Category Archives: Business Tips
Ways to Increase Brand Visibility with Weibo Marketing
What is it about the Chinese marketplace that makes it such a hard catch? Perhaps it is the crushing population and the endless opportunities to make it big for your brand. While entering the Chinese market may seem like a daunting task, the truth is that with the power of social media and the blessing of social media marketing, it is no longer that hard to reach out directly to your target audience!
Weibo Marketing: The Secret Behind it
Perhaps the best thing about entering the Chinese market is the audience: Chinese people are the most connected population known to mankind, they need social media on a minute-basis. In other words, they live and breathe social media. If they’re not looking up or searching something on the internet, they’re posting their most random thoughts for the rest of the world to see. In fact, this generation is called the Chinese digital natives because of how connected they are with the aid of social media. Today, the average Chinese customer wants to break out of their routine and be surprised with a fun product or service they spot online. This is where your brand comes in, with the help of Weibo Marketing!
The most challenging part of bringing your business overseas to the ginormous country of China is that you’re unfamiliar with the marketing techniques that work here. It is very different from that of the western countries and you must adapt to the circumstances. Using the right strategies and applying it to your target audience using Weibo marketing techniques is the only way to go. Given that Chinese social media values Weibo significantly, it is a must that you get well acquainted with this revered social media platform!
Weibo: What Exactly is it?
Before we discuss how Weibo marketing helps increase brand visibility, let’s talk basics. Weibo is China’s most famous social media platform. Its literal translation is a microblog, and refers to the mini-blogging services in China. It is to China what Twitter is to the rest of the world and is taken very seriously by Chinese consumers: it is a platform where they can truly be themselves and express their feelings. If anything, it’s better than Twitter because you can write long posts (over 10,000 characters) and customize them using videos and pictures!
Weibo Marketing Reaches Target Audience
By using the right Weibo marketing techniques, you will reach a large pool of customers, which might broaden the horizon vis-a-vis your target audience. As you know, the Weibo audience is massive and very diverse in nature. Most people use Weibo for entertainment, but many business companies (including foreign companies) use it to leverage their business and increase brand visibility.
They use these marketing techniques to reach out to the average Chinese customer, analyze their audience, and in effect, promote their brand. It’s a win-win situation for both parties. But that’s not the extent of your target audience. Journalists use it to search for new ideas and perform investigative reporting, celebrities use it to communicate with their fans and KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) use it to motivate their communities, which by the way, is a popular Weibo marketing technique used by many!
Why Weibo Marketing is Important for Your Business?
Needless to say, Weibo is a powerful tool to establish yourself and your presence to the wide population of China, especially for foreign companies. Hiring a digital marketing or social media marketing agency to do the background research and reaching out to the customer for you would be ideal if you’re new to the marketplace and have no idea how to start. Most foreign companies use Weibo accounts to communicate with their customers and announce product launches! By being consumer-focused and business-driven, there’s really no better way to increase brand visibility than by using Weibo marketing and its very effective techniques.
In effect, Weibo marketing really helps boost your morale when you’re a first-timer in the Chinese market and need a way in. With the help of Weibo marketing techniques, you can easily interact with customers and find out what they’re all about, increase your brand recognition by constantly posting updates and interesting quotes about what your company does and its main focus, send advertisements, videos, and pictures captivating content to increase not only visibility but relatability, and ultimately seize the opportunity to convert users to customers, which is ultimately the goal of every business.
How a Digital Marketing Company Takes Your Business to a New Height?
As one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, China offers a lot of business opportunities to international companies. If you can successfully tap this market for your products and services, immense profits are guaranteed. However, you will have to overcome a couple of hurdles first.
Before you can do business in China and advertise on the Chinese internet, you need to get permission from the Chinese government and make sure, thereafter, that you follow their rules and regulations. Additionally—although a growing number of Chinese now know English—knowledge of Mandarin, Cantonese, or the other local languages is essential for business and advertising. You will also need to have a good grasp of the social and cultural aspects.
If you are a foreign company, with little understanding of the language and culture, it is probably going to be problematic for you to get your business going to China on your own. It will be best if you team up with a reputable digital marketing company that has many years of business experience in China. Here’s how the best digital marketing company in China can assist you:
They can help publicize your brand with social media marketing
With over 60 million Chinese using social media every day, it can be a powerful marketing tool if you know how to leverage it properly. To do so, however, you need to be proficient in Chinese languages and also be aware of social and cultural mores. Using a translation app won’t cut it. You might, inadvertently, make a faux pas that could turn you into a laughingstock, or, worse still for your business, end up offending people. By working with a digital marketing company in China, you can avoid these possible pitfalls.
The digital marketing company will know how to research social trends and create posts that will incorporate these. They will also connect with influencers on social media and rope them in to assist with your marketing campaigns.
They can increase your outreach and improve your audience engagement
By using proper keywords and key phrases and also social media trends, the digital marketing company in China will try to ensure that your advertisements reach a wider audience. They will also strive to increase your social media followers by engaging with people on social media. That involves posting remarks on other people’s posts and responding to queries and replies on yours.
Regular social media engagement will raise your social media profile and make your brand known to more people. The digital marketing company will handle the digital interactions for you and make sure that your posts are interesting enough to capture people’s attention, without veering into controversial territory. The audience will also appreciate your quick, courteous responses and will then be more willing to be part of your online community and more likely to buy your products and services.
They can monitor and analyze the marketing performance of your brand
To find out how well your marketing campaigns are doing, the digital marketing company will monitor your social media posts and advertisements. They will keep track of the number of impressions they are getting. Additionally, they will track which are the most popular posts, which get fewer likes, how many conversions they are making, and what the bounce rate is.
Using this data, they will come up with a content strategy to get maximum attention from the target audience. They will also pinpoint the best time to post to get more views and interactions. They will then set up a posting schedule accordingly.
By reviewing and analyzing the social media and marketing performance data, the digital marketing company will be able to offer you tips and advice on how to enhance your publicity by creating more attention-grabbing and engaging social media posts. For the best results, you should take their suggestions under consideration and act on them.
Working with a digital marketing company in China can prove to be quite beneficial for your business. While it won’t be inexpensive, it will help you establish a strong customer base. Furthermore, the digital marketing company will make sure that your products and services, social media posts, and advertising campaigns align with the Chinese government’s legal requirements.
Benefits of Hiring A Professional Digital Marketing Company for Your Business
Digital marketing has many facets like content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and retargeting. To manage all these together successfully, you need to hire a professional digital marketing company for your business.
To make things easy for you, we have provided you with reasons for partnering with a digital marketing company in China below.
China’s Digital Space is Different
Unlike the rest of the world, China has a different digital landscape and top players. For example, the world of Internet search is not dominated by Google; it is dominated by Baidu, China’s own search engine. Also, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are blocked in China. The popular social media platforms in China include Weibo and WeChat, which have millions of daily active users.
Internet censorship and surveillance are tightly implemented in China, and you need a Chinese digital marketing company that knows the rules and the Internet tools that would work for your business to capture the Chinese market.
China’s Internet Landscape is Fragmented
The world of the Internet is dominated by Google and Facebook, except for China. Be it searching for information, entertainment, or shopping, a large number of people use Google as the gateway. Similarly, the world of social media is dominated by Facebook. In fact, the most popular image sharing platform Instagram and the most popular online chat application is owned by Facebook. In most cases, your marketing strategies revolve around these two platforms to achieve success.
Things are different in China. The government of China has encouraged a rich ecosystem of local, homegrown apps and tools like WeChat( social media and chat), Baidu(search), and Taobao (online shopping). If you want to succeed in China market, you have to be familiar with these huge tech platforms.
The Chinese social media landscape is completely different. The competitors and targets are significantly different from their western counterparts. Strategies that worked for Facebook and Instagram platforms might not work here. Due to the fragmentation of the Internet, you would need separate strategies for targeting customers on each platform.
A digital marketing company in China can help you plan a dynamic communication strategy to win Chinese consumers. The Chinese digital marketing company can help in the initial analysis of the Chinese markets, targets, and competitors. This will be a crucial step in initiating the right communication plan to gain entry into the Chinese market.
Chinese Language and Culture
China has a complex and diverse consumer market. Businesses need to tailor their marketing strategies and products to local preferences. You also need to consider the Chinese language, symbolism, and culture while marketing your product and services to Chinese consumers.
Translation from English to the Chinese language is not going to help. In fact, translation of the company or product name may have a negative or embarrassing meaning that may not go well with the Chinese audience. This can have a fairly large impact on sales with agents, distributors, and consumers, all avoiding your product.
A professional digital marketing company in China can provide you the right advice in the translation of your business name and product and help avoid these problems. Also, the Chinese language is the preferred language on Baidu and social media platforms. In fact, a large number of Chinese audiences do not see ads in the English language. If you want your business to succeed in China, you need to embrace the Chinese language, tune your marketing strategies to adapt to Chinese culture.
High Starting Costs
When you are trying to grow your business in China, spending money on digital marketing is not optional. The cost of advertising varies on different Chinese online platforms. Here are the average yearly marketing budgets for brands of different sizes.
· Very small : $25,000 USD – $100,000
· Small : $100,000 – $300,000
· Medium: $300, 000 – $1,000,000
· Large: $1,000,000 or above
Over the past 5 to 10 years, the Chinese market has become very competitive with all multinational brands to start-ups attempting to grab a pie of Chinese market share.
The intense competition, government censorship, diverse Chinese market calls the need for partnering with a digital marketing company in China to get the best ROI and success.
Tips for Choosing an Esports Agency
With the widespread popularity of video games in the world today, it is no wonder that the esports industry is thriving as well. With esports, skilled gamers the world over have the opportunity to compete and win in a variety of gaming tournaments, just as traditional athletes do. However, while you might be eager to dive into a contract with the first esports agency that shows interest in you, it is important to ensure that you choose the best one for you.
Why Should You Sign with an Agency?
Like with professional sports, acting, or any other careers that require you to sign deals with corporations, plan out events and appearances, and be very visible to the public eye, an agent is a necessary asset to have. Whether you are just starting out or have already made a name for yourself in the world of esports, having a trustworthy and reliable esports agency at your side will be very helpful for a number of reasons.
Put simply, the value of being represented by an esports agency is that the agency is there to help ensure that you make the best decisions for your career. Whereas you might not be trained in reading legal documents and contracts—something that you will sign a lot of as part of your career as an esports athlete—your agent is, and they will guarantee that everything in the contracts serves your best interests.
What to Look for in an Esports Agency?
Like all decisions that affect your career, choosing an esports agency to represent you is a choice that should be made with consideration and care. As noted earlier, it is never a good idea to dive right in with the first agency that shows interest. Not only does this prevent you from making a decision informed by research, but it is also possible that the agency may not have your best interests in mind and is only interested in exploiting young and eager esports athletes. It is important to do research into a number of topics.
See What Others Thought About Them
While you might not have the pick of the litter when it comes to esports agencies, chances are that you will still have a couple of options. When considering these potential esports agencies, look up reviews of them as an agency. By looking up reviews and seeing what other esports athletes have thought of the agency, you might just realize that the esports agency you thought seemed so great is actually not. Without looking up reviews of their services, you will never know if the agency you are considering is actually good or not.
Consider Your Needs
If everyone who has previously worked with an agency says positive things about them, it can be tempting to choose them immediately. However, the next step is to determine if their services will satisfy your particular needs. Every esports athlete is different, just as every person is different. Therefore, an agency that worked well for one athlete might not work as well for you.
Pricing
No esports agency will take you on for free, so one of the first things to consider is price. Are they too expensive for you? Or do they seem too cheap? Both of these could be signs that going with a different esports agency might be a good idea.
Location
If an esports agency’s headquarters is very far away from where you are located, it might be best to choose a more local agency, unless you are willing to move to the location of the agency in question. While you may be able to work with an agency from a distance through email and other online methods of communication, it will be altogether more convenient if they are located somewhat close to you. For example, if you are ever required to meet with your agent in person, flying to another country or continent might be a serious inconvenience, and could even affect your own ability to work.
Services Offered
Finally, whether you intend to compete internationally, or simply wish to be represented on a smaller scale to the public, it is important to consider the services offered by the esports agency that you are interested in. If you want to have international representation and compete in large-scale tournaments across the globe, then a small esports agency is definitely not the right choice for you. Similarly, if your resources are limited and you do not want international representation anyway, then going with a smaller agency may be best. In fact, not only will the smaller agency be cheaper, but they will also be more tailored toward smaller-scale representation than a very large esports agency that predominantly represents world-famous athletes.
How to Find the Cheapest Exchange Archiving Provider for Your Business
Today, businesses are relying heavily on emails as their main mode of communication. The fact is many startups are using smartphones as the main communication medium for doing business. With so much emphasis on mail, it is crucial that your business must use the cheapest exchange archiving service for storing all mails. The affordable mail archiving services creates a copy of each mail on your business account or personal account and stores them in an offsite server. It does not matter the content of the email, it will always be stored in the archive even if it is accidentally deleted on someone’s account. The highest level of transparency has several benefits for your business.
Archiving your mails is vital for your business. It helps to safely store the mails for future preferences. You may require past mails for simplifying the work of the IT department, litigation support or regulatory purposes. It also helps in reducing the costs for maintenance of servers. Managing servers for mails is a huge business cost. Even the normal archiving process takes much time to search for specific mails. Email archiving services helps in simplifying the processes and lowers the operational costs for your business. However, finding an exchange archiving provider at low cost is a difficult task. Therefore, we have provided some tips to find the cheapest one where you have to look for the features and compare the costs of various providers.
Focus on Short – Term Commitment
If you are planning to buy an email archiving service for the long term then you may waste your money if it does not fulfill your needs in the way you wanted. Instead, opt for services that provided a limited free trial or a pay-as-you-go option. This will help you to get familiar with the features and also helps in assessing the costs vis-à-vis-their benefits. If you feel satisfied with the short-term or free service, then you can subscribe for the long term with the provider. It not only helps you in saving money but also gives you peace of mind that you have taken the right step.
Unlimited Storage
There are service providers who will be offering unlimited storage for a little extra payment or for no additional costs. This is a very handy feature for your business that helps you in saving costs when choosing the cheapest exchange archiving service. If you think that your business will need more email archiving in the future, then it is wise to choose a provider that offers unlimited storage at cheapest rates.
Special Discounts
In your quest to find the affordable service, search for providers that offer very cheap rates as well as some discounts when you are opting for services like five to ten years archiving. With low rates, you will able to get a complete email archiving system. You can still access all the mails even if they are deleted from your end.
Additional Costs and Avoid Them
If the email archiving service provider wants you to invest in additional hardware then eventually it will add to your overall business cost. Therefore, if there are any extra requirements that may increase the cost of the archiving service then you must look for other archiving providers. You must choose an effective yet simple service provider that caters to your needs. Organizations opt to archive their emails to an external company for operational hassles and cost-cutting. If you have to invest in additional systems or hardware for the purpose then ultimately you need to pay more than perhaps what you have estimated.
Enhanced Features
With cheapest exchange archiving provider, you want your messages to be archived as well as safe. When choosing a provider, ask them to show how your emails will be stored. Various providers store your mails are different secure sites that are beneficial for your business. Does your provider verify the legitimacy of messages before archiving? Are the messages encrypted before transferring them for storage? What is the method of transporting your mails and is it safe? Are your messages stored in a read-only state for extra security of your data? You should ask these questions to your provider.
Reasons to Work with Temp-to-Hire Staffing Agencies
Finding the right talent can be a challenging proposition for many organizations. Apart from having the required qualifications and experience, the candidates must also be able to fit in well with the organizational culture. Failing this, they may not perform to the expected standard and end up costing the organization in time as well as in money. Therefore, to avoid bad hires, many of the leading organizations prefer to partner with temp to hire staffing agencies to do their hiring for them.
Top Reasons to Work with Temp-to-Hire Staffing Agencies
They Can Save You Time and Money
The entire hiring process can turn out to be time-consuming and expensive if you do it in-house. You must divert high-level resources from existing projects and put them in charge of the recruiting. They will then spend a lot of time in sifting through applications and resumes and in shortlisting candidates. Furthermore, they must interview the candidates and negotiate their salaries.
In the business world and elsewhere, time is a precious commodity and, if squandered away, can cost organizations a lot of money. The time expended in the hiring process can disrupt your organization’s other on-going projects and end up hurting your business. Additionally, it can cause dissatisfaction in the executives if they have to handle the recruitment on top of their regular duties. They may speed up the hiring process to get it over with, and you might end up with sub-par new employees as a result. That, again, will take a toll on your business operations.
The better option is to get someone that is solely concerned with selecting the right candidates. Temp-to-hire staffing agencies can do that for you. They will take over the work of searching for people whose skills match your job requirements. They will then schedule interviews and select those that will be an exact fit.
They Will Put You in Touch with Qualified Talent
Most reputable staffing agencies have built extensive industry networks over the years and maintain contacts with the best talent in town. They will, thus, be able to quickly find people who have the right skills and experience for your projects. Moreover, they will negotiate the work and salary terms with them.
With the temp-to-hiring staffing agency handling the entire recruitment process, you can rest assured that you will get top-tier candidates that have what it takes to get the work done.
They Let You be Flexible with Your Hiring
The staffing agency can help you to hire candidates on a temporary or permanent basis. It depends on your organization’s requirements. You may want to hire extra staff quickly on a seasonal basis or for a short-term project. You may also need to hire for a short duration to fill workforce gaps or to cover for existing staff members that are on leave. Or, you may want to tighten up your business operations and maintain a fluid workforce, hiring people only as and when needed.
Additionally, you may want to hire temporarily to assess the candidate’s work performance in a real-world environment before committing. Many organizations prefer to do this to avoid hiring the wrong people. If the candidates do well in a three-month trial period, you can choose to offer them a permanent position. That also works out well in the candidates’ favor. It gives them a chance, in their turn, to experience how your organization operates and decide if the work is what they want to continue doing in the long term. They can then accept or decline your offer.
They Assume Legal Liabilities
When the selected candidates start working for you on a contract basis, it is the staffing agency that will pay them their salary. They will also take care of their benefits, taxes, insurance coverage, and other dues. You will assume these responsibilities only if you decide to hire the candidates permanently.
So, for a growing number of organizations, temp-to-hire staffing agencies have become valuable partners for efficiently fulfilling their hiring requirements.
Why Hire SEO Expert for Your Business Growth?
Search engine optimization or SEO is a must for businesses to thrive nowadays. SEO includes a number of techniques that help a website achieve higher rankings on search engines. To be found at the top of a search engine is now really imperative for optimum business growth.
Potential customers rarely look beyond the first page of a search result. Often, people do not look beyond the top five websites on a search page when they are looking for something specific. Now, a search engine is the first place where people go when they need to find a specific product or a solution to their problem. If your website is not visible at the top of a search page, then it can mean the loss of business. To counter it, businesses now require professional SEO services.
Reasons to Hire Professional SEO Services
SEO requires technical expertise –
SEO consists of several technical steps that require professional expertise. SEO experts spend years learning the trade, which includes creating, monitoring, and analyzing the practices incorporated in their work.
The SEO experts first conduct a website audit to understand the amount of work needed for your business to achieve the desired search engine rankings. Then they will formulate a strategy for SEO needed for your website. The work itself will include content that will help organic traffic reach your website. Every page on the website will require meta tags, meta descriptions, relevant keywords, headers, backlinks, etc. For instance, Plano SEO for a local clothing brand will include all relevant keywords and links on its website to bring it more visibility on search engines. For another business category, keywords will be different. For a business that is not local, the SEO focus will also be different.
Search engines also keep altering their algorithms, which SEO experts need to keep pace with to be successful. It requires immense technical knowledge and a lot of experience to perform SEO work properly. SEO work is incomplete without a periodic analysis of the results. SEO experts constantly analyze the results of their SEO work and alter strategies to counter the limitation of the previous strategy if any.
Proper SEO will also make a business website easier to navigate. Such websites receive more positive responses from customers, and they are likely to stay on it for longer. It can then also translate to more brand visibility and sales.
So, for SEO to work, it needs to be implemented well. It is best left to experts who can provide proper SEO services for your business.
SEO requires time –
SEO work requires a lot of time and dedication.
Keyword research alone requires a lot of time. You need main (primary) keywords for your website’s content but also many other variations of the same. These keywords need to be used naturally in the website content or your business’s dedicated blog. Search engines now penalize websites that do not follow proper norms for using the keywords.
There was a time when people simply stuffed keywords into a web page’s content for receiving higher rankings. But with time search engines have become advanced. Search engines can now recognize relevant content based on their advanced algorithms. Search engine companies now also aim to provide their users with quality websites in response to their queries. So, keyword research and content creation requires expertise as well as dedicated time.
Optimization of a web page with meta descriptions, headers, and backlinks also requires dedicated efforts and proper time for implementation. It is not possible for small business owners to perform these tasks themselves even if they have the necessary skills for SEO work. Small and medium business owners are always pressed for time and have a lot on their plate. An expert who can perform SEO work for them can be really a boon. Otherwise, it can come down to performing the SEO tasks by yourself or to not do it at all.
SEO cannot be done in half measures. Hiring an expert can help businesses benefit from SEO in terms of greater visibility, branding, and eventually more sales.
SEO experts can not only make lives of business owners easier. They can also ensure that the SEO activities actually work for your business.
SEO & its Importance in Business
SEO is essential for your business and here is why you want your business website to be search engine optimized.
Brings visibility
The search engine optimization Houston TX helps to build visibility for your website. It is capable of giving leads that no other advertising method can provide. SEO lets your website target customers who are genuine leads and have a high probability of getting converted.
When people search online for products or services, then you want your website to rank higher to get more traffic by creating visibility. The SEO tries to research on the keyword searches that users make on the search engine to be able to reach clients.
The method of SEO lets you reach out to people directly who are looking for your product. A consumer searches about the product or service online and if your website keeps appearing on the search engines this will increase the probability of the customer clicking on your website. SEO helps to optimize your product, and this increases the chances of your website being found.
Helps in branding
Branding is what gets your business recognized. When you brand your business, it enters into the customer’s subconscious mind. The more people are aware of your brand, the more leads it creates. This is possible only when your website is optimized. SEO helps in branding, and it makes the customers depend on you. It helps to build trust and once this confidence is created the customer keeps coming back to you over and over again.
Hiring a professional SEO company is important because it is an investment that will help your business to grow.
Makes it credible
The search engine optimization Houston TX lets your business be credible. A search could create a psychological ranking for your website, and if your website manages to be credible, then it can generate a lot of revenue. Being credible takes time because the website has to be optimized and the search engine has to crawl to give you the results.
Brings in traffic
A website needs traffic to run the business. SEO is important because it helps to regulate the traffic to your website. Like if suppose one wants to buy a product or a service then the SEO optimizes the content of your website using texts, videos, and images so that the search engine drives the traffic to your website. This generates leads for you, and if the leads find what they are looking for, then they get converted.
Return on investment
You can generate a high rate of return on your investment when you market your business using SEO. The SEO ROI is better than the traditional forms of marketing. You do not spend a lot of money to be able to reach the target audience since SEO targets only the relevant audience. You thus do not waste time since you do not reach out to the audience who may never be interested in your product. SEO this is highly effective and increases the conversion rate.
Results that are measurable
SEO lets you measure the result and understand the metrics. This lets the SEO read the data and work better to get the results. When you market your business with an SEO, you will be able to measure the success and failure of this method of marketing. You can measure what you are doing right or wrong.
SEO lets your business stay ahead in the competition. The SEO industry is evolving consistently and being able to stay on the top and maintain your ranking you need to take care to hire a professional SEO. You need to hire an SEO partner that is able to understand your business fully and works to implement the solutions of SEO.
Five Reasons to Use Temp to Perm Agencies
Temp-to-perm employees are often referred to as try before you hire. It allows employers to bring in talent first temporarily without offering any commitment for permanent employment.
There are several benefits in hiring temporary workers, but there is a right and wrong way to go about it. Hence, organizations need to be careful and work with temp to perm agencies. Here are five reasons why it makes sense to use temp to hire with an agency for hiring temp-to-perm employees.
1. No Legwork Needed
Hiring temporary employees can be time-consuming like other recruitments. When you use a temp to hire agency, the company does not have to do the legwork for hiring temporary employees. It just needs to contact the temp to perm agency and provide them the company’s staffing requirements.
2. Assess the Suitability of the Candidate
The temp to perm model offers several benefits to employers. Traditional hiring processes are subjective and imperfect. The candidate that looks so good on paper and interviews might be a poor fit for the role.
Companies leverage temp to perm strategy to reduce the risk of bad hires. If the company plans to directly hire employees as per a temp to perm strategy, they also have to look at the legal aspects of such hiring. This is because the company is directly employing the candidate.
When you use a temp to perm agency, the agency is the employer of the candidate, and the company need not worry about the legal aspect of such hiring. This setup helps the company to assess the suitability of the candidate without the risks involved in such a hiring model.
3. Avoid Unemployment Costs and Wrongful Termination
The employment rules are complicated. If the company hires temporary employees on its own, they would need to bear the burden of unemployment costs when they terminate employees. Things are different when you use temp to perm agencies. This is because the temporary employees are on the payroll of the agency and not on your company’s payroll.
When you hire temporary employees through the agency, your company does not have to bear the financial burden of unemployment costs or unemployment insurance of temporary employees who are terminated or fired for a cause.
4. Reduction in Costs Related to Paid Vacation, Paid Time Off, Paid Sick Leave, Retirement Benefits
When your company hires temporary employees directly or through the agency, it has to pay workers compensation and overtime wherever applicable. However, when you hire temporary employees through an agency, the company saves on other financial benefits.
Since the temporary employee is not on the company’s payroll, the company needs to offer monetary compensation in the form of paid vacation, paid sick leave, paid time off, and retirements benefits. These monetary compensations will only be applicable if the temporary employee is offered a permanent position in the company.
5. Helps in Easy Growth Transition
Bad hires continue to be a big risk for organizations. Irrespective of all the questions and tests, it is difficult to tell whether the candidate would be a perfect fit for the role. If the candidate is not culturally fit, he/she may leave the company leading to financial loss due to attrition.
When you hire temporary employees through an agency, the company gets enough time to assess candidates on all aspects like skills, behavior, integrity and other important characteristics. The company gets the freedom to test the candidate for longer periods and not hastened to take any decision.
Only if the company finds the candidate suitable and they need staff, they can offer a permanent position and strengthen the workforce by a valuable addition.
There is no doubt that the temp to perm is the best strategy for businesses in a period of growth. By using temp to perm agencies, businesses can reduce the risk associated with it and hire the best candidates for permanent roles.
Did we miss any important reason for using temp to hire agencies?
Five Things You Must Know About Branding Your Startup
Starting a new business includes a lot of hard work. Every day you have to juggle between many tasks; meeting investors, recruiting people, sweet talking with clients and managing contractors. With so much daily commitment, you are left with very less time for important stuff. But, if you want your startup to grow healthily, you will need a unique identity.
Brand reputation and position is something that is built up slowly and earned over a time. Having said that, the actions you take at the initial stages of branding will dictate where your brand will move ahead in the future. It is important to get things right from scratch. Here are some important things you should know about branding your startup with the help of a branding agency in Seattle, New York or Los Angeles.
- Define Your Brand Clearly
The majority of the startup founders has a clear idea about things they are trying to accomplish. However, when someone asks them what their company does, they come up with an explanation of conceptual solutions rich with technical jargons that are not easy to understand. This is not good.
The best way for effective branding is coming up with a simple descriptive sentence. It’s okay if the sentence is not long enough and does not convey everything you do. The point is to achieve clarity while communicating your brand. For example, the branding of Nike has just three recognizable words – Just Do It. It does not say anything about their shoe business. The tag line has become a communication model for the company that is relevant to all fitness enthusiasts.
- Craft a Visual Identity for Your Brand
“Picture speaks a thousand words” and it holds true for branding. Your Logo is the first visual your customer gets about the company. Your logo should represent your business in some way.
The famous Amazon logo has an arrow starting from alphabet “A” to alphabet “Z” which also looks like a smiley that tells customers the company wants its customer to be happy. So you need to make sure, your startup logo tells some story to your customer.
- Brand Positioning
Positioning means giving information about your business. In simple words, it’s communicating what you stand for a specific customer segment in the market. Your brand positioning should clearly tell what problem in the industry/society your startup is trying to solve.
Brand positioning is different from taglines. Positioning statements are more for internal use. For example, when zipcar.com was launched in 2001, its brand positioning statement was “To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers, when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car, you save money while reducing your carbon footprint.”
The above brand positioning clearly states the target market and the problem the startup was trying to solve.
- Bringing Customer to the Brand
Today, you need a strong presence in the mass media to get recognition for your brand. You can give advertisements in the newspaper, but that is not enough. Your customer is dispersed across different marketing channels and you need to explore every marketing channel you know where your customer exists.
You can use SEO, Social Media and YouTube to get attention of your customers. Given the short attention span of customers, startups need to develop a strong brand marketing plan and put in consistent efforts to stay in the limelight so that your brand in always in front of your customers until it becomes memorable and easily recognizable.
- Customer Service That Supports Marketing Efforts
Every brand that stands strong today is able to achieve the position only because of exceptional customer service. For example, if you Google about Amazon’s customer service, you will find several examples where the CEO, Jeff Bezos gives high importance to every issue faced by customers. There are examples of customers amazed by the action taken by the online retail giant just to make the customer happy.
Your customer service needs to back up claims made in marketing campaigns. If it does not, your brand will attract negative reviews that can be disastrous. Make sure your operations team always reads about the action taken by the marketing team to build your brand. Never forget, you need to always put customers first.
Do you recognize any other branding elements that need to focus by startups?
Why Business Management is Important for the Success of Your Company
There are several qualities that result in successful businesses, and many of these things are organized and driven by managers and management teams. Here are a few of the important things business management teams do well that helps a company’s success.
Cultivate culture
Every company has a culture – or a belief system, often driven by whatever they have earmarked their ‘core values’ to be. To perpetuate this culture, companies have to hire people who are naturally inclined to possess the traits they desire and who will be naturally willing to promote and support the company’s core values. Business managers carry a lot of responsibility in this respect because they promote the brand of the company, not only to customers or clients, but to employees too. A good business manager helps to continually cultivate the company’s culture amongst its employees.
Strategy
Proper business management is all about strategy and following the dictated plan of how to move a company from one level to the next. A good business that is implemented effectively will influence and permeate throughout a business. It often falls to business managers – depending on the industry – to devise or redesign these plans, and then enforce them.
Taking risks
Not all risks are, well, worth the risk. This is particularly true when it comes to business, but in business, you often have to take measured and calculated risks to get ahead. A strong business management team should act as knowledgeable advisors regarding the possible risks (or leaps) the business could take, and then mapping out the cause and effect of each. At the end of it all, with proper information and guidance, a business owner should be able to choose the best risk for the company that will pay off in the end.
Financial plan
I financial plan for any business is critical. Setting forth and adhering to a budget is critical – no matter how big the budget is that you are working with. Finances need to be allotted to particular departments, or to research or even material procurement and salaries – ever dollar must be accounted for, and a business manager should be a great asset in this department. With their breadth of experience, they will have the knowledge necessary to help you determine where you can afford to spend, and where you should skimp.
Tax plan
Every business needs a tax plan if they hope to succeed. Tax plans should encompass everything from profits and losses to succession, in order to maintain a business’s strength and presence in its given market. Proper tax planning can save a business a lot of money and help them to budget their finances more effectively.
Streamlining processes
It’s all about efficiency and a proper business manager on the ground floor will be a great asset when determining where the slack is in the business. This could be determining if there are any redundancies in employee jobs/tasks, or in the company protocols themselves. The more efficient a company’s operating and manufacturing processes are, the more profits it will net and the better it will be able to serve it’s client base.
Get with the times
Staying up to date with technology is an important off-shoot of streamlining processes. Whether it means installing new software on company computers, or updating the tech itself, say by introducing personal tablets to the work environment, being on top of technological advances and taking advantage of them for your business can never hurt.
Marketing
A strong and innovative marketing strategy can be hard to come by in today’s world of shock and awe – but the closer you can get to perfection and originality, the better. Your business manager should be a key player in the effort to keep each department informed and working with each other. Making sure that your marketing is in-line with your culture and your financial goals is a big job, but it’s also an important one. Marketing strategies can make or break your business, so you’ll surely want to have a solid go-between in a business manager to pick up the slack during the times you can’t represent yourself in important meetings.
There are so many more ways that good business management professionals and teams can work to make a business successful, or more successful than it already is. More often than not, businesses without a business manager are in desperate need of one – even if they are doing relatively well. It’s one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you needed it. Get ahead of the curve!