You might have heard it in your workplace conversations,
usually in conjunction with automation and business processes. But, what is
workflow exactly?
Workflows are the day to day motions that make up your job. You might follow them routinely, you might document them methodically, or you might be somewhere in between. In any case, workflows make up a crucial part of your workflow life. So, let’s try to delve deeper and understand what workflow is all about.
Understanding
the basics: What is a workflow and how it is useful?
A workflow can be ideally defined as a sequence of related processes, actions, or tasks undertaken to complete a piece of work. For example, A writer’s workflow can look like this:
ResearchàOutlineàWrite-àEditàOptimizeàPublish
Every business whether they are aware of it or not uses workflows. Anytime you have performed a sequence of steps to complete a piece of work, you have used a workflow. But, by outlining and structuring your workflows, you mitigate risks and unlock a host of benefits.
The Role of
Automation in your Workflows
There is one big benefit of mapping your workflows: they let your opportunities to automate. The word workflow is used routinely in conjunction with automation, that’s because two are closely related in conjunction. So, what is workflow automation software?
Automation
software allows you to make certain processes happen automatically. This means
that automation will handle some of the steps in your workflows for you. In
other words, you can augment your workflows with automation. This allows you to
free your team from time-consuming, repetitive work that comes as part of a
workflow.
In some
cases, you can build workflows with your automation tool. Alongside automating
individual processes, you can string them together to automate repetitive
workflows. (But only those that don’t need human intervention.)
Automation can also help your workflows run smoother by acting as an IT bridging tool. This means that automation software can bridge processes across your tools and departments. So, if a workflow calls for work to cross departments or swap tools, the automation tool can join those dots.
Benefits of Workflow Automation Software
An
automated workflow benefits your business in numerous ways. Here are some of
the most important benefits of business workflow automation:
Better Insight into
Business Processes
Mapping your processes in workflow allows you to get a more clear, consistent, and top-level view of your business.
One of the biggest reasons why workflow automation is
important is because it gives you greater insight into your processes. From
then on, you can use the said insights to better your workflows, and improve
the bottom-line of your business: get more profits.
Improved Employee Productivity and Quality of
Service
Repetitive
tasks are the main reason why employees feel unmotivated. The mundane tasks not
only take up time, but they also hurt the overall productivity of your
employees.
Eliminating repetitive tasks allows your employees to focus on more critical business activities. It can enhance the morale of employees and improves creativity.
Businesses
that have automated workflows for repetitive and manual tasks have successfully
increased employee productivity by 12% to 15%.
Improved
Teamwork and Communication
Workflow automation provides employees with a
convenient platform where they can communicate and collaborate efficiently.
Proper communication encourages teamwork and
improves overall productivity.
Most of the workflow automation systems have
internal communication platforms that are designed to connect different
departments and teams within your organization. It will notify individual
groups when the specific phase of the project is completed, so the team
responsible for the next stage can step in.
Actionable
Data and Scalability
Workflow automation can help teams focus more
on the organization’s growth rather than spending time on mundane tasks. The
right business automation software allows you to eliminate the bottlenecks and
reach a higher potential.
In addition, workflow automation software
provides you with valuable insights and actionable data. This data helps you
identify employee performance, overall business productivity, and the problem
areas.
Improved task management and resource allocation
can increase individual team performance and overall productivity of your
organization.
Why Is
Tigersheet Best Value for Your Business?
In addition to offering all the above-mentioned features, Tigersheet is known for its no-code environment, which offers a highly flexible and adaptable business process management, and application that users at every level can refine.
At Tigersheet, we understand that
organizations are constantly evolving and growing, and their processes should,
too. Being able to make processes match the reality of business operations
shouldn’t take countless hours, expert developer assistance, and multi-phased
functionality testing.
With a solution like Tigersheet, end users can be empowered to creating and refining their own workflows without prior coding knowledge. The intuitive drag and drop interface, web forms, one-click triggers, interactive reporting tools make business automation a much-needed breeze and everything happens in a no-code environment. Anything more than this is a waste of your staff’s time and your organization’s money.
Take the Next Step
Keeping your business ahead of the curve takes technology that is adaptable, innovative, and easy to use. Tigersheet takes the frustration out of creating, monitoring, and improving your business processes by empowering end-users while removing coding hassles. Want to see and try Tigersheet for yourself? Sign up for a free trial today!
Over the past decade, the rise of subscription-based services has been the most popular trend in the software industry. While vendors like NetSuite and Salesforce pioneered this model, IT giant Microsoft joined in subsequently. A few years until now, productivity applications like Word and Excel were sold with ‘perpetual licenses’, intended to be purchased once and replaced by a newer update. But, today Office 365, which is a cloud variant is sold as a subscription.
It is interesting to note that the recent transition to subscription-based services is not only dominant in the software industry. Here are some examples of subscription models that have become a part of our lives really soon:
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu for movies and T.V
Spotify, Saavn, Wynk for streaming music
Slack, Trello, Canva for Project management
……and the list could be endless
So, the vital question here is that what is the driving force that is making us move to subscriptions, and why software in particular? Let’ s try to decode it here.
At Tigersheet, our every effort is an endeavor to stay at the forefront, and SaaS is no exception. Our new generation no-code platform helps businesses automate their processes in a drastically reduced timeframe and in a cost-efficient manner. We’ve chosen to embrace the SaaS model for a number of reasons.
Flexibility to Scale
Scalability is one of the most beautiful aspects that lead customers to subscription pricing models. By paying for only what you use, the magnitude of your bill can be tied to the individual needs of your business. The subscription can increase readily, adding one user license every time a new employee joins in. Similarly, it can be removed meaning that – if your business wants to cut off expenses or your team downsizes, your software license subscription can reduce proportionately.
This is in complete contrast to burdensome perpetual licenses, generally sold in fixed numbers, often hundreds at a time. These purchases tend to be inconsistent, uneven, and often unpredictable and often adding to the company’s capital expenditures (CAPEX) than operational expenditures (OPEX). On one hand, this does eliminate fluctuations in costs from month to month, it also leaves companies with little room to adjust changes in their business environment. However, with SaaS companies can more easily harmonize costs with growth.
Note: Capital expenditures (CAPEX) are major purchases a company makes that are designed to be used over the long-term. Operating expenses (OPEX) are the day-to-day expenses a company incurs to keep their business operational.
Immediate Access to Live Upgrades
Another significant benefit of selecting a subscription-based model is the access to live upgrades which happens instantly. This eliminates the need for any new installation or purchase agreement. For instance, you must have experienced this with any online or cloud-based application you use. Every time Google introduces a new feature to Gmail, there is an instant pop up telling you what is new and offering information on how to use it.
This is a massive gain to the user in more than one way. You never have to worry about missing out on new features or having out-of-date software. Such immediate reach to the latest technology is crucial in a world where competition never sleeps and security threats emerge continuously.
With Tigersheet, for example, new features, connections, upgrades, and integrations are regularly updated to enhance the offering. If new features like parse email to a sheet, document generation, etc. are available within your subscription, they’ll be ready for you to use as soon as they’re released. Not already subscribing? It’s fast, simple, and cost-effective to expand your subscription to include them.
Easy to offer a proof of concept
With a one-time rigid payment system, it becomes arduous to offer a free trial version. Even with a free trial, the full price of the item could be a potential deterrent to a sign-up. However, a SaaS model makes this much easier allowing vendors to offer free versions in the hope of enticing clients into subscribing to the full package.
This can work in more than one way and especially in the long run. Even if the customer doesn’t sign up immediately, they are likely to have provided you with their contact details, which can be used to email newsletters and/or promotions that may convince them to sign up later.
Tigersheet acknowledges the importance of offering a thorough demonstration and live experience of the product to users, much before its purchase. We have a free trial in place (that has no strings attached), you aren’t compelled to make an outright purchase. One can test out the features like visual tools, UI accessibility, etc. and determine if the platform actually delivers on the promises solving one’s business needs.
Under this no cost trial, customers can avail some awesome features like:
• 2 Applications
• 5 GB storage
• Up to 3 Users Access
• Phone/Chat/Email support
A Route to business automation with Tigersheet
Tigersheet is an innovative SaaS platform and there’s no need to purchase any additional infrastructure. Once the app is built, it’s ready to go. This makes it possible to develop applications in a matter of days and in some cases right away. The no-code platform is available in the cloud and supports the easy deployment of your app in the cloud. It’s time you take advantage of it!
We are living in a fast-paced technologically-driven world that is constantly changing. Speed, Agility, and Adaptability have become game-changers in the 21st century. Living in an age of instant gratification, customers today get easily accustomed to new services and expect you to deliver excellent quality in whatever you are offering.
Amidst this, a pivotal question to ask is how quickly does your business move and adapt to changes?
Well, frankly speaking, every business organization be it a small startup or multinational giants like Amazon or Google are looking at ways to improve productivity and for many of them, the answer lies right under their nose.
The Answer: Business Process Automation. It is a technology that streamlines business processes thus eliminating the need to perform repetitive manual tasks. By leveraging rule-based logic to automate manual tasks, workflow automation can help your business save time and money, reduce errors, avoid inefficiencies, and boost productivity.
The Big Question: What types of tasks or processes can be automated?
The good news is that Automation can start small and doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated tools, to begin with. You can always begin by mapping the workflow of a given process and look for inefficiencies and errors.
An important aspect to keep in mind is to not begin automating mission-critical tasks. Starting small has an advantage that it lets you identify errors and correct them as you move forward. Initially, stick to a goal followed by trimming minutes from predictable, repetitive processes, with small benefits adding up over time.
As you move forward identifying your workflow, search for processes that are:
Simple if/then scenarios
Actions that are recurrent and predictable
Actions that often get delayed in the absence of any human action
Now that you have a fair insight into what automation means, let’s dive deeper into specifics. While the list could go on and on, we bring here 5 common tasks that are ripe for automation
Copy and Paste Between Systems
Let us begin with a common yet significant task. One cannot deny how many times, organizations are seen struggling to manually move their data across systems.
For example, their ERP systems aren’t connected with their reporting software, so they are forced to manually pull data out of their ERP, edit in Excel, and then upload it to other systems. No wonder, this wastes so much time and also puts data at grave risk for errors. While this is just an example, I am sure it shows the bigger picture. Any time one is manually moving the data from one piece of software to another, that process should be simply automated.
With Tigersheet in place, we don’t let our users suffer from the hassle of moving their precious data from system to system. Tiger sheet’s importing capability ‘Import from Excel’ allows you to bring your Excel record to the platform while saving in a lot of time and effort that can otherwise go into creating a sheet from scratch. You can even convert your excel sheets into a centralized web application without any coding knowledge involved!
Reporting
Reporting Options in Tigershee
Reporting is one of the most vital arenas that has highest potential for automation, yet very few organizations take this step. For many companies, reporting is still a manual process wherein some cases employees waste hours manipulating data in Excel. In other cases, users still submit reporting requests to the IT department and wait for their approval.
In today’s data-driven world, automated reporting is a must-have. Here’s why you should consider automated reporting for your organization:
Data Error & Inaccuracies: Studies suggest that more than 90% of data stored in spreadsheets contain errors. So, if you are still relying on manual reporting through excel, you must be prepared to deal with data inaccuracies in your reports.
Slow and Tedious: We live in a fast-paced technology-driven world, but manual reporting is tedious and very slow. These days, businesses need a way to be able to create and access reports on the go which can be automatically delivered to them on a daily basis.
Tigersheet has powerful report generation capabilities, including grouping items, generating pivot tables and charts. All your reports can be saved and shared with other users, along with drill-down filter capability. Such insightful reports will not only give your business a better insight but will also help you identify bottlenecks, view how your teams are performing, and allocate budget and other resources effectively.
WebForms
Build Web Forms in Tigersheet
It’s 2020, and it’s quite surprising to see that some businesses still do not have automated forms. Wondering what are automated forms? Let us break this down to you.
Let us consider a scenario where a prospect completes a contact form on your website asking for more information on a specific service or product.
Now with a manual process, someone in your company will receive an email with the prospect information. He will first enter his data into a system (preferably a CRM) and then a concerned salesperson shall be notified to follow up with the lead. But with automated forms, all of this happens instantly!
Tigersheet lets you design and launches web forms in just minutes, right from your browser. On top of that, there is no coding involved, so anyone in your team can build forms. The data gets sent to your CRM system and any other necessary system. Notification emails are sent to the appropriate employee. The form can even trigger an email campaign that educates the prospect of the benefits or the product/service they inquired about.
See the difference? The automated forms not only eliminate manual data entry, but they can also improve the entire process.
CRM Tasks
Having a CRM software for your business has become indispensable at this point. While you must be familiar with the common benefits like data organization, improved sales performance, higher customer retention, and so on, there is still a lot more that an automated CRM can offer.
The automation features in a CRM can provide a plethora of benefits like:
KPI Tracking: Present-day automated CRM gives you a visual summary of your key metrics in an easy to read manner. This completely eliminates away the need to go through complex steps to measure your KPI metrics. All you have to do is configure your dashboards and display the information that you want to keep track of.
Better lead nurturing: Many CRM systems provide the option to set up follow-up emails, meetings, or calls. They can trigger email campaigns based on specific actions taken by the prospect.
Improved efficiency: Integrating your CRM system with other tools can dramatically improve your sales team’s efficiency. It can automatically schedule meetings, update calendars, create follow-up reminders, and much more.
Most of the pre-canned CRM software available today incur huge costs and that too with a lot of features you don’t need. Instead, why not subscribe to a no-code platform that allows you to create your own CRM at a fraction of costs? By using a no-code platform like Tigersheet to build a custom CRM system, you have an opportunity to automate another process of your business. Right from sales, customer service to HR your daily business operations can run more smoothly with Tigersheet when implemented across multiple departments.
Email or Text Message Auto Responses
Automatic responses are one of the simplest yet most effective areas to automate that can save so much time. Some of the ways in which email or text automation can help are:
Nurture and Follow Up Leads: Many businesses nurture and follow up their leads via autoresponders that are activated whenever a lead completes a form on their website. These responses share content that the prospect might find useful and help them understand how the business can solve their problems.
Improve Customer Support: Let us consider a situation that a customer submits a form on your website. Hence, an automated message can be sent to deliver a thank you message to the customer and an alert message to the concerned employee in your business.
Report Sharing: Many companies set up their reports to run on weekly/daily intervals. With the help of automated responses, they can automatically distribute these reports to various department heads without any human involvement.
Set Reminders and Alerts: If you are constantly reminding your team to complete specific tasks Or, are there predefined steps in a project that require reminders, its high time you should consider automation to increase productivity.
Closing Words
Automated workflows are key to remaining competitive in the coming years, as they help businesses achieve higher goals in a relatively shorter time. Start streamlining your processes today, and don’t get left behind. Get in touch with us.
Tigersheet is a uber-fast modern-day no-code platform that can help streamline business processes in quick and easy steps. The intuitive drag and drop interface allows users with zero coding knowledge to create workflows and share them with your employees.
Businesses owners around the world know that Europe is now protected by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) –May 25, 2018, as the date when it was signed.
But chances are likely high that they all have the same question: What does GDPR mean to my business and since the deadline has passed can we breathe easy?
To break down the truth, GDPR is indeed complex legislation that can appear difficult to comprehend. Any company, big or small will have to comply with new regulations regarding the secure collection, storage, and usage of personal information. What’s more, violations will be met with fines.
To make things simple, we have come up with a definitive guide to make you familiar with the nitty-gritties of GDPR, how it applies to your business and what steps you can take to be GDPR compliant.
Setting the Stage: What is GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a series of laws that were adopted by the European Parliament on April 2016, replacing an outdated data protection directive from 1995.
It is a regulation that requires businesses to protect data and privacy of the citizens of the European Union, who transacted with them.
At the same time, it empowers citizens with greater control over the data they share during transactions and use of services. Citizens have the power to request access to their data and even withdraw consent.
Whom does GDPR apply to?
At its core, GDPR applies to every organization operating under EU as well as to organizations outside the EU offering goods and services to businesses or customers in the European Union.
This simply means every major organization in the world that holds any data of EU citizens, from personal information such as credit cards numbers to even a simple a photo of the citizen needs to stay compliant with the GDPR.
A simple illustration to determine if GDPR affects you or not.
Why GDPR does exists?
The reforms under GDPR are designed to reflect the world we are living in at present, which also brings in-laws and obligations centered on personal data, privacy, and consent.
The two reasons which can be attributed to the introduction of GDPR are:
GDPR brings data protection legislation in line with ever-changing ways of data consumption, for example, the way that companies such as Google and Facebook now swap access to their customers’ data in exchange for their services.
The earlier legislation- the Data Protection Act 1988- was introduced prior to the use of internet and invention of cloud-based services and hence had turned obsolete with regard to associated security issues such as data exploitation. With GDPR in place, the EU wanted to increase trust in the digital sphere and hence introduced a clear, uniform legal realm in which businesses must operate.
What constitutes “personal data” under GDPR?
Under the GDPR legislation, Personally Identifiable Information (abbreviated as PII) refers to any information associated with an individual pertaining to his private, public and professional life.
The types of information in PII included:
Basic Identity information such as First and Last names, addresses
Web data such as email address, location, IP address, cookie data, and RFID tags
Banking Information
Political opinions such as one expressed through Social Media Posts
Health and generic data
Sexual Orientation
Breaking down the basics: How to be GDPR Compliant?
For all businesses operating or dealing in the EU, the maiden GDPR legislation has introduced a lot of changes that they must implement. Right from maintaining strict data protection controls to reporting breaches to customers, businesses need to actively monitor and protect user’s data continually.
Consumer Rights in GDPR and what they mean for businesses
Here we are distilling GDPR compliance down to basics, so you can make sure you are in line with it.
Obtaining Consent
Businesses should clearly mention their terms and operations. This simply means you cannot stuff them up in the complex language designated to confuse your users. Consent should be easily given and freely withdrawn at any time.
Timely Breach Notification
In case a data breach occurs within your organization, you have to report it to both the customers as well as data controllers within 72 hours. Any failure to reporting breaches within this timeframe will incur fines.
Right to data access
In case users request their existing data profile, businesses should be able to furnish a fully detailed and free electronic copy of the data they have collected about them. This report must also include the various ways you’re using their information.
Right to be forgotten
Also referred to as Right to data deletion, once the original purpose of customer data has been realized, the customers have the right to request that you totally erase their personal data.
Data Portability
This right empowers users an absolute right to their own data. They must be able to obtain their data from an organization and reuse that same data in different environments outside of the organization.
Privacy by design
Under privacy by design, GDPR makes it compulsory for companies to design their systems with the proper security protocols in place from the start. Any kind of failure in designing your systems of data collection the right way will incur a fine.
Potential data protection officers
In certain cases, companies are required to appoint a data protection officer (DPO). Whether or not one needs an officer depends upon the size of the company and at what level it currently processes and collect data.
When should a company appoint a Data Protection Officer?
The GDPR directive clearly specifies that an organization should appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) if it carries out operations pertaining to special categories of data or is involved in large scale monitoring of citizens such as behavior tracking or is a public authority.
In the case of a public authority, a single DPO can be appointed for a group of organizations. While appointing a DPO is necessary, it is also vital for companies to ensure they have adequate skills and staff necessary to stay compliant with the GDPR legislation.
GDPR has brought about a new level of transparency into data collection, storage, and usage. In case your company is secretive about its data, this is high time to make a dramatic turnaround in line with the points mentioned above.
What comprises GDPR-compliant breach notification?
In the event of a data loss, whether a result of cyber-attack, theft or human error or anything else companies are subjected to deliver an official breach notification. It should specify information related to the number of individuals compromised along with the categories and approximate numbers of personal data records concerned.
In addition to providing the potential consequences of a data breach such as theft, identity fraud, companies are also obliged to describe measures being taken to deal with the data breach to counter any negative impacts which might be faced by individuals.
What are the consequences of GDPR non-compliance?
For your company’s account: Breaching GDPR comprises four levels of sanctions: a warning, a reprimand, the suspension of data processing and a fine.
The fines are distributed at two levels:
Level 1: A payment of €10 million or 2% of an annual global turnover-whichever figure is greater.
Level 2: A payment of €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover-again whichever figure is greater.
The higher level of fines are reserved for cases where data infringement occurs, consumer request for data access is overlooked, procedures handling data are not being followed or an unauthorized transfer of data occurs.
While the lower level of fines is also applicable to data misuse but on a minor level. Examples can be a failure on the part of reporting a data breach, failing in implementing proper data protection protocols
For the credibility of your business: GDPR is no joke, and any failure meeting it can directly put the viability and future of your company at serious stake. GDPR puts businesses under an obligation to officially notify of the possible leaks of user’s private data. If an organization breaches this notification, its image will get associated with this infringement, both in public opinion and within the industry. Don’t be surprised if you are given a straight no next time you happen to secure an agreement for your company.
GDPR is already here, now what?
In preparation of GDPR, many companies have updated and redistributed their business policies. And often think of what should be their next steps to stay compliant. We will break down the steps for you:
Manage your Data through Audits
The prerequisite to reviewing your current data protection policy is to perform a data audit. This includes checking all the current personal data and information that you have in the database asking yourself some simple questions:
How did you collect the data?
Was consent sought before collecting that data?
Has the data been used or sent to any 3rd parties?
Answering these questions will help you identify weak spots in your existing data policy thereby creating a scope to re-work on them accordingly. By getting an overview of the current data you hold and how you use it, you’ll be able to see which areas need improvement to become GDPR compliant.
Get Rid of Unnecessary Data
Once you are up with reviewing your current data on file and protection policies, move forward with a data clean-up.
This simply means looking through all the data you currently possess and deciding what you need to keep and what to delete. There can be scenarios where you’ve collected data in the past but haven’t used it. Hence, deleting unnecessary or redundant data is a great way to clean up your systems that help to mitigate the risk of any data breaches.
The GDPR legislation states that user and event data must be retained according to more strict settings; when set properly, your systems will automatically delete user and event data that is older than the retention period you select.
Adopting a retention control policy is a great way to avoid data hoarding, and at the same time provides a robust way to demonstrate to auditors. Hence make sure you:
Understand what data you are collecting and also classify it. Comprehend what comprises personal data and whatnot.
Adopt measures to understand where data is held, how it is kept and how & when to delete it.
Back up your data or anonymize and encrypt it.
Be open and completely transparent about your internal processes. Do not forget your influencers, customers and other stakeholders will trust you as long as you prove to be trustworthy.
Summary and Final Thoughts
It is not wrong to say that GDPR is indeed a huge transition in how business approach customer data. While the deadline has already passed, the real work is actually in the months and years that come ahead. Especially when the dust over the first breach is beginning to settle, this is a good time to reflect on the changes that GDPR can bring.
Companies should now begin focusing on the ultimate goal to build trust and be the kind of organizations where customers offer up insights and data freely. Encompassing the quintessential mantra “security is everyone’s responsibility”, it’s high time for businesses to holistically work towards meeting the expectations set for meeting GDPR.
To put it as the final verdict: GDPR is an aggressive swing in the face of data abuse. Nonetheless, it should also be viewed as a positive force that has come to safeguard consumer data rights in our increasingly accessible world. And just as it protects the consumer, it also protects organizations from surpassing their boundaries.
In the world of cutthroat competition where businesses are increasingly turning their heads to online advertising and social media marketing- It may leave us wondering if live events such as trade shows or exhibitions are still relevant.
Well, the
answer is Yes!
Though businesses have endless options of marketing today
than what they had a few decades ago, they shouldn’t ignore the massive power
of trade shows and exhibitions which can help them stand out amidst high
competition. There is no denying that these live events do involve high costs,
but with right steps and team on board they can turn out to be attractive lead
generation opportunities.
Being themed events, trade shows or exhibitions help in
garnering the attention of customers who are interested in services or products
being offered. Moreover, these allow businesses to expand their customer base
in a very short span of time. All one needs is to cleverly sift through the
crowd identifying hot leads from the sea of people!
Here I have come up with some creative ideas that will help you turn attendees into leads, ensuring the best return of your investment.
1.Choose Strategically: Research is the Key
Exhibiting at a trade show is never a cheap deal-hence
thorough research beforehand on choosing the right place, convention and the
type of trade show to attract maximum leads is prerequisites to successful
business marketing at live events.
For instance, say, your target audience is small business and
they are on the lookout for knowing more about a particular industry at trade
shows. Find out what they are looking forward to know and then equip them with
some insightful information. Capitalizing on this opportunity and acing your
presence at the trade show will leave a lasting impression of you as a business
expert that will help you in future too.
Hence, know well in advance, what you want and then
craft those details to delivery properly.
2. Invest in Pre-Event
Promotion
The trade show is going to be your showcase event, hence you
must ensure it is pre-promoted heavily.
Make sure to update your contact details to reach as many
customers as possible. Make use of social media, update information on your
website, create event landing pages to segment your contact lists and automate
emails.
Another good way practice pre-event promotion would be to
create a door of enticement. Send out just a particular piece of information to
your contacts that may prove valuable to them, thus urging them to come and
claim the full portion while attending your booth at the actual event.
3. Keep the Booth
Designs Attractive
Your booth design will go a long way in attracting visitors
hence make sure your booth appearance is professional yet attractive. Keep the
design in line with your buyer persona in mind. Don’t include things that have
nothing to do with your business and services. Invest smartly in building the
brand so that your booth stands out: a nicely designed background, highlighted
bold banners, some extra lighting (not too gaudy) and may be some unusual
chairs.
Consider ‘installing call
to action elements’ at your
trade show booth such a screen asking visitors to fill a survey along with
their contact details. You can install vending machines where you can ask
visitors to equip it with their business cards. Such elements at your booth
design will help you generate leads while encouraging participation from
visitors.
4. Equip Your Booth
with the Right Staff
Staffing your booth with enthusiastic, kind and inviting
staff is one of the prerequisites to gauge solid leads.
The people at your booth are your brand representatives who
know your services inside out. Hence, it is important for them to be assertive,
friendly and professional in their approach and not behave like employees
sitting behind tables who are bored and drained of energy.
Hence, be selective about selecting your staff and look for
people who can communicate well, are willing to participate in the goal of
bringing benefit to the company. They should also have a warm smile and
pleasing personality. Taking a technical guy with no communication skills to
represent your booth who can answer the toughest questions will never serve any
purpose. Lastly, ensure that the staff manning your booth are trained about the
products and well aware of your business objectives.
5. Hand out Freebies, Keep Giveaways
Freebies can instantly catch visitor’s attention, provided
they are aligned well with your lead generation strategy. Consider keeping giveaways that are related
to the services you are offering such as a pen drive for a software company, a
wooden showpiece for a furniture company.
Also, make sure to give your gift items to qualified leads
and not just for the sake of giving. Make them work to earn it like keep a
prize draw as this will keep them engaged and offer a more time span to discuss
your product value to them.
Though we are living in the age of digital, keeping some form
of paper collateral such as a leaflet, a catalogue is good. Don’t forget to
include details of your company logo, services offered, website etc. with
everything you plan to give away.
6. Nail your Live Presentations and
Product Demos
Doing a live
presentation or a product demo would be one of the most effective ways to
generate crowd at your booth.
However,
make sure to keep it short and engaging keeping it for 10 minutes at most.
Keep a good presenter who is confident as well comfortable
addressing the audience.
Doing a recurring presentation say every hour or at frequent
intervals will be helpful in telling people about your products and inviting
them to your booth.
Make sure to indulge or invite people after your presentation
so they don’t end up leaving your booth. You can make them fill a form,
participate in a competition or speak to your sales personnel so they can
qualify them further.
7. Focus on networking,
Visit Other Trade Booths Too
Exhibitions and Trade shows are not just about hype or making
money, but also connecting with like-minded people, networking and having some
fun!
Visit other booths, introduce yourself to people who might
turn into your prospective leads. Strolling out can help you understand what
your competitors are doing in keeping attendees engaged thus proving out a
valuable tactic.
8. Keep the Atmosphere
Lively, Indulge in Fun
The experience of meeting people in person at a real event can be overwhelming, especially when you can control the experience you want for your visitors. It can actually be energizing meeting leads face to face, knowing about them while adding a little flavor of fun while interacting with them.
In order to make your event memorable that can leave a long
lasting impact in the minds of attendees, you can:
Consider doing a stage talk, or perhaps walk through a
product demo answering questions and asking them, you don’t have to only focus on
gaining customer attention but also in making your message stick longer with
them.
Investing in some form of entertainment, music, food, and
drinks will also
make the environment more comfortable for your team boosting up the enthusiasm
to work actively towards closing deals.
9. Collect
Data and Follow Up Timely
Given the huge stake involved at your trade show event, it is
important to collect all the data of your prospective leads who may be
interested in your services in the future. Make sure to have a robust method
for collecting the data.
Make use of productive CRM tools that can directly feed
data to your smartphones or tablets ready to be launched in your customer
database, it will save in a lot of time and manual effort.
Moreover, following up
with leads in a timely fashion is crucial to keep the conversation going. Left
attendees will forget you and grow cold in today’s’ fast paced environment or they may get wooed by your competitors who
are faster on their feet. Reach out to leads through social media, connect them
up on LinkedIn. Reply and Respond to every query and request to establish
credibility and authority.S
Trade shows can be fantastic opportunities for you to
increase brand awareness, multiply leads and maximize ROI for your business.
All you have to do is understand what visitors are looking for, man your booth
with the right staff, craft an attractive booth appearance, nail your live
presentations, focus on networking and follow up in a timely fashion.
Ultimately the planning, thought and participation you put
into your trade show will have a direct impact on the leads you will generate.
Formulate your strategy based on the tips and suggestions outlined above and
walk confidently in the direction of making your upcoming event a success.
Marketing is the lifeblood of any sustainable business
Companies know this and spend tonnes of time, energy, and money in
employing different marketing strategies. However, these strategies don’t
always bring in expected and profitable results in the form of more traffic,
more customers, more money, and increased customer loyalty. For small
businesses and startups, the problem is especially frustrating because they
have a cap on the financial and human resources that they can use.
Companies know this and spend tonnes of time, energy, and money in employing different marketing strategies. However, these strategies don’t always bring in expected and profitable results in the form of more traffic, more customers, more money, and increased customer loyalty. For small businesses and startups, the problem is especially frustrating because they have a cap on the financial and human resources that they can use.
The missing key is being
smart and strategic and implementing techniques thoughtfully by examining
which ones will have the greatest ROI. Part of that smartness and strategicness
is to be as knowledgeable about what not to
do as it is to be about what to do.
Hence, it’s time now to fill those knowledge gaps, learn the most common marketing mistakes that you might be unknowingly making, and get on the path to rectifying them for a profitable and successful business.
The What-Not-To-Do-In-Marketing
Guide
Not marketing yourself
This mistake sometimes arises out of fear, especially for people
and businesses starting out. Putting yourself on the line, speaking about your
product or service, making a case for yourself, are all nerve-wracking. Most
business owners, hence, end up marketing very half-heartedly which is not going
to be effective at all.
The other reason for making this mistake might be the assumption
that ‘people will find my product.’
Truth is: people aren’t going to learn about what you offer unless you tell them. The brands and companies that everyone knows about, reached where they are due to an excellent quality product and dogges marketing efforts to tell the world about its excellence.
The market is already saturated with people from all over the world
creating and selling all kinds of products and services that humankind would
ever need. In such a scenario, if you don’t make it a point to stand up and
tell the world about what you offer… you are actually stealing from the people
who would benefit from your service.
This ties into the next mistake….
Not taking the time to know your ideal client
If you are talking to everyone in the market, you are talking to no
one really.
This is akin to mistake #1 albeit in a different form. ‘Market and
the right people will find you’. No, they won’t. Your modus operandi should be:
‘market to the right people and they
might end up staying.’
And who are these right people? Someone who would derive great
value from your product.
For this, you need to actually sit down and think hard. What kind
of person would buy your product? What are their needs? How do they see the
world? What do they spend their time doing?
These questions will help you to market to an actual human instead
of in a void. Additionally, it will help you to craft authentic campaigns that
make the customer feel as if you just stepped in their brain and then helped
solve a problem. By the end of it, you would have won them over.
Not leveraging your USP
Once you know your ideal customer and have pulled them in, the plan
of action is to offer them a solution in a way that no one has. This will
originate from your unique strengths and capabilities a.k.a your USP.
Your USP is what sets you apart in the market. Because, as pointed
above, there are already thousands of businesses operating in every imaginable
domain. There is always someone with a better quality product, a cheaper price,
a discount offer, and sometimes all three.
So you need to sit and think. What sets you apart in the market?
What is your USP? What will help you to stand out from the crowd and get
chosen?
Not focusing on retaining old traffic while bringing in new one
Some businesses make the mistake of trying to pull in new customers
at the cost of cross-selling or up-selling to their previous group of
customers.
Your existing customers already know your value, have a
relationship with you, and are more likely to buy from you. The amount of
energy that you have to invest in them is a lot less than what you have to
invest in new ones.
According to Marketing Metrics, a customer who has previously made
a purchase from you is 60% more likely to purchase from you again. In contrast,
the chances of a first-time visitor to your website making the same purchase
are only 20%.
So, as you seek to expand your market and your reach, don’t forget
to walk your existing clientele with you. Keep in constant touch with them and
communicate that you value their presence. It’ll pay off in the long run.
Not focusing on website because of social-media
With the popularity of social media, the rise of influencer
marketing, and the fact that everyone, has an account on a social media
channel, has encouraged most people to ditch their websites in favor of a
social media account.
This is akin to building your business on rented land. You can’t
help when the price of the land goes up.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn- none of them are owned by you. They
are controlled by other folks who care about their business and not yours. So
when the algorithm updates or policies are changed, you are always vulnerable
to being negatively impacted.
Your organic reach might decrease, you might have to create ads
with a set minimum budget that might be more than your budget, or video ads
might be given more outright preference than display ads.
You cannot control any of these consequences. Social media is great
for finding new customers and driving a few sales, but to rely on it entirely
for running your business is foolhardy.
Your primary focus should be on your website only. Best to build
your home on a piece of land that you bought where you get to make the rules.
Not including call to actions (CTAs)
At the end of the day, all your efforts are geared towards a
particular action: getting the customer to buy from you, to book you, or to
hire you. To simply include you as a value-providing part of their life.
A beautifully designed email about your latest course is of no use
if, after reading it, the subscriber has no clear way to sign up for it. Hence,
your every conversation with the customer should prompt them to take action and
say ‘hell, yes!’ to you.
CTAs become even more crucial on your website. The customer needs
to spend time with you so that they can go through your content, gauge if it is
of value, and eventually, come to trust you.
How to get them to stay with you? By integrating CTAs on different
pages. A synonym for it would be internal linking.
So, sprinkle these links and CTAs all over your website. At the end
of the article, you could display the related posts. Or tell them to check out
a course which further expands on the information provided. After they sign up
for your email newsletter, you can direct them to your archives.
CTAs work well on other mediums, too. According to AdRoll, adding
CTAs to your FB page increases click-through rates (CTRs) by 285%. When Brafton made
changes for a client by adding CTA buttons to article templates, their revenue
increased by 83% in one month.
Take action and include some calls to actions now!
The above are just a few of the mistakes and entrepreneurs and
business owners make during their marketing efforts. The sooner they are
rectified, the sooner revenue begins to flow in and customer loyalty begins to
go up. Which business wouldn’t like more of these, right?
So, go into introspection mode as soon as possible, call a meeting
with your team post that, and make plans to become the next marketing legend in
business!
The domain of recruiting has changed drastically in recent
years with employers increasingly moving to social media platforms to source
talent. While there is absolutely no dearth of platform one can consider for
hiring, LinkedIn, in particular, has emerged as a great resource for
professional communities to build their network and augment their recruitment
needs.
Unlike conventional job board portals such as Monster, Shine,
Indeed, LinkedIn provides a more business-focused interface where a candidate
can easily highlight their resume, skills, achievements, experience and
connections and general influence in the field.
However, being inundated by hundreds of resumes from an
endless number of applicants can make screening the right candidate a lot more
difficult for employers. To make things simple at this end, we have come up
with this comprehensive piece that will guide you on how to make the most of
LinkedIn- using Free, Premium and Recruiter so that you can find the best
candidates.
We have listed general tips that can be followed by all
recruiters irrespective of the subscription they have as well as some paid
subscription-specific tips that can amp up their hiring strategies to reach
prospective employees.
How to use LinkedIn for
Free for Finding the Right Candidate
Market Your Company
through LinkedIn
Marketing your company page is one of the most important prerequisites for successful hiring. In order to garner the attention of your potential employees and bring an impact, you need to provide an outlet for candidates to reach you. Make sure to update the latest company activities and openings via careers page. The company profile should be linked to Twitter and Facebook profiles as well.
Another good way to indulge in your company marketing would
be to make use of status updates to source the best talent. While back in 2010,
LinkedIn used to fetch status updates from a Twitter account, today it supports
standalone updates. Also, do not forget to modify your company status to
“Hiring” that can indicate that the company has open positions and is actively
seeking new joiners.
The Key to Finding Lies
in “Search”
While it may sound very concrete, but the key to finding a
right candidate lies in how one searches for them!
Searching through keywords is increases the chances of
finding suitable candidates based on their skills and experiences. Moreover,
LinkedIn itself comes with a search tool that allows search refinement to be
done at multiple levels. One can search for specific people based on location, experience
or company they work for, this will nullify the chances of coming across miss
and hit candidates while saving in a lot of time.
While the search result can give a list of people matching
your needs, the job doesn’t get finished here. As 90% of these people will
already be in some role, a few of them who aren’t’ will most likely be using
the keyword ‘seeking new opportunities’. Hence, as a recruiter consider looking
at them as well as their skills could prove relevant to your needs.
Another aspect to keep in mind while searching
potential candidates is to look for freelancers. While the majority of freelancers
prefer self-employment working in flexible hours, there can be chances if some
of them are looking for full-time employment for different reasons (e.g.;
financial needs), hence approaching them would not be a lost cause.
Go for LinkedIn Referrals
More than 80% of employees believe that employee referrals
are one of the most effective ways to recruit that saves in a lot of time and
effort.
LinkedIn also has a feature called LinkedIn Referral that
automatically identifies the first-degree contacts of your existing employees
to find the most suitable candidate for your job posted on LinkedIn. Moreover,
the software sends a notification of these matches to your fellow connections
on LinkedIn every week that further helps to increase engagement. One can
combine this technique with incentives and bonuses (if you complete successful
hiring from one of your connections) to have a robust recruitment strategy at
their fingertips!
Contact Candidates
through LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups can be a golden guild of candidates with a
very specific skillset that could exactly match your needs. The best part
LinkedIn Group is it is Free and one of the exciting business offerings from
LinkedIn.
Say if you are looking for a Social media expert, join a
group like Social Media House, or if you are searching for a content writer
connect with a group called Content Writers Network. It is simple as typing the
relevant industry such as “media” or “engineering” in the search box and then selecting
the group that is shown after the search result.
Being a part of LinkedIn Groups would help you come across
leaders, available workers, professionals from different walk of life that will
refine your search to reach your prospective employees. You can go through
their post, read their conversations etc., weigh in different factors and
contact them if you find them suitable. Don’t think of this interaction as a
waste of time because LinkedIn ultimately is a networking channel and this
group engagement can generate exposure and interest for your business from
prospective employees.
Invest in Sponsored
Jobs
One of the fastest, reliable and direct ways to catch
talented candidate details in your inbox would be to invest in sponsored
jobs. The sponsored category would
highlight your job opening in front of candidates by bidding for prime
placement in the jobs presented to them.
This would cost you as it would work on pay-per-click system (pay
depending upon as many times your job gets clicked) but at the same time will
generate more exposure for your job thus increasing your chances of meeting the
right candidates.
Make Use of “question and answer” and
publish section
You can post questions and answers on LinkedIn in the
question-answer section to establish relationships with leaders, industry
experts, and influencers to expand your network and leverage them to fill your
positions. Posting a department opening specific question or answer can invite
people you’re your network as well as outside to come up with suggestions and
influence hiring.
Also, do not forget to publish your own articles on the
LinkedIn publishing platform. The benefit of publishing on LinkedIn can be
many: you will get to share your knowledge, cultivate a following and
strengthen your own professional identity.
LinkedIn Paid
Subscription: LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn offers a myriad of
subscription plans to lets businesses meet their networking needs in the form
of LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Recruiter. Upgrading to these paid plans
unlocks various additional features like LinkedIn InMail, that lets recruiters
connect directly with contacts, not in their connection list.
LinkedIn
premium costs $47.99 per month for Business Plan while $99.99 per month for Executive
Plan, however, the only difference is that Business plan gives 15 Inmails each
month while Executive gives 30 every month.
LinkedIn
Recruiter is available in two versions- RecruiterLite that costs $99.95 per
month and Recruiter Corporate which costs $825 per month.
Having a LinkedIn
Recruiter subscription is beneficial over LinkedIn Premium only in a sense that
it lets you save your searches, get more number of InMails (30 total) along
with saving the templates of InMail you send most frequently. In fact, it’s
really not that best when compared to LinkedIn Executive Plan which costs a lot
less.
However Recruiter Corporate does offer some additional
recruiting benefits like applicant tracking, multiple users, a talent pipeline
and the option to get feedback from managers while you are interviewing or
hiring.
While
LinkedIn Recruiter is an ideal plan for big companies and recruiters, small
businesses and start-ups can go for LinkedIn Premium as it is more affordable
Here we have
listed down some additional features of LinkedIn Paid plans that can help
business owners and HR’s to recruit new employees.
InMail
InMail is a LinkedIn copyrighted email system that lets an
employer contact candidate outside their connection without revealing their
personal email address. Being able to contact anyone out of the blue can be
extremely resourceful in a sea of professionals all around.
Follow these tips to boost your recruitment strategies while
using LinkedIn InMail:
Customize your Job Description showing how their skill set matches your job needs.
Give the person a reason to contact you, for e.g.: “I loved your views on “X” and wonder if you know anyone who has expertise similar to you.”
Mention your contact details on your company page- phone, website,
and work email so the candidate can reach you even outside of LinkedIn.
Follow up on connection request so that in case they reply it will
be easy to contact them further without wasting your InMail credits.
See Your Profile
Viewers
This lets you see profiles of people who are checking your
business and personal profiles, and there are chances they may be job seekers.
Send them messages, or invite them to connect sharing details of your business
and current openings!
The Bottom Line
Hiring top candidates on LinkedIn is not rocket science,
provided you are aware of using the platform efficiently. Make sure to come out
as honest, upfront and clear with your job description, location, and salary
parameters to stand out from the competition.
LinkedIn is a talent reservoir and with new features evolving every year, it would not be wrong to say that it will eventually emerge out as a major source of recruiting talent in years to come. Now go forth and employ these skills in your employee recruitment strategy and avail the benefits of finest candidates that end up coming your way!
As each year goes by and technology evolves, consumer behavior
does, too. And with a change in the preferences and behaviors of customers, a
business must also change its modus operandi.
What worked for you as a company just 2 years back, won’t work now.
Sure, there are some timeless principles, but the form in which they are
applied and leveraged continues to evolve as new and more engaging ways of
conveying information emerge. And if you don’t adapt, your customer acquisition
and retention rates might nosedive to their death.
That being said, below are the top 3 marketing trends for 2019
that you must know if you want to be a hit with your audience this year and
rack up those precious profitable numbers:
Content is still King
With an abundance of businesses on the internet, content is one
of the things that will make you stand out from the crowd and allow audiences
to connect to you.
Nike is a true King when it comes to content. Although it sells
sportswear, Nike will never upload an advert with a picture of the latest
athletic wear and its price. The power of its marketing lies in the visuals and
sentences that talk of women breaking stereotypes, men triumphing in spite of
disability, children growing up to become heroes.
In short- a plethora of empowering content that makes people want to buy Nike gear
because they want to be that hero, that achiever, and the one who overcame the
odds. Nike makes them believe through its content that if they #justdoit, they
will be that person. Buying Nike shoes almost seems like a no-brainer then.
Another winner at content is TED. 5 million people have subscribed to watching
these 18-minute videos. If you have ever surfed YouTube, you would have watched
or been suggested to watch one of these, too.
Their secret? The fire-catching phrase ‘Ideas worth spreading’.
The conferences they hold, the people they invite, the initiatives they launch
(TEDx, TED Fellows) are all geared to ‘ideas worth spreading’. They simply want
to make content that people love. Their audience feels it, loves it, and TED
keeps rolling out more awesomeness.
And hence, content is not just blog posts. Looking to the
example that TED sets, anything that your company rolls out on and off the
Internet counts as content.
Your website copy? Content. Guest post on a high-traffic tech
website? Content. BTS Instagram stories? Content. The videos of the conferences
that you hold? It’s all content, and you
simply cannot compromise on it.
Quality is of paramount importance and people can detect it
quite easily. Audiences do not want to be directly sold to even if they know
that’s exactly what’s happening. According to the Economist Group’s report ‘Missing The
Mark’ 71% of buyers/ readers were turned off by content that seemed
like a sales pitch.
Hence, when you are creating content, make sure to emphasize on
quality. A repertoire of creative content that resonates with people will build
a more loyal audience than any amount of paid ads will.
Data will not be for
computer scientists alone
‘What gets measured, gets improved’ is not for self-improvement junkies only.
Tracking is an essential practice for all businesses, and when
it comes to your marketing campaigns, it is absolutely essential that you
measure how much you invest and the returns you reap on those investments.
Else, you might end up making the same mistakes whether it is 2009 or 2019.
Hence, using data for increasingly personalized interaction and
to provide top-notch customer care experiences is going to be a major marketing
strategy in 2019.
Data is going to help you answer critical questions like: how
is your product performing? How are customers engaging with it? What are they
responding well to? What are they not responding to at all? Getting answers to
these questions will help you direct your future marketing efforts.
And notwithstanding common security concerns, consumers are
willing to share their personal data if it means a better customer experience
is the end result of it.
Using data will also help you to segment your customers. Again,
this will help you to make the right offers to them at the right time on the
basis of profession, age, demographics, past purchasing history, and other
insightful numbers.
Stacy Martinet, VP of
marketing strategy and communication at Adobe, told CMO.com: “A data-driven
approach to creativity helps marketers work more productively, create the right
content faster, and deliver that content to the right customer, across the
right channels, at the right time”.
No reason to not get involved in those numbers.
Videos on the rise
According to Animoto,
videos are consumers no. 1 favorite type of branded content on social media. If
you embed a video on your landing page, it can drive up
conversions by 80% or more.
In a Q3 2018
Earning Calls, Mark Zuckerberg himself said that “Video
is a critical part of the future, it’s what our community wants, and as long as
we can make it social I think it will end up being a large part of our business
as well.”
Numbers related to Facebook Stories and Facebook Watch,
released by MarketingLand, reveal that 62% of people were more interested in a
brand after watching a video about it whereas more than 50% of people said they
make more online purchases as a result of Stories.
LinkedIn is also on the way to becoming a marketing hub,
especially for B2B enterprises. According to official stats,
video is shared 20x more than any other type of content on the LinkedIn feed.
On the other hand, if you are a B2C enterprise, Instagram
stories might help you since 400 million people watch these Stories every day
and 48% of
consumers have made a purchasing decision after
watching a brand’s video there.
And how can we forget YouTube? The video giant has over a
billion users which are 1/3rd of the internet population. These people watch more than 500
million hours of video on YouTube.
The point that all these numbers are making? No matter which
platform you use for sharing videos, rest assured that people are going to stop
and watch it. But since it is also a form of content, you gotta remember- its
quality is of paramount importance. Do not compromise on it, and you’ll have
cracked a large part of the successful content marketing code.
Conclusion
These 3 trends are primarily geared towards 2 objectives:forming a relationship with the customer and becoming a brand that they want to associate themselves with. Though not always quantitative, the results of these 2 objectives will make you an ace player of the long-run.
What are you waiting for now? It’s time to call a meeting with
your marketing team asap and discuss your strategy for 2019. The clock is
ticking and your campaigns are waiting to be a success.
