All posts by Miley

Using videos in digital marketing – 9 best ways!

Miley on July 25, 2018

Videos are a must in your digital marketing strategy because videos are versatile, and also one of the most profitable marketing tools of today! Over the past decade, there has been a radical shift from textual information to digital information. Won’t you agree? As a result of this, every business is developing a digital marketing strategy to clamour their audience’s attention. The mothership of them all are the videos without a doubt. Videos have embraced the digital age and established themselves to be the present and future of digital marketing. By using videos in your digital marketing strategy, you are choosing the right way to promote your business, build brand awareness, educate your audience while attracting them towards your business. Regardless of the type of business you own, a video is a must in your digital marketing landscape, since there’s nothing better to nail your marketing campaign. Now that you know why you need a video, and before you overflow with ideas for the same, check out the different ways to use videos and make the right choice for your business’s digital marketing strategy.

1. Commercial Videos

Is gaining the attention of a mass audience one of your objectives? But maybe you have only a little time. That’s okay! Commercial videos are less than 30 seconds, simple videos with the ability to create a huge impact amongst the viewers, in a short timespan. Best to be advertised on television, social media platforms, video hosting platforms or public events, creating a commercial video as a part of your digital marketing will help in better visibility, as well as a mass audience engagement. For that reason, they might cost you a fortune but is worth every money you spend. No matter what your business is, you’ve got the budget? Then, your digital marketing team needs to invest in a commercial video!

2. Animated Explainer Videos

While saying that there is no limit to what you can animate, as a matter of fact, it is ultimately the truth. Therefore, by including an animated explainer video in your marketing strategy, your business can pop up to great heights. There are no limits to locations, characters or objects in an animated explainer video. No matter how complex your business idea is, animated explainer videos can convey it as simple as possible. Using characters, objects or maybe a combination of these, use these videos in your digital marketing strategy for abstract and conceptual topics such as Cryptocurrency. They can be used literally by anybody from startups, B2B, B2C, mobile apps, software etc.

3. Tutorial Videos

Seems like you have a great product or service with some amazing features for its users. Do you wish to clarify the proper functioning of your product or service? In that case, including a tutorial video in your digital marketing using real product screens! Tutorial videos are instructional videos guiding your customers through the various steps to use your product or service. Including them in your digital marketing will make it easier for the users to follow, since they are engaging and educational at the same time. They are perfect to inform new customers in a business, to inform existing users about an update, while launching a new feature, in your FAQ page, as email responses, in sales demos, for training purposes of new employees and so on.

4. Live Action Explainer Videos

Locations, cast, properties, set, wardrobe! Does all that sound exciting? Well, seems like your interest lies in live action explainer videos. Live action explainer videos use real places and people to shoot the video. Using such a video in your digital marketing is helpful since, people can connect with other people, and it helps in humanizing a brand. Also, if you have a hardware product to showcase or require a human body talking to your audience, including them in your marketing idea would be great. They can be uploaded on Youtube, social media platforms, your website’s homepage etc.

5. Testimonial Videos

Letting your existing clients communicate with other clients through a video is a great digital marketing strategy. Testimonial videos are what you need to make for this. In testimonial videos, you can find real clients speaking about your business, as well as their experience of working with you. There are also case study videos used to outline a business’s effectiveness, thereby elaborating your project. It gives an idea of the challenges faced, the process and the end result of that project. Using them in your digital marketing will create a positive influence on the buying behaviour of your clients. You can incorporate them in your newsletters, blog, about us page, website landing page, social media etc.

6. Company Story Videos

Have fun at work, create an enthusiastic team and an envious work culture. Also, show this to your prospective customers. But how? Through company story videos! Company story videos are short videos to be used in your marketing, which serves the purpose of taking your clients through a stroll of the founders, employees, executives or any other person working in your organization. They show the ambience of work, with people speaking about your business thereby creating loyalty, personal connection and trust with your business. Therefore, these videos should be used in the consideration phase of the purchase funnel. Company story videos can be used in newsletters, about us page of your website, etc.

7. Branded Content

Suppose you could make a business video that influences individuals by creating a desire to see the video, as opposed to compelling them to see it. Wouldn’t that be great? That is what branded content can do in your marketing strategy. These videos barely mention the company, but the entire focus is laid on the targeted audience. These videos are attractive, engaging and impactful without a moment’s delay, therefore influencing your clients to share it all by their own will. They create audience engagement overselling the brand, hence being perfect for building a mindfulness about your business, item or service. They can be hosted on social media platforms, video hosting websites and on television.

8. Retention Videos

Are you facing huge competition in the market? Is it difficult to retain your existing customers and maintain their loyalty to your brand? That’s where you should use retention videos. Retention videos are indeed essential to engage your existing customers, connect with them and maintain their interest in your business. You can use a platform such as TikTok to create concise and compelling content for your followers, that will capture and hold the viewers attention. It’s worth taking a look at this your complete guide to buying TikTok followers on Twicsy, to create an established platform to post your content on. This type of marketing is helpful in making your customers keep coming back. Creating retention videos will ensure that you don’t lose them, while also increasing their relationship with your business. They can be either a video answering their queries, a festival greeting, a thank you video, a skit, or videos about customer updates etc.

9. Live Videos

The camera is in your pocket and you are celebrating a year of your business’s success. What are you waiting for? Take your mobile out and go live on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Live videos are nothing but videos that are shot and broadcasted at the same time, thereby helpful in connecting with your users and prospective clients in real time. These videos are an epitome of who you originally are, what your organization looks like etc. Users can shoot any questions and you can instantly send them replies or reactions. Awesome isn’t it? Live videos are a must have in your marketing strategy because they can create a rational bond with the customers, increasing their trust factor due to unfiltered content offered. Summing up, above were the different ways in which you can incorporate video into your digital marketing strategy, and shoot up to marketing heights. These video types are undoubtedly the best in town to get your marketing grip upright!

Development

Developing artificial intelligence apps using python

Miley on July 21, 2018

The IT world offers numerous highly utilizable options of programming languages for your next project. Every development environment comes with a specific set of advantages and disadvantages which are best realized reading reviews across the Internet. The whole world will tell you how and why programming language is good or bad, but you will not find some real words to act over for your next AI project. Among all the programming languages offered for a project like Lisbon, Java, C hash and many more, brightness turned out to be a real potential player to host your next big AI project. It is true that the choice if you do it will be influenced by many factors like the availability of human resources similar to that language, libraries and the overall, is of coding in that language.

This highly informative, genuine blog post brings you all the compelling reasons to choose Python software development.

Being a company in the IT ecosystem is a common sight where developers spend the day in and day out working out custom algorithms and the overall functioning blocks of code to give birth to an overall AI solution. Python is easy to code language and reduces the lines of code by over 80%. It becomes a cakewalk to make new AI systems.

Python as the AI enabler

Another compelling reason to choose python to be your next language for the right solutions is the proactive contributing community which gives an enormous number of open source libraries which are mostly built-in or easily accessible. Write an offer some super useful libraries like my brain, sci-fi, and Mumbai for different kinds of uses and approaches to words your next AI solution.

Support is smartly blended with all the pies in this product which are available through the help of the great buyers in the community. In general, it is not something complicated to rule out complex products with huge functionalities that provide assistance and support for all of them is an enormous task. Python encourages you to make it your next solution development language with the colossal community willing to help the programmers at every stage of development.

YouTube link: – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsAVf3fn3yM

Cross-platform ability generally brings jabber to our mind. Python is another language which allows you to make applications which are easy to run on any platform just with a simple tweaking of the code. This not only helps your AI solution to reach a large number of users but also reduces the workload of your developer’s manifolds.

Why Python against the Sea of Others?

If you build your solution in any other language like LISP or C sharp, the human resources will take a massive chunk of your budget. Moreover, talent acquisition will create a deep hole in your pocket in the initial phase.

R is considered to be the go-to language for all kinds of data analysis and management purposes. But Python has dedicated libraries which will help you build projects with utmost ease. Most of the AI projects involve data cleaning, and then the same data is used for manipulations and fed into the algorithms for the mathematical which procedure is like the nodes of a neural network. All this can be done with fantastic ease and lesser time material cost.

These are some of the most compelling reasons to choose python as your next AI solution development language. Unlock the real potential of AI with the key of python in coming years.

Development Insights SaaS

Answered: Your Most Burning Questions About Salesforce

Miley on July 20, 2018

Whether you are looking for a Salesforce app to use in a business operation or you want to make a position in the Salesforce world, you need to understand what Salesforce offers and what it does to help you win more customers. Being a pioneer in Salesforce, people, experienced or fresher, come to us with so many questions regarding the utility, features, and technicalities of Salesforce. Through this post, I have answered a few repetitive questions that Salesforce enthusiasts continuously ask us.

What are the benefits of Salesforce CRM?

The topmost benefits of Salesforce CRM are:

You get more opportunities to increase your sales
The use of the analytical approach to ensure customer acquisition.
Minimizing the cost to improve customer satisfaction.
The complete automation of repetitive tasks.
Upfront communication with improved efficiency

To unlock these benefits, you need to master the concepts and aspects of this CRM tool, which Salesforce training can help you achieve.

What are Salesforce’s custom objects?

Salesforce.com contains all enterprise-level data. There is a requirement for Junction Object, which has a master-detail relationship. This allows you to create a master-detail relationship between two objects and plug in a child object to a related list. You need to define these custom objects if you want to take the following steps.

Integrate records with custom objects.
Custom lists display the custom object data
Build a custom tab for a custom object.
Developing page layouts.
Developing a dashboard & report to evaluate custom object.
You can share the custom tab, app and object.

What are Governor Limits in Salesforce?

Governor Limits controls the volume of data and the number of records you can store in shared databases. This is because Salesforce is designed on the basis of multi-tenant architecture. Simply, Salesforce stores the data of multiple clients/ customers using a single database. To avoid the monopolization of shared resources, Salesforce is driving the concept of Governor Limits based on the Apex run-time engine. Whenever the Apex code goes beyond the limit, a run-time exception is what the expected governor issues that are not possible to handle. Therefore, being a Salesforce developer, stay cautious while developing your application. The governor Limits of Salesforce are:

Per-Transaction Apex Limits
Force.com Platform Apex Limits
Static Apex Limits
Size-Specific Apex Limits
Miscellaneous Apex Limits
Email Limits
Push Notification Limits

What can cause data loss in Salesforce?

Reasons responsible for Data loss in Salesforce are:

Changing date and time as well as data
Moving to currency, number, and percentage from other data types
Shifting from the multi-select picklist, checkbox, auto number to other types
Changing to multi-select picklist from any type rather than picklist
Moving to auto-number except for text
Taking advantage of text-area for e-mail, phone, URL, and text

What are the different dashboard components?

The different Dashboard components are: Chart: A graphical representation of data. Gauge: You can display a single value amongst custom values. Metric: You can show a sole key value – By clicking on a blank text field next to total and then entering the metric label straight into components. All metrics are correctly aligned in the console column. Table: Display report data in column form using the Table. Visual force-This helps generate custom component or showcase info not accessible to other sections. Custom S – component: It involves the content that runs or exhibits a browser like Excel file, Java applet, ActiveX Control and custom HTML web form.

Can you explain the details of Salesforce SaaS functionality?

The important features of Salesforce SaaS functionality are:

You get a pay-as-you-go framework that resonates well with all clientele.
You don’t need to bother about substructure management.
Retrieval of all requests via the internet.
Easy to integrate along with numerous applications.
Uncover newest features without any postponement.
High uptime and safety.
Excellent presentation for various operations.
Connect anywhere through mobile devices

If you know about CRM, you must have heard of Salesforce. It offers robust customer relationship management software, which performs real-time analytics by evaluating customers’ data. It has become a need of the hour to meet the requirement of the client end to end.

Development Insights

How Increasing Design Tolerance Can Cut Costs

Miley on July 17, 2018

Product development and design are essential for ensuring that you can actually produce and sell the products you make. Oftentimes, products are designed and produced in a way to maximize quality. In order to achieve that, tight tolerances are focused on during the development process. What exactly are tight tolerances in product development? Tolerances are variables in the design, usually concerning the dimensions of a specific product.

In layman’s terms, it’s a plus or minus here and there that are allowed in product design. Tolerances influence the overall design of the products, as well as its manufacturing and quality control. In some cases, tight tolerances are absolutely necessary to ensure that the product can perform appropriately. However, strictly leveraging tight tolerances isn’t mandatory in every case. What’s more, they will only increase the production costs. Therefore, here’s how increasing design tolerance can actually cut costs.

Determine the functionality of a product

The functionality of a product determines how it will be designed and produced. In some cases, tolerances of even a single decimal can mean the difference between a functioning product and a failed one. That is only the case if product functionality depends on tight tolerances. However, materials used in the manufacturing process also play a role in determining acceptable tolerances in product design. In other words, not every part of the product needs tight tolerances, but in most cases, the entire product is based on strict requirements.

For instance, a product with a certain number of components requires a tolerance of ±0.001 because there’s a specific way component must fit together. But, a separate part is also automatically specified using the same tolerances, even if the part does not interact with the others or may not need the same tolerances. That’s why it’s important to determine the functionality of the product and which component – if any – requires a tight tolerance to function.

Consult with a manufacturer

Creating a product design eventually comes down to tolerances that are numbers on paper. You may think that those tolerances are absolutely necessary, even if that’s not the case. Tolerances are influenced by the materials used in production, how they’re made during manufacturing and the sensitivity of product features to variations in design. That’s why it’s important to have an experienced manufacturer on board that can help you determine if there’s room to increase the design tolerance or not.

For example, if you’re developing a design for electrical components, you should consult with an electronics manufacturer. That way, a manufacturer can go over your design and help you determine the acceptable increases intolerances to help you cut costs. Electronics are produced by the IPC (Association Connecting Electronics Industries) standards which allow certain tolerances in product design. Your manufacturer will know how to best implement those tolerances, without compromising the product’s functionality and quality.

Understand the costs of tight tolerances

As mentioned before, product developers and designers focus on tight tolerances in order to ensure product quality. The reality is that tight tolerances do not always influence quality, but they are always expensive to implement. You need to consider these costs before insisting on tight tolerances. For example, tight tolerances require more precise tools and higher grade materials, which cost a lot more. The tighter the tolerance is, the more it will cost you. In addition, tight tolerances require more processing, which increases the costs of the machinery used and labour.

Moreover, you need to pay for a close inspection to determine whether the tolerances are within the acceptable range. What’s more, if you cannot implement tight tolerances on your own, you may need to outsource the process, which will cost you more. In the end, you end up paying for precision that may not be required. That’s why it’s important to actually determine if tight tolerances are mandatory for your products. If you don’t need such tolerances, you should take the opportunity to implement more appropriate variables and greatly reduce the costs of product development.

Don’t relax tolerances too much

In an effort to cut costs, increasing the design tolerance is quite beneficial. However, relaxing the tolerances too much involves certain risks. For example, the product components may not fit well together if tolerances are too extreme. In addition, your customers may disapprove of increased tolerances, if you haven’t consulted with them beforehand. Also, you may need to repeat the manufacturing process and redesign your products if you’re not careful with tolerances.

That will only skyrocket your costs. Instead of focusing on tight tolerances or relaxing them too much, you should focus on implementing quality assurance and tolerance analysis. That way, you’ll be able to determine exactly which variables are acceptable for your product design. In addition, you’ll know exactly where to apply strict tolerances and, of course, how much you can increase them to cut costs.

Product design is important for the manufacturing and quality of the products. However, ensuring product quality doesn’t always rely on implementing strictly tight tolerances. Tight tolerances are only required when there are specific needs and functionality requirements. Other than that, you can consider relaxing the product design tolerance and save yourself a lot of money during the development process.

About the author:

My name is Raul, editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can reach me out on Twitter.

Development SaaS

Top 3 Machine Learning trends in 2018

Miley on July 10, 2018

Machine Learning has been growing at an incredible pace in 2017. We’ve witnessed many breakthroughs such as AlphaGo beating the best world’s Go players, the comeback of evolution algorithms meta-learning, or WaveNet generating speech that mimics any human voice. Deep Learning research has been skyrocketing since 2012, and it’s not going to stop. Carlos Perez – Co-Founder of Intuition Machine – predicts that the number of research papers related to Deep Learning will triple or even quadruple in 2018!

The beginning of the third quarter of 2018 seems like a good time to take a closer look at the top Machine Learning trends in 2018.

Generative Models

One of the core goals for AI is to understand the world as a human does. In order to understand the world, one is required to build meaningful representations of abstract concepts. In particular, generative models are very good at this task. There’s nice intuition behind this taken from Richard Feynman who said:

What I cannot create, I do not understand

Since their introduction in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are probably the hottest topic in unsupervised learning research, along with Variational AutoEncoders. A GAN is a generative machine learning model that consists of two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. During training, the generator tries to generate realistic samples, while the discriminator needs to determine whether they’re fake or real. As the training proceeds, both the generator and the discriminator get better at their tasks. In the end, the generator is capable of generating data that looks like the real thing. GANs have a lot of interesting applications, such as an image to image translation, or improving the quality of low-resolution CT scans.

The classic problem with GANs is that they are really good at generating synthetic images in a bunch of different domains, but they struggle to model aspects of images that require the understanding of the whole, like getting the number of animal legs right.

Recently the father of GANs, Ian Goodfellow, has published a work on Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks (SAGAN). Introducing a self-attention module to the generator resulted in generating images in which fine details at every location are carefully coordinated with fine details in distant parts of the image.

There are already almost 4000 papers on Google scholar related to GANs this year, and there’s much more to come!

Interpretability

Many machine learning models, for example, Deep Neural Networks, are considered to be black boxes. However, the typical end-user of machine learning based system prefers solutions that are interpretable and understandable. For example, you may ask yourself if you would trust a neural network diagnosing cancer without explaining its reasoning. Would you choose an AI doctor with 85% accuracy that can explain its reasoning or an AI doctor with 90% accuracy that cannot?

Interpretability of machine learning models seems to be crucial for applications in healthcare or law. Last but not least, machine learning engineers benefit a lot from interpretable models, as it’s much easier to validate and improve them.

Again, we can borrow an intuition from Richard Feynman who said:

If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

We can notice an increasing amount of research in the area of explaining machine learning models. One may distinguish model-agnostic methods and model-specific methods for explaining machine learning models. For example, LIME is a simple technique that uses local linear approximation via K-Lasso regression to provide model-agnostic explanations. You can find a Python implementation of LIME on GitHub. There are a lot of techniques for producing visual explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks, such as saliency maps. If you’re interested, I strongly recommend this compiled list of resources on interpretability by Michał Łopuszyński.

Edge Computing

The Internet of Things is going to revolutionize our world. All of these devices, such as mobile phones, beacons or Raspberry Pis, are able to provide tons of data. However, IoT alone is not smart technology. On the other hand, machine learning is fueled by data. These incentives are crucial for machine learning meeting edge computing.

There are several advantages for running machine learning applications on edge devices. Firstly, we can highly reduce latency when communication with the cloud is not required. It’s possible because of several reasons, such as hardware improvements, software improvements, and last but not least – compact deep learning architectures without losing a lot on accuracy (MobileNet v2). For example, MobileNet’s forward pass only takes about 20 milliseconds on the newest iPhones.

One cannot omit the importance of the existence and development of frameworks such as CoreML and TensorflowLite. Currently, it’s very easy to implement, train and evaluate a model in one of Python’s Deep Learning libraries and latter deploy it on an Android device or an iPhone.

Privacy has always been an important concern on the Internet, and it seems that this year this is truer than ever. Machine Learning algorithms cannot be trained without data. However, if you train a machine learning model on an edge device, your data doesn’t need to leave it.

And last but not least, since Deep Gradient Compression has been introduced at ICLR 2018, distributed training on many edge devices seems to be possible on 1Gbps commodity Ethernet.

Guest post by Mateusz Opala, Machine Learning Tech Lead at Netguru

SaaS

Measures that determine the success of CRM performance – The screw gauge for KPIs

Miley on July 6, 2018

Peter Drucker rightly said, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! Nowadays more and more organizations are increasingly focusing on quantifying the CRM performance to enhance the level of customer experiences and to better handle organizational data. CRM indeed provides a significant return on investment. However many companies fail to quantify it. This is where the CRM software with its analytics engine can help measure performance so that your business does not land on the unpaved runway!

So, how does one measure CRM performance? Don’t worry! Let’s slice through the royal cake.

CRM performance can be measured through balanced scorecards, value driver analysis, customer knowledge management and ROIs. It gets quite technical from here! I feel you. I will try my best to simplify it.

Balanced scorecards!

The balanced scorecard was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It is one of the foremost measurement tool used by highly successful management firms to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the firm. Robert and David analyzed many successful businesses and found out that all those successful businesses had one thing in common. They had a clear vision and strategy aligned with key areas such as finance, customer service and internal operations.

The balanced scorecards allow decision makers to view businesses from 4 different aspects.

They are:

How businesses view stakeholders in terms of financial aspects?

Are the businesses providing value from a customers’ point of view?

From an internal process point of view,

Are the business operations aligned with the company goals and values?

And finally from a learning and growth perspective,

Is the company providing the right training for its employees?

These aspects create a roadmap for analyzing and understanding smaller objectives within the larger framework.

As the famous Occam’s razor principle states “the simpler one is usually better.” So, the balanced scorecard helps businesses to focus on smaller things so more can be achieved!

In case you were wondering, this is the secret formula for businesses.

Value driver analysis

This is the second layer of the royal cake! The concept of value driver analysis was developed by DuPont several years ago. This is the extension of the infamous money flow analysis which allows companies to take more informed decisions thereby improving their day to day operations.

This hits you hard on the face!

Yes. Literally speaking, this method helps enterprises understand the value of a project. The value may have a strong impact on the organization’s finance or it may create a lasting impression on the society. The variables are usually controlled by the project management team who create a “driver tree’’ to map out the major drivers of value.

For example, for a stadium construction project, the seating capacity can be a major point of focus. The key value drivers for the seating capacity may include public transport, location, and ticket prices.

Customer Knowledge Management

It refers to the mechanisms and procedures used by the company to record, quantify, categorize and analyze data about its customers. This enhances organization’s sales processes. The data may be related to customers’ previous transactions, feedbacks, demographics and other miscellaneous personal information’s.

All data is stored in a single database!

Through customer knowledge management, customer experiences can be taken to a whole new level by minor tweaks or by fixing any loopholes in the business operations.

ROI

This is the icing on the cake for organizations trying to measure performance. Technically speaking, ROI is defined as the profit divided by the stock or funds invested. ROI is generally expressed in terms of percentage. Calculating ROI usually requires an incubation period of six months or more after the crucial data has been gathered from various sources. ROI analysis can drastically improve organizations performance and help achieve greater success.

CRM software can help with all the analytics and can act as a screw gauge for KPIs. CRM software would have a Business Intelligence engine which would efficiently handle all the analytics. It can also act as a database for customer knowledge management.

The report engine would also allow one to view and generate multiple reports for further statistical analysis that would help give your business a boost!

Indeed! CRM software is a must for any industry for analyzing the measures that would determine the organization’s CRM performance.

Guest Post by:
Kapture CRM

Insights

The IRS’ View on Bitcoin Roth IRA’s

Miley on July 5, 2018

Bitcoin was developed in 2009, which means it is not even 10 years old yet. The result of this is that financial experts are not making any statements with certainty on it yet because it is impossible to draw real conclusions in such a short period of time. This country is, in fact, one of the only ones in the world that has issued formal guidelines on cryptocurrencies as an investment class. Knowing the IRS’ view on bitcoin roth IRA’s is very important if you were hoping to invest in one.

How the IRS Views Bitcoin Roth IRA’s

The IRS made an official statement in March 2014 outlining that dates are cryptocurrencies as a type of commodity when calculating taxation. This means it processes Bitcoin in the same way as stocks and bonds. The IRS declared that cryptocurrencies are a type of property, which means that investment in them is possible but only when overseen by a custodian so that regulations are complied with.

Historic Lee, custodians would only accept mainstream assets in an IRA. This includes certificates of deposits, mutual funds, bonds, and stocks. Hence, if you do wish to invest in a cryptocurrency, you will have to choose a self-directed option. You do have the option of choosing between a traditional IRA, whereby you pay taxes on the eventual withdrawals, or a Roth IRA, where buy you pay taxes on the initial deposits.

Image via Pixabay

A bitcoin Roth IRA is fully self-directed. This means you decide when to buy, sell, and hold bitcoins. You can also purchase dedicated cryptocurrency fund shares. If you want to invest directly in cryptocurrency, you will effectively become a Forex Trader with the difference being that your currency is not a mainstream one. If, on the other hand, you decide to invest in fund shares, you will delegate forex knowledge to that fund instead. Hence, you need to weigh up whether you have more confidence in your own skills or whether you have more confidence in the skills of a shared fund. Again, because bitcoin is so new, it can be quite difficult to determine whether or not someone truly does have the required experience to properly invest in this currency, but then the same would go for you personally.

Whatever decisions you make, you will have to open a bitcoin wallet. This is not a physical wallet but rather an application on which your digital signature, also known as private keys, are stored. Those keys are required in order for you to move coins between others on the public ledger, which is the blockchain. Those private keys are incredibly valuable because of the anonymity of the blockchain. It is impossible to determine who is accessing the chain so if you share your private key with someone else, for instance through loss or theft, they will be able to remove all your bitcoin and you will never be able to get them back. Do be careful with your private key, therefore!

Martech

Marketing tech: how to build and manage your reputation as a newbie entrepreneur

Miley on July 4, 2018

Your brand or company is an extension of your work ethic. Entrepreneurs all over the world toil endlessly to give birth to an idea that was formed in their minds. The Disney universe is an extension of Walt Disney’s imagination, and Ali Express came into being because of Jack Ma’s life story.

When you come up with a revolutionary idea, the first thing you face is harsh criticism. We are creatures of habit, so our brain negates the ideas that move us away from our comfort zone. Once we beat this habit, something beautiful and meaningful comes into existence.

As an owner of a new enterprise, you have to wear many hats at once. You may or may not be comfortable in building your personal brand, but it is crucial to start working on it. Personal branding bridges the gap between your personal and professional life. When you bring value to the business environment, people immediately start taking you seriously.

Martha Stewart and personal branding:

Let’s take the example of the housekeeping queen that is Martha Stewart. This remarkable lady built a whole brand around her name, and until today we see Martha Stewart’s brand as a product of her creativity and hard work.

There are so many things you can do the ‘Martha Stewart way.’ Be it weddings or crafts; this person created a brand around things she was insanely good at. I would rather choose a recipe from Martha Stewart’s cookbook, rather than believing in anything on the internet.

Creating an experience around your brand is essential. If you are a true professional at what you do, there is a way to project that positive image that impresses people. Stewart started her lifestyle business from catering, and slowly escalated to the top by writing books about it. She is one of the most trusted lifestyle influencers in America because of her unique sense of style.

Once you have kicked off with the business, work on your brand and make sure you keep your personality secure from habits or things that can tarnish the reputation of your company.

Personal website:

It doesn’t matter if your professional venture is a few years old or a few weeks old, you have to invest in a website. Personal websites are like the internet real estate of your own brand. People visit your site to learn more about you and your work that led to the creation of a company. Successful entrepreneurs like Seth Godin are famous for their quirky blogs which work as a marketing medium for little or no cost.

Don’t underestimate the potential of a personal website or blog. However, don’t do it just because the cool people are doing it. You must be invested in this affair and reach out to your audience regularly to collect feedback.

For B2B causes, a personal website becomes your knight in the shining armour. People look up to you for news, professional info, and future investment opportunities. You can craft a unique digital narrative simply by crafting a website that depicts the best version of you as an entrepreneur.

Here are some vital things to have in observance when creating a personal website:

URL: your website should contain your name in the URL. For example, rickbennet.com looks like a trustworthy site owned by Rick Bennet, the Moreover, the site will turn up first when people search for you on the internet
About page: this is where you should put all the right info. Investors and current vendors will visit the about page to know more about you and your work
Add an active page that can be a blog, a news section or a press section. It gives an impression that you are regularly in the news
Include a call to action like a sign-up form for your newsletter. The newsletter is a great marketing tactic for entrepreneurs because the email has more chances of getting noticed by people, compared to a time-bound social media post
Add an active phone number and email ID so people can contact you easily. Don’t make it difficult for people to reach you

Provide value:

If you are dwelling in a saturated market, people may perceive you as just another entrepreneur. If you work hard to provide value to the audience, they may be able to distinguish between you and the rest, giving you a competitive edge.

‘next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.’ – John D. Rockefeller

Helpful content, positive marketing strategies, sales cycle, paying attention to your customers and building a sustainable brand are all ways in which you provide value to your audience. If you are a newbie in your field, start by researching your target audience and the message, then the content and execution will flow naturally.

Write more “how to’’ posts and refrain from calling out your competitors and highlighting what they are doing wrong. Whatever you do, stay humble to the core and maintain the monotony in your business messages.

As an owner of a new business, if these tips seem overwhelming to you, you can always hire a Contact Manager who can do this job for you. Contact Managers help you flourish while maintaining your positive image in front of the business fraternity.

If you’re new in the business game, then you may also contact them to learn more about various strategies and learn about things such as sales cycle definition and other critical concepts that will help you in understanding how you must successfully proceed forward with your business

Digital PR:

A Contact Manager will also assist you in managing your PR. If you are doing good work, you shouldn’t be the only one talking about it. Other people should talk about it as well. That’s where digital PR comes in with utilizing advanced technologies. Guest posts, leadership articles, lectures, and conferences are great platforms to spread your valuable insights to the world and get some credibility built around your business.

If you are a regular contributor to a publication, your author profile will rank higher than others, earning you valuable links back to your site. Regarding other mediums, you should maintain synonymity around your digital profile, and people should know about the decent things you have done in the industry.

Do you have a tip to help newbie entrepreneurs on this long and tedious journey? Tell us in the comments section below.

Author Bio

Andrea Bell is a blogger by choice. She loves to discover the world around her. She likes to share her discoveries, experiences and express herself through her blogs.

Find her on Twitter:@IM_AndreaBell

Development Insights

How to Improve Your Customer Help

Miley on June 28, 2018

The customers’ journey is an important thing to keep track of in today’s market. Customers who are happy with their journey with your brand are more loyal – and more likely to make future purchases than those who aren’t. You also have the ability to build better relationships with the customers through a positive customer experience.

Naturally, the customers’ journey doesn’t stop when they make a purchase. Offering good customer support and aftersales services is also an important thing to do. To improve customer support, here are some of the strategies you can implement right away.

Keep Track of Support Requests

One of the worst things you can do when providing customer support is not keeping track of customers’ requests properly. This usually leads to the customers having to explain their issues again, which is extremely annoying for them.

A simple IT solution is all you need to manage customer requests better. A help desk software is a great foundation and will lead to better – and more efficient – customer support. The help desk software then acts as a way to manage your customer support efforts.

The IT industry has used help desk software to provide invaluable services to their customers. Today, other industries are using the same approach to deliver the same level of user experience across their customer base.

Service-Minded Employees

The next challenge to tackle is employee development. You can’t expect to offer good customer support without employees who are serious about offering the best customer service. Training and development programs are how you reconfigure employees to have a more service-oriented mindset.

You can start by strengthening the customer service skills of key employees. The most important skills to develop are empathy and patience, good product knowledge, the ability to mitigate customers’ complaints intelligently, and good worth ethic in general.

These skills can be further supported by the good understanding of customer touchpoints and how every part of the customers’ experience can be improved. Even bad customer experience is an opportunity; through good customer service, those disappointed customers can become your most loyal ambassadors.

Focus on Interactions

The incredible solutions you deliver are important, but how you deliver them is even more important. You want to make sure that the good aftersales experience you provide is the experience the customers see and feel too.

The way to do this is by ensuring customer support is delivered in a timely and pleasant manner. You can establish policies to allow the customer support executives or officers to do just that while staying within the boundaries of SOPs.

The way executives interact with the customers’ matters too. Offer a more personalized approach, listen to what the customers really want, and don’t be afraid to admit mistakes. Admitting your mistake even before customers launch their complaints is a powerful way to ensure that the customers always have a great customer experience.

Combined, these strategies will substantially improve customer support and the overall customer journey. Add sincerity to the mix, and you have the perfect recipe for offering stunning aftersales service that keeps customers coming back for more.

Development Insights

Why You Should Invest in a Digital Kanban Board

Miley on June 28, 2018

Digital Kanban boards are taking the tech world by storm as the software helps teams to prioritise tasks and improve efficiency in the workplace. Kanban might have started off as a physical board, but the digital version of the software is becoming very popular and it is something that you should consider investing in if you want to improve how your team works. In this article, we are going to take you through some of the reasons why you should invest in a digital Kanban board and the benefits that this piece of tech can bring to you. Keep reading if you’d like to hear more about this.

What Is Kanban Software?

Kanban software comes in many forms with many different companies giving their own take on this sort of organisational structure. With Kanban software, you input tasks onto the board when they first are confirmed. From here, tasks move across the board depending on their level of completion. This means that tasks can be prioritised, and staff efficiency levels can be monitored. Make sure to learn more about Kanban software before you invest in this piece of technology to ensure that it is right for you. You can learn all you need to know by reading Kanbanize’s guide “Kanban Software: Explore the Opportunities“.

Easy to Use

With an online Kanban board, you can create it to work for the type of project that you are completing. Every team is different and so the fact that this type of system is so easy to use makes a huge difference. When you first download the software, you can choose the type of layout that you want, and you’ll find it really easy to add new cards and move them along the board when you need to. This type of technology is a lot easier to use than a physical board that will require you have to write on cards or print them out. With an online Kanban board, you can edit the cards in a matter of seconds.

Great for Teamwork

If you have a large team then you will love this benefit of using an online Kanban board. When you put the different tasks on the board, your whole team can see it and they can grab a task and get it done. You don’t need to worry about things slipping through the cracks as Kanban doesn’t allow for this. If you invest in this software, you won’t need to inform your team of what they need to do and when it needs to be done by because they’ll already know. You’ll save yourself time on having meetings and sending out emails and you’ll be able to get your work done more quickly.

Remote Workers

One of the best things about Kanban software is that it can be used by any member of the team no matter where they are. As long as they have access to the software on their computer or their mobile phone app, they can view the board online and get started. This works really well if you have remote workers or you don’t have the main office. You could also consider getting rid of your office and having your staff work from home. They’ll be able to stay connected using the Kanban board online and you can still get your work done effectively.

Improve Efficiency

If your team struggle with getting things done on time, you’ll find that having an online Kanban board can totally change the way they work. The system works well to improve efficiency and you’ll be able to identify the weak points in the company. Perhaps someone is not getting as much work done as you’d like, maybe you could use this information to try them on another task or analyse what they did well. Making use of a Kanban board can really help you to understand how your team works and you’ll be able to get your projects done on time.

Reasonably Priced

When it comes to Kanban software, you don’t even need to fork out a lot of money to get help with your business. This piece of tech is reasonably priced and if you find a good one, you might even get a free trial to see if you could really benefit from this type of software. Don’t be afraid to have a look around at what is available online in order to really improve how your businesses flow.

Final Thoughts

If you are thinking about investing in Kanban software, then you’ll find that it is actually a really good idea. There are a lot of benefits and you will see your business start to shine as you improve the way in which your team works. The systems are easy to use, and you’ll get to grips with them reasonably fast so make sure to try it now.