In 2024, a digital marketing strategy is essential for the success of every business in just about every industry. According to a Pew Research Survey, 81% of Americans conduct their own research before making an important decision. In most instances, this research is primarily done online. Without an effective digital marketing strategy, it will be challenging to connect with these people and convert them into valuable customers.

Your digital marketing strategy provides your business with a comprehensive plan outlining how you’ll leverage the various digital channels at your disposal to reach your target audience, grow your brand, and generate the high-quality leads necessary for your business to thrive. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must go beyond detailing the specific tactics your business will use and also provide a big picture view of how your efforts will complement each other in order to achieve your overarching goals.

Despite digital marketing becoming an increasingly significant driver of success for businesses in recent years, 45% of organizations still don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. These companies are failing to leverage one of the most important tools at their disposal to help grow their business. In fact, businesses that have a well formulated digital marketing strategy tend to report greater success than those who don’t:

• 75% of marketers improved the trust and credibility of their company when they employed a digital marketing strategy
• Marketing teams that document their digital strategy are 313% more likely to experience success

Still not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why it’s crucial that you adopt a digital marketing strategy in 2024.

You’ll Have More Focused Efforts Aimed at Achieving Specific Goals

Your digital marketing strategy gives your marketing team direction. It provides a roadmap that keeps your business focused on the goals they want to achieve and the initiatives necessary to reach these goals. When you set clear goals as part of your digital marketing strategy, it also makes it easier to:

• Prioritize the initiatives that will be most effective in achieving your desired outcome
• Arrive at the proper budget necessary to achieve your goals
• Determine that best way to allocate your budget in order to maximize the ROI on your efforts
• Identify the right success metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing tactics

You Can Ensure the Latest Trends Guide Your Efforts

Many businesses simply keep the same digital marketing strategy in place year after year. While this is better than not having a strategy at all, you risk using an outdated plan that either no longer aligns with your current goals or fails to leverage the latest trends that are impacting the digital marketing landscape today.

Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends has never been more important than it is in 2024. The last 12 months have ushered in a new AI era that is changing the way businesses operate. Many of the most successful companies have been early adopters of AI technology and are actively pursuing ways to use AI to improve every aspect of their operations, including marketing.

AI technology allows you to automate many aspects of your marketing efforts, improving your efficiency and results. A few ways businesses are leveraging AI in their marketing efforts include:

• Using AI tools to improve keyword research efforts
• Implementing AI-powered chatbots to improve customer experience
• Leveraging AI plugins to more effectively use existing platforms, such as Canva, with their social media efforts
• Leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze massive quantities of customer behavior data to determine the most effective targeting strategies
• Implementing AI-powered predictive analytics to more effectively examine patterns and trends that will optimize your marketing efforts

When you update your digital marketing strategy every year, it provides an opportunity to evaluate the latest trends, digital marketing channels and tools which can provide your business with a competitive advantage. This process of annual reflection and planning ensures you remain on the forefront of the digital marketing landscape rather than scrambling to catch up with the businesses that innovated before you.

You Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience

In order to ensure you’re targeting the right audience and delivering a message that will resonate with them, you first need to understand your audience on a deep level. What are their pain points? What information are they seeking out? What motivates them to take action?

With many traditional marketing methods, you lack the data necessary to gain these insights about your audience. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a treasure trove of data to help you refine your efforts to connect with your target audience more effectively. You’ll be able to capture a wide range of data, including:

• Which pages on your website are visited most often
• How long people spend on each page (a measure of their level of engagement)
• What questions are most commonly being asked (which you should then address in your marketing content)
• Which CTAs on your website are clicked most often
• How far down the page visitors go when they are on your website
• Which interactive features on your website generate the most engagement
• Which pieces of content are shared the most (an indication that your audience finds this content valuable)

In addition, you can leverage social media marketing to directly engage with your audience on a more personal level. You can learn a great deal about what your audience values by reading and responding to their comments on your social media posts. When you respond to these comments, you’re also creating a direct connection with the individuals who made them. This demonstrates that you truly value them, which will help forge a relationship which may lead to these individuals becoming customers down the road.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Eliminating Negative Reviews

It Becomes Easier to Develop an Effective Value Proposition

Most businesses face a very competitive landscape. In order to succeed, it’s critical to differentiate your business from your competitors so that your audience clearly understands why your offering is superior and provides a better experience. Developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy with the help of experts from merged.ca can help you refine your value proposition so that it resonates better with your audience.

The data you compile about your target audience makes it easier to build out detailed buyer personas which help you understand their preferences, needs and motivations. This information can be used to develop messaging that will differentiate your brand from your competitors and allow you to convey the value your business provides.

Your digital marketing strategy can then outline the ways in which you’ll deliver this messaging to your audience. A cohesive strategy will also ensure that this messaging remains consistent across all your digital marketing efforts. Whether someone visits your website, engages with you on social media, reads your email newsletters or clicks on your paid ads, they will receive the same messaging about the value you provide and the ways your business is different than your competitors. This cohesiveness creates a powerful effect among your audience and helps you generate a loyal customer base.

You Can Target Your Marketing Resources on the Specific Audience Most Likely to Become a Customer

Traditional marketing methods such as TV, print, radio or billboard advertising provide very limited control over who your ad reaches. While you can make certain calculated decisions with these channels – demographic information is available for viewership of many popular TV shows and magazines – there’s still no guarantee that the people seeing your ad will actually be interested in your product or service.

Digital marketing removes a great deal of this uncertainty from the process. You have the ability to target the specific audience that is most likely to resonate with your message and become a customer. Digital marketing makes this possible in a variety of ways:

• You can target your social media ads to only be delivered to the profiles of individuals who meet the specific demographic information you identify in your buyer personas
• You can use organic SEO strategies and paid search (PPC) campaigns to increase the likelihood that your website and other digital marketing efforts reach individuals who are searching for information associated with the products or services you provide
• You can create gated content pieces that allow you to capture the email addresses of individuals who are interested in your product or service, allowing you to follow up with them using targeted email marketing journeys which will build trust and credibility in your company so that you remain top of mind as these individuals move closer towards their buying decision
• You have the ability to create sub-groups within your target audience to ensure these individuals receive the most relevant information for their needs

Digital marketing allows you to compile data that will help you better understand your buyer personas and refine your marketing strategy to address their needs more effectively. Over time, these refinements should improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to improve your ability to connect with your audience and convert leads.

You Can Engage Your Audience at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Most people don’t make purchases on impulse. Instead, it’s common for them to engage in a lengthy process where they research their options to understand what they need. Part of this research will involve learning more about specific products and services, but it will also give them an opportunity to learn more about the companies which provide these products and services.

When you’re able to engage your audience in the early stages of this buyer’s journey, it gives you a greater opportunity to capture their attention and move them through your sales funnel. Digital marketing allows you to accomplish this at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

With digital marketing, you have the ability to create content that targets every stage of this journey. Therefore, you can meet your audience where they are at the moment. In addition, you can track your audience through the journey to better understand their buying process. As you gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, you’ll be able to refine your marketing efforts to convert more leads.

Results Are Easily Measured

One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing strategies involves the ability to accurately measure the results of your efforts. It’s virtually impossible to identify how many people contacted you after watching your TV commercial or viewing your print ad. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a wealth of data that allows you to accurately measure the success of your efforts.

You can use analytics data to gain a comprehensive understanding of your website traffic, including:

• How many people visit your website
• Which pages they visit
• How many pages they view while visiting your website
• What type of device (desktop, tablet, mobile) was used
• Where these visitors are from
• Where your website traffic is coming from (organic search, paid search, social media, etc.)

This data can help you prioritize which marketing channels to invest most heavily in. For example, if you’re getting most of your traffic from paid search, you may want to increase your budget for your most important PPC campaigns.

You can also use this data to track all your sales back to an individual’s first digital interaction with your company. This process, called attribution modeling, enables you to identify trends in the way your audience is engaging with your online content. This information can be used to refine your efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey to keep your audience more engaged and increase the likelihood of converting them into a new customer.

Find Answers with our Marketing Strategy FAQs.

You’ll Maximize the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you’ll have a framework in place that allows you to track the ROI of each tactic used in your strategy. An effective digital marketing strategy will always outline the:

• Specific goals you’re trying to achieve
• The marketing tactics you’ll use to achieve these goals
• The success metrics necessary to track the effectiveness of your efforts
• The benchmarks that must be hit in order to achieve your desired outcome

Your analytics data allows you to track the day-to-day and month-to-month performance of every campaign. Over time, this will provide you with a detailed understanding of which tactics are performing well and which are struggling to deliver your desired results. You can use this data to refine your campaign, focusing on the tactics that generate the best results. You can also reallocate your budget so that you dedicate more resources to the channels that are contributing the most to your overall success. This will allow you to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

It Becomes Easier to Compete with Bigger Companies

If you’re a small business, you most likely lack the deep resources possessed by the largest companies in your industry. With limited resources, it’s extremely challenging to compete in traditional marketing methods which require a tremendous investment of money to deliver results. Digital marketing creates an ability to target your efforts in a way that allows you to compete with these larger brands more effectively.

With some savvy SEO work, you can identify specific search queries and long-tail keywords which are being used by your target audience. By creating high quality content around these terms, you have an opportunity to outrank larger businesses who may not be focused on these valuable search terms. Creating content that resonates better with your audience than what is being produced by bigger brands gives you the ability to reach a larger number of people than is possible with a limited marketing budget that is focused on traditional methods.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Getting Your Content Marketing Strategy Started

You Can Improve Your Conversion Rate and Generate Higher Quality Leads

Perhaps the most important benefit you’ll experience from all the data generated by your digital marketing efforts is the ability to improve your conversion rate. You can review data associated with the various CTAs on your website and run A/B testing to see which are most effective. You can also identify which of your marketing methods typically result in the most conversions, allowing you to invest a larger percentage of your resources in the strategies which have proven to be most effective.

In addition, you have a greater ability to target specific audiences with digital marketing. This allows you to focus your efforts on the segments of your audience which yield the highest quality leads – both in terms of their likelihood of becoming customers and the amount of money they’re likely to spend with your business once they convert. This not only helps improve your conversion rate, but also can boost the revenue generated by each new lead.

Getting Started Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you already have a robust digital marketing strategy, congratulations. You are way ahead of many of your competitors. For those businesses that have been struggling with creating and implementing a strategy, here are some tips to help you get started:

• Identify your marketing goals – Less is more. If you establish 10 or more goals, you will struggle to create a cohesive strategy that achieves each of them. Pick the 3-5 goals that will move your business forward the most and focus on those.
• Identify KPIs for each goal – How will you measure whether you’ve successfully achieved each of your goals? What metrics are most effective at measuring this success?
• Understand your target audience – Create a series of personas that provide detailed information about each segment of your target audience. Include demographic information, pain points, what types of messages resonate with them, and what will motivate them to take action.
• Determine which tactics will most effectively achieve your goals – Are you focused mainly on organic search? Paid search? Does your audience engage with you most on social media? Make sure you’re implementing the proper strategies to achieve the goals you’ve established.
• Continuously monitor and refine – After implementing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you regularly review your data to measure the success of your efforts. When necessary, make adjustments to your strategy to improve the outcomes.

Read our other Marketing Strategy Articles full of Helpful Information.

Webolutions Can Help You Develop and Implement a Digital Marketing Strategy

Developing an effective digital marketing strategy is a complex process that takes considerable experience and expertise to get right. Unless your business has the resources to employ a team of in-house marketing specialists, it’s generally more effective to work with a seasoned digital marketing agency who can help you craft and implement a strategy that aligns with your goals. With nearly three decades of experience, Webolutions can set you up for success.

Webolutions is the only strategic digital marketing agency in the United States delivering a transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. We lead you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about you as a company. Our team will then conduct thorough market research to clearly understand what your competitors are doing and saying.

As part of this process, we’ll create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that clearly differentiates you and makes you stand out from the competitors in your industry. This plan will be used to develop your Brand Platform™, which creates a cohesive story and brand messaging that will be used throughout every aspect of your marketing efforts. Based on this information, we’ll develop a detailed digital marketing strategy that brings your story to life and achieves your goals for the upcoming year.

Our team provides comprehensive digital marketing services, and we will recommend the right mix of methods to convey your brand story most effectively to your target audience. We’ll implement the right communications and tracking systems necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Over time, we’ll make any adjustments and refinements necessary to achieve your marketing goals.

This exclusive approach results in faster, easier company growth that allows you to thrive for years to come.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

The post 10 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

The increased prevalence of climate-related disasters and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this shift in consumer behavior. These factors have caused a growing number of individuals to prioritize sustainable products and brands, as well as brands that promote socially responsible values, when making purchasing decisions. In fact, we’re rapidly reaching the point where sustainability will be one of the most important factors driving purchasing decisions for the majority of Americans.

As a business owner, it’s critical to prepare for this shift in consumer behavior to ensure you don’t get left behind in the next few years. Keep in mind that it’s not sufficient to simply promote sustainable practices. Your business must also be able to effectively communicate the ways in which you promote sustainability to ensure consumers connect your brand with these values and practices.

Research Supports this Shift in Consumer Buying Decisions

According to a recent IBM study, purpose-driven consumers who seek products and brands that align with their values and promote sustainable practices have surpassed value-driven consumers as the largest segment of the population. They now comprise 44% of all American consumers, and this percentage is expected to continue rising over the next few years.

The same study also found that purpose-driven consumers are much better brand ambassadors than consumers prioritizing value. Purpose-driven consumers introduce friends and family to the brands they support more frequently than value-driven consumers, with 58% of purpose-driven consumers indicating they regularly offer these recommendations. As a result, demonstrating the ways your brand aligns with the values of consumers can result in lucrative, long-term relationships with individuals that can help you grow your customer base over time.

Another study conducted by the retail inventory technology company Sensormatic Solutions found similar evidence that brands who promote their sustainability efforts are gaining a competitive advantage:

• 80% of US consumers consider sustainability when making purchases
• 80% of retailers believe their sustainability efforts have increased customer loyalty
• 54% of consumers read about a brand’s sustainability initiatives when making purchasing decisions
• 70% of consumers indicate they would change their shopping habits if they found out a brand wasn’t operating sustainably

Not only are consumers valuing sustainability more than ever, but they’re also willing to pay for these products. A recent survey by the Business of Sustainability Index found that 66% of US consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products compared with less sustainable options offered by competitors. This figure is more pronounced with younger consumers, with 80% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 saying they’re willing to pay more for sustainable products.

In addition, this survey found that a brand’s ability to communicate their sustainable practices is important in these purchasing decisions. Approximately 50% of consumers said clear language on products detailing their sustainability is important, and 46% of consumers also say having a third-party or independent source confirm these sustainability practices is important in their decision making. Furthermore, 73% of consumers said they’d sign up for a company’s loyalty program if it helped reduce the environmental impact of their purchases.

Younger Consumers Are Driving This Trend

While we’ve seen this trend hold for consumers of all ages, it’s also clear that this shift towards prioritizing sustainability in purchasing decisions is being driven by younger consumers. Millennials and Gen Z consumers have been leading the charge.

According to Harvard Business Review, Millennial and Gen Z consumers are 15% more likely than older generations to spend more money with a brand and choose it over its competitors when they rate the brand highly on humanity. In addition, 75% of Millennials consider sustainability when they make a purchase, compared with 66% of the general population. Moreover, 90% of Gen Z consumers interviewed for a recent survey stated they’ve purchased a sustainable product in the past six months.

The fact that Millennials and Gen Z consumers are driving this shift in purchasing behavior is significant, and it’s a clear indication that this trend is likely to continue over the next decade. Gen Z’s influence on consumer behavior will continue to increase as the youngest members of this generation become adults. In addition, the Harvard Business Review report indicates that the purchasing power of Millennials and Gen Z will surpass the purchasing power of Boomers by 2030. Furthermore, Gen Z will represent 27% of the world’s income by 2030, and they are expected to surpass the percentage of income possessed by Millennials by 2031.

Businesses who fail to align with the sustainability ethos valued by these younger generations can expect to struggle to maintain their market share as we reach 2030. In order to avoid this fate, it’s critical for businesses to pivot towards sustainability now.

Embracing the Circular Economy Will Help Elevate Your Sustainability Practices

To thrive in this changing consumer landscape, your business must embrace sustainability and appeal to the growing number of purpose-driven consumers who now hold the largest market share. One of the best ways to do this is to shift your business model from a linear economy to a circular economy.

Traditionally, businesses have operated as a linear economy. In this model, businesses take materials from the earth to manufacture their products. Consumers then purchase these products and use them until they wear out, eventually throwing them away as waste.

A circular economy, on the other hand, takes steps to prevent this waste from being produced. In this model, processes such as reuse, refurbishment, recycling, maintenance, remanufacture and composting are implemented by businesses to keep these materials in circulation and reduce the waste generated by consumers. As the trend towards prioritizing sustainability in purchasing decisions continues to grow, it’s likely that more and more companies will shift their model towards a circular economy that keeps the materials they use in circulation as long as possible.

Leveraging an Emphasis on Sustainability to Grow Your Business

It takes more than sustainable practices to appeal to the changing purchasing patterns of the modern consumer. You must also make this a core part of your brand and communicate this to your target audience to gain their trust. There are several important steps to take in order to connect with today’s purpose-driven consumers:

• Know your customers
• Communicate your values as part of your branding
• Embrace transparency

Know Your Customers

It’s important to identify the values and practices that are most important to your customers. When you know what motivates them to support your purpose, you can begin to transform your operating models to deliver the sustainability your customers value.

Communicate Your Values as Part of Your Branding

Once you’ve established sustainable practices and adopted socially conscious values that your customers expect from the companies they support, you must make sure your brand messaging aligns with these practices and values. It’s important to communicate these ideals in all your marketing efforts to raise awareness of the steps your business takes to foster a more sustainable solution.

Embrace Transparency

Communicating these ideals in your brand messaging is important, but purpose-driven consumers expect more concrete information in order to trust that you provide the sustainable solutions they demand. These consumers often spend a significant amount of time investigating the brands and products they support. When researching your company, they will look for hard evidence to demonstrate your use of sustainable solutions.

The more transparent you are when providing this information to consumers, the more likely you are to gain their trust. When this occurs, you’ll be able to cultivate a loyal customer base that will also serve as powerful brand ambassadors to others in their network who share their socially and environmentally conscious values.

A Real-Life Example of a Company Embracing Sustainability

At Webolutions, we see many of our clients embracing a culture of sustainability every day. One of these clients is Vaniman, a manufacturer of air filtration systems, dust collection solutions, and other industrial products that improve air quality.

Vaniman operates under a “repair, don’t replace” business philosophy. As part of this approach, all their machines are designed to:

• Last for decades, using metal cases and structural pieces
• Have any parts that can wear out be replaceable by the user
• Have all non-wear parts made available for replacement in the event of damage our misuse

As new motors, switches and other technologies become available, Vaniman upgrades their replacement parts with newer, better units while ensuring they are compatible with older models, including the original Vaniman machines made decades ago. For example, if a new motor is designed that is more powerful and efficient, Vaniman will also make an adaptor bracket to allow the new motor to retroactively replace a motor in an existing machine designed 20 years ago.

This business philosophy creates a circular economy that keeps Vaniman machines out of landfills. A typical light industrial dust collector with a five-year lifespan manufactured by a competitor will create 3 cubic feet of landfill waste every five years, and 12 cubic feet of waste every 20 years. A similar unit manufactured by Vaniman will only need replacement brushes and potentially a replacement motor over time. As a result, their machines produce less than 1/8 of a cubic foot of landfill waste in that same 20-year period. This equates to 1% of the volume of waste produced by their competitors every 20 years.

In addition, this model reduces fuel consumption and transportation costs since there is no need to deliver new units to customers every five years.

Vaniman’s sustainability efforts are making a significant impact on our environment and as an increasing number of customers prioritize these initiatives over the next decade, they are primed to experience a strong competitive advantage over other businesses in their industry.

These sustainability practices aren’t unique to Vaniman’s products. There are ways to adopt sustainable business models in just about any industry. If your company is committed to prioritizing these initiatives and living these values, you’ll find that the growing number of purpose-driven consumers in our country will come to view you as a trusted brand that they want to support and recommend to others.

The post More Consumers Are Valuing Sustainability When Making Buying Decisions appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

With such high stakes associated with the customer experience you provide, it’s critical to get this aspect of your operations right. To address this pressing need, an increasing number of businesses have been leveraging AI technology to improve their customer experience. Over the past year, AI has made a tremendous impact on how businesses operate, and this is one of the many ways you can integrate AI with your business to achieve better results.

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience refers to the relationship you build with an individual over time through every interaction they have with your brand across all channels and departments. When a person’s perception of how these interactions are conducted is positive, you’ve delivered a good customer experience.

Every touchpoint – from the customer’s first introduction to your business to the customer support you provide – creates an opportunity to deliver an exceptional experience and cultivate a great impression of your brand. Providing a great customer experience is one of the key ways you can differentiate your company from your competitors and maintain a loyal customer base.

What Is AI Customer Experience?

AI customer experience involves the use of AI-powered technology, such as chatbots, machine learning and conversational UX applications, to improve the efficiency of every touchpoint you have with your customers. Keep in mind that you’re not replacing your human support agents with AI technology. AI is simply serving as a tool to streamline these processes. By automating simple customer inquiries with AI technology, your employees will have more time to spend addressing the complex issues that are critical to providing the great experience your customers expect.

In addition, AI technology has the ability to process and analyze large amounts of data rapidly, providing your business with important intelligence information that can help you enhance the overall customer experience you provide.

10 Ways AI Can Improve Your Customer Experience

AI technology is a true game changer for your ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience. The AI-powered tools available to businesses continue to expand at a rapid pace, creating new opportunities to use this technology to enhance the experience you provide. Some of the most powerful ways you can use AI to improve your customer experience include:

• Deliver personalized recommendations
• Offer 24/7 customer support
• Resolve customer issues faster
• Anticipate customer needs
• Route incoming messages and calls to the right agents
• Reduce errors
• Analyze customer data to better anticipate future behavior
• Ensure consistency across all channels
• Reduce employee burnout
• Boost sales

Deliver Personalized Recommendations

Providing personalized recommendations helps customers access the products and services they’re looking for much faster, delivering a better experience. Instead of spending a long time browsing all of your offerings, customers can more easily find the ones that are most relevant to them when they receive personalized recommendations.

AI facilitates this process by allowing you to compile, organize and analyze large quantities of customer data in order to provide them with personalized recommendations that will cater to their unique preferences and buying habits. Some of the customer data used to create these personalized suggestions include:

• Browsing habits
• Purchasing history
• Demographic information

By making it easier for customers to find the most relevant products and services for their needs, you’ll be able to cultivate a loyal customer base that keeps coming back to you for future purchases. In fact, 60% of consumers state they’re more likely to be a repeat buyer when they receive a personalized shopping experience.

Offer 24/7 Customer Support

AI-powered chatbots are an effective way to provide your customers with the support they need, when they need it. These chatbots can answer a wide range of customer questions, allowing you to offer 24/7 support without having to increase your customer service staff. You’ll be able to maximize your support offerings while minimizing your costs for this important service.

Using chatbots offers a variety of additional benefits:

• Empowers customers to solve problems independently – Chatbots can provide links to related content such as instructions, guides and articles that can help your customers solve their problems without the need to interact with a live agent. This results in faster resolutions to customer problems and improves their experience while freeing up your agents to focus on more complex issues.
• Improves your customer journeys – AI-powered chatbots can provide important information regarding the specific areas customers are getting stuck along your journeys. This allows you to improve these points on your journey to make it easier for customers to find the information they need.
• Analyzes the effectiveness of your support content – You can generate data regarding which pieces of your support content generate the most views and the best engagement. This can help you to improve your support content to better respond to the needs of your customers.

Resolve Customer Issues Faster

AI-powered chatbots not only improve your ability to deliver customer support, but they also allow you to provide faster response times to inquiries. This is accomplished in several ways:

• Chatbots can pull up relevant answers and content from your help center faster than human agents can
• Chatbots can filter spam, helping your support agents avoid wasting their time on ingenuine help tickets or answering basic questions covered in your customer support content
• Chatbots help customers get answers to quick questions without waiting for a support agent to be available to assist them
• Chatbots can implement callback queues, allowing customers to hang up and receive a call back when a live agent is available

Anticipate Customer Needs

You can implement AI tools that analyze customer behavior in order to identify what they’ll want or need in the future. This is especially effective for subscription businesses. AI can evaluate a customer’s historical purchase data to predict when they’ll need to reorder, allowing you to send your customers an automated reorder message at the right time.

This improves your customer experience by making the recurring purchase process easier and more streamlined. Customers will be able to make their next order by clicking a button on an email instead of having to browse for what they need from scratch and go through the entire checkout process again.

AI technology can also leverage your customer data to more effectively:

• Engage in forecasting
• Identify emerging growth opportunities
• Adapt your marketing strategies to align with shifts in consumer preferences

Route Incoming Messages and Calls to the Right Agents

Very few things are more irritating to your customers than getting routed to the wrong support or service agent. When they must get redirected multiple times, this frustration grows exponentially. AI technology allows you to route customers to the right agent the first time, providing a better overall experience.

You can use AI chatbots to evaluate the nature of an issue based on a set of predetermined keywords. Then, the ticket is automatically assigned to the appropriate agent to help that specific customer. By performing an initial screening of each inquiry, AI technology can help your customers get the assistance they need much faster.

Reduce Errors

The likelihood of errors is much greater when your data is processed manually by your team. AI technology can process data much faster and find errors before they negatively impact the credibility of your data. In addition, the ability to analyze large quantities of data enables AI solutions to provide context for the data-driven decisions you make. By viewing data holistically and providing greater contextual information, AI algorithms are able to reduce errors even further.

Leveraging AI technology to reduce errors not only provides a better customer experience, but it also saves you money. It takes time for customer support agents to fix errors. If each agent spends 30 minutes every day correcting errors, it will equate to a significant amount of wasted time over the course of an entire month. By eliminating this time spent correcting errors, AI technology can give your live agents more time to devote to helping your customers.

Analyze Customer Data to Better Anticipate Future Behavior

AI technology has significantly expanded the ways in which you can leverage customer data to better understand your audience and anticipate their future behavior. By predicting the context of user interactions, AI technology enables you to more effectively curate these upcoming interactions in a manner that will provide a better experience during the later stages of the customer journey.

You can also leverage customer data to proactively predict and prevent customer attrition. You can analyze customer sentiments from various interactions along their journey to identify situations where people are experiencing frustration with your company. This allows you to reach out to them to apologize, take steps to alleviate their frustration, offer incentives for them to remain a customer, and take any other action necessary to repair the relationship.

Ensure Consistency Across All Channels

Many individuals will engage with your business on multiple channels before making a purchase. Therefore, it’s important to track all interactions with a person across every channel to ensure no information gets lost and you provide a consistent experience at every touch point.

AI technology provides you with robust capabilities to track interactions across channels. Some examples include:

• Using AI to automatically load information provided by an individual on a prior interaction, making it easier for them to pick up where they left off in a sign-up or purchase process and increasing the likelihood that they complete the process
• Using AI to send automated reminders to customers who abandon their shopping carts, offering a small perk or discount that incentivizes them to complete their purchase
• Using AI to retarget to customers who engage with your business but don’t complete a purchase, increasing the likelihood that they’ll choose your business once they’re ready to make a buying decision

Reduce Employee Burnout

The high workload and abundance of mundane, repetitive tasks creates high levels of burnout among customer support employees. When these employees are overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out, they’re more likely to make mistakes or to snap at customers. This can result in a poor experience that increases the likelihood of customer attrition.

AI technology can provide important support to your live agents by handling many of the mundane, repetitive tasks that can bog down their day. By automating these tasks using AI, you can reduce the workload of your support team, giving them more time to spend on the complex issues that require their attention. It also reduces the likelihood of burnout, which will improve the experience they provide to your customers.

Boost Sales

AI technology can help boost your sales in several different ways. It can be used to detect sticking points in your customer journey, allowing you to address these issues and provide a more seamless buying process that reduces the likelihood that customers won’t finalize purchases. In the event that a purchasing issue does arise, chatbots can help resolve the problem right away to keep the purchase moving forward.

You can also use chatbots to let customers know about new products, special discount codes and other promotions you’re running. Many AI-powered chatbots also have the ability to make customized product recommendations for your customers. These capabilities can help increase your average order value.

You can also have chatbots automatically alert your sales team to follow up with customers who express interest in a specific product or service. This allows your sales team to jump right in and try to complete the sale. Since these alerts will let your sales team know which product or service an individual is interested in, they will be able to more effectively cross-sell or upsell products that might align with the customer’s needs.

Get Started Elevating Your Customer Experience with AI

AI provides you with a powerful tool to improve your customer experience at every point along their journey with your business. However, in order to leverage these benefits, you will need a CX platform that is able to integrate the latest AI technologies. If your current CX platform lacks these capabilities, you may need to upgrade to a CX system that can work with the AI tools you’re using. Making sure you implement the right systems is a critical first step to crafting the exceptional customer experience necessary for your business to grow and thrive.

The post Leverage AI Technology to Improve Your Customer Experience appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

This article is a follow up to our earlier article, Annual Planning Roadmap – Your Guide to greater Success. In that article, we detailed the key elements of an effective annual plan, the steps for effective execution, and how to establish a success rhythm. If you are new to creating an annual plan, be sure to read this previous article.

In this article, we are focusing on many of the cultural and operational benefits of developing an annual plan and effectively executing this with your team throughout the year.

Cultural Benefits of an Annual Plan

There are multiple cultural benefits to effectively developing an annual plan with your team. The more engagement, understanding and participation your team has in the development of your plan, the more benefit your annual plan will provide.

Your annual plan should tie directly to your organizational vision. According to Jim Collins (author of Good to Great, Built to Last, and many other highly recognized business success books), an effective organizational vision contains three critical elements:

• Core Values – A system of guiding principles and tenets; a philosophy of business and life. Principles that are to be held inviolate which guide how all organizational decisions are made, and which dictate all experience had with the organization.
• Purpose – Grows out of core values. The foundational reason for the organization’s existence. Should serve to inspire the organization to be something greater.
• Mission – Specific, defined measures of success. Has a clear finish line and specific time frame. Should have a vivid description linked back to your purpose.

Your annual plan should connect each persons’ key role responsibilities and the planned organizational initiatives for the year back to your organizational vision. When your team is engaged in this process and when these connections are made, an unexpected shift occurs. In addition, your annual plan provides the following important cultural benefits:

• Vision alignment
• Individual connection
• Accountability
• Confidence and empowerment

Vision Alignment

By using your organizational vision as the basis for your annual plan, your team is reminded of it, and you have the opportunity to reconnect them with all the attributes of your vision. Most organizations do not have a vision that actively drives all of their decisions. Annual planning is an opportunity to come together, review these key elements and reinvigorate your team behind what your company stands for and where everyone is heading together.

Individual Connection

Through the highly intentional development of team BIG 3s (individual role responsibilities and key success measures) and SMARTs (key company initiatives or projects) for the year, everyone on your team comes to understand the importance of their individual role. This connects everyone on your team with how their day-to-day role responsibilities are intimately tied to the success of the entire organization. It does not matter if the individual’s role is to answer the phones, sweep the floor, or generate enterprise sales, each team member must achieve their individual goals, or the organization will not be as successful.

This intimate connection between each person’s individual role and the overall vision of the organization is powerful. It aligns everyone behind common goals, creates extreme teamwork, and moves everyone forward together.

Accountability

Without a well-developed annual plan, it is nearly impossible to clearly define the individual role responsibilities and key success measures for each person on your team. As a result, your team may not have clarity as to:

• What success in their role looks like
• How their success will be measured
• How each team member will 100% understand what is expected of them and how they can know each day, week, or month if they are doing a good job

To create team member accountability, key measures of success must be clearly defined. Each day, your team members should be able to objectively state if they did a good job in their role. If this is currently not possible, you need to spend the time to get granular about each person’s role and their key success measures. This is the only way for a team member to be truly accountable.

Confidence and Empowerment

Clearly defined role responsibilities with agreed upon success measures allow your team members to be truly accountable, and they also provide each one of them with confidence and empowerment.

If your team members do not know whether they are doing a good job, they cannot be confident in their role. Worse yet, if your mangers come to your team members every day with a new set of role responsibilities and priorities that your team member is not sure how to prioritize and/or isn’t sure how to complete successfully, it is impossible for your team to have confidence that they are doing a great job.

If each team member’s role is clearly defined, their success measures are in place, and they are hitting or exceeding their role expectations, they can have confidence. Plus, with a clear vision as to what we are trying to achieve as a company, they can now begin to take steps or suggest improvements that help move the company forward faster. Taking this elevated view and operating at this level is true empowerment.

Operational Benefits of an Annual Plan

In addition to the many cultural benefits, an annual plan also provides multiple operational benefits to your organization. These include:

• KPI Clarification
• Intentional systems development
• Growth planning

Key Performance Indicator(s) Clarification

As you develop your annual plan, you will need to create several mathematical scenarios. Some of these mathematical scenarios might include:

• At X dollars in sales, how many employees do we need to deliver our services?
• To achieve a profit margin of X%, we need our cost of goods sold to be less than $X/month
• If we grow next year by X%, how many more machines will we need to purchase to meet the larger demand?

Essentially, you will create mathematical models to help inform your annual plan. As you create these models, they will inform your annual plan and also provide you with the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you need to manage in order to achieve your organizational business goals.

Intentional Systems Development

As you develop your KPIs, you may realize that you do not have the tools or systems in place to measure and monitor them.

For example, if you are a professional services company and your revenues are based on billable hours, not only is your professional services delivery team your #1 generator of your revenues, but they are also your largest business expense. If you do not have an accurate system to measure the revenues from your clients as compared to the hours of service that your team is delivering, the odds are that your professional services delivery team is not generating the profits that they should. When someone comes to you and says that they are too busy, maybe this is because they are doing too much free work. But, without an effective measurement system, it is impossible to know.

Once you have established the KPIs in your annual plan, it is imperative to develop the tracking tools and systems to measure these on a regular basis. If your actual numbers are not meeting the goals of your annual plan, your attention should focus on the actions needed to improve this performance.

Growth Planning

Another huge benefit of developing an annual plan is organizational growth planning. As in our KPI example above, there are many mathematical models that you will use to inform your projections as you develop your annual plan numbers.

Often these models result in unintended insights, especially if you give the development of your annual plan the time and the space it requires to gain additional insights. Some key growth areas your plan may uncover include:

• What will your future org chart need to look like?
• What infrastructure costs will need to increase as you grow?
• How will you keep your team and your culture aligned?
• How will your new business generation need to expand to meet the goals?
• What additional access to capital might you require?

Consider consulting with asset finance brokers uk, as they specialize in facilitating access to various forms of financing that could align with your expansion plans and capital needs. As you work through these plans, you will identify potential future issues and key business planning areas. This allows you to address them during your planning process instead of when it is too late somewhere down the road. This is a true advantage.

Annual Planning FAQs

How many months is an annual plan?

An annual plan is typically 12 months. It begins on the first day of an organization’s new fiscal year and continues through the end of that fiscal year. As the company experiences results against their plan, quarterly plan adjustments may be needed to reset for unforeseen events.

What are the benefits of an annual plan?

There are many benefits an annual plan provides. These include:

• Fresh insights and ideas
• A renewed cultural connection with the company vision
• Improved connections between individual team responsibilities and the goals of the organization
• The development of critical KPIs used to measure the organization’s success

How do I make a year plan?

Developing an annual plan involves multiple steps, including:

• Understanding your specific market
• Assessment of company strengths and weaknesses
• Aligning your team with your company vision
• The creation of accurate models to explore possibilities
• Defining a clear, well-organized plan forward for the coming year

Learn more about the steps required for effective annual planning.

How do you run an annual planning process?

Running an annual planning process is a skill developed over time. It requires a combination of a deep understanding of the business, knowledge about the overall market, competitive research, operational insights, and the ability to lead and inspire.

Learn more about successful annual planning execution.

What are the most important elements to have in the annual plan?

Some of the most critical elements to include in your annual plan are:

• Accurate revenue
• Cost and profit projections
• Revenue source projections
• Operational initiatives required to achieve the set goals
• Key stakeholder role responsibilities
• Defined systems of accountability

Learn more about how these important annual planning elements will set your business up for ongoing success.

What is the focus of an annual plan?

The focus of an annual plan is to create an accurate projection as to what the future of the organization will be in the coming year if all the goals and objectives are successfully met. This can be used to communicate with the organization’s team members to inspire the teamwork, effort and the individual results needed.

Get Started

The key to developing an annual plan is to get started. October is a great month to begin your annual planning if you are on a fiscal calendar year. If you are new to annual planning, do what you can this year. As you practice, you will improve. Each year, what goes into your annual plan will evolve and become more critical to your business success. No matter the level of time and effort you put into this, you will achieve a new level of clarity, understanding and wisdom about what your company needs to become more successful.

Developing an annual plan creates a concrete path forward for your company’s success in the coming year. It provides insight and perspective which would otherwise not exist. Take the time to do this well and you will be rewarded.

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum digital marketing and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & CRM Systems Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how we can help you develop a successful annual plan for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a free annual plan consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Annual Plan Development – A Roadmap to Strategic Target Achievement appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

More than three years later, these concerns have largely been debunked. Data has found many employees have in fact become more productive, managers have identified ways to effectively supervise their teams, and technology such as Zoom and cloud-based file sharing platforms have rendered most logistical issues moot.

While it’s become clear that many businesses can not only function, but actually thrive in remote environments, we’ve also made another discovery over the last few years – most employees prefer working in these remote and hybrid environments. As a result, we’re seeing a large number of workers prioritizing remote and hybrid work opportunities during a job search. However, employees should be cautious when transitioning out of a role, as some separation agreements waive the right to file a lawsuit, which could impact their ability to address any potential issues that arise from their previous employment.

Regardless of your feelings about the effectiveness of remote and hybrid work models, it’s time to acknowledge that they’re no longer temporary responses to a crippling global pandemic. Remote and hybrid work models are here to stay, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that they represent the future of how businesses will operate. Companies that embrace these working models will be better positioned to attract and retain the top talent in their industry, and this will set them up for long term success.

If your business can accommodate remote and/or hybrid work models, it’s in your best interest to at least consider adopting one of these models. But as with any other critical decision you make, it’s always important to be armed with the knowledge necessary to make the right choice for your short- and long-term success. To help you accomplish this, we’re going to:

• Examine some of the data on remote and hybrid working
• Clarify the difference between these two models
• Highlight some of the benefits and challenges associated with these flexible working arrangements
• Provide some tips to help you set your team up for success if you choose to adopt a remote or hybrid model

Data Shows Many American Workers Prefer Remote and Hybrid Work

While it’s easy to make the claim that workers prefer these flexible models, it’s important to back up these assertions with hard data. Fortunately, there have been enough studies to support the fact that our country is moving towards a more flexible work environment that features remote and hybrid options.

McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey evaluated responses from over 25,000 American workers. This survey included workers in all types of industries, in every part of the country and every sector of the economy. With data from traditional “blue collar” jobs that would be expected to require on-site employees as well as “white collar” professions that would be more ideally suited to remote and hybrid working models, the data becomes even more significant:

• 58% of workers surveyed had the ability to work at home at least once a week
• 35% were able to work remotely five days a week
• 87% of workers who have the chance to work remotely take advantage of the opportunity
• 65% of workers would be willing to work remotely all the time

The results of the McKinsey study reflect sweeping changes currently impacting the US workforce. The study estimates that roughly 92 million workers are offered remote or hybrid work options, 80 million employees actually have one of these working models as part of their job, and a significant number of workers have indicated a search for more flexible work options as a major motivator to change jobs.

A study from Owl Labs found that remote and hybrid workers:

• Were 22% happier than employees in onsite office environments
• Stayed at their jobs longer
• Had less stress, more focus and were more productive
• Experienced better work-life balance
• Experienced better physical and mental well-being

A study by Ergotron also yielded data that indicates many employees view remote and hybrid work environments as beneficial:

• 56% of workers experienced mental health improvements, more physical activity and better work-life balance in remote and hybrid settings
• 88% of workers felt the flexibility to work from home has increased their job satisfaction
• 75% of workers move more frequently and have a more active work style in remote settings

Data from Prodoscore found a 5% increase in productivity during the pandemic work from home period. Furthermore, their data revealed that an employee’s personal traits were a greater indicator of their productivity than their work environment – employees that were highly productive in the office were still productive at home, while individuals who slacked off in the office were more likely to do so at home as well.

According to data by Gusto:

• The number of fully remote employees has increased by 240% since 2021
• Every state has experienced at least a 10% year-over-year increase in the number of fully remote workers since 2021
• 60% of companies now have at least one remote worker, and many of these employees live out of state
• 35% of workers identified location flexibility as the primary deciding factor they used to accept their last job offer
• 48% of workers consider location flexibility to be their primary deciding factor when considering future job offers
• Fully remote workers are 13% less likely to quit within three months of hire, saving businesses thousands of dollars per worker in annual turnover costs

Remote vs. Hybrid Work: What’s the Difference?

There are two different types of flexible work models:

• Remote work
• Hybrid work

In remote work models, employees work at home full time. Generally, there is no central office for employees to come to, although many businesses maintain a smaller office setting where a select number of employees, such as executive team members, have the opportunity to work onsite. Often, these offices are in shared working spaces where each company has just a few offices and access to a conference room to meet with clients. In many fully remote work environments, employees have the ability to live anywhere, including out of state. This provides the benefit of a larger pool of applicants for each job, allowing businesses to hire the best talent regardless of where they live.

In hybrid work models, employees split their time between working in an office and working at home. The number of days in-office vs. remote varies based on the policies of that specific business. Depending on the size of the company and where the bulk of the employees are geographically located, there may be one or more onsite office locations. It’s common for very large national companies that adopt a hybrid model to have several hub offices around the country where their employees must work onsite several days a week. This model limits the ability for employees to live in locations that are too far to commute to the office, eliminating the benefits created by access to a larger talent pool associated with fully remote work.

Benefits of Remote and Hybrid Work Environments

Both employers and employees experience a variety of benefits associated with remote and hybrid work environments.

Many employees find remote and hybrid situations appealing due to:

• Flexible schedules that improve work-life balance
• Less time spent commuting
• Reduced burnout
• Improved productivity
• More efficient use of time
• Improved mental and physical well-being

These working models also present a variety of benefits for employers, including:

• Reduced costs – Businesses can save money on office space, utilities and other expenses
• Expanded talent pool – Businesses can attract the top talent in their industry from all over the country (or even the world) rather than be limited by the options in their local area
• Greater ease of filling open positions – A larger talent pool increases the likelihood of finding a candidate who will be the right fit for open positions sooner, and the attractiveness of remote and hybrid opportunities make your opportunity more appealing to candidates
• Improved productivity – This benefit applies to employers and employees alike, as everyone wins when your team is more productive
• Improved morale – Employees who experience better work-life balance and improved overall well-being will be happier and have higher morale
• Greater employee retention – As a growing number of workers prioritize remote and hybrid opportunities, offering one of these models will make it easier to retain your top talent

For any growing company, maintaining a professional address is crucial for credibility, but that doesn’t always mean leasing a physical space. Instead, a virtual address can provide the benefits of a real-world presence while allowing you to manage your business remotely. Services offering virtual office solutions can help you stay organised, keep your communications secure, and ensure that your business always looks professional to clients. This approach keeps overheads low, making it ideal for companies that are scaling or working with flexible teams.

Challenges Associated with Remote and Hybrid Work Environments

While the benefits of remote and hybrid work models make these options worth pursuing for most companies that can accommodate offsite employees, it’s still important to be aware of some of the challenges that may arise in these settings.

Maintaining Employee Engagement and Collaboration

When working remotely, it can sometimes be challenging to maintain the same levels of engagement and foster opportunities for collaboration compared with what can be accomplished in an in-office environment. Lack of face-to-face interaction can sometimes result in miscommunication, reduced teamwork and delays in decision making.

Employers can avoid this challenge by prioritizing ways to keep remote workers connected to their team members and including them in important decisions. This requires implementing tools and strategies that improve communication between remote workers. In hybrid formats, in-office days can be structured in a way that promotes collaboration, ensuring that your team has an opportunity to work together.

Blurred Work Boundaries

In a remote or hybrid work environment that allows for flexible working hours, many employees will keep more of a nontraditional schedule where they work outside of typical 9-5 hours. This can sometimes make it more challenging for team members who choose to work less traditional hours to create the boundaries necessary to separate their work and personal lives. Without these boundaries, employees may end up responding to emails late at night and working longer hours than would occur in an office.

To help employees maintain a healthy work-life balance, employers should establish policies that encourage their team to set and stick to established work schedules, even if these schedules aren’t specifically 9-5 working hours. Team members should be discouraged from checking and responding to emails outside of their typical work hours, making it easier for them to disconnect from the stresses of work and recharge before the next day.

Reduced Social Interaction

Many employees who express a preference for working in an office often cite social isolation as the primary reason. Certain individuals thrive on social interactions, and the lack of spontaneous exchanges or informal conversations with coworkers can make them feel disconnected or isolated. While this isn’t an issue for all remote and hybrid workers, it’s still a challenge that exists for some employees and must be addressed by employers to reduce the risk of burnout among individuals who are prone to experiencing social isolation when working at home.

There are many ways to get creative and foster social interaction in remote settings so that employees feel connected to one another. In hybrid settings, giving employees the opportunity to choose how often they come to the office can help those who prefer greater levels of in-person interaction to get what they need and avoid feeling socially isolated.

Greater Difficulty Coordinating Work Schedules

Allowing flexible schedules is a great benefit for your employees, but it also may mean that you won’t have all team members working the same hours each day. This is especially true in fully remote work environments where employees live in different time zones. This can create challenges scheduling meetings and other opportunities for collaboration.

This challenge can easily be overcome by establishing certain times of the day where all employees are expected to be available. Then, meetings and other collaborative projects can be scheduled during these common working hours. Ideally, these common working hours should occur during the middle of the day to avoid a situation where employees in certain time zones must get up extremely early or work extremely late to attend a meeting.

Best Practices to Set Remote and Hybrid Employees Up for Success

Remote and hybrid work models are here to stay, and it’s likely that they will become increasingly prominent over the next few years. For businesses that can accommodate this type of working environment, the benefits are significant, and it’s worthwhile to strongly consider adopting one of these models.

While the challenges discussed above must be taken into account, they’re hardly insurmountable. As long as you put a great deal of thought into how you set up your remote or hybrid work model, you can easily create an environment where your employees can thrive and your business is successful. The following best practices will help you set your team up for success.

Choosing Between Hybrid and Remote Models

The first decision you’ll need to make involves determining whether to adopt a remote or hybrid model. The lessons learned during the pandemic have dispelled many of the myths associated with the importance of employees working in an office. Therefore, if you’re going to require employees to come to the office one or more days a week, there should be a purpose for this decision.

If there is truly a benefit to having all of your employees in the same place one or more days a week, then by all means you should choose a hybrid model. Just keep in mind that you’ll lose some of the most important benefits associated with remote work when you choose a hybrid model:

• Employees will not be able to consider living in other locations since they will need to remain within commuting distance from your office.
• You won’t have access to a larger talent pool that is possible when you’re able to hire the best people, regardless of where they live.
• You’ll still need to incur all the expenses associated with keeping a large office even though it will be empty several days of the week. This will negatively impact your profitability.
• Shifting to remote-first workflows may become more challenging since your office will serve as a crutch to collaboration.
• Informal (unscheduled or unplanned) meetings and brief interactions between coworkers passing each other in the office can hinder productivity compared to what can be accomplished when all team members are working at home with fewer disruptions and distractions.
• If you stagger the days of the week in which employees are in the office, meetings will still need to be held on video conferencing tools such as Zoom. When some team members are in the same room for meetings and others are at home, it can create suboptimal conditions for meetings.

Engage Your Employees to Find Out What They Want and Need in a Work Environment

When deciding what type of work model to implement, it’s always best to engage your team in the process. Speak to your employees personally to find out what they think. Send out surveys to gather additional information and feedback. This will help you establish a work model that more effectively addresses the needs of your entire team.

Some items to seek feedback on include:

• Work preferences of each employee – Some employees may prefer to work at home all the time, others may prefer a hybrid environment, and some may want to be in the office every day. In addition, some employees may prefer flexible work hours while others may want to retain a traditional 9-5 schedule. Understanding the different work preferences of each employee will make it easier to establish a policy that allows everyone to thrive.
• Needs of specific teams – Do teams across your business have different needs or preferences? Some teams may be able to work successfully in a fully remote environment, while others may find it beneficial to collaborate in person several days a week.
• Technology needs – What technology does your team need to thrive in a remote environment? Will you need to provide employees with laptops, extra monitors and other items that allow them to do their job? Are there specific software tools and platforms that must be adopted to allow everyone to access the information they need in a remote environment?
• Best ways to spend time – If you opt for a hybrid model, it’s important to make sure that the in-office time is spent purposefully and productively. Ask your employees about the different types of tasks they feel are ideally suited to being completed at home vs. in the office. Perhaps your team will prefer in-office meetings, but focused work time at home. Perhaps there are certain projects or tasks that need to be worked on in the office, while others are easily completed at home. Making sure you understand how to best structure your work week is critical in hybrid environments.

Not only will engaging your team in the process help you understand what’s truly important to them and make it easier to set your employees up for success, but it will also show them that you value their opinions. When employees feel like their leadership team listens to them and values their ideas, they typically remain more engaged and derive greater satisfaction from their job. This can help you improve employee retention over time.

Provide Opportunities for Communication and Collaboration

The potential for social isolation is real when employees work in remote or hybrid environments. As a result, it’s critical to establish a process that facilitates employee communication and collaboration. Utilizing tools such as Slack or Google Chat can make it easy for team members to check in with each other and ask quick questions. Using video meeting tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams can make collaboration much easier as well.

While facilitating work-related communication is critical, it’s also important to provide remote employees with ways to socialize. “Water cooler chats” that occur in offices may detract from productivity, but they are important ways for employees to get to know one another and build camaraderie. A tight-knit team will help boost morale and provide a more positive work environment.

There are several things you can do to ensure your employees maintain social communications:

• Have new employees schedule brief 1:1 “get to know you” meetings with all other team members when they are hired. Keep the focus of these meetings light and personal, allowing new employees to learn about their coworkers’ interests, hobbies, families, etc. This can help establish a rapport more quickly in remote environments.
• Schedule periodic Zoom happy hour meetings where team members can spend a few minutes chatting and catching up with each other. This will help maintain personal connections and improve camaraderie.
• If all your employees live in the same geographic location, organize a monthly in-person happy hour where team members can chat and socialize.

Find the Right Balance of Flexibility and Consistency

The flexibility provided by remote and hybrid work environments can result in less structure than occurs in traditional in-office work environments. While this flexibility is typically an overall benefit, it must be balanced by providing your team with the consistency necessary for them to thrive. Therefore, finding the right balance between the two is critical to achieving a successful work model.

Establishing this balance may involve:

• Coordinating schedules to allow for set meeting times
• Clearly defining the purpose of in-office work and the tasks that must be completed in-office vs. at home (for hybrid work models)
• Establishing agendas for meetings in advance to maximize the value of the time your remote employees spend on these meetings
• Providing clear documentation of all expectations and policies, and ensuring remote employees know where to find these documents

Create Opportunities for Communication Between Leadership and Team Members

When adopting a remote or hybrid work environment, it’s critical that you provide your employees with opportunities to communicate with your leadership team. Employees should have regular check-ins with their managers to ensure everyone is aligned on goals and that employees receive the assistance they need when challenges arise.

In addition, you may want to consider scheduling regular 1:1 meetings between each employee and a member of your executive team. These can be brief 15-minute check-ins where your employees have the opportunity to remain connected with your leadership team, even when they don’t interact face-to-face. This will also make it easier for your leadership team to understand the needs of your employees.

The post Employees Actively Seek Out Remote and Hybrid Work appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, positioning your organization effectively is critical to the success of your company. With attention spans dwindling, you may only have a matter of five seconds or so to create an impression on the new potential customer. If your messaging sounds exactly like that of your competitors, you cannot create interest, you cannot create differentiation, and you cannot create that defining moment of revelation which compels a prospect to continue to want to learn more about you and what you have to offer.

Often, when we ask new clients what sets them apart from their competitors, we get the same, old, tired answers:

• We provide great customer service
• We have a great product
• We have a great team who cares

Unfortunately, these are often the exact same messages that their competitors are stating on their websites.

In this post, we are going to walk you through the steps that we take to create a differentiating positioning platform for our clients. Once achieved, there are multiple benefits to reap, including:

• Differentiating your offering to potential new customers in a compelling and relevant way.
• Reducing or eliminating customer price sensitivity
• Improved understanding of your customers and your marketplace opportunities
• Clarity around who your company is and exactly what you stand for
• Easier attraction of new, talented employees
• Improved strategic and tactical decision making

What Is Market Positioning?

Market positioning encompasses many key areas, including:

• Identifying and understanding the specific product or service areas where you compete. In today’s world, this is a constantly evolving dynamic.
• Identifying and understanding your core competencies and strengths. You cannot create a competitive advantage without capitalizing on those things which you possess which differentiate you from other companies.
• Identifying and understanding your specific audience, their drivers, the questions they have, how they make decisions and why they should purchase from you vs. one of your competitors.
• Identifying and understating a concrete company vision. The key elements of this include:
  • A set of clearly defined core values and their associated behaviors
  • A well-structured and inspiring company purpose
  • Well-constructed company goals and defined performance numbers that drive organization change, align your team and inspire them to reach forward together
• Identifying and understanding exactly how to position yourself in a way that is genuine, compelling and effective so that everyone quickly and easily knows what makes you stand out from everyone else.

Who Does Your Market Positioning Impact?

It is easy to understand how effective market positioning impacts your marketing results. But, there are additional benefits that your organization will enjoy.

You and your leadership team will experience greater clarity around making tactical and strategic decisions. What are the right moves and what are the distractions to which you should say no? These will become evident to the entire group, saving you time and driving greater success.

Your team members will enjoy multiple benefits as well. When hiring new team members, positioning clarity will allow you to share a compelling vision with candidates and invite them to become a part of something with meaning instead of simply offering them a job. Your existing team members will enjoy reaching towards defined goals together and doing this with people they like and respect who all share the same core values.

Our Approach to Effective Market Positioning

The highlights of our unique positioning process include the following steps:

1. Working with your key organizational stakeholders and following a proven process, we lead your team through a fun and engaging self-discovery journey. Along the way, we apply a series of new lenses and conduct collaborative dialogue which shines light on many areas which are not possible to uncover by those who work within an organization. They are simply too ingrained in their existing ideas and preconceived limitations or too close to all the business details to effectively step outside of what they believe is possible. The group experiences a united transformation in the way that they see the company, who they are, and who they can be.
2. We develop personas to better understand your customers, who they are, what they need and how we can address their specific needs.
3. We fold in detailed market research to gain better clarity into the marketplace demand for your company’s products or services. We identify the top keywords used by your target audience and the number of searches being done each month for them. We also uncover insights into how your company’s competitors are marketing, the size and strength of their website, their messaging, their calls to action, their social strategies and more.
4. This interactive and data-driven collaboration results in newfound energy, excitement and a go forward strategy that rejuvenates your passion and drive for the company to thrive.

It is important to note that our market positioning process is simply helping your company see and understand many of the great things that you already possess. This makes it easier to understand how to capitalize on these strengths in order to enjoy a competitive advantage. We call this process our Intrinsic Multiplier™ approach. We pull all the greatness and possibilities out of your company leaders and help you achieve a vision for all that you create. Then, we provide a concise implementation roadmap.

Implementing Your New Market Positioning

Once we have worked with you to establish your market positioning, the fun really gets started. Now it is time to implement. Some of the common implementation steps include:

• Establishing a clear set of critical KPIs (key performance indicators) which we will use to measure progress against your defined goals.
• Setting up real-time performance intelligence dashboards to ensure that we can quickly and easily see what areas are going well and what areas require attention to drive the results we need. We need to see what levers to pull.
• Engaging your company team members in the overall vision to drive engagement and create synergy between everyone’s specific role responsibilities and the shared success we are working towards together.
• Creating a success rhythm to align everyone, measure progress, celebrate results and continue to reach your defined goals together.

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum digital marketing and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & CRM Systems Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

Our purpose at Webolutions is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. If you are a business leader who wants to take your organization to the next level or if you believe that that you are not achieving all the success that you could, we’d love to show you more about how our market positioning process works and share the results that our clients have seen. If you are a company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request your Free Market Positioning Consultation. During this 30-minute introduction, we’ll help you start to see a clearer path to success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Positioning Your Company for Greater Success appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

When a company establishes a leadership position, they may enjoy many benefits including:

• Heightened brand recognition and loyalty
• Elevated access to customer data
• Increased cost efficiencies
• Premium pricing

In this article, we will share the fundamental building blocks you need to establish and maintain a strong market leadership position.

Defining Market Leadership

It is easy to identify some market leaders. These include Apple, Amazon, Google, Home Depot and other massive companies. But, this article is not focused on how to become a company doing half a trillion dollars in sales each year. That is an entirely different journey. In this article we are going to focus on how you can take an established company doing less than $100 million a year in sales and turn that company into a market leader.

To be a market leader, there are two key terms we need to clearly define. The first of these is market. This can have a broad spectrum of meanings. It can be the global industry in which your business participates. McDonalds is the global leader in the fast food market. This can also be scaled down quite a bit. A company can be the leading provider of a specific type of product or service in the US, a specific region, or even in a specific metropolitan area. Any of these can be a market. You must simply define the market in which you want to lead. To begin your ascent to a market leader, take a minute and write down how you will define your market.

The second of the two words is leadership. Again, this can be defined in many ways. Some of the most popular ways to measure leadership include:

• Most products sold or largest market share
• Most dollars in sales or the most profitable company
• The most recognized brand or the first to market

To establish your company as a market leader, you much first define your definition of leadership. Now, write down your definition of what leadership means for you.

Identify and Understand Your Competitive Landscape

To win at anything, you must first understand your competitive landscape. In the step above, you wrote down what you consider to be your target market and how you will define your leadership position. In this step, we will identify with whom you are competing and important insights into what becoming the leader will take. We are going to approach gaining this critical knowledge in multiple steps.

List Your Market Competitors

Based upon your identified market, begin by listing your competitors. You can build this list in several ways.

• Ask your sales team who they run across the most in competitive sales
• Ask your customers who they see as your competitors
• Conduct a Google search for the keywords under which your customers would search for your products and services to see who is ranking

If you provide multiple products or services, be sure research and document your competition for each of your primary, core services. You may have competitors who provide a more specialized offering. You do not want to ignore these companies.

Understand Their Positioning

For each competitor, you need to understand how they are positioning themselves in your market. You can gain a lot of insights by reviewing your competitors’ website and social media channels. You can also engage a marketing firm to conduct this market research for you. Some of the market insights that you should come to understand include:

• Their brand messaging – How do they describe their products or services? Do they state USPs (Unique Selling Propositions)? How do they describe their customer service? What are they offering that is over and above what you provide? How are they engaging new prospective customers / clients?
• Their pricing – How are they pricing their products and services? What is included or excluded from this pricing? How does their pricing compare to your pricing?
• Their website – How does their website compare to yours:
  • Number of pages indexed on Google
  • Their domain authority
  • Their inbound link profiles
  • Their rankings on Google
  • The keywords for which they trying to rank on Google
  • The content they are generating regularly
• Their social media presence – How are they using these channels and engaging their audiences on social media? For each channel, you should document:
  • The content they are generating and the frequency of posts
  • How large a community they have created and the level of engagement their audience exhibits

Assess Yourself – Based on The Data

Based on the data above, assess how are you doing. Remember to always assess yourself through the eyes of your target audience, not your own biased point of view:

• Is your messaging differentiating and more compelling to your specific target audience(s) than your competitors’?
• Is your pricing and / or the value you provide to your customers / clients stated better or in a more compelling way than that of your competitors?
• Is your online presence impressive enough to lead in your market?

Dig into each of these key areas, document the competitive benchmarks, and identify the areas in which you need to do better.

Document Industry Trends

To lead within a market, it is important to understand where that market is going as well as possible. All markets are in a constant state of flux and evolution. Take time to conduct some research to help you better understand what changes are taking place within your market. Some common changes that you may be able to identify include:

• Changing trends in consumer demand or consumption
• Changing pricing or value trends
• Societal changes that may impact future demand or consumption
• New technologies that may interrupt your market
• Changes in the way your products or services are delivered
• New upcoming competitors who are revolutionizing the market

Be sure to document the trends you have explored and documented for future success planning.

Create Your Strengths Inventory

It is impossible to create a competitive advantage or leadership in any market without capitalizing on your strengths as an organization. To identify your strengths, you can conduct a SWOT. But this must be done correctly. Here are some helpful pointers:

• Strengths are always internal to your organization:
  • What do you do well?
  • What resources do you have to draw from?
  • What do others perceive as your strengths?
• Weaknesses are always internal to your organization:
  • What could you improve?
  • Where do you have fewer resources than others?
  • What do others see as your weaknesses?
• Opportunities are always external to your organization:
  • What opportunities are open to you?
  • Of what trends could you possibly take advantage?
  • How can you leverage your strengths to create market opportunities?
• Threats are always external to your organization:
  • What possible threats could harm you?
  • What is your competition doing that could impact you?
  • What threats do your weaknesses expose?

Some organizations find it useful to conduct a reverse SWOT. This approach reorders the conversation by starting with the Opportunities and the Threats first.

You may also try creating a SWOT for your key operational areas to identify additional insights. Some of your key operational areas might include marketing, sales, operations, HR, data analytics and innovation.

Once you have completed your SWOT, use this to identify your organization’s top 4 or 5 strengths upon which you can best create your market leadership. These are the strengths upon which you will capitalize to build your position.

Outline Your Plan

Now that you have identified the market in which you want to lead, how you define leadership, your competitive landscape and your strengths upon which you can capitalize, you have all the information needed to develop your market leadership plan. Below we have outlined how to best organize this plan for your success.

Critical Areas of Focus

Outline the 3 to 5 (never more than 5) areas in which you must succeed to achieve your market leadership goal. Some of these areas might include:

• New product or service innovation
• Raising capital
• Acquiring market share

The time horizon for these areas of focus may span many years. They are the keys to your success in achieving your goals.

Annual Priorities

From your critical areas of focus, develop your annual priorities. Once again, the fewer of these you create, the higher your likelihood of achieving them. These are the specific areas of focus you must achieve in the coming year. They need to be specific as to how you will measure success, and they need to be broad enough to allow for their evolution throughout the year.

An example of an annual priority might be to implement a new CRM to meet your growth plan.

Quarterly Priorities

From your annual priorities, develop your quarterly priorities. The fewer of these you create, the higher your likelihood of achieving them. These are the specific areas of focus you must achieve in order to complete your annual priorities. They need to be specific as to how you will measure success. These priorities will be far more specific than your annual priorities.

An example of a quarterly priority might be to finalize your selection of the new CRM your will implement.

SMARTs

From your quarterly priorities, you will develop the specific projects needed in the quarter for you succeed. We call these projects or initiatives SMARTs. Other systems may refer to them as Rocks. These initiatives must be very specific and clear. They should detail and document all of these critical elements:

• The specifics of the initiative
• Who is responsible for completing the work
• Who is accountable for measuring and reporting the progress of the work
• How the success of the initiative will be measured.
• The specific timeline in which the initiative must be completed.

An example of a SMART might be to create a requirements document for your new CRM system. This would include content outlining:

• How this should be done,
• When this should be complete
• What information this should include
• Who should be interviewed to gather the information
• Who is responsible for doing what
• Who is reporting project progress
• How the success of the initiative will be measured.

Build Your Team

Now that you have a multi-year plan for leading your market, it is time to expand and build your team. Your team should share an established set of core values and be committed to the vision you have created.

As you build your team, it is critical to hire talented people who will enthusiastically fulfill the needs of the strategy you have developed while being aligned with a set of core values that provide the “how” for all that your business does.

As you invite new people to join your team, they should not only be a cultural fit, but a cultural add. They should be individuals who are excited about the market leadership goals you have set and fully committed to being a part of high performing team who will achieve these goals. For more on this, read our blog post, The Critical Steps to Build Cultural Alignment with Your Team.

Implement the Necessary Performance Intelligence Systems

As you developed your market leadership plan, you documented what market leadership means to you. This definition should provide your primary set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are the initial numbers upon which your success towards this goal will be measured.

If you stated your goal was to have the largest percentage market share, then this is something that you must measure. If your stated goals was to have the broadest brand awareness, then this is something that you must measure. Without the right measurement systems, it is impossible to engage your team with the progress towards reaching your goals. You will also have no way to know when you have succeeded.

Creating the right measures is not always easy. You may need to get creative as to how you measure some things, but the accurate measurement of what you are planning to achieve is imperative.

Once you have established the necessary systems to measure your primary KPIs, you will need additional reports to measure your contributing KPIs. For example, to achieve the largest percentage market share, the contributing KPIs might include:

• The number of new customers / clients acquired
• The number of new target customer / client leads generated
• Your overall client retention rate for repeat or ongoing purchases

The better the measurement systems you create, the higher the probability of your success.

FAQs – Leading Your Market

How long will it take for me to build my business into a market leader?

If you follow these steps, the knowledge and insights gained will begin shaping your decisions almost immediately, within 2 to 4 weeks. As you identify and understand your marketplace at a deeper level, your decisions will elevate further. Then over the next several months, as you create your annual plan, quarterly initiatives and SMARTs, you will start to hit your stride and enjoy a far better handle on every aspect of your business. After you have established your tracking systems and practiced regularly hitting your KPIs, you will begin to experience transformational change. This phase normally takes 18 to 24 months.

What are the biggest challenges in implementing a market leadership plan?

There are a couple challenges we have seen with implementing a plan like this.

The first is a lack of commitment and organization. Business executives tend to get caught up on the day-to-day. Creating and implementing this type of strategy takes a lot of time and effort. After the initial excitement, some executives will stop allocating the time necessary to the develop a sound plan for market leadership.

The second challenge is a lack of discipline to stay focused and implement. So many businesses create annual plans, but they do not create the tracking systems necessary or a success rhythm of regular check-ins and reviews to ensure they achieve their goals.

What To Do Next

Work with your leadership team to review the steps outlined in this article. Coordinate and begin assigning responsibilities. Complete these steps in order, get together, review the data, discuss what you have learned and discuss the next steps.

As you work through this process, all those participating will gain a sense of clarity and direction. As leaders, you will begin creating a company with a more compelling goal and start putting all the critical pieces together.

If you need some help working through these steps, let us know. Our purpose is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. We’d be happy to chat and help!

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how you can implement these strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request your market leadership consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start creating a plan for success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Market Leadership – Establish and Maintain a Leadership Position appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In a recent post, our CEO and founder, John Vachalek, outlined the fundamental building blocks necessary to create a strong culture that will position your business for greater success. But creating a strong culture is only part of the equation. It’s also important to ensure your entire team is aligned with your culture.

Developing cultural alignment takes time and hard work, but it will pay huge dividends to your business. When your entire team is aligned with your culture, values and mission, you’ll experience greater buy-in from your employees and be able to elevate the success of your organization.

Why Is Cultural Alignment Important?

Your company culture defines the values, practices and expectations that guide your business. It establishes the attitudes and behaviors that are adopted by your team. When your company culture aligns with the personal values of your team, and when your team is fully aligned on the norms established as part of your culture, it can have a powerful impact on your business. When all your employees are aligned on a shared purpose and devoting all their energy towards this purpose, it significantly elevates your company’s ability to thrive.

Unfortunately, very few businesses are able to achieve this cultural alignment. According to a study by Gartner, only 24% of employees believe their company culture impacts their work. In addition, only 31% of company leaders feel that their organization’s culture positively impacts business performance.

The reason these numbers are so low has to do with a lack of cultural alignment in most companies. The same Gartner study found that when a company’s employees are aligned with the culture, it has a significant impact on business success, including:

• 9% improvement in performance against revenue goals
• 22% improvement in employee performance
• 16% better reputation outcomes

The reason for this is simple. When your employees are aligned with your culture, it creates a common understanding of what your business is trying to achieve, and everyone becomes focused on finding the best ways to achieve this purpose.

How to Create Cultural Alignment Among Your Team

You can invest a great deal of time and energy into creating an amazing culture at your company, but that doesn’t guarantee your team will be aligned with these attitudes and beliefs. Achieving this level of cultural alignment requires additional steps. While this involves a lot of effort, the benefits will be well worth it for your business, as it will set you up for long term success.

Recognize the Desired Behaviors You Want Your Team to Exhibit

Praise and recognition are powerful motivators. Not only does it provide the individual being recognized with an incentive to replicate this behavior in the future, but it shows other team members the types of actions which are valued and will bring them similar recognition. In fact, 92% of employees indicate they’re more likely to repeat an action after they’ve been recognized for it. Therefore, showing praise for behaviors that are aligned with your company culture is a powerful way to ensure those behaviors continue.

In order for this recognition to impact your culture, it must become embedded into the way your business operates. Showing appreciation for actions and behaviors that align with the company culture should occur on a regular basis. To make sure this happens, build it into the weekly work rhythm for your managers and team members.

Make Sure Your Management Team Lives Your Company Values

Your company values are a key component of your culture. They serve as the guiding principles and beliefs that every team member should possess. These values should shape just about every action associated with your business – from long range strategic planning to day-to-day items such as how your team interacts with your customers.

When you have a strong set of company values, it will be easy for your team to get behind them. However, it’s important for your team to see that these values are authentic to your management team. Otherwise, they will be dismissed as lip service. Therefore, it’s critical that your management team live these values every day and establish them as part of your culture in a top-down way.

Establish a Culture of Trust and Safety

Trust and safety are core tenets of any strong company culture. If your team doesn’t trust you to treat them fairly and provide a safe space for them to be themselves, it’s virtually impossible to achieve true cultural alignment. It’s critical that your team knows they are able to express their opinions freely without fear of punishment or other repercussions. Your management team must do more than pay lip service to this philosophy – they must live it every day and demonstrate by their actions that your business truly provides a safe environment for your team.

Make Cultural Fit Part of Your Hiring Criteria

You’ll never be able to achieve cultural alignment if you don’t hire employees who share your company’s values. In order to ensure you’re hiring people who will buy into your culture, you must invest time during the interview process to determine each candidate’s cultural fit. This is just as important as making sure they possess the proper skill set to be successful at the position.

In addition to prioritizing cultural fit during the hiring process, you must then reinforce this during the onboarding process. New employees should be learning about your core values and company culture throughout the onboarding period, and this information should be connected to their role in a meaningful way. When this occurs, you’re much more likely to have new employees internalize your culture and values, and this will improve overall alignment throughout your team.

Webolutions Can Help You Create Better Cultural Alignment

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation agency. For almost three decades, we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses across a wide range of industries to help them create better cultural alignment throughout their company.

We’ll work closely with your company’s leaders to help you define your company vision, purpose and core values. As part of this process, we’ll provide you with a framework for how to integrate this into your day-to-day actions in order to cultivate a strong culture that your team can get behind. We’ll also provide strategies and coaching to help you improve cultural alignment across your entire team, allowing your business the thrive.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post The Critical Steps to Build Cultural Alignment with Your Team appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

We understand and have seen firsthand the challenges, pitfalls, and potentially devastating impacts of what an unintentional culture can mean for a company. As well, we have seen the many benefits of what a great work environment provides. We have developed a defined and proven system to help organizations align their teams behind a shared, well-defined, and highly inspirational vision to create a great culture.

In this article, we will share some of the fundamental building blocks you need to align your team, create a world-class culture, and position yourself for greater success.

Common Misconceptions

In our work with hundreds of businesses, we can quickly spot the companies and leaders who are able to create a great culture and the companies and leaders who struggle. Below we have outlined some common misconceptions related to cultural challenges.

Telling People What to Do Should Be Enough

Unfortunately, this is still the philosophy of many leaders, and it may not even be all their fault. After all, this is how the workplace worked for many decades. It used to be that people were happy and grateful to just have a job.

However, times have changed. Today, the great people that you want to work for you want a lot more from their careers:

• They want a deeper sense of purpose and meaning from their work.
• They want to be a part of something special and personally rewarding.
• They want to understand how the work that they do connects to the overall success of the organization.
• They want what they do to be important.
• They want their work to have impact and meaning.

People Should Want the Organization to Succeed

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone you hired shared your motivation for the organization to succeed? The fact of the matter is that most people simply are not wired that way. They have lives outside of work. They have challenges, and they have a vision for what they want for themselves in life. To believe that everyone you hire should simply want to organization to succeed without any personal interest in what this means for them is simply not realistic.

We Do Not Need to Spend Too Much Time on This

Many leaders believe that a great culture should just happen. If you hire great people, then the culture of the company should just be great. Wrong! Creating a great company culture takes intention, engagement, systems and a lot of work.

Start With a Clear Vision

If you expect people commit, have a connection to something, and be an invested part of it, the first step is to clearly define what this is. This intention, dedication and clarity is something that many companies fail to establish. If the company doesn’t believe that defining a clear vision for the organization is worth their time, what sort of culture can they possibly hope to create for their teams?

Jim Collins, author of Good To Great, Built to Last, Great By Choice and many other leading books on the subject of organizational development, defines the 3 critical elements of an effective organizational vision as:

• Core Values
• Purpose
• Mission

Over the years, we have seen these simple concepts misconstrued and implemented poorly by companies. They will say, “Oh yes, we have all of that nailed down.” But they have not done this correctly. This is why we feel it is critical to define each of these important elements. Afterall, if you start with a bad roadmap, you cannot possibly arrive at your destination.

Core Values

These are a set of guiding principles and tenets; your philosophy of business and life that define who you are and how you behave in all circumstances. Some examples of person’s core values might include:

• Accountable
• Caring
• Responsible

We often work with companies who have developed their core values based on how they want to market their products or services. So sometimes we will see a core value of a company that is “Customer Service” or “Safety”. Core values developed like this do not carry any personal connection. Do you know anyone who would say that either of these core values sound like who they are? A core value should be something that a person or individual might say describes the principles they follow in their life.

Purpose

A purpose is a simple statement that grows out of your core values. It is the foundational reason for the organization’s existence. This purpose often reflects greatly on the company founder or leader and the joy they got from starting the business. It is what drove them. Some sample purpose statements are:

• To give unlimited opportunity to women – Mary Kay
• To be a role model and tool for social change – Patagonia
• To make people happy – Disney

Here again, we often see companies getting this wrong. When you read any of the purpose statements above, you will notice that none of them have anything to do with the product or service provided by these companies. When we begin working with some clients, they may tell us that their purpose statement is something like, “to be the best law firm in the Rocky Mountain Region”. We’ve found time and again that when a company’s purpose is structured to sell their product or service, the vision will not connect with people.

Mission
We often work with companies who say that they have a mission statement. Often, we find these statements are missing the mark. A successful mission , something that is part of a successful vision for an organization, is not a statement. A mission is the specific mountain that the organization is going to climb. It is meant to stimulate change and progress by people making a resolute commitment to it. You must be able to define specific measures of success. It must have a clear finish line and a specific timeframe.

An example of a well-crafted mission is:

• By the year 2028, we will reach over 1 million people with our message. We will generate revenues of over $50 million dollars and we will have created positive impact in the lives of more than 15 million people worldwide.
• Another great example of a compelling and motivating mission is JFK’s Speech “Why go to the moon?”. Listen for the key elements we’ve outlined. Think about how you feel as you listen to this.

Make Your Vision Personal

Once you have created a clear, compelling, and inspiring vision for your organization, the next step is to communicate this and make it personal for every member of your team. After watching the JFK speech, you can see how he was making the space race personal for everyone in America. He shared why this was so important, he included everyone, he talked about the benefits for everyone, he set a deadline, and he made it about the success of our country together.

The rollout of your company vision must achieve this, but for your organization. You must include everyone, and they must feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Then, this vision must be ever present, reinforced, and part of all that the organization does from that point forward. Afterall, this represents why the organization exists and the meaning to which you want everyone to connect in order to create a great culture.

Coaching, Leadership and Management

As you bring this compelling and uniting vision to life within your organization, it is critical that your top executives and mangers reinforce your vision throughout all interactions. Your core values and purpose should be an integral part of your:

• Hiring Process
  • Role Requirements
  • Recruiting Ads
  • Interviewing
  • Offer Letter
• Management Process
  • New Team Member Onboarding
  • Leadership
  • Recognition
  • Reviews / Promotions
• Firing Process
  • Performance Evaluations
  • Documentation
  • Coaching
  • Dismissal

Your executives should implement team engagement strategies beyond simple performance measurement. They should actively engage in:

• Coaching
  • Understanding each team member’s personal goals, what they value and how you can help them be more successful and fulfilled

• Leadership
  • Exemplifying your core values in all that they do. Reinforcing the core values and the associated behaviors any time there is a meeting of 3 or more people.

• Management
  • Setting clear expectations for personal team member success. Holding people accountable. Providing the resources needed for success and celebrating achievements.

Values-Based Recognition

Your organization should have a values-based recognition system. This could be as simple as a box with paper slips for team members to shout each other out for going above and beyond in ways that are related to exemplifying your defined organizational core values. This simple action alone will help everyone within your organization to recognize and become familiar with your organization’s core values.

These recognitions should be celebrated publicly. This will socialize these behaviors with positive reinforcement and you will begin seeing these behaviors happening more and more often, until no one within your organization will be comfortable outside of your established core values. It is truly an amazing thing to watch happen.

Creating a Rhythm of Success

To create a great organizational culture, you need to develop an intentional rhythm of reinforcement and engagement with your team. This rhythm provides a space to pull everyone out of their day-to-day work for a while to focus on the vision. It should create opportunities for questions, feedback and fresh insights. It should make everyone feel included in the process and the success of the organization. It is time that that is just as important as hitting a client deadline or making that next big sale.

A good company reinforcement rhythm might include:

• A weekly one-on-one with each team member for 30 minutes
• A monthly relationship meeting with each team member to review their progress and performance
• A quarterly all team convergence to review overall company progress, initiatives and the next quarter planning
• An annual all team planning 2-day planning session to prepare for success in the coming year

You can also create your own rhythm. The key is to have these connection points frequently enough to maintain everyone’s engagement. Be sure to set these up at the beginning of the year to ensure that they do not get pushed aside as you get busy.

FAQs – Team & Cultural Alignment

How Long Does This Process Take to See Results?

If done well, you will begin to see noticeable results after your initial introductory meeting with everyone, especially if you implement other noticeable changes (like a regular success rhythm) at the same time.

You will continue to see noticeable cultural improvements, as you successfully implement, over the next 2 to 3 years.

Will This Help with New Hiring?

The development of a successful vision and living your organizational core values will dramatically improve your ability to find and attract new talent to your organization. You will stand out from almost every other company in your industry and become an employer of choice for top candidates.

What You Should Do Next

This depends a great deal on where you are in your cultural development journey.

If you do not have a clearly defined, inspirational company vision which meets all the criteria we have outlined above, you must start there. Take the time to develop this. It will pay off endlessly  for you.

If everyone in our organization does not know your core values, purpose and mission, you need to start with effectively socializing this. It does no good to have a great, compelling and motivating vision if no one knows about it. You have to make it who you are, not just some work you did on a retreat.

If you need some help determining the next best step, let us know. Our purpose is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. We’d be happy to chat and help!

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how you can implement these strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request your Team Alignment Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start creating a plan for success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

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