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Volunteerism can positively affect a company’s culture and morale while enhancing brand perception.
Employees often don’t have free time to pursue volunteerism, so they feel empowered and grateful when their workplaces help them give back to the world.
Volunteer programs allow businesses to embrace corporate social responsibility and boost their appeal to customers, investors, and employees.
This article is for business owners seeking creative ways to improve their workplaces and enhance corporate social responsibility.
Creating a company culture of volunteerism in your organization can help your community and the world while improving your business. Employee-sponsored volunteerism appeals to consumers who prefer doing business with socially responsible companies and employees who want to make a difference in the world. Whether you focus on climate issues, racial injustice, diversity and inclusion, poverty, or another concern, the shared mission can create a stronger workplace culture and help businesses embrace corporate social responsibility.
We’ll explore how volunteering helps businesses and their employees and share best practices for creating an employee volunteer program.
Did You Know?
Money isn’t enough to adequately compensate employees. Meaning and purpose, challenging work, trusted relationships, and autonomy are powerful motivators.
How does volunteering help employees?According to the 2023 Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose Giving in Numbers report, 84 percent of companies offer flexible scheduling or paid time off for their employees’ volunteer opportunities. Some businesses even allot up to 60 hours of volunteer time off.
Here are some of the benefits volunteerism brings to employees.
1. Volunteerism helps employees feel more empowered.Employees feel empowered when they can contribute to causes close to their hearts. According to the Giving in Numbers report, employees are more likely to participate in volunteer programs when the cause resonates with them.
Deloitte’s Global 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that today’s Gen Z and millennial employees feel the need to balance work lives with a drive for societal change. They’re drawn to businesses that allow them to be of service to the community. In return, employees will feel a heightened level of commitment to their company and team, offering substantial growth and development opportunities for both.
2. Volunteerism helps employees develop and share talents and skills.Employees are hired for the talents and skills necessary to perform their jobs. However, most, if not all, likely have untapped skills they’d appreciate exploring — ones that would bring enormous value to their organizations.
Volunteer programs open a new world for employees to explore their talents, improve skills, and learn new skills. In fact, the Giving in Numbers report revealed that employees volunteer more when the employer offers skills-based programs. Of companies offering employer-sponsored volunteerism, 73 percent offer skills-based volunteer programs that allow employees to practice and explore tangible skills to help their communities.
Whether employees learn new skills or hone current talents, they’ll bring this expertise back to their organization along with higher self-worth and a higher value to the company.
3. Employees will feel happier when they participate in volunteerism.A Journal of Happiness study found that volunteering can positively impact physical and mental health, alleviate stress, and experience increased life satisfaction. In other words, people who volunteer are happier.
Employees who participate in volunteerism benefit from higher morale and an increase in overall happiness — and happier employees see significant productivity boosts. When employees feel good about being at work, they tend to work harder and take pride in their company.
4. Volunteering helps employees develop leadership potential.Volunteering can help employees discover untapped talents and may even help them realize their leadership potential.
Volunteer programs are an excellent platform for employees to discover a natural affinity to lead, especially when participating in activities that require sharp management and organizational skills. For the company, discovering new leaders is a valuable opportunity to strengthen the entire organization.
Key Takeaway
Volunteerism is a way to improve employee engagement. Other ways include implementing team-building activities, offering health and wellness programs, and supporting their professional goals.
2. Volunteer programs can improve a brand’s image.Just as employees want to work for a company that positively impacts the world, today’s consumers prefer supporting companies and brands that are public and transparent about their corporate social responsibility initiatives. Volunteer programs that feature employees connecting with communities through social initiatives are positively received by the public, which can improve a brand’s image organically.
3. Volunteer programs boost employee engagement.According to Gallup, only 36 percent of employees feel positively engaged in their positions, although they want to be invested in, connected to and enthusiastic about their employers. Volunteer programs are an excellent way to create and boost employee engagement, motivating employees to invest time and energy into their employer relationship.
The values and skills they acquire via a volunteer program allow them to perform better while fostering a deeper sense of loyalty to the company. More engaged workers are more productive, making volunteer programs a win for employers, employees, and the causes they support.
Did You Know?
Aside from volunteering, other community involvement measures can include offering free services or discounts, offering free workshops in your area of expertise, and sponsoring local events.
How to create an employee volunteer programTo improve employee morale with volunteer programs, preparation and follow-through are crucial. Here are some best practices when developing an employee volunteer program:
Assess your community’s needs. Determine what needs are present in your community. Then, poll your employees to learn about their interests. Try to match community needs with employee passions. You may also consider a broader scope for your volunteerism, such as helping the environment or fighting racial injustice.
Align the volunteer program with your business goals. A volunteer program should benefit employees, the cause and the company. Align your business goals and objectives with your volunteer initiatives. They should reflect the company mission and its long-term goals. For example, if you have a sustainable business model, consider environmentally focused volunteer initiatives.
Ensure everyone is onboard with your volunteer initiatives. Ensure everyone in the organization is onboard with prospective volunteer programs. If company executives support the program, they’ll be more willing to encourage employees to participate and offer time off. They also may roll up their sleeves and help.
Partner with other organizations in volunteerism. Determine if you can partner with other local organizations, customers and vendors to help strengthen your volunteerism’s impact. Partnerships also open opportunities for bigger collaborations in the future and more meaningful relationships.
Acknowledge your volunteers and show them your appreciation. Employees are motivated when their efforts are recognized, and this holds true for volunteerism. To show employees you appreciate them, reward volunteer participants with awards, gift cards, coupons, or other forms of recognition.
Volunteer programs are an excellent way to encourage employees to explore their talents, give back to the world, and develop stronger relationships with their organizations. Businesses benefit from an enhanced brand image and a more engaged and discerning workforce. Positively impacting the world is a noble goal that befits the community, employees and sponsoring companies. Carefully consider your volunteer programs and implement them with sincerity, excellent management, ethical behavior and thoughtful leadership.
Adam Uzialko contributed to the reporting and writing in this article.
You're reading Employee Volunteerism Can Improve Your Workplace
How Behavioural Email Marketing Can Improve Customer Loyalty
What Email Marketers need to learn from Retailers How email marketers can use behavioural email to increase customer loyalty and drive more purchases
I believe email marketers have major lessons to learn from how the world’s leading offline retailers market to customers before, during and after their purchases. These companies serve as great examples of why email marketers need to go beyond the basic newsletter.
One of the best ways to frame email marketing is to focus on one key event; the purchase and then break it into three phases:
3 Phases of behavioural email marketing related to purchase
1. Before: The customer isn’t necessarily ready to make the purchase, but your goal is to stay top of mind and nurture the relationship until they are.
2. During: The customer is in the process of making a purchase, and your goal is to ensure they have a great experience but also that the customer is fully aware of what you offer.
3. After: The customer has purchased, and your goal is to turn that into a repeated event and build a true relationship with them. Growing this loyalty can have an incredible impact on profitability.
1. Pre-Purchase: Building Awareness and DesireBefore customers make a purchase, marketers usually focus on email newsletters to build awareness and desire in potential customers to get them in the store or on the site to purchase. That said, looking at some of the more creative efforts of retailers in the past shed light on how to think outside the box and standout.
Get local: One classic retail technique is to leverage local events (sponsoring sports clubs, announcing new stores openings in local newspapers, etc) to build a local following. While ecommerce stores don’t have a local presence, they should similarly think about using local allegiances and events to tailor their messaging.
2. During Purchase: Expanding customer relationshipsWhile customers are in the store and making a purchase, offline retailers are masters of highlighting additional products that customers might want.
Seize Opportunity:Think about the queues in a typical retail store; they’re lined with small products that you can easily add to your basket.
The lesson for email marketers? If you know your customer well, you can use abandoned cart, order confirmation or other emails sent within a day or two of purchase to focus on products you know those customers might want.
3. Post-Purchase: Bringing the customer backProbably the area of greatest opportunity for online marketers to learn from offline retailers is in how to build loyal and lifelong customer relationships.
Because of the often substantial costs of acquiring a customer the first-time, a customer who purchase a second, third and fourth time is often way more than 4 times as profitable as a customer who purchases once.
Loyalty Programmes: Many offline retailers have created loyalty programmes that literally reward customers for every purchase they make. To use this same idea, email marketers should craft campaigns around customer milestones, for example: thanking first time purchasers, recognising customers who make 5 purchases, etc.
Email marketers have a unique opportunity to send personal emails to customers who haven’t purchased recently to check-in, give them special offers, etc.
Email marketers have the unique ability to reach the right customers at the right time with the perfect message but they still need to do the legwork to figure out what to send.
Offline retailers have built deep and strong customer relationships with their marketing and online marketers have a great opportunity to emulate their success and improve on it!.
Ed Hallen is the co-founder of
Ed Hallen is the co-founder of Klaviyo , an intelligent email marketing platform for Ecommerce and Web Apps that helps makes email marketing easier, automated and more effective. You can connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
21 Essential Customer Feedback Questions To Improve Your Business
Without customers, none of us would be in business. So to stay in business, we need to listen to the feedback of our customers. The thing is that customers don’t always come running to us to share their thoughts, which means that we have to actively seek feedback.
But what questions are worth asking? Which ones will get you the most valuable insights with which to improve your business? And how do you ask for customer feedback in the first place? We’re sharing the top customer feedback questions you need to know broken down by:
Questions related to customer profiles
Customer feedback questions about your company and offerings
Questions about your marketing and messaging
Customer feedback questions about your competitors
Plus, we’re sharing how to ask for customer feedback and how to use the answers to benefit your business big time!
Customer feedback questions related to customer profilesSmart marketers understand the value of detailed customer profiles, also known as buyer personas.
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At the very least, you’ll want to gather demographic information about your customer base including the most common shared age ranges, locations, education levels, professions, and so on. This is where marketers stop, not wanting to seem like they’re prying or pushing for personal info.
However, it’s also important to ask questions such as:
1. “What are your biggest challenges?”
Of course, you’ll be especially interested in the challenges that your company provides solutions for. However, other pain points your target customers experience can inform and enhance the way you engage with them, making your marketing more effective.
2. “What are your main goals?”
Your customer’s responses reveal what they really want and, more importantly, what they care about most. This keeps you from guessing at what you think they want or prioritizing selling points that, while beneficial, are not the main things your customers are after.
Plus, you can also gain insight into the differences between their long and short-term goals, which can help you plan for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
3. “Where do you go for information on [your industry, product, or service] and why?”
Answers to this question reveal your customer’s mindset and who they currently trust as it relates to your industry. This can teach you how to earn and maintain their trust.
4. “How do you like to make purchases?”
Do your customers prefer to do a demo or product tour before they buy? Do they prefer to meet in person or virtually for a consultation first? Or do they like to have the time and space to do their own research and purchase online when ready?
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Whatever the answer, spotting patterns in customer behavior can help you choose the most persuasive calls-to-action (and help other teams within your company to nail the user interface and user experience).
5. “What are your hobbies and interests? How or where do you spend your free time?”
While this might seem off-topic and not necessarily relevant to what your company does, this information can be surprisingly useful.
For example, let’s say that many in your audience share a certain passion. You could use that as inspiration for examples and analogies in your content, case studies, or the language you use in your copy.
Customer feedback questions about your company and offeringsNext up are some important customer feedback questions to ask regarding your company and what it offers.
6. “What solutions (products, services, or specific features) do you associate us with?”
One, this can give you an idea of what products or solutions are most important to your customers.
Two, it can reveal gaps in their knowledge of what your company offers. For instance, you could find that you’ve been unknowingly promoting certain offers more than others, although your target audience could benefit from your less popular products, services, or features as well.
7. “What prompted you to search for or switch to our product or service?”
The better you understand what business or life events that start people on the road to becoming your customers, the more potential customers you can attract and convert. How?
By showing that you understand those triggers, and making your company visible when and where ideal customers are entering the buyer’s journey.
8. “Before you became a customer, what were your expectations or hopes for our product or service?”
Similar to the question about goals, this one also reveals what people want from what you offer. The better you understand their goals, the better you can market to them.
Not to mention that you can pass the information along to other teams to improve your product or enhance the level of service you provide.
9. “Has our product or service helped you achieve your main goals?”
There’s no point in asking about initial expectations without also inquiring about the post-purchase experience. Is what you offer really getting results for people? Does it meet or exceed people’s expectations? You need to know.
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10. “What don’t you like about our product or service? If you could change one thing, what would it be?”
It feels great to get outstanding customer feedback and to hear success stories. But customer experience is rarely all peaches and cream. So don’t be afraid to ask for constructive criticism. Only when you know what customers dislike about your offerings can you consciously, strategically give them something better.
And don’t just ask what they don’t like; narrow their options by requesting a single thing they would change. That way, they’re more likely to share their biggest dislike, which will help you to prioritize improvements.
11. “How often do you use our product or service?”
Responses to this question can say a lot about the severity of your customer’s pain points, the importance of their goals, and the quality of what you offer.
For example, if you offer a product that’s meant to be used daily to solve a major challenge, but your customer only uses it a few times per month, you’ll want to get to the bottom of why. Is the product not meeting their needs? Are they lacking the motivation that you can help to spark with your marketing?
12. “How would you feel if you couldn’t use our product or service anymore?”
Understanding the emotional connection people have to your brand is crucial. Unless your company has a monopoly on the industry and customers have no choice but to pick you, they have other suitable options. So, you can’t appeal solely to logic in your marketing; your competitors will be doing the same.
To get on top and stay on top, you also have to forge deep customer relationships (AKA emotional connections) with your target market so that they have extra motivation to choose and stick with you.
Related: 120 of the Best Words & Phrases for Marketing with Emotion
13. “What would make you stop doing business with us?”
Customer feedback questions about your marketing messagingAs an extension of questions about your company, you can and should ask for feedback on your marketing messaging specifically. Your interviews or customer feedback survey questions should dig into how people understand and feel about it.
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14. “What content formats and channels do you prefer?”
Customers have the power of choice. They can choose you, they can choose competitors, or they can choose nothing at all; the choice is theirs until you as marketers meet their requirements for engagement.
If you don’t produce content in formats or on channels they like, they can and probably will choose not to engage. So, instead of going with personal preference or what’s trendy, ask about and be respectful of the preferences of your audience.
15. “What topics would you like to see us create content around?”
Find out what topics are on your customers’ minds and focus on those; they will appreciate you listening to their feedback.
PS: Get more customer appreciation ideas here!
16. “How would you describe our [unique value proposition, product, or service]?”
This question is pure gold because can singlehandedly tell you if your messaging is clear and if the way you present it matches with how your customers talk about your brand and company.
If the description your customers give is not aligned with the message you’re promoting, you know you need to go back to the drawing board. If it’s mostly aligned, you either need to clarify the message or sync your brand language with that of your audience. And, if your customers’ responses are spot on, you know to keep doing what you’re doing.
17. “If our brand or company were a person, how would you describe it?”
Similar to the last question, this can help you see your brand through customers’ eyes and make sure that the vibe people are getting is on par with the impression you want to make. Even better, customer responses can lead you right to the root of any misalignment so that you can fix it.
Related: Get tips to build a brand personality here.
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18. “Is there anything you dislike about the way we present our products or services?”
True, not all customers will answer this question honestly; some may dodge it to be nice or sugarcoat their criticisms. But there are customers who will be brutally honest with you, and their feedback is invaluable.
Don’t shy away from asking outright what people don’t like about your messaging. Often, they’ll point you in the right direction quicker than you could figure it out on your own.
Customer feedback questions about your competitorsLast up, it’s smart to ask for your customers’ thoughts on both direct and indirect competitors.
19. “What solutions did you try before ours and what was your experience (from the time you started searching to the point you decided to switch to us)?”
It’s important to be aware of who your top competitors are, whether they’re other companies that offer similar products and services or DIY alternatives to what you offer.
And it’s just as important to know the strengths and weaknesses of those competitors so that you can take every opportunity to stand out as different or better.
20. “What frustrates you the most about [your industry, product category, or service type]?”
This question goes along well with our earlier one about customers’ biggest challenges. Understanding their frustrations can help your company avoid pitfalls and clarify the most important aspects of your solution to promote front and center.
21. “What feature, product or service could [major competitor] offer that would make you consider switching?”
Responses to this question can help you identify what’s most important to your audience. And it can also give you ideas for staying ahead of the curve when it comes to new and improved offers that could help you gain and retain customers.
How to ask for customer feedback: Best practicesYou might have noticed that all 21 of the asks above are open-ended. This is no coincidence. What’s the importance of using open-ended questions for customer feedback collection? Think about it.
If you were to primarily ask yes or no questions, you’d end up with oversimplified answers and little to no context on why your customers feel the way they do. Not only could that make it difficult to improve your marketing and business but being in the dark about the nuances of customer responses could even make your marketing less effective.
And what about leading questions such as “how satisfied are you with our product” or “how well did our services meet your needs?” They subtly assume that customers feel a certain way, which can prompt them to answer your questions differently than they otherwise would.
Ultimately, your goal is to get as much pure, honest feedback as you can. So whether you ask the questions above or others that are relevant for your business, make sure they’re open-ended.
How to use customer feedback to the fullestNow that we’ve gone over what to ask and how to ask it, here’s an overview of a very effective process for using the feedback you receive from your customers.
1. Build a community around itThis is where a brand community comes in. It reduces friction when customers see that others share their experiences and validate their feelings. But it can also encourage them to continue sharing their thoughts with you, which earns you additional customer insights manual feedback collection needed on your end.
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While you can find common themes manually or devise an internal system to spot them, it might also be worth looking into a way to let customers point you to the most important feedback.
3. Prioritize action on the most common customer feedbackOnce top priorities are identified, it’s important to follow through and implement valuable changes and improvements. And not just within the marketing department.
As you can see from our list of questions, much of the information shared by your customers can also benefit other teams within your company so be sure to pass it on. It will keep everyone on the same page internally, and it will translate into a far better customer experience and higher customer acquisition and retention rates!
Ask for customer feedback to improve your business todayCustomer feedback can help you improve your business and better serve your customers. Ask these 21 customer feedback questions to get started collecting valuable data:
What are your main goals?
What are your biggest challenges?
Where do you go for information on [your industry, product, or service] and why?
How do you like to make purchases?
What are your hobbies and interests? How or where do you spend your free time?
What solutions (products, services, or specific features) do you associate us with?
What prompted you to search for or switch to our product or service?
Before you became a customer, what were your expectations or hopes for our product or service?
Has our product or service helped you achieve your main goals?
What don’t you like about our product or service? If you could change one thing, what would it be?
How often do you use our product or service?
How would you feel if you couldn’t use our product or service anymore?
What would make you stop doing business with us?
What content formats and channels do you prefer?
What topics would you like to see us create content around?
How would you describe our [unique value proposition, product, or service]?
If our brand or company were a person, how would you describe it?
Is there anything you dislike about the way we present our products or services?
What solutions did you try before ours and what was your experience (from the time you started searching to the point you decided to switch to us)?
What frustrates you the most about [your industry, product category, or service type]?
What feature, product or service could [major competitor] offer that would make you consider switching?
Nia GyantNia Gyant is a freelance writer and brand messaging strategist with a background in online marketing. She supports marketing agencies and small to mid-sized businesses by creating strategically-crafted, goal-oriented content and copy.
Other posts by Nia Gyant
Is Employee Monitoring Software Legal?
If you look for computer monitoring tools on a search engine, you’ll see a range of tools designed to keep tabs on employees. These typically include some worrying features, such as the ability to track someone’s activities without them ever knowing. But how legal is this, and can a boss get into serious legal trouble if their monitoring is discovered?
What Kind of Monitoring Can Happen?Employers will typically monitor employees for one of two reasons. For one, they want to protect business assets. When a company owns a building and gives resources to their employees, they want to ensure nothing gets stolen or damaged. This includes tracking the location of employees and products but can also mean monitoring email to prevent data leaks and breaches.
Another reason is that the boss wants to monitor the productivity of the employees. This involves spying on what the employee is doing during work time. This can include keylogging, webcam spying, and monitoring active applications.
How Legal Is the Monitoring?When breaking down how legal this monitoring is, there are many variables involved. For example, different countries will have different ways of approaching this grey area.
You’ll find that laws typically side with the business when it comes to protecting assets. For example, if a business logs emails made on its work email accounts to prevent information leaks, that would be legal. Similarly, if a business wants to use CCTV to protect against thieves, they could.
Things get a little murkier when it involves spying on how a worker uses their company computers. Typically, if an employer can see what you’re doing by watching over your shoulder, they can log it. This includes the websites you visit and the applications you use.
The grey area comes in when the employer hides these tracking apps from the employee. In most U.S. states and some countries like the UK, it’s totally legal for a boss to install monitoring software without the employees knowing. Connecticut, Delaware, and some countries demand the employer tell their workers what’s being monitored and for what purpose.
Employers also enter a grey area with GPS tracking on equipment. They can argue that installing GPS on a laptop helps retrieve stolen goods, but it could also be used to track employees after work to see what they do. As such, an employer may need to put forward a strong defense for GPS monitoring – that is if such a thing is even legal in the country they operate in.
When Monitoring Goes Too FarSo we can see there’s a good chance that employees in your country can and will monitor workspace equipment. However, this doesn’t give them free reign over what they can monitor and store about you.
For instance, things get illegal when the employer tries to push their monitoring into employees’ private lives. For instance, if you use a work PC during a break to check your email, the employer can legally see that you visited your email provider but can’t go through your emails.
Similarly, any monitoring that does occur has to have a business reasoning behind it. If an employer monitors your phone calls to ensure you’re meeting company protocol, that’s acceptable. However, if an employer monitors someone with a speech impediment and saves recordings to share with his friends for a laugh, that’s illegal.
Monitoring Made LegalWhile employee monitoring software features may seem intrusive, the truth is that employers can legally monitor a lot. As long as it’s related to the operation of a business, employers have a lot of freedom; however, as soon as it breaches into unprofessional spying, the employer works against the law.
Do you think employers should inform their employees of monitoring software by law? Or is it an effective way to prevent misuse of property in the first place? Let us know below.
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.
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How To Leverage Seo To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
5 techniques to use SEO data to make better content marketing decisions
Did you know that 91% of marketers use content marketing as an approach in their organizations?
It’s clearly gaining momentum.
But not all is sunshine and roses.
The same survey also showed that 48% of marketers believe that their content marketing strategies are either average, fair, or poor.
Image via SEMrush
That brings us to the question:
What can marketers do to drive content marketing ROI?
The answer lies in leveraging SEO data.
To create an effective content marketing strategy, marketers need to take a closer look at their SEO insights.
In this article, let’s take a look at how you can amplify your content marketing efforts through SEO insights.
5 techniques to leverage SEO to boost your content marketing efforts
Let’s get this straight:
SEO and content marketing are complementary approaches.
While SEO can help you figure out what your audience is looking for, content marketing enables you to deliver exactly what they want.
To create insightful content, leveraging search data can give you an edge over your competitors. Here is how you can use SEO data to guide your content marketing strategy:
1. Find out what your audience is searching for
Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. By taking a closer look at the most popular keywords in your niche, you can get a whiff of what your target audience is looking for online.
To find your website’s most popular keywords, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you a list of search queries that users have typed to read your site content.
What’s more, you can understand a user’s search intent via keywords. All you need to do is Google a keyword and check out the top results on the SERPs.
For instance, when you look up the results for the keyword “video editing,” you’ll find results related to the best editing software.
This indicates that users may not be looking for tips related to video editing. Instead, their intention while typing the keyword is likely to find the best software for editing their videos.
Image via Google
Looking at the search intent can help you find fresh content ideas and gaps in your content marketing strategy. It’s also a good idea to organize your keywords based on intent.
For this strategy, make sure you check the SERP results in an incognito window for more accurate information.
2. Identify your top-performing content
To get insights from this SEO data, you can look for answers to the following questions:
Which posts get the highest number of impressions?
Is any post ranking on page one of the SERPs?
Once you find the answers, you’ll know which content on your site is the most popular. With these insights, you can further amplify your content’s reach and engagement via email marketing.
This strategy can even help you boost your revenue. After all, for each dollar that a business spends on email marketing, they can earn on average $40.
Isn’t that great?
All you need to do to leverage this strategy is repurpose your blog posts into email newsletters. It doesn’t take much effort but can yield great returns.
Pro Tip: Leverage tools for email marketing to amplify your reach.
3. Learn from your competitors’ strategies
Through competitor research and analysis, you can get a sneak peek into your competitors’ strategies. From their top keywords to backlinks and traffic data, you can check everything out.
Wondering how that can help your content marketing efforts?
Not only can you identify new content ideas, but you can also find new linking opportunities for your website. Analyzing what works for them can help you polish your strategy as well.
4. Track how your audience interacts with your content
Tracking and analyzing your traffic can help you find gaps in your overall content marketing strategy. Let’s say, multiple users bounce off your site after reading the first paragraph of your article. This may indicate that the content in it isn’t engaging enough.
To get a better idea of what works, look for specific changes. It could include anything from publishing a new headline and to changing the placement of your CTA button.
With the results, you can make changes to the content that is already published. You can also be more cognizant of these changes while writing your future articles.
5. Pay attention to in-site traffic
What do you do when you want to look for a particular article on your favourite website? Chances are you type a keyword related to the article in the search bar.
Your site audience is likely to do the same.
When users can’t find what they are looking for, they may have tried searching for it. By pulling out the data from your site’s search bar, you can unlock a goldmine of ideas to create share-worthy content. You may find a topic or a keyword that you may not have covered yet.
Here is how you can find this data:
Log into your Google Analytics account.
Go to the “Site Search Report” that is listed under the “Behaviour” section.
Check out the data for the used search terms.
If a particular search term is featured frequently in the report, it means that people want to read about it. That’s your cue to create an article related to it.
Conclusion
SEO and content marketing overlap on multiple levels. To amplify your online presence, both of these strategies should go hand in hand. By leveraging your SEO data, you can identify gaps in your content strategy and come up with new content ideas.
In addition to this, you can identify linking opportunities and get an idea about your competitors’ strategy. Your SEO data holds the key to creating a winning content marketing strategy. With careful analysis, you can take your content game to the next level.
Author biographyShane Barker is a digital marketing consultant for 15 years with an emphasis on Influencer Marketing in the last 5 years. He is specialized in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, Influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
Data Management In ‘23: What It Is & How Can Ai Improve It?
According to Statista, the total data volume worldwide has been on an increasing trend since 2010 and is expected to keep rising until at least 2025 (see Figure 1).
With this increase in volume comes an increase in the need to determine a way to manage it. Subsequently, a wealth of data management techniques, tools, vendors, and careers, have emerged to support this need.
To better help your business achieve effective data management, it is necessary to first understand what exactly is data management and how it can become beneficial for your organization.
What is Data Management?Data has a lifecycle that requires careful management from the day it is created until the day it is no longer in use. By managing this data properly, the risks are greatly decreased and the usability and quality of the data are greatly increased. Ultimately these two things together lead to a better and more profitable business no matter the industry or topic.
Some of the biggest focus points in data management include:
1. Data qualityAvailability and usability of data for its desired purpose. Maintaining data quality is not a one-time effort, but instead requires regular ‘maintenance’ at logical times in the cycle.
2. Data accessBeing able to access and retrieve data from its current location.
3. Data governanceHaving data that is aligned with the greater goals of the business. Outlines the processes for determining data owners, their roles and responsibilities, and how they work with data users. Clarifies the role of compliance in data management. For example, due to regulatory limitations, some data can only be analyzed after anonymization and aggregation.
4. Data integrationDifferent steps and methods for combining different types of data.
5. Master data management (MDM)Defining, unifying, and managing the data that is essential across an organization.
To learn more about master data management, feel free to read master data management: best practices & real-life examples.
There is a wide range of tools available to support all of the above and more for industries with data volumes that are both small and large. One example of this can be seen with ETL tools, which ‘extract’ incoming data from multiple sources, ‘transform’ it into the required format, and then ‘load’ it into its final destination, often a data warehouse.
To improve data management, businesses can leverage workload automation tools that automate the scheduling and execution of batch processes on different platforms from a single point. This enables better visibility and transparency, optimizes data storage strategies, creates an audit trail of all processes, and provides a single source of truth. Scroll down our data-driven list of workload automation tools to get a comprehensive view of the ecosystem.
Advantages of Effective Data ManagementAside from the intrinsic benefits associated with data management in terms of factors such as cleanliness and availability, there are a growing number of benefits that can be felt across the business.
Better and faster decision making owing to higher quality data and a single version of the truth
Easier achievement of compliance and governance standards
Long-term preservation of data for a longer historical perspective
More efficient sharing and access generally within a web-based or cloud environment
Synchronization of data
Minimized security and fraud risks
New lines of business
An improved customer buying experience
Ease in change management
Better use of internal resources in terms of employees and tangible goods
Improved visibility and transparency
Image source: Avaali
Integrating Data Management in Your BusinessUnderstanding the benefits of data management is a great place to start as it will help you decide from the beginning with a clear mind what benefits you aim to achieve. There are a few additional steps that can be taken to help integrate better data management into your business.
Start by deciding if a more extensive data management process is really right for your business. The best way to do so is by determining whether or not you have a need, pain, or problem that could be solved with data. One such type of problem would be in data governance where there are disruptive forces that can lead to data problems and challenges in demonstrating compliance. Some additional problems that can be solved with data management include:
Information security
IT/systems modernization
Strategic enablement
Consolidation
After determining the problem that requires solving, it is necessary to build a small model to act as proof of concept behind your idea. This should be small, measurable, and controlled, and helps to prove the value of your solution.
Once you have determined a solution to your problem that needs to be solved, the next step will be to get the executive approval that is necessary in order to proceed. The most effective way to do this is to connect a ‘data’ problem to a ‘business’ problem in order to clearly demonstrate the value. Some of the most common challenges incurred include:
Data is seen as an IT issue alone
Overall organizational silos
Unclear ROI
Data management will often require an organizational change in terms of internal team members, plus any consultants or vendors that may play essential roles in not only the integration but ongoing support of processes. Some additional roles that will become involved with data management (and its later analysis) include:
Image source: IBM
By having all of these different tasks and roles in mind from the start, it can be easier to demonstrate the value of data management in addition to creating an effective solution.
The Impact on Data Science and AIData science is the field of collecting, modeling, and interpreting data in order to make predictions. Data scientists work with the data using different tools and formats to reach a certain conclusion, and understandably, the data they are working with is key to finding these conclusions. Subsequently, having a well-executed data management solution is key to their success.
AI has largely become recognized as one of the biggest changes that we are part of with the ‘digital transformation’. However, before organizations can get the most from the latest in AI technologies, they must first have an effective BI solution. This is because AI is wholly dependent on the quality of data that it receives, and without proper data management, the quality of BI and related data will make it that much more difficult for AI to do its ‘job’.
These two integral fields in technology and their place in the future demonstrates the need to begin making changes to data processes that will be sustainable for changes to come.
For more on data managementAnd if you believe your business would benefit from leveraging a data management platform, we have a data-driven list of vendors prepared.
To gain a more comprehensive overview of workload automation, download our whitepaper on the topic:
We will help you choose the best one for your enterprise:
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Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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