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Category: financial strategies

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financial strategies

Five Customer Success Metrics That Reveal The True Health Of A Business

The success of any business venture depends on two factors: the goals and metrics for defining that success. One of the goals is customer success, which starts with understanding why and how customer success is critical for growth.

Customer success goals might be straightforward, but the real deal lies in metrics. For entrepreneurs already on top of one or more of these CS metrics, monitoring business success will be easy.

Here are five customer-focused metrics that reflect the performance and true health of a business:

Customer Loyalty

Once the business gets off the ground and starts attracting clients, loyalty is arguably one of the most important objectives to focus on. Customer loyalty is reflected in the retention rate. Tracking retention rate will indicate the number of customers that consistently use a company’s product or service over a specified period and—in the case of merchandise—repeat purchases.

The actual number of loyal customers can be calculated with this formula: Retention Rate = [Number of customers at the end of a specified period] – [Number of new customers in the period] ÷ [Number of customers at the start of the period] x 100.

In other words, the retention Rate is the number of retained customers divided by the number of customers at the start of the period x 100. The last step will give you the percentage, which you can use to easily track improvement.

Net Retention Rate And Average Rate Per Customer

Closely related to customer loyalty is the net retention rate. While customer loyalty measures the number of clients that stay with the company, the net retention rate tells of their purchasing power.

Customer loyalty is an excellent foundational customer success metric for a new business to track. However, net retention must be considered down the line as it is more comprehensive. For instance, net retention will tell you how many customers have upgraded or downgraded their product use. These factors can indicate when a customer is about to stop using a product.

In addition to the net retention rate, the average rate per customer speaks of the company’s customer value. While the number of customers matter, one business may have high-value customers while another has low-value customers. You want to be in the former category. To gauge the average customer value of the business, divide the total revenue collected from customers by the total number of customers.

Churn Rate

The churn rate is another success indicator when it comes to customers. Simply put, churn rate is the flip side of customer loyalty, showing the number of clients a business has lost over time.

In SaaS, the churn rate is the number of people unsubscribing from the product, considering product or service satisfaction generally drives the churn rate.

Notably, a high churn rate is a critical telltale sign that the business may not be providing value or the retention strategies are not working. Further, these retention strategies may include activities along the customer journey, such as onboarding, customer support and promotions.

As with average rate per customer, churn rate is another excellent way to determine the value each customer brings, helping you to assess the difference between losing a client paying $200 and one paying $1,000.

To get the churn rate, use this formula: Churn Rate = [Number of lost customers] ÷ [Total number of customers at the start of the period] x 100.

Is there an acceptable churn rate? All businesses lose customers at some point, even the most popular and robust ones. The big question is how many losses can you incur before you enter the red zone. According to Hubspot, an acceptable churn rate is below 8%.

User Statistics

User statistics or analytics indicate customer success in using the product or service. A business can determine its user cohorts (i.e., groups of users with shared traits) by analyzing the user data inside the website or product.

Analytics show the company’s health at a finer scale by revealing how customers adopt, interact and engage with the key product features or, in the case of goods, the types and categories of goods. Entrepreneurs using tools like customer relationship management technology understand how vital this metric is to the growth of the business and customer success in the long term.

Customer 360: Tying It All Together

At the core of customer success is the customer. That’s why gauging the health of a business takes interacting with metrics around the customers. With that said, a Customer 360 touches on all of these metrics and more trackable data and solutions that give businesses information about the customer’s interaction with the business at any point—past, present and even future.

While it takes sophisticated tools to gather consistent, accurate data, a Customer 360 is the single source of comprehensive insight into all the relevant information, which includes but is not limited to:

  • Product usage history
  • Purchasing history
  • Transaction history
  • Length of time as a customer
  • Survey history
  • Inquiry history
  • Next purchase or renewal
  • Contract value

The goal of customer success is revenue growth, but it is also worth noting that customer success is customer-focused. From these metrics, the business owner can tell whether that’s the case for their business.

Read the original article on the Forbes website

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financial strategies

CRM Strategy: How Smart Entrepreneurs Leverage Growth with A Customer-Led Approach

Working with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool is the fastest way to develop a custom strategy for any business. In the past, CRMs were always considered tools for sales. However, today, their solutions have expanded to work for marketing, customer service and even e-commerce functions.

A CRM strategy can boost business growth by doubling sales, maximizing revenue and improving customer service. So, let’s see how entrepreneurs can fast-track business growth with a smart CRM strategy.

What Is A CRM Strategy

Usually, companies adopt CRM tools solely to get more leads and effectively guide them through their funnels created with business goals in mind. But in a highly competitive and customer-centric market, this is not very customer-centric.

With so many product and service options, customers are picky and can switch to any company they want. That’s where a CRM strategy comes in.

A CRM strategy is the application of CRM tool intel to develop a business plan to grow sales, improve customer service and boost growth opportunities. The concept hinges on combining planning, process and technology.

Instead of implementing CRM software from strictly a business perspective, a CRM strategy helps entrepreneurs understand how customers can best receive value when they choose their products and how to operationalize this.

Why All This Matters For Business Growth Today

In a market where customer loyalty is not guaranteed, customer satisfaction is the only way to retain and attract more targeted potential customers. That leaves business success tied to customer satisfaction. But just how much?

According to PWC research on the future of customer experience:

  • 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after one negative experience.
  • Speed, convenience and helpful, friendly employees rank top for consumers at over 70% each.
  • 54% of U.S. customers want improvement in company customer experience.

What does all this mean? Customer satisfaction is the most vital strategy for any business.

The trend in software growth seems to prove this point, as CRM snagged the giant spot in the software markets in the last five years. At a 16% growth rate, this can point to a forecast hit of about 80,000 million U.S. dollars in revenue by 2025.

Savvy entrepreneurs know this and take the customer-led approach by implementing a CRM strategy.

How To Leverage Growth With A Customer-Centric CRM Strategy

A good CRM strategy is always evolving. To implement a customer-centric approach to strategy, you must understand the customer more than they do.

1. Research customer goals.

The CRM strategy supports the development of a customer-led approach to sales, marketing and customer service. In this sense, implementing any meaningful strategy starts with clear goals and a vision of what a happy experience looks like for the customer.

Understand what your customers need from you. What are their pain points? What do they want to achieve? Once you understand this, you can develop a strategy to address their needs. This involves gathering insights at critical moments through surveys and spot interviews, with questions about what they are looking to accomplish, what motivated them to invest in the product and the features they love most.

Part of this research is also profiling the customers—knowing which types of people find value in the product or service.

2. Understand processes.

Understanding the process from when a potential customer makes contact to the point of purchase is a savvy CRM move. What are the steps involved in taking a customer from initial contact to a closed sale? By mapping out your processes (the customer journey), you can identify areas where there may be bottlenecks or opportunities for improvement.

Mapping out the customer journey entails identifying the preferred communication channel, the team the customer engages with at each stage and the content they interact with most.

3. Automate customer-centric processes.

Greater customer satisfaction is achieved through efficiency, speed and convenience. By automating customer-related processes such as marketing, sales and customer care, a company can expedite meeting customer needs.

The most important customer-centric processes to begin with can be segmented as below:

Marketing

  • Customer profiling
  • Campaign creation
  • Campaign execution
  • Project management

Sales

  • Lead nurturing
  • Purchase and accounts management
  • Cross-selling and upselling

Customer Care

  • Complaint escalation
  • Inquiry management
  • Service tracking
  • Feedback management and after-sale

4. Measure results.

Analyzing data is the final crucial step so that you can fine-tune your strategy. Data will help you understand what’s working and what’s not, and you can use it to drive decisions about what products to sell, what services to offer and how to price them. Be sure to track key metrics such as customer satisfaction, sales growth and revenue per customer.

Smart entrepreneurs understand that a customer-led approach is necessary to create a successful CRM strategy for their business. When you focus on the customer and what they want, you’re not just shunting leads down a funnel that leads them to the product or service. Instead, you are meeting customer needs on your terms and according to your preferences.

Article was originally published on the Forbes website.

Categories
business ideas financial strategies

Business Coaching: Top 10 Rapid Growth Tips for Small Businesses

Business Coaching: Top 10 Rapid Growth Tips for Small Businesses

Marketing tips for small business Everyone wants to succeed in business, but knowing the path to success is not always as clear as we all want it to be. Many successful ventures have been built upon years of failures, mistakes, and starting over.

As the competition intensifies, emerging small businesses can disappear as fast in the sea of millions of other ventures offering similar products. As such, not every entrepreneur can afford this luxury of trial & error.

That’s where proven business coaching becomes invaluable; in layman’s terms, simply walking with someone that has already made those mistakes and now gives you a customizable template of strategies that work.

The big question remains from who and where the advice comes.

With the Tonika Bruce website recently featured in the top 10 list of 100 leading business coaching blogs, we are proud to share her top 10 tips for navigating competitive markets as a small business.

Further, we’ll touch on the essential information you need to know to choose a business coach.

Why Leverage the Power of Professional Business Coaching

Coaching is a process that helps business leaders or owners to achieve their goals through self-awareness, learning, and accountability.

Professional business coaching works because it helps you produce results by focusing on the process rather than the outcome.

The vision isn’t the problem for most entrepreneurs but the steps or at the very least mastering them to get there. There are a lot of business owners currently relying on general business knowledge or simply random internet search results to run their business.

While there’s nothing wrong with using online resources, free or paid, there is intentionality of purpose and measuring results that comes with professional coaching.

To demonstrate a few benefits of working with a professional business coach, here is what you can achieve:

Developing key skills

First and foremost, business coaching is as much about training to successfully run a business as it is about building the owner’s capacity- skills, aptitudes, mindset, and habits.
You learn how to manage people, communicate, negotiate, and build grit.

Establishing effective business systems

Coaches are also helpful in providing guidance on team organization, resource allocation and setting goals. Essentially, how to set up processes, best practices, and standard operating procedures for executing tasks.

Setting achievable goals and objectives

Every successful business starts with a set of realistic and implementable goals.
Emphasis on implementable. It is one thing to write down goals, however, it is another to bring them to life.

Factors such as resource level, alignment with business concept and market affect the suitability of goals for a business.

A professional coach guides you on nailing down the specifics of your goals in relation to your business idea, market and scalability.

Understanding customer needs better

Nothing ruins a business more than marketing a product to everyone. In essence, this is marketing to no one at all. You must identify your target market and know your customer avatar. A professional will help you brainstorm and create a buyer persona for what you intend to sell.

Creating a Strategic Growth Plan

When you enlist professional coaching, the first step, depending on the stage of the business, is to evaluate current performance and help you create an actionable plan that outlines strategies for future growth and development.

The training will focus on low flying business areas. This will allow leaders to make informed decisions regarding investments, staffing and marketing initiatives.

Access to Business Resources

Beyond training, professional business coaches have access to market research data and their own templates and business tools they have utilized. So, you are not trying what works.

Do you have a business idea? How do you know if it is worth investing in: listen for key pointers.

Business Growth Focus Areas

Whether you can afford to enlist the help of a professional or not, for a business to grow, you must be doing things right. You also need to know the core aspects of business growth.

We just looked at setting the right goals as one of the benefits of working with a professional business coach. Business growth is one of those common goals for entrepreneurs and company leaders. But in itself, business growth is too general.

Specific growth will depend on where you are currently in the business and life journey.

Before diving into this, the crucial three-fold question to ask yourself is what, why and how you wish to grow.

There are three main focus areas for business growth:

1. Profitability

Here the business is profit-oriented. If your goal for starting a business is to have revenue for funding your lifestyle- or a; cash cow, then this is the growth that works.

Profitability thrives on slow and steady progress by working with good clients and projects that align with business values.

Since the profitability model of business growth is about the long game, the entrepreneur must also have a plan for letting the business run without them. They can do this by hiring a team and building a system of automating everyday tasks.

2. Market Share

Market share growth is about scaling the enterprise to reach more customers in a specific market.

This is also the next level in business growth. It demands that the leader or owner is removed from the daily operations of the business to focus on big picture areas such as business development and sales strategy to increase the market share.

The business coaching and growth here requires focus on critical thinking to innovate, leadership training, and sales and marketing success.

3. Market Value

Increasing market value is a business growth goal for entrepreneurs looking to develop and sell their business. The focus here is identifying what investors look for in a startup and building on these to multiply its value for sale.

With that in mind, let us consider the strategies for success you need to have at the forefront when starting and running a business.

10 Small Business Coaching Tips and Strategies for Success:

1. Know Your Why and let it Show in Your Business

Purpose is an incredibly powerful driver for success. Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers small enough for people to use at home or office. Your why is the reason for your business existence. What problem it solves and by distilling it down to the daily operations.

Practically speaking, this is a breakdown of the vision, mission, goals, values, and culture around it- and how they all work together to solve the target customers’ problem.

Before you start selling, document all these in plain terms. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel as long as you have your vision; you can use business and S.O.Ps templates like the ones in our Call-to-Action program to do this.

2. Put Systems in Place to Boost Your Business

Well-defined systems are essential for efficiency.

Both business and customer-facing operations need documented processes by which teams operate.That means business management systems that account for work-related activities in customer service, accounting, operations, and marketing.

As an entrepreneur, you need these to save yourself sleepless nights, depression, and pounds.

Systems help streamline workflows, save time, fill efficiency gaps in humans, and act as reference for teams and collaboration tasks.

3. Focus on Growth and Expansion

Do not get too comfortable with where you are currently with your business if you want to experience rapid growth; always strive for bigger and better opportunities.

The enterprise will need to evolve eventually, so plan your next steps to stay grounded.

Expansion is a broad term, but it can be going for risks, such as offering products or services different from the current market, entering new markets altogether, or as simple as reviewing existing contracts to identify better deals.

4. Focus on Where You Want to Go, Not Where You Have Been

A mistake many entrepreneurs make is focusing too much on past successes instead of future ones.

To ensure constant advancement, redirect all energy towards understanding actions for today and in the coming weeks/months/years to propel the company forward.

5. Find the Right Team for the Job

There is no getting around it – people break or build a business. Strong players on board are central for any business for long-term success and a steady growth trajectory.

6. Have a Visibility Plan

The ability to stand out from competitors in this crowded marketplace requires an effective visibility strategy.

Create a plan for actively engaging with customers through various channels, such as content marketing, social media platforms, and event activations to amplify brand awareness & recognition.

Focus on building your voice on social media with effective marketing strategies.
Brands that stay active online have a higher visibility than those that post sporadically.

7. Nail Your Customer Experience

Your business thrives on happy customers.

Most customers decide whether they like a product based on their overall experience – everything from product quality to customer service etiquette and sales pitches. So, pay attention to every touchpoint along their buyer journey & refine it according to respective feedback.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you understand your customers better.

8. Research Competitors

It pays off knowing who you are up against when entering any market – identify data points like pricing strategies, and promotional tactics used, then build upon them accordingly.

9. Be Consistent with Your Branding and Marketing Efforts

The elusive online presence- the bane of small business owners. One tip to remember about building an online presence is that you are a brand, not a business.

Two or more businesses may sell the same product, but the brand (overall presentation in the eyes of a buyer) sets them apart.

The way to do that is with consistency in branding elements across marketing channels- logo, color schemes, messaging, and content quality. Wherever possible, since this helps consumers connect better with brand image established over time already – also set aside finances dedicated solely towards promotional activities like advertising campaigns.

Meanwhile, this marketing hub guidebook is an excellent start to understanding branding and building an online presence.

10. Don’t Forget About Yourself

Personal development is critical for longevity in business.
Staying afloat during tough times can become increasingly difficult without a proper balance between work life + leisure activities.

This encompasses mental and physical resilience. Consistent skill development and physical wellness play into the business.

Top executives often underestimate this aspect, unfortunately. Yet neglecting health issues (physical+mental) associated with burnout scenarios often leads to massive losses financially – so invest some extra effort into maintaining healthy habits.

Effective business coaching aims to improve your mindset, organization, processes, and overall business strategy.

How to Find a Reliable Business Coach

For many businesses, growth is a stated ambition – but when we look closer to understand what that entails or how they intend to achieve it, suddenly things become less clear.

Uncovering the desired outcomes of business expansion requires digging below the surface – with carefully tailored questions and sessions that empower you to chart your course for success.

This is the basis of identifying not just a professional coach but one with actual experience in the field.

Of course, you want someone that has practical information and guides you with their own template for starting and running a business.

Parting Shot

Working with professional business coaching in the early stages of a startup will help avoid many pitfalls, harmful generalizations, and ensure rapid business growth.

The indicators for success include revenue, profits, market share, customer acquisition and retention, and team size. But growth is also progressive, and these indicators will appear with the stage of business.

Let us walk you through the business journey. The Call-to-Action program’s new cohort is open now: Signup to Register!

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business ideas financial strategies

Five Ways Entrepreneurs Can Build Resilience for Tough Times

Entrepreneurs Can Build Resilience: Tough economic times lead to dwindled customer confidence and diminished sales. Although all businesses suffer during economic recess, entrepreneurs are specifically vulnerable. Entrepreneurs encounter numerous obstacles like market uncertainties and financial insecurities that threaten their existence.

The current economic climate looks bleak with market insecurities, recessions, war, and the pandemic. Previously, entrepreneurs focused internally on their business, but now they must pay attention to world markets.

Entrepreneurs who continuously build their resilience have a better chance to excel. Here are five ways entrepreneurs can develop adaptability for tough times.

1. Adapt to Change

Adapting to change as an entrepreneur means that you view adversities as opportunities. Changes allow entrepreneurs to grow and expand their perceptions, philosophies, and performance.

The journey of entrepreneurship is that of constant change where companies experience challenges from inception to maturity.

For instance, the number of employees will change, management strategies will change, technology will advance, and even the globe is transforming. Currently, tough economic times are amplifying these challenges. Clever entrepreneurs do not resist changes, but they embrace them.

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from setbacks and embrace unanticipated circumstances. Resilient entrepreneurs have made adapting to changes more accessible, preparing them for unforeseen situations.

Resilient entrepreneurs who embrace changes and view adversities as growth opportunities are likely to succeed even in a harsh economic climate. At the height of the pandemic more businesses came into existence than before.

starting an online business at home

Start a Home-Based Business

2. Focus on Core Proficiencies and Business

As an entrepreneur and business leader, there is a huge temptation to spend business funds on multiple unbudgeted needs or business expansions.

During tough economic times, some entrepreneurs try to add other products and services to their offerings in the name of diversification. Often, these random reactions end up wasting funds and time.

Worse, they can destroy the main business by removing the necessary focus and resources from the core proficiencies. Resilient entrepreneurs focus on their principal competencies even during tough economic times.

Tough economic times demand that entrepreneurs reduce their unnecessary expenditures. Unnecessary expenditures include luxurious company dinners, extravagant retreats, and profligate trips.

During turbulent times, the business will incur financial losses if they continue spending money on unnecessary outflows. Resilient enterprises must focus on the fundamental purpose.

Similarly, entrepreneurs ought to be driven by well-defined business plans to overcome the challenges of a harsh economic climate.

3. Keep the Business and Marketing Campaigns Running Even Through Credit 

During economic recessions, most entrepreneurs shy from investing in their businesses.

Some entrepreneurs slash off the marketing budget or even abolish it entirely. However, the company needs all the support it can get during these tough economic times. Resilient entrepreneurs take huge risks by inputting more funds into their businesses and marketing campaigns.

Investing in your business and marketing operations can help your enterprise grow exponentially during an economic downturn. Despite tough economic times, clients seek opportunities to acquire new products or services. Therefore, entrepreneurs who borrow funds to finance their businesses and marketing campaigns make enormous profits despite the harsh economic climate.

Download the Free Brand-Building and Market Hub Checklist

4. Invest in Personal Well-being 

Diminished sales, unavailability of credit, pay cuts, dwindled profits, and other financial struggles of recession can lead to stress and depression.

Although stress is a personal issue, it can affect your business negatively. Stressed entrepreneurs tend to lose their business-friendly traits. For example, often-depressed leaders are rude to clients, lack the zeal to offer quality customer service, are always late to work and make numerous mistakes.

At this point, stress becomes a business issue, as the entrepreneur is highly inefficient, and the business can easily make huge losses under the leadership of a depressed businessperson. Hence, despite tough economic times, entrepreneurs must prioritize their well-being.

Business owners and leaders must find healthy ways to cope with stress.
Examples of methods that businesspeople can employ to cope with stress include; eating healthy meals, getting plenty of sleep, avoiding alcohol, and exercising regularly.

5. Optimize on Current Customers and Entice the Competitor’s Customers

Resilient entrepreneurs are clever enough to make the most of current customers because they know the struggle of getting clients during tough economic times.

Making the most of current clients means selling more products without spending on marketing and advertising. The secret here is having excellent customer service that ensures all clients are satisfied (more on adopting a customer-centric approach). Identifying customer needs and fulfilling them retains and draws clients from your competitors.

Summary

Although there is no prescribed method to build resilience or insure your business against financial struggles associated with recessions, employing the above techniques will ensure that your business survives through a harsh economic climate.

Furthermore, implementing these strategies can help you make profits even during a tough economic time. The techniques focus on analyzing the current work plan and finding methods to enhance it.

Categories
financial strategies

Top Five Books That Can Make You a Millionaire

Sometimes the dream of becoming a millionaire may seem like an unachievable goal, despite working with blood, tears, and sweat. Many people are ignorant of the necessary tools to use to propel them to prosperity. 

The secret tools can be certain books that help build your mindset, enthusiasm, and knowledge of becoming a wealthy and successful individual. These books will inform you about the available possibilities and opportunities for amassing wealth. Here are five helpful books to orient your financial journey in the right direction.

1. Power for All

Power for all by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro is an authoritative book that elaborates clearly on demonstrated strategies for agitating, innovating, and engineering change. 

The book explains how individuals with less power can challenge established systems to make them balance or work in their favor. The book illustrates how to power-map a workplace and work with individuals that can influence real change at the place of work. 

The advice is that you must stay in power, as when you are away from power, you are giving it to someone else who might not have your interest. This book can help individuals who want to grow their careers by manipulating power dynamics.

2. Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is another must-read book for anyone aspiring to be a millionaire. The title illustrates that you must develop a particular mindset to achieve tremendous wealth. 

This book centers on the thirteen steps to riches, which the author learned from interviewing famous and wealthy individuals.

The thirteen principles include: 

  • Having a burning desire to achieve success and wealth
  • Exhibiting faith to manifest your desires
  • The concept of auto-suggestion through visualizing success
  • The technique of acquiring specialized knowledge in a particular field
  • The power of imagination as a catalyst for achievement
  • Creating concrete plans to achieve success
  • Prompt decision-making; persistence despite numerous failures
  • The power of mastermind; converting desire into creative energy
  • The subconscious mind
  • The brain
  • The sixth sense

Implementing the above principles in your work routine will see you grow exponentially and acquire great success.

3. The Checklist Manifesto

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande investigates why even highly skilled and experienced individuals often make avoidable mistakes despite their extensive knowledge. 

Atul discovered that a checklist is a simple and potent solution to doing things correctly. 

The author details the learning path and crucial insights into utilizing and developing checklists. Many fail to succeed because they underestimate checklists as ticking boxes and mindlessly following protocol. 

In contrast, successful and wealthy individuals view checklists as facilitators of teamwork and disciplined working culture. Checklists unequivocally outline the critical steps in a task, develop a verification process to protect against human fallibility, and enforce discipline to uphold performance standards. 

A checklist can resolve decentralized decision-making, teamwork, and communications challenges. Additionally, using a checklist helps in minimizing errors and improves performance.

4. How to Win Friends and Influence People

When writing “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Dale Carnegie understood that it is difficult to make friends as an adult, yet it is vital to make friends and build connections to succeed. 

The book outlines some classical ideologies that serve as universal techniques that one can use to make small talk a bit easier. These ideologies are building blocks of social intelligence that promote good social skills and enhance your social life.

 The author teaches people handling techniques like not being a critic, giving honest and sincere appreciation, and arouses in the other person an eager want. 

Additionally, the book illustrates ways to make people like you. For example, having a genuine interest in people, smiling, listening, and acknowledging the interests of others can make you a likeable person. Hence, this book is a must-read for people aspiring to grow their network and success.

5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Tim Ferriss wrote this book out of frustration and documented how he left his company to pursue what he loves. The 4-Hour Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich holds many valuable lessons that individuals today can implement for growth outside the workplace. 

First, the author teaches how to be effective, not efficient.  He uses the Pareto principle of 80/20, that clever people should utilize 20% of their time to accomplish 80% of their success. Time spent working should not measure productivity because you can waste time at work. 

The second piece of advice by Tim is that you should always validate your business ideas. 

Before investing heavily in producing a specific service or product, ensure that people are willing to purchase it. Lastly, the book teaches about charging a premium to need fewer clients and to make your life easier. After validating your business idea, invest in producing quality products that fetch high market prices. This book can guide any entrepreneur to accomplish business success.

In a nutshell, one of the goals for every professional or entrepreneur must be to read at least a book each month. The books do not have to be nonfiction or business-oriented. Reading is one of the top habits for success.

What is your current read? Here are more options:

Related articles:
7 Books to Read Before Enrolling in an MBA Program
Book Recommendation for Entrepreneurship Success
The Leaders Path to Personal Growth

Affiliate Disclosure: This content contains affiliate links. If you purchase the products through our affiliate link, we will receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support.

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financial strategies

How Technology Can Help Your Business Scale

How Technology Can Help Your Business Scale

Running a business is never easy, but luckily, software advancements have opened the door to innovative solutions.

We will explore in this article how modern digital capabilities can help smooth out the bumps in any organization’s journey from concept to completion. Get ready for increased collaboration between teams and improved project management – with modern-day technology, anything seems possible; you only need to get the right tool.

Contrary to some skeptics’ belief, technology is not here to replace humans in the workplace but rather to enhance roles.

Below are ways technology can help your business grow (even if you are a small business).

Business Communication Enhancement

One of the biggest challenges facing medium and small-sized businesses is communication. The heart of satisfactory customer service is how and when the company communicates with its customers throughout the journey.

However, in this digital age, there are numerous channels and bases to cover when it comes to customer inquiries.

How does a small business owner maintain high standards with consistent and fast feedback to your clients? After all, in this hyper-connected, tech-savvy world, customer experience matters a lot for long-term success.

Automating some customer service operations will help with consistent quality communication between your business and customers or potential customers.

Chatbots are gaining popularity in quick customer inquiries and improving customer experiences. Using a Chatbot is a great way to enhance customer service. It allows customers to ask questions or provide feedback quickly and easily without having to wait on hold or send an email that may take days or weeks for a response.

According to the MIT Technology Review report (Humans+Bots), 90% of businesses that used chatbots registered enhanced complaint resolution.

3 Effective Ways to Increase Customer Trust

Sales and Marketing

Now more than ever, sales and marketing are crucial elements for success in any organization. As the digital era progresses, these departments have started working collaboratively to emphasize user experience (UX) as an integral part of their strategy-building process.

These are innovative automation methods a business should take advantage of for better sales and marketing processes to scale:

  • automated lead generation & tracking technology
  • social media scheduling & data analysis tools
  • automated email marketing 
  • AI-driven sales assistants 
  • machine learning A/B testing tools

Sales and marketing departments can also benefit from technology advances by leveraging social media platforms and running campaigns tailored specifically to their target audience.

Business Ideas That You Can Start with Little Investment

Task Automation

Various automation tools can help streamline day-to-day operations, such as CRM tools for customer follow-ups or information and data organization.

Today, there are tools for enhancing and cutting back on time spent on most administrative tasks, from sending payment invoices to scheduling appointments.

Not to mention, tools that can help all software or apps a business uses to automate all the related functions. An excellent example is Automate.io which can help update information between a CRM and Google spreadsheet.

Other than automating tasks, an all-in-one CRM can help with Business Intelligence (BI), especially small businesses that cannot afford business intelligence tools by helping to gather customer intel and creating an effective customer-centered strategy.

How to Use Your CRM tool for Business Strategy

Remote Collaboration

Running a business has become much easier with remote collaboration. Companies can afford to outsource labor by engaging temporary contractors and freelancers cost-effectively.

Finally, cloud storage systems like Google Docs or Dropbox allow teams to collaborate remotely in real-time on projects without needing to be physically together.

Google Docs allows people to collaborate remotely on content and edit documents. Dropbox takes it further with cloud platforms which allow massive files like 4K videos to be edited simultaneously across vast distances.

Efficient Projects Management

Technology has undoubtedly made it easier for businesses to scale. With the advent of project management software and tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, organizations and ventures can manage projects with greater efficiency and clarity. That not only saves time and money but also allows businesses to grow at a much faster pace.

For example, a business can easily track the progress of a project by creating tasks, assigning them to team members, specifying due dates, and adding comments or attachments as needed.

Comments and media attachments can help clarify instructions or provide updates on the project’s status. And if there are any questions or concerns, team members can easily communicate with each other through the software’s messaging system.

Project management software helps businesses stay on track with work progress, especially when working with remote teams.

Conclusion

The possibilities of what technology can do for businesses are endless!

By leveraging the power of tech tools and software applications, startups can scale up efficiently while maintaining productivity levels regardless of geographical location. So if you are looking for ways to improve your business operations, look no further than modern technology. It may be what you need.

Try Phalera CRM for your small business – Watch Demo

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How Business Leaders Can Leverage Digital Transformation for Better ROI

How Business Leaders Can Leverage Digital Transformation for Better ROI

How Business Leaders Can Leverage Digital Transformation for Better ROI

What comes to mind when you think of digital transformation? Is it automation or some realm of metaverse project management?

So what’s all the fuss about digital transformation, and why are all the companies, including SMBs, embracing such a revolution? You will understand the objective of digital transformation for businesses and how you can begin implementing it immediately in this post.

A Few Things to Consider

1. Consumer behavior is changing rapidly. Staying competitive requires knowing the ever-changing consumer dynamics and responding accordingly to satisfy customer needs. Knowing the ever-changing consumer needs accurately requires digital analytics and even predictive analytics. 

2. The most productive companies in terms of operations and revenue are the ones with the best communication. Efficient communication depends on having teams that communicate within a collaborative network, getting real-time feedback rather than working in a silo.

3. The most successful organizations in terms of ROI are the ones with products that address customer needs and pain points instead of creating products and then looking for the customers that need them. In other words, they look for unique problems in the market and then create products that solve these problems. 

4. Organizations that embrace an agile mindset succeed faster, and grow exponentially than organizations that fail to embrace it.

5. Regardless of size, and level of experience, the most successful firms are organizations that keep the best data and make the best use of these data in their decision-making.

Simple Ways To Adopt Digital Transformation

Simple Ways To Adopt Digital Transformation

1. Digitalize Customer Experience

It is needless to say that customers are always looking for improvements on products and services. Meeting these demands requires you to closely monitor them, know what they truly want, and understand them even much better. Simple ways you can digitize customer experience involve the use of Live Chats to facilitate real-time communication and also promote customer retention through relationship building. 

That’s not all, tracking the way clients interact with your business and how you manage the information associated with them is a great way to digitize customer service.

This is achievable with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. There’s no need to reinvent the wheels by hiring software developers. Tools like Hubspot and many more are great for managing customer data and even your sales pipeline.

2. Drive Performance Based On Data

What is not monitored can never be measured. When you don’t measure, you can’t tell how well you’re doing and you really cannot also tell which of your business activities are driving the best ROI. Business data analytics give you insight into which of your business activities to improve on and which ones lack the potential for profitability so you can focus resources on key business concerns.

3. Build Resilience Into Your Business Processes

Everything that happens within the scope of digital transformation is an opportunity for better performance. No surprise, the pandemic was even a big game-changer for some organizations regardless of their size. Building resilience involves leveraging technology that will enable you to continuously improve. This will also help you deploy regardless of your financial position and even when unprecedented circumstances such as during a pandemic hit.

How to Adopt Digital Transformation for Improved Efficiency & Profits in Your Business

To successfully adopt digital transformation, it must first be integrated into your business culture, and the ultimate goal should be towards creating a better customer experience and satisfying customer needs.

Doing this successfully starts with the mindset, and then this should be communicated to everyone in your organization. Digital transformation is not reserved for CEOs and top executives alone. It is for everyone contributing to the organization one way or the other regardless of what they’re doing.

Importantly, it is common for organizations looking to adopt digital transformation to assume that digital transformation is only for engineering firms. 

But that’s not the case. Here are a few myths about digital transformation.

Myth 1: You need a large team of software engineers before you can start adopting digital transformation.

Myth 2: You need a large cloud infrastructure to start digitizing your business.

Myth 3: Digital transformation requires a fat budget.

The fact is that digital transformation involves majorly the inclusion of internet-based and digital-based tools to achieve operational efficiency, and ultimately business results.

More importantly, most of these tools are cost-effective compared to the task they perform. For instance, if you need a solution to collaborate with your team members, set deadlines, organize projects, and set goals, tools like Teamwork, ClickUp, etc., have features that can achieve all that and you can start using them for free. 

Additionally, if you need analytics solutions to start monitoring behaviors on your website to get customer insights, tools like Google Analytics and many other web analytics tools can get that done for you. And you can get started for free. 

But there’s something to note, gaining access to these digital transformation tools requires that you position your business digitally. This means that your business must have an online presence, it must be integrated on the web and your customers too must have their online signature. That is, the series of events that take place from clients purchasing your business should easily happen online from the moment they found themselves on your website till the moment they eventually purchased from you. 

This positions you to be able to control the type of interaction they get when they engage with your brand online and how you react with them. You can categorize and personalize your prospects as well as their interactions with your website. With these, you can easily solve their problems and stay ahead of the competition. At the heart of the pandemic at the start of 2021, some businesses that embraced digital transformation reported record-high profits. 

Both small and large business owners, regardless of their niche, from restaurants, to service-based businesses experienced improved sales and became even more profitable. On the other hand, businesses that refused to adopt that transformation faced losses and some even went out of business. 

The essential point is that digital transformation can shield your business from unforeseen circumstances, enhance your speed, and efficiency, and ultimately enable you to engage in borderless business transactions and operational management.

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Translating Critical Care Nursing into Innovative Business Processes

Translating Critical Care Nursing into Innovative Business Processes

At the heart of entrepreneurship is innovation. It is the key that unlocks endless possibilities of products and services for any business venture. Speaking of business, if you are like most entrepreneurs, you are always looking for new and innovative ways to improve your business processes, but critical care nursing isn’t the first place you look.

You may not realize it, but critical care nurses have a knack for using their knowledge and experience to develop such innovations. The Covid 19 pandemic has just begun to highlight this.

We will explore some of the business innovations that healthcare professionals have pioneered and how you can learn from them.

Why Critical Care Nurses Spearhead in Innovation

Nurses are often the unsung heroes of the hospital. Critical care nurses, in particular, have some of the most challenging and crucial roles in the medical profession. Daily, they deal with life and death situations. For that reason, they must quickly assess patients’ conditions and administer life-saving treatments.

The pandemic made this creativity even more urgent not only for the survival of patients but also for theirs Reports show that 1,500 nurses, 7,000 healthcare workers died, and 3 million health workers were infected]. In addition to their clinical skills, critical care nurses also need to think innovatively and translate their knowledge into creative processes that improve patient care.

This level of creativity can especially be helpful for nursing professionals who want to create new businesses or improve existing ones.

Nurses in critical care units are constantly innovating to improve patient care

There is a common misconception that nurses are all cut from the same cloth. In reality, nurses come from all walks of life and have a variety of talents and strengths. Critical care nurses, in particular, are renowned for their creativity and innovation. In emergencies, they always find ways to make the patients comfortable-whether that’s developing new protocols or making existing treatments more effective.

Here are ways critical care nurses have used the pandemic to improve patient care outcomes. According to a report by neuroscience nursing, the motivation for these innovations falls into three categories:

  • To reduce the use of unnecessary PPE
  • To promote staff safety and support
  • To improve the readiness of nursing professionals while reducing foot traffic

Now, let’s dive deeper.

Using the Pandemic to Innovate for Better Patient Care

With the Covid 19 causing restrictions in contact with ICU patients, many critical nurses found it difficult to manage care for their patients.

Preventing and Controlling the Spread of the Virus
Nadia Andrade, a critical care nurse at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center is one of the many who have implemented the use of extended infusion pumps allowing them to tend to patients without being inside the rooms. Moving infusion pumps to the hallway allowed nurses to replace the bags and tend to alarms without entering the ICU rooms.

In support of this, Jason Farley of Johns Hopkins developed a portable plexiglass testing booth for nurses that prevents the exhaled air by patients from reaching the care provider while in the room.

Telemedicine Innovations

Although telemedicine had already been in existence before the pandemic, it has become one of the best opportunities for nursing professionals to innovate patient care.
Like many other nurses, Whitney Fear, an NP at a clinic for the homeless in North Dakota, transitioned to using technology to consult with patients after being quarantined.

Another innovation spurred by the pandemic is the Facebook group Social Distance Powwow creating experiences for ICU patients. Through its now 200,000 members, people can share stories of healing and survival.

Staff Safety and Support
One thing stands out as far as nursing professionals’ physical and emotional well-being is concerned- the role of social media in offering support, encouragement, and information. As nurses invented better ways to care for patients and protect themselves, social platforms were the place of ideas exchange.

Tonika Bruce, a former critical care nurse and business leader, has been at the forefront of innovating ways to support and connect nurses. One of her ventures, the Network Nurse, provides nurse empowerment through training and networking.

Starting as a place to connect healthcare professionals to business and healthcare training opportunities, The Network Nurse has become the hub of other healthcare inventions. It has given rise to Thrudemic; an anthology by healthcare professionals that captures the Covid experiences in the industry, and MBBCH; an online health encyclopedia simplifying nutrition and illness management for the public.

But like many great achievements and inventions, there is always an immense deal of support going on behind the scenes.

Bruce credits the fast tracking of these innovative projects to the dedication of a solid network and community of supporters. These partners include the YEC by Forbes platform providing entrepreneurial resources, the NBNA for awarding her the graduate studies scholarship, and Common Ground’s sponsorship and support to the Young Professionals Council membership.

Critical Care Nurses Innovations in Business

Critical care nursing innovations also translate to ventures that solve specific problems within the emergency care setting. Below are a few examples of businesses started by nurses:

  • A company that makes and distributes specialized medical equipment for use in the ICU
  • A home health care agency that provides skilled nursing visits to patients recovering from critical illness
  • A web-based training program for critical care nurses
  • A mobile app that helps clinicians track patients’ vital signs and provides clinical decision support tools

In conclusion

Often when we talk about innovation in healthcare, we think about the invention of a vaccine or an endoscopic robot, yet, the chief innovation during this pandemic period has been the ability of critical care nurses to innovate patient care on the go.
Critical care nurses can translate this knowledge and experience into innovative business processes.

References:
Bode, Lisa De. “Innovating “In the Here and Now”.” Issues in Science and Technology 37, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 50–55.

Newby, Jamison C.; Mabry, Madison C.; Carlisle, Byron A.; Olson, DaiWai M.; Lane, Blair E. Reflections on Nursing Ingenuity During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Journal of Neuroscience Nursing: October 2020 – Volume 52 – Issue 5 – p E13-E16
doi: 10.1097/JNN.0000000000000525

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How to Become a Persuasion Master and Attract More Customers

How to Become a Persuasion Master

How to Become a Persuasion Master and Attract More Customers

Every brand and consumer is different, but the goal for all business brands and entrepreneurs is to sell more and, for the consumer, to satisfy a need.

The only way the two goals intersect is through clear and persuasive communication.

There have been studies on persuasion for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that psychologists began to investigate powerful persuasion techniques. Persuasion’s ultimate goal is to get the target audience to internalize the persuasive argument and adopt the new attitude as part of their belief system.

Here are a few persuasion strategies to help you attract more customers and increase sales.

Different Persuasion Techniques You Can Use to Attract Customers

1. Make an Anchor Point

The anchoring bias is a subtle cognitive bias with significant impacts on negotiations. Marketing and advertising firms understand this and use it to reinforce people’s perceptions of a product.

How does it work? When attempting to make a decision, the first offer made tends to become the anchoring point for all subsequent negotiations. The first number you suggest will serve as the starting point and may result in a higher offer in the end.

Here are a few ways anchoring bias is applied in persuasion:

Using multiple unit pricing
When pricing items, say 4 hygiene wipes for $2 usually perform better than 1 hygiene wipe for $0.5.
Although the price is the same in both cases, multiple pricing performs better. Psychologists Brian Wansink, Robert Kent, and Stephen Hoch’s study on multiple unit pricing found the brain uses the number 4 as an anchor.

Initial price technique
In sales negotiation, the initial offer price always becomes the anchor point. Anything below that appears reasonable regardless of its legitimacy. After this initial anchor, any lower price is a good deal.

Using product range
Pricing two or more similar items on a price range can influence your ability to persuade a customer. For instance, when you place a cotton T-shirt at $45, people will see it as expensive. However, put it alongside another cotton T-shirt labeled as a premium at $99, and people will see the $40 one as cheap. That type of anchoring is super popular with digital marketing solutions pricing, such as web hosting.

Clever marketing uses cognitive biases to persuade.
The anchoring effect happens subliminally on everyone, experts and non-experts- learning about it doesn’t change.

2. Create a Need

Creating a need or increasing the appeal of an already existing one is a powerful method of persuasion.

This type of persuasion appeals to a person’s basic need for love, shelter, self-actualization, and self-esteem. All business startups hinge on meeting a need in the audience or demographic they choose to serve.

That is useful for persuading your customers to buy the product once it hits the market. You can use this strategy to sell your products by telling potential customers that they should buy your product because it will make them happy, loved, safe, and admired.

People go for Uber because it meets the need for safety, household brands like Chanel and Giorgio Armani for fame and class.

Already online with your business? Increase your conversion rate with a step by step guidebook on email marketing and digital marketing strategies: Dominate Your Market

3. Make an Appeal to Social Needs

Another effective persuasion technique that you can use in your business is to appeal to the desire to be popular. A good example is how companies use television commercials to persuade viewers to buy products.

Persuasion using social appeal focuses on motives and customer needs such as status, fame, respect, recognition, etc.

It is a fact that you can convince a person to buy a product if they see that everybody is buying it. That’s why people check reviews before making a purchase.
Influencer marketing is also based on this principle.

Some excellent examples of brands with high sales because of social appeal include WordPress, YouTube, Masterclass’s celebrity endorsements. All these are part of social proof based on popularity.

If you want to understand your target market or audience, you can also read: 8 Keys to Understanding Your Target Market As a Small Business Owner

4. Start With a Foot in the Door

Another effective method for getting people to comply with a request is the “foot in the door” technique. It entails persuading someone to agree to a small request, followed by a much larger one. You can get your foot in the door by convincing them to agree to a small initial favor, making the person more likely to comply with a bigger request later.

How does this work?

When starting with low prices and increasing them gradually. A company like Apple has been increasing its prices over the years despite protests. People use the initial price as a reference point seeing the increase as a small one and accept it.

5. First, Go Big, and Then Go Small

This method is the inverse of the foot in the door approach, which requires you to start with a broad, often unrealistic request. The chances are that the person will refuse, allowing you to respond with a much smaller request, which is more likely to be accepted. People frequently feel obligated to respond to such offers.

Already running a business online? Increase conversions with this guidebook on how to find, nurture potential clients and build a customer database: Dominate Your Market

6. Use a Powerful USP

Apart from persuading using emotions and their hearts, you can also reach them using their brains- rational appeal. You can use logic with measurable results indicating statistics, facts, or benefits. That is usually a company’s unique selling proposition.

If someone told you they wanted to sell you a cup of coffee at $5, for instance, you would think it ridiculous. Yet Starbucks does, and thousands pay for it. Starbuck isn’t just selling coffee, it has created a lifestyle and culture around it with its unique flavors and relaxing cafe ambiance- the benefit/USP.

Logical fallacies are not uncommon in customer persuasion, but giving honest, tangible results, nothing can match that in sales.

In Summary

These are just a few effective techniques you can employ to persuade people to buy your products or services. Look for examples of persuasion in your daily life and consider which ones you might be able to apply to your business.

Be knowledgeable, learn more, apply and keep testing what works for your market demographics

Learn how to create a social media and email marketing campaign with this package: Dominate Your Market.

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8 Keys to Understanding Your Market as a Small Business Owner

8 Keys to Understanding Your Market as a Small Business Owner

8 Keys to Understanding Your Market as a Small Business Owner

A target market is an assembly of people with similar traits or needs that you aim to serve. A target market represents the ideal group of customers that business management should deliberately focus most of its marketing efforts on. In this article, we will explore eight ways a small business owner can identify the market it serves.

The Importance of Understanding Target Market

A company that identifies its target market can create an effective marketing communication strategy. Understanding the target market helps a business develop the most cost-effective method to satisfy the customers’ essential needs.

Knowledge of the target market, such as the demography, helps a business select marketing tools to increase sales. Acquiring actionable insights into the target market enhances the business adaptability, essential for fruitful inbound marketing.

Understanding the target market and obtaining effective communication channels are arguably the most vital steps to developing a successful marketing strategy.   

Keys to Understanding Your Market

1. Develop a Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona is the first step to understanding your target market. A buyer persona is the general and fictional representation of an ideal audience, and developing one aids a business to acquire more insights about its ideal customers.

A compelling buyer persona includes psychographic information, demographics, customers’ lifestyles, communication preferences, responsibilities, and media consumption. Creating a buyer persona helps a business to produce products or services that resonate with its target audience.

2. Analysis of Existing Customer Base

Analyzing and understanding the purchase patterns and characteristics of the current customers can give insights into the business and target audience. For example, manipulating, modeling, and profiling the data on the existing customer list helps the business understand its target audience’s age ranges, geographical distributions, and lifestyle factors.

Furthermore, a small business owner can utilize the existing data to identify which marketing campaigns and communication channels worked in the past. Therefore, the analysis helps the entrepreneur to reveal crucial untapped opportunities and understands customers’ buying patterns

3. Profound Research, Analysis, and Segmentation

Profound analysis and further segmentation of every customer demographic can reveal the specific needs of a target audience. Deep analysis may include doing some social media digging. Following hashtags relating to your business give an understanding of what your target audience is doing in real-time.

A business can look at what the competitors are doing on social media and utilize that information to know what content to produce for its target audience. Segmentation will help small business owners know the specific products or services for each audience group.

4. Watching the Competition

Keeping an eye on the competitors’ activities, the market they are targeting, and the strategies they are utilizing to meet the needs of their customers can aid a smaller business in understanding its potential audience.

Keeping a tab on the competitors can give insights to a small business on how to develop tactics to fulfill its customers’ needs and differentiate itself from the competition.

Watching the competition will help an entrepreneur to understand the market trends and target audience.

5. Challenge the Assumptions and Norms

Successful business owners do not assume that they understand their customers, despite many years in the market. Entrepreneurs continuously conduct market audits by critically reassessing the trends as the businesses evolve.

Businesses must research the precise customer segmentation, purchase motivation, and the differences in demographics, then compare the research findings with original assumptions about the target market. Additionally, business owners should interview or listen to their customers’ needs.

Finally, entrepreneurs should implement the feedback from the customers, even if it conflicts with their initial assumptions or norms. Small Business Owner

6. Perform Test Campaigns and Embrace Setbacks

Small businesses should test their marketing campaigns to understand the needs of their target audience.

Running test campaigns help the business to find the strategies that work best, content that captures customers’ attention, and calls to action that resonate with the potential target market. Consider applying both offline and online marketing campaigns to gauge where your potential customer lies.

A further breakdown into strategies like email marketing and social media will help give clarity on the demographic. However, not all tests will be successful; thus, an entrepreneur should embrace failure and learn from the mistakes.

7. Periodic Assessment

The audience is increasingly becoming fragmented, and the technology is constantly evolving; therefore, businesses need to revaluate their marketing strategies regularly.

Periodic assessments and continuous updates of customer persona and audience profile will help small business owners to understand their target market. In addition, entrepreneurs can use test campaign results and current data to understand and connect with the target market. 

8. Use Analytics

Using analytic tools can help  businesses learn more about its target market. For example, analytics gives a detailed breakdown of the audience’s interests relating to content, products, or services on various online platforms. Furthermore, analytics tracks the audience’s online activities, thus helping entrepreneurs to acquire insights about the target market. 

Technology has made it easy to gather useful data relating to the people your business targets. 

Conclusion

Understanding the target market is essential in helping a business owner craft strategic marketing campaigns and meaningful marketing messages that resonate with the audience, resulting in increased sales.

Additionally, deep knowledge of the target market facilitates a good relationship between the business and clients because the business is aware of the customers’ needs and how to satisfy them.

Conducting a comprehensive marketing audit is an excellent way to understand the target market. A marketing audit takes an objective assessment of the marketing landscape that aids a business owner in gauging the current marketing tactics and identifying the right target customers for maximum return on investment