By Sheiresa McRae Ngo

Sheiresa McRae Ngo is a staff writer at Bankrate. She is known for her expertise in personal finance and consumer affairs topics. Sheiresa’s goal is to help people with budgeting and saving money. Her work has been featured in CBS MoneyWatch, Credit.com, Yahoo Finance, GOBankingRates, and MSN, among many others. She also contributed to two CNN segments on debt management.

Sourced from Bankrate

By Christiana Jolaoso

A website is like a business salesperson working around the clock, but without optimization, it can encounter relegation quickly, hiding at the bottom of search results when potential clients look to engage your services or buy a product you offer. However, with effective website optimization, search engines like Google can place you on top and bring visitors who’ll enjoy navigating your website. They’ll also find what they want and buy from you. Let’s look at tips you can leverage to bring desired results.

By Christiana Jolaoso

Sourced from Forbes

By Patrick Kulp

There are a lot more AI entities attempting to join your professional network on LinkedIn these days.

From conversational tools for recruiters to newly announced AI-augmented learning features, the Microsoft-owned jobs platform is taking full advantage of its parent company’s AI resources. This week, LinkedIn said it will make its various AI tools generally available to its Premium subscribers.

The rollout comes at a time when it seems like one can’t navigate any online platform without stumbling upon an AI feature freshly jammed into it. Big Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are all attempting to suss out where the latest wave of generative AI might best play a role in user experience.

But LinkedIn VP of Engineering Prashanthi Padmanabhan told us she sees this latest wave of generative models as an extension of AI that has already governed the updates feed, personalized guidance, and other parts of LinkedIn’s platform in the background for years.

Secret agents: To manage the many hats that LinkedIn’s AI wears, the company has developed a system of behind-the-scenes agents, or generative AI tools, that can perform tasks beyond simple chatbots. It taps a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to evaluate a user query and route it to one of these agents, which include models dedicated to “job assessment,” “company understanding,” and “takeaways for posts.”

Padmanabhan said the agents-based system and the RAG pipeline can help to add context to, say, a draft message from a recruiter to a job seeker by pulling information from each of their profiles and skills.

“​​We want to make sure that this agent that is acting behind the scenes, which is essentially a model, it takes this information that is contextual to this job seeker and this recruiter, and it’s actually making sure that this message it’s going to produce as a draft message for you is personalized for that interaction,” Padmanabhan said.

Tweak tally: Once LinkedIn has served up a draft message, Padmanabhan said the platform encourages users to review and edit it. The company then measures a stat called “edit distance,” which collects data around how much the user tweaks the message from the AI-produced draft before they send it off. Padmanabhan said this information is used to tune the system.

“In the generative AI space, you can sort of get that first 80% right very quickly. It’s that last 20%, it’s the last mile that actually takes a lot of iteration,” she said. “Using a combination of both human reviews and member feedback is what’s guard railing this experience.”

Anyone who’s recently had a search engine advise them to add glue to their pizza knows how wonky generative AI responses can be without appropriate guardrails. That review process will be especially important as LinkedIn begins pushing AI into its LinkedIn Learning offering as of this week with help from some of the course instructors on the platform, who can now earn royalties based on usage.

“The more this technology becomes powerful, and it gets better in how to control hallucinations and how to improve accuracy of response, it’s just going to open up a lot of avenues for us,” Padmanabhan said.

Feature Image Credit: Francis Scialabba

By Patrick Kulp

Sourced from Tech Brew

By Melissa Daniels

Throughout 2023, Grove Collaborative customers began to notice that something was missing from the household supply company’s website. Luckily, they had an outlet to speak up: Grove Co.’s invite-only, VIP subscriber Facebook group.

Some users said they missed the Free and Clear products because of allergies. Others didn’t care for scents. At least one customer used it to clean guinea pig cages. “They are sensitive little critters and it’s best not use scents around them,” the post said.

For years, brands have used groups to form an online community and tap into a goldmine of data. But in this current environment, the strategy is proving to be even more cost-effective. From an operational standpoint, a Facebook group requires a brand to check in multiple times a day, even if it only posts itself occasionally. But unlike ads, there’s no up-front cost to play.

While Grove has a community manager for the group, Perry said it’s a daily must-read for many members of the team. That includes dropping screenshots in a cross-department Slack channel where different teams, from customer service to operations, can stay in the loop. “There are a lot of eyes on the channel because the data is so valuable,” Perry said.

Grove dubs its Facebook group The Pantry, which is open to customers who are existing subscribers. Perry said the company will occasionally clean out the members list with people who are no longer active and open it up to invite newer members. But she said keeping it at its current size allows Grove to have a more intimate conversation and relationship with its VIPs.

The brand will occasionally post its own messages, like opportunities for free samples or early access to sales. It might run polls on potential new scents or product names or have AMA sessions with a health advisor for the brand. One recent poll asked users what kind of soap refiller they are — such as, if they wait until the bottle is empty or like to keep it full. But Perry said the true benefits lie in the customers’ interactions with one another — like trading ideas on how to reuse the small concentrate bottles or best practices for cleaning wood floors.

“We announce new products but that actually isn’t as valuable as it is when a customer says ‘I found this new thing, has anybody else tried it?’ And then you’ll have 15 other customers comment ‘I did and I love it,’ or ‘No, it doesn’t do this.’ And there is constant communication like that.”

Claudia Ratterman, director analyst with Gartner, said organic content typically doesn’t get as much engagement as sponsored ads. Ratterman said that can be mitigated by pages or groups full of authentic content. Customers are most likely to engage with brand content they find informative and entertaining, like behind-the-scenes videos or tutorials. Gartner research shows that about 53% of people say they’ll engage with brands on social media.

But, Ratterman said, investing in organic reach can be a time commitment for brands and may not immediately increase sales. It’s more about giving customers what they are looking for in terms of authentic content — and building loyalty in the process.

“It’s a long-term vision versus the short-term of, ‘do we make a quick sale?’” she said. “If you show me a more authentic community, you’re building that trust you don’t get on ads. You’re getting to see the real side of the brand.”

Ratterman also said that R&D can be a costly process for brands. Cutting out budgets for focus groups for a Facebook poll could be a money-saving swap, and help test out an idea before spending more to develop and scale it.

This tactic has been useful for many of the DTC brands that operate Facebook groups for loyal fans. Brian Tate, founder of breakfast brand Oats Overnight, said the official Facebook group is a key way that the brand receives feedback about its new flavours.

About 80% of the company’s $150 million in revenue is driven by direct-to-consumer sales, the vast majority of which are subscriptions. Roughly 260,000 subscribers receive Oats Overnight deliveries on a regular basis, including a rotating “Flavour in Development” made by the in-house food science team. Subscribers can fill out a post-order survey to share thief feedback on the prospective flavour. But over on Facebook, around 82,000 Oats Overnights subscribers can also weigh in.

“We’re getting around 2,500 comments a day just talking about oatmeal, which is pretty wild,” Tate said.

The four-year-old company now has about 45 flavours, most of which were developed through this digital feedback loop. As far as the group itself, Tate occasionally jumps into the chat, as do Oats Overnight’s community manager and social team. But it’s largely a hands-off operation, Tate said. He said he’s open to criticism around flavours people don’t like or why — like a decision to remove chunks of banana from a flavour that otherwise was a hit.

“I think when you’re a big company it’s very challenging to do this because you’re looking at the customer through retail data and focus groups, which is pretty far removed,” he said. “Facebook groups [are] a way to bridge that gap and keep us close.”

Over at Grove, The Pantry is also inspiration for new products to add. Commenters may ask to see specific third-party brands sold on the marketplace so they can add them to their subscriptions. For example, since 2020, customers have been asking Grove to carry products from the period care startup The Honey Pot. A Grove spokesperson told Modern Retail that when the calls first began, the company didn’t have the inventory to supply the marketplace. But the conversation has continued and Grove Co. now aims to start selling The Honey Pot in the second half of this year.

There’s also overall consumer sentiment to absorb. Grove’s Perry said that includes people who may criticize the company around its sustainability goals and branding — some people will offer ideas on how to cut down plastic or improve the recyclability of packaging, while others may debate non-toxic claims. like where and how it decides to use plastic or why it sells products manufactured overseas that may have a high carbon footprint. “They are at the bleeding edge of sustainability,” Perry said of some of the group’s members, “and they have a high bar.”

But that, too, is valuable feedback. Perry said such concerns help the company frame its own conversations around sustainability. It often images one of its top commenters during conversations, wondering what they would say about a decision.

“We get a tremendous amount of benefit from the learning of just listening to customers,” she said.

By Melissa Daniels

Sourced from ModernRetail

By Rachel Wells

If you’re looking to start out as a freelancer this year, you’ve no doubt heard of popular freelance platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr, and People Per Hour.

And while these all have their place, the unfortunate reality is that, much of the time, they are over-saturated (especially in some sectors and freelance job categories).

As the freelancing and the side hustle or gig or economy increases in popularity and widespread adoption by professionals globally, almost everyone is setting their sights on these freelancing websites and it becomes much more difficult to obtain work without being overcrowded or not noticed at all due to the competition.

Consequently, you end up being back at square one: endlessly looking for work, and lowering your fees to ridiculously low prices in a desperate bid to have enough income to boost your salary or to live on full-time.

To this end, within this article are compiled five freelancing websites which may not be as wildly popular when you initially think of freelancing, but nonetheless, are effective and gather a niche crowd of customers and clients.

What To Consider Before Joining A Freelance Platform

Since they are so niche, there are a couple things you need to bear in mind:

You Need To Be Niche

Places such as Upwork can be viewed as more general job boards such as Indeed, while freelance job platforms such as the ones listed below, can be compared to places such as Dice, which is exclusively focused on tech. Therefore, you need to ensure that you have a set goal and purpose as a freelancer. You need to have a very specific set of skills, and stick by them. You should also be able to clearly articulate what value you bring to a specific industry or niche.

Entry Requirements

While on the topic of exclusivity, it’s very useful to bear in mind that these freelance websites are not mere job boards. They exist as a freelance marketplace, providing high value to their clients who search for freelance talent on their platforms, and they also exist to ensure you as a freelancer are protected and abide by their ethics.

Therefore, you may find it more difficult to get in the door with these freelance communities more than any other platform that accepts your profile within a few short hours after you sign up.

For this reason, it’s essential to know how to sell yourself, and most of all, to be patient, persistent, and follow all their guidance and instructions for what they’re looking for in freelancers.

5 Websites To Get Freelance Jobs

Here are a few of the niche, or “elite,” freelance job platforms that you may or may not have heard of. They raise the bar for freelance talent and as such, it would be very useful at this stage to have a portfolio before applying or setting up your profile with them. You need to be extremely confident in your skills and abilities. Otherwise, you may be sorely disappointed.

1. Catalant Technologies

This freelance platform is dedicated to freelancers looking for consulting projects. Their consulting project categories include corporate strategy, supply chain, HR, sales and marketing, and digital transformation.

2. Gigged AI

Gigged AI is a UK-based skills-focused freelance talent platform that connects you with freelance work according to your skills. These skills can range from project management, to stakeholder management, to business analysis, and social media management.

3. Contra.com

Contra is a commission-free freelance platform that helps you find a variety of freelance jobs suited to your profile, and enables you to create invoices and manage your workflow.

4. Gun.io

To be a freelancer on Gun.io, you need to be a developer and you need to pass comprehensive vetting. They make it clear that they are looking for world-class, “exceptional developers.” After screening and profile creation, you would have an intro call with the Gun.io team and then be introduced to their clients to get the ball rolling.

5. DesignHill

DesignHill is a creative marketplace for graphic designs, from logo creation, to stationery, brochures, and packaging. As a designer, you would be competing for your design to be selected in a design project competition, and if your design is selected, the client will request to work with you further on edits.

So when it comes to freelance websites, if you think you’ve seen them all, chances are you’re missing out on a ton of freelance job opportunities. With a little digging, you can find a wide array of freelance opportunities and projects to work on.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Rachel Wells

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

LinkedIn Top Voice. Silver winner of the London Chamber of Commerce’s Young Business Person of The Year 2024. The 24-year-old founder and CEO of Rachel Wells Coaching. Youtuber. Launching an AI start-up soon. Started coaching when I was 14 years old…… read more

Sourced from Forbes

You can also choose to copy the link to your board before sharing it on your Instagram story. Then, you can add the link to the Instagram story, allowing everyone to tap and view your board directly on Pinterest.

If you choose Add to story, you will be directed to Instagram, where you can make any edits before posting and use all the things you can add to your Instagram story. If you download the video, you can still upload it to your Instagram story later, just like would add any photo or video. Additionally, you can share it on other social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, or anywhere else!

By Marissa Parisi

Sourced from MUO

By Alyssa Meyers

“I’m calling it the first TikTok Olympics,” one executive told us.

The Olympics is expected to be one of the biggest broadcast events of the summer. But for many younger viewers, they might spend more time watching the competition and the content that surrounds it on social platforms like TikTok than on the TV screen.

That means that the organizing committee itself, as well as the advertisers looking to target audiences interested in the games, are preparing for an Olympic-sized presence on social media to accompany the competition on NBC. In other words, expect Olympics-related ads, content, and shoulder programming to descend on just about every screen ahead of the Opening Ceremony.

“It’s no longer enough to make a beautiful TV ad and put an official logo at the end of it,” Rahul Titus, global head of influence at Ogilvy, told Marketing Brew. “You need to make sure you’re looking at it as a connected ecosystem, where you’re activating your athletes on the ground, on social media, pre the event, post-event, and that’s a much more complicated and complex system. Obviously, there’s beauty in it and it’s a very high-reward system if you get it right, but it’s tougher.”

“The TikTok Olympics”

The TikTokification of the Olympics isn’t limited to advertisers. The organizing committee for Paris 2024, for example, is using social channels like TikTok to amplify its messaging around the games, according to Augustin Pénicaud, VP of Havas Play, Havas’s sports and entertainment division that has been working with the organizing committee and several official brand partners. While TV remains central to the Olympic experience, “you cannot be solely and only on TV,” he said.

Social media isn’t exactly a new ballgame for brands, but compared to past Olympics, they’re leaning further in, according to Titus.

“I’m calling it the first TikTok Olympics,” he said, later adding that “it’s quite refreshing to see that whole ecosystem being fully utilized for the first time.”

While official sponsorships and broadcast ads are still valuable, even major brands with access to those assets are increasingly embracing social. Coca-Cola, an official Olympic partner that’s running a 360-campaign including TV ads, is more focused on social than during prior Olympics, in part because of the platform’s reach among Gen Z audiences, according to Robin Triplett, VP of North America integrated marketing.

“We have several brands showing up…and each brand has its own social voice and audience that we can engage with during this special event,” Triplett said in an email. “Social media also provides more opportunity to quickly act upon the events taking place, cheer on our incredible athlete partners, and engage directly with the consumer in real time.”

Athleta, which is running its first-ever linear TV ad during the Olympics and is activating on the ground in Paris, is also using social in a “significant way,” CMO Ilona Aman said. Team USA sponsors like Reese’s and Core Power are also stretching their campaigns across platforms including linear, digital, social, and audio.

Flood the Seine

Beyond TikTok, brands are turning to emerging media platforms such as newsletter and podcast companies that create sports content to help expand the reach of their Olympic efforts, and several of those companies’ executives told Marketing Brew that they’ve experienced a boost in revenue thanks to the interest.

Podcast company Acast has fielded some recent advertiser interest in sports-related podcasts like The Mid-Point with Gabby Logan, according to Tom Roach, Acast’s commercial strategy director for the UK. And New York Times-owned The Athletic, which is covering the Olympics for the first time, began having conversations with brands about sponsorships a couple of years ago, with renewed brand interest a few months out from the games, according to Chief Commercial Officer Seb Tomich; Nike and MassMutual are sponsoring some of the publication’s Olympics content, and there are several other brands with campaigns that have yet to go live, he said.

Despite the interest, competition for pitching brands about Olympic campaigns has been stiff among media companies, Tomich said. “It wasn’t just us versus ESPN on every pitch,” he said.

The Gist, a sports media brand started in 2017, is working on Olympic campaigns with brands like Nike and Canadian Tire, and is partnering with Adidas to create content on the ground in Paris, according to co-founder Jacie deHoop. Just Women’s Sports, a women’s sports-focused media company, is covering the games beyond its site and newsletter to position itself as an “easily accessible second-screen experience” on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and its podcast network, Jackie Caldwell, its head of content, said in an email.

For much of the company’s audience, “we’re the only sports content that they consume,” deHoop said. “They’re going to be scrolling through their feeds during the day, they might listen to the podcast, and that’s going to be the Olympic content that they consume. They’re not necessarily going to watch a broadcast, which is just wild, but we definitely factor that in.”

Whether it’s working with sports media companies or creating social content, the options offer advertisers creative ways to get involved with the Olympics with or without official ties to the rings, Joe Caporoso, president of sports and entertainment media company Team Whistle, which has been working with Snapchat and Meta to cover the games, and selling sponsorships since late last year, said.

“Everyone’s going to be talking about the Olympics in the back half of the summer,” he said. “It only comes every four years…so you don’t want to sit that out.”

Feature Image Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim, Photo: Getty Images

By Alyssa Meyers

Sourced from Marketing Brew

By LISA CUPIDO

All social media apps rely on your data to help them monetize through third-party advertisers, but some are notoriously worse than others.

In your never-ending quest to make your accounts as private and secure as possible (to the extent that it is even possible to do this), you may be wondering which social media apps are the worst of the worst when it comes to data. Maybe you’re open to deleting a few of these apps or perhaps you would simply like to adjust your settings so that these apps don’t have access to your location and other personal details.

Whatever the case, when you are focusing your attention on apps, these four social media apps always seem to turn up on every expert’s list of apps that expose your data, making cyber attacks more of a risk.

Meta Apps

The major Meta apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — have been the subject of scrutiny these past few years for data practices that include sharing their data for the purpose of monetizing via third-party advertisers. The old adage “if an app is free, you are the product” rings especially true when it comes to these apps. Facebook, in particular, kickstarted our distrust in social media apps and their data habits after Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.

TikTok

A social media app that is owned by a company called ByteDance based in China — what could go wrong? Considering there are allegations that TikTok collects users’ data and shares it with Chinese government authorities, that is up for debate, but not a minor consideration.

Twitter

Over the years, concerns have arisen over how Twitter collects data and tracks its users’ activity, and even how it responds when government officials request user information. Many have claimed it is not the most safe and secure social media platform.

Snapchat

In 2014, Snapchat experienced a data breach that exposed its users’ phone numbers. Snapchat is also under a microscope for how it uses location data and other private information from its users.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By LISA CUPIDO

Sourced from SHEFINDS

By Natalie Fear

Surprise, creatives hate minimalism.

Design trends can be a tricky thing to handle well. When a trend gets popular every company wants to hop on the bandwagon, but in most cases, it slowly becomes too much of a good thing. Unfortunately, in today’s lightspeed trend cycle, the birth of a design trend also marks its untimely death.

In the wake of this ever-changing design plague, graphic designers took to Reddit to share their design trend pet peeves – from illegible typography to cringy retro revivals – but don’t take it too much to heart. As we’ve seen with the resuscitation of design aesthetics like Frutiger Aero, just because your favourite design trend has met its demise doesn’t mean it won’t come back stronger than ever.

The most common design pet peeve shared on the r/graphic_design subreddit was the influx of soulless minimalism. Naturally, as graphic designers, there’s a compulsion to explore the creative possibilities of a project – something that the minimalism trend has destroyed.

“It has its place just like every other style, but everybody can’t have a minimalist logo and branding,” user u/thegreenstars says. Pointing to recent examples like the new Johnson and Johnson logo and the X rebrand, they question why brands are no longer trying to stand out against the competition. “Why are y’all ruining your brand identity and ditching your whole personality to conform to this “need” for minimalist design?” they add.

Others cited the return of 80s/90s logo design as a creative pet peeve (check out our best logos by decade series for more retro design). User u/LunaTheLouche commented, “The 90s trend of replacing letters with numbers in a logo,” was their biggest design gripe. “It’s coming back and it needs to stop. Or maybe it never went away,” they add.

Also shunning the retro revival was user u/Deficon112 who highlighted the return of 1920s style anthropomorphised “mascot type hot dog/burger/pizza/sun with the big smiley face with arms & legs.” Its return to modern design has become oversaturated, taking the hand-drawn animated charm out of the aesthetic. Honourable mentions also include illegible logos, forced “dual meaning” design, corporate blues, 3D balloon text effect, glass morphism, variable font widths and the dreaded Corporate Memphis.

Increasingly we’re seeing overplayed design trends popping up all over the place, like the “more” billboard marketing trend plaguing underground stations across London. While trends can help us gauge the current design climate, it’s good to remind ourselves that unique creativity will always triumph over safe ‘trendy’ design.

Feature Image credit: Getty Images

By Natalie Fear

Natalie is Creative Bloq’s staff writer. With an eye for trending topics and a passion for internet culture, she brings you the latest in art and design news. A recent English Literature graduate, Natalie enjoys covering the lighter side of the news and brings a fresh and fun take to her articles. Outside of work (if she’s not glued to her phone), she loves all things music and enjoys singing sweet folky tunes.

Sourced from Creative Bloq

By Kate Gibson

Setting and achieving business goals and objectives is essential to strategy execution. It can be challenging to direct employees, allocate resources, and measure performance without doing so.

Despite the importance of goals and objectives, companies struggle to map them out. According to the Phoenix Business Journal, only 51 percent of organizational leaders attempt to develop goals, and just six percent revisit them regularly.

One tool that can help ensure your goals aren’t only achievable but also create long-term value is a business strategy map.

WHAT IS A BUSINESS STRATEGY MAP?

A business strategy map is a visual tool that helps outline your company’s objectives. It aligns actions and resources to achieve strategic goals and tells an end-to-end story about how your organization intends to create value and implement ideas.

“A strategy map illustrates the cause and effect relationships that underpin your strategy,” says Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons, who teaches the online course Strategy Execution.

An effective strategy map needs two components:

• Arrows showing cause-and-effect relationships between value objectives
• Goals expressed as action verbs that illustrate what you’re striving for

Its main objective is communicating how your business intends to create value alongside a balanced scorecard—a tool designed to help track and measure non-financial variables at your organization.

“The balanced scorecard combines the traditional financial perspective with additional perspectives that focus on customers, internal business processes, and learning and development,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “These additional perspectives help businesses measure all the activities essential to creating value.”

While a balanced scorecard is crucial to effective strategy execution, you must first create a strategy map.

“Without a strategy map, your balanced scorecard is really just a list of measures,” Simons says. “And those measures may or may not tie back to your intended strategy.”

If you struggle to execute strategy, here’s an overview of how to create a business strategy map for your organization.

HOW TO CREATE A BUSINESS STRATEGY MAP

1. Define Your Company’s Core Values

Before outlining your company’s objectives and goals in a strategy map, you need to understand what core values they support.

Core values communicate your business’s larger purpose by:

• Inspiring employees to feel proud of where they work
• Guiding behaviours when making tough decisions

Your core values should be a framework for your strategy map’s goals. This ensures stakeholders and employees are more likely to buy into strategic initiatives.

For example, Google’s mission statement focuses on making the world’s information universally accessible and useful. As a result, the company’s goals of improving search algorithms and user interfaces, developing products and services that promote accessibility, and investing in new areas of technology all align with its values.

Perhaps your company values sustainability, in which case goals like transitioning to carbon-neutral production or utilizing recycled materials in products would be more likely to garner your team’s support.

With so many types of goals, it’s crucial to understand what aspects of your business strategy should appear on your map.

2. Establish Goals

Your strategy map should touch on the four perspectives a balanced scorecard typically tracks, which are:

• Financial: Creating economic value for your company and its stakeholders
• Customer: Fostering brand loyalty with your target audience
• Internal business process: Ensuring value creation for customers through your products or services
• Learning and growth: Investing in human capital and infrastructure resources to meet goals

In Strategy Execution, Simons recommends establishing goals from the bottom (learning and growth) to the top (financial). Doing so helps you reflect on how perspectives build on each other to create value for your business.

While it can be tempting to establish a financial goal first, the preceding perspectives directly impact whether it’s realistic.

For example, if you work at a retail company, its financial success may rely on factors like brand loyalty and customer service, which are driven by the customer perspective. However, improving the customer experience often requires changing internal processes, such as improving warehouse efficiency for faster shipping times.

This is why it’s better to start at the bottom of your strategy map and focus on learning and growth. Since other goals aren’t possible without a well-trained warehouse staff that understands new technologies and processes, it’s critical to establish realistic goals at the bottom before considering financial benchmarks.

Working from bottom to top also ensures that the balanced scorecard’s measures link to actionable steps for achieving organizational goals.

“Without a strategy map to tell a story, people in your organization will have no clue where those measures came from,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “They’ll be asking themselves, ‘How do I know if those are the right measures?’”

3. Ask for Feedback

Asking for feedback is an important step in strategy execution—particularly when drafting a strategy map.

Getting diverse perspectives on your strategy map can offer insights into goals’ strengths and weaknesses. It can also expose gaps you may not be aware of, such as:

• Ineffective job design
• Lack of risk management
• No employee buy-in

By asking for feedback, you can keep employees engaged, motivated, and invested in your strategic planning.

According to a study by management consulting firm Gallup, companies with highly engaged business units generate 23 percent greater profitability. They also have less turnover.

4. Revise and Refine

Much like your business strategy, you must revise and refine your map as circumstances change. If your organization is effective at managing risk, then modify your strategy map to address new market challenges.

“Competing successfully in any industry involves some level of risk,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “But high-performing businesses with high-pressure cultures are especially vulnerable. As a manager, you need to know how and why these risks arise and how to avoid them.”

A strategy map can help address challenges such as:

• Shifting market conditions
• Emerging disruptive technologies
• Evolving customer needs

By continuously revisiting your strategy map’s goals, you can integrate new insights and feedback from your team to achieve long-term objectives. Revisions don’t need to result in major changes; in some instances, they can lead to the creation of an entirely new strategy map.

“What matters, in the end, is that you’ve formally drawn the cause and effect relationships that illustrate how your business creates value,” Simons says in Strategy Execution.

By Kate Gibson

Kate Gibson is a copywriter and contributing writer for Harvard Business School Online.

Sourced from Harvard Business School Online