3 Mistakes to Avoid When Deploying BI Tools

Business Intelligence is gaining tremendous popularity among organizations. It simply describes a set of methodologies that businesses use in order to convert raw data into useful information for better decision making. However, with a rise in the number of BI solutions, the probability of companies choosing wrong BI software for their business problems has also grown. So, in order to make the most of their BI investment, companies should avoid making mistakes while investing in BI software.

Here are a few mistakes to avoid when deploying BI tools:

1. Having a Lack of Business Knowledge: Projects that completely rely on a single BI tool are doomed to fail. No single tool is bound to solve all business problems. So, when selecting a BI tool, companies should first understand

• Business problems that they are trying to solve
• Goals they are trying to attain
• BI tool they should use

2. Failing to Bring Everyone On Board: BI tools tend to fail most of the time because employees are completely clueless on how to use these tools. So, before buying any business intelligence tool, organizations should take each employee on board and

• Address their concerns and queries about the BI tool
• Show them how it will benefit the company and employees

3. Providing Insufficient Training: BI software is a complex structure that has lots of functionality in it. However, many businesses exhaust their entire BI budgets on either a few weeks’ training or software licenses. They fail to understand that it requires a lot of training to understand, how the software works. To avoid such mistakes, businesses should look for new ideas such as

• Providing expert training in a slow and systematic way
• Looking for someone technically trained who can explain software’s usage clearly
• Scheduling training sessions in small units for better understanding

A reliable business intelligence consultant can help businesses avoid these mistakes, set up new BI software, ameliorate existing systems, and make strategic decisions.

How Can Responsive Website Design Be a Big Win for Business Websites?

Responsive web design continues to surge in popularity, as the usage of the internet on mobile devices is steadily increasing. So, nowadays, to have a mobile-ready website is not an option, but a necessity. A responsive website not only helps businesses to reach a large audience but also provides its users with improved visibility on search engines, greater ROI, better user experience and much more. Hence, organizations need to ensure that they have a responsive website that can be easily accessed from all major mobile platforms, be it a smartphone, a tablet, or a smartwatch.

Let’s see why it is important for business websites to have a responsive design:

1. Search Engine Ranking: A mobile-friendly website design can have a significant impact on the website’s search engine ranking. A responsive design contains one URL and the same HTML that allows search engines like Google to crawl, index and organize website content. On the other hand, having a separate mobile site can only prolong Google’s process.

2. Audience Engagement: Responsive design allows businesses to reach potential audiences via mobile devices by providing fast navigation, easy-to-read features and dynamically altering its format depending on the device used to access it.

3. Traffic Conversion: With responsive design, users can access the website faster and easily on mobile devices. To do that, Google’s Page Speed developers suggest that website content load limit should not exceed 1 second and the entire page should load within 2 seconds. While a desktop version website takes more time to load, responsive design allows users to access website content in a short time by providing fast navigation with minimum scrolling and resizing that leads to more traffic flow.

4. Google Recommendation: Google recommends all website owners who aren’t taking advantage of responsive design to use it for their websites, as it is soon going to demote websites that are not mobile-friendly. Having a mobile readily design can help businesses sell more of their products and/or services, get better SEO results, and enhance user experience.

5. Time & Cost: A mobile-friendly website is always faster, keeps development cost down, and saves money & time, as compared to a stand-alone website created for mobile viewing that consumes a lot of time and money.

Nowadays, to run a successful business, it is essential to show your competitive presence. So, having a mobile-friendly website is all that businesses can do to stay ahead of their competitors and improve their website performance. 

The Ultimate Cheat-Sheet On Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing, since its emergence has proven to be the most effective marketing method. Marketers no longer rely on the traditional aka outbound marketing, instead, use new marketing technique to attract new customers, influence future purchases, increase brand awareness and much more.

Image Credits:towriteastory.com

Before you leap into the concept of inbound marketing, first consider asking a few questions to yourself:

• Which business are you running, B2B or B2C?
• Which industry are you working in?
• Whom are you targeting?

Why does your business need it?

Inbound marketing has a number of benefits as it:

• Leverages permission-based marketing approach to engage and attract customers through social media, SEO, blogs, etc.
• Provides useful information in the form of blogs, social posts, landing pages, etc.
• Uses captivating content to solve potential customers’ problems. 

Want inbound marketing to work wonders for your business?

Here are a few things you need to ensure to make permission-based marketing work wonders for your business:

1. Developing Content Tactics: Provide useful information to your audience in the form of blogs, social media posts, landing pages, etc. Before that, chalk out comprehensive personas your ideal customers, gather information on their requirements and interests, and then create content that can drive the right traffic to your website.
2. Build a Social Media Following: After creating informative content, it is very important to share it in an interesting way. Creating a quality social media following is the best way to spread your content and engage your audience.
3. Capture Prospects: Once you start getting consistent views from your audience, it becomes easy to generate leads and fuel sales through resources and form submissions. At this stage, you can use gated content to capture more information about your leads.
4. Nurture Leads into Customers: It’s not always necessary that every prospect may become your customer after viewing your informative content. Email marketing is the best way to continue educating your prospects and encourage them to buy your product in the future.

Inbound marketing, if done well, is definitely a great way to reach your target audience and generate qualified leads. Hiring an inbound marketing consultant can help you develop an effective inbound marketing strategy and achieve your business goals.