Powering Your Company Culture with Technology


These days, employees crave tech-savvy work environments in order to stay motivated and be productive. The introduction of generation z, i.e. the digital natives, into the workforce means companies are challenged to optimize the workplace for engaging employee experience. This usually means integrating technology into day-to-day operations to ease the burden of everyday tasks.

As you look to add talent to your growing business, you’ll want to make sure that your company is utilizing technology in a way that will both entice young professionals as well as improve the productivity of your current employees. Below, we’ve shared a few resources to help you learn more about the modern small business’ relationship between technology and company culture.

Flexible Benefits

The internet has provided the unique opportunity for work to be done in any place and at any time, and many businesses are utilizing this benefit by giving their workers a little more control over their work schedule. Work-from-home and flexible office hours allow employees to work when and where they are most productive, helping to prevent burnout in your workers while offering them the opportunity to create a healthier work-life balance. 

Flexible hours also help to improve the overall vibe of the office. When people are able to adjust their hours, they are less likely to use paid time off or sick time for appointments and other events that require them to be away from the office. This means more people are likely to be at work, which promotes the sense of community and company culture. Your workers are also happier and more relaxed when they’re able to shift their schedules to meet their at-home needs, meaning they’ll have better focus once they return to work.

The efficient use of technology is the key to granting this privilege to your employees. Before the wide-spread use of the internet, it was nearly impossible to be sure that your remote workers were actually working when they said they were. Cloud-based time management software is a tool that enables remote work by allowing users to track their time off-site over the internet. This tool helps avoid micromanaging, as well as creates trust between workers and upper management— allowing employees to feel autonomous, free, and loyal to the company.

Communication

Effective communication is essential to develop a unified company culture and drive a clear direction for your business. It’s what keeps everything running smoothly, and allows for employees and management to be in alignment with what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. 

If not properly managed, poor communication can be detrimental to small businesses— leading to increased employee turnover rates, unsatisfied customers, and potential physical and mental health hazards for your workers. Poor communication can be caused by a number of factors, from employees not being reachable because of time and distance barriers to lacking the structure needed for information to move freely within the company.

Luckily, the internet has made it easier for employees to communicate with each other throughout the company. Internet-powered Voice over IP is just one example of technology that helps businesses improve their communication efforts, allowing employees to make and receive calls over an internet connection rather than traditional phone line networks. Services like this make your workers more accessible, meaning it’s easier to transmit messages across time zones and satellite offices.

Training

Efficient training programs not only bring your new hires to proficiency more quickly, but they can also aid in long-term employee retention and happiness within your organization. These programs allow your workers to rapidly learn the responsibilities and operations of their role which, in turn, builds their confidence in their ability to do their job. 

These programs also give businesses the ability to address any areas of weakness in terms of skill and productivity. This helps to ensure that everyone in the company has the same level of knowledge and leads to more consistent work, making people self-assured in their ability to complete the tasks expected of them.

Technology has made it easier for companies to train their newly-hired and current employees. Virtualized learning management systems allow businesses to standardize their approach by building specific courses and tracking employee progress. These cost-effective computer programs are easily customizable, making them an ideal choice for smaller businesses looking to improve their training process. 

Career Development

Employees today highly value personal and professional growth in their workplaces, making mentorship and soft skills development courses a key part of any company culture. These programs help workers feel valued by the organization and encourage them to grow within the company rather than taking their skills elsewhere. They also allow your company to be ready for any changes in the industry by preparing your employees with skills that could be useful in the future. 

Businesses can utilize software to help nurture their workers’ skills. There are plenty of new mentor program technologies that can help small businesses create and facilitate effective programs. Artificial intelligence, for example, can assist in creating ideal mentor and mentee pairings. These technologies help businesses identify their often overlooked mentor-ready employees, giving these people the chance to spread their soft skills throughout the company. These programs help mentors feel valued by the company while giving mentees the chance to learn from individuals they may not otherwise interact with, which strengthens company culture.

Recognition

Recognition is an incredibly powerful tool that leaders and managers can use to keep employees invested and excited in their work. Not only does it promote a positive and forward-thinking work environment, but it also increases the recurrence of desired behavior— meaning that employees will be both productive and proud of the work that they’re doing. 
Technology has made recognizing great work easier than ever before. Tools like browser-based employee recognition software allow small businesses a platform for shouting out great work and easily sharing it across an organization. These tools also allow peers to recognize each other as well, eliminating the idea that upper management is the only place to receive valuable praise. Technology helps to encourage and promote positive relationships throughout the business, leading to a happier, more productive work environment.

Designing a Powerful And Effective Content Remarketing Plan


Designing a Powerful And Effective Content Remarketing Plan
In the past few years, content marketing has moved from an unproven marketing idea to becoming the center of many digital marketing strategies. Content marketers use blog posts, whitepapers, videos, and a variety of other content to build trust, create engagement, establish authority, and create leads. When content marketing is successful, the return on investment is great. However, in spite of these efforts, not every initial point of contact leads to a conversion. When that happens, content remarketing can improve on that ROI significantly.

What is Content Remarketing?
Not every person who consumes your content will be converted into a lead. Some will simply visit your site, but for whatever reason fail to answer your call to action. With content remarketing, you retarget these potential leads with relevant advertising. The idea is based on the concept of behavioral marketing where customers are based on actions they have previously taken online. Content remarketing is a valuable tool that you can use to impress customers you may not have reached on the first point of content. Here are some of the benefits of remarketing:

Boost awareness of your brand among members of your target audience.
Increase the power of your marketing budget.
Improve your ability to target audience members who have already shown an interest in your products.
Boost the conversion power of your content and landing pages.

What Does Content Remarketing Look Like?
How does content remarketing appear to your audience? Imagine that you search the internet for a specific type of jewelry. Later, you see advertisements for that exact jewelry on your social media feed, or as a banner ad on a different website. You might also see ads in the video content you watch. In many cases, these are created with the specific purpose of bringing you back to the site you visited earlier so that you can continue the conversion process.

How Does Content Remarketing Work?
Content remarketing allows you to boost engagement, and helps you get the most out of your content. It reminds users of your products, and motivates them to continue down the path to conversion. You reach out to them via social media, email marketing, PPC advertising, all based on their previous behavior when consuming your content.

Here are the steps involved in content remarketing:
A potential lead visits your website and reads/watches your content.
Your site uses a tracking cookie on that prospect’s browser session.
The potential customer exits your website before they convert.
The cookie remains active as the prospective customer surfs the internet, and displays ads promoting your company, its products, and services.
Ideally, the customer is drawn back to your site to complete the purchasing process.

Each time you retarget a potential customer with advertisements that have been specifically created for their interests, you create a new opportunity to improve the impression you have made. Even better, if you have a potential customer who is a bit ‘on the fence’ about making a purchase, remarketing can push them to go ahead and convert. You can also reach customers who were very close to converting previously.

Creating Remarketing Content
You can use remarketing as a means to drive customers back to existing landing pages or product pages. You may also redirect them to new or existing content. This, in particular, allows you to either make use of old content, or leverage new content. You can then add a conversion magnet or call to action to the bottom of that content to help drive your audience closer to converting.

Of course, if you are going to use content as part of your remarketing strategy, it’s going to have to be particularly powerful to be effective. Try some of the following tools to ensure your renewed content efforts are successful:
Canva: For adding great visuals to your content without graphic design expertise.
Wow Grade: A professional source of content writing and editing assistance.
Yoast: The ultimate in SEO and other content tools for your WordPress Site.
Hemingway: A great source for ensuring that your writing is reader friendly.
Studicus: Copywriting and editing assistance.

Your Content Remarketing Plan: Choosing Your Platforms
The first step in creating your remarketing plan is to select the platforms for your targeted advertising. Chances are, you’ll be using Google or Facebook as the base of your remarketing plan. This means you can retarget your audience through:
Gmail
YouTube
Android Apps
Search Results Advertisements
Display Network
Social Media

Clarifying Your Remarketing Goals
When you create your remarketing plan, you can focus your effort on one of three types of campaign:

Cart Abandonment Campaigns
In these campaigns, you use remarketing to reach out to customers who have abandoned the checkout process. Ideally, you will be able to attract them back to your site to continue with their purchase. Here, the tracking cookie can be placed on the checkout page. Later, the user will see advertising based on the purchase they almost made.

Content Retargeting Campaigns
When a potential customer visits a specific page on your site, you can use retargeting to direct them to additional content that could be interesting to them. For example, if they visit one of your product pages, you could use an advertisement to send them to a page that contains a product demonstration video.

Lead Renewal Campaigns
When a customer visits your landing page, but fails to convert, you can use retargeting to renew that potential lead with advertising that focuses on continuing to build confidence and trust.”

Edna Betters, a content marketing advisor at Trust my Paper says, “Once you know the type of campaign you plan on launching, you know what you want your end results to be. When enough customers take the desired action, you know that you have reached your goal.

At this point, you can also choose the pages on your site that will use remarketing cookies. Create the marketing, ad content. Build the pages to which you will direct your retargeted customers.

Understanding The Remarketing Process
If you have a Google Ads account, you can use remarketing. Fortunately, Google does an excellent job of making it relatively easy to create a remarketing campaign. You’ll find plenty of resources, and other information online to help you get started. Here is a great remarketing setup article written by Google. This comprehensive content will walk you through the technical steps of setting things up.

Another option for retargeting is using Facebook Pixel. You do this by installing Facebook Pixel, creating the pixel, and installing it on your site. You can then use this to target audiences on Facebook based on pages they visit on your site. You can also use Facebook tools to create custom audiences for your remarketing campaigns.

Final Thoughts
Retargeting is an exceptionally effective way to double down on your content marketing efforts. Use it to increase the ROI on your marketing efforts, and to ensure that interested customers keep their eyes on your brand.

Author Bio:
Melanie Sovann is a blogger and editor at BestEssay.education and GrabMyEssay. She is passionate about teaching small business owners effective marketing techniques that can be applied on a lean budget. In her spare time, she enjoys playing golf and traveling.

Looking to the Future: Preparing Your Business For Success or Failure


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According to statistics gathered by the US Small Business Administration, only about half of all small businesses survive past the five-year mark, while just about one-third will make it to their 10th anniversary. Those who fall behind can fail for a number of different reasons, but in many cases, a simple lack of preparation is to blame.

With the right planning, funding, and flexibility, your business can beat the odds and be one of those that succeed in the long run. So, in this article, we’ll go through how you can financially prepare your business for sustaining success or ably managing failure.

Preparing for Success
The first thing you have to do to make sure your business is prepared for success is to have a skilled finance manager with experience in business management within your team.

Aside from analyzing sales and cash flow, Chron shares that a skilled finance manager can help executives in making big financial decisions, while projecting future spending and earning. To enhance the key economic aspects of your business and monitor your business’ health, you should conduct regular analyses of financial ratios and statements with your finance manager. This will give your business a balanced financial structure that will enable you to map out your financial future, and grow with it.

This is very important because when your business is growing, it’s easy to think that everything is going well and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Those who aren’t mindful about the dynamics of their cash flow will fall into a trap, and may even fail to sustain the business’ growth even in the short-term. So, make regular projections based on accurate analyses with your finance manager, to make sure that you know how much money or credit you’ll need well before you have to start writing checks as your company grows.

Preparing for Failure
When it comes to business, you do not only plan or prepare for growth, you need also consider possible undesirable situations — such as sales falling flat compared to projections, unfortunate failures in your production floor, or even simply bad management. Only by doing this can you anticipate any challenges ahead and prepare for them financially.

When it comes to preparing for dire situations, this post entitled ‘Emergency Fund: What it is and How to Build One’ by Marcus points out that you should keep a fund for accidents and urgent crises separate from your regular accounts. Be sure that you have quick access to your emergency fund if (or when) you’ll ever need it to cushion an organizational fall. And when it comes to building the fund itself, you can save for it in small amounts over time, as we all know a little can go a long way.

When your business is met with financial problems, you’re not supposed to just immediately dip into your emergency fund or worse, give up and call it a day. As we’ve previously shared in our post on ‘How to Overcome Financial Problems’, there are several ways in which you could fund your company, such as through venture capital or bank loans.

Whether it is for the success or failure of your business, you should always prepare for all possible outcomes regardless of what’s expected. Doing so will enable you to respond more efficiently and effectively to whatever the future holds for your business and its finances.