Month: October 2017

Both digital and non-digital companies are always looking for ways to grow their sales, increase market share, and stay ahead of the competition. Running a successful sales team, however, can be challenging, especially when it’s digital. Moreover, keeping tabs on your employees entirely through the internet depends upon a particular dose of skill, patience, and diligence.

The ability to work remotely is a significant incentive to many internet-based salespeople. If you manage your digital dealers right, you can easily maintain a loyal, satisfied and productive team to steer your business towards success.

Here are seven tips that will help you accomplish just that.

Acquire and Use the Right Tools

For effective collaboration, your dealers need online tools that work. They need to have reliable access to files, information, schedules, updates, news and more, to keep your clients satisfied. The proper management of an online sales team starts with getting everyone on board with organizational, scheduling and communication tools.

A vast pool of professional tools are currently available, but choosing the right ones for your operation can be overwhelming. Start by identifying the needs of your team and look for ideas for process improvement. Compare every tool and ideas you find with a list of your required features. Try and put much focus on things like cost, user-friendliness and technical support. Trello, Slack, Asana, and Catsy are some of the solutions which can get you rolling into working efficiently with your dealers.

Proper Communication

Effective communication has become an integral part of online businesses. Gone are the days of face-to-face only communication. In fact, many customers will be looking for ways to get in touch with your customer support even before purchasing any product on your website.

To keep all your dealers on the same page, be sure to communicate clearly. Always double-check with them, and ask follow-up questions to avoid surprises down the road. You can also send them reminders and encourage them to update you on prospective clients and deals.

Also, keep your communication lines open and let your digital team know they can reach you whenever they need answers or clarifications. Even when at home, check your email and make yourself available through social networking sites like Skype and Google Hangouts so they can get to you easily.

An essential aspect of proper communication is conveying positive feedback whenever a team member accomplishes something significantly impressive. A simple “job well done” after a day of commendable sales can go a long way to keeping your dealers motivated.

Insist on Video Calls

According to research, more than half of all human communication is non-verbal. When you don’t get to work with your dealers physically, using video calls instead of audio-only or textual communication can be a great way to gauge their mood and enthusiasm, and convey encouragement when needed. Sure, throwing a short email can save time for more important tasks, but those non-verbal clues you get when you converse on video will help to keep your dealers closer and more passionate about the job at hand.

Account for Schedule Inconveniences

One of the reasons why many brick-and-mortar companies and new startups are putting their offline businesses online is the ease with which they can expand their customer base beyond physical borders. On the other hand, having global reach brings the need for international employees to conduct product research, interact with prospective clients, and deliver traded goods or services.

To keep everyone comfortable with working in different time zones, especially for projects that need collaboration, you need to come up with a well-balanced schedule. Find out convenient times to set up conference, calls, and meetings. If you have fewer people working overseas than within your primary time zone, don’t forget to show team solidarity by occasionally setting up calls in favor of your international dealers. It will help your team realize the sacrifice their fellow workers are regularly making.

Set Clear Expectations

Before bringing a digital dealer into the fold lay down everything you expect from them. Setting expectations for your team can be a challenge, especially if you didn’t have a well-defined team structure when you started. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. A clear set of expectations will help to keep your digital dealers focused and engaged, while also facilitating constructive criticism and benchmarking.

Nurture Company Culture

Yes, you can create culture even when your sales team is remotely scattered across the world. Everyone working for your brand must be privy to your values in the way they engage with clients, advertise, and sell your products. Evaluate new employees against the backdrop of your values and be ready to let go of anyone that doesn’t uphold it. Understanding your company’s culture creates the much-needed sense of loyalty and community, even among those digital dealers you never meet in person.

Get Together Face-To-Face, at Least Once a Year

Working with outsourced dealers may not need personal interaction, but if you have a permanently employed sales team, it’s important to create some time to talk and build rapport. Sure, video calls will mostly have you covered, but a few hours of in-person interaction can cultivate more team spirit than weeks of remote efforts.

Getting everyone together may be pricey at times, but more often than not, the energy from these gatherings will be high, and you will have a better opportunity to discuss things like culture, vision and the company’s future than you have when your team is spread around the globe.

What’s Next?

Maintaining a successful and motivated team of digital dealers means upholding clear communication, encouraging cohesion and building value for what each person brings to the business, even without face-to-face interaction.

Your team will also need to remain organized at all times, and that means implementing a reliable product information management platform. Catsy is your number one solution for keeping all your company data in one centralized location to streamline workflow among all your digital dealers.

Manufacturers and retailers strive to connect with existing and potential customers. Manufacturers describe their products and services persuasively. Billions of dollars are spent by the manufacturer to determine what content to include.

However, attracting sales is not as easy as you may think. A lot of research is done by the manufacturer to ensure they provide the kind of products their customers crave, identify and understand target market, and most importantly, get ROI. All these are only possible via dealers. The two entities are inseparable, and this divulges the importance of the symbiotic relationship between them.

The Importance of Dealers

Dealers play a major role in the success of most companies. They see to it that the goals of the companies they represent are achieved as well provide insights about product content variation, market size and share. With the available tools, they interact with customers at a more personal level, and as a result, they’re better placed to understand the needs of the clients and relay it to the manufacturers. With this kind of information, robust product content can be created which would convert more and increase the success of the product manufacturers and the dealers as well.

What are Robust Products?

Products are considered as robust content if they are insensitive to variations. In simple terms, when the product is subjected to different variations; internal, external and unit to unit, it would be expected to remain consistent.

Every product is subject to change at all times. Manufacturers having a robust product content ensures that your retailers can more easily sell your product. This is because, the customer can more easily understand the product. This begs the need for manufacturers to bring on board designers who would emphasize creating more robust product designs that are least affected by variations. The eCommerce and marketing teams should also be used to widen the coverage based on statistical data and research that is done and statistical data collected from consumers.

Here are key points how robust product content can help increase your dealers’ success.

Improvement in Attribute and Accuracy

When tasked with creating a product, the manufacturer involves different contributors in their quest. These include the designers, as well as the marketing and eCommerce team. The product designers come up with a product that’s fully customized to meet the demands of the users. A robust product content features accurate and complete attributes that would be well received by the consumers. When such products are made available to dealers, their rate of conversion is bound to grow as well as increase success rates.

Reduced defects

Taking into account the three variations that products face throughout their lifetime, a robust design reduces the chances of getting a defective product. The manufacturers who have taken into account these variations end up creating products that are less defective.

Deciding between different features during product design is important. It ensures that the final product is superior. Products being less prone to defects can help your business gain customer trust and confidence. When your products are in the market returns will decrease. Customers will return after the great experience you provided.

Reduced Turnaround Time While Developing or Improving Products

Customers are in constant need of new products. As a result, companies must adapt to the changing consumer behavior and produce quality products. Time taken to make content changes to these products has a lasting negative effect. The dealers are required to make these content changes and discount out of date product. This may not only be costly for the dealers, but they might also lose a lot of customers who might have purchased the defective products.

However, coming up with a robust product ensures that the product is geared towards meeting the needs of users. Spend time understanding what the customer is researching your product for. Once this is know, tailor you content around the searches. Essentially, the results of this kind of investment are profitable for both the dealers and manufacturer.is trusted.

Improvement in the Quality of Produced Products

Robust content quality is what is needed to drive sales. This is supported by the fact that the products maintain consistency when subjected to the different variations. Dealers are bound to make more sales when the products they stock have a longer shelf life, do not succumb to the conditions in their operational environment and do not vary from unit to unit.

Dealers who sell machined products tend to sell more, especially if the machines have a long operational span. They do not wear and tear at an extremely fast rate. Manufacturers whose products are well known for their quality are in a better position to increase their dealer’s success from the name they carry.

Robust products are more appealing to customers

As far as appeal goes, robust products are highly esteemed by consumers. Manufacturers create a name for themselves and their products when they design and build robust products. Customers are known to purchase the quality of service they get from an item. This attribute has been the key factor in the growth of most brands. Due to the appeal that these brands attract, their products have led to an increase in customer loyalty which in the long run is a good thing to the dealers.

Dealers getting these robust products would lead to an almost sure success score. This is so because of the appeal that these robust products have and the quality of service that they guarantee to their consumers.

Robust product content has the key attribute that most products in the market strive to achieve and that is quality. The superior quality of these products puts them in a good position to attract consumers from all the brand dealers which in effect, translate to an increased ROI.

“Once I get my products on eBay, Google Shopping, and Amazon, the sales will increase with 5-10 folds!” This is the common expectation that a lot of online merchants have when entering the e-commerce marketplaces. But, they end up getting very disappointed. Unlike the conventional stores, marketplaces are complex and highly competitive. Often, sellers on marketplaces are forced to adopt new methods of thinking and implementing different business models. Whether your sales have not been performing well or you want to grow them to the next level, here are some of the best tested and proven technologies to consider.

Optimize your product content

To drive clients to your online marketplace and raise conversions, you need to optimize the content. The target audience should easily find everything about your product to decide to buy. Start by optimizing the headline, creating great descriptions, and capturing product specifications. These will give your visitors an opportunity to compare with other products and establish the items’ superiority. Besides, provide multiple images and product part numbers so that clients can be sure they are picking the right items. If you are using several marketplaces, it is important to optimize the data feed so that all the fields are included.

There is nothing that turns down and discourages clients from coming back like stressful shipping procedures. As the last step in a client’s purchase, it is important to make the settings accurate. When you optimize content for a product, deliver the right details, ensure it rhymes well with the market demand and target enhancing UX.

Provide top-notch customer support

Many marketplaces correspond directly with customers. To a great extent, they control the customer relationship. This brings about two crucial things for merchants who want to get higher sales; perfect relationship with the respective e-commerce and focus on the customers. How can these be achieved?

First, you need to follow the marketplace’s policies carefully especially on shipping, exchange, and refund rules. The focus at this point is getting ranked at the top by customers to win more. This means being on-call all the time so that any inquiry is responded to within hours and not days.

Note that even the marketplaces are also in competition. If a customer walks away because of poor support, the respective marketplace also loses. For example, eBay and Amazon do not allow any lag to clients’ inquiries. It is also crucial that you review customer emails regularly to establish whether the response is winning clients or a change is needed.

Price your products competitively

Products’ prices within different marketplaces are highly dynamic. If you follow specific items on the marketplace list, the prices keep changing as sellers adjust with shifting demand. The objective is to ensure the price is not too low or too high. To achieve this, you should identify price monitoring tools and make appropriate adjustments. Some of the top monitoring tools include Appeagle, 360pi, Monsoon Commerce, and Channel IQ among others. The tools allow users to monitor prices of products from competitors in multiple marketplaces. Remember that these tools only provide recommendations for your prices. Therefore, you should factor the product margins before making adjustments.

Make sure to boost visibility via advertising

One thing that merchants must appreciate is that marketplaces cannot deliver the anticipated results on their own. Once you get the products on Amazon or another marketplace, it should be used to mark the start of more aggressive advertising in multiple networks. You need to take the message about your product to the social media, form groups, and demonstrate why it is better than others. Here, you can even enlist the services of influencers who will direct following to your marketplace pages.

Many marketplaces also provide advertising platforms for their users. For example, Sears and TigerDirect have an advertising network referred as Search Exchange. Make sure to follow with your preferred marketplace to identify specific marketing platforms because many clients flock there for deals. Remember that once you settle for specific advertising models, an appropriate analytics should be included for regular reviews.

Create regular promotions

Many people are attracted to promotions. There are those who hold on until a promotion is announced to make a purchase. To raise your sales, ensure to plan regular promotions for the target market. This can be a gift attached to the item, price reduction, or free shipping. Note that the promotions should be carefully calculated with the target profit margins in mind. One of the best methods of offering promotions is providing free shipping to clients who reach a specific amount of purchase. The method has been successfully applied by Amazon to encourage clients to shop more from the store.

Select the right products to sell on the marketplaces

The marketplace operates differently from conventional stores. In many cases, products that do very well in your store might fail to replicate similar success in marketplaces. To grow sales, you need to focus on specific market niches and identify the products that are in greater demand. At the onset of summer, a merchant might target selling tanning related products because everyone is getting outdoors. Make sure to stay ahead of the target market by establishing what clients want and how they want it.

When selecting the products, ensure to capture everything that guarantees users of extra value and engagement. This means sourcing from top brands with high approval in the market. The products on your store should also have comprehensive reviews or link to reviews that demonstrate their superiority. Do not shy from pointing at related items to demonstrate why clients should buy from you and not others.

Manage products’ inventory accurately

For merchants who list products on multiple channels, the inventory should be managed with great accuracy. There is nothing as harmful as getting multiple orders when you do not have enough items. The moment you cancel orders because they exceed the inventory, your rating on the marketplaces will fall drastically. To manage this, it is advisable to indicate the items that are remaining in your store. You could also work in close collaboration with the manufacturer or supplier for a guarantee of prompt supply when bigger orders are made.

Driving more sales in marketplaces demands careful marketing and regular monitoring of competitors. Unlike a conventional store where you are under control of everything from price to product quantities, the marketplaces are more competitive and highly dynamic. Make sure to market the product more aggressively, use promotions, and apply the best analytics to understand emerging trends.

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User Experience Design

The user experience is the most important piece of your business puzzle when you want to build up your long-term customer base and enjoy the loyalty that’s necessary for success in a competitive marketplace. If your users have a bad time when they engage with your website, they’re going to make it known by going elsewhere. Here are 10 signs that you need to invest in user experience design as soon as possible.

1. You hear a lot of customer complaints about your website. When people are telling you exactly what’s wrong, you need to take a step back and listen.
2. Mobile users are out of luck when it comes to getting usable features. Tablet and smartphone users are not going to be happy if they can’t check out your site on the most convenient device for their needs.
3. Your navigation takes 10 clicks to get to the right resource. Your users have probably gone to your competitors five clicks ago.
4. You’re pretty sure no one actually knows how to use your website. If the information on your site has confusing organization, resource-heavy elements and poor information architecture, you probably won’t see a lot of repeat visitors.
5. You never consulted actual users during development. They’re the ones using your company’s site, so they need to give their two cents.
6. Your conversion rate is horrible. Problems in the user experience show through in your bottom line.
7. Customers can’t figure out how to contact you. If your phone number, chat, social networks or email addresses aren’t front and center, you’re generating a lot of frustration.
8. Your bounce rate is sky high. People come to your site, but they’re closing the tab almost immediately.
9. You use the same website design you’ve had since the late 90s. You might love it, but it’s showing its age and needs to be modernized with the most recent UX improvements.
10. You don’t continually evaluate your user experience performance. Pick key performance indicators, and track your progress over time. This shows you which design elements are great, and which ones need to go out the window.

If you’re guilty of one or more of the things on this list, it’s time to get in touch with a user experience design expert immediately.

More About Catsy

Catsy is a product information management platform that makes it easier for manufacturers and distributors to manage and share product content. For more information on centralizing data, listing on marketplaces, giving dealers access, and more visit www.catsy.com.

Is Your Industry Immune To The Digital Transformation? – NO – All Brands Are Going Digital

It can’t be overstated: no industry is immune to digital transformation. In 2017, we are seeing that all brands are going digital.

This message is almost everywhere, from the internet to business magazines to almost every new digital-related study that endeavors to address the importance of businesses adapting to and remaining competitive and relevant in this new business landscape. Everyone is on the same page that all brands are going digital is the next massive industry pivot.

Interestingly, even though both digital and non-digital companies are aware that digital disruption is inevitable, not all of them (except for industry leaders) are making fundamental changes to stay ahead of these threats. Well, they might be paying attention, but still feel they don’t have what it takes to make the necessary adjustments. Sadly, some are also regularly fed with a barrage of advice – most often than not, conflicting and wrong – about thriving, growing and transforming themselves to fit in the fast-changing market.

Other reports have also found that companies are reluctant to embrace new technology innovations because of certain perceptions. These perceptions are treacherous, misleading and can lead to dangerous and expensive blunders for organizations even on the verge of moving into the new digital economy.

If you still believe that your industry is free from digital transformation, you need to look around and learn from big names like Blockbusters and Kodak that were displaced by new digitally savvy competitors. And this explains why many leaders in every industry have embraced the change and continue to gain huge benefits than their competitors.

You can avoid getting caught up in this confusion. And this post will help you understand why no industry is immune to digital transformation, and why your business needs a digital transformation overhaul not only to stay competitive in the continuously-evolving market but also keep pace with technological disruption.

It’s not Only About Technology

Digital transformation has made it easy for big digital companies to adapt to the storm of new technology usually affecting markets and customers. Unlike the past, electronic records are rampant, online shopping is becoming popular, and businesses are moving their offline businesses online. Is that all digitalization is all about?

Acquiring and implementing the right technology for your business is important. If you don’t treat technology as a tool, nonetheless, you’re preparing for disappointments. No matter the technology you acquire to run your business, an alteration in your business culture is what makes digital transformation a success. You have to think about people, data, processes, and culture of the organization for technology to work.

One of the challenging parts of the process is your staff adapting and accepting the change. Nevertheless, if the leadership team can step up and point the rest of the staff in the right direction, the change will be embraced across the whole company.

Other Opportunities Exists Apart From Customer Experience and Marketing

Digital transformation has aided the world’s biggest players in every industry to stay ahead of their competitors by creating, enabling and nurturing stellar customer experience. Even with the ever-changing technology, they can swiftly transform their internal processes to quickly deliver exciting new products and services that their customers crave.

While organizations that are moving to digital focus so much on creating an exceptional and highly relevant customer experience (they consider it their top priority), other opportunities also exist in efficiency, productivity and employee leverage. Together, these three forces can ensure that products are in line with advances in technology, meet customer expectations and generally lead to productivity improvement. When you take advantage of these opportunities the right way, you get access to larger online markets that are currently out of reach, which is one surefire way to accelerate growth.

Digital Transformation is Not a One-Time Investment

Digital transformation is not a one-off project or investment. A lot of organizations that believe that their digital transformation program is going very well – even if it’s delivering the results anticipated – have it all wrong. In fact, digital business models that provide your organization the ability to stay ahead of your competitors are constantly-changing. New channels are emerging, different ways of engaging with your customers and making your brand connection more tangible are conceived as well.

Evolution

Evolving with the rapid pace of digital change requires an extra and continued effort to increase efficiency with technology wherever possible. That would mean adopting agile principles across the business. For instance, investing in a slick website seems like the best thing to do if you aim to create an online presence. However, customers will require more than a website for you to gain their trust and become a leader in the industry. You see, the prevalence of legacy technology spans all industries, and even if you acquired the most successful digital transformation program, you cannot be digital in one day/month/year. Technology changes day after day, therefore, business transformation must be continuous or else you’re going to fall increasingly behind.

Moreover, technological innovations have led to technology disruptions. Identifying and assessing such threats might not be a problem. However, to remain competitive in the long run, established companies must adopt and use new and right technology innovations to curb tech disruptions. This mean that what you used last year might not necessarily provide the results you want today.

Digital Transformation Approach is Not Different for Every Industry and Company

Resistance to change is one of the challenges that hinder digital transformation. Some organizations are not receptive to the new trend simply because they struggle or because they don’t see their expectations met or exceeded.

While some industries and companies are more digital than others, the journey towards digital transformation is not different. The large and growing gap that still exists between industries, and between companies within those industries isn’t attributed to the approach industry leaders take to become digital entirely. It is because they understand that digital transformation is not a mere shake-up of processes, but rather a fundamental change to the very foundational components of the business. They understand that they have to frequently engage their customers through high quality, simple digital channels, streamline workflow and operations through an effective and seamless collaboration between teams and departments, gain insights and foresight that can help improve management and marketing decisions, and more importantly, speed development of new products and services going forward.

The truth is these things are not premeditated nor are companies ready to transform every time a new technology emerges. They are forced to evolve. The sooner they do it, the better. All brands are going digital, make sure you do.

With this in mind, industry leaders are not only paying attention but also not reluctant to make alterations in their business strategies necessitated by the changing landscape. To them, transformation is a way of life, and are using digital technologies to move forward digitally as well as accelerate their growth.

If you have been in content marketing for some time, one of the discussions that have refused to end is, “what is more crucial between content quality and quantity?” Marketers take hours discussing whether to prioritize small amounts of top-notch online product content or regularly generate a lot of content. The answer is that quality and quantity in content marketing are inseparable.

Why is quality very important?

Quality is king when it comes to content marketing. Top notch online product content quality appeals to site visitors while poor content will easily turn away potential clients. Recently, search engines such as Google have revamped their search algorithms to focus on enhancing UX (user experience). This means that your content must be of highest possible quality to deliver what the target audience wants in overflowing proportions. Quality content should have the following components.

• Focuses on a specific target audience
• Answers issues that affect the target audience
• Structured well to engage the clients from the start to end
• The right keywords that point to specific products, services, or brands
• Appropriate links to respective sites
• Well-crafted title, sub-headings, and ideas that flow from one section to another

Why quantity is as important as quality

As marketers focus on penning top-notch content, the truth is that updating infrequently will not keep clients coming back. Do not let online content get dusty/stale. Studies have established that firms that post over 16 articles every week get 5X more traffic compared to those that post less than 4 within the same period.

Graph courtesy of Hubspot

Here are top three reasons why you should avoid getting your content stale.

Posting content regularly helps to improve your site ranking

When a site is regularly updated with new content, there are more opportunities to strengthen the brand’s search engine optimization and ranking. How does this work? Top engines such as Google deploy web crawlers that use special algorithms to index all sites on the internet. These bots rank the websites they crawl based on factors such as inbound links, whether the content is mobile friendly, and user engagement among others.

The search engines crawl websites in search of new content. If the site has stale content, search engines will still crawl but rank them at the bottom. However, if you are posting new content, the chances are that you will get better ranking when bots crawl.

Posting new content about different topics in the niche attracts diversified visitors. With time, they build many links that demonstrate your site’s authority. This is an excellent way to build a site’s reputation. Once such links start growing, the search engines will rank you at the top and show the site in the first SERP pages. As a marketer, do not underestimate the potential of new, updated, and high-quality content in digital marketing.

Regular content grows the site’s keyword profile

The advantages of maintaining high quality and updated content surpass the notion of indexing. As you post the content regularly, the number and range of keywords continue to grow. For example, if you are in the fitness sector, the chances are that clients will search diverse keywords ranging from “fitness training” to “fitness diet.” With diverse contents in most areas of your niche, the chances are that most clients’ searches will land on the site.

Increase social media Content

Though Google had pointed that social shares are not part of the ranking signals, things have changed in the last couple of years. In 2015, marketers found that top ranking posts also enjoyed high social share counts. A closer look at the scenario indicates that posts with high engagement rates and shares on social media also enjoy high CTR in SERPs. The social media and search engines use machine learning that reward engagement with better visibility.

The more the content you post on social media, the more the opportunities for user engagement. At this point, the relationship between high quality and regular posting come out explicitly. Well, while coming up with top notch content is never easy; you must learn and improve progressively.

One reason that slows down the release of content is the need to start researching from scratch in every new article. In many cases, the resources used to pen different articles are similar. To avoid reinventing the wheel, you can turn articles into white papers or repurpose them for videos. By exploring topics in great details, you will soon become an authority because of top quality and regular releases.

How to generate top-notch online product content regularly

Now that you know that posting regular and high-quality content is very important, the question shifts to generating such posts frequently.

• Set a brand editorial calendar

The ability to create great and regular content narrow down to personal capacity to organize the marketing schedule. When a marketer knows the frequency of releasing posts, he can easily plan about the time every piece should be finished. You can take this planning a step higher to break down components of the next post and even associated research. Note that this might require some practice to master.

• Create a reliable buffer

Do you simply work on online product content and post it online as soon as it is finished? This is not the best way to do it. The best method is working on regular content and creating a reliable buffer before releasing them on a regular schedule. Holding the articles provides ample time to review, correct errors, and even change some components before posting. More importantly, the buffer means that if an article that you have just posted goes wrong, a replacement will be ready.

• Work on content in batches

One thing that digital marketers know very well is that working on individual articles on a regular basis can be difficult. Because of the work involved, you are likely to get fully engaged carrying research and penning the content. This could deny you time for other things. However, working on batches of articles guarantees you there is enough content to release on a regular basis.

• Outsource content services

If you find that generating high-quality online product content is a challenge, you can outsource. You only need to craft instructions for the posts and ask the contracted firm for high-quality content. In some cases, content creation firms carry independent researches to craft regular and top quality content.

The Final Take

While there is no question about the value of creating top-notch quality online product content, the frequency is equally crucial. Do not try to separate quality and frequency because the entire campaign will fail. To get it right on getting regular content and preventing the posts going stale, simply plan well and budget accordingly.