#BusinessTips Archives - Page 2 of 2

7 Benefits of Virtualisation for Your Company

Posted on 10/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Virtualisation is one of the most exciting technologies being used by businesses today. It has revolutionised the IT world, bringing a range of benefits to both service providers and their customers. In this post, we’ll look at how virtualisation can help your company.

1 . A cool and eco-friendly IT solution

A server can generate a lot of heat and when it is not properly cooled it has the potential to overheat. This can lead to power outages, hardware failure and a resulting loss of data – all critical events that businesses strive to avoid. When you have banks of servers sitting in the same datacentre, the potential for disaster is even greater. One way to reduce the amount of heat generated is to reduce the number of physical servers being used and this can be done effectively by creating multiple virtual servers on each physical machine.

Not only is this a cooler solution; it’s also an eco-friendly one. Businesses are not only lowering the energy consumption needed to run so many physical machines; they are also reducing the energy required to power air-conditioning. As a result, virtualisation can help your drive to become carbon neutral while bringing about less expensive energy bills at the same time.

2. Less expensive to deploy and maintain

The capital expenditure required to create an in-house datacentre can be very expensive when you add up the cost of the hardware. Servers are not cheap. With virtualisation, the number of physical servers needed is fewer, thus lowering the overall investment needed. Similarly, virtual servers require much less maintenance than their hardware counterparts and this lowers costs even more.

Those who opt to use virtual machines hosted by a service provider will also notice a significant difference in the price.

3. Blisteringly fast to deploy

Deploying a new virtual server is a swift and simple process that enables companies to get on with necessary tasks without disruption. This attribute is also excellent for preventing downtime. If a physical server crashed and there wasn’t a redundant backup available, getting back online could be a time-consuming process with a costly outcome. Using virtualisation, a new server could be online in the time it takes to boot up.

4. Faster up-to-date backups

Today’s virtual backup tools, like Veaam, enable not just the data stored on virtual machines but the entire virtual server to be backed up swiftly, securely and at automated schedules, ensuring that what you store is always up to date. As it is possible to migrate these virtual servers between physical machines, any necessary redeployment can be undertaken very quickly.

5. Disaster Recovery made simple and quick

Being unable to recover quickly from a disaster situation can have a catastrophic impact on a company, potentially putting them out of business. Despite this, a 2019 survey discovered that 82% of businesses were not fully prepared for a DR incident, with only 27% confident they could ensure continuous availability and only half of them confident of restoring all their data. The majority believed it would take over 8 hours to fully restore services.

In a virtual environment, however, the DR process is both simplified and quicker. Regular backups ensure your virtual server and data are up to date and these can be migrated to another location to be restored within minutes of going offline.

6. Easier and safer DevOps and testing

For those developing new applications or testing new environments, there’s always the risk that if something goes wrong you would have to restart the testing process from the beginning. The ability to create backup clones of virtual machines at any point during testing means that if the worst happens, you can restore the last working stage of your project almost instantly. As a result, testing is less arduous and can proceed at a quicker pace.

7. Avoid vendor lock-in

Reliance on the hardware configuration provided by your vendor can tie you to their services and prevent you from seeking better provision elsewhere. Virtual machines, however, work independently from physical servers so there is no reliance on any specific server type or platform. As a result, many of the complications that arise during migration to a new vendor are removed, meaning you can be free from vendor lock-in.

Conclusion

As you can see, virtualisation brings many benefits to businesses. It safer, greener, requires less energy and needs less capital expenditure and maintenance. Additionally, it offers swift backups, quick deployment, it simplifies and speeds up disaster recovery and makes testing easier. It even removes the potential for vendor lock-in.

8 Strategies to Boost Your Instagram Sales

Posted on 17/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, it sent a clear signal that this was a platform with real potential. Since then, Instagram has gone from strength to strength and its increasing usage has made it a place where businesses can have a real marketing impact. In this post, weâ€™ll look at the platform and show you eight tips to help boost your Instagram sales.

A growing platform

Instagram has grown massively in recent years, expanding its monthly user base to over one billion. Thatâ€™s three times as many users as Twitter. This has made it a very appealing place for businesses to advertise their products and to run social media campaigns. Indeed, half of all businesses now use Instagram as a marketing tool and in 2017, they spent almost Â£2 billion on advertising. With this amount of investment, it is obvious that these businesses are seeing great returns.

Advantages of Instagram for online retailers

Instagram is a media that focuses on high-quality images and video, making it ideal for posting highly visual and creative product photographs and marketing that can link directly to your online store. In this sense, Instagram becomes an extension of that store â€“ people stumble upon a product they like and can click through to buy it. Nothing could be easier.

And with such a large and growing audience, it can massively expand your companyâ€™s reach, enhancing user engagement while helping to improve your brandâ€™s positioning. Add to this the option to link Instagram and Facebook accounts, so that posts which appear on Instagram also appear on Facebook, and the potential for spreading the word is even higher.

Tips on boosting Instagram sales

Set up an Instagram business profile

Instagram now lets you set up a business profile, so you wonâ€™t need to rely on using a personal account to do your marketing. One great feature of the pro-style, business profile is that you can import all your Facebook contacts. It also gives you analytics data to help you see how well your posts are doing.

Take advantage of the selling tools

There are many tools now available that help you to sell products on Instagram. Essentially, these use a variety of techniques to let users click on your photo and go buy what they see. These clickable shopfront tools include â€˜available to buyâ€™ icons, item prices or â€˜shop nowâ€™ buttons. All a user has to do is click on an icon or button and they are taken directly to the store or to your Instagram bio URL.

Post photos that attract attention

With millions of photographs added every day on a platform that aims to promote great photography, you need to post images which stand out. The better the visual experience you provide for users, the more your brand will get noticed. Experiment with different techniques of taking photographs and use filters and editing tools to create an identifiable brand style of your own.

Promote your website in your pictures

A creative way to get people to visit your website is to show your URL in the photos you post. Some do this with added text or through watermarking, however, there are more ingenious ways to do this â€“ have someone wear it on a t-shirt or have it graffitied on a wall in the background, for example. Subtlety like this is intriguing and will develop curiosity without users feeling over-marketed to.

Make the most of your captions

Aside from the image, you can also add a textual caption to your photo. With up to 2,200 characters available, including the use of emojis, captions are a valuable opportunity to develop your brand’s identity, engage your audience and slip in those important calls to action. You can also add numerous hashtags, too, helping your post turn up in relevant searches.

Use hashtags wisely

Just as on Twitter, hashtags are widely used on Instagram, enabling people to search for them. For this reason, all your marketing images need to have relevant keyword-style hashtags added to their captions. Doing this helps your products get seen by a wider audience and ensures that searchers have a better chance of finding them.

Attract Instagram influencers

Influencers are a big deal on social media. If they like or share your marketing material, it can have a massive and instant effect on your sales. This is why many of the famous vloggers and bloggers now have lucrative sponsorship deals with major brands. However, if you can grab their attention they may like your products without you having to pay them huge sums of money. To do this, mention them in your captions and give some positive responses to the things they post in order to try to establish a relationship. While getting a positive response back is never guaranteed (these people have millions of followers) the potential results can be worth the work.

Use Instagram ads

Finally, you should consider paying for advertising on Instagram in the same way you would on Facebook. Instagram ads are more direct than a social media campaign and can have a quicker impact, helping businesses get established on the platform sooner.

One reason for advertising on Instagram is that, statistically, its users are sixty times more likely to engage with your ad than users on Facebook, leading to a much higher ROI.

Conclusion

As you can see, Instagram is a highly useful platform on which to market your products. Is it ideal for every business? No, youâ€™ll need to research whether your target audience is part of the Instagram diaspora. If they are, however, following the tips given above should help you boost your online sales.

Ways how IoT can be an asset for businesses

Posted on 06/10/201819/06/2021 by Tushar

IoT devices enable businesses to generate large volumes of valuable data. This real-time information gives them a better insight into their performance, helping them to be more productive and efficient and have a better understanding of their customers while opening the door to innovation in workflow and new services. Here weâ€™ll look at seven ways businesses can benefit from the IoT.

1. Asset tracking

The tagging of items using inexpensive Bluetooth or RFID tags and the use of internet-connected readers to track them means almost any asset can now be connected to the Internet of Things. This enables companies not only to know where all their assets are but also to check their usage, maintenance history and, in some industries, an assetâ€™s health.

Preventing assets from getting misplaced can improve efficiency and cut down on unnecessary repurchases. In sectors like healthcare, where critical equipment can be located across a hospital, it can be life-saving. The ability to check usage and maintenance ensures compliance with regulation and helps companies understand when assets need upgrading. The monitoring of asset health is critical in many industries and can help prevent manufacturing processes coming to a complete standstill or, as in the case of inflight aircraft engine monitoring, prevent catastrophes.

2. Inventory Tracking

Tagged inventory can also be connected to the internet using the same Bluetooth or RFID technology, giving companies real-time stock level data. This can reduce the cost of manual stock taking while providing more accurate, up to date information. This provides much better inventory management and, as it is connected over the internet, can be used across multiple sites. It is ideal for retailers and for the manufacturers, wholesalers and logistics companies that serve them.

Indeed, using Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) and satellite tracking, the location of tagged inventory can even be tracked during transit.

3. Better communication with customers

The vast amount of data being collected using the IoT provides companies with the opportunity to give valuable information to their customers. In retail, for example, it enables them to offer omnichannel personalised marketing. Personalised marketing has proved very successful for online companies who use data from their websites to provide tailored offers to individuals. However, for businesses with both online and bricks and mortar stores, the IoT enables data from all forms of interaction to be collected. Supermarkets, for example, can learn about a customerâ€™s in-store habits from their loyalty cards and send them online offers tailored around this.

Other types of IoT device can also help companies send valuable communications. Smart meters, for example, can help energy companies show customers where money is being wasted or where they can save from a different energy package.

4. The development of new services

Not only does IoT data help companies send valuable data to their customers, it can also create opportunities to offer them new services. The ability to monitor asset health, as mentioned above, means businesses can also track the health of the products they sell and offer their customers add-on maintenance services.

We get our boilers serviced annually as a precaution but wouldnâ€™t it be useful if the service company knew in advance that a part was about to fail and contacted us to replace it before it packed in? The same service could be applied to cars, televisions, computers, vacuum cleaners and many other items we use.

It is not just with breakdowns where additional services could be offered. Manufacturers of products which use consumable parts could monitor when those parts were due for replacement and offer a service to send them before they ran out. This would be ideal for replacing ink cartridges, lightbulbs and batteries, etc.

5. Improved security

Todayâ€™s IoT-enabled CCTV cameras bring many security advantages. Any business owner can now view multiple premises, internally and externally, from anywhere. And the advancement in CCTV technology means these systems use AI to identify suspicious activity, send out warning notifications and use facial and other visual recognition signals to track and record perpetrators.

6. Visual analytics

The same IoT technology is also helping businesses to gain greater insight into customer and employee behaviour. Connected cameras using artificial intelligence can gather valuable data which enables retailers to better understand how their customers interact with their store layouts, promotional materials and product displays. With employees, it is possible to learn how individuals interact with machinery, use their time and undertake processes. This can help improve workflows and lead to greater efficiencies on the shop floor.

7. Efficiencies and improvements

IoT data can help businesses make major efficiencies and develop improvements. It helps manufacturers speed up workflow and cut bottlenecks. It enables logistics companies to reduce energy costs, reroute vehicles when there are traffic jams or organise deliveries for the quickest routes. It even helps theme parks know which attractions are most popular and when: ensuring adequate numbers of staff are available and that unpopular attractions are replaced.

Conclusion

The data gathered from IoT devices is enabling companies to make important changes to the way they operate. It can improve asset and inventory management, enable better communication with customers and offer the potential for new services. It can also improve security, offer insights into customer and employer behaviour and help introduce efficiencies and improvements.

Google Local SERPS might be affecting your Business

Posted on 01/10/201819/06/2021 by Tushar

Google has changed the way it promotes local businesses in its search results and for many companies, this can have a serious effect on their ability to attract new customers. Here, we’ll look at what these changes are and how they are having an impact.

How things are changing

Until recently, anyone undertaking a Google search for a type of business in their local area would have been provided with a list of ten nearby businesses. Clicking on the links in these results would take the searcher to the businessâ€™ website where they could discover the information they required. Those companies that appeared in these lists would have been the recipients of higher rankings, increased traffic, and the consequent conversions.

Recently, however, this list has been reduced, first to seven and now to just three â€“ making it harder for many local businesses to be featured. While this decision might be some way down to making the results more mobile-friendly, there are other changes, beyond this, which show Google to have moved its stance on how it promotes local businesses. Here are three of the main ones.

1. Keeping users on the Google website

One of the key changes we are seeing is that Google is trying to keep its searchers on its own website rather than sending them to that of the local business. There has been a significant increase in the number of search results, especially on mobile devices, that do not require the user to go beyond the information provided by Googleâ€™s interface. With mobile visibility being key to local businesses, as customers search on smartphones while out and about in local areas, this is a cause for concern.

Indeed, even when a search is done for a specific company, the display of the companyâ€™s Knowledge Panel means customers can access a wide range of information without the need to click through to the website. For instance, they can find out the basic company details, see images, take a virtual tour, read reviews, make a reservation, phone up, ask questions, see the opening hours and when the place is busy. And as all of this can be done on the Google results page, it means fewer searchers will head to your website. This doesnâ€™t necessarily mean, however, that you will get fewer customers as the information provided by Google might be enough to win them over.

2. Ads appearing in the local search results

While it is worrying that the number of businesses being displayed has fallen from ten to three, a further issue is that other businesses are allowed to appear alongside them because they have paid for the listing. In a recent survey of over 10,000 local search results, a third of them also contained ads.

Indeed, with its Local Service Ads scheme, some now consider that Googleâ€™s stance is to develop itself as a local lead generation provider.

3. Ads appearing alongside your Knowledge Panel

Another disturbing factor is that when a Google user searches for your specific company, the internet giant now intrudes this space with the paid for content of others. For example, you may see ads above and below it followed by an â€˜Other Users Searched Forâ€™ list of businesses beneath that.

What do these changes tell us?

Overall, the focus of Googleâ€™s local search results has changed. Today, instead of simply providing users with links to local business websites, itâ€™s more concerned with providing information about these businesses which keeps the searcher on Google itself. Indeed, with millions of Google Local Guides contributing to its knowledge about local businesses by answering questions and giving reviews, it can sometimes provide more relevant information that searchers are actually looking for than the company website can. If, for example, a customer wants to know if a business has free parking and Google doesnâ€™t know, it will ask the next Local Guide who visits in order to ensure it can provide the answer in future.

This begs the question of why Google wants to keep users on its own website and the answer to this looks fairly clear – because it helps it generate more revenue through advertising and in turn, helps its advertisers grow their businesses.

Conclusion

While you may think that this change in focus by Google means that local business websites have become irrelevant, the truth is exactly the opposite. There is a powerful link between the organic performance of your website and your ability to appear in the featured local rankings. So, while there is little you can do about the changes Google is making to keep people on its own site and placing paid ads in local search results, the best way to appear in the three featured local spots is to have the best website that you can. If you are looking for hosting for your local business website, check out our homepage to see our wide range of hosting solutions.

1 . A cool and eco-friendly IT solution

2. Less expensive to deploy and maintain

3. Blisteringly fast to deploy

4. Faster up-to-date backups

5. Disaster Recovery made simple and quick

6. Easier and safer DevOps and testing

7. Avoid vendor lock-in

Conclusion

A growing platform

Advantages of Instagram for online retailers

Tips on boosting Instagram sales

Set up an Instagram business profile

Take advantage of the selling tools

Post photos that attract attention

Promote your website in your pictures

Make the most of your captions

Use hashtags wisely

Attract Instagram influencers

Use Instagram ads

Conclusion

1. Asset tracking

2. Inventory Tracking

3. Better communication with customers

4. The development of new services

5. Improved security

6. Visual analytics

7. Efficiencies and improvements

Conclusion

How things are changing

1. Keeping users on the Google website

2. Ads appearing in the local search results

3. Ads appearing alongside your Knowledge Panel

What do these changes tell us?

Conclusion

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