Trust may be one of the most valuable commodities in your business. A team that trusts each other and their boss is a team that will work harder and happier to achieve great things. Cut corners where you will, but when it comes to people you need to invest. Not just money, but time and care. A whopping 93% of employees believe that trusting their leaders is essential to work satisfaction. And a satisfied team makes your business more money. So how to go about developing that trust?

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Trust works both ways

Trust is most effective when it’s mutual. When you show trust in your employees, they will feel that you’ve taken their feelings and identities into consideration. To work together requires a sense of collaboration. When you just pass tasks along with little consideration, you risk alienating your crew.

To build trust, try to be as open as possible with your team about every aspect of your business. Involve them in decisions, and show them how you work and why you do things the way you do. This has the important advantage that it removes uncertainty from your employees’ daily tasks.

[U]ncertainty about the company’s direction leads to chronic stress, writes Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, “which inhibits the release of oxytocin and undermines teamwork“.

“Openness is the antidote”.

Listen carefully

Part of showing your trust is to listen carefully. And again, your team will learn to trust and respect you if they know you have their interests at heart. Asking open-ended questions can begin an open and creative dialogue.

This listening occurs in daily interactions, but it also refers to how you treat your colleagues in the bigger picture. For example, letting them know that you’ve noticed when they’ve done something particularly smart or effective.

And listen not just to what they say and do, but what they feel. If you see somebody is raring to have a bit more responsibility, and you know they’re capable, reach out to them and delegate some of your own important tasks. Or hold regular sessions to observe and redistribute the workload. Discuss or use feedback forms to give folk a chance to express what work they believe they’re good at, and what they would like to do.

Behave honestly

It may sound obvious, but one of the simplest ways to build trust is by being honest. That starts with being open about your business practices as discussed above. But it should refer through to all areas of your workplace.

Being honest isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always pleasant. But a healthy and considerate conflict is more productive than simmering resentment and distrust.

To be a trustworthy boss doesn’t require you to be a tyrant. However, bottling things up or sweeping them under the carpet will damage your relationships and your business. Equally, make promises you can’t keep will lose you trust.

A boss “whose behavior can be reliably predicted will be seen as more trustworthy,” says Robert F. Hurley, professor of management at Fordham University in New York.  “One whose behavior is erratic will be met with suspicion“.

Here the issue of integrity comes into play – that is, doing what you say you will do. Trustees who say one thing but do another lack integrity.”

To begin building that trust, take a long hard look at this infographic from The Business Backer

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to acquire new customers quickly. It is especially beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses that have small marketing budgets. Social media influencers are people who are immensely popular on social media primarily due to their content. Their followers love their content and follow them for their ideas, opinions, and expertise in their niche. In fact, their followers are likely to act upon their recommendations and purchase products they endorse too.

Image Source – Influencer Marketing

According to a Twitter study, 40% of people have purchased products based on an influencer’s recommendation. This suggests that influencer marketing can help brands build credibility and grow pretty quickly.

Here are some of the best influencer marketing strategies to acquire customers

Branded Blog Posts

Branded blog posts from influencers can be very useful for brands. If you work with bloggers who have a high Domain Authority and who get a high amount of traffic to their sites, your brand will gain greater visibility.

This will also help you build greater brand awareness. Ask your influencers to review some of your products or services and share their honest opinions on their blogs. Such authentic reviews can help you win the trust of their audiences [who are essentially your target audience].

However, for this, you need to make sure that you collaborate only with relevant influencers in your niche. You can also give their followers a little nudge towards a purchase by sharing affiliate links or discount codes with your influencers. When someone makes a purchase using them, you might need to pay a certain percentage as commission to the influencer.

Brand Mentions

Mentions of your brand by influencers on social media can help to attract more eyeballs. This can increase your visibility, brand awareness, and boost credibility too. When popular influencers mention your brand in a positive light, it can help to increase your conversions too.

Electronic Arts collaborated with popular Instagram influencers like David Lopez and Koya Webb to promote their gaming app, Bejeweled. As a result of the campaign, the app rose 520 places, from #702 to #182, among the top grossing apps in the Apple App Store.

Guest Posts

Guest posting on an influencer’s blog or website is a great way to attract more traffic to your site. If their website or blog gets a large amount of traffic and is a high-authority site, it can help with SEO too. Any backlinks from their site to yours will be of high-quality which can help to boost your rankings as well as traffic.

In addition, you’ll also benefit from greater visibility and brand awareness.

Takeovers

A takeover is a very interesting influencer marketing strategy that’s used by many brands to generate content and gain more followers. It involves an influencer taking over your social media account for a certain amount of time.

During this time, they will be posting content on your account. When they cross-promote such takeovers on their own accounts, their followers are likely to check out your account. Not only does this give you a chance to woo your audience with some amazing content, but also grow your following.

To learn about some more influencer marketing strategies, check out the following gifographic

10 Influencer Marketing Strategies You Should Know

Image courtesy: Grin.co

It’s always better to retain customers than to attract new ones because the cost involved in getting new customers is much higher. Around 90% of consumers shop from different brands and are not loyal to any one in particular. Therefore, it’s important to focus on developing consistent customer relationships.

Let’s take a look at four of the best ways to do so

1. Get to Know Your Customers

The more you know your customers, the better your retention will be. Do research to understand their needs and desires and what delights them the most. Understand why they make a purchase.

From your previous experience, map your customer journey. Explore the available data and analytics to understand your customers’ behavioral pattern and trends.

2. Standardize the Process

Maintain a standardized process throughout your company for a great customer experience. Create clear guidelines and make sure your employees follow them. Address different situations while preparing guidelines so that your team can be prepared for anything.

Go out of your way to give your customers an amazing experience. Surprise them. Never let the quality of your customer service drop in any circumstances.

3. Train Your Employees Properly

Train your employees, especially your client-facing and client-interacting team members. Hire the best professionals for client handling and then arrange regular workshops to keep them updated. Provide a holistic customer experience on all platforms.

4. Deliver Unified Customer Experiences across channels

To maintain consistency in customer service, it’s important to standardize it across different channels. Customers expect to receive similar experiences on all channels. They don’t like to repeat themselves if they have already told you their issue in some way.

Therefore, it’s important to keep track of every conversation you have with them. Address all of their issues promptly.

Tips and Tricks

  1. Be it social media, your blog, or in a newsletter, stay connected with your customers often.
  2. Find out which social media platforms your customers use the most and accordingly create a strong presence there.
  3. Increase customer engagement.
  4. Feedback is a very important part of building a customer relationship. Listen to what your follower have to say about your product and services.
  5. Show them that you are acting according to their feedback.
  6. Always appreciate them if they say good things about you, and try to solve any grievances they have. Keep in mind that you should never take a reactionary approach with customers.
  7. Make them feel special and let them know that their opinions matter.

Leverage Inbound Marketing

Use customer-generated and influencer content to spread the word about your brand. There is nothing more effective than a good customer testimonial.

A happy customer is indeed a part of your salesforce, as they have more credibility than your salespeople have. After all, trust and credibility are the backbones of a long-term customer relationship.

Check out this infographic to discover more about these customer relationship building tactics.

Infographic Source – SalesMate

Author the Author

Samir Motwani is a growth hacker cut from a different cloth than most entrepreneurs. This action oriented technophile may have been trained as a developer, but is a designer at heart. He is currently the CEO of Salesmate, a CRM tool, that is adept at developing low-cost strategies for startups, and defining best practices for budding ventures. You can find more about Samir Motwani here.

Search Engine Optimization is the process by which web developers optimize a website so that a search engine such as Google or Bing can index it. Taking this a step further, SEO also helps a website rank higher in search engine results and thus gain more exposure and custom.

Image Source – SEO

SEO is a complex and ever changing process, so web developers and SEO experts have to continually update their knowledge to keep track of how search engines such as Google are indexing and ranking websites.

The following are several important factors that can contribute to a website’s SEO

Keywords – Search engines look at common words and phrases known as keywords that a user might type in when searching for a particular thing. For example, if a user is searching for hotels in New York, a keyword phrase could be ‘Top quality hotels in New York‘ or ‘quality hotels in Manhattan‘. When considering SEO, you must research popular keywords and incorporate them into your website content.

Content quality and relevance – Content such as blogs, social media posts, and website text should be relevant, informative, and useful. By creating engaging and interesting content, your organic SEO should improve, which is incredibly important if you want to get more traffic. Seotribunal.com even states that 70 to 80 percent of people focus exclusively on organic search results, ignoring the ads altogether.

Page loading speeds – Loading speeds can play a role in SEO. If a website has really slow page loading speeds, this will put customers off and give them a bad experience. Search engines understand this and in their drive for providing quality results, they will give less weight and ranking to such websites.

Backlinks – A backlink is a link to your website from a third-party source. Search engines look at your catalogue of backlinks to help ascertain the quality and popularity of your website. It is important to build up a quality library of backlinks from reputable and relevant sources to help boost your SEO.

These are just a few factors and there are many more to consider. As stated, SEO requirements and techniques are constantly evolving to match search engine updates.

Infographic Source

Alibaba, or as the site is now known, AliExpress, is the largest e-commerce store in Asia and has been steadily taking on the shopping giant Amazon. The number of active shoppers using the site in 2017 was a whopping 470 million. Up from 198 million in 2013, this staggering growth is a testament to how popular AliExpress has become.

Image Source – Alibaba-Amazon

And, while the lion’s share of users is in China, India rates in the top three when it comes to the number of users with 6% overall. So, clearly, AliExpress has been making waves in India as well. Can the site take on the big guns? Amazon is a good option for those living in the United Kingdom or the United States for the most part. Those living outside these countries have a very significant disadvantage when it comes to Amazon, though – shipping costs are high.

Sometimes, the shipping costs vastly exceed the cost of the item itself. It is in situations like this that AliExpress usually has a significant advantage. With a lot of the sellers on the site being based in China, and having their shipping costs subsidized, shipping is very reasonable, if charged at all.

The average price of items tends to work out a lot better than on Amazon as well, as the sellers offer very competitive pricing. And they do offer a range of AliExpress coupons and deals. So, you get a massive range of products and some excellent savings at the same time. It is a great deal, but is there a catch?

There is one slight snag with this site. When you are paying a fraction of the cost of shipping or being offered free shipping, you cannot really expect your items to arrive in record time. Depending on where you are based globally, there might be substantial delays. So, you do have to factor that into the equation when considering what purchases you are making. Despite the potential for delays, the site is still very attractive for online shoppers.

The site is well designed and extremely user-friendly. You can tailor your search by category, by price, by how new the listing is, whether or not free shipping is offered, etc. This makes it extremely easy to find exactly what you are looking for.

Found an item and want to make sure that you get the very best price? Simply take a screenshot of the photo, and run an image search – the site will be able to search through and bring up any other similar products. From there you can filter the options to find the best price, if any sellers offer free shipping, etc. And I do recommend checking this out – sellers can offer goods at very different pricing. Some charge less for the item but add on a shipping charge, so do watch that carefully as well. Overall, though, if you want a good deal online, and you want to save on shipping, check out the site. Just be warned, you are going to see a lot of things that you will want.

Image Source – Alibaba Infographic

It feels as if we are in a new era, as if there will be a before and an after with smartphones; perhaps it’s too great a comparison, but maybe it’s not dissimilar to the industrial revolution. Already, within the space of a few years, it is ingrained in our lives, changing the way we interact, work and spend our time. Social media came earlier, but with smartphones it has rapidly impacted our lifestyle – the way that younger generations are growing up will probably never be the same again.

Image Source – Health

There are certainly pros and cons, and as we begin to understand the potential pitfalls of this revolution, one wonders how Mark Zuckerberg will be seen by future generations. But while we are just beginning to understand the ramifications, we are still working out ways in which we use the new technology. Thousands of years on we are still tinkering with the wheel, finding new designs and new things to put it on, while smartphone technology is developing faster than we can find ways to use it. Not only are there new questions, but we have the opportunity to re-examine old problems. It follows that we would do the same with the health sector.

Hypertension, or as it is more commonly known as high blood pressure, is by all accounts the biggest affliction facing the world at the moment- thus it makes sense it would be the first question we try to address. Hypertension may seem like a relatively innocuous ‘condition’, but surprisingly it is the number one risk factor for death around the world and affects over 10 million people around the world. High blood pressure significantly increases the risk of stroke and heart attacks – one of the biggest killers in the world. Despite this, reportedly only half of the hypertensive population are aware they have it.

The International Society of Hypertension [ISH] believes that millions of lives could be saved if people were to simply get their blood pressure tested and then could take steps to manage their blood pressure appropriately. Indeed, in India, the rate of hypertension is estimated to be around 1 in 3 adults, as per Dr. Ramakanta Panda, MD of the Asia Heart Institute. These somewhat scary statistics led the ISH to launch the incredibly successful May Measurement Month campaign, which aims at publicizing the issue and getting people to get their blood screened.

You might be wondering what smartphones have to do with this? Well, they are helping people to stay healthier for longer. The MyTherapy app for example, allows you to track your blood pressure [or any other measurement/symptom] over a long period of time and puts it into easy to read graphs, so people can get a comprehensive, fact-based summary of how their health is. If someone with hypertension, for example, is able to see their blood pressure rising or a change coinciding with other symptoms, they can address the issue sooner, before the situation worsens. The app even allows you to share the information with healthcare professionals, allowing them to diagnose the issue quicker.

Originally launched in 2013 in Germany, the free app is chiefly a medication reminder app, but has expanded to include other functions like the measurements section or the sharing option which is available for family and friends too, for extra support. Taking into account that adherence for chronic diseases is only around 50% [WHO], it obviously represents a potential area of major improvement. Tested and proven to better adherence, millions of lives and billions of pounds, dollars and rupees could be saved if people were able to take their medication consistently and correctly.

The ‘new era’, as referred to earlier, brings with it more uncertainty than anything else. We are yet to properly explore and find out what it means for us in general. But it does present us with many opportunities, like the MyTherapy app and the MMM campaign. The infographic below sheds some light on the importance of knowing your health well.

The MyTherapy app is available for Android as well as iOS and can be downloaded from here & here.

Social commerce is a trend that is sweeping the online world and transforming the way we do business online. At its most basic definition, social commerce is the facilitation of ecommerce business through social media and social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Image Source – Social Commerce

Traditionally, social networking platforms were for sharing information and being nosy. This has now drastically changed, however, as businesses see these platforms as a potential tool to increase revenue and appeal to a wider audience – hence the creation of social commerce. This article looks at how social commerce is changing the world of online business.

A change in e-commerce platforms

Traditionally, ecommerce is carried out through dedicated websites. For example, you may log in to Nike.com or a third party retailer to make a purchase. Social commerce is changing this process. Users can now make purchases directly through their social media profiles, as there is no need to open up the suppliers’ website. You can do everything within the same browser, and be using the same social media site. Facebook marketplace, for instance, allows you to browse through various goods that others have posted and purchase them there and then.

A change in online payments

The way that we pay for goods is also changing. In ages behind us, you may have been able to add an item to your shopping cart, but then you may have had to visit a third party payment gateway, such as WorldPay, to process the payment.

Social commerce retail is all-encompassing. You can literally do everything within the social network site, including processing the payment. Typical accepted payment methods include credit and debit cards, and even digital payment methods such as PayPal and Skrill.

A change in customer service and interactions

Traditional online customer service involved several different methods of communication including email, live chat, and feedback forms. Social commerce has again opened up new possibilities and could potentially change the way customer service is carried out.

We are seeing an increasing number of businesses using social networks as a form of customer service channel, such as Twitter. Some companies respond directly to tweets from users, or directly to Facebook posts. This has given a more personal and direct feel to customer service.

A change in Digital Marketing

Finally, social commerce has brought a change in digital marketing. We are now seeing an increase in adverts and marketing through social media to advertise their social commerce products directly. We see many ad campaigns, paid advertisements, and direct social media posts such as Tweets, Instagram pics, Pins and Facebook statuses. Online retailers like eBay and Amazon use social media extensively to advertise all their promotions, so it’s pretty hard not to come across some sort of Amazon discount on their page at least once a week. In short, the methods of advertising have diversified and businesses have a greater number of marketing channels to use.

As you can see, social commerce has already made a huge impact. With more businesses starting to use this type of ecommerce, and more social networking platforms facilitating retail transactions, we should only see an increase in its usage. The infographic below provides some interesting facts and figures relating to social commerce

Infographic URL

We’re all familiar with games, right? From board games to video games to card games, there’s a little luck and a little skill involved in winning—but with winning comes rewards, too [even if it’s just gloating power for a few hours]. Companies have long evolved an approach to gaming with ensuring or enhancing customer loyalty.

Image Source – Gamification

Airlines are the best example – Earn miles and you can earn flights or other types of rewards. So the more you spend with that particular airline, the more you earn, and the better you feel about your purchases. That is called gamification of the buying experience.

And gamification isn’t just about rewards; boosting the gameable aspects of your customer service also has a feel-good aspect. Gamification also allows you to think differently about what rewards you want to use. So what’s the process and how can you boost the gaming in your process? The graphics below explains the same

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The Benefits of Creating an Entertaining Customer Experience With Gamification

Via Salesforce