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Chances are your customers are spending a good deal of time with social media applications every day. Be part of their online experience by integrating social networking tools, a web site or a blog into your marketing plans. Use the internet and tools like Facebook and Twitter to inform your customers of your plans and events and enhance your relationship with them. Let us help you. It starts with understanding your business and helping you to see the potential for social interaction with your customers.

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Simple Ways to Prepare Your Website for Growth

Guest Author, Amy Collett, Owner and Branding Specialist at bizwell.org

We all want our businesses to grow and thrive. In the digital world, this means having a website that caters to our current clients and can easily scale to accommodate new ones. With the following tips, you can keep growth in mind from the initial launch!

Understanding Your Customers

With any major project, your first step is always preparation. As you design or redesign your site, get to know your customers better. Process mining – this is often called task mining – is a streamlined solution for learning about buying behaviors and diving deeper into actual customer data instead of generic demographic profiles. The data you cull can then be leveraged to develop your process maps and diagrams, which are vital in boosting sales, making better on-page recommendations for your site, and reducing the chances of an important step in development being missed.

The right business systems, including ERP and CRM, will provide you with the data you need through algorithms and analytics. For process mining to be truly effective, you can then deploy a slew of tools to analyze the data, taking into account the sequence of events, processing times, and more, and identify opportunities to streamline and improve. To facilitate website improvements, you can then create a timeline and identify the people within your organization who will play key roles in analyzing and using this data, as well as those responsible for implementing changes in response.

One such change you might make is to create a more responsive and user-friendly website. Beachside Social Networks can create a website for you that seamlessly transitions from desktop to either phones or tablets. This has many purposes, but one is that it helps you maintain a consistent image and experience between all online platforms.

A Functional Site

Having a consistent-looking website does more than help you manage your brand. In addition to appearances, your site must also load quickly and offer your customers quick access to navigation and other contact information. Usability Geek also suggests making your site searchable so that your customers can quickly find what they’re looking for.

Another important piece of your digital puzzle is ensuring that your website integrates with your existing systems. This is especially true if you’re already utilizing a CRM or ERP system. For each type of program, you can choose to utilize an on-site device or integrate with a cloud-based system.

On the Cloud

Speaking of the cloud, you should also bear in mind that utilizing the cloud (essentially storage and services hosted online) makes your business more scalable and flexible. Salesforce notes many other advantages of cloud computing, including sustainability and the potential for increased collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, using the cloud makes your business more secure thanks to more integrative technology and consistent security management.

Social and Sustainable

As social media becomes more and more in line with our world, having a website that works with your social media applications is more important than ever. Messaging, for example. It’s helpful to deploy a solution that helps you keep up with all of your messages in one place so that you can best respond to queries and comments without having to log in to half a dozen or more social media platforms just to interact with your customer base. Another quick note on social media: Make sure that your branding is the same not only on your websites but also on your social tools. Your brand is how your customers will recognize you, and you do not want to confuse them by adding logos, colors, and fonts that don’t look the same from one place to another.

Your website is your digital real estate, and it has to treat your customers as well as you would in person. Take the time to dig deep into the data that drives your business before you make changes to your website. This will help you make it friendly, scalable, secure, and sustainable. In turn, you will save money and time and avoid the headaches that come with having a site that doesn’t work for your customers.

Call Beachside Social Networks for more information on how we can help you watch the perfect site for your brand.

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Yes, You Can Start an Ecommerce Business Today—Here’s How

Guest Author Lance Cody-Valdez, Digital Nomad at free-lance-now.com

Are you ready to tap into the endless potential of ecommerce? Launching an online store requires a lot of hard work and smart strategy. But if you prepare accordingly and stay committed to the long game, you can set yourself up to flourish. And it doesn’t even have to be overwhelming! Here is a quick guide for getting your ecommerce business up and going:

Doing Your Research

The first thing you want to do is explore your options and study what you’re getting into.

  • Conduct market and product research to define your target audience and the products you will sell.
  • Look into various product sourcing options. This is where you will decide whether to make your own products, work with a drop shipper, or find a wholesaler.
  • Assess the viability of your product. Ensure that there is a sustainable demand and that you can make a profit after everything is said and done.
  • Educate yourself on online business laws, and figure out which legal structure will best suit your needs.

Building Your Store

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time for the fun part—creating your online store!

  • Take the time to develop your brand and image. This includes the logo, typography, color scheme, and other design elements that will represent your company.
  • Choose a hosting platform (e.g., Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc.) that will allow you to easily create and manage your store.
  • When uploading your products to your store, be sure to include quality product photos and descriptions.
  • Choose your shipping strategy (e.g., carriers, same-day delivery, free shipping, etc.).

Growing Your Reach

You’ve got a beautiful store with great products. Now is when you begin to expand your audience and turn them into customers!

  • Start looking for social media influencers who can push your products to the masses.
  • Invest time and energy into increasing traffic to your store via social media. Use paid advertising along with engaging users to organically grow your audience.
  • Develop a content strategy for your site’s blog, and ensure that every webpage associated with your business is optimized for SEO.
  • Prioritize your email list. Strategize how you can collect email addresses from the people who visit your store and then promote your products through email marketing.

If you’re thinking about starting an ecommerce business, don’t be overwhelmed by the seemingly endless to-do list of getting a store up and running. While creating and managing an online store requires a lot of work and commitment, it can all prove well worth it when you start making a profit. And if you consult the guide above, you will be starting at an advantage!

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How to Avoid App Mishaps as a Small Business Owner

Guest Author Lance Cody-Valdez, Digital Nomad at free-lance-now.com

If you’re a small business, you may have already heard the statistics that there are nearly 3 million apps on the Google Play store and just less than two million available via Apple. Considering that 88 percent of our mobile usage consists of time spent in mobile applications, it makes sense to want to release your own. But, it is not as simple as downloading a template or telling your designer that you want an app.

There are lots of things to consider before you start the process. Beachside Social Networks shares the following application development mistakes that your small business should avoid when you’re ready to go mobile.

Not Doing Your Research

If you’re like most of us, you want to dive right in and create an app yourself. This is certainly admirable. However, it might not be the best solution. Although there are plenty of app creation tools available, it’s almost always best to hire a developer or a freelance app designer. The right team or person can take your idea and turn it into a functioning app. This can eliminate the hassle of learning how to code or releasing a templated product that is full of bugs and not catered to your clients.

Failure To Understand Your Customers

When you started your business, you likely did research to identify your target demographic. When you’re going to release an app, you have to go through this process again. The difference is that this time, you’re researching what your current customers want. Before you spend the money on the process, you’ll want to get to know your customers.

CustomersThink suggests that you can use social media, surveys, and events to grow closer to your customer base, which will give you an opportunity to find out exactly what they want in a mobile application. You might be surprised to find out, for example, that your customers want an option to buy online or to make reservations directly from an app.

Rushing The Process

In apps, as with most business moves, patience is key. Rushing too soon to release is a huge mistake that many companies, including Google, have made in the past. When you push an app through too quickly, you might miss fatal errors in the code or, just as damaging, not realize that your capabilities are inferior to existing products.

Moving too quickly may also result in a serious failure, such as a data breach or system crash. When customer or client information is jeopardized, more than your product or system stability is at risk — now you’re at risk of lawsuits and other damages. It’s wise to have a disaster recovery plan in place to have recovery software. With the right tools and disaster recovery protocols, you’ll be able to recover your data quickly and securely in case something does happen.

Missing The Budget

How much could it possibly cost to develop and release an app? More complicated apps can easily cost you over $50,000 to launch. This includes features, such as a social login as well as the visual and user interface design. Copywriting and branding also factor into the cost as does the complexity and the size of the database attached to your app. This figure doesn’t even take into consideration any changes you’ll choose to make after the initial release.

One way to save money here is to start with a “minimum viable product.” This is a scaled-down version of an app that will allow you to test functionality and perfect your basic products before adding additional features. If you need some extra funding to launch your app, look into potential grants. When applying for grants, be sure to include details like financials, the structure of your business, and marketing strategies.

Lastly, you can help put your budget back into focus by using free tools to help promote the app. For example, in place of hiring a graphic designer to design a logo, use a logo creator that allows you to put together a memorable image you can use on your website, social media, and even within the app itself. It’s a great way to be creative while saving some money.

Your mobile application can help your customers find out more about you and you more about your customers. But, you do not want to rush through the process. From hiring a developer that can help you work out the kinks to fully understanding the budget, plan your app development process well from the beginning, and you’ll be in a better position to lay a solid, digital foundation that will help you build your entrepreneurial empire.

Image courtesy of Pexels.