by Irina Georgieva | Jan 2, 2025
Thanks to audience data businesses now have the ability to track and collect large amounts of consumer data. These can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns that can help businesses to increase their sales. But there’s another important ability that collecting big data affords businesses. This is the know-how related to building relationships with consumers.
All the information that is gathered can be used to create buyer personas that help you understand the consumer better. Moreover, audience data also shows us that it’s much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Existing customers, once they become loyal to your brand, can also act as vocal ambassadors for your business, all by themselves. If they enjoy your products and services, they may tell their friends and family about them, leading to free marketing for you.
Using audience data for developing relationships with customers
Customer experience has become important when it comes to enabling business success and meeting sales targets. Research shows that nearly two-thirds of companies now compete based on their customer experience alone. In 2010, this number was just 36%. But what do big data and big data companies have to do with customer experience?
They hold the key to creating better, more targeted, and personalized messages that can help you convert leads to loyal customers. Moreover, nearly 74% of consumers say that they are somewhat likely, at the very least, to make purchases based on their customer experience alone.
To develop better customer experiences, you’ll need to understand their pain points, as well as what they are looking for from you and this is where audience data comes in handy.
The three kinds of audience data you can collect
There are three main kinds of data you can collect from your consumers. These include:
Big picture data
Big picture data is related to your target demographic, information about current trends, as well as what consumers are interested in. This type of audience data enables you to create projections regarding what the audience wants. You can then create a marketing campaign tailoring your findings to help your campaign resonate more with your audience.
Transactional data
This includes data related to any and all purchases made by a consumer. You can specifically track the products and services they are buying, as well as the number of times they are making that purchase. You can track a consumer’s buying habits, including how often they shop from you and what they usually look for. This can help you tailor recommendations to them or send them coupons and offers.
Granular data
This is the kind of data that is limited to a person and their buying attitudes and behaviors. You can collect such data from mobile apps, loyalty programs, and more. Granular is used to create tailored, personalized messages that can enable a consumer to feel special. Moreover, you have access to all the insight and information related to consumer behavior, as well as their buying patterns. This can enable you to improve your marketing campaigns.
Five ways you can use audience data to build relationships with consumers
By building relationships with your consumers, you’ll be able to create a loyal group of consumers, who you can expect to make regular purchases. Here is how you can go about building relationships with your customers with the help of audience data:
Personalize customer experiences
With the help of personal granular data, you can better tailor customer experiences catered to each customer. This can enable you to build strong relationships with your customers and provide them with experiences that make them want to make purchases. You’ll be able to refine your messaging to create targeted ads that make consumers want to buy your products or services.
Targeted promotions
Using audience data, you can keep track of everything that a consumer is buying from you. This will allow you to recommend items that are similar to what they normally buy, increasing their chances of purchasing them. You can also send coupons and offers pertinent to what the consumer regularly buys to get them to make a purchase. This is in contrast to sending random offers and coupons, which may or may not be items the consumer is interested in.
Provide useful and relevant content
Consider providing content that the consumer is likely to provide useful, as well. If you notice through your customer surveys, or social listening, that customers need help regarding a certain product, create an article or blog post about it. This can enable your audience to feel heard and help you provide information that can lead to them using your products or services better.
More importantly, the consumer will feel heard, and this can improve customer loyalty as well.
Providing products and services based on what consumers want
With the help of customer surveys, and in general, following what consumers are saying on social media, you can find out about products or services that they are interested in. Using this information, you can then provide them with products or services that they’ve been asking for. This provides you with information on products or services that will sell well and gives the consumers what they want as well.
Building customer experience
Customer experience is key to ensuring that you develop great relationships with consumers and that they, in turn, become loyal to your business. You can use data to ensure that consumers have an easy time once they enter the purchasing funnel. Make your website easier to navigate and use, and make the registration process simple. You can also make loyalty programs based on the data you’ve collected to ensure that you build trust among your consumers.
Conclusion
Audience data can be useful when it comes to building relationships with your consumers. By using the audience data you’ve collected, you can tailor personalized messages and optimize your marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to retain your customers better and develop loyalty among them as well.
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by Irina Georgieva | Jan 2, 2025
As a business owner, you are the one that decides what work environment the company will have. That means that happy, motivated, and capable employees are your success to claim. But what if you are dealing with poor work performance and unmotivated employees? That’s on you too.
Not knowing how to deal with poor work performance will always be considered poor leadership. Besides the fact that you will lose time, money, and energy while ignoring employees that don’t perform well, you will also demoralize the other employees. In the end, not addressing performance issues in the workplace will lead to a toxic work environment with unmotivated employees.
Entrepreneurs share how they manage poor work performance
Since we are pretty sure you don’t want to build an unhealthy work environment, we asked professionals, how do they manage poor work performance in order to get the benefit for both sides. And guess what? There are more than a few ways you can try to help them overcome whatever is pulling them back.
Motivate
Someone with 100 percent motivation and 75 percent ability to perform will often produce above-average results. However, regardless of motivation, a worker with just 25% talent would not be able to reach the level of success you intend. This is why job selection and recruitment are such important aspects of successful management.
During the selection process, make sure to determine capacity appropriately. Later, the answer on how to correct an employee with a weak performance is training and motivation, but most organizations lack the time and money to address major flaws.
Nabil Mounem, Founder & Marketer of Have Websites
Encourage
Encouragement is crucial, especially when an employee is trying to break bad habits, deal with a difficult situation, or work through a very heavy workload. When dealing with poor work performance, keep track of your employee’s success and search for places where you can provide encouragement and show how much you appreciate them.
Encouragement is not the same as praise. A compliment is a positive answer to something that has already been accomplished or completed: “Wow, you did a fantastic job on that report!” Encouragement is a positive reaction to something that is being done or is in the process of being done: “You’re making good progress, and I’m confident the report will be fantastic.”
Darshan Somashekar, Founder & CEO at Spider Solitaire Challenge
Give appropriate training
You should make sure that all team members receive proper preparation, which includes the success goals, simply and succinctly. Since employee development is one of the most important things, be sure you log anything and don’t just talk about it. This ongoing training should provide your staff with new skills and experience that would benefit both you and them in the long run.
Inquire personally with employers to see how the preparation can be changed. Are there any topics on which they’d like to hear more? Do they believe they possess the necessary expertise and abilities for the job? What obstacles are preventing them from finishing the job to a reasonable standard?
Andrew Smith, Founder of CozySeating
Listen first and talk late
One of the most important characteristics of a successful leader is listening. Don’t just assume that you understand the root cause of poor performance. It’s time to convene a meeting and pay attention. You may believe you know what’s causing the anger or bad behaviors, but you won’t know for sure until you hear from your employee.
If you struggle managing poor work performance sit down with your employee and inquire about their job. Inquire into your frustrations. Inquire about any issues. Inquire about your success. Determine whether or not the employee is aware of the performance problems.
Dennis Thankachan, CEO at Lightyear
Set clear performance standards
My one tip on how to handle employee performance issues is communication. Often, an employee is underperforming not because of their abilities, but because expectations weren’t clear. So, when I have a low-performing employee, the first step is to address it with the employee in a clear way, so they understand what needs to be improved and so both of you can verify that you’re on the same page.
Then, I create a performance plan that spans a defined amount of time and outlines milestones, that if met, should turn the performance around. I also make it clear what will happen if the milestones in the performance plan aren’t met, so there are no surprises if employee performance issues end up with letting the low-performing employee go.
Evan Tarver, Co-founder & CEO at Selling Signals sellingsignals.com
As a business owner, I noticed that one of the most common causes of poor performance is lack of adequate job description and absence of clear and written procedures. It is important to let the employee knows what exactly he should do, and assign him tasks along with expected targets to achieve. Those targets have to be measurable and realistic and should be achieved in a previously determined time frame.
The point is that awareness and acknowledgment of all of that is a catalyst that triggers employees to work effectively and productively. Particularly, if there is a clear and effective work progression tracking in the business environment.
Jeremy Ong, Founder of HUSTLR
Regular coaching sessions
Regular coaching sessions can help you find a way to handle employee performance issues and help them get back on track. They’ll feel supported and motivated to pursue their personal and professional goals. You can do this after performance reviews that facilitate a culture of open communication between the employee and the management.
It encourages discussion and helps establish the importance of setting goals. On this note, a performance review should be able to inspire employees to raise their productivity and improve their outlook instead of discouraging them. In our case, by following a real-time feedback session, we’ve tremendously helped them adjust to the new normal setting.
Michael Hammelburger, CEO at The Bottom Line Group
Keep in mind why you hired them
Keep in mind that you hired this employee because you see the potential in that talent. Keeping this in mind allows you to open-mindedly seek the reason behind the employee performance issues.
Before discussing with an underperforming employee, reflect on yourself being his/her leader. Try to evaluate the tasks you have given, the goals you set, and whether you have provided ample guidance and support he needs. Besides guiding you on your future discussion with the employee, this also helps you reassess and improve your leadership.
Sam Dolbel, Co-founder and CEO of SINC Workforce
Ask them to set a task deadline
I do not force them a deadline from my side but make them calculate the time they’ll take to finish a task. If due to low performance, they are not able to complete the task within a time frame set by them, I ask them the reason for the same.
I ask them the hurdles they faced or the reasons which caused this failure. While answering these questions, eventually they figure the problem on their own! If they are a genuine learner, they’ll ask me for some time to improve which I happily allow. I provide them with time and courses to improve their skill and perform better.
Shivbhadrasinh Gohil, Co-founder of Meetanshi
Observe
Being an HR or manager is not a piece of cake. This is especially the case when you have to be ready to make difficult confrontations with difficult employees. Here are some tips that on how to handle employee performance issues:
- Give them a chance to improve by providing employee support and observe how they perform at first.
- If the above doesn’t work, confrontation is the only way left and this conversation should not be delayed as you never know if the employee is aware of low-performance or doing it on purpose.
- Be specific while giving feedback, vague feedback may not be good enough for everyone, you need to pinpoint the area of concern.
Mike Thompson, CEO & Direct Lender Hyperlend
Shift responsibilities accordingly
Avoid falling into the trap of assuming that low-performance is the employee’s issue when it can often be due to misalignment. If your employee seems engaged and shows aptitudes that could make them useful in other areas, consider shifting their responsibilities accordingly. Thanks to this strategy, a low-performing employee became a vital member of our company after we made readjustments.
We had discovered that their strengths were being wasted by parts of their role that amplified their weaknesses and ultimately weighed them down. Through some experimentation and flexibility, and understanding our employee’s strong suits, we modified their day-to-day operations and were able to better utilize their talent. In doing so, we avoided the arduous process of having to fire a member of our team.
Linn Atiyeh, Founder and CEO of Bemana
Conclusion
It’s easy to blame someone as lazy and consider that hiring him was a mistake, but that’s something a bad boss would do. Therefore, always be understanding and focus on the bigger picture. We are all human beings and behind an underperforming employee can be a thousand reasons. So next time you are wondering how to deal with poor work performance, implement one of these proven ways. In the end, you might motivate your employee to be even better than you expected him to be in the first place.
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by Irina Georgieva | Jan 2, 2025
If you notice an upward trend in the number of data rooms, it’s all because of their demand. Therefore, it is difficult for the average client to choose among many options. Compare different data room providers to choose the most suitable option.
3 top data room providers in the market
Are you looking for the best VDR products on the market? Then be sure to study the full list and make your conclusions. Among the most popular data room providers are:
They have high ratings thanks to reviews and a huge customer base. Also, you will learn more about prices, advanced features, and more. Choose the best data rooms and take advantage of the free trial to understand your needs.
iDeals
This platform is well suited for all types of businesses, ranging from small ones. The electronic data room supports the largest number of operating systems, including Linux. There are all types of support, ranging from chat by phone to live rep.
Key data room software features include:
- easy management of files & folders;
- secure fence view;
- group overview reports;
- look & feel customization.
There are more features, but these are the key ones that make the product really special. The price for the pro plan for a month is estimated at $460. There are other plans: for business and enterprise. To get a full-price calculation, you must complete the form indicating your data, email, and company name.
Sharefile
This offer is also suitable for any type of business but does not support Linux OS. Data room software supports many languages and has many different tools for work in its arsenal. Among them are share file content viewer, the view-only file, watermarking, Q&A, data room index, advanced analytics, and others.
The price of this electronic data room depends on the plan. There are four in total. The first – basic – $50, advanced – $80, premium – $122 and virtual data room – $338.
Box
Founded in 2005 in San Francisco this online data room software, accompanies Box’s extensive line of products. The platform positions itself as reliable storage and supports major operating systems. The price starts at $13.50 per month. There are 4 plans in total: Business, Business Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus.
Each plan includes:
- unlimited storage;
- technical support during local business hours;
- built-in integrations with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Slack;
- unlimited e-signatures via web app;
- data loss protection.
What is important to know before buying
Data room vendors regularly compete for a place of honor among competitors. Thanks to this, you have the opportunity to buy the best, as there will always be updates.
Pay attention to promotions, so you will have more chances to save. Be sure to evaluate the level of trust in the virtual data room providers. If there are a lot of negative reviews, then it is worth considering.
It is important for the user to evaluate the work of the support service before buying a virtual data room. To do this, write something in the chat on the site. Check how quickly you get an answer to an individual question. Also, evaluate the prospects of working in other languages and the possible volume. Remember, choosing a more extensive plan is better if you need to store a lot of information.
How to choose
Be sure to compare virtual data rooms before paying for the plan. Keep in mind that your data must be in a safe place and protected. Ignore false information from unreliable sources on some sites.
Before paying, you should evaluate the work of virtual data rooms yourself. Choose from the list of suitable options and see if there is a free trial option. If yes, then evaluate the prospects of work here yourself.
Don’t choose data rooms with many bad reviews and low ratings. Give preference to those that occupy high positions. Try to find out the prospects of work and understand your goal. If you succeed, you can easily learn more about the useful qualities and those that are unique to specific data room services.
Before choosing, it would be nice to clarify your questions with the support service. Get as much useful information as possible to prevent misunderstandings in the future. Do not forget to clarify what is included in the indicated price and how it can be solved if certain difficulties arise.
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by Irina Georgieva | Jan 2, 2025
An efficient data room is the dream of most entrepreneurs who want to own a business that is completely autonomous from them and processes in a couple of minutes. It’s easy enough to do if you start considering a few criteria. Conversely, if you don’t take them into account, you will end up with a completely dysfunctional program that will take up a lot of your money and time. You can select your perfect data room on this website, it’s easy enough to do because of the honest reviews. You also can compare virtual data rooms there.
It is not always possible to achieve efficiency in using a particular corporate application. The fact is, if you are not succeeding in using enterprise applications, the reason may lie either internally or externally.
Either way, the best data rooms are recognized by experts as the best milestone in enterprise software in the last ten years. Is it surprising? Not really. Every business strives to automate and eliminate routine because routine and daily tasks steal a huge amount of work time daily. Can you imagine what you could accomplish if that time was spent usefully on actual work instead of, in fact, preparing for work?
VDR during due diligence
The phenomenon of adopting VDRs as a secondary or major instrument for performing due diligence during commercial transactions is extremely puzzling. If you have ever participated in a transaction, such as an M&A, a legal or financial audit, fundraising, an initial coin offering, or an IPO.
Then you may be certain that it requires a lot of time. You are unlucky if you’ve been working on these transactions under conventional circumstances. Every time you open the file area, you might feel as though someone is watching you. There definitely have been times when, despite having checked on every shelf in the room by yourself, you trivialized your inability to locate the paper you need. One essential document was once lost for two days before being discovered in an unexpected stack of papers. An online data room software put a stop to conventional corporate practices.
A safe and well-organized file repository by nature, the virtual data room providers offer superior due diligence capabilities in the following ways:
- Folders are used to efficiently organize all material in one location.
- The sophisticated security mechanism allows you to freely offer access to any document without worrying about data leaks.
- Almost all data room providers include redundant features that help streamline the due diligence procedure itself.
This clearly benefits every executive, as we can see. It also holds true for any business.
Possible issues of using VDRs
The software occasionally falls short of expectations. Here, the staff’s ineptitude is the primary cause since they either don’t fully understand how to utilize the technology or haven’t received adequate training in its use. Having malfunctioning software will have the following negative effects on you:
- Staff members who are on edge and still learning how to use the technology. Each virtual data room offers a little bit of training that can prevent this.
- Decreased general effectiveness. This could be the situation. Ironically, a technology meant to boost productivity really does the opposite. Another significant effect of incorrect usage is this.
- Spending money on an instrument is always ineffective. Since data room services memberships last for months and you use a poorly configured product, your money is being wasted.
Most of the time, all you need to do is follow the instructions and ask the customer care service any concerns you may have in order to minimize the bad effects of this instrument on your organization. You can only fully comprehend and improve your whole workflow this way.
Workforce preparation
How can you get your workers ready to deal with something unfamiliar? Since this is a relatively recent development in the service sector, the best virtual data room providers are actually quite a sophisticated product. The user interface of modern virtual data rooms might become overloaded with features, or users may become scared to use them for fear of making a mistake. For those business owners who fit this description, we have some surprisingly excellent news. If you take into account the following factors, you won’t choose incorrectly:
- Use every training service that the software developer provides. The only person who can fully explain all the complexities of their own product is the creator, thus this is absolutely crucial. Help is available in the form of online tutorials, offline lectures, or FAQs. Which option will you select? You have the choice. Because your workers will treat the procedure more seriously, we may suggest that live training be preferred. Select the online alternative if this choice is not accessible.
- You should continually teach your workers how to utilize the program. The majority of employees just aren’t used to working with unconventional methods, which gives them the impression that they do tasks more quickly. In actuality, folks who are unwilling to learn frequently make this error. Modern technology should be used by the whole firm, without exception.
- Don’t be scared to make mistakes since, if properly configured, every electronic data room protects against human error. Indeed, thanks to backups and properly implemented security controls, the typical user won’t often be able to make a serious mistake at all. Let your staff get proficient with the interface. To give them some time to experiment with the user interface and functions, you can also launch a virtual computer with a trial edition of the program.
You most likely won’t experience any issues with us in the future if you have considered all of these factors. Another issue is that most businesses just store data room vendors’ products after using them for a brief period, such as during M&A transactions or other similar activities. This is not a wise use of the funds, but it’s up to you.
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by Irina Georgieva | Jan 2, 2025
Customer data protection is one of the most important determinants of business growth. Although online services provide fast, affordable, and convenient solutions, their rising adoption encourages data breaches. This illegal industry is lucrative to cybercriminals, with experts expecting the cost to keep rising.
High-profile attacks against giants such as Acer, Microsoft, and Bombardier show no company is immune to hacking. This worrying trend calls for constant vigilance and commitment to customer data protection in compliance with the highest cybersecurity standards. The following tips will help you achieve these objectives:
Have an explicit and honest privacy policy
Trust determines how comfortably consumers interact with your brand. They have more faith in healthcare providers than in social media apps. That’s because the former asks for information most relevant to your physical and mental wellbeing, while the latter collects more than they need. In addition to harming your reputation, deceptive data policies expose you to potential legal disputes.
Embrace data encryption
Encryption sounds like a no-brainer, but most businesses don’t embrace it. Network access points are always vulnerable to data breaches. Apart from firewalls, password management tools provide affordable and productive solutions.
They improve data security by complicating stored passwords, making them unreadable to unauthorized personnel. The best encryption tools protect data in transit and at rest.
Limit data access
Although efficient data collection and analysis are beneficial, you should only give access to employees who need it. For instance, your marketing department utilizes different information from the finance section. This limitation reduces the likelihood of internal breaches.
Similarly, collect data that are crucial to your organization’s core business. It makes more sense to allow third-party vendors to process credit card transactions rather than handle them in-house.
Implement minimum cybersecurity standards
Minimum security standards ensure consistency across the board. Customer information is better protected if your SaaS tools comply with SOC 2 or ISO 27001 requirements. SOC 2 follows five essential principles: privacy, security, confidentiality, availability, and processing integrity. ISO-based compliance requires continuous evaluation, refining, and augmentation. These solutions make it easier to scale service provision to thousands or even millions of users. According to DataCo, when it comes to earning the trust of customers, it is a good idea to pursue an ISO 27001 certificate. Having this in place will give you a blueprint for what it takes to protect private data as comprehensively as possible, while also enabling you to show clear evidence of your commitment to security to existing customers and prospects alike.
Prompt system updates
Most companies avoid regular software updates for fear of affecting the customer experience. However, cybercriminals are always looking for vulnerabilities. Every minute you delay this crucial step could lead to a costly data breach. Although some updates are expensive and time-consuming, their long-term benefits are worth the minor inconvenience.
A comprehensive guide to secure data collection
Most consumers submit their data because they trust the company to safeguard it. Data security consists of various techniques that prevent unauthorized access and misuse of this information. Improper access ranges from harmless actions such as an employee viewing data without proper clearance to deliberate malware attacks.
Collecting data over insecure connections also increases the likelihood of cybercriminals intercepting vital transactions. HTTPS protection prevents it through the TLS protocol, which offers three crucial security layers:
- Encryption prevents unwanted eavesdropping, monitoring, and access to information.
- Data integrity prevents unlicensed modification and corruption during transfer.
- Authentication ensures your customers are interacting with the correct website. This layer protects data against man-in-the-middle interceptions.
With several data collection tools available, the ideal choice depends on your business niche, budget, and target audience, among other factors. Commonly used business solutions include Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, and SurveyMonkey.
The Google Tag Manager (GTM) allows you to gather visitor details by adding JavaScript code snippets to your website. It’s a free tracking tool compatible with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and other online advertising options. The snippets, also known as tags, eliminate the complications of manually tagging each platform.
How data collection helps measure business performance
Efficient data collection techniques help you identify the best key performance indicators for your business. KPIs are quantifiable measurements that determine an organization’s long-term strategic, operational, and financial achievements. Although they vary between industries, there are five universally applicable KPIs: customer satisfaction, profit margin, revenue growth, client retention rate, and revenue per client.
To avoid confusion, choose a few measures for each business objective and assign each KPI to particular individuals. Additionally, set a monthly, quarterly, or other suitable frequency to ensure continual monitoring and reporting. Performance management software allows you to create custom KPI dashboards for different audiences, such as departments and company executives.
Why do you need strategic risk management?
Strategic risk management identifies, quantifies, and mitigates threats to your business strategy. These risks include technological changes, competitive pressure, regulatory updates, management turnover, and merger integration. Risk management involves five essential steps:
- Defining your business objectives.
- Creating KPIs to gauge results.
- Identifying risks that can affect performance.
- Establishing key risk indicators (KRIs) and your tolerance for these threats.
- Monitoring and reporting continuously to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
As with KPIs, you can use premium software solutions such as Reciprocity ZenRisk to unify cybersecurity compliance and risk. This platform offers high-level visibility to help you avoid threats and receive actionable insights.
Important data regulations
Effective data collection methods and tools comply with various state, federal, and international regulations on security and privacy. One of the most comprehensive regulations is HIPAA compliance, which pertains to protected health information (PHI).
HIPAA-compliant solutions collect up to 18 different data items. They include names, email, phone numbers, geographical identifiers, social security numbers, vehicle details, biometrics, IP addresses, account numbers, and photographs.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) is another law that outlines how financial service providers should handle sensitive data. Its essential requirements include providing clear privacy notices, formulating an extensive security plan, and working with GLBA-compliant contractors.
At the state level, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) stands out for its commitment to protecting consumer data privacy. Requirements include providing opt-out options, updating privacy policies, using CCPA-compliant tools, and having a disaster response plan.
International data protection laws include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Strong Consumer Authentication (SCA).
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