Monthly Archives: July 2014

Why Is Cashflow Management Important For Your Business?

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Does your business constantly have to deal with financial trouble? Do you struggle to pay your suppliers, taxman or staff on time? This is a common problem that is happening to several businesses of all sizes, the root cause being an ignorance of cash flow management, which is interregnal to the growth of a company. Cash is the lifeblood of your business enterprise, and if your business wants to be successful, then it’s time you paid attention to your cash flow management.

The world is currently going through difficult economic times. Today, banks are not supporting businesses as they used to in the past. At the same time, many businesses operate on a culture of slow payment to their end- suppliers. This is fast-becoming a top-down problem. This all means that you must take appropriate action and implement strong cashflow management into your company. You can start by managing your outgoing payment, while asking everyone who owns your business money to pay you back as soon as possible.

You can get rid of this problem by implementing a strong cashflow management process into your business. Ensure that you manage your outgoing payments and get everyone who owes you money to pay you back, as soon as possible. Here are some tips that can help you manage your cashflow (receivables and payables) with ease.

Tips on how to deal with your receivables:

  • Get your customers to pay you back faster by offering small discounts (For example, a discount of 1-2%)
  • Agree to invoice customers at regular intervals for long-term projects. Do not wait to bill your customers until the project is completely finished
  • Ask your customers for a deposit or a part payment before you commence work on a project
  • Make sure that you carry out a detailed background check on the credit scores of your customers
  • Ask your team to send out correct and clear invoices promptly to customers. Send gentle reminders to your customers to pay up before an invoice becomes overdue
  • Stop dealing with customers who refuse to pay on time. Ensure that you take legal action on customers who have failed to continually pay on time
  • Get your business funding from your investors

Tips on how to deal with your payables:
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Improve Your Website’s Ranking With These Top 3 SEO Tips

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Your customers can find your business website in a variety of ways, but the most common way for people to find a website is through search engines.  Making your site appear in search results is free as opposed to paying to promote your site through online advertisements.  However, the trick in getting your website listed within the first page in search results is to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Here are three SEO improvements that you can use to boost your business website’s ranking and catapult your sales.

1. Make use of keywords

“Keywords” are words that relate to your field of expertise or topic and are the search terms that are most likely to be used in search engines. It is therefore critical to choose your keywords wisely and use the right keywords for each page on your website. When it comes to individual pages, remember to focus on different keywords for each page.

By doing this, each keyword will be bringing its own value to a particular web page, rather than a similar set of keywords on each page, rivalling against each other to bring about the same results. This will make your SEO less effective. Place your keywords in the content, image tags, headings and in the URL. At the same time, do not cram in too many keywords or use the same keywords again, as it will have a negative impact on your search engine ranking.

2. Write a blog

Effective SEO is all about adding original and new content on your site regularly. Search engines spiders scan sites for fresh content or changes to existing content, so it is of utmost importance to make sure that you frequently update your site with new content. One simple way of adding new content to your website is through a business blog. Continue reading →

How To Come Up With A Marketing Plan

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Does your organization have a marketing plan? If not, then it’s time to get one right away. A marketing plan is an all-inclusive blueprint, which broadly describes an organization’s marketing efforts. Following a marketing plan can help you successfully market your product/services, reach out to your target audience and stay a step ahead of your competitors.

Here is a simple checklist that you can use to come up with an effective marketing plan:

  • Describe your current market and clearly state the size and characteristics of each market segment that you wish to target. Ensure that you review important market trends
  • Conduct market research on what your customers value the most – like quality, after-sales services, product features, pricing etc
  • Think about the distribution channels that you will be using to reach out to your customers (retailers or direct sales) and compare them
  • Create thorough profiles of your competitors and describe what they are offering
  • Identify the key factors that influence your business environment and conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of your current position
  • Review and study the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives in the past, such as, seasonal sales or advertising campaigns
  • Asses the sales potential and profitability of different market segments and customers. Also assess the scope of different products and activities
  • Decide on the group that you wish to target among your potential and existing customers. Decide on which products need to be pushed and which products need to be updated or replaced
  • Set definite objectives for increasing order sizes, retaining customers, winning new customers or selling new product/services
  • Decide on how your business will price each service or product that you offer
  • Decide on how your company will distribute and sell your products. Come up with a plan on how you can accelerate customer satisfaction and after-sales services
  • Chart out a plan on how you will promote your services/products and how you can maintain a relationship with your customers
  • Create a timetable for your marketing activities by identifying the purchasing cycles of your customers
  • State the implications of your marketing plan and describe how it will affect the rest of your business like production, training or requirements
  • Prepare realistic budgets and sales forecasts
  • Include key indicators into your marketing plan, like average order value, conversion rates, new enquiries or the number of lost customers. Think about a system that you can use to measure these key indicators in your plan

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What to Do After your Content Goes Live?

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Did you know that finding your content on the internet is as difficult as searching for a particular star in the galaxy? If you were to set yourself up to this impossible task, you would take appropriately 340 years to check through the 2.15 billion pages on the web, even if you only spent over 5 seconds on each page!

This means that your customers are not going to accidently stumble upon your web pages. Even if you have done your part and come up with a relevant, interesting and quality article, you will still need to work in order to get the most out of your web pages. By continuing to effectively market and track your pages you can reach out to your target audience and increase the credibility of your brand.

Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, read on to find out three free ways by which you can market your content once it goes live.

1. Share your content on LinkedIn groups

Use your newly written article as a resource in your LinkedIn groups. This can enable your business to effectively share your area of expertise, without trying to be too promotional. Look out for like-mined groups on the website and remember to take part in their discussions before you start to share your content. A good tip to keep in mind is to not over share your content and to always keep it professional. Read about Outsource2india’s Social Media Marketing Services.

2. Promote your content via Email

Sending out a promotional email with offers or discounts to your customers? If yes, then add your most recent article below your company’s email signature. Doing this will give you an instant credibility badge and make your customers what to click on the link. Promoting your content via email signatures shows your leadership in your specific industry and never fails to get your message across to your target audience. Read about Outsource2india’s Email Marketing Services.

3. Mention the new article on your company’s blog

Your business blog is a great place to extend the conversation with your customers about a newly published article. Make sure to give a link to the original article on your blog. Go through the comments and respond to them. Finally, ask yourself if you learned anything from your customer’s comments. Read about Outsource2india’s blog writing services. Continue reading →