Keeping your customers engaged is super important for your business if you want it to thrive. Without your customers, you don’t have a business in the first place. The Internet is packed with distractions, which means that your customers are going to go elsewhere within less than 10 seconds of clicking on your website.If your website or your products are not going to deliver what your customers want, they’re not going to stick around to find out why.
You need to make sure that you attract your customers, but you also need to be able to retain them. For example, if you have an easy website but a super difficult payment system, they’re going to click off and you’re going to have a lot of abandoned baskets. If you have a streamlined payment API that makes their lives easier. They’re going to want to shop with you again and again. Technology is going to help you to attract your customers and retain them. And we’ve put together a list of five of those technologies to help.
A Great Customer Relationship Management platform. Building relationships with your customers is crucial to your business success. One of the easiest ways to do that is to keep track of what they’re up to, and a good customer relationship management system is going to help you to do that. There are plenty of tools out there that eliminate the need to switch between different systems, and they also allow you to input existing contacts and social networks in one place. This will help you to keep track of those developing and emerging customer relationships.
Easy payment systems. We already mentioned a streamlined payment API to make their lives easier, but you need to have an easy system for payment. For example, if you only accept PayPal, you are cutting off a huge market of customers. If your payment systems are easy to use, then your customers will continue to use you because they know that you’re all about convenience.
An informative website. Your website doesn’t need to be packed with content to be informative, but it should be smartly designed and intuitive to what your customers need. First impressions will draw people in and keep them where they are loyal for good. There is never a shortage of free online website tools, so make sure that you have the tools available to make it happen.
Great social media. You need to have a good online presence if you want to draw in your customers and keep them with you. Businesses that have the hang of social media platforms are the ones that will be doing much better than those still stuck in their website and in their physical locations.
Easy data analytics. Do you want to know what your customers and your competition are up to? Well, you need to utilize analytics to pull out the raw data to turn into digestible information about how customers engage with you. There are plenty of tools that help you to focus on small business success and this is one of them.
As a business owner, you very well may have been in a situation where you have to create a presentation that will make a memorable first impression on your audience. Be it pitching a new idea, a proposal presentation, or simply speaking at a conference, sometimes the quality of your presentation may be a real make-or-break deal determining your success. Designing any winning presentation that can engage your audience requires more than just a deck of well-designed slides; thoughtful preparation, engaging content, and strategic delivery are needed.
Here is how to create an unforgettable presentation based on four of the most important focus areas: knowing your audience, impactful content, designing visual slides, and mastering the delivery.
Know Your Audience
The foundation of any great presentation rests on knowing your audience. Ask yourself: Who do you think they are? What interests them? Are these potential clients, investors, or your peers in the industry? Once you comprehend their needs and motivations, it shall be easier to deliver information that you believe would resonate with these people. Research becomes key in this regard: professional background, pain point and interests. Investors may instead want to know about the profitability of the output and scalability. Remember, the better you know your audience, the stronger you are in speaking effectively to what matters to them.
Address Their Pain Points
Once you have identified your audience’s most relevant concerns, it’s time to address them directly. After all, the best presentations offer up solutions. As you build out your content, keep in mind the problems of your audience and how your business solves these. Give examples specific to your business and provide case studies that reflect expertise in your subject matter. For the women business owner, this is particularly important because one is pitching products or services to a potential client who may be skeptical about the product or service. By framing how your business solves certain challenges, you immediately make your presentation relevant.
Connect with Stories
Stories are one of the most effective ways to connect with an audience. Humans are far more likely to remember stories rather than facts and figures. When you’re preparing your presentation think about how you might weave in stories to show value and impact from your brand. These could be personal anecdotes about how you started your business or success stories off the back of satisfied clients.
Impactful Content
Strong Hook
The first minutes of your presentation are the most critical moments in the presentation, where you need to capture the audience’s attention. Begin with one strong hook to draw in your audience and make them curious about what you’ll be saying. This is surprising statistics, a provocative question, or some kind of intriguing statement that goes against the conventional way of thinking. You will be trying to entice them into wanting to hear more.
Keep It Simple and Focused
One of the worst things a presenter can do is overwhelm their audience. The best presentations are light on detail and focused on just a handful of takeaways. Before you start building your slides, determine the three key points you want to leave with your audience. Design a presentation that will center around those core points and resist the urge to tangent.
Call to Action
What do you want your audience to take away with them at the end of your presentation? Do you want them to call to learn more about your services? To book an appointment? Sign up for a newsletter? Whatever it is, a presentation should always have a clear call to action. Make it easy for your audience to take the next step.
Designing Visually Appealing Slides
Presentation Slide Design
Remember that when designing your presentation slides, less is often more. You should avoid cluttering your slides with too much text or images. A clean, professional design presents your information nicely and will help to keep your audience engaged with your message. Use a continual color scheme depicting your brand, and no more than one key point per slide. The text should be supported by the visuals and not overwhelmed by the visuals.
Add Storytelling with Visuals
This can add a whole new meaning to your presentation. Rather than just writing your messages, you can show images, graphs, and infographics to display your key messages. This keeps the audience more tuned into your presentation, rather than reading through ‘bulleted text’. In this way, they retain more of the information. Visuals unravel the text-heavy slides and hold the attention of the audience members.
Exercise Restraint with Animations
While it might be tempting to add a few flashy animations to your presentation, it is smarter to use them sparingly. Too many transitions and/or animations are distracting and take away from your message. For that reason, subtle transitions are best since they offer a smooth-looking presentation that doesn’t steal the show. Of course, if you do utilize the animations, make sure they have a point.
Mastering the Delivery
Practice Makes Perfect
No matter how well-designed your presentation is, poor delivery can undermine its effectiveness. Practice is the master of delivery. Run through your presentation several times to make sure you’re comfortable with the content and pacing. Record yourself, if necessary, and then watch for places where you can improve your tone, pace, and body language. Whenever possible, practice in front of a friend or colleague who can give you feedback.
Engage with Your Audience
A good presentation is not one way; rather, it’s an opportunity to engage with your audience. Make eye contact, ask questions, and invite participation. This keeps your audience involved in what you have to say and creates a more interactive and dynamic experience. During the middle of your presentation, stop and ask for questions or even comments. This will not only make your audience feel more engaged with you, but also provide you with the opportunity to extend any points which they fail to get.
Collaborate with Professional Support
Developing a successful presentation requires much time and hard work. If you face any problem with the content or layout, then you should not hesitate to consult any professional help. Of course, many business owners juggle their many responsibilities, and this is where outsourcing can free up valuable time. Professional writing services can help develop well-honed content that best fits your brand, ensuring the presentation communicates its subject clearly, is engaging, and most effective. This enables you to pay more concentrated attention to what you do best: run your business and communicate with your audience.
A presentation that wows requires a mix of thoughtful content and engaging visuals, delivered confidently. Understanding your audience, crafting effective messages, designing clean and simple slides, and practicing delivering-the fundamentals of constructing a presentation are all sure to educate and delight.
Health and safety is an important one in the workplace and something you want to be mindful of. Everything you do or don’t do for your employees, will likely benefit you or backfire and cause problems.
The purpose of health and safety is to ensure both parties are doing their absolute utmost to keep themselves and others safe. As an employer, you have a duty of care and responsibility to your staff. With that being said, here are some helpful tips to improve health and safety within the workplace.
Train your employees
First and foremost, make sure all of your employees are trained when it comes to health and safety. You can’t assume that everyone within your workforce knows how to conduct themselves when faced with an emergency situation or a scenario whereby the employee’s actions could potentially cause a dangerous outcome.
Training your staff is helpful and it’s something that can definitely help improve the safety of your workplace, as well as the health of all staff members and guests. Try to allocate a reasonable budget to training your employees in health and safety courses.
Create a health and safety policy
A health and safety policy is something that you want to introduce and ensure every staff member sees. This policy should outline the various practices you have as a business to ensure the health and safety of your staff.
This policy can be customized, adapted and updated as and when it’s deemed necessary. Having a health and safety policy is also a great way to provide some legal backing should you get yourself into any trouble with existing or disgruntled employees.
Implement equipment for improving ventilation
Ventilation is crucial because you want to ensure the air your employees breathe in and out is healthy.
When you’re working in an environment that’s dealing with harmful or toxic substances, it’s important to have equipment such as https://topairsystems.com/ if operating in laboratories. Proper ventilation is important to keep moisture levels at a normal level rather than causing dampness and potential mold issues.
Use labels and clear signage
Within the workplace, there should be clear labels and signage around the place. This is important to ensure that everything is highlighted and made apparent. There’s nothing worse than a lack of signage and an employee injuring themselves as a result.
A lot of injuries in the workplace are preventative and while you can’t predict the inevitable, you can put in preventative measures like signs to help avoid a nasty fall or accident.
Promote a collaborative work environment
Finally, when it comes to your workplace, you can’t have eyes everywhere. Therefore, it’s worthwhile speaking to employees and teams in general to ensure everyone is doing their bit in promoting a collaborative work environment.
Encourage staff members to flag any problems they spot so that it’s not just your operations team who are tirelessly working to keep eyes on the building.
Improving health and safety within the workplace is crucial so be sure to use these tips ot improve it within your organization.
If there is one thing that the internet has had a significant impact on, it is the workforce. And while that was seen to the extremes during the pandemic – what has happened after has been brilliant for millions of businesses and workers.
The ability to work from home was forced upon most people, and businesses saw how much more flexible they could be. They saw better profits because they had fewer overheads, and what’s more, is that the global talent pool opened up.
But if you haven’t had experience running a remote and flexible team, it can still be a challenge. So for any small businesses that are growing their team or people stepping into the role of managing a flexible team – here are some tips.
Communication
Communication x 3 and then some. If there are miscommunications within remote teams, things can get tricky quickly. While there is a joke about a video call or a meeting that could’ve been an email – sometimes conversation via video is best.
All of your team members might have a preferred way of communication, and if that is the case, you will need to learn that and accommodate them. People generally give their best work when they feel comfortable and accommodated.
Try weekly calls, check-in emails, direct messages, and being open to being contacted when needed. See what works, see what doesn’t, and streamline it. Keep in mind you might only realize that there is an issue when something goes wrong. Proactiveness and vigilance will help.
Talent Pool
The job is the job, and the tasks are the tasks. But you have the ability to design the team, and this gives an incredible amount of flexibility.
Don’t stick to the regular recruiting methods; instead, make use of all of the platforms online that can help you put together a literal dream team. Go to specialists like a marketing staffing agency, a content writing agency, and more to hand-pick the best people for the job.
You’ll have access to a wealth of skills, and what’s best is that they are likely already vetted.
Using a global talent pool will mean that you and your team will be flexible on working hours – which can be beneficial to night owls and early risers alike. Don’t be afraid to split jobs up into parts so that you can have two or more people per task, allowing for part-time and ad-hoc people too.
Reimagine the team, and build it as you see fit.
Trust
Freelancers who were working from home or across the world ahead of the pandemic have always had a level of trust that people who went from office to home didn’t have. Trust is one of the most important parts of being able to have a flexible team. The only way you can build trust is to show it and act like it.
Focus on the deliverables, be able to talk through issues, and avoid micromanagement and constant check-ins when they just are necessary.
After you build the team, let them work on their strengths and get on with what you have to do.
Workplace safety is a vital concern for employers. Not only is it their responsibility to ensure that their employees are safe while on the job, but promoting workplace safety can also lead to increased productivity and morale and decreased workers’ compensation costs. So, what are some things employers can do to promote workplace safety?
Conduct a Hazard Assessment
To identify areas where workplace safety can be improved, employers must conduct a hazard assessment of their business premises and operations. This will involve looking for potential risks such as tripping hazards, fire hazards, chemical exposure, and more. Once these risks have been identified, employers can formulate solutions that reduce the likelihood of accidents occurring within the workplace.
Implement Safety Protocols And Procedures
Once the hazard assessment has been completed, and risks identified, employers should implement safety protocols to minimize potential hazards. This could include providing employees with personal protective equipment (PPE), such as hard hats and safety glasses. Additionally, emergency evacuation plans should be developed in case of a fire or natural disaster, ensuring that machinery is maintained correctly and implementing safety training for all employees.
Provide Regular Safety Training
Employers should ensure that their employees receive regular safety training to keep them up-to-date on the latest safety protocols and procedures. This could include annual refresher courses and more frequent sessions if new equipment or processes are introduced into the workplace. Training should also include information on how to report potential hazards and accidents and safety protocols that must be followed in the event of an emergency.
Do Regular Inspections and Maintenance
Regular inspections and maintenance of the workplace can help to identify any potential hazards before they become a problem. This could include:
conducting air quality tests in areas where hazardous materials or chemicals are stored or used.
Create An Open Dialogue
Employers should also create an open dialogue with their employees about workplace safety. They should encourage employees to report any potential hazards or problems they notice in the workplace and provide feedback on existing safety protocols and procedures. By creating a safe environment where workers feel comfortable speaking up about potentially hazardous situations, employers can help to ensure that their workplace remains safe for all.
Track Safety Performance
Finally, employers should track their safety performance to ensure effective protocols and procedures. This could include monitoring the number of accidents and incidents in the workplace, as well as conducting regular feedback surveys with employees on how they feel about the safety protocol. By tracking this data, employers can identify areas where workplace safety is lacking and take steps to improve it.
These are just a few ways employers can promote workplace safety. By taking the time to assess potential risks, implement protocols and procedures, provide regular training, do regular inspections, maintain an open dialogue with employees, and track safety performance, employers can ensure that their workplace remains safe for all. Doing so will help protect their employees from harm and help employers avoid costly lawsuits and fines.
