“Larger institutions will likely need to leverage data from across a greater range of geographies and services, each supported by many-layered operations. Smaller and ‘challenger’ institutions may have a simpler data and systems landscape but less established operational and compliance support. Across the spectrum, there are powerful techniques such as network analytics that can be tailored to compliment traditional investigation techniques and provide a comprehensive, sophisticated and robust response to financial crime.”

In essence, to continue to meet and prevent the threat of financial crime, financial institutions need to rapidly combine, evaluate and make decisions on any data that may indicate criminal activity. Across all those incumbent, advanced analytics and process automation are essential tools to get the right data to the right person at the right time.

By Nick Hourigan

Senior Managing Director, Head of Data and Analytics, FTI Consulting

Sourced from CITY A.M.