Enter artificial intelligence (AI), the new frontier in the generation of images and artwork for digital marketing. AI has opened doors to possibilities that were once considered the realm of science fiction. With tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3, AI is not just an assistant; it’s a designer and a collaborator, reshaping the way we think about and produce creative content. These advanced AI tools are capable of understanding complex requirements and generating visuals that not only meet specific criteria, but also resonate with the intended audience on a deeper level. The precision, efficiency, and scalability offered by AI are unparalleled, making it an indispensable tool for modern digital marketers.

The Evolution of AI in Digital Marketing

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing marks one of the most significant advancements in the field. Its journey from a novel concept to a fundamental component of marketing strategy reflects a broader shift in how technology shapes business practices.

The Early Days of AI in Marketing

AI’s initial foray into marketing was characterized by cautious optimism. Early applications were rudimentary, focusing primarily on data analysis and automated customer service. These systems were programmed to perform specific tasks, such as sorting through customer data or managing basic inquiries, but they lacked the advanced capabilities we see today from the leading large language models. They served as a foundation, demonstrating the potential of AI to streamline operations and provide insights driven by data.

Transition from Traditional to AI-Based Strategies

The real transformation began with the advent of more sophisticated AI technologies. Machine learning and natural language processing allowed AI systems to not only analyze large sets of data, but also learn from them, adapting and improving over time. This shift from static to dynamic AI systems marked a significant turning point.

AI’s role in content creation and digital asset generation was a game-changer. Tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3 emerged, capable of creating written content and visual assets that approximate what is achieved through human creativity and intuition. This transition from traditional design methods to AI-based strategies represented a new era where creativity was no longer bound by human bandwidth or skill limitations.

ChatGPT: A New Frontier in Content Creation

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, stands as a groundbreaking innovation in natural language processing. This AI-driven tool is designed to understand, interpret, and generate human-like text or images based on the input it receives. It can create anything from detailed articles to book illustrations, mimicking the nuances of human language with remarkable accuracy. For marketers, ChatGPT offers a valuable asset in content creation, allowing the generation of written material that is both high-quality and contextually relevant.

Dalle: Bringing Images to Life from Text

Complementing ChatGPT’s capabilities in text generation is Dalle, another AI marvel from OpenAI, which specializes in creating images from textual descriptions. With Dalle, the process of creating visual content undergoes a transformative change. Users can describe the image they want in detail, and Dalle translates this description into a visual representation, often with striking creativity and relevance.

Integration of ChatGPT and Dalle in Digital Marketing

One of the most significant advancements in these AI tools is their integration. Marketing professionals can access Dalle directly within ChatGPT, seamlessly combining the power of text and image generation. This integration means that you can use ChatGPT to craft a detailed description of the desired image, and then Dalle can be employed to bring this vision to life. This synergy between text and image creation opens up a world of possibilities for content creation in digital marketing.

Benefits for Marketing Professionals

The implications of ChatGPT and Dalle for marketing professionals are profound, particularly in the realms of personalized content, efficiency, and scalability.

1. Personalized Content: In today’s marketing landscape, personalization is key. ChatGPT and Dalle allow for the creation of highly tailored content that can resonate with specific audience segments. Whether it’s custom-written posts for different demographics or images that reflect varied consumer preferences, these tools enable a level of customization that was previously challenging to achieve.
2. Efficiency: The speed and efficiency with which ChatGPT and Dalle can generate content are unparalleled. Marketing professionals can now produce high-quality written and visual content in a fraction of the time it would take through traditional means. This efficiency translates into more time for strategy and less time on execution, a critical factor in the fast-paced world of digital marketing.
3. Scale of Content Creation: Perhaps the most significant benefit is the ability to create content at scale. With ChatGPT and Dalle, marketers can generate months’ worth of social media assets in a matter of hours. This scalability is crucial for maintaining a consistent and engaging online presence, a cornerstone of successful digital marketing.

The integration of ChatGPT and Dalle in digital marketing is not just a technological advancement; it’s a paradigm shift in how content is created and consumed. For marketing professionals, these tools offer an opportunity to redefine creativity, efficiency, and personalization in their campaigns. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the potential of AI-driven content creation tools like ChatGPT and Dalle will undoubtedly play a central role in shaping the future of marketing.

Integrating ChatGPT and Dalle 3 in B2B Marketing Strategies

The integration of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3 into B2B marketing strategies represents a significant leap forward in the way businesses approach content creation and customer engagement. These tools not only streamline the creative process, but also offer new avenues for personalized and impactful marketing.

Strategies for Integrating ChatGPT and Dalle 3

Integrating ChatGPT and Dalle 3 into existing marketing workflows requires a strategic approach that aligns with business goals and audience needs. The first step is to identify areas within your marketing strategy that can benefit most from AI-powered content creation, such as social media posts, email campaigns, and website content. Training teams on how to effectively use these tools is crucial, as is establishing a process for generating, reviewing, and refining AI-created content.

It’s also important to integrate these tools into the data analytics framework. By analyzing the performance of AI-generated content, marketers can refine their strategies, tailoring content more effectively to their target audience.

Using ChatGPT and Dalle 3 for Different Marketing Channels

ChatGPT and Dalle 3 can be used to enhance written and visual content used in several different marketing channels, including:

• Social Media: ChatGPT can be used to generate engaging and relevant posts, captions, and responses to user comments. Dalle 3 can create eye-catching images that complement these posts, making them more likely to capture your audience’s attention. For example, a B2B tech company might use these tools to create a series of informative posts about industry trends, accompanied by custom visuals.
• Email Marketing: AI can personalize email content at scale, addressing recipients by name and tailoring messages based on their interactions with previous content. Dalle 3 can be used to create custom graphics for email headers or product images, adding a visual appeal to these emails.
• Website Content: ChatGPT can assist in writing SEO-optimized website copy, product descriptions, and blog posts. Dalle 3 can generate unique images that align with your website’s theme and content, enhancing the overall user experience

The integration of ChatGPT and Dalle 3 into B2B marketing strategies offers a wealth of opportunities for innovation and personalization. By understanding how to strategically implement these tools across various channels and addressing the associated challenges, you can significantly enhance your marketing efforts and forge stronger connections with your audience.

Webolutions’ Approach to AI in Digital Marketing

Webolutions, a trusted name in digital marketing since 1994, has continually adapted and excelled in the dynamic landscape of marketing technologies. Our approach to leveraging AI in digital marketing strategies, especially the integration of tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3, exemplifies our commitment to innovation and excellence.

Webolutions has consistently embraced emerging technologies, recognizing early the potential of AI to revolutionize digital marketing. By integrating AI tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3, we have not only enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of our campaigns, but have also provided our clients with innovative solutions that set them apart in their respective industries.

The transformative potential of AI in digital marketing is not just an impending promise; it’s an unfolding reality. Tools like ChatGPT and Dalle 3 have already begun reshaping the landscape of content creation, offering unprecedented personalization, efficiency, and scalability. As these technologies continue to evolve, their capacity to enhance and refine digital marketing strategies grows exponentially.

For businesses looking to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital environment, the adoption of AI tools is no longer a futuristic concept, but a present-day necessity. The integration of AI into marketing strategies not only streamlines content creation, but also unlocks new dimensions of customer engagement and brand storytelling. By harnessing the power of AI, your business can create more relevant, engaging, and impactful marketing campaigns, setting you apart in a crowded digital marketplace.

As we look to the future, the possibilities are as vast as they are exciting. Will AI continue to be a tool in the marketer’s kit, or will it evolve to become the marketer itself? How will the continued advancement of AI reshape the very fabric of digital marketing strategies and customer interactions? The potential is immense, and the future is ripe with opportunities for those willing to embrace the AI revolution in digital marketing.

The post From Words to Pictures: Using ChatGPT and Dalle 3 to Improve Your Digital Marketing Campaigns 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.

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.

As a market leader, Webolutions explores these tools daily. We follow the latest advancements, test them, and use them to help our clients create a competitive advantage. In this article, we will share our thoughts and outline some of the newest AI tools available today. Then each month, we will bring you practical insights into how these tools can be used to advance your business goals.

Leading AI Tools

Below we have outlined 15 of the most trending AI tools in the marketplace, including a link to their website and some notes about what they do.

Writing

• Hoppy Copy
  • Write high-converting emails, 10x faster. Extensive email templates specifically designed for writing powerful email campaigns (email marketing campaigns, drips, newsletters and more)
• Undetectable
  • Scans your text to detect if it was written using AI, then it “humanizes” it to be undetectable as AI content to the search engines

Images

• Removebg
  • Quickly removes the background from any image Dahl-E
• Lexica
  • Generates AI Art
• Nightmare AI
  • Upscales images for enhanced clarity and resolution
• Media
  • Upscales lower resolution images for enhanced clarity and resolution

Videos

• Dreamix

• • Provide an image or video along with a text prompt and it will create the video
• Captions
  • Camera and editing app that automatically transcribes, captions, and clips your talking videos. The AI will also adjust your eyes to make it appear that you are looking into the camera. Great for reading copy and adjusting the video later. See video

Audio

• Well Said Labs

• • Voiceover text-to-speech with 50+ avatars
• Adobe Podcast
  • Converts any audio to rich, quality, studio sound, even over background noise
• Descript
  • Multiple tools for video and voice. Really great voice output of any sampled voice from typed text.
• AutoPod
  • Superfast AI automated editing of podcasts in Adobe Premiere Pro

Websites

• Kuki

• • AI customer service chat bot

Personal Productivity

• ChatPDF
  • Allows you to upload a .pdf and interact with it, ask questions and provide summaries using AI
• GPTE
  • Find the latest AI tools and sort them by categories like Writing, Code, Image, Video, etc.

Sensitive Information

Remember, AI is still a bit of the wild west. Never upload sensitive personal or company information to these tools without first vetting their privacy policies. In many cases, all information uploaded becomes the property of the tool.

Some information that you should not currently share with AI tools might include:

• Human resource records with PPI
• Private company information
• Private personal information
• Information that can be used to infer things about you that you’d rather keep private

What To Do Next

We are entering a new age of tools that allow people to be more productive. If you are newer to AI, we recommend going to ChatGPT, spending some time there and understanding what is possible. Ask some questions and ask ChatGPT to respond as if it were someone. Ask it to create an outline for an article or a presentation for you. Get used to how it works. After that, start using some of the other tools outlined in this article and our previous AI article to better understand how you use AI to help you.

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

The post 15 New AI Tools – Explore the Possibilities appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Over the past 3 decades, we have led our clients forward as our connected world and these technologies continue to evolve. There have been many significant advances along the way:

• The smart phone
• Streaming media
• Better search engines
• Efficient eCommerce
• Social media platforms

Despite the impacts these other advancements have had, AI is a true gamechanger. This charge is being led by ChatGPT.

There are many other AI tools flooding the market. These tools allow users to do everything from writing ad copy to generating marketing videos to analyzing financial data to helping plan corporate strategy.

As a market leader, Webolutions explores these tools daily. We follow the latest advancements, test them, and use them to help our clients create a competitive advantage. In this article, we will share our thoughts and outline some of the leading AI tools available today. Then each month, we will bring you practical insights into how these tools can be used to advance your business goals.

Read our article: How to Become and Remain a Market Leader with Continuous Innovation

AI’s Recent Surge

After ChatGPT’s initial release from OpenAI on November 30th, 2022, the adoption rates of this groundbreaking tool and related services have soared.

It has set the record for the fastest growing user base in history. After only two months in existence, around 13 million unique visitors used ChatGPT every day in January 2023, doubling the number of users in December. The latest data shows that in just 5 days, ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users and that it currently has over 100 million users. The underlying technology (OpenAI) gets approximately 1 billion visits per month.

On March 14^th, GPT-4 was released. GPT-4 is 10 times more advanced than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. This enhancement enables the model to better understand context and distinguish nuances, resulting in more accurate and coherent responses. Furthermore, GPT-4 has a maximum token limit of 32,000 (equivalent to 25,000 words), which is a significant increase from GPT-3.5’s 4,000 tokens (equivalent to 3,125 words).

“We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” – OpenAI

Practical Uses of ChatGPT

ChatGPT and other AI tools should be seen as a content assistant, not a replacement for human marketers. While they provide great information, they still lack context. ChatGPT had a knowledge cutoff date of September 2021. After this time, it has no knowledge of current events. In addition, all generated content should be reviewed to ensure it aligns with company values and goals and does not contain biases.

Some great ways to use AI to increase your creativity and productivity include:

• Brainstorming fresh content & thought leadership opportunities
• Adapting existing content to a specific audience persona / vertical
• Repurposing existing long-form content into new content
• Developing new email nurture campaigns
• SEO planning & persona research
• Generating A/B testing variations of ad creative or landing page copy
• Turning an event or call transcript into content
• Generating talking points & assist in developing marketing strategies
• Designing spreadsheets & dashboards
• Writing video scripts & storyboards
• Suggesting feedback / improvements on content or strategies
• Changing the voice in which something is written
• Generating email subject lines (including A/B test variations)
• Repurposing sales collateral into drip campaigns / email content
• Writing event descriptions and develop interesting questions for panelists

Leading AI Tools

Below we have outlined many of the most popular and talked about AI tools, including a link to their website and some notes about what they do.

Multi-Purpose Tools

• ChatGPT
  • A breakthrough conversational AI tool that can chat with you, answer questions, generate content and even challenge incorrect assumptions. According to ChatGPT, “I am ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. I am designed to process natural language and generate human-like responses to textual inputs. I was trained on a massive corpus of text data, which includes books, articles, and websites. My training enables me to understand and respond to a wide range of questions and topics, from factual information to creative writing prompts. As an AI language model, I am continuously improving through new updates and training data, which allows me to offer more accurate and relevant responses over time.”

Writing

• Anyword
  • Ad & Marketing Copywriting
• Writer
  • Content generation without data risk. This tool also has an AI detector. Enter a URL or text and it will calculate a ‘Human Generated Content’ score.
• Rytr
  • Allows you to generate text and select your specific tone
• QuillBot
  • Paraphrases your content so that AI is not detectable
• Quetext
  • Plagiarism checker
• Content at Scale
  • AI detector and content generation tools

Image Creation

• Midjourney
  • Image generation
• Dahl-E
  • Image generation from OpenAI
• Beautiful
  • Generate creative designs, charts, and graphics

Video Creation & Editing

• Descript

• • Video editor
• Synthesia
  • Type to video with a selected avatar or custom scene. Create your own custom avatar using a video recording of yourself. You can even synthesize your voice so your avatar sounds like you.
• ElevenLabs
  • Clones your voice. You can type and it will read it back in your voice.
• Murf
  • Library of voices that you can use for studio quality voice overs
• FlexClip
  • Video editing
• Fliki
  • Creates videos from your blog posts using realistic voices
• Runway
  • Image and video generation
• Syllaby
  • Find what questions people are asking about in any industry and create a social media video script
• Dreamix
  • Video editing – provide an image or video and a text prompt and it will create the video

Personal Productivity

• Cody
  • Personal assistant for anything you want to know. You can upload knowledge and access this using simple text prompts.
• Lavendar
  • A personal email coach to make you more effective
• Whisper
  • Transcribes speech to text
• Repurpose
  • Shares your content across your social media accounts for easer posting
• Finchat AI
  • ChatGPT for Personal Finance
• Merlin
  • An AI content aggregator that provides easy access to all your content

Sensitive Information

As with all new tools that change the world, using AI does require some cautions. Never submit sensitive information to AI tools that might accidentally share your information with others. Even with some basic information, AI can infer further details about you, such as your political leanings, race, etc., even if you do not specifically share these details.

Some information that you should not currently share with AI tools might include:

• Human resource records with PPI
• Private company information
• Private personal information
• Information that can be used to infer things about you that you’d rather keep private

Prompts

An “AI prompt” is a specifically crafted request to an AI tool designed to generate the desired response. An example of an AI prompt could be something like, “create a 500-word blog post outlining the best practices of SEO written by an SEO expert.” Learning how to interact with AI and asking the right questions allows the AI to help you more.

Prompt engineering is a new field resulting from the adoption of AI. This area of specialty is growing rapidly and is even offered via online learning courses. A Prompt Engineer is a professional who specializes in developing, refining and optimizing AI-generated text prompts to ensure they are accurate, engaging and relevant for various applications. They also collaborate with different teams to improve the prompt generation process and overall AI system performance.

There are also websites and tools that help AI users create better AI prompts. These are called prompt libraries. Some of the more popular prompt libraries include:

• Chatsonic Prompt Library
• AIPRM
• PromptBase
• ChatX
• FlowGPT
• PromptHero

FAQs – AI Impacts, Tools & Insights

Can AI write about anything?

ChatGPT can write intelligently on virtually any subject. The only limitation is that its access to information was cut off in September of 2021. So, if you were to ask about the hockey score from last night’s game, it has no context.

Are AI tools free?

Like all online tools, some are free and some are not. Many of the tools offer a free or scaled down version with paid premium options.

Can Google identify AI generated content?

Many people believe that Google can identify AI generated content and that using this content could jeopardize your SEO rankings. In Google’s most recent statement about AI content, they state, “Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results for users for years.”

But that doesn’t exactly answer the question. Our recommendation is that if you are going to generate AI content, it should be reviewed and edited by a person to ensure accuracy, brand alignment and the beliefs of the company. This editing should result in original content.

What To Do Next

All of this can seem somewhat overwhelming. However, we are entering a new age of tools that allow people to be more productive. If you are newer to AI, we recommend going to ChatGPT, spending some time there and understanding what is possible. Ask some questions and ask ChatGPT to respond as if it were someone. Ask it to create an outline for an article or a presentation for you. Get used to how it works. After that, start using some of the other tools outlined in this article to better understand how you use AI to help you.

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 & CRM Systems Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

The post AI Is Changing Our World – Impacts, Tools & Insights 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.

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.

The post Aligning Your Team for Your Company to Thrive appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Making Excuses Is Expensive

One of the biggest differences between those companies achieving average business success and those businesses who are continuously super successful is that the top performing businesses have established a routine or rhythm of doing the things necessary to drive their growth. The businesses who seem to struggle are more apt to simply make excuses.

Some of the excuses we hear from average performing company leaders include:

• They do not have time to create a plan for success.
• They do not know exactly what to include in their success plan.
• They do not know how to make their plan actionable.

This may seem somewhat blunt, but when we hear excuses like these for not creating an actionable plan for success in the new year, we know immediately that the organization is going to continue to struggle. If you do not create an organized plan, the odds of you achieving anything greater than average decreases dramatically.

Your Annual Planning Roadmap

In our recent blog post, “Annual Planning Roadmap – Your Guide to Greater Success“, we detailed our steps for successful annual planning. If you are not sure how to do annual planning or if you want to conduct more successful annual strategic planning, be sure to review this article.

Here is a summary of the key annual planning elements detailed in our previous article:

• Marketplace Insights & Clarity – Do you understand your market as well as any changes or shifts occurring within it?
• Clarity of Your Positioning – How do you compare to your competitors, and are you creating and communicating your true differentiation factors to your audience?
• Core Strengths Identification – What are you able to do that is truly better than others in your market, and are you effectively leveraging these strengths to achieve a competitive advantage?
• Strategic Decluttering – Do you have clarity on your specific goals and the strategies necessary to achieve them?
• Team Alignment – Is your team connected to, excited by, and engaged in your vision? Do your team’s individual success metrics align with your goals?
• Executable Key Success Measures – Do you know precisely what you need to measure to achieve your goals, and have you implemented the right performance intelligence systems to track your success?

The Results You Will Enjoy

Those companies who follow these steps enjoy many advantages and even a vast competitive advantage over those companies who do not. Some of these many benefits include:

• The ability to complete more impactful strategic projects which move the company forward.
• The ability to say no to new initiatives which may clutter their focus and take them off track.
• The ability to create a more aligned and connected team that performs at a far higher level.
• The ability to grow sales faster and enjoy a higher profit margin.

Preparing & Implementing for Success in 2023

Let’s take a step back and take a look at the characteristics and the routines followed by those companies who achieve amazing results.

They Establish a Success Discipline and Rhythm

Preparing and implementing for your annual business success is not something that just happens. You must dedicate time specifically for this by scheduling strategic time spaces. These spaces must allow enough time for understanding the available information, asking critical questions, introspective thinking, stakeholder collaboration, and truly fresh thinking.

Many companies scheduled these spaces at the beginning of each year to ensure that nothing can get in the way of them taking this time. They are not optional and cannot be cancelled. This attention to rhythm and discipline assures that this critical strategic preparation and implementation are given the full attention that they deserve.

A sample annual strategic rhythm may look something like this:

• Monthly exec team meetings to review performance and plan
  • A half or full day each month
• Quarterly exec team offsite meetings to take a deeper dive
  • One or two full days each quarter
• Fall annual planning offsite with research, evaluation & planning
  • 2 full days each year

Companies who do not have a plan often make the excuse that a rhythm like this would take way too much time. But highly successful companies who implement this type of rhythm and discipline and would all agree that without this time, there is no possible way to excel and achieve their lofty goals.

They Collect the Data Needed for Intelligent Insights

Highly successful companies do not rely on their feelings or individual bias for the development of their plan. They collect the necessary information for objective review and to determine the facts more accurately. As a matter of fact, it is far more beneficial to hope that you are surprised by the data than to assume that you already know everything. Each surprise you encounter teaches you something that you did not know. This makes you and your plan better and more competitive.

Some data that you may want to gather as part of your annual planning process could include:

• Team Insights
  • Your team member happiness, engagement, and dedication score.
  • Areas in which your team feels you excel.
  • Areas in which your team feels you need to improve.
  • Your team’s perception of your marketplace unique selling proposition.
• Client Insights
  • Your clients’ overall satisfaction score.
  • Areas in which your clients feel you excel.
  • Areas in which your clients feel you need to improve.
  • Your clients’ perception of your marketplace positioning.
• Organizational Insights
  • What are your sales closing rates by marketing channel?
  • What is your marketing ROI by marketing channel?
  • What products or services generate your best and worst profit margin?
  • What factors may impact your sales or margins in the coming year?
• Competitive Insights
  • How does your website rank on search engines compared to competitors?
  • How does your messaging compare to your competitors?
  • How do your offerings and pricing models compare to your competitors?
• Market Insights
  • Which of your products or services are growing in demand and which are declining?
  • What words is the market using to search for your products and services?
  • To what upcoming trends do you need to pay attention?

Every company is different with regard to what data might provide the critical insights for them to reach a greater level of success. As you practice your planning, you will continue to improve your knowledge of what critical data you need and the insights this approach will provide.

They Develop Their Plan

The first element of an effective success plan is setting specific goals. There is no right or wrong answer for how many years into the future that you should look when doing this. However, the fewest number of years forward that we have seen, as effective, is three years. Then, for each of the next three years, you should outline your key success measures. Some of these success measures might include:

• Annual Sales
• Profit Margin
• Client Retention Rates
• Sales By Product / Service Type
• Number of Team Members / Future Org Chart

The more specific and detailed your plan, the more successful you will be.

By using and understanding the right data and insights through an open-minded and curious review, you can create a plan with greater clarity and intention. When we work with our clients to help them develop their plan, we define the following key elements:

• Critical Areas of Focus
  • These are the overarching areas to which we must pay attention over the next two to three years if we are going to succeed in achieving our business goals. We list these and then prioritize them in order of importance.
• Mission Strategies
  • These are the consolidated areas of focus to which we must allocate attention and resources over the next two to three years that are most important to our business success.
• Annual Priorities
  • These are the specific areas of focus beneath our defined mission strategies for which we must create initiatives in order to ensure our most critical areas of focus are being addressed.
• SMARTs
  • These are the specific projects or initiatives we are going to complete on a quarter by quarter basis that ensure we are successfully moving our company forward to meet our long-term business goals. Every SMART must contain its own unique and quantifiable success measure(s).

They Establish the Right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

When you have developed a plan using the approach outlined above, you should have the knowledge necessary to identify the key performance measures which you need to ensure your success.

This list of possible KPIs can get overwhelming quickly. You can drown yourself in a sea of data. Our advice is to go ahead and make a complete list of all the data that you would like to track. Then, take a step back and start to prioritize your list by what will move your success meter the most. A good goal is to have an initial list of 10 or fewer (less is better) key business indicators that you need to track, based on your defined business goals.

Let’s look at an example. If your #1 annual priority is new client acquisition, the most important KPIs for you to track would include:

• # of new qualified leads per month
• Your new qualified lead closing rate

It is just that simple. If you are achieving your monthly goals for these two KPIs, you will achieve your new client acquisition goal for the year. So, if these KPIs are on track, you do not need to measure anything else for this initiative. Keep it simple.

They Implement the Necessary Tracking Systems

One of the biggest challenges we see with our clients is that they do not have the systems in place to accurately measure their most critical KPIs. Here is a little secret. NO business has the systems in place to accurately measure their most critical KPIs until they clearly define these KPIs and set up necessary systems to measure them.

This makes perfect sense, right? How would a company possibly have the system to accurately measure KPIs without first defining what these are? The first step is defining the KPIs, then identifying and creating the right systems to create accurate measurement. It is important to avoid getting distracted by what your current systems can measure. These may or may not be your most important KPIs. You cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Let’s go back to our example above. If you need to measure your # of new qualified leads per month, here is what you need to accurately measure this:

• A clear definition of what a “qualified lead” means to your organization
• A CRM system that allows you to mark new leads as “qualified” when these criteria are met
• Team training to ensure that all qualified leads are marked properly in your system
• A way to accurately pull a report (often or maybe in real time) of the number of qualified leads for a given month

For each of your identified KPIs, you must create this type of system. Once in place, you can focus on achieving the results needed.

They Engage & Align Their Team

The most successful companies engage their entire team in their plan. They outline the specific goals and the most critical KPIs. They tie everyone’s role responsibilities and the company projects/initiatives to these goals. Everyone understands how what they do each and every day fits into the overall plan. Everyone understands the value they create, why this is important to the overall team’s success and the impact that this creates for themselves, their team and their clients.

Some companies will even tie profit sharing and other goal-based perks to an individual team member’s performance and the overall company’s success.

If your team understands the vision of the company and that their specific role is critical, the performance of the entire organization elevates.

They Measure, Review & Adjust Often

Let’s say that I had a personal goal to lose 10 pounds this year. At what frequency of weighing myself on the scale would you say that I would have greatest chance of success?

• 1X – once at the end of the year
• 4X – one time each quarter
• 12X – one time each month
• 365X – once a day

Of course, the more frequently something is measured, the greater the odds of success.

The most successful companies have the systems to measure their most critical KPIs often. These measures may even generate reports in real time. This information needs to be readily available and viewable by everyone who is able to contribute to your results. If you need X qualified leads in a month to be successful, the number of new qualified leads should be reviewed on a daily basis. If not, your odds of achieving your goal diminish greatly.

The quote “What gets measured gets managed” rings true. Once you have created an effective rhythm for measuring and reviewing your most critical KPIs, that next step is to manage these outcomes to achieve your defined goals.

Let’s go back to our lead generation example. If you set a goal of 19 new qualified leads per month and you conduct business Monday–Friday, there are about 23 business days in a month. This means that to achieve your goal, you need to generate .83 new qualified leads per day. If you are 4 days into the new month, you should already have 3+ new qualified leads. If not, this situation needs managed.

Some examples of ways to manage these results to improve your KPIs could be to:

• Spend more money on advertising
• Get your current marketing to convert at a higher level
• Create a more compelling sales offer

As you measure, review and adjust to achieve your defined KPIs, you will excel as an organization.

FAQs – Preparing & Implementing for Greater Business Success in 2023

How can I prepare for greater business success in 2023?

The most important first step is to carve out the time necessary to establish a cohesive, actionable business plan that identifies the strategic initiatives you believe will lead to your desired growth goals. If you don’t already build time for annual planning into your success rhythm, start by setting up a series of meetings with your exec team to work through the items we discussed above.

What are the 4 basic elements of business success?

There are four essential elements that must exist for your business to become – and remain – successful:

• Strategic focus – Your management team must put in the time necessary for establishing business goals, planning the initiatives necessary to achieve these goals, and analyzing the data that will let you know whether your efforts are achieving their desired outcome.
• People – Your team is one of your most critical components to your success. Your staff must not only possess the skillset necessary to deliver high quality work, but they must also be aligned with your company culture and values, and be invested in the long term success of your business.
• Operations – You must establish and document the processes necessary for your team to be successful in their role.
• Marketing – In order to grow your business, you need a steady influx of qualified leads for your sales team to close. Therefore, your marketing efforts are critical to the success of your business.

What are the 3 ways to prepare for the future of business?

The only thing we know for sure about the future of business is that it won’t look like the present. The only constant in the business world is change. Therefore, the best way to prepare for the future of business is to place your company in the best possible position to capitalize on this change. The following three steps will help ensure you’re prepared:

• Recognize the value of adaptability – Failure to adapt to changing trends in your industry will make it virtually impossible to remain a market leader. A culture of adaptability is critical to your ongoing success as your industry evolves.
• Identify potential disruptors – Work with your team to generate a list of potential changes that may disrupt your industry in the next few years. Identify which of these will have the greatest impact on your business and then monitor these disruptors carefully so that you can become one of the first businesses to address them as they occur.
• Prepare a change plan – Make sure your team is prepared for how to handle the disruptions that change your industry. To do this, you must first understand how this change is impacting your business and your industry. Then, you must provide your team with the tools necessary to address these disruptions head on.

How do you run an annual planning process?

As we discussed earlier, we outlined this in detail in our recent blog post on annual planning. We recommend that you review it for additional insight on how to get this process rolling. For tips on how to develop an annual marketing plan that will drive more qualified leads, read the companion post on our blog.

Start Preparing & Implementing Today

Believe it or not, you are probably spending more time spinning your wheels and dedicating your resources to things that are not going to move you forward than the time you will spend putting the elements of this approach into practice. Change can be hard. But, once you start and get into this rhythm, you will begin to gain clarity into what is important. You will begin to focus on the activities, KPIs, and actions that will allow you to grow your company faster, smarter and easier.

The more you do this work, the better you will become at it. You will begin to create systems. You will gain a clearer understanding of what creates the most impact. You will develop reports and structures that make this easier and easier. As you implement these systems, your knowledge and understanding of them will grow along with your company. The key is to start! If all you do is set some goals, do some competitive research, develop your KPIs and start tracking, reviewing and managing against these on a daily basis, you will see amazing results.

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. 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 Free 2023 Success Planning 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 Preparing & Implementing for Greater Business Success in 2023 appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

We are fortunate to work strategically with dozens of leading companies across a diverse mix of industries and markets. This allows us to gain a unique perspective and insight into the shifts and changes affecting businesses today.

Now that the world seems to be normalizing after COVID, there is a new set of factors creating pressures on businesses. Some of these factors include:

• Increasing interest rates
• Inflation fears
• Slowed consumer demand
• A turbulent stock market
• A continued tight labor market
• General uncertainty about the future

This uncertainty presents an opportunity for those businesses who can lead through the turbulent waters and focus on the right strategies.

How Streamlining Creates a Better Company

Streamlining means to make more efficient and effective by employing faster or simpler working methods. In this article, our primary focus will be on simplification. So, how does simplification create a better company? Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of some key business areas.

Operational Effectiveness

Let’s say that your 2023 annual plan has roughly 20 operational initiatives that your leadership team have brainstormed and planned for implementation in the coming year. Some ways to streamline or optimize these initiatives include:

1. Clearly define the resources needed to implement initiative

Outline the hard purchase costs as well as the internal team member resource costs for each of these initiatives to effectively estimate the full cost of each initiative. Then, with the full cost understood, rate the return on investment (ROI) for each initiative on a scale of 1 to 10. As you take these steps, you may realize that some of your planned initiatives are far less important than others. Some may even have a negative ROI. These can simply be eliminated.

2. Prioritize your initiatives against short-term and long-term business goals.

Organize this list with most critical short-term initiatives (2023 items) at the top down to the least important. Then do the same for your long-term (through 2025) priorities. This will provide you with clarity and insights into which of these can simply be eliminated from your 2023 list.

3. For each of your remaining priorities, be sure to outline defined specifics:

1. Who is accountable for the success tracking of the project?
2. What is the start date and end date of the project?
3. What other team members and resources are required for the project’s success?
4. How often is project progress going to be reported?
5. What are the criteria for the success of the project? Make absolutely sure that you spend the time to create clarity around this!

Read our article: Be Your Company’s Chief Simplification Officer

4. Apply this thought model to any new initiative ideas which may arise throughout the year.

You and your team already have a plan which is optimized for your success. However, it is inevitable that new ideas are going surface. If a new initiative idea is MORE important than those you have planned, then replace something. If a new initiative idea is not more important than those you have planned, put it on a list to possibly explore in the future.

As you take these steps, you will gain valuable insights into the impact, cost, and the specific success measures for each of your critical operational initiatives. In most cases, your list of possible initiatives will shrink as you focus on the priorities which are most important to the success of your business.

This practice will help you create a better company by:

• More effectively understanding and utilizing your precious resources
• Focusing only on those initiatives most important to your company’s success
• Ensuring that everyone involved in the implementation of your initiatives is 100% clear on the budget, timeline and the success measures of the initiative
• Being able to simply say no to any initiative ideas that are not as beneficial as those in your plan (this is a powerful benefit)

Free Streamlining Consultation

Schedule a free consultation to learn how to streamline your business initiatives for greater success.

Schedule Your Consultation

Another way to streamline is to provide clarity around the roles and responsibilities for each of your team members. Just like an operational priority, for each of your team members, you should create a set of BIG 3s. A BIG 3 clearly defines a team member’s 3 role responsibilities. Then, for each of these 3 (and only 3) role responsibilities, define:

The weight of the responsibility. This allows the team member to fully understand how you perceive the importance of the role. We use a scale that adds up 100% and assign a number of approximate monthly hours which corresponds to weight, like this:

• Example Role Responsibility #1 – 70% (121 hrs / mth)
• Example Role Responsibility #2 – 20% (34 hrs / mth)
• Example Role Responsibility #3 – 10% (17 hrs / mth)

An overview statement of the role responsibility

• How an individual’s BIG 3s tie into your company’s core values, purpose and mission
• The key success measures of each role responsibility
• The more quantifiable, the better
• A check in rhythm to review status

It should be 100% clear to each team member whether they are successfully achieving their BIG 3s. On at least a monthly basis, there should be check in with their supervisor to convey their status and discuss any issues they are having or additional help or support they may need. We use a scale of:

• Green – All their success measures are being hit and on track
• Yellow – Their success measures are being hit, but there are some potential issues we should address
• Red – Their success measures are not being hit and we need to address these ASAP

By creating and using BIG 3s effectively, you create a better company by:

• Providing extreme clarity and confidence to every team member as to how they will be successful in their role
• Creating a system by which your organization quickly and accurately identifies areas of focus to ensure that your organization is achieving its goals
• Creating a culture of accountability and one where everyone understands how their individual role ties into the overall company vision.

Marketing Success

Today, there are countless potential channels through which you can market your business. We have found that the biggest challenge is not identifying all these possibilities, but to simply focus on the ones that are necessary for you to achieve your defined business goals. Many marketing teams get pulled in too many directions and in the end, do not effectively execute.

Each year, we work with our clients to develop a Collaborative ROI Projection Model™. This model allows us to streamline our clients’ marketing plans to focus only on those channels and the related activities needed to achieve their business goals. Some of the information in each of these models includes:

Potential Business Verticals – These can be:

• Product lines
• Key industry targets
• Marketing Channel ROI Calculations

If it makes sense to do paid search marketing (e.g. Google PPC), for each individual vertical, our model will include:

• The proposed monthly spend
• Seasonal spend variances (if any)
• The projected ad impressions we will receive
• The projected click through rate
• The projected cost per click
• The projected landing page conversion rate (number of leads or sales made)
• The value of a conversion to the business
• The average profit margin for the conversion
• The estimated ROI of that strategy

By taking this approach and being armed with the information from this model, you create a better company by being able to clearly see:

• What marketing strategies create the best ROI for your company
• What budget is required to achieve the goals for each identified vertical
• How we can shift budget from low ROI strategies to those with a higher ROI
• The specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we need to track and hit each month to achieve your marketing and business goals.
• Which marketing strategies we can simply eliminate from our mix.

Challenges to Strategic Optimization

As you read the examples above, they naturally make sense. So, why aren’t all organizations able to streamline their strategies? Let’s take a look at some of the typical obstacles we see businesses encounter.

Evolving Your Organizational Mindset

For many years, organizations have lived by the mindset that more is better. More products, more job responsibilities, more marketing channels, etc. The notion of streamlining implies that a greater focus on fewer things which matter most is a far better approach. This discipline has made even more possible through the advancement of business intelligence tools. Companies now have access to far more data. The effective access to this data provides greater business intelligence.

Optimizing your strategies across your company requires a conscious effort and discipline. It is a shift in mindset away from more is better.

To help you on this mindset shift journey, there are a couple of books that we recommend by Greg McKeown.

• Essentialism – The disciplined pursuit of less
• Effortless – Make it easier to do what matters most

Lack of Critical Information

When we begin this conversation with many of our clients, their first response is that they do not have the information needed to make streamlining their organization possible. It seems obvious to us that this would be the case.

As you begin to focus on streamlining your strategies, the outcome of this effort is the identification of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to be successful. Until a business identifies what these are, there is no way that they just happen to have this information available. As you implement this approach, you will come to understand what information you need. Then, you must create the systems to have this information in as close to real-time as possible.

Creating The Required Systems

Companies implement software and systems based on the goals and priorities at a moment in time. There is no avoiding this. As you begin to streamline your strategies, it is highly possible that you’ll discover that to be successful, you need a more detailed data structure for you to gain the focus and intelligence you need. Sometimes we find that a company’s existing systems infrastructure is not flexible enough to be altered to provide this information. In this case, the systems may need to be upgraded or changed to allow the company to streamline their strategies.

Let’s look at an example of this. One of our clients recently implemented a new CRM system. Their consultant set up all their contacts according to how they had been organizing their target contacts to date. As we worked to develop their new Collaborative ROI Projection Model for their upcoming year’s marketing plan, we identified that to streamline their marketing it would makes sense to focus on different classes of clients within each of their target verticals:

• Class A targets within a designated vertical are contacts with the potential to purchase or refer $500k or more a year in sales.
• Class C targets within a designated vertical are contacts with the potential to only refer $20k a year in sales.

Naturally, far less time, expense and resources should be spent on a Class C target than a Class A. This would greatly streamline their marketing resources and increase their overall marketing ROI. To achieve this level of segmentation, results tracking and marketing success, their CRM required some reprograming.

Streamlining Your Strategy FAQs

Q: What does it mean to streamline business processes?

A: Streamlining business processes refers to the intelligent simplification of these processes to focus on its most impactful elements though prioritization and the reduction of complexity. It reduces unnecessary steps or use of resources which could be better utilized.

Q: How do I prioritize which strategies to streamline first?

A: Once you’ve set a clear vision for your organization including your annual mission goals, core values, and purpose, identify and prioritize what strategic initiatives are most important to your success. This will help you determine the how to prioritize your streamlining efforts.

Q:How should I go about streamlining a specific strategy?

A: We have found that most companies are used to doing things a particular way. That approach and process has been part of what makes them successful. It is very difficult for someone in the middle of the trees to see the forest. For this reason, one of the best ways to streamline your strategies is to hire an outside expert in this area. They will see things through a different lens.

Start Streamlining Today

As with most effective improvement strategies, the key is to take the first step. When you start streamlining, you will begin to see your strategies in a new light. You will begin to identify the clutter and extra effort spent in all you do. You will begin to identify your most critical paths, develop greater focus, and come to understand the information and systems you need to become more successful.

Summary

Streamlining your strategies helps you create a stronger company in many ways:

• It forces you to identify the most impactful use of your company resources
• It helps you build more intelligent decision-making models
• It provides clarity, focus and a connection to your vision for your team
• It requires you to identify your most critical KPIs and create effective tracking systems for these
• It gives you the tools to eliminate extra effort and clutter along your road to success

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, allowing 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 streamline your strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Streamlining 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 Streamline Your 2023 Strategies to Create a Better Company appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.