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Category Archives: Blog

Why You Should Never Go Cheap When Printing Marketing Material

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Chester Bullock Posted in Blog .

Running a business isn’t easy. You need to be able to market your products and services to your target audience. You need to be able to project a good image. Printed marketing material quite often is one of the first avenues you have to attract your audience. It is easy to think that since most businesses are online that printed material doesn’t matter. It does.

There are at least three times that you’d use printed marketing materials to attract potential customers. The first time is when you initially contact a potential customer personally. The second time is to make people aware of an open house or a sale. The third time is to provide information on a new product or service. For these times, you definitely don’t want to print on cheap paper or rely on a printing company that uses cheap ink.

Quality Control and Image 
Using cheap ink that wears off on a person’s hand reflects on your business. You may not think that it makes a difference but it does. Because print marketing can enhance your company’s image, you don’t want potential customers to think that your product is shoddy due to poor image resolution.

Quality printing provides your company with the boost it needs to attract new customers. It also reflects back to your products and services. Shoddy, faded and smeared copy tells potential customers that your products and services are the same.

Tangible Asset and Visible Items 
People like having stuff that they can hold in their hands. A great quality printer that is designed to re-create your company’s logo on merchandise that you can pass out is priceless.

Poorly marked items that wear off leave your company’s advertisement in the lurch. It could also result in lost sales.

Insurmountable Delays and Dropped Orders
A good reason why you shouldn’t go cheap when printing marketing materials is the insurmountable delays you could encounter. These delays could cost you both time and money. Working with a cheap printer, especially if it’s an online printer could also result in dropped orders. A lack of communication, a typing error and shipping delays are typical issues with cheap printing.

Building Your Company’s Image-Brand Awareness
The best way to build your company’s issue and produce brand awareness is through printed marketing material Contrary to popular thought, not everyone is online all the time. Poorly put together print advertising repels customers. It reflects badly on your company’s image as well.

Using cheap printers may save you some money in the short term. It could also ruin your company’s reputation. In other words, the money you supposedly saved using cheap printing would probably end up costing you more in the long term.

If you value your company’s reputation, you will think twice before utilizing cheap printing materials. Spending a few extra dollars will be well worth the cost of printing marketing materials. It could also bring in new customers and retain your existing customers.

Why Being Ranked #1 Is Essential For Business Success

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Chester Bullock Posted in Blog .

Ranking first on search engines is something that most businesses tend to undermine. I gather this is because they do not really understand the relationship between SEO and their business success. Therefore, I will lay it for you some of the benefits that top ranking on search engines, has on your business.

 

Increased Business Credibility

 

One of the benefits of having your business being ranked number one on search engines is that your credibility increases. Customer who sees you rated first will have the impression that you are excellent at what you do, thus the rankings. This is important in building trust. Besides, customers automatically connect first rated businesses with a high level of trustworthiness. Also, this helps in building you a great online reputation, just what you need to get more customers viewing your page.

 

Saves on Marketing Costs

 

Optimizing your business visibility over search engines is a very cost effective way of marketing. The reason being that you are able to reach to clients who are specifically looking for the products and services that you sell. Therefore, you are able to save money that would have been used in outbound marketing initiatives. This money can go towards more production or anything else that will increase your profitability. Also, the fact that it is one of the most effective marketing strategies, it means that you get a better Return on Investment as compared to other marketing strategies.

 

Increased Brand Awareness

 

Being ranked first on search engines is beneficial in increasing brand awareness. If your business is the first that people see when they search certain keywords, then it means that a wider audience will know what you do. They don’t necessarily have to buy now. But, they will know about you and the next time they are looking for products under your profile, you will be the first to come to mind.

 

Competitive Advantage

 

Ranking first on search engine gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors You competitors by now realize the importance of Search Engine Optimization, but you being first, means that they are not the first to be seen by potential clients. This means, that you get more traffic and possibly more sales than your customers.

 

Increased Traffic

 

Not being visible over search engines is the worst thing that could happen to your business. If clients cannot see you, how will you get any business? Increased traffic could just be what you need in order to make more sales. Besides, increased traffic translates to increased brand awareness to clients who are looking for keywords that are your products.

 

Bottom Line

 

To be ranked as number one on any search engine takes a lot of work. But, I guarantee you that it is all worth your while. And, once you get to the top, do not just relax. Do everything you can to maintain this position. Even if it means hiring a Gold Coast SEO company This is the only way you will be able to maintain the benefits.

5 Basic SEO Tasks You Should Implement Today

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Chester Bullock Posted in Blog .

Millions of new websites and blogs are established daily across the web. However, few of those just starting out have the necessary skills to optimize their pages for the top search engines like Google. We at SEO Consultant Brisbane realize that Search Engine Optimization or SEO is vital for a site’s existence and attracting traffic. SEO is also the strong suit of all basic marketing tactics online. Here is something important to consider. The majority of people that discover your website, will do so through a search engine. Few people rarely just directly type a URL to a website. Ranking high on the search engines will shift your site into high gear. Here are 5 basic SEO tasks you should implement today. 

Web Page Titles
We are going back to basics here. Of course, there are new strategies that are implemented every day about SEO. However, it is still the basics that draw traffic and the search engines to a website. Some new webmasters make the mistake of placing the same title on every web page. Instead, give each page a distinctly different name with a keyword in the title. This should help the search engines recognize that the web pages contain distinctly different content and rank the pages accordingly.

Add Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are part of the HTML coding that the search engines read. This information includes key information about the website. It is vital to place the top keywords in the descriptions to let the search engines know what the page is about and rank the page.

The fact is that meta descriptions are still very important to SEO basics because the meta description appears on search results and coax the searcher to click the link provided.

Add Meta Tags
Some mistaken web designers are operating under the false assumption that web page meta tags are a thing of the past, and no longer required. The meta tag section on a web page is still very important because it helps the search engines find and rank the web pages on a website. There are two meta tags to carefully consider. They include the meta description and the meta keywords. The meta tag section is HTML coding that contains the carefully researched keywords, that accurately depict the content that is on the page. 

Optimize Images
Most new webmasters place a lot of emphasis on the text that is on the website. This is a great practice. However, it is also vital to pay just as much attention to the images that are on the website pages. Certainly, search engines cannot accurately provide information about the graphics or images on the site, unless the webmaster uses the ALT text code to describe the graphics or images on the web page. The ALT text is HTML coding that is designed to describe the images and is read by the search engines.

Short URL
The search engines crawl the Internet looking for sites to index and rank. The experts state that an accurate URL that is shorter, is more likely to get indexed by the search engines than a very long URL that does not accurately describe the website’s content.

Commercial Vs Domestic electricians – What’s the difference

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Chester Bullock Posted in Blog .

Commercial Vs Domestic electricians – What’s the difference

The difference between a commercial and a domestic electrician is very distinct because you have to make sure that you have brought the right person in to help you with your building. The commercial electricians Sunshine Coast you work with will be able to help you with the building you are in, and they will show you that a whole building can be rewired. You can get a domestic electrician for your home in the area because they work on a much smaller scale. Working on a much smaller scale is good for the domestic electrician, and you need to ask them if they will bring all the right gear into the house.

A commercial electrician is very good at not only helping you with the wiring in the building and the wiring for your machinery. You should remember that you will be able to get all the machines serviced in the same way. This means that the machines can be handled just like the outlets and the lights in the building. You can get a commercial electrician to come in and help you wire your security system, and you will be able to have someone help you when you are not sure why these things are not wired the right way.

The domestic electrician that you bring into the house knows how to wire everything from the appliances to the HVAC unit in the house. You need to have someone in the house is coming in to help you with all the wiring. You can set up the wiring so that you will be able to have the house in better shape, and you should remember that you will be able to get them in the house anytime you have a new kind of wiring done for new kinds of purchases.

The best thing that you can do is to call the person that matches the size of the house or the building. Someone who works only in the commercial should be able to bring all the commercial wires and parts. It is very easy for people to get the wiring done when they come in with a spool that can be used to wire the whole factory or office. That means that people will need to be sure that they have hired the commercial electrician who will bring all their gear with them to get the work done.

Working on the small scale in the house is much easier for someone who is trying to fix a small problem in the house. The house can have any small changes done with help from the electrician, and it is very easy for them to do everything from the electrical outlet to the appliances and the air conditioning. Let them take care of everything to be sure that you have someone who is going to help you make sure that you have the right results in the building. You will have a much safer space, and it will be much easier to use.

Corporate Strategy in a Digital Age

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Chester Bullock Posted in Blog, Business .

The Internet phenomenon has generated more press over the past 18 months than any other business topic. Has all the hype been justified? Is the Internet really revolutionizing the business world? Or is it – like so many other so-called technology revolutions of the past 20 years – merely the latest in a string of incremental technology improvements, one whose time might be over in a few short years?

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Recently, Booz-Allen & Hamilton and the Economist Intelligence Unit (E.I.U.) undertook a joint project to understand what senior executives around the world are thinking – and doing – about the Internet. More than 525 executives from a wide range of industries completed a written or online survey (which was prepared in six languages); more than 100 others participated in two Thought Leadership Panels in New York and London or were interviewed individually.

The results of the research – which have been published by the E.I.U. under the title “Competing in the Digital Age: How the Internet is Transforming Corporate Strategy” – lead to an irrefutable conclusion: Quite simply, the Internet is reshaping the global marketplace and it will continue to do so for some time to come.

As the chairman and chief executive officer of the Bank of Montreal, Matthew Barrett, says, “We are only standing at the threshold of a New World. It is as if we had just invented printing or the steam engine.” Mr. Barrett is not alone in his assessment. More than 90 percent of our survey respondents believe that the Internet will transform or have a major impact on their corporate strategy within the next two to three years. Moreover, more than 60 percent believe that the Internet will help their companies achieve their strategic goals within the next year or two. That is quite an achievement for a technology that no one except technophiles had even heard of four or five years ago.

The Internet is changing the way customers, suppliers and companies interact, creating huge opportunities as well as unforeseen competitive threats. In much the same way as it is redefining external relationships with suppliers, customers and alliance partners, the Internet is also changing the way companies work internally, collapsing boundaries and redefining relationships among different functions, departments and divisions. In just a few years, the Internet has profoundly affected the basis of competition in many industries. Instead of the traditional focus on product features and costs, the Internet is shifting the basis of competition to a more strategic level – changing the business models that companies use to organize themselves, engage in relationships and conduct their most basic transactions with customers and suppliers.

SURVEY FINDS MEGATRENDS

Our survey findings identify seven megatrends, all due – at least in part – to the rise of the Internet.
(See Exhibit I.)


Exhibit I
In a nutshell, these portend the next major business transformation. Obviously, senior executives must understand these trends and their implications, especially because so many of them have already become potent forces for business change. Many executives have begun to realize competitive advantage from rethinking how the Internet will affect their companies, customers, suppliers and partners. They are restructuring their businesses accordingly to exploit one or more of these megatrends.

NEW BUSINESS MODELS

As senior executives realize what these Internet-enabled megatrends can mean for their companies, most see that they must develop congruent Internet strategies that may call for some dramatic changes in the way they do business. Most tellingly, old ways of thinking about one’s place in the value chain are blurring past recognition. (See Exhibit II.)



What is different about suppliers and customers today? When does it make sense to go to market through intermediaries? What kinds of relationships should a company build with its suppliers, its customers, its alliance partners?

Senior executives’ responses confirm that the Digital Age has changed age-old definitions of what various groups are and do:

Intermediaries: Once a necessity for reaching customers in many industries, many intermediaries are at serious risk because producers can reach out directly to their end- customers via the Internet. To continue to be viable, these intermediaries will need to reassess what they bring to the table, most likely repositioning themselves in the process.

Suppliers: They face a host of similar challenges. How can they harness the Internet to get closer to their customers, retooling traditional processes to enhance customer service and deliver e-commerce solutions?

Customers: No more caveat emptor; with a wealth of product information from thousands of companies only a mouse click away, customers are in the driver’s seat now.

ONE SIZE WILL NOT FIT ALL

Our survey participants caution their counterparts everywhere not to fall into the trap of thinking the Internet only provides new sales and marketing channels; rather, it impacts all the strategic weapons chief executive officers can use to build competitive advantage. An all-too-common mistake is to view the Internet simply as a new communication channel, failing to make it an integral part of the whole business. More than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have an Internet presence today, yet only 5 percent actually are generating online profits from e-commerce. Those companies that have successful, profitable online operations, including The Dell Computer Corporation, Cisco Systems, the Charles Schwab Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation, have all integrated their e-commerce objectives into their overall corporate strategies.

Other companies can learn from these masters. “There’s almost nothing you’re doing that you can’t figure out some way to do better, faster and cheaper using the Internet,” says Jim Harkness, vice president of TIAA-CREF, which provides retirement and insurance products for the education and research communities. “If you can’t figure out a way to make the Internet help your business, that’s not what’s wrong with the Internet, that’s what’s wrong with you. …There’s almost nothing, there’s almost no industry that I can think of today that can’t enhance its bottom line in some way using the Internet.”

Not surprisingly, the number of companies investing in all kinds of Web sites (i.e., public vs. “private” intranets and extranets) is growing. (See Exhibit III.)

Interestingly, our survey respondents are forecasting that extranets (i.e., private sites accessed by people outside the corporation) will experience the most rapid and significant growth over the next three years. That is where senior executives see the biggest opportunities to develop new sources of competitive advantage with customers and suppliers. In fact, over the next three years, survey respondents believe that extranet deployment will more than double – from 32 percent of respondents’ companies having them today to 65 percent having them within three years. They believe that building extranets will allow them to bring customers closer to their companies through the delivery of specialized services and also to reduce costs and improve efficiencies when such extranets are used with suppliers. Now that most large companies have already built the simpler Internet applications – public Web sites and intranets – and achieved some success with them, they’re ready to capture the additional value that extranets can deliver.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

Clearly, senior executives are convinced that the Internet and related technology will revolutionize their businesses. While not everyone calculates their return on investment from Internet investments, senior executives know they must keep up with the Internet leaders in their industries or fall behind forever. As the chairman of the Intel Corporation, Andy Grove, recently exclaimed when someone asked him to quantify his company’s payoff from Internet e-commerce, “What’s my ROI on e-commerce? Are you crazy? This is Columbus in the New World. What was his ROI?”

Admittedly, to date few companies have seen measurable returns, but almost all are looking far past the short term: 90 percent of survey respondents are convinced that their companies will see a payoff from their Internet investments within three years. They are in wholly new territory, “betting on the come,” but they believe this is a necessity. If they do not make substantial investments now, they risk being left in the dust a few years hence.

At BP Amoco P.L.C. and many other companies, Internet investments are seen as enablers. “You create an infrastructure capability. No one sits down and says, ‘What has this done for me, what has this saved me?’ It has become part of the way business is done,” explains Jim Hood, information technology leader for BP Amoco’s Global Business Center. Consequently, total investment for Internet products and services is expected to top $92 billion by the year 2000, according to the International Data Corporation. This represents an almost 50 percent compound annual growth rate for the computers, networking equipment, software and services necessary for building Internet infrastructure. This covers both the spending on creating e-commerce Web sites and the myriad of internal uses to which the technology is being applied.

Since Internet investments focus on building infrastructure, keeping pace with the market and building new capabilities, senior executives expect payoffs to come in many forms. (See Exhibit IV.)

Not surprisingly, survey respondents attribute the greatest Internet value to those payoffs that touch the customer, such as “improving communication” and “enhancing customer service.” These encompass benefits of customer loyalty, better targeting of customers, and more rapid response to customer and market demands. Survey respondents also point to a wide variety of channel-oriented payoffs, including new market entry, new product creation and globalization.

From an internal perspective, “improving knowledge-sharing” is judged to be the most valuable payoff, as companies reap savings when their employees waste less time searching for information contained within the organization. More importantly, knowledge-sharing has a multiplier effect on good ideas generated within a company. As more people have access to these ideas, they can be enhanced and executed more broadly.

Unfortunately, most of these Internet benefits are not easily quantified. To a great extent, this accounts for the surprisingly low number of respondents who believe their companies have already seen a payoff from their Internet investments. The monetary impact of “improved communications” or “improved knowledge- sharing” is difficult to assess. Yet senior executives assuredly see value in these “soft” benefits. They believe that they are positioning their companies for longer-term gains, and not relying strictly on orthodox metrics when evaluating their companies’ Internet investments.

“WIRED” – NOT “TIRED”

Our survey underscores that the Internet is far more than just a new channel for selling products and services – it represents a seismic shift in how companies structure their operations, share knowledge, empower employees and get things done. Mr. Harkness of TIAA-CREF explains, “We are not going around looking for things that we can do on the Internet. We are looking at the work that is integral to our business and seeing how can we do that better on the Web.” To compete effectively in the Digital Age, companies will need to evolve their business models from the tired, command-and-control hierarchies that developed with the Industrial Age to the wired organizations common among companies that have sprung up with the Internet.

William Thiele, vice president of the General Reinsurance Corporation, sums up the challenges and the opportunities of life with the Internet: “Internally the benefits are clear: It has speeded our business up tremendously; we’re now effectively open 24 hours a day. People work from multiple locations in a collaborative environment… . Externally, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. We’ve been in the business a long time; we have a substantial investment in bricks and mortar. Our business model has emphasized face-to-face contact, personal relationships, direct marketing. We can easily envision someone setting up shop in Dublin or Honolulu or wherever they want to and accessing all of our customers without going through the trouble that we have. And if anyone else can do thay…we have to do it faster and better.”

To paraphrase Mr. Thiele, the Internet will require – and truly enable – companies to become round-the-clock operations that can act more quickly and with more flexibility. It will restructure roles within the value chain by blurring boundaries between companies and their customers, suppliers, partners and even competitors. It will force chief executive officers to create new business cultures where innovation, change management and leadership through shared mission are paramount.

Senior executives who are positioning their companies to make the most of the Internet-enabled world understand that the Internet is truly revolutionizing all facets of business life. Although no one has figured out all the ramifications yet, most senior executives are certain that they must invest in the Internet and related technology – and, in some cases, invest heavily – or lose market share. By placing their bets on this new way of doing business, by ceasing to rely on old tools and traditional business rules, companies are preparing to emerge from the coming transformation on top.

For more information or to obtain the full findings of “Competing in the Digital Age: How the Internet is Transforming Corporate Strategy,” please visit www.bah.com or www.eiu.com.

Reprint No. 99202

 
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/16544?gko=12e17

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