Business Articles

Article / Updated 07-23-2024

The power of personalized branded books In the dynamic and competitive landscape of trade shows, businesses constantly seek innovative ways to stand out and generate high-quality leads. One powerful strategy that is gaining traction is the distribution of personalized branded books created by Custom Dummies. These custom-tailored books serve as memorable, valuable, and impactful marketing tools that can significantly enhance your brand. Here's how you can leverage this unique approach to make your next trade show a success. Why personalized branded books? Engagement and memorability: Personalized branded books are more than just promotional materials; they are tangible, valuable assets that attendees can take away and revisit long after the event. A custom book from Custom Dummies, filled with tailored content relevant to your audience, ensures that your brand remains top-of-mind. Unlike traditional brochures or flyers, these books offer a unique and lasting impression. Authority and trust: Distributing a well-crafted, informative book positions your company as an authority in your field. It demonstrates a commitment to providing value and showcases your expertise. Attendees are more likely to trust and engage with a business that invests in creating high-quality, educational content. Brand differentiation: In a crowded trade show environment, it’s crucial to differentiate your brand. Custom Dummies books, featuring your branding and tailored content, help you stand out. They provide a unique way to communicate your message and highlight what makes your company special. Strategies for effective trade show lead generation with Custom Dummies Pre-show preparation Target audience identification: Understand who will be attending the trade show. Define your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and tailor the content of your Custom Dummies book to address their specific needs and interests. Content development: Work with Custom Dummies to develop a book that provides real value to your target audience. This could include industry insights, practical tips, case studies, or how-to guides that align with your products or services. Promotion: Announce the availability of your personalized branded book in pre-show communications. Use email campaigns, social media, and your website to generate interest and encourage attendees to visit your booth to receive their copy. During the show Engaging booth design: Create an inviting and visually appealing booth that showcases your Custom Dummies books. Use clear signage to highlight the unique value of your personalized content. Interactive presentations: Use the content from your book to create engaging presentations or demos. This not only attracts attendees but also provides a natural segue into distributing your books. Lead capture and qualification: Offer your Custom Dummies book as an incentive for attendees to share their contact information. Use digital forms or lead capture apps to collect and qualify leads efficiently. Post-show follow-up Personalized outreach: Follow up with attendees who received your book. Reference specific content from the book in your communications to reinforce the connection and demonstrate your attention to detail. Lead nurturing: Develop a lead nurturing campaign that builds on the content of your Custom Dummies book. Send additional resources, updates, or invitations to webinars that align with the topics covered in the book. Analytics and feedback: Track the effectiveness of your book distribution strategy. Use analytics to measure engagement and gather feedback from recipients to continually improve your approach. The benefits of trade show marketing with Custom Dummies Enhanced brand visibility: Custom Dummies books not only attract attention at the trade show but also continue to promote your brand long after the event. Attendees are likely to keep and share valuable content, extending your reach. High-quality leads: By providing substantial value upfront, you attract leads genuinely interested in your products or services. This increases the likelihood of conversion and fosters long-term relationships. Networking opportunities: Custom Dummies books can also be used as conversation starters, making it easier to network with industry peers and potential partners. Conclusion Utilizing personalized branded books from Custom Dummies at trade shows is a powerful way to generate high-quality leads, differentiate your brand, and establish authority. By focusing on delivering value through tailored content, you create a memorable experience for attendees and set the stage for lasting business relationships. Ready to transform your trade show strategy with Custom Dummies? Contact us today to start creating your personalized branded book and make your next trade show the most successful yet.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 07-23-2024

Unleash the power of AI to transform your writing process and revolutionize your creativity. This Cheat Sheet introduces you to some common AI lingo and popular AI tools to get you started, and helps you to identify your target audience, generate a writing brief, and polish and proofread your content.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 06-30-2024

Financial risk management can be very complicated, which can make it hard to know where to begin thinking about it. This Cheat Sheet distinguishes some of the key concepts such as risk versus danger and opportunity, probability, volatility, normality and uncertainty. It discusses how to manage the seven major types of financial risk in financial institutions including asset managers, banks, insurance companies and dealers. These aren’t exclusive; in fact, a common mistake is to fixate only on one type of risk. Most risks cross boundaries and present issues of several, or even all seven, types. The seven types are market risk, credit risk, operational risk, liquidity risk, funding risk, reputational risk and political risk.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 06-10-2024

Whether you’re a manager, an entrepreneur, or a recent graduate, the ability to write well is a skill you can’t afford to be without — particularly in the world of business. This handy Cheat Sheet helps ensure your business writing is fit for the right purpose, and gives you tips on effective resume writing, international communication, and online content creation for your business.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-07-2024

Now more than ever, inclusive leadership must become the new normal. Inclusion is the degree to which an employee perceives that they’re a valued member of the work group and encouraged to fully participate in the organization. That means that an inclusive leader demonstrates the skills and creates the kind of work environment where all talent can thrive because they feel valued, respected, that they belong, and are set up for success. As such, this means that leaders must shift their mindsets and adopt new skillsets in order to meet the demands of the global changing marketplace, workplace, and the communities in which they do business. It also means embracing inclusion as a leadership responsibility and a performance expectation that is as common as managing projects and serving customers. Becoming an inclusive leader isn’t as easy as it sounds. Inclusive leadership is much more than having a title, giving a hug, and being nice. It requires a paradigm shift, an openness to different ways of doing things, leaning into some discomfort, and demonstrating courage to embrace the unfamiliar. This Cheat Sheet provides food for thought, best practices, and strategies, as well as guidance on how to become a more inclusive leader and how to drive it inside the organization.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-07-2024

From searching for a business to buy, getting your finances in order to managing and marketing and everything in between, the world of small business can be both exciting and overwhelming. If you’re thinking about buying and running a business, check out the following list of tips to improve your chances of success.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2024

From managing to marketing and everything in between, the world of small business can be both exciting and overwhelming. It’s a place where no two workdays are exactly the same and where unpredictable things happen. If you’re thinking about starting (or you already run and manage) your own business, check out the following list of tips to improve your chances of success.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2024

Entering the financing world can be a confusing place at first. One way to get a handle on it all is to master the common financing and investing terms. It always helps to know what everyone is talking about!

Article / Updated 03-28-2024

Everything is digital these days, and the digital experience (DX) should be more effective and downright delightful than ever before. Its evolution is critical for the future of delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies. This digital-first approach to CX is particularly important as new technologies emerge. One such technology is artificial intelligence (AI) — you may have heard of it. AI can be used to create world-class experiences that drive customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and engagement, and a reduction in operating costs. In this article, you discover the essential pieces of a digital-first CX strategy and the steps you need to take to implement your own. Implementing a digital-first strategy The future of CX is moving away from voice channels and toward digital channels. Voice channels are still in use, of course, but your DX strategy must seamlessly integrate digital channels to remain competitive. In fact, to deliver a stellar DX program, keep in mind these four considerations: Self-service should be an integral part of your DX activities. To supercharge agent productivity and self-service experiences, use the power of knowledge. Customers should be at the heart of your DX program. Deploy proactive engagement. For more information on these pillars, visit www.aberdeen.com/blog-posts/the-four-pillars-of-best-in-class-digital-experience-program. While keeping these key components in mind, follow the pointers in this section to start your digital-first strategy. Avoid focusing solely on CCaaS Today’s recipe to develop a crystal-clear focus on the customer is complex. You need several ingredients, and while choosing the right contact center as a solution (CCaaS) product is an important step for your customers’ digital-first experiences, it’s not everything. Would you make a cake with just flour? To ensure your DX strategy puts you ahead of the competition and delivers the delicious results you’re craving, mix together five ingredients to make up that “special sauce.” Manage digital assets In many companies, DX can include several teams and types of interactions, including social media, AI technologies, chat, and email. Eliminating silos means you can access a complete view of your customer history, interactions, and sentiment to provide the high-caliber service your customers deserve, no matter how they interact with your business. Conversational AI and chatbots Customers want self-service, but they also want to feel like they’re having conversations and communicating effectively in these self-service interactions. With AI-powered intelligent virtual agents and chatbots, your customers can have their cake and eat it, too! They can converse naturally and radically improve their automated experiences. If you’re interested in accelerating your self-service channels, visit www.nice.com/products/conversational-ai-and-chatbots to find out more. Promote a unified agent experience Your agents need unified sources of organizational knowledge, product and feature updates, and customer data to easily stay up to date. Without this unified experience, they may experience constant slowdowns to complete trainings or take too long to search for the latest information. This experience empowers your workforce and creates time needed for complex tasks, and it increases confidence, accuracy, and efficiency — all adding up to greater job enjoyment. Provide the omnichannel journey Your customers’ typical journeys are non-linear, so you need to support them through self-service, the contact center, and any combination of channels through to resolution. Varying customer preferences underscores the need for omnichannel support. That includes seamless integration of emerging channels as they become available. Optimize AI for self-service Self-service capabilities powered by AI optimize digital channels by beginning with simple and repetitive use cases that generate high value. You can also use intelligent routing to enable collaboration between live agents and self-service tools. Partner with AI AI has been a supporting role for CX for a while now, but AI in customer interactions is now taking center stage as the main character. AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of CX across digital industries, so partnering with AI now is crucial. Through this enhanced technology, you can provide a more personalized experience and immerse your customers in AI for unparalleled convenience and satisfaction. AI also upskills your employees and allows them to perform more advanced tasks and increase their impact and value to your organization. When agents trust the system that evaluates their performance, job satisfaction and engagement increase. To advance your company’s future, use AI to maximize employment loyalty and engagement while delivering amazing experiences for their customers. Make experiences flow Your organization — no matter the size or location — can create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting your business goals. If you need help along the way, look to NICE CXone, a cloud-native, customer-experience platform. NICE is a leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center — and beyond. Elevate every customer interaction. Find out more at get.nice.com/digital-self-service.html.

Article / Updated 03-07-2024

Here are some things you can begin to do for a new marketing campaign for your small business. Before you hire professionals, see what you can do yourself. Compare your approach to that of your competitors When you compare your marketing approach to competitors, you easily find out what customers like best. Make a list of the things that your competitors do differently than you. Does one of them price higher? Does another give away free samples? Do some of them offer money-back guarantees? Make a list of at least five points of difference between your business and its major competitors based on an analysis of marketing practices. Now ask ten of your best customers to review this list and tell you what they prefer — your way or one of the alternatives — and ask them why. Keep a tally. You may find that all your customers vote in favor of doing something differently than the way you do it now. Create a customer profile Collect or take photographs of people (from Facebook or email thumbnails, and with the individuals’ permission) who you characterize as your typical customers. Post these pictures on a bulletin board — either a real one or a virtual one like Pinterest (set this board to private because it’s definitely not for sharing beyond your marketing team) — and add any facts or information you can collect about these people. Consider this board your customer database. Whenever you aren’t sure what to do about any marketing decision, sit down in front of your bulletin board and use it to help you tune in to your customers and what they do and don’t like. Entertain customers to get their input Entertaining your customers puts you in contact with them in a relaxed setting where they’re happy to share their views. Hold a customer appreciation event or invite good customers to a lunch or dinner. Use such occasions to ask for suggestions and reactions. Bounce a new product idea off these good customers, or find out what features they’d most like to see improved. Your customers can provide an expert panel for your informal research — you just have to provide the food! After they get to know you, they may be happy to give you ongoing quick feedback via a chat room, Twitter, or a group text message, especially if they use these media routinely themselves. Use email to do one-question surveys If you market to businesses, you probably have email addresses for many of your customers. Try emailing 20 or more of them for a quick opinion on a question. The result? Instant survey! If a clear majority of respondents say they prefer using a corporate credit card to being invoiced because the card is more convenient, well, you’ve just gotten a useful research result that may help you revise your marketing approach. Always ask people for their email addresses whenever you interact with them, through your website or in person, so as to build a large email list. Emailing your question to actual customers or users of your product is far better, by the way, than trying to poll users of social networking websites for their opinions. Sure, you may be able to get a bunch of responses from people on Twitter, but would those responses be representative of your actual customers? Probably not. Research government databases Many countries gather and post extensive data on individuals, households, and businesses, broken down into a variety of categories. In the United States, you can find out how many people earn above a certain annual income and live in a specific city or state — useful if you’re trying to figure out how big the regional market may be for a luxury product. Similarly, you can find out how many businesses operate in your industry and what their sales are in a specific city or state — useful if you’re trying to decide whether that city has a market big enough to warrant you moving into it. If you want to use the web to explore useful data compiled and posted by various agencies of the US government, visit the United States Census Bureau website and check out the data on households and businesses. This site is your portal to US data from the economic census (which goes out to 5 million businesses every five years) and the Survey of Business Owners. Establish a trend report Set up a trend report, a document that gives you a quick indication of a change in buying patterns, a new competitive move or threat, and any other changes that your marketing may need to respond to. You can compile one by emailing salespeople, distributors, customer service staff, repair staff, or friendly customers once a month, asking them for a quick list of any important trends they see in the market. (You flatter people by letting them know that you value their opinions, and email makes giving those opinions especially easy.) Print and file these reports from the field and go back over them every now and then for a long-term view of the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. If you don’t work for one of the handful of largest and best-funded companies in your industry, then your trend analysis should also include careful tracking of what those giants are doing because they may be setting marketing or product trends that affect the rest of their industry. Tracking media coverage is easy on Google or other search engines. Analyze competitors’ collateral Print out or clip and collect marketing materials (brochures, ads, web pages, and so on) from competitors and analyze them by using a claims table. Open up a spreadsheet (or draw a blank table on a piece of paper or poster board) and label the columns of this new table, one for each competitor. Label each row with a feature, benefit, or claim. Add key phrases or words from an ad in the appropriate cell. Include one to three of the most prominent or emphasized claims per competitor. When filled in, this claims table shows you, at a glance, what territory each competitor stakes out and how it does the staking. One may claim it’s the most efficient, another the most helpful, and so on. Compare your own claims with those of your competitors. Are you impressive by comparison, or does a more dominant and impressive competitor’s claims overshadow you? Do your claims stand out as unique, or are you lacking clear points of difference? Research your strengths Perhaps the most important element of any marketing plan or strategy is clearly recognizing what makes you especially good and appealing to customers. To research your strengths, find the simplest way to ask ten good customers this simple but powerful question: “What’s the best thing about our (fill in the name of your product or service), from your perspective?” The answers to this question usually focus on one or, at most, a few features or aspects of your business. Finding out how your customers identify your strengths is a boon to your marketing strategy. Investing in your strengths (versus your competitors’ strengths or your weaknesses) tends to grow your sales and profits more quickly and efficiently. Probe your customer records Most marketers fail to mine their own databases for all of the useful information those databases may contain. Study your customers with the goal of identifying three common traits that make them different or special. This goal helps you focus on what your ideal customer looks like so you can look for more of them. Test your marketing materials Whether you’re looking at a letter, catalog, web page, tear sheet, press release, or ad, you can improve the piece’s effectiveness by asking for reviews from a few customers, distributors, or others with knowledge of your business. Do they get the key message quickly and clearly? Do they think the piece is interesting and appealing? If they’re only lukewarm about it, then you know you need to edit or improve it before spending the money to publish and distribute it. Customer reviewers can tell you quickly whether you have real attention-getting wow-power in any marketing piece. Just ask a half dozen people to review a new marketing piece while it’s still in draft form. Interview defectors Your company’s records of past customers are an absolute gold mine of information that can be easily overlooked. Use these records to figure out what types of customers defect, when, and why. If you can’t pinpoint why a customer abandoned you (from a complaint or a note from the salesperson, for example), try to contact the lost customer and ask him directly. Ask kids about trends In consumer marketing, it’s best if customers think you’re cool and your competitors aren’t. Because kids lead the trends in modern society, why not ask them what those trends are? Ask them simple questions like, “What will the next big thing be in (name your product or service here)?” Or try asking kids this great question: “What’s cool and what’s not cool this year?” Why? Because they know, and you don’t. For example, if teenage girls know what the next cool color combo will be, the way to find out is simple: Ask them what colors they want their room to be. (Or visit social media sites that skew toward younger members and see how they’re decorating their pages.) Create custom web analytics Web analytics are readily available for your websites and blogs, but they’re mostly traffic counts of various kinds. You probably want to know about sales, not just visitors. What are the most meaningful indicators of success on the web? Just as you (hopefully) do off-line, track online sales, repeat sales, lead collection, quality of leads (measured by rate of conversion), sign-ups, use of offers (such as you may post on a business site on Facebook, for example), and overall revenue and returns from e-marketing. These numbers tell the story of your marketing successes and failures online and give you something to learn from as you go.