Picture this: you stumble upon a small business website and find yourself drawn in by a compelling story that resonates with you on a personal level.
Suddenly, you feel a connection with the brand and are more inclined to make a purchase.
This is the power of storytelling in small business websites, and in this article, we’ll show you how to harness it to connect with your audience and take your business to the next level.
Why Storytelling is Essential for Small Businesses
As a small business owner, you want to do everything you can to stand out from the crowd. But in a sea of websites, it can be tough to capture the attention of potential customers.
That’s where storytelling comes in. By sharing your brand story and using narratives to connect with your audience, you can differentiate yourself from competitors and build a loyal following.
But it’s not just about standing out. Storytelling has a real impact on consumer behavior. Studies have shown that people are more likely to remember information presented as a story than in a list or bullet points.
When you use storytelling on your website, you’re not just making your brand more memorable; you’re also making it more relatable and emotionally compelling.
Understanding your Audience
Before you can start crafting your brand story, you need to understand who your audience is and what they care about.
What are their pain points?
What are their desires and values?
By answering these questions, you can create a story that resonates with them on a personal level.
For example, let’s say you’re a fitness coach who specializes in working with women over 40. In this case, your audience might be dealing with issues like hormonal changes, low energy, and a desire to feel strong and healthy as they age. By crafting a brand story that emphasizes your understanding of these issues and your ability to help women overcome them, you can create a powerful emotional connection with your audience.
Crafting your Brand Story
Your brand story is more than just a list of facts or a marketing pitch. It’s a narrative that brings your brand to life and makes it relatable to your audience. There are a few key elements that make up a great brand story:
A protagonist
Your brand story should have a main character that your audience can root for. This might be you, the business owner, or it might be a fictional character that represents your brand.
Conflict
Every good story needs conflict, and your brand story is no exception. What obstacles have you faced in building your business, and how have you overcome them?
Resolution
Your brand story should have a happy ending (or at least a satisfying one). What have you achieved, and how has your brand made a difference in the lives of your customers?
For example, let’s say you run a dog grooming business. Your brand story might focus on a rescue dog who came to your salon looking unkempt and unhappy.
Through your expert grooming skills and compassionate care, you transformed the dog into a happy, healthy pet who was adopted by a loving family.
By telling this story on your website, you’re not just promoting your business; you’re also highlighting your commitment to animal welfare and building an emotional connection with your audience.
Other examples of how businesses can use storytelling:
A photographer might use brand storytelling to showcase their passion for capturing life’s special moments. They could share stories about the meaningful connections they’ve made with their clients and how they’ve helped them to create lasting memories.
A fitness studio can emphasize its commitment to helping people achieve their health and wellness goals. They could share stories about clients who have transformed their lives through fitness, or about the studio’s own journey to becoming a welcoming, inclusive space for all.
A coffee shop might use brand storytelling to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere that feels like a home away from home. They could share stories about the origins and roasting process of their coffee beans, or about the community events they host that bring people together over a cup of coffee.
Incorporating Storytelling into your Website
Once you’ve crafted your brand story, it’s time to incorporate it into the content of your website and there are a few ways you can do this:
Use visuals
Quality Images and videos are a great way to bring your brand story to life. Consider using photos of your products or team members, or creating a video that tells your brand story in a compelling way.
Highlight your mission
Your brand story should be woven into your website’s mission statement and about page. Make sure these sections of your website reflect your brand story and values.
Here are some examples to get you started:
At XYZ Bakery, we’re more than just a bakery – we’re a community. Our commitment to using locally sourced ingredients and providing a warm, welcoming atmosphere is rooted in our belief that good food brings people together. We’re passionate about creating a space where our customers feel like part of the family, and where every bite of our delicious baked goods tells a story of quality and care.
At ABC Cleaners, we’re committed to more than just clean homes – we’re committed to a cleaner planet. Our brand story is one of sustainability, with a focus on using eco-friendly cleaning products and reducing waste. We believe that a clean home should also be a healthy home, and that our customers’ satisfaction comes from knowing that their clean home is contributing to a cleaner world.
At Grooming Haven, we’re not just in the business of grooming pets – we’re in the business of creating happy, healthy pets and happy, satisfied pet owners. Our brand story is one of compassion and expertise, with a focus on providing top-quality grooming services that keep pets looking and feeling their best. We know that every pet has its own unique story, and we’re committed to helping them look and feel their best for years to come.
Use testimonials
Testimonials from satisfied customers are a powerful way to reinforce your brand story and build social proof. Use customer quotes and reviews throughout your website to show that your brand is making a real difference in people’s lives.
Engaging with your Audience
Finally, it’s important to engage with your audience through storytelling. This means using your brand story as a jumping-off point for conversations with your customers and followers.
For example, you can develop a quiz based on your brand story that helps customers learn more about your business while having fun. A pet grooming business could create a quiz that helps customers identify their pet’s grooming needs based on their breed or personality.
You can encourage your customers to share photos or videos of themselves using your product or service, and then feature those posts on your website or social media pages. This helps build a sense of community around your brand and encourages your customers to feel more invested in your success.
Use social media or video conferencing platforms to host a live Q&A session where you can answer questions from your customers and followers. This provides an opportunity for you to share more about your brand story and connect with your audience on a personal level.
Incorporate stories into your email marketing campaigns to help build a deeper connection with your subscribers. For example, a clothing brand could share stories about the inspiration behind their latest collection, or a food delivery service could share stories about the local farmers and producers they work with.
Provide a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workings of your business by sharing photos or videos of your team, your workspace, or your creative process. This helps humanize your brand and makes your customers feel more connected to the people behind the products or services they love.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for small businesses that want to differentiate themselves from competitors and build a loyal following.
By understanding your audience and crafting a compelling brand story, you can create an emotional connection with your customers that goes beyond simple transactions.
Incorporating storytelling into your website and engaging with your audience through social media and other channels can help you build a community of supporters who are invested in your brand’s success. So don’t be afraid to share your story and let your customers get to know the heart and soul of your business.
Sentiments and emotions are hard to quantify, but, ironically, are the most crucial factors when a user makes a purchase decision. Users share their thoughts and opinions across various social platforms day-in-out. To make the most of it, brands need to monitor the chatter and derive useful insights that help understand user emotions, intent, and purpose. After all, every brand wants to know how their target users “feel” about them!
What is Social Sentiment Analysis?
Marketers are obsessed with metrics, and why not. Metrics help you boost your business in the right direction. However, metrics cannot surpass your users’ sentiments and feelings.
Social sentiment analysis can help brands dig deep into how their target users “feel” about them and turn social insights into actionable data. When a brand tries to incorporate user perceptions into its marketing and branding strategy, you get a successful and loved brand.
Social sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a natural language processing technique that tells you if the data acquired is positive, negative, or neutral. This enables brands to create a better user experience. After all, it is the end-users experience that matters.
Sentiment Analysis + AI
AI tools are paving the way in every domain we can think of. Whether driving business goals, writing content, or generating customized audio, there is an AI tool for everything.
It is only obvious that AI found its way into analyzing social sentiments. It pits together the power of two of its subfields –
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
The technology behind sentiment analysis
Any AI-enabled sentiment analysis tool has these two subfields at its core.
NLP converts human language into a language that machines understand. It implements syntactic (understand text structure) and semantic (identify meaning) techniques.
Once the text is processed, machine learning algorithms come into play for classifications. Machine learning algorithms help identify patterns in data and make relevant predictions based on them.
However, you must understand that machine learning algorithms do not rely on explicit instructions. Rather, it learns from its existing data set, i.e., the training data.
In layman’s terms, a machine learning model will classify texts by sentiments based on the text emotions it is trained on. Each emotion must be labeled with corresponding categories and tags.
After seeing a few examples, the model learns to associate a given text with a specific tag. Based on this, it starts predicting tags for unseen content.
Sentiment analysis with AI lets you tag a huge volume of data sets simultaneously and in real-time. Since machine learning algorithms learn over time, your sentiment analysis models will only get smarter.
Social Sentiment Analysis with AI
Social sentiment analysis tools follow the same model. It scouts social channels to identify and classify texts (social messages) into positive or negative. For instance, a social post stating, “I love using this tool” will give positive results in sentiment analysis.
While marketers use these two terms interchangeably, they are different.
Social Listening
Social sentiment analysis
Social listening captures brand mentions across the web. It is not limited to social channels. Brand mentions can be anywhere – blogs, social channels, forums, communities, etc. It helps answer questions like – Where do people talk about my brand? How do they perceive my brand? How does my brand perform against my competitors? Who can be my key influencers?
Social analytics provide actionable insights. It analyzes brand performance on social media at a deeper level and helps you understand the impact of your social efforts. It helps answer questions like: How effectively users are engaging on social media? How many people can see your brand? What are the user demographics and interests?
Social sentiment analysis can be tagged as a subset of social listening. Once you discover your brand mentions, the next step is to analyze the sentiment across those mentions.
This allows brands to detect emergencies and take appropriate action before it is late. After all, more social mentions are not always equal to positive mentions.
For instance, the eCommerce giant was in hot soup in 2019 for apparently hurting Hindu sentiments when it started showcasing products like doormats, slippers, and toilet seat covers with pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses. A Twitter user posted images of the same and was backed by thousands of people urging the brand to remove the entire catalog.
The aggression was severe, to the point where users threatened to stop using the app or delete the app, altogether! And why not. It was the second time Amazon made the same mistake.
As a result, Amazon clarified that the said product catalogs are removed and that all sellers will adhere to the selling guidelines. If sellers do not adhere to the selling guidelines, their products will be removed from the eCommerce portal.
Owing up social backlash with utmost honesty and rectifying mistakes – brands can do it right if they successfully listen to their users and analyze the sentiment around the chatter.
Types of Social Sentiment Analysis
Opinions (or sentiments) on social media are wide-ranged. They can be extremely positive or negative, somewhat positive or negative, or absolutely neutral. This is also termed as polarity-driven analysis.
Here’s how you can grade emotions from the tone of the text.
User opinion
Sentiment analysis
I am so stocked to see this feature live. Can’t wait to try it out
Extreme positive
Why would you remove the icon @xyz brand?
Somewhat negative
I am never coming back to this website ever, ever again. Pathetic customer service.
Extreme negative
Not sure if this feature will help marketers in the long run
Neutral
I love buying from @xyz but this time you’ve really goofed up
Somewhat negative
Sentiment analysis models
Grading sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral is the first level. To implement AI-enabled social sentiment analysis, you must go beyond polarity.
Some advanced and popular types of sentiment analysis include:
Emotion analysis
Emotion-driven analysis helps you dig deeper into user emotions like anger, happiness, or frustration around your product/brand. In most cases, sentiment analysis tools use lexicons i.e. list of words that conveys emotions, or resort to advanced machine learning algorithms.
The downside of using lexicons is that the correct emotion is often not captured. Lexicons contain words that specify a certain kind of emotion. For instance, words like bad or kill often resonates with anger. However, a social opinion stating this feature is killing it indicates happiness.
For instance, look at this tweet with all the bad words, but the tweet’s emotion is positive and happy. In such cases, the emotion analysis can go wrong unless your sentiment analysis also considers the emojis.
In that case, the algorithm will predict the emotion correctly.
Aspect-based analysis
Aspect-based analysis helps brands understand what exact feature or part of ad users tag as good, bad, or ugly!
For instance, This filter does not look good on nigh-mode pictures instantly tells a brand that the opinion is solely about the said filter. The brand can improve the filter or launch a new one for the camera’s night mode. Either way, aspect-based analysis helps dig deep into what users want and what they do not.
Multilingual sentiments
This involves a lot of pre-processing and resources. You will need lexicons (available online), noise, and translation algorithms (you must build them) to detect the sentiment.
Multilingual sentiment analysis works for brands with users from varied ethnicities, cultures, and demographics.
Social sentiment analysis to Understand Customers
There is no other alternative for brands but to listen to and understand their end-users. As more and more users become aware of the power of social media and brand positioning, brands must leverage social monitoring and sentiment analysis.
Here’s how you can use sentiment analysis to your benefit.
1. Spot opportunities to improve user experience
When you start monitoring brand mentions across social channels (and the web), you monitor compliments and complaints. This gives you a detailed insight into what your users expect from you. While compliments show that your product/services are built in the right direction, complaints show the gap that you might be missing otherwise.
For instance, a complaint need not be aggressive or extremely negative. It can also be around a missing feature or service you have not yet introduced. Monitoring such mentions and engaging with users can help you identify what your users seek. If you find most users voting for that missing feature, you know it’s time to get it done.
One brand that I absolutely love using is Canva, not only because the templates and design possibilities help marketers like me design pro images – but also because this brand listens and responds.
Check this tweet from one of its users and how Canva handled it.
There are many instances when you feel like a feature is missing and validate the same via social media. Social posts like these are also part of sentiment analysis. The score may not be as high as a proper negative review, but it will still be graded as negative.
Pro-tip to handle such mentions: Own up to the gap and be empathetic. This lets the user know you’ve noted the issue and will work around it. It builds trust and also improves user experience. When a user knows he/she is heard, that’s all that matters to build a healthy brand reputation.
2. Reduce customer wait time
Sentiment analysis tools will show you sentiments over time, like days, weeks, and months. Simultaneously, it will also tag social posts as positive, negative, and neutral for you to take quick action.
The tool analyzed the text and scored -100, indicating extremely negative and serious issues. The post uses a sarcastic tone to complain, but the tool accurately captures the negative sentiment.
While this tweet is regarding a missing feature in the product, the sentiment is still positive and generates a 100 score on the sentiment scorecard. It contains lexicons like ‘not sure’, which can easily get tagged as negative sentiments. However, looking at the context, the tool marks it as positive.
In both cases, you must be quick to respond.
Responding to a positive or neutral social post will help you build better relationships with your users, along with instant gratification.
Responding to an issue or complaint on social media posts with either a solution or a process/resource to resolve the issue quickly can help you build user retention.
No one wants to wait endlessly. Forget endless; users hate to wait beyond an hour. Research shows users expect a reply within 24 hours. Your users will start rethinking your brand within seconds of encountering an issue. So, the quicker you are, the better it is.
For instance, Apple’s customer support is always prompt in its reply. While it does not fully resolve the issue immediately, the response time is less than a minute which is a breather for any users stuck with an issue. The response contains either some general steps to resolve the issue or a quick message to DM them the issue using the send us a private message CTA included in the response. [Tweet]
What I love about this social handle is that every response (although these are automated) has customization. For example, the user complains about iMessage, so the response includes the ‘iMessage’ term to give it a personal touch.
Pro-tip to reduce wait time: The best way to reduce wait time is by automating tas tagging for incoming support tickets.
You can train your customer support team to use sentiment analysis to tag incoming tickets and automatically put negative tickets at the top of the queue.
Simultaneously, you can create rules to automatically get negative tickets assigned to the most experienced representative to guarantee the best attention.
3. Define Neutral and Emojis for accurate analysis
Defining positive and negative is easier than defining neutral. It is hard to train your machine-learning model to detect neutral tags.
How you perceive neutral plays an important role in training your sentiment analysis model. Each tagging data will require tagging criteria so that a good definition can go a long way. Here’s how you can do this:
Classify all objective texts as neutral, especially those that do not have explicit sentiments.
If your data is still pre-processed, you can tag it neutral since the irrelevant data is yet to be filtered. But do it with caution. Sometimes, it may add more noise and hamper the performance.
Texts like “I wish it could do XYZ” are usually neutral. However, you may find it harder to categorize wish texts like “I wish xyz did better than abc”.
Next comes categorizing emojis. Emojis are of two types:
Western emojis with two characters
Easter emojis with longer combinations of characters of vertical nature
Emojis play a pivotal role in determining the sentiment of the texts, especially in tweets.
In this case, you must be careful of character and word levels when performing sentiment analysis.
Pro Tip: Consider pre-processing social media content, transforming emojis into tokens, and whitelisting them.
How to do social sentiment analysis [Use Case: Twitter]
Twitter offers instant gratification, which makes it the most accurate blueprint of user opinion. Monitoring brand mentions and competitor mentions can help in understanding the ‘emotion’ of users, how they feel about a product or a particular feature, and what can trigger them incorrectly.
Twitter sentiment analysis can be done using programming languages like R and Python. Below are the steps for Twitter data sentiment analysis.
1. Extract and collect data
To mine data from Twitter, you can use Twitter APIs like Tweepy and TextBlob. Data extraction is the crux of the process because all other steps directly depend on this.
Ensure that your Twitter data contains the observations you want to analyze. You will find two types of tweets:
Latest tweets under real-time hashtags, keywords, or topics.
Historical tweets posted in the past and their responses in different timelines.
2. Pre-process sentiment analysis dataset
Tweets are mostly unstructured data and require extensive pre-processing before using them as training data for the sentiment analysis model. Data reduction is one way of preparing data for mining.
This includes:
Cleaning all the noise from the data
Deleting duplicate or meaningless tweets [eg, tweets shorter than three characters]
Formatting improvements and concatenation
Preparing custom data to perform testing on the model
Clean and good data facilitates precise outcomes, i.e. more accurate predictions.
3. Build an ML model for sentiment analysis
The model building depends on the problem statement, requirements, and use cases. However, it has 5 mandates –
Create the base model type as a Classifier to categorize and define tags
Under the model, create a sentiment analysis project for the classification
Import the pre-processed data as the training dataset for model
Train the model by tagging each tweet as positive, negative, or neutral. After a few manual tagging, the models learn to do the tagging with maximum accuracy.
Test the model performance and preciseness of predictions. The larger dataset you use, the easier it is for the model to learn the tagging.
Tip for maximum accuracy: Define tags more explicitly in the training data and crosscheck for false positives and negatives using various test cases.
4. Analyse the data for sentiment analysis
Integrate Twitter data with the tweet sentiment analysis model. There are pre-built APIs that require tokenization and API calls to complete the integration process.
Examples: Inference API by Huggice Face, Lexanalytics, Brandwatch, Rosette, Social Mention, and more.
5. Use data visualization to demonstrate your findings
Data visualization illustrates any sentiment analysis report the best. It is easy to understand, interactive, and dynamic. In addition, they work on business intelligence frameworks and render impeccable data visuals.
Examples: Power BI, Google Data Studio, Tableau, Klipfolio, etc.
Closing statement
Social sentiment analysis has proven benefits like –
Large-scale data sorting
Real-time data analysis
Improved user experience
Detailed competitor analysis
It can be applied to innumerable aspects of your business – be it brand monitoring, product analytics, market research, and customer service. Social sentiment analysis helps brands work fast and work smartly. It works towards listening to users more accurately and making the end-user experience worthwhile.
Sentiment analysis is already mandated for brands who want to build products or design services catered to humans. It gives a deeper insight into user intent, emotions, and engagements for teams to work more effectively.
Have you started analyzing your users’ emotions across social channels?
In today’s digital age, designing for accessibility is more important than ever. With over a billion people living with some form of disability, it’s crucial to ensure that websites and digital products are accessible to everyone.
Designing for accessibility is not only the right thing to do, it’s also good for business. By creating a website that is accessible to all users, you can reach a wider audience and improve the user experience for everyone. So whether you’re designing a new website or updating an existing one, make sure to prioritize accessibility in your design process.
Some giants, like H&M, PayPal, or Linkedin, are introducing one feature to boost accessibility after another, hoping the strike the AAA score (the highest level of accessibility). And similar to how we follow these brands in terms of design and tendencies, here it’s even wiser to follow their example. So in this article, we’ll explore some tips and best practices for designing for accessibility.
Make your website or digital product keyboard accessible
Not all users can use a mouse, so it’s essential to make sure your website or digital product can be navigated using a keyboard. Keyboard navigation is crucial for users with motor disabilities, and it’s also helpful for users who prefer to navigate uniquely using their keyboard.
Keyboard navigation can be implemented by ensuring that all interactive elements can be accessed via the Tab key. Users should be able to navigate through links, buttons, and form fields using this way. Additionally, check that your website or digital product has clear visual focus indicators to help users understand where they are on the page.
Use proper color contrast
Many users with visual impairments have trouble distinguishing between colors, so the proper color contrast in your design really matters. This means using a combination of colors that are easy to distinguish and have a high level of contrast.
One way to obtain proper color contrast is to use a tool like WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker. It allows you to check the contrast ratio of two colors and make sure they meet accessibility standards. WCAG 2.1 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
Use alt tags for images
Images on a website or digital product are often meaningless for users with visual impairments. That’s why it’s important to use alt tags for images, which provide a text description of the image. Screen readers can read the alt tags aloud, allowing users to understand the content.
When writing alt tags, do your best to be descriptive and provide as much detail as possible. Avoid using phrases like “image of” or “picture of,” as these don’t give much information. Instead, describe what’s in the image and what it conveys.
Make your content easy to read
Readable content is essential for all users, but it’s especially important for users with cognitive or learning disabilities. That’s why you are recommended to use a font that is easy to read, with a large enough size and appropriate line spacing. Additionally, avoid using long paragraphs and use headings and bullet points to break up the content.
The font you choose should be easy to read and not too stylized. Sans serif fonts like Arial and Verdana are a good choice, as they are clean and easy to read. Avoid using decorative fonts, as they can be hard to read, especially for users with dyslexia.
Headings and bullet points are a great way to structurize your content and make it more scannable. Make the headings clear and descriptive so they help users understand the structure of the content. Also, ensure the bullet points present information clearly and concisely.
Ensure your website is compatible with assistive technology
Many users with disabilities rely on assistive technology, e.g., screen readers or speech recognition software, to navigate websites and digital services.
The easiest way to ensure compatibility with assistive technology is by using semantic HTML. Semantic HTML uses tags to convey the meaning of the content, making it easier for screen readers to understand.
We’ve talked with The Designest team, who runs a blog for the professional design community, and asked what they find crucial for website accessibility. Here are some tips and best practices they suggest:
Provide alternative text for images. Screen readers and other assistive technologies rely on alt text to describe images to users who cannot see them. Make sure to provide alt text for all images on your website.
Use clear and concise language. Let it be plain and avoid jargon or complex sentences/words that may be difficult for some users to understand.
Ensure that all interactive elements, like buttons and links, are keyboard-accessible. Users should be able to navigate and interact with your website using only their keyboard.
Provide clear and consistent navigation. That’s how the users can easily find what they are searching for.
Use color with care. It’s important to ensure it remains accessible to users with difficulty perceiving certain hues. Use a high-contrast color scheme and avoid relying solely on color to convey information.
Test your website with assistive technologies.
In addition to the recommendations above, designers can do several other things to make their websites and digital products more accessible.
Use of multimedia
Videos and audio content can be particularly challenging for users with hearing impairments. To make multimedia content more accessible, consider adding closed captioning and transcripts for videos and audio content. Closed captioning provides a text version of the audio content, while transcripts provide a written version.
Web forms on websites
Web forms can be particularly challenging for users with visual impairments, motor disabilities, and cognitive or learning disabilities. To make them more accessible, ensure they are easy to navigate using a keyboard and provide clear and concise instructions for each field. Additionally, you might consider using labels and placeholders to provide context for each field.
The internet is vast, full of potential …and dangerous. As the world becomes more dependent on digital activity, hacks and breaches are becoming more common.
Even elite cybersecurity firms aren’t immune to the risks. In 2022, the popular password manager LastPass reported that cybercriminals had broken into its password vaults and stolen encrypted data, leaving customers unsettled and worried.
As 2023 gains momentum, business owners must be on guard to protect both themselves and their clientele from this growing threat. One of the best ways they can do so is through multi-factor authentication.
What Is Multi-Factor Authentication?
The LastPass data breach serves as a reminder that the digital world is always evolving — and business leaders and customers alike must evolve with it if they want to stay secure. Multifactor Authentication (MFA) offers an effective way to complicate the hacking process by using more than one level of security depending on the situation.
For instance, the data security experts at Okta explain that MFA “blends at least two separate factors.” The identity provider details that one of these factors is usually a username and password — but that on its own is no longer enough.
MFA adds an additional level of security. This could be a physical possession, like a phone or keycard. It could also be a physical location based on GPS. In situations where more safety is desired, it could also include a personal identifier like a fingerprint or iris scan.
Multi-factor authentication can feel like a hassle on the surface. However, in many cases, it can actually have a positive impact on the speed of logging in. In fact, the simple act of adding another step to the login process can provide a slew of other worthwhile benefits to businesses and customers alike.
The Benefits of MFA in Business Transactions
MFA takes some time to implement — but that is true with any defense system. Even Medieval castles expanded the building time of a home to as much as a decade, all in the name of creating an elite defense system for something that had value.
If you’re hesitating over whether MFA is worth it, here are a few of the major benefits to consider for both you and your business.
MFA Provides Peace of Mind
One of the most obvious benefits of multi-factor authentication is that it provides peace of mind.
Businesses are in a constant race to take advantage of technological solutions to give them an edge over the competition. The ability to aggressively invest in digital software and applications without worrying about compromising on security is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.
MFA Means Less Long-Term Clean-Up Work
According to research reported by the University of North Georgia, 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses. The odds of facing a web-based attack, a phishing scam, or another attempt to hack your system are serious and significant.
Proactively establishing better security for your business means you’re putting a little work in early. However, once MFA is in place, you’re also avoiding the need to spend a significant amount of time, energy, and resources later on when a likely attack would have taken place.
MFA Is an Adaptable Security Solution
The world was already shifting to a decentralized office before the pandemic exponentially sped up the evolution of the workplace. In the wake of the crisis, offices are shifting to a combination of in-person, hybrid, and fully remote workplace settings. Sometimes all three of these are present within a single workforce.
With so much in flux (and many workers trying to access company software remotely), the complexity of security is changing. MFA is a strong and adaptable solution that can meet the security needs of this new workforce.
MFA Is User-Friendly
No one likes memorizing passwords (or resetting them when they forget). With that in mind, the thought of creating an even more complex cybersecurity network can sound daunting — but it isn’t.
In fact, MFA removes much of the need for passwords. Instead, things like physical locations and facial recognition can serve in their place. This makes it easier to create strong authentication processes that are still user-friendly (for employees and customers alike).
MFA Enhances Customer Trust
From peace of mind to adaptability, MFA has many direct and applicable advantages for a business. In addition, its user-friendly nature is a boon to both employees and customers.
Another area where customers come out on top is the trust and loyalty that MFA can create. When a customer knows that a business is going above and beyond to create a safe environment for them, it can help them feel safe and secure as they interact with you.
As far as your business is concerned, fostering customer trust translates to things like loyalty, repeat business, and word-of-mouth advertising — all of which positively impact revenue.
MFA Is the Future of Cybersecurity
Individual complex and nuanced security solutions are useful for a while. Eventually, though, cybercriminals figure things out.
MFA deploys an organic, impossible-to-overcome complexity to the security process: layers. By complicating a username and password with additional biometric, geographic, and possession-based factors, it naturally creates a level of security that can let business owners, employees, and customers alike operate in peace, no matter what ups and downs the digital future may hold.
While a project plan can give project managers more profound insights into a project, measuring its progress keeps it going in the right direction.
Monitoring a project from a close distance can yield timely and high-quality results and keep Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), like team progress, budget overruns, and obstacles, in check. To understand the term better, let’s talk more about project progress.
What Is Project Progress Tracking?
Project progress tracking, also referred to as collecting actuals, is a project management method that’s used to follow the progress of tasks in a project.
It indicates the actions that project managers take regularly to observe the work going on in a project so that desired results are obtained. This action involves the following-
Building project status reports from the project tracking systems in use
Monitoring resources that were used at any point during the project
Cross-checking the completion of tasks and their dependencies according to the project timeline
In the beginning, team members may not be comfortable with you asking them regularly about their actions. Yet, project managers must drive motivation while also being sensitive to team concerns to always receive accurate information.
Challenges in Measuring Project Progress
Team resistance may be one of the challenges that project managers will come across while tracking project progress. But there’s more to be prepared for. Below are some of the most common hurdles that are faced by project managers.
Inadequate Risk Analysis
This is a vital segment of a project lifecycle as it can foretell potential factors that can jeopardize a project’s timeline. However, risk analysis comes with its vulnerabilities, which can result in flaws in the project plan. For instance, if the analysis is rushed at some point in the project, it could result in monetary issues or failure in the overall project plan.
Tip: Improve risk analysis strategies by researching potential issues that your team might encounter while also devisingcontrol measures to prevent them. Also, make sure you have access to real-time data.
Communication Gaps
Are you effectively communicating with your team and stakeholders? If not, then it’s high time to start doing so. Without communication, getting an accurate portrayal of a project’s progress can be hard.
Communication skills, verbal or written, can assist project managers in instructing team members more effectively and relaying any gathered information to the stakeholders.
Tip: Having a robust project management tool can help you with proper reporting communication. Such tools can make sense of all the data and send scheduled reports to the required stakeholders in the format they need. Also, project managers must remember to adjust their communication methods to adjust different communication styles.
Vague Goals or Criteria
Most projects fail because they never started with a clear purpose. If you want your projects to be successful then you should have clear and measurable goals to work towards. Imagine what an endless road trip you’d have if you did not know your destination. It’s the same for a project without a goal.
Tip: Define your project’s KPIs as well as the timeline before the implementation phase to have clearer goals.
The Danger of Scope Creep
When a project starts, changes might crop up in the deliverables or goals of a project, which may deviate its focus from the original plan. This can affect the project outcome. Some common instances of scope creep are as follows.:
Changes in the number of deliverables
Increase in the number of features required in a project
Changes in client’s needs
Instances where the client asks for incorrect deliverables
A change of the project’s end goal by the stakeholder
Resistance
The project manager will not always be the line manager for all resources and there might be some resistance from teams when tasks are tracked. To avoid this, it’s important to prepare them for the idea of project progress measurements right from the start. This can be done by explaining how it can help them streamline their activities.
Once teams are aware that their progress will be measured from time to time to make things easier for them, you’ll surely receive the most accurate estimates from them.
How to Measure Project Progress Effectively
Project managers must keep a few simple tips in mind to help them successfully observe a project’s progress. This must also be conveyed to the concerned team managing the projects from the start to the end making the information exchange easier throughout the project.
Having said that here are some tips that can aid in measuring a project’s progress effectively for the successful completion of tasks:
Choose the Right Methods for Project Tracking
Project progress tracking methods can either be quantitative or qualitative. While the former focuses on metrics like any turning point in a project, the costs, and the time, the latter concentrates on data and information from team meetings. Both methods are different but ensure great results.
The quantitative variables may include tracking of time, costs, etc. which gives objective data points to work with. The qualitative tracking could include regular check-ins with the team to analyze the ‘WHY’ behind the data to deal with any issues.
Build Project Status Reports
It’s wise to begin projects by deducing information that would be useful for measuring a project’s progress and understanding its usefulness for someone else.
Status reports aim at providing an overview of all activities happening in a project as well as the reason for the activities. That is why status reports have to be easily understandable so that team members can make decisions on how to proceed with the project.
Tip: Making reports manually may seem like a standard but for accurate progress tracking, it’s always better to have data in real-time and avoid working in silos. Also, too much data never help so make sure you have a reporting system that’s comprehensive but can be easily customized as well.
Recognize the Project Goals and Adhere to Them
Knowing your project goals is key to tracking your performance. Your team must also be informed of the same to be able to deliver the target objective. Have a SMART goal in place to deal with this. Such goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, meaning that you can easily track the goals vs. progress of a project in tangible terms.
Once your goals meet the criteria mentioned above, you can get your team members in on the plan as well and ensure that they stick to them.
Tip: Ensure you have a system in place to have a complete view of estimates vs. actuals. This should include data on the management of all assets that are contributing to the project, especially human resources.
Always Use Checklists
Having an inventory right in front of your eyes aids project managers in breaking down tasks into phases like
client onboarding
project ideation and planning
execution
submission
final review & edits
Each of these phases can further be divided into actionable tasks that can be further allocated to different team members.
Keep Stakeholders in the Loop
Always share your project progress with all relevant stakeholders. This makes you, the project manager, responsible, and stakeholders aware of issues that might arise during the project.
Stakeholders will know what to expect upon project completion, and project managers will have more options to assess the costs involved and project timelines in real time if required.
Let Communication Always Be Constructive
If you aren’t able to communicate effectively with your team then it may not be possible to provide stakeholders with correct information about the overall progress of the project.
Remember to always keep all communication channels transparent and clear, not overburdening your team members in the process. Constructive communication encourages efficient data exchange in a simpler form so that everyone gets at least a gist of the project’s progress.
Guarantee Project Success With Progress Tracking
Tracking project progress might not seem important at first, but the truth is that it’s critical in determining the success or failure of a project. For this, many project tracking software is available for project managers to leverage and efficiently manage projects on an intuitive and flexible platform.
Does it look like your project is not going as planned and diverting from the plan of action? If your answer is yes, then it’s time for you to start reaping the benefits of project progress tracking today.
