There are around 1.95 billion websites on the internet. This means there are 1.95 billion online businesses out there who want the same thing as you: the attention of their customers.

The competition might not be direct but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. At the end of the day, the more time they spend watching movies on Netflix, the more time they are not shopping on Amazon or interacting with people on Instagram or Facebook, or interacting with your brand.

Perfect Your Online Presence

To be their first preference, or be in the top-of-mind awareness for a specific industry or category, maintaining a consistent and engaging online presence of your business is essential. But occupying premium space in your target audiences’ minds doesn’t have to be expensive or hard.

The key to making your online presence more effective is to be human. This makes your brand relatable, giving your target audience a chance to connect with your brand.

In addition to that, let’s explore some other effective ways you can strengthen your online presence in 2021.

6 Ways to Strengthen Online Presence of Your Business

1.    Optimize Website User Experience

Your website is your business’s first impression. And to make the right first impression, you will need to create an intuitive and rewarding experience for your visitors.

Start by removing unnecessary steps and elements that create friction in their overall experience. The simpler your website, the better the customer experience.

If you are still in the website designing and development phase, here’s an amazing website design cost estimator to help you create an appropriate budget.

Secondly, there’s nothing more boring and off-putting than a static website. So try adding interactive elements like videos, slides, quizzes, games, etc. But also make sure they are fun, add value to their experience, and create unnecessary friction for them. Such elements should complement your website’s main goal and shouldn’t drive your customers’ focus from the main goal.

Lastly, invest in tools that can help you create personalized experiences for your visitors. Netflix and Spotify are the kings of a personalized experience, as they recommend movies and songs, playlists to their viewers and listeners based on their past choices. This is a great way to make your customers feel special and heard.

Other simple and effective ways to optimize your website’s user experience:

• Providing easy-to-access customer support
• Optimizing CTAs based on past data
• Implement responsive web design
• Keep forms short and simple

2.    Make the Most of Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool offered by Google to help business owners manage their branded online presence. Optimizing your Google My Business listing can boost your local rankings, improve search engine engagement, and convert more customers.

The first step is to claim your business on GMB and add in the basic information like your business’ name, address, working hours, website link, phone numbers, email address, etc.

Once you are done with the basic information, work on the following sections:

• Question and answers – you can add them based on the past customer questions and feedback
• Product and service listings
• Posts – based on your industry, specific category, and target keywords
• Reviews – ask your loyal customers to leave a review of their experience with your brand

One of the main sections of GMB is the Business section which is a brief description of your offerings. Make sure the description is engaging, friendly, and has the target keywords. Also, keep the content simple and concise.

Lastly, keep adding quality photos of your product or office space to increase customer engagement.

3.    Data Protection

The more protection you provide, the stronger your customers’ trust becomes.

Data leaks, thefts, and hacks are happening quite frequently these days. As a result, businesses need to pay attention and prioritize making efforts to protect their customers’ data.

Here are a few ways you can get on top of protecting your customers’ data:

• Endpoint, email, and network protection to filter files containing spam and malware
• Conduct company-wide cybersecurity training sessions
• Secure the web gateway
• Have a data protection policy in effect
• Add encryption on servers to protect sensitive data

4.    Create Useful and Engaging Content

When we say content, we mean content in every form and shape—blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, etc.

Creating value-adding and engaging content goes a long way in building a good rapport with your customers. However, the key to successfully utilize the true potential of content is to be consistent with it. And the key to being consistent is to have a content plan in place. But make sure your content plan aligns with your business’ main goals.

Here are a few ways you can create original, engaging, and value-adding content for your customers:

• Tell a story, but make sure it has some useful takeaways, because they are going to spend 10-12mins of their lives reading your content, so make it worthwhile.
• Invest in creating evergreen content and then reuse it into graphics, Twitter threads, Instagram stories.
• Enable your followers on social media to create branded content for you by giving them assets like meme templates, reels, giveaways, and use the user-generated content to build trust among your audience.

5.    Engage in Real-time on Social Media

To engage with your followers on social media platforms, talk about what you know: your industry. Don’t just talk about your products/services; share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. For example, if you have a chain of gyms, then you can share your knowledge about nutrition, discipline, exercises, training, etc.

When you share your expertise, you are giving your audience a rock-solid reason to trust you. And for a cherry on top, you can showcase some of your best work through case studies, before/after posts, testimonials, etc.

After you’ve built a small group of loyal followers, you can host giveaways, making it easier for your loyal followers/promoters to promote your brand. You can also host Q&A sessions to answer FAQs and real-time questions about the products or your area of expertise.

One other great way of engaging with your target audience is to share/repost content from businesses with similar target audiences. Following the same example, a gym owner can repost content from dieticians, nutritionists, personal trainers, bodybuilders, etc. When you repost their content, they’ll mention your business which means their audience will engage with your account.

6.    Spend Wisely on Advertisement

There’s no way around paid advertisement anymore. After all the efforts improving user experience, social media engagement, and content marketing, you’ll still need to invest in paid advertising to reach your target audience with the right message, at the right time, with the right call to action for better conversions.

Quick tips to start with the paid advertisement:

• Create a checklist for paid advertisement
• Have a properly analyzed advertising keywords list for campaigns
• Test, analyze, optimize, and repeat for the best results

Quick tips to start with social media paid advertisement:

• Experiment with different forms of content, time frames, and audience
• Fine-tune your copies, schedules, and budget
• Always go to social media analytics for new ideas for campaigns and to analyze which kind of content works for your business

Pro Tip: Always have a predefined budget before running any paid campaign, which should be according to what you are willing to pay to acquire leads/customers.

Lastly, Stay in Touch

After doing all this hard work, you don’t want your customers to visit/shop with you only once. So, make sure to have an after-sales communication plan in place to keep them engaged with your business. It could be through email newsletters, app notifications (if you have an app), social media campaigns, offline advertising, feedback loop, etc.

Image Credit: anna tarazevich; pexels; thank you!

The post 6 Ways to Perfect the Online Presence of Your Business in 2021 appeared first on ReadWrite.

Brand management has always been a complicated concept, even for those who have had the chance to work on it themselves. Some reasons are its ever-evolving nature and complex tasks like defining organizational values, brand vision, and influencing customers’ perceptions of your brand.

It might seem an overwhelming aspect of marketing, but really, which isn’t? With brands overseeing and managing their brand’s voice and reputation round the clock on social media platforms, marketing has become the most crucial and hardest function of running a business.

That being said, strategic brand management can turn into a competitive advantage that can help your brand reach its new height.

What is Strategic Brand Management?

Strategic brand management can be defined as a brand strategy that supports your company’s goals and processes, from brand recognition to boost revenue. While crafting the brand strategy, make sure that there’s room for your brand to grow and evolve alongside your business.

If you are wondering what brand strategy is, then here it is. A brand strategy combines a few methods to define the uniqueness and personality of your brand, using which you can improve the quality of all your customer touchpoints and communications for a better brand image and selling power. In other words, it means providing a value-driven and positive experience to your customers whenever and wherever they interact and engage with your brand.

The success of a brand strategy lies in its ability to maintain consistency in the customer experiences across various platforms, from web pages to social media accounts to customer support.

Remember: Your brand strategy should be agile, beneficial for your brand, and add value to your brand’s overall perception.

Why is Brand Management Important?

• Firstly, brand management strengthens your selling power and improves your brand’s perception in the minds of your target audience.
• Because brand management revolves around providing positive customer experiences, it increases customer retention, loyalty, and the overall value of your brand.
• With brand management, you can communicate the uniqueness of your brand to your customers.
• Through the practice of brand management, you can understand your target audience better, which means your brand’s communication strategies and methods become more impactful than ever.
• Lastly, it increases your employees’ internal and external engagement, which makes them feel closer to your company, thereby reducing the overall attrition rate of your company.

The Art of Brand Management

Now that we’ve established a proper understanding of brand management and its importance, let’s explore the art that is brand management. Here we are going to explore the important actions that combinedly make the art of brand management.

1.    Positive brand perception

Many businesses operate under the wrong impression that brand management is limited to having a recognizable custom logo design, a catchy tagline, or a viral campaign. But it’s much more than that. It is the cumulation of every customer’s experience with your brand based on which they form a perception of your brand.

Now, it’s not quite possible to control your customers’ perception, but you can always influence them by means of creating positive experiences and associations with your brand.

To come across as a genuine and positive brand, you must:

• Always, always deliver on your promises
• Define, communicate, and behave with integrity
• Craft and deliver unique customer-centric experiences
• Invest in understanding your customers’ needs and deliver value accordingly
• Provide consistent multi-channel support
• Seek feedback from customers and work on them

2.    Brand positioning and value

Your brand’s positioning in the market should always be aligned with your brand’s values. Brand positioning is one of the most important aspects of the art of brand management which includes identifying the positioning of your brand and what you want to achieve. This stage of brand management will take time, effort, a lot of brainpower, and coffee.

The first step in identifying your current brand positioning is to research and understand the brand positioning of your competitors and industry market leaders and look for the differentiators. This will help you define and create a unique position for yourself in the market to resonate with your target audience.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to creating your brand positioning strategy:

• Understand your current brand positioning – Make use of surveys to understand your customers’ current perception of your brand.
• List down your direct and indirect competitors – In the beginning, you will compete with the direct competitors but sooner rather than later, you will have to position yourself uniquely against indirect competitors as well.
• Know your competitors – Try to understand who your competitors are, their offerings, their differentiators, etc.
• Look inside to know what makes your product/brand unique
• Define your positioning statement to communicate the unique value of your brand to your audience
• Analyze if your positioning statement works by gathering feedback from your customers
• Humanize your brand to establish an emotional connection with your customers
• Redefine your sales process to reinforce and highlight your brand differentiators
• Create, communicate, and deliver value
• Train your customer-facing employees on your brand’s values

3.    Reputation Management

Once you’ve defined and implemented your brand positioning and values, pay attention to your brand’s reputation.

Keep a close eye on what’s being said about your brand, who’s saying it, and where they are saying it. Media monitoring and social listening tools will ensure you know every conversation, mention of your brand. The chief aim behind constantly monitoring your brand’s reputation is to stay one step ahead. If you know what’s coming, you will be able to steer the conversation in the right direction; hopefully, a direction that doesn’t hurt your brand’s reputation.

The role of brand reputation management is to take ownership and accountability of your brand’s perception and dictate it according to your defined brand and organizational values.

Here are the top 5 best practices for effective brand reputation management:

• Focus on content marketing
• Invest time, resources, and efforts to improve overall customer satisfaction
• Actively use social listening tools to manage and revert to negative comments
• Personalize your customers’ interactions with your brand
• Quality online and search presence

Pro Tip: Centralize your brand’s assets, definitions, essentials, creatives, and more to keep your brand’s communication on point. Also, make sure all the digital assets are easily accessible by all the stakeholders.

4.    Brand performance and analysis

Once your brand management strategy is off-the-ground and active, start analyzing its performance and optimizing it for better impact. You can perform brand audits in-house or outsource them to an external agency based on the time and money you have.

An ideal brand audit should cover the main three areas:

• Internal branding – values, brand positioning, company culture, etc.
• External branding – advertising, marketing materials, PR, social media, website, content, etc.
• Customer experience – sales process, customer support – both online and offline

If you decide to do it in-house, here’s how you can go about auditing your brand:

• Start by creating a framework of the audit
• Center your brand audit around questioning your customers and getting feedback from them
• Dig deep into your web analytics
• Review your social data
• Review your sales excel sheets and CRM
• Evaluate your competitors and their brand management strategies using competitor analysis tools

Pro tip: While evaluating your brand management strategies, make sure the assets, brand’s voice, and customer experience are consistent throughout.

Lastly

Create a schedule for brand audits to keep your brand management strategies effective and impactful.

The more you pay attention to brand management, the greater return on investment you will get on your marketing budget.

Image Credit: from the author; thank you!

The post Strategic Brand Management: The Differentiator Between Good and Great Marketing Strategy appeared first on ReadWrite.

Business credit is the grease that keeps the wheels of a business enterprise moving. The fact that business enterprises rely on business loans from time to time is an obvious statement. Regardless of the scale or the diversity of a business — budding entrepreneurs running from pillar to post in search of seed capital or liquidity injection for their business enterprises are a common sight in business circles.

Challenges in Getting a Business Loan Approved

While getting a business loan application approved by a banker, angel investor, or a private equity (PE) fund has always been a tall order. It has become even more complicated in the last two decades in the aftermath of global economic crises. There has been the subprime crisis (2008), the Eurozone crisis (2011) and the lessons learned from the cases of fiscal profligacy in the PIIGS (Portugal, Iceland, Italy, Greece, and Spain).

Banks, private equity investors, angel investors, and lending institutions for business across the world have become even more cautious about approving loan applications due to a vast number of reasons.

Some of the significant macroeconomic challenges that have an impact on the non-approval of business loan applications are as follows:

• Stringent guidelines by regulatory agencies and federal banks
• Impact of non-performing assets (NPAs) on balance sheets of banks due to bad business loans
• Absence of a strong value proposition to be offered through the business
• Lack of a clear definition of the purpose of the business loan
• Absence of well-documented history on the corporate behavior of the firm
• Absence of demonstrated history of credit and payback by the firm
• A weak revenue model to support the payback of the credit
• Lack of the scope to build scale into the business model for expansion

How to Raise the Chances of Getting the Business Loan Application Approved

Define the Purpose of the Business Credit

First, define the core purpose of seeking business credit. It is of paramount importance that you, as an entrepreneur, be clear about the goals that you aim to achieve through the business credit that you are seeking.

• Do you want a working capital injection for your business to pay off salaries and wages?
• Do you want a loan to pay off existing debt?
• Do you want a business credit to expand your business?
• Do you want a line of credit to reach out to new geographies
• Do you want to diversify your business
• Do you want to embark on a capacity expansion through the establishment of new production units?
• Be very clear about the source of your journey and where do you want to end up?

Decide on the Capital Injection- Debt or Equity

Second, as an entrepreneur, explore the multiple modes of business credit that are in place these days.

• You do not always have to lean towards a bank to seek a capital injection for your business.
• There are other options of private equity (PE) funds
• Angel investors who are also sometimes referred to as venture capitalists (VCs)
• Microfinance institutions (MFIs).

You also have the option to explore capital injections through equity crowdfunding. Banks offer the traditional debt route, PEs and VCs offer an equity route. On the other hand equity crowdfunding is a mechanism that allows your business to lean on broad groups of investors that fund micro, small and medium enterprises in lieu of payback, profit or revenue sharing of sweat equity.

Update your Tax Records

Third, do not forget to be a socially responsible corporate citizen. At the grassroots level, this translates to compliance with regulation and governance norms as per the local laws. Tax compliance is one of the essential factors for micro, small, and medium businesses.

Bankers, PEs, VCs, and even crowdfunding platforms pay a great deal of attention to the details of the tax burden on your business and are particularly keen to study your tax records.

Check for outstanding tax burdens and liabilities and consider a clean tax statement to be a testimony to subsistence level checks before proceeding forward with further processing of your business loan application or liquidity injection that you are seeking.

Assess the Financial Risk Factor Objectively

Fourth, be sure of the financial risk that your business is capable of taking upon itself. Ask yourself where and how to draw the line? There is no substitute to sound financial risk management.

• How much of financial risk is considered to be conservative, and how should you recognize the red flags?
• Work on your financial risk modeling. Your risk modeling should ideally include the expected return on investment (RoI), the payback period of your business, and the net present value (NPV) of the assets of the firm.
• Further, work with an experienced financial risk analyst to assess the unforeseen risk factors that may delay the returns from your project.
• In short, as an entrepreneur, you should be aware of the farthest that you can stretch with the financial risk involved with the capital injection.
• Define the degree of affordable risk (DAR) to yourself first, and you should be in an excellent position to explain it to the bankers and creditors.

3Cs Matter: Character, Capability, and Credibility

Remember, bank managers and creditors, watch out for three things here:

• Character–The character here may refer to the value creation potential of the business seeking a capital injection.
• Capability–Capability here refers to the projected risk-returns trade-off faced by the business.
• Credibility– credibility refers to a combination of things, including brand value, the market capitalization of the firm, or the total valuation of the assets in possession of the firm.

Safeguard Your Intellectual Property Rights

One last thing before you pitch your application before a banker, PE firm, or angel investor. Your intellectual property rights are especially applicable to product based and concept selling businesses. If you are into a company that uses technology, data, or digital assets in any way.

It makes enormous good sense to think of your core competence and operational risks in terms of the VRIO model.

VRIO here refers to:

• value (V)
• rareness (R)
• non-imitability (I)
• organizational fit (O).

When you safeguard your intellectual property rights like trademarks, copyrights, and patents you have a very potent weapon to beat the competition in the market and create a solid basis for product differentiation and thus, a unique selling point for customers to lean on.

Having a unique selling point transforms the very nature of your business loan application. It gives you a legal safeguard, a USP to talk about and finally a perfect core competence to draw the attention of PEs and VCs and win their trust.

Conclusion

While this is a list of general guidelines for entrepreneurs seeking a capital injection for their business, more layers and sub-layers of analysis may be added to make your business loan application even better and precise.

One parting shot for entrepreneurs here is to focus not just on justifying why their business deserves a loan or an equity investment but to focus on how a small capital injection can multiply the value creation many times more and benefit investors, clients and employees through a profitable, predictable, sustainable and de-risked business model.

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Blockchain has become a hot topic of discussion these days as it has made its way into a number of industries. From finance to infrastructure, blockchain or distributed ledger has found interoperability in every sphere of work. Healthcare is another realm that has found a widespread implementation of the technology. This collaboration has changed the way patient healthcare data is shared across entities in the value chain. We are shaping healthcare ecosystems with blockchain.

Simplifying Blockchain

Blockchain technology at its core consist of three main components:

• Distributed network
• Digital transactions
• And stored ledger

In this distributed network of computers, a group of members or users can share health data, information, or scans etc. The sharing is basically classified as peer-to-peer transactions that are structured into a block that contains cryptographic hash. This digital information is shared onto a stored ledger which is open to all members of the network and yet ensures security.

Though the process sounds simple the main catch is that these shared ledgers of records and transactions can neither be deleted or edited without the prior consent of other peers in the network.

When a peer sends information to another peer over the network, the same is validated by every member of the group. The approved transaction then gets added on to the record of existing transactions.

How Blockchain Powers Healthcare.

The implications of blockchain in the realm of the healthcare industry are widespread. As there are a number of departments catering to different healthcare treatments within an integrated practice unit (IPU) such as dieticians, obstetrics. It becomes difficult to get access to all the information when needed.

To overcome the shortcomings, blockchain technology facilitates interoperability by sharing the data of different physicians. It has the power to connect all the fragmented systems to generate quick and better results similar to a distributed network of systems. For instance, patients with similar chronic conditions such as Chronic Gastritis are identified and doctors identify their treatment plans also referred to as IPUs.

Through the open ledger, smart contracts are created and treatment responsibilities are shared through distributed networks. Similarly, patients can collate their health data tracked over medical devices.

This collaboration enables unique opportunities in healthcare, and a secure and immutable way to share information.

Why Blockchain is the Solution.

For patients, their health database security and confidentiality are essential. However, as data is tangible, it can be accessed in bytes and bits that sometimes compromise its authenticity.

Data that is available on a computer can also be tweaked as any administrator who has access to the network or files can edit and corrupt the file. With blockchain, these shortcomings are eliminated.

• The biggest catch of blockchain is that it lacks a central administrator.
• Users have access and full control over their data.

With blockchain, the access to confidential patient’s data can be streamlined and this will eliminate duplication, errors and other discrepancies that may occur with traditional data storage.

The smart contracts application will be the need for intermediaries to manage contracts.

Moreover, the multiplicity of tests and clinical trials is significantly reduced as the test result that was earlier carried out by one clinic can be shared through the network to other practitioners

How Blockchain Fits with Healthcare.

Blockchain application will enhance the healthcare ecosystem as a whole. This is mainly by the elimination of third parties and middlemen’s. Moreover, a number of challenges which the industry faces such as fragmented data, security among others can be completely eliminated. The authentication controls of shared transactions lower the risk of data thefts and other frauds. Below table provides an insight into how blockchain will complement the healthcare industry.

Conclusion.

Considering the complexity of the healthcare sector, the usage of blockchain will be enormous.

Looking at the huge potential that blockchain has, it will be the next big innovation that will transform the sector. Healthcare providers need to fully roll out the technology to achieve synergies and optimize service delivery.

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