Meanwhile, remote workers benefit from a healthy work-life balance, reduced commuting time and expenses, and high levels of job satisfaction. However, despite the advantages or remote work, engagement challenges can arise.

Fortunately, as a business owner or manager, you can keep your remote workforce productive, profitable, and happy, using these tips.

1. Improve Communications

Remote workers often miss the social component of office work and can easily begin feeling isolated as they work. These feelings can intensify if they feel as though you’ve either forgotten about them or treat them with a low priority.

If you leave your remote workers out of important discussions and decisions, or just forget about them for long periods, you jeopardize their success and yours. Avoid this by taking the initiative to create a culture of open communications.

Use all the tools available to you, including video conferencing, email, voice conferencing, and live chat to speak often with your remote team members. Additionally, schedule communications such as a weekly conference call that can inform your remote workers and allow them to ask questions.

Simply by promoting communications, you can make your remote workers feel like part of the team. As a result, you can expect them to become more productive and engaged.

2. Promote Happiness

Happy workers produce more and tend to be more engaged than their peers. Ao, proactively ask questions of your remote team members to learn how they feel about their job and the work that they do.

Always accept what your employees say at face value. Show them that you care by promptly responding to their questions and concerns.

You can also increase employee satisfaction by making self-service options available. Choose an online HR management tool that gives your workers round-the-clock access to frequently used scheduling tools, vacation requests, and other documents.

Technology can also help you monitor employee sentiment through the use of online surveys and suggestion boxes.

When your remote workers want concessions such as flexible hours, company-subsidized equipment or similar perks, try to accommodate their requests. Your investment can easily result in a substantial ROI that also makes you happy.

Don’t worry about what your remote workers might ask for. In many cases, they might surprise you. Sometimes all they want is more training and better tools for doing their job.

3. Embrace Technology

Ultimately, technology can help you organize your business, streamline your work processes, and optimize the use of your human resources.

Try the various tech tools that are currently available and choose to buy the ones that best fit your budget. Also, pay attention to the needs of your firm, so primarily invest in apps that enhance collaboration and communication.

For instance, project management software can unify your remote and on-premises teams with centralized communications, scheduling, load balancing, forecasting, and other features.

Similarly, you can improve communications by subscribing to virtual whiteboards, video conferencing and instant messaging. You can also find tools that can improve your time and financial accounting.

4. Offer Recognition

Always acknowledge your remote workers, especially in the presence of your in-house staff. To begin with, consistently acknowledge their existence. Let them and the rest of your team know that your remote workers exist and are important team members.

Furthermore, recognize the performance and contributions of your remote workers. If you don’t recognize their achievements, they may start feeling ignored, unappreciated, and taken for granted.

Rather than commending your remote workers in private, make sure that you provide recognition in public, for all to see. To maximize the effect of the praise that you offer, present all accolades and awards during live video conferences with your entire company in attendance.

5. Employ Gamification

Around the world, companies have boosted employee engagement by making work seem more like a game. Of course, no one wants to diminish the serious mission of your business.

Instead, gamification aims to make work more competitive, interesting and fulfilling. Just as game players strive to reach their next level of play, workers in gamified environments want to achieve specific goals.

You can extend gamification to include your remote employees. Regardless of whether they compete against themselves to reach higher qualification levels or compete with each other based on productivity.

In addition to making work more interesting and accountable on the individual’s behalf, gamification can build teamwork by making it fun to work together to achieve mutually beneficial goals.

6. Articulate Goals

When people don’t understand the purpose of their work, they can easily lose their focus and enthusiasm. For this reason, you should make sure that your entire team, including remote workers, know what you intend to achieve via their efforts.

In addition to knowing the goals of their organization, remote workers should also know what you want them to do. Clear, concise job descriptions and well-defined scopes of work can get you and your team started on the right path.

When you establish goals at every level of your organization, you infuse your remote workers with a sense of purpose. Afterward, you can watch them rise to surpass your expectations.

In the end, when you use technology to equip and support your remote workers, you can unify your workforce. Consequently, you can boost productivity and efficiency while minimizing your expenses.

The post How to Use Technology to Keep Remote Employees Engaged appeared first on Tech Web Space.

In some cases, marketing mistakes may simply waste valuable financial resources needlessly. In other cases, these mistakes can do true damage to the company’s reputation or have other serious ramifications. While you could learn about these mistakes through painful trial and error, a smarter idea is to educate yourself about them ahead of time so that you have a better idea about how to properly market for your small business and reduce the chance of making serious mistakes.

1. Lack of a Professional Website

When you have a very small business, it makes sense to conserve financial resources as much as possible. However, a professional website is not an extra expense that you can put off for another day when financial resources are abundant. A professional website is a necessity in today’s business world. It can be used as a marketing tool to help your business obtain new leads and sales. However, it also is an essential component to your company’s legitimacy and clout. Many consumers view businesses that lack a website with scrutiny. You can see that this can be detrimental to your business regardless of how small it may currently be.

2. No Cohesive Marketing Message

Marketing messages can be fun and creative, but you should not rush through the marketing planning process. When you haphazardly throw messages around in different marketing formats, you run the risk of confusing your customers. You may also lose their focus and fail to achieve results. On the other hand, when your marketing message is cohesive and uniform, you can build a solid reputation and establish brand recognition. Keep in mind that cohesive and uniform does not mean stale and boring.

3. Not Understanding Their Target Audience

Marketing is a way for you to speak to your audience about your products or services. Some companies make the mistake of putting their voice out into the world without paying any attention to who is actually listening to their message. Consider the different approach that you would take when speaking to a young adult audience in comparison to a middle-aged audience with teens at home or older retirees. You must understand who your target audience is and what their motivators are. Then, you must create a message that speaks directly to them. If you have a segmented audience with very different types of people in the segments, it may be necessary to approach your marketing efforts in a fragmented way.

4. Minimal or No Marketing Plan

It is common for small business owners to toss marketing efforts out into the world as funds permit or when business is slow, but this is detrimental. Both online and offline marketing efforts should be steady and have a consistent message. You should have a marketing plan developed ahead of time, and your efforts should correspond with this strategic plan. For example, you may plan to post to your social media accounts several times per week. You may develop these messages ahead of time, and you may even use a marketing software program or application to control the delivery of these messages.

5. Poor Analysis

Savvy business owners regularly improve their marketing efforts. Through careful analysis of results from current efforts, you may be able to reduce spending going forward or revise your messages so that they are more effective. The delivery method and time may also be tweaked. If you are not currently analyzing your marketing results, you may be missing out on the ability to obtain valuable information that can improve your operations in different ways. If you are already receiving analytical data, you may need to improve your review process or adjust how you use this data.

6. Not Being Unique

At first glance, it makes sense to look at the competition to see what works from a marketing perspective. Mimicking those efforts could potentially produce similar results, but this is not always the case. The unfortunate reality is that some customers may view a company that follows or tags along as being second-rate or a copycat, and this can be detrimental to your image. It is important that you create your own image with customized messages, promotions and more. You need to be bold enough to confidently proceed with exciting marketing plans that you develop through your own creativity. This may even include using alternative platforms that the competition has not yet even thought about using. Even though something has not yet been done before, it may still be a wonderful and lucrative idea.

Final Word

You can see that there are many perils and pitfalls associated with small business marketing. Some of these efforts or oversights may simply cost a company valuable financial resources unnecessarily, and others may ultimately lead to the demise of the company in some cases. Marketing impacts expenses, sales, reputation, brand image and more. You must have a thoughtful marketing plan that is based on originality and research if you want your business to proceed with the best foot forward. Review your efforts with these mistakes in mind to determine how you can strategically improve your marketing efforts.

The post 6 Ways Founders Destroy Their Startups With Poor Marketing appeared first on Tech Web Space.

Of hundreds of available e-commerce products, it could be that only one of them is right for you. Make the wrong choice, and you will face operational challenges and future expenses. However, choosing the right e-commerce package can boost your sales and pave the way for growth.

Improve your search for the best e-commerce platform by using the following criteria.

Convenience

You don’t want to spend all your time managing e-commerce transactions. Similarly, you want your customers to have a convenient way to buy your goods. For this reason, convenience should rank high on your list of criteria for selecting an e-commerce platform. Of course, convenience involves many factors.

For starters, consider platforms that have easy administrative functions as well as a simple pathway for upgrades. Also, if you have existing data, make sure that the e-commerce solution has a convenient way to import your existing data. Export functions are also important, just in case you change platforms in the future.

For daily operations, make sure that your e-commerce platform offers an easy way to add and edit pages as well as your product listings. Pay special attention to usability from your customers’ perspective. For example, you need an e-commerce platform that functions well on mobile devices and has a simple checkout process.

Safety

With so many high-profile hacking incidents in the news, you should understand the importance of safety and security for you and your customers. As a business owner, you will need to ensure that your e-commerce platform is fully PCI compliant and runs on a secure web server with an authenticated SSL certificate.

If you want to make your current website compliant then provide employees with PCI secure coding training so that your team can complete coding requirements needed. Operating a private server with a skilled IT team will greatly enhance your company’s cybersecurity and reduce expenses from other expensive e-commerce platforms.

Remember that credit card numbers are only one type of data that hackers crave. Passwords, names, addresses, and other personal information are often targeted. If you don’t pay attention to safety details upfront, you could face audits and even lawsuits in response to any data breaches that occur. Knowing how to prevent this is of the utmost importance.

Likely, you will discover that some e-commerce platforms have more available security features than others. Consider those that offer the most robust security options, including DDoS monitoring and fraud protection. These features protect you against malicious users while giving your customers extra reasons to feel safe.

Scalability

Your company may be small right now, but you probably want it to grow. Rather than investing in an oversized e-commerce package choose one that wills scale with your business. Doing so will ensure that you can accommodate seasonal sales spikes without increasing your year-round costs.

Meanwhile, as your company grows, you will probably increase the number of users who need to use your e-commerce system. So, make sure that your package offers user-level access controls. Additionally, you will probably want to have the ability to add and remove users as needed, without such activity adding to your cost.

Most of all, be sure that your e-commerce platform can accommodate other changes that accompany growth. For example, you may need to expand the number of products and pages offered. Meanwhile, as you grow, you’ll probably want to offer enhanced features for your staff and customers alike.

Customer Experience

Modern customers want to be able to quickly find the products they want to buy and checkout without hassle. Also, they expect to have access to easy processes after the sale in the event that they need customer service, refunds, or product support. Moreover, they expect to have a pleasant experience with your brand.

Look for an e-commerce platform that makes shopping a breeze. Also, insist on a solution that has a shopping cart that naturally suggests additional products that can improve the end user’s experience with your product. Payments should be completed in as few steps as possible to ensure fast and easy transactions.

These days, shoppers expect to choose the way that they interact with businesses, so don’t disappoint them. Make sure that your e-commerce package lets you provide customer service via available via chatbots, live chat, email, and telephone. You should also provide self-service options such as FAQ’s, knowledge bases, and community forums.

Integration

Maintaining simple internal business processes is just as important as providing an excellent customer experience. Make things easier for your team by choosing an e-commerce platform that integrates with popular business applications. Such integration can eliminate redundant data entry and improve the accuracy of your business’ data.

For example, just think of how easy your bookkeeping and accounting processes can be if transaction data is directly transferred to your accounting software. Similarly, you should expect to find e-commerce solutions that unify your e-mail marketing, website’s CMS, inventory management, and CRM platforms.

Your e-commerce platform should also integrate with social media to make your marketing team more efficient. Also, for your managers, be sure that the software that you choose offers all the reports needed to meet your operational needs. Additionally, check with platform developers to learn about their plans for supporting future software integrations.

What is the Best E-commerce Platform for You?

A large variety of e-commerce platforms exists because no business has the same needs. For this reason, you should allow the above considerations to guide you to the solution that is best for your business.

The post Choosing an eCommerce Platform for Your Business appeared first on Tech Web Space.