optimization

small design web icon

How to Optimize Your Business and Your Website

Author: Sophia Young

There are a million things to think about running your business, from acquiring funding to marketing your product or service. And though all businesses want to attract more visitors, convert more leads, and boost sales, the specific techniques for achieving these goals can be somewhat elusive.

That’s where optimization comes in. By definition, optimization is the process of making something the most effective version it can be. Optimizing your business means making it as effective as possible at achieving its goals. Likewise, optimizing your website means making it as effective as possible at attracting visitors and converting leads.

Don’t know where to begin?

Fortunately, the process sounds harder than it is. Optimizing your business today necessitates optimizing your website. That means that you’ll be hitting two birds with one stone by following our tips below.

1. Automate Business Processes

Automating your business processes can help you resolve many common issues, including:

  • Inefficiency -Manually completing tasks can often be time-consuming and error-prone. Automating these processes can help you speed up completion times and reduce errors.
  • Repetition – If your employees are spending a significant portion of their day completing the same task over and over, there’s a good chance that the task could be automated. This would free up their time to focus on more value-adding activities.
  • Dependency – If your business is reliant on a single individual to complete a task, automating that process can help to mitigate the risk of disruptions should that employee be unavailable
  • Lack of visibility – It can be difficult to get a clear picture of how your business is performing when business processes are manual. Automating key processes can help you capture data and generate reports that give you valuable insights into your operation.

Thanks to recent advances in technology, particularly with Artificial Intelligence (AI), even smaller businesses can now automate several processes, including:

  • Customer support – AI-powered chatbots can handle customer queries 24/7, freeing up your customer service team to focus on more complex issues.
  • Data entry – AI solutions for accounting and finance can automate data entry, saving your team time and reducing the risk of errors.
  • Appointment scheduling – Automating the appointment scheduling process can help you reduce no-shows and scheduling conflicts.

Automating your business processes also makes it easier to collect data and generate reports. This data can be used to identify areas of improvement, track progress over time, benchmark your performance against competitors, and optimize your website.

2. Improve Website Performance

Most of your customers’ first interactions with your business will be through your website. That means that its performance is critical to the success of your business. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t put much thought into their website’s performance—until it’s too late.

The average user expects a website to load in less than four seconds. If your site takes longer than this to load, you’re likely to lose visitors and potential customers. You can improve your site’s speed by optimizing your images, using a content delivery network (CDN), and minifying your CSS and JavaScript.

And because more than half of all retail web traffic now comes from mobile devices, you must also ensure that your website is optimized for them. That means creating a responsive design that can adapt to any screen size, as well as ensuring that your site’s content is easy to read and navigate on a smaller screen.

3. Invest in SEO

Ever wonder how your competitors crowd the first page of Google results? They’re using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which optimizes their website for Google’s algorithms so that your site appears higher in search results.

Don’t waste your website design cost by building a beautiful site that no one can find. Hiring an SEO expert can help you ensure that your site is visible to your target audience. They can also help you improve your click-through rate (CTR) and organic search traffic.

Remember that SEO is more of an ongoing process than a one-time optimization effort. That means you’ll need to regularly update your website’s content, Meta tags, and other elements to ensure that it continues to rank high in search results.

4. Don’t Stray from Quality Content

All business owners know that their content is important. But in the rush to produce more and more content, it’s easy to lose sight of what actually matters: quality.

You may think that interspersing a few low-effort posts among your high-quality articles will help you save money and time. But in reality, this will only hurt your business in the long run.

Your audience can tell the difference between well-written, informative articles and hastily put-together posts full of fluff and filler. The former will help you build trust and credibility with your readers; the latter will damage your reputation and turn potential customers away.

And because Google’s algorithms are designed to penalize sites that engage in what’s known as “content farming” — the practice of producing large quantities of low-quality content in an attempt to game the system— it’s more important than ever to focus on quality over quantity.

5. Keep Your Site Secure

If your website isn’t secure, you’re putting your business at risk of a data breach. You don’t want to land on the news because your customer’s personal information was compromised.

To protect your site, make sure that you’re using a secure hosting service, as well as a strong password for your admin panel. You should also consider investing in an SSL certificate, which encrypts your website’s data. We covered what small businesses need to know about cybersecurity in a previous post here.

Optimizing your business as well as your website in one fell swoop isn’t as hard as it seems. Automating your business processes opens the door to a host of benefits, including easier data collection and analysis, improved customer communication, and increased efficiency.

With that data in hand, optimizing your website with SEO, quality content, and a robust cybersecurity strategy becomes a much simpler task!

How to Effectively Increase Brand Visibility

Author: Eleanor Hecks

Brand visibility is imperative to success and relates to more prevalent customer recognition and awareness. It denotes the ability of customers to recognize a brand or business based on various factors.

It is commonly associated with visual representations of a brand such as the business logo, colors, and products, but it’s much more pervasive than that. For example, Apple and Google are synonymous with technology products, including computers, mobile devices, and so on. Every time those types of products are brought up, or the related topics are in focus, those two brands come to mind, among others. That is because they have effectively boosted brand visibility, in many different ways.

Of course, effectively increasing brand visibility for a small business or medium-sized operation, with limited resources, is quite a bit different than doing so for a corporate entity. What goes into brand visibility, and what are some ways to enhance and leverage the concept?

1. Optimize for Search

These days, there is no valid excuse for NOT optimizing a business or brand website for SEO, or search engine results. You can do this by focusing on relevant keywords, namely terms that your customers will be searching for. It’s not something you have to do alone either, as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO experts willing to help. It’s also accessible to all businesses, big and small. 

Choose keywords, use a proper SEO tool, and begin adding those keywords to your site. Coming up with a clear content marketing campaign that hits all those relevant keywords and delivers enriching and engaging material is just as important. Moreover, the keywords can be embedded within the web copy on all pages, product descriptions, headers, and much more.

2. Use Smart Advertising

Advertising and marketing are critical for boosting visibility, across print ads, digital ads, and various other mediums. But one of the best ways to get your name out there is to use creative measures, doing something a little different than everyone else. Some examples include clever office branding, unique product packaging, local sponsorships, or even customer rewards and incentives.

Like all forms of advertising, the idea is to get your brand out there and in front of as many eyes as possible. Doing it in a witty or creative way ensures that both the medium and the content stand out, creating a memorable experience, and vastly boosting brand awareness.

3. Tap Into Influencer Marketing

The term “influencer” has taken on new meaning in the digital frontier. It doesn’t just include celebrities and public personas, but also YouTubers, social media users, content creators, and much more. Moxy Hotels launched a YouTube channel featuring Taryn Southern, a popular influencer that became so popular, it now has multiple seasons’ worth of content.

Just as you would with celebrities during the days of old, you can tap into an influencer’s audience and resources to build awareness about your brand. You can do it by offering products for review, paying for ad placements or mentions, sending out free swag, opening discussions with creators, and so on.

The trick is to choose the right influencers for your niche, products, and brand. Instead of just picking someone because they’re popular, try to find someone local. Alternatively, you can look for someone that works with the types of products or services you offer, such as tech, makeup, accessories, or whatever.

4. Enhance Offline Marketing

In the digital age, and with so much happening online, it’s easy to overlook the offline world. Every business should invest some time and resources enhancing offline marketing efforts. It includes product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising or referrals, radio advertisements, networking, public events, cold calls, and much more. Basically, the term encompasses anything that happens offline and away from the internet.

Wearing yourself thin trying to do it all is not the goal, nor is it a good strategy. But choosing one or two channels to focus on, and then becoming the best of the best is the way to go. If you choose to participate in local job fairs or networking events, then do it with a splash! Host a keynote discussion or panel. Give out free swag to all booth visitors. Make it memorable and get your brand out there.

5. Reward Your Customers

To build loyalty, entice customers to share their experiences, and naturally increase awareness, you need to be going above and beyond. Rewarding your customers is an excellent way to do that. The first thing that comes to mind is a customer loyalty program or cashback rewards, but while those are great solutions, they’re not the only strategies that exist. There are many ways to give back and reward your customers, not necessarily through monetary incentives.

Bundling small gifts with every purchase is one example. Honing customer service programs to near perfection to ensure customers are always taken care of, is another. Another still might be something as simple as offering free shipping for all online orders. You’ll need to review your competitors so you know what they’re doing and what they offer, and then you can up your game. Ensure that your customers continually have positive and memorable experiences, and that will create a cyclical system where those people are always willing to share and talk about your brand.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Continue improving and innovating as much as possible, but also establish a way to measure brand visibility. Doing so is easier than you might think. You can look at website traffic, and how much it’s growing, review the search volume of your keywords, check in-store traffic, look at trending topics or messages about your brand, and much more.

Search optimization should always be on your plate, which means you should continue utilizing your chosen keywords and researching more. Smart advertising, offline marketing, and influencer support should also be persistent strategies. Don’t forget to reward your customers or your employees on the frontlines!

Once you put that vehicle in motion, don’t use the brakes, continue your momentum. Measure, iterate, improve, and then re-measure. It’s the best way to increase visibility, build strong and positive awareness, and cement your brand in the annals of history.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

7 Best Platforms for Mobile App Developers and How to Optimize App Development

Author: Romy Toma-Catauta

But how do you build a mobile app efficiently and effectively these days? In this digital era, every app is completed against not only the market but also the incredible rate of change in healthcare organisations, in institutions and in many types of companies. Mobile app developers have to spend a great deal of time making their apps accessible and enjoyable, they need platforms that help expedite the development process.

Here are the best platforms for mobile app developers looking to cut down on development time and cost:

1. Ionic

Ionic is an HTML5 mobile app development framework. With Ionic, mobile apps are simply web pages converted into an “app shell.” For mobile developers, having multi-platform support is incredibly important. Through frameworks like Ionic and PhoneGap, mobile app developers can release hybrid apps with a native feel.

A mobile app developer can use HTML, CSS, and AngularJS, to create apps that are easily exported to Apple and Android. What’s most compelling: Ionic’s community edition is completely free.

2. Xojo

Xojo is an incredible developer tool that allows those with limited experience to create powerful and complex applications across Mac, Windows, Linux, and Mobile devices. Xojo prides itself on being the best at making the complex easily understood. 

It reads much like Visual Basic and uses simple commands to execute a myriad of tasks. The cross-platform object-oriented language allows developers to make their dream application once and then immediately export it to whatever platforms they want. Xojo gives developers the freedom and opportunity to produce whatever they want without the limitations of the market.

3. Buildbox

Buildbox is a drag-and-drop mobile app creator. No coding is required. Just a bit of design sense and some digital literacy, you can start building right out of the box (hence the name). 

Apt as the name may be, some mobile app developers may be disappointed that Buildbox is primarily used to create mobile games.

4. Unity

Unity is a powerful game engine with a lot of importable assets and frameworks. Unity does require some coding and a modicum of technical skill to leverage effectively. 

For mobile developers looking to create an immersive experience, Unity is one of the best platforms available.

5. ShoutEm

ShoutEm is an app development tool that erases the need for experienced coders or marketing expertise to build your first app. 

Their tools allow developers to build apps and market them within the same platform. Their goal is to make app development easier than ever so that more people may realize their dreams of building an app without the technical requirements of coding. 

6. Appery.io

Appery.io requires very little coding experience. With appery.io, you can create hybrid mobile apps (apps that are easily exported to Android and Apple devices). 

The backend of your app is provided within Appery.io’s infrastructure. Developers and entrepreneurs alike can drag-and-drop components, utilize Appery.io templates, and collaborate in the cloud. Best of all, the platform has a free trial version so you can begin developing on their platform before you make any financial decision. 

7. Appcelerator

Appcelerator is a mobile development company that primarily develops a cross-platform development tool called Titanium. 

Their goal is to not only provide a great cross-platform development tool but to also offer complex services in the background to help mobile apps stay current and functional. Appcelerator is a great service for those developers who want to find a truly all in one product.

Mobile app developers have more tools tailored to their applications than ever before whether you have experienced coders that can help you build you’re at scratch or with a framework like Ionic or Unity or you’re an entrepreneur with zero programming experience, there are many successful paths your development team can take.

With today’s technology, you can make your dream app a reality. Work on your idea, find a suitable platform, do your market research, and reach out to customers. With these tools and tips, you should be able to create a killer app in no time at all. 

6 Ways to Radically Optimize Mobile App Development

Optimizing mobile app development is all about opening communication lines, staying open to the pivot, and prioritizing your team members. A fast and efficient team is always going to bring the best results but only if major considerations are taken into account. 

The development principles are a great place to start. Your development team must have an agreed-upon style in which they can develop without hindrance or interruption. 

Here are six ways to radically optimize mobile app development for your team:

1. Adopt agile practices

Using the agile method will promote an environment of cooperation amongst the developers and will guarantee that each developer is heard and considered. The agile method concerns itself with the elasticity of a product’s development. 

Your mobile app can be optimized instantaneously by implementing a system that iterates upon the product so that it can always stay competitive. Once a firm development plan is in place then you will want to optimize the daily functions of the team. 

2. Make meetings quick

The first and most effective thing that your team can do is to make meetings quick and efficient. Meetings, by and large, can slow and hinder a development team by over corporatizing them. 

Instead, opt for mandatory meetings and for all other communication use Slack, Trello, or any service that grants instant messaging to your team members. 

3. Complete a market analysis

Once work properly begins on a webdesign, then you will want to complete comprehensive market research that includes customer questionnaires and focus groups. App development cannot begin in earnest until everyone knows what they are making and for which audience. 

Completing a complex market research plan will give your team a better understanding of the app’s identity and how it should be designed and also on how to grow an ecommerce business. Good market research will make the development process a breeze for you and your developers as they will have a clear picture of where they are going. 

4. Concentrate on one platform at a time

Concentrating on one platform at a time can also be very helpful for your team as they won’t have to consider each of the feature changes between the platform versions. There are a few platform options out there for mobile devices and deciding to focus on one platform at a time will dramatically simplify the development process. 

This will, in turn, make your mobile app a much more focused product that takes full advantage of a particular platform’s features. 

5. Integrate your development process these were ongoing marketing research

However, fully realizing your product entails doing constant market research throughout the development process. Maintaining a presence within your audience will guarantee that your mobile app comes to full fruition without missing anything that your customers want. 

Also, consistent market research will help your team with the design and flow of the app which will keep it competitive with the other similar apps on the app stores. Smart mobile app developers know that to keep a product interesting you must find out what interests others. Always designing to improve is a guaranteed way to find success with your app. 

6. Trust your team

One of the hardest things that any owner or manager can do is to trust somebody else with a decision that they don’t fully understand. It is in these times of trust and invention that some of the best mobile app ideas have come to pass whether you work in digital marketing agencies, technology companies or any other companies.

Open and considerate teamwork is the tool with which all apps are possible. A team that trusts one another is a team that is bound for incredible success and glory.

However, creating a successful app is always going to depend on how much you trust your team. Your development team is your greatest asset and they should be treated as such by always listening to their ideas and incorporating them into the decision, making the development process more effective. 

Ultimately, optimizing your mobile app development boils down to communication, write for us technology and cooperation, the cornerstones of a great business. By keeping the channels open and the ideas flowing you will be able to create the best apps that you are capable of making and then some.

Why Should Your E-commerce Site Be Optimized?

Author: Sean H.

When was the last time you reviewed and optimized your e-commerce site? If it’s been more than a year or two, it’s probably time to check in and tune up your site. All the work that you do to bring traffic to your site is wasted if people find its appearance dated or don’t have a good experience. You want people to glide effortlessly through your sales funnel, not meander or get lost in loops that don’t lead them where you want them to go.

Your brand has probably evolved since you built your site, and you want to embed your current branding deep in every corner of your website — including the product pages and shopping cart. But even if your brand hasn’t evolved much since you last optimized your site, the internet probably has. Your customers are comparing their experience on your site to their experience on e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Wayfair, and they have high expectations that can’t be met by technology from three years ago.

Check out this infographic on e-commerce optimization for a quick overview of the importance of website optimization. The graphic covers a range of topics from how to tell if your site needs optimization to which optimizations are most commonly needed. It also discusses building optimization into your business model and includes a concise list of items to review on your site. If you’re looking for more detailed information, download this free e-commerce optimization whitepaper from CopyPress.

You can also learn more about Sales Funnels here – https://funnelengine.com/sales-funnel-examples