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Market Challenges

For every small business success story there are many failures. After ten years, only one out of every ten small businesses started still remains in operation. In a recent survey of small business owners by the Yellow Pages Association, more than half of the respondents said that acquiring new customers and retaining them for long-term are the biggest ongoing challenges, and over two-thirds said they don’t currently outsource their marketing campaigns for customer acquisition and retention. Most surprisingly, more than half of small businesses said they don’t even have a website.

The truth is that many small businesses do not know anything beyond the basics about websites and online identity. And since they do not know what the right things to do are, they simply do not do them.Instead, they think, "It does not work". Or they think, "No, one will ever find me. It is all luck." Or they think, "It will cost too much to get it to work". By not creating a strong, professional Web presence you are effectively throwing potential customers to your competition. People are using the Internet more and more to do local searches. Your small business needs to be online to be found, to establish your value, message and brand, and to outshine your competition. You need to make your websites more social, interactive and user-friendly, so they become preferred destinations for consumers.

Creating a business website has become increasingly affordable with many do-it-yourself programs now available for beginners. However, this has also led many small businesses to wrongly believe that flashy graphics and shock-wave downloads make a site successful. Most people don’t realize that beautiful websites created by graphic designers and prepackaged software are often loaded with code that is a nightmare for search engine spiders to crawl. This means the site will not get indexed properly and it will not rank well in search results. If you want a truly professional Web presence, the do-it-yourself Web design is not always the best option. Smart entrepreneurs already know that it is necessary to find experts to get specialized jobs done. Doing everything yourself is not cost effective even if you have some knowledge and capabilities. You may be able to figure out how to do an oil change on your car,but you know that there are better ways to spend your time. This is definitely the case with website design. We have the tools, and expertise to help you beat your competition, whether it is in a local market or in the global arena.

You will hear some businesses complain that they have a website and it does nothing for them. This is because their website is lost in cyberspace. Such websites are little more than "brochure-ware". In reality, it is not enough to create a website and then sit back. You have to actively market a website to drive traffic to it, just as you have to market a brick and mortar shop. Not only is there a science to driving traffic to a site, there is also a science to converting visitors to prospects and then to customers. With our Search Engine Optimization and Conversion Optimization services, Diginuvo can transform your website from little more than a business flyer to a magnet for generating new business.

For most small business owners, marketing is an overwhelming concept. Small businesses typically have limited advertising budgets and often find themselves strapped for time. They have traditionally relied on common marketing techniques such as networking, word of mouth, customer referrals, tradeshows, yellow pages directories, TV, radio, billboards, and print media. But sadly enough, gone are the days when mail-in coupons, yellow page ads and small postcards could acquire new customers and drive sales. Print, radio, television, and advertising can only reach a limited number of people and that too at extremely high costs. On the other hand, Internet Marketing ensures that your product or service reaches to innumerable customers across the globe 24/7 and at comparatively throw away prices. Thanks to search engines and local directories, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) through Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertisement has become a viable option for many small businesses. However, without careful bid management and keyword research, PPC campaigns can be mediocre at best and downright disastrous at worst. Many businesses have experienced their advertisement budget squandered through click fraud, which occurs when people click on paid search ads with no intention of buying anything. In some cases, the clicker is a competitor that wants to force a rival to burn through cash. Other times, it's someone from an affiliate site that hosts search engine ads and receives a small commission for every click. It could be a team of users clicking repeatedly on an ad. Or, most commonly, the fraudulent clicks are automated by "hitbot” software. Diginuvo has a repertoire of tools and techniques to prevent click fraud, so that you can get the maximum return on your investment from Search Engine Marketing. We also ensure that your keywords are relevant, your bids are competitive and your campaign results are measurable.

In the age of viral marketing on social media, many small businesses have jumped on the bandwagon of Facebook and Twitter as a way to reach out to their loyal customers and generate repeat business.Blogging has been popular with teens, geeks, and flamboyant extroverts for years, but today, it's garnering more attention from businesses as a way to connect with customers and prospects. The relational nature of social media, along with its immediacy and 24-hour presence lend intimacy to the relationship small businesses can have with their customers, while making it more efficient for them to communicate with greater numbers. Facebook ads are also a very cost-effective way for small businesses to reach a targeted audience with a very specific message. However, managing an effective social media campaign is not an easy task. Businesses of all sizes have learned the hard way that second-rate editorial and shoddy graphics send customers away faster than an e-mail chain letter. In addition,online content gets stale very fast. Unless you have the resources to refresh content frequently and improve the appearance of your web page on a regular basis, you may as well be serving sales prospects day-old doughnuts or sending out holiday cards in January. With Diginuvo’s Social Media Optimization, Affiliate Management and Professional Copyrighting Services, businesses can leverage social media marketing tools to acquire new customers, improve retention rates, establish brand and drive sales – all at a fraction of the cost of running a traditional marketing campaign.

Over the last decade, e-commerce sales have grown on average 19% per year, far faster than offline retail. Even during the dark days of 2009 when retail sales in the U.S. shrank 2%, e-commerce vendors grew sales 1.4%, capitalizing on price-sensitive and increasingly Web-savvy consumers to gain market share. Since most of the big corporations have already developed their e-business solutions, it is expected that the small and medium businesses will increasingly demand more flexible and affordable electronic commerce solutions to level the playing field. The number of options for e-commerce today is expanding rapidly and an increasing number of brick and mortar businesses are building their on-line store for both products and services. With Diginuvo’s end-to-end solution, small and medium businesses can rapidly offer their own branded e-commerce storefronts with integrated online catalog, inventory management, payment processing and shipping capabilities.

With the explosive growth in the mobile sector in the last few years, small and medium businesses are further challenged to create a “mobile presence” that is at par or better than their “web presence”. Customers expect these days that most enterprise applications and services should be accessible from their smartphones and tablets, which is fueling the demand for native and browser based application development on a wide range of mobile devices and platforms. Even when a small business does not have online services for its end-users, the customers still expect to view the website just as easily on their phones as on their desktop. However, mobile devices have a significantly reduced screen size, which presents screen real estate issues that have not existed since the days of projection monitors. Combine these issues with cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility problems, and bandwidth limitations on slower networks, it isn’t hard to see why mobile development is still a daunting challenge for most small and medium size businesses. Other technical issues, such as mobile stylesheet design, navigation inflexibility, lack of JavaScript and Flash support, and page compression desequencing can make mobile application development significantly more difficult compared to generic enterprise services. Diginuvo understands these challenges and excels in providing innovative solutions that can circumvent these issues. In addition to designing mobile apps and mobile website, we enable mobile marketing for small businesses through e-coupons, mobile ads and m-commerce portals.

In recent years, a number of enterprise applications once considered the holy grail of bigger corporations have been increasingly adopted by small and medium sized businesses. There is a growing realization across the board that complexity of running a business is not always related to its size, and companies of all types and sizes can be immensely benefited by increased productivity, reduced operating expenses, improved information flow, and enhanced performance management realized through the usage of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS).

The primary reason an ERP solution is so vital to a company’s success is efficiency. Cumbersome,error-prone, labor-intensive manual processes can drain both time and money. In today’s economy, businesses must operate as lean as possible in order to keep the bottom line in check, and failing to automate critical, yet routine business activities makes it nearly impossible to do that. ERP solutions allow companies to achieve true business process automation – streamlining many of the important day-to-day tasks across a business, and freeing up staff to focus their efforts on more complex initiatives that require more personalized attention. This can not only boost productivity and worker output, it can dramatically reduce operating and overhead expenses. Diginuvo’s ERM solution, designed specifically for small businesses, addresses all of the issues mentioned above plus more, and it it’s significantly less expensive compared to the complex ERP packages available in the market today.

For small businesses, CRM is often seen as contact management or computer assisted marketing. But it is much more than that. The pace at which technology is changing today, any company which is a step ahead of others because of some unique product or service will not be able to hold on to that advantage for long. The key to stability in today's dynamic marketplace is forging long-term relationships with the customers. So why do you need CRM? Because the problem is you don’t know which customers you will lose, how many you have called on, or what the rest of your organization is doing that will affect your success or failure. Just knowing how many sales calls your reps are making is often done by asking them! For years, companies relied on inside and outside salespeople to maintain good relationships with customers. They kept their own customer records, followed up on new opportunities and grew your account base and customer service reputation. But when salespeople change jobs, or the inside salespeople don’t know what the outside sales folks have promised (and vice-versa), this gets many companies in trouble. The use of CRM as a business strategy for bringing silos of disparate information together for the use of all employees leads to better customer satisfaction and service. CRM can grab relevant pieces of information from accounting or other software used to manage operations, and display them to your sales team or other employees without having to show everyone where to find the data in each different system. CRM also creates a central repository to find everything about an existing or potential customer, such as quotes, proposals, emails, meeting reports, invoices, contracts,contact info, and anything else that you think is necessary to track for your customers. Providing sales and business support employees with the information that they need at their fingertips is critical for achieving higher customer satisfaction and repeat business. Diginuvo can help you accomplish these goals with our CRM solution specifically targeted for small and medium businesses.

Too many times small businesses think they are too small to justify an HRIS, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a company is never too small to automate processes that can save money, or that any company can improve employee and managerial productivity through quality HR decision making. Many small businesses have little or no knowledge about the requirements to comply with COBRA, ERISA, FLSA,OSHA, and other statutes and regulations, and do not have the resources to hire a full-time HR person to oversee them. A lot of small businesses do not have employee handbooks, emergency evacuation procedures, and safety guidelines, which makes them increasingly vulnerable in today’s litigious environment. Benefits administration, including enrollment, status changes, and personal information update is often done manually through error-prone processes, and integration with payroll and other company financial software and accounting systems is a rarity in most occasions. Diginuvo provides a state-of-the-art HRIS that is designed specifically to address the needs of small businesses to track and analyze all the relevant information about employees, former employees and job applicants, leading to more effective organizational management and greater employee satisfaction.

 


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