Guest post by: Danielle Canstello

A wealth of information is generated every single day in today’s digital-first landscape. It goes without saying that all of this data is critical to the growth of any business. The question now is: how can entrepreneurs and managers make better sense of their organization’s data without being overwhelmed by it?

Business Intelligence.

It gives organizations a competitive edge in this ever-changing landscape of business by providing them with a better understanding of the factors that influence market trends. Business Intelligence (BI) solutions include:

• Data warehouses
• Dashboards
• Ad hoc reporting
• Data discovery tools
• Cloud data services

A BI solution can aid your organization in several ways. However, companies have been slow to embrace such an approach. That’s mainly because there’s still a lot of confusion about business intelligence and how it should be applied to your organization.

In this guide, we hope to illuminate some areas that you might find confusing.

Why Is Business Intelligence Critical to Success?

No matter what industry you’re in, a well-implemented BI solution will empower you to derive actionable insights and critical business opportunities from big data.

Here are some of the benefits of implementing a BI system:

1. Gives you quick access to critical information

Entrepreneurs constantly have to make critical business decisions to stay ahead. For you to make well-informed and timely decisions, your data needs to be accessible and easy to discern. That’s what BI solutions do for your company, allowing you to gain a competitive edge.

2. Minimizes need for manual data entries and manipulation

In reducing the need for manual data entries, companies can minimize human error. Reporting and visualizations can be processed sooner, which means you can make smarter decisions faster as well.

3. Aligns your key performance indicators with your strategies

Investing your time and resources into activities that are aligned with your business strategies will help you take your business to the next level. To avoid wasting resources, you must establish the metrics with the necessary KPIs that are aligned with your business strategies. By implementing BI solutions, you can improve the performance in areas that matter most.

4. Measuring and tracking sales performance

Monitoring sales performance is easier with a BI solution, especially when you have several sales partners. It gives your team full visibility of their performance. In turn, it lets you know which partner needs a bit more effort.

5. Illuminates areas where you can cut costs or allocate your budget

BI solutions can also help you identify areas where you can cut costs. Once you determine these critical areas, you can take immediate action and save resources.

Business intelligence solutions can have a positive influence on all aspects of the organization—your people, performance, and projects. In a study, researchers found that companies that have used big data have seen an 8% to 10% increase in profits, as well as a 10% reduction in overall costs.

How Is Business Intelligence Used?

There are several ways to use business intelligence in your organization. Here are a few:

1. Analyzing customer behavior

Customers are at the heart of your business. To thrive in this ever-changing world, you need to keep up with their needs and interests. The best way to do that is by analyzing customer habits, the bread crumbs they leave whenever they interact with your brand online.

Using business intelligence software, you can determine which products customers are into and which ones they aren’t. Analyzing purchase patterns, for instance, helps you make an informed decision about expanding a product line or scaling it back. Not only that, BI solutions enable you to determine cross-selling and up-selling opportunities in different customer touchpoints.

2. Enhancing inventory management efficiency

Having too much or too little stock can hurt your bottom line. With a solid BI solution, you can identify how much you have left, how much isn’t selling, as well as the potential risks of understocking. In other words, it improves the visibility of your supply chain and allows you to maintain ideal inventory levels all year long. Not to mention, it keeps you informed of seasonal changes, as well as changes in customer demands.

In this customer-centric landscape of business, effective stock management is key to improving business performance. Research shows that 89% of consumers have turned to the competition following terrible customer experiences. By improving inventory management, you can drive more sales and improve the customer experience.

3. Improving employee engagement

According to Gallup, around 34% of US workers are engaged, which is the highest record in the publication’s history. Inversely, the rate of actively disengaged employees is at an all-time low at 13%.

To keep up with the needs of a modern workforce, you need as much information as you can get on how employees are performing on the job. By implementing business intelligence, you can figure out how to approach disengaged employees and take immediate action. BI solutions also empower employees to work smarter and faster.

4. Improving financial management

Embracing the right BI solution will let you simplify your financial data. It allows you to combine these financial statements with real-time analytics. In doing so, you can manage expenditures well and improve revenue.

Using BI solutions, you can analyze cash flows and balance sheets using visual content such as graphs, charts, and dashboards. These systems will make it easier for you to manage your finances and rebates.

5. Increasing productivity of the IT department

It’s not unusual for IT departments to be swamped with work, especially now that companies have more data to gather and analyze. Without a sound BI solution, many IT departments have the responsibility of performing complex reports. Since they are often required to run several of these, errors are inevitable.

If you have a BI solution, you can assess your own reports and present them in a way that everyone can understand, even if you aren’t tech-savvy. This also presents you with several opportunities to acquire new skills and try out new strategies.

What Are the Signs Your Company Needs Business Intelligence?

Every company benefits from using a business intelligence solution. However, if you aren’t quite sure you should adopt one, you might want to pay attention to the signs.

Here are a few clear indicators that your company needs a BI solution:

1. Lack of visibility into your business operations

2. Seeing rapid business growth or a pending acquisition

3. An increase in the volume of users accessing information

4. The need to access relevant business data more efficiently

5. Having new products

6. Implementing upgrades within your IT environment

It’s the perfect time to invest in business intelligence solutions. Since consumers are producing massive volumes of data now more than ever, you ought to put that to good use. Implementing a sound BI system will help you improve your business performance and profitability.

Takeaway

Business intelligence solutions can be implemented in companies of all sizes from any industry. They give entrepreneurs the capabilities required for gathering and organizing critical data. It then allows them to process the information and present it in a way that makes it easier for everyone to come up with an actionable plan that will move the business forward.

Favicons are the Google equivalent of being picked first for gym.

And everyone wanted to be picked first!

Do You Know These Businesses Just Based on Their Favicon?

If you can name more than three, then you already understand the importance of using an easily recognizable visual symbol to represent your brand. (See the bottom of this post for answers.)

Google search results include a small icon on the left hand side to help searchers distinguish between businesses they know and those they don’t. When your favicon, or image, is recognizable by potential customers, they are more likely to pick you first for gym, er, I mean pick your business’ website over your competitors.

This change of heart on Google’s part is largely related to paid advertisers. Google wants advertisers to succeed and one of the easiest ways to do this is to make it more difficult to separate paid ads from organic results. The favicon becomes one more opportunity for your business to stand out from the crowd.

Curious If Your Website has a Favicon, or Which Image Google is Using?

Check out this favicon test tool (Don’t mind the poor English, the tool was built in Amsterdam.) If the image that appears after the test is not your favicon, or is the default favicon for your website management tool (CMS), then the favicon has not been updated. See below for details on updating your favicon.

Search Results are Not the Only Reason to Use a Favicon.

Has your browser ever looked like this?!

If this makes your heart beat faster, this is why a favicon might be your new BFF. How can anyone possibly figure out what tab they were on, EXCEPT based on the favicon! That little picture that says so much to the potential customer. It says, “hey pick me, I’m the business you were looking for!”

A Favicon Can be Optimized (ie made Google Friendly):

1. Create an authentic 16×16 image. Try to select something other than your logo.
2. Simple is more effective for customer recall.
3. Minimize the background colours.

Currently Google has limited guidelines for favicons except the dimensions however, the SEO community agrees guidelines are needed. Misuse is already commonplace. Impostor businesses are using similar images to large brands in an attempt to grab their click-thru traffic. How long will it be til someone grabs the Google “G” logo and uses it as a favicon?!

Keep the Following in Mind as You Select Your Favicon:

• The favicon and homepage must be crawlable by Googlebots (no nofollows).
• Your favicon needs to be square.
• Keep your favicon on brand.
• Google will not display an image deemed inappropriate.

Ready to Get Picked First?

Favicon settings are inside your website management tool. You will need 3 sizes prepared at a minimum; 14×14, 114×114 and 144×144 preferably in .png or .ico format. If reading that last sentence feels like a new language, chat us up here and we’ll help you out!

Favicon answers (top to bottom):

1. Facebook
2. Gmail
3. Diib
4. Above the Fold
5. Moosend

Are you a business owner who sees great value in building a reputable online presence? If so, here are four strategic tips to check your online presence and ensure your brand is recognized as the reputable, quality business that you want to provide to your customers.

Check for Spammy Links

Spammy links are defined as links that add no real value to the viewer’s experience. Websites can be guilty of this when they buy links from a link farm or exchange links through link wheels and low-quality press-syndication schemes. Instead, build creative content that people will want to share with their followers, and watch the natural links pour in.

Design a Trustworthy Site

There are several ways that your web design can be seen as untrustworthy by visitors. Having a wall of text saying nothing is one of them. Not having enough white space or too much white space makes a page look bad in a viewer’s eyes. Pages without clear intent also fall into this category. While your viewer may never see it, Google will greatly penalize sites with hidden messages. Suffice it to say, bad web design hurts your business. Instead, take the time to create beautiful web pages that add real value to your target customer’s knowledge.

Avoid Using Similar Names

Some businesses try to trick people by borrowing more successful business’ names. This is a bad idea as you want to only be responsible for your own reputation. Additionally, it’s best if people remember the great experience that they had with your company instead of thinking that it was your competitor who delivered such excellent service. To avoid any mix-ups, buy all website domains that sound a lot like your own so that others cannot claim them in the future. Do the same with any social media accounts that are similar to your company name.

Stay Away from Questionable Reviews

Google now requires that all their posted reviews come from real Google accounts. Nevertheless, many websites continue to post fake reviews. Use a plugin to allow your reviews to show directly on your website. Respond professionally to all reviews, and watch them accumulate. People are more willing to forgive a negative review if they see that you have responded professionally and are taking steps to correct the situation. After all, they realize that you cannot please 100 percent of people all of the time.

Examine your website to make sure that you are not guilty of any of these mistakes. By avoiding these practices, you can help your company to thrive.

Website creation is more exciting than ever as creators benefit from a constant stream of new approaches to building an incredible website. Although there are many competing approaches to web design being featured on a broad range of sites, there are many common elements we can identify to find the best design techniques available for creating a highly rated website today.

Emphasize Mobile Compatibility

In 2018, more people are searching the internet with mobile devices than on desktop computers. This means that designing a highly rated website includes building it with mobile viewing as a primary concern. Emphasizing collapsible layouts, minimalist designs that look better on a smaller screen, icons explicitly designed for mobile use, and choosing images and illustrations that will still be easily recognizable on smaller displays are all essential parts of modern web design. The keyboard is no longer the primary tool used by people navigating the internet; touch-screen icons have to be easy to use and interpret to pull and retain mobile customers.

Related: StatCounter | Mobile and Tablet Internet Usage

Let Custom Illustrations take Center Stage

Popular websites today heavily emphasize the creative use of custom illustrations. Storytelling through illustration can be used to emphasize the voice and culture of your brand in a way that is more compelling than an about-us page or a detailed explanation of your companies values. While text is still the primary way to communicate with the viewer, reactive animated illustrations make your website fun for the viewer to interact with. Most importantly, illustrations, more than photographs or other more complex images, are more easily scale-able to mobile platforms because of their relative simplicity. Utilize illustrations to break up the visual field and stand out from the crowd.

Related: Web Designer Depot | The Use of Illustration in Web Design

Design Beyond the Grid

Minimalist website design layouts of the near past made tremendous strides toward eliminating unnecessary and distracting features from older website layouts. This was partly achieved with the creation of grids that helped simplify and define the functions of each element of the page. While this approach did a lot to modernize and declutter websites, the reliance on grid structures often made sites feel impersonal and sterile. The human element was lost. Today’s best sites incorporate design that hasn’t abandoned the grid but isn’t restricted by it either. Modern layouts utilize overlapping elements and organic shapes to create personality and uniqueness.

Related: Creative Bloq | The Designer’s Guide to Grid Theory

But Don’t Go Overboard

After luring viewers in with SEO and creative marketing, professional sites must effectively accomplish their business objectives without making a bloated site that turns off viewers. An emerging solution is the use of AI and business intelligence to create data visualizations in real time that can quickly communicate information to the consumer in creative, visually appealing ways which effectively funnel consumers into transactions with minimal real estate. That means that there shouldn’t just be sole focus on attracting new clients, but to create a usable and effective website while integrating brand and company identity into it.

Related: TechEmergence | 6 Examples of AI in Business Intelligence Applications

Form Follows Function: Great sites Emphasis Usability

Creating a site with high usability means building it with the user’s needs in mind at every stage. In a modern context, assuming mobile compatibility, a usable site has several other distinct characteristics. It is accessible. Emphasizing SEO and social media tools brings your site to viewers. The tools on your site should be intuitive and easy to learn.The purpose of each page should be clear and should be a part of your marketing funnel. Your site should create a sense of authority, trust and be relevant to your audience’s interest.

Related: InBoundREM | Best Realtor Websites

Break Up the Monotony With Creative Multimedia Utilization

Not long ago, it was common to see websites with long, uninterrupted blocks of text as the primary feature of each page. Websites were divided into clear sections that separated images from stories or comment sections. Modern sites use a multimedia approach to break the visual monotony of sites. Think of this as topically relevant commercial breaks strategically placed inside your content to keep viewers engaged and interacting with your content. Images, videos, illustrations advertisements should be strategically placed within web content in a way that still supports the overall goals of your site.

Related: Louise Myers | Multimedia Content

Approaches to website design are affected by trends in the market just as much as any other creative enterprise. The design philosophies that worked in the past might produce a dated result today. By incorporating one or several of these design philosophies, we can help you create a website that is modern, fresh, and that people will love to visit.

Get Your Business Found on Google Today!

Looking for a quick check on your Google-friendliness? Here’s a handy checklist to measure your progress.

Moving up in the search results takes time, patience and high quality information that includes the keywords your audience is searching. Remember, your audience, or customers, are looking to solve a problem. You want your business to be the solution.

Google condensed the number of visible Business Listings in the search results down to three. These three listings are referred to as the Snack Pack. Here is an example of the Snack Pack in the auto dealer category. These three businesses listed increase their exposure exponentially.

Top the Organic Charts

Only a small percentage of consumers will click the “ADs” at the top of the search results. Only 7% of searchers feel the content matches their search, or feel safe clicking the content. Organic content is the other 93%!

Organic content is free. It’s a genuine match to what the searcher was looking for and as a business owner, you have complete control over the content. But here’s the thing. It takes time and it takes effort, but the checklist below is everything you need to know to rise to the top of the organic search results.

As a business owner, you have complete control over the content

1. Backlinks still matter.

Those inbound and outbound links on your website matter. Linking to other areas of your website, other content and articles, it matters. As do the inbound links to your website. Google likes to see other websites (Facebook, Twitter) linking to your website.

2. Be sure your Name, Address, Phone number (NAP) match your social profile info.

The business information on your Business Listing, social profiles and directories should be the same. Google rewards businesses that take the time to keep this information consistent.

3. Optimize your Google Business Listing category based on your target audience. IE local business categories.

If Google does not know your business category, then it is nearly impossible to appear in the search result. Be as specific as you can about the type of business you operate. IE If you are a Consultant, list yourself as a Consultant, not as a Corporate Office.

4. Optimize descriptions on your channels. IE use your keyword research!!

Each business listing and social channel gives you another opportunity to describe your business. The descriptions should be the same, or similar, but should describe your business as accurately as possible.

5. Geo-tag your photos on all channels.

Add location specific data to your photos, or “allow” location data to be saved with your photos. And don’t forget to name your photos with “keywords” and “business name.” IE “Be Google-Friendly Above the Fold”

6. Enhance your Google maps details.

Complete all available details on your map Listing. This links to your Google Business Listing.

7. Complete your meta data, titles and descriptions on your website.

Use the titles, descriptions and all of the meta data available to you in the back end of your website.

8. Add Reviews to your site, Listing and social profiles.

Google loves to see business Reviews! Ask for them. Respond quickly to them. Share them.

These simple steps will keep your business Google-friendly. If you would like to see your business search results improve, this list is exactly where you need to start!

Let us know how it goes!

Websites that Work (For You!)

Websites that work. It’s our mantra around here lately.  We see a lot, let me repeat, A LOT of websites that don’t work. And by work I mean, do your work for you. Convert customers. Make sales. Book appointments. Make sales. Talk to customers. Make sales. Capture leads. Make sales.

Appearances Only Go So Far

You don’t have to tell us. Business is tough. And if you own your own business, it’s even tougher. There’s not enough hours in the day. We do it too. We use our website to book appointments. We use Messenger to talk with customers. Don’t get us wrong, we love people and we love to talk to people. We simply need our website to do some of the work. We made a huge investment in our website; now we expect it to do some of the work.

The appearance of a website only goes so far. (As in life! :)) And at some point your website needs to work for you.  Websites are built to promote a business, showcase products, highlight special promotions, communicate with customers and in some cases provide password protected content.

Looks Will Fade. Your Website Needs to Work.

Beyond the content, the images, the search-friendly page names, is your website doing it’s fair share of the work? Think about it. If you had the privilege, (and by privilege I mean are old enough to remember), of buying traditional advertising a few years ago, you expected the promoted sale to be a success. You expected customers to be aware of your promotions. You knew you were successful when the neighbours mentioned they heard you on the radio (on the Secret Life of Entrepreneurs?!). Now don’t misunderstand, looks and appearances will get you going, but sooner or later, looks will fade and now you need a site to do its share of the work and carry on its share of the conversations (with customers).

A Website is Your Storefront

What’s changed? Well first, how much advertising reaches each of us daily has exploded. Advertising content comes at us from every possible direction. Our brains have learned to selectively tune it out to protect our heads from exploding! We naturally block out the information that is not of interest, and have heightened awareness for the ads that are of interest. (Ever notice after you buy a new car, that everyone is driving the same car? That’s heightened awareness.  Read on if you want to see cognitive dissonance used in a blog post too!)

Second, just because we build it, doesn’t mean they will come. Baseball dreams or not, building a website is the same as opening your storefront. A website is not just part of doing business; it IS your storefront. Just as you need your lights on, and doors unlocked for customers to enter, so to do you need your website up and running. There was a statistic reported by Google a few months ago claiming customers trust businesses with websites 70% more, than those without.

Listen to Your Website

Many customers come to us saying, I built it, where are they? (customers). Those businesses are posting content to social media and are unable to determine if Followers are customers.

A website that works, pulls it’s weight. It’s one that tells you about your visitors. Tells you where your website users come from (ie how they find your site). A website that works can tell you where your visitors live, their age, gender and even their interests. Websites are very telling when you put them to work.

Let your website do some of the heavy lifting for you. Not sure how? Start with our free assessment of your website and online properties and finish with a detailed plan of action to set you on a path to a website that works.

We Create Websites that Work

When it’s time to tune-up your website or create a new one, we can design a website to meet your business goals and your budget. Your website is a strategic tool to grow your business, promote your products and services and communicate with your customers. As the largest marketing store in Saskatchewan, we provide straight-forward prices, all-inclusive services and no hourly fees or up-charges.