Insights, Ideas, Results
Social media marketing is an essential part of the current business culture. Every business that takes marketing seriously has to use social media accounts to create better marketing opportunities. Social media can affect how customers view your brand, and it is wise to learn how to make that happen.
The concept of uptime and downtime will be familiar to anyone who uses the internet. Every service provider strives to meet service level agreement (SLA) that determines the amount of uptime it will provide. Often, those SLAs are not met.
In online services, it’s normal to see uptime targets of 99.9 percent or higher. In business, SLAs tend to err more towards 100 per cent. Whatever your provider promises and whatever availability you expect, the reality may be very different.
Virtual office space allows business owners to cut costs without sacrificing the image they have built for their business. When you rent a virtual space, you reduce production costs while maintaining a prestigious business address. When you do business out of a virtual office, you have access to everything a business owner needs; you never have to worry about things like conference rooms, technology and staff to answer your phones.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become a trend in the corporate world whereby employees can use their personal mobile device to access work email or perform other work related tasks. However, allowing employees to use personal devices in the workplace may expose companies to litigation risks. For example, when a company is being sued, they may need evidence that an employee may have stored on a personal device. Gaining access to the device and obtaining data while respecting employee privacy can become a legal minefield. Because some jurisdictions have stricter data privacy regulations than others, employers could face unintended consequences if they access or delete company data stored on a personal device without the owner’s permission.
The social media continued to command attention from consumers, publishers and advertisers alike in 2013. Consumers still cannot live without accessing their Facebook account almost every day. They cannot stop showing pictures of their favorite food or vacation spot on Instagram. Because of this publishers cannot afford not to pay attention to social media sites to get in front of their audience. The end effect is that advertisers have taken notice of this increasing trend in social media and have started spending more money on social media sites. Any vendor or publisher who does not have social media strategy stands to lose customers and audience members.
A website can be the online face of your business or hobby. If you are considering setting up a website for the first time, you will want to spend a good amount of time planning for your content, multimedia and design elements. Those who are new to building websites may not have the knowledge of more complicated techniques such as coding, but with a number of products on the market for web design, it is easy to put together a website without having to deal with the specific code of each page.
Every business lives and dies by how it manages customer relations. Companies that manage this relationship well can grow consistently for number of years. We have seen this with customer focused companies such as Amazon, Southwest Airlines and Ritz Carlton. Think about the great customer service experience you received from any such companies and you will understand what I am talking about. On the other hand, companies that do not manage customer relationship well can lead to their own demise in a short time.
As an online business owner, you must know when to expect a major increase in the number of orders you’ll receive. After all, it’s no mystery why some major retailers increase their workforces by tens of thousands of people during the holiday season.
There are plenty of other times outside the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas when your business could see a spike in orders, and if you are not prepared to manage them, you could end up with dozens of unhappy customers, and less-than-stellar online reputation that will undoubtedly turn those high volume order periods into non-existent order periods.
When you own your own business or work as a freelancer from home, you don’t have to answer to anyone but your clients to reach your goals. At the same time you don’t have higher-ups providing you with all the tools you need to make your work day go smoothly. Whether you’re just starting out as a small business owner or freelancer or you’ve been at it for a while and think there must be more efficient ways to run things, invest in these must-haves.
E-Commerce sales continue to grow at rapid pace. Online retailers such as Amazon and eBay have been growing at double digit rate for the last several years and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Traditional brick and mortar retailers have recognized this trend and have started to take aggressive actions to increase their online presence. Every single retailer is focusing on integrating traditional and online shopping with the ability to order for online items right from the store and return items purchased online to the store.
Small business owners can benefit equally well by including ecommerce channel with their traditional operations. As I will explain below, when you consider what is required to set up the ecommerce operation and the resources available to do so, it becomes a no brainer to set up an online store. You can improve sales by tapping into this additional channel to get customers who otherwise would not visit your traditional store.
