BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Developing and implementing a reliable and carefully considered business security system remains a top priority for modern employers, with dedicated security teams expected to identify and neutralize sophisticated physical and cybersecurity threats with the aid of proactive and intelligent technologies. 

Commercial security systems have been revolutionized in recent years as industry professionals seek to better address novel risks, provide employees with a more convenient way to access core facilities, and markedly improve incident response times with support from integrated remote-access systems. 

With data suggesting that the number of recorded significant cyber-attacks may have risen globally by as much as 38% in the last year alone, and crimes against property account for over 60% of all reported crimes in recent times, business leaders must have plans in place to deter common threats.  

To help achieve this, here are 4 commercial security trends to consider in your company’s strategy.  

1. Mobile access control 

Ensuring that access to all company facilities is appropriately secured behind considered physical security devices is essential to protect businesses from instances of physical violence and theft, but choosing to operate traditional access control systems may no longer provide adequate protection. 

Legacy solutions such as RFID, NFC, and pin code access systems may hinder unauthorized persons from gaining property access to some degree, though in many cases, unauthorized intruders are able to compromise such systems by simply stealing, duplicating, or brute-forcing relevant permissions. 

Businesses can lessen these risks and markedly strengthen on-site security policies by choosing to develop smart commercial access control systems configured to accept secure digital credentials. Rather than issuing easily lost and hard-to-monitor key cards and fobs, mobile systems allow security teams to send staff unique digital credentials to be stored and managed within a smartphone application. 

Mobile systems offer touch-free property access, allow users to secure their credentials behind extra protections like in-device multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometric locks, and allow security teams to remotely adjust or revoke permissions if they suspect a credential has been compromised, providing businesses with reliable 24/7 protection to deter physical intrusions and property crime. 

2. AI-informed security cameras 

Advanced AI technologies and machine learning algorithms are currently transforming a number of modern industries, with commercial security providers being just one of many to benefit from these novel solutions. Recently published data indicates as many as 77% of businesses are currently using or exploring the use of AI systems, with 61% believing AI tools to be necessary for security purposes. 

One of the primary benefits presented by the integration of AI technology alongside traditional security devices is the application of automated smart data analytics used to improve the efficacy of installed video security cameras. For example, AI-informed object detection software can be used to identify suspected weapons or contraband items, instantly alerting on-site security staff to provide a response. 

Modern AI software tools are able to apply intelligent machine learning algorithms to recorded data, meaning active systems can be configured to automatically detect anomalous events such as crowds forming in unusual areas, and instantly notify teams of disturbances via cloud-based communications. 

Installing and operating such solutions enables on-site security teams to better focus their efforts only on matters of immediate importance, removing the need for staff to constantly monitor live video feeds and ensuring that no potentially harmful incidents or significant threats go undetected or ignored. 

3. Automated lockdown procedures 

Typically, when businesses choose to install and operate modern security technologies such as mobile access control systems and AI-informed video security cameras, teams will also choose to develop a cloud-based security management platform used to provide a holistic view of all active devices.

Cloud-based security management allows security staff to view and adjust connected security devices remotely from within a single easily navigated platform, with further benefits found in the ability to link a range of Internet Protocol (IP) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the same system, enabling the creation of automatic security responses triggered by the activation of specific devices in the network. 

In practice, this means if a suspected intruder is detected by installed security cameras or IoT motion sensors, this information can be used to automatically engage all nearby access control devices and locking mechanisms, sealing the property and instantly notifying security staff of the unfolding event. 

Developing such a system allows for the creation of bespoke security responses as staff can choose which devices should be programmed to inform the operation of connected systems. Considering that 94% of enterprises already use cloud services, upgrading existing networks will often be achievable.   

4. Physical and cybersecurity convergence 

Modern businesses aren’t only expected to contend with a myriad of physical security threats, in fact, recent reports indicate as many as 96% of executives consider cybersecurity resilience to be a top priority with regards to internal operations. As many organizations now operate physical security devices capable of communicating with digital systems, security convergence is likely to become increasingly essential. 

Physical and cybersecurity convergence describes a considered approach to enterprise security in which all relevant digital systems and all physical security devices are subject to dedicated policies and procedures, specifically designed to protect integrated networks from both physical and cyber-attacks. 

This means physical security staff and IT teams will work together to assess all active systems and ensure that all settings and operational policies are configured to detect and respond to both physical and digital threats, typically via the deployment of combined risk assessments and training programs. 

Choosing to implement converged security policies ensures that all security professionals within an organization understand how to identify and address gaps and vulnerabilities in essential systems, reducing the risks associated with cross-platform breaches and strengthening wider security policies. 

Summary 

Developing a reliable and proactive commercial building security system remains a top priority for organizations across all major industries, though to appropriately prepare for and defend against modern threats, security, and IT teams must prioritize adaptive systems and policies to improve their security posture. 

By investing in smart technology systems and integrated cloud-based management platforms, business leaders are able to provide security staff with a more holistic view of all installed systems and assist teams in creating automated incident responses, helping to strengthen commercial security strategies.

Featured image by Mi?osz Klinowski on Unsplash

The post 4 commercial security trends to consider in your company’s strategy  appeared first on noupe.

With the evolution of technology, customer preferences have evolved, changed, and expanded. You have to work harder than your biggest competition to grab their low attention span. This is why you require innovative technologies to stand out in your customer’s inboxes.

The inboxes of your audiences are already crowded. How do you then engage with your subscribers and make them click, read and take action?

One of the best approaches is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in email marketing. What is AMP and how do you use AMP email marketing to accelerate growth for your business? Let us understand in detail.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages in Email Marketing?

AMP aka Accelerated Mobile Pages in email marketing is an integration (initially developed by Google) for a web page-like experience inside emails. It allows your marketing team to create interactive and dynamic digital experiences for your users within those emails and enhances engagement.

Using the power of AMP, you can directly embed interactive elements like image galleries, forms, carousels, etc. These components are what will make your users click and engage with you.

These elements also make it easier for the users to engage and interact without having to leave the inbox on a different app. This way, the results would lean towards higher engagement, improved customer experience, and increased brand visibility. 

How to Leverage the Power of AMP in Your Email Marketing Strategy?

Here are some of the major benefits of AMP that you can get an advantage out of for your email marketing strategy:

1. Increase in Conversions

The longer a prospect takes to make a decision, the lower the likelihood of conversion. AMP email addresses this issue by allowing subscribers to complete transactions directly within the email itself, reducing decision-making time. This functionality proves instrumental in generating leads and increasing conversion rates, ultimately transforming prospects into customers.

2. Real-Time Updates

You can also include live, real-time updates in your emails using AMP. This feature was specifically developed for displaying real-time pricing, showcasing inventory availability, publishing event updates, and overall ensuring that your users get the correct and relevant information timely.

3. Personalization at Scale

Also, when you are using AMP, it allows the dynamic content to adapt to the user patterns and their interactions. This capability actually helps marketers for delivering personalized recommendations. 

Such tailored experiences resonate with the users and eventually drive revenue for your business.

Now, let us explore how to best utilize AMP for your email marketing strategy.

Best Practices for Implementing AMP

When you are utilizing AMP, you need to leverage the maximum potential out of it to get the best ROI for your brand. How can you do that?

1. Get started with segmentation

In order to get the maximum impact of AMP for your email marketing strategy, you have to categorize emails into different groups based on various criteria, such as past purchase history, level of engagement, geographical location, and more. 

This personalization tactic proves effective as it enables the delivery of valuable and pertinent messages to specific groups, fostering higher customer engagement and boosting email-driven conversions.

2. Use interactive elements

AMP provides a range of interactive components and elements and if used wisely and thoughtfully, they can make a significant impact. You must focus on the components that align with interactive emails, email marketing strategy, and objectives.

1. Forms: You can embed interactive forms within emails, allowing recipients to submit information, provide feedback, or participate in surveys and polls directly from the email.
2. Carousels: Carousels enable you to display multiple images or content blocks within a single space, allowing recipients to scroll or swipe through the carousel to view different offerings or information.
3. Accordion Menus: Accordion menus allow you to present collapsible content sections within an email. Recipients can expand or collapse these sections to access additional details or navigate through different sections of the email.
4. Countdown Timers: Countdown timers can be added to create a sense of urgency or to promote time-sensitive offers. These timers visually display the time remaining for a particular event or offer.
5. Ratings and Reviews: You can include interactive rating and review elements within emails, allowing recipients to provide feedback or rate products, services, or experiences directly from the email.
   
6. Continuously test and optimize

As with any process or strategy, even when you are using AMP, testing and optimization are crucial to the process. A/B testing, multivariate testing, and optimization through improvements are a must.

Through A/B testing, you can understand the impact of AMP components and elements on the open rates, click-through rates, as well as conversions. You can use the insights gained through testing for refining your approach.

By doing this, you can achieve continuous improvement in the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

4. Always provide support for non-AMP versions

There are email clients that do not support AMP. Here, you need to ensure that you have a fallback option. This way, the clients and recipients who are not compatible with AMP can also still access your content, and engage with your brand.

5. Always comply with the best practices and follow the guidelines

When it comes to using AMP, you have to comply with the guidelines set by the email service providers along with the AMP specifications. Ensure that the email client supports and enables AMP for email functionality. Not all clients may offer support for AMP (like Outlook and Amazon Simple Email Service), so it’s crucial to confirm compatibility beforehand.

This will ensure that the emails you send out as a part of your campaign are properly rendered, and compatible with the recipients, and improves client engagement by also following the best practices and guidelines.

Conclusion

Integrating AMP into your email marketing strategy can boost your engagement significantly. When you are leveraging the interactive capabilities of AMP, you are offering a dynamic, personalized, and immersive experience to your users.

Of course, it is important to always follow the best practices to get the maximum output out of AMP technology. AMP comes with a list of benefits that you must take advantage of for your email marketing strategy. By following the best practices, you ensure that it makes a significant impact on your brand.

Featured image by Dirk Wouters from Pixabay

The post How to Use AMP Email Marketing to Boost Engagement  appeared first on noupe.

Social media marketing has changed the way that businesses connect with consumers. Businesses that use social sites like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook can post trending, engaging content that piques the interest of potential customers and builds a buzz around their brand. 

However, creating content that connects with your audience can be difficult. Consumer trends change quickly in the digital world and it’s easy to look out of touch if businesses aren’t constantly updating their approach. 

Companies that want to improve their social reach can connect with customers by tailoring their content to meet the genre expectations of each social platform. This can help marketers build a connection with a multi-generational audience, too, as different demographics have vastly different preferences in the digital world. 

Characteristics of Social Media Marketing

Understanding the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing is key for any business that wants to improve its social following. While traditional marketing can be repurposed for social content, it’s usually best to adopt an entirely different strategy to target social sites. 

Digital marketing is an innately audience-focused approach to content creation. It’s less expensive than traditional marketing and can help businesses reach a global audience. Digital marketing on social media can significantly improve consumer connection, too, as social platforms offer businesses a two-way conversation in the form of direct messages, comments, and shared content. 

However, no two social platforms are the same. Each site has its own unique conventions and norms that dictate consumer preferences and content creation. These platforms can be categorized into five types of social media, including: 

• Social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter);
• Photo sharing (Instagram and Pinterest);
• Video sharing (YouTube and Vimeo);
• Interactive media (TikTok and Snapchat);
• Blogging and Community Building (Reddit and Tumblr).

While there is overlap between these categories, distinguishing between them can help marketers produce creative content that connects with users. Once marketers understand the differences between social sites, they can start to plan and produce content that redirects users to omnichannel services for improved customer communication. 

Embracing Creativity

Creativity is a skill that can be refined with practice and the right approach. Businesses that want to be more creative with their content marketing should adopt an honest, research-driven approach to ideation. Even small changes, like encouraging internal collaboration, can have a huge impact on reach and engagement online. 

Marketing departments that have run out of creative marketing ideas can use the “Wonderland” game to produce unique and engaging content. The “Wonderland” game is an ideation technique used to discover connections between unrelated things. Marketers use Lewis Caroll’s iconic brain teaser “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” as inspiration to form their own questions. This can result in remarkable, eye-catching content ideas like: 

• “What I learned about content marketing from my grandma”
• “How I increased my open rate by 174% with a roll of duct tape”.

Even if marketing departments take a different direction, the “Wonderland” game is a great way to spark conversation and generate ideas. Ideally, the “Wonderland” game should be used in tandem with other social media trends like influencer marketing and video-based content. This ensures that posts are relevant to current consumer preferences. 

Embracing creativity is particularly important for businesses trying to reach a multi-generational audience. Content creators will have to get creative to adopt a Gen-Z or baby-boomer mindset when crafting digital content. 

Generational Marketing Tactics

Generational differences have a huge impact on customer preferences and digital behavior. Trend-driven marketing content may resonate with younger users but will likely put off older consumers who are looking for easy-to-understand posts. 

Ideally, businesses should use their social presence to target one or two generations online. This simplifies the content creation process and maximizes the impact of a business’s social media strategy. This is particularly important for businesses that want to use social media to break into a new market segment. 

Companies that want to connect with new users should use high-profile social pages to direct their content creation strategies. For example, if a business wants to create a buzz amongst Gen-Z consumers, it can follow Doritos’ example and post content that utilizes trending sounds and content. 

Using high-performing pages as a guide is a great way to streamline the content-generation process and create materials that connect with audiences. This will free up time for engagement and ensure that marketers can spend most of their time tracking key metrics and utilizing analytic data. 

Utilizing Analytics 

Social media is a treasure-trove for consumer data. Content creators who want to produce materials that connect with consumers must use data analytics to refine their approach and spot emerging trends. To get started, marketers should familiarize themselves with the basics of: 

• TikTok Analytics;
• Google Trends;
• Instagram Insights;
• Meta Business Suite.

These services are in-built analytic services that track key metrics like follower count, growth, engagement rate, and views. They’re largely user-friendly and can be used to direct future marketing strategies based on the performance of previous posts. 

Marketing professionals that want to amplify the impact of their social media content can look to external services like HootSuite, SproutSocial, and Brandwatch to improve their consumer connection. These sites help businesses track useful metrics and improve common key performance indicators (KPIs) like: 

• Growth rate percentage;
• Theoretical reach;
• Social share of voice;
• Engagement rate percentage.

These KPIs give marketers quantitative data to track and measure consumer connection. They give content creators a benchmark to measure performance and can even be used to plan future posts. This is particularly important today when stiff competition makes capturing a piece of the social pie harder than ever before. 

Conclusion

Creativity is key to successful social media marketing. Adopting an honest, research-driven approach to ideation and content generation can help businesses produce unique and engaging content that resonates with a multi-generational audience. 

Today’s marketers must become savvy data analysts, too. Data analytics are essential when refining existing campaigns and measuring performance. By tracking KPIs, businesses can improve their social media campaigns and produce content that authentically connects with consumers. 

Featured image by Pratik Gupta on Unsplash

The post Creating Social Media Marketing Content to Connect With Consumers appeared first on noupe.

Let’s face it. We’re currently living in some turbulent times, under a constantly expanding shroud of volatility and uncertainty. Today, it’s becoming more difficult to manage personal and household expenses on a single income stream. But if you’re working online, you’re in luck.

Cutting corners and trying to create a reasonable budget may help. But it isn’t a permanent solution. What you need is to diversify your online income stream. And if you’re a freelancer or trying to find multiple passive income streams online, you can do that in many legitimate ways.

In light of this, we’re going to talk about how to build multiple income streams online along with managing those income streams. We will also talk about how you can track and manage your earnings.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it!

Some Brilliant Ways You Can Maximize Your Online Income Stream

Become an online tutor

If you want to multiply your earnings as a freelancer, there’s nothing better than offering services as an online tutor.

The market size for online tutoring in the US currently stands at $2.1 billion and is rapidly growing. Plus, compiling your knowledge into digestible online lectures will be easier if you’re good at something.

Additionally, there are plenty of authentic and reputed teaching websites where you can teach at flexible hours. After gradually building your target audience, you can easily create your independent website to convert your lead traffic directly. If you picture yourself working as an online tutor but want to move on to life coaching or online training later on, you might want to invest in the right set of tools. With that in mind, know that online coaching software might prove useful later on to assist you in keeping all information and activities in one location, making running the business simpler.

Sell the photos you take

Selling digital artwork, stock images, and photos is another way to earn money online. Some reputed and globally embraced websites allow you to subscribe, upload pictures, and earn commissions when sold.

Moreover, you can even introduce this service on your website for interested parties. With the number of content people churn out daily, everybody needs high-quality stock images.

So, this can be a great way of earning money. However, keep in mind that you won’t get rich overnight.

Do micro-jobs

Micro jobs are an excellent way of augmenting your online income. Plus, they’re less demanding and less time-intensive. And over time, you can rack up quite a decent penny. A great example of a micro job can be filling out online surveys. Some survey platforms may even pay up to $50 per survey.

Similarly, another excellent and passive way of earning money is to subscribe to a data-sharing app. However, unlike micro jobs, the best thing about using a data-sharing app like Honeygain is that you won’t have to do anything actively.

The app pays you for using your internet. It’s crowdsourced, secure, and even has a good referral program that pays great commissions to users.

Powerful Financial Planning Strategies for Beginners

Understand where the money flows

The best way to start building a long-term and successful financial plan is to understand where your money goes 365 days a year.

One of the best ways to do this is using credit or debit cards. You see, it is challenging to track cash payments. With credit/debit cards, you can track where you’ve spent money and how to save money.

Utilize separate bank accounts

If you have multiple income streams, keeping savings and salary account separate for your expenditure and the other for saving and tracking your expenses is wise. Using one bank account could make things a bit tricker and potentially messy when drafting a budget.

Don’t forget to pay yourself

Whenever you receive your revenue, pay yourself the profits first. Then keep the rest of the money in a different checking account.

Don’t just go spending your profits on paying bills, shopping, or other miscellaneous expenses. Do all this from the percentage your pay yourself. This is how you will build financial discipline. 

Important Tips for Tracking and Managing Your Finances

Develop a realistic budget for your monthly expenses

One of the most effective ways to stay atop your finances is via precision-based, realistic budgeting.

You’ll be able to track your spending habits and will learn to make do with the money you pay yourself. Apart from becoming better at financial planning, budgeting also instills a sense of responsibility.

You become more accountable and aware of what you’re spending and where you’re spending it. Gradually, you will learn how to control your impulses and, instead, route all that money back into your business.

Minimize recurring expenses

If you’ve subscribed to multiple services (and you don’t use most of them), it’s time to disconnect. Monthly subscriptions can rack up quite an amount if not checked or used—an amount you can save.

And do it just for the general principle. Why waste money on things you don’t use?

Bottom Line

All in all, these are some excellent ways you can increase your online income and learn how to stay financially responsible.

Featured image by micheile henderson on Unsplash

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