As a business manager, you have to deal with many processes on a daily basis. If you have the chance to, as you grow, you will try to automate those processes. There comes a time where you start to trust that which is going on under you, and try to allow both your staff and your brand to begin working for itself. For instance, brand recognition is an outcome tailored and pursued by business leaders to ensure that even when not promoting their services, a brand can speak for itself.
But there is such as thing as being too-systemized, or too-trusting of the processes taking place around you. It can sometimes blind you from understanding exactly what’s going on in your business and systems. In the worst cases, it can also leave you to stick your head in the sand. For instance, if you have an effective manager yet you are getting HR reports about the questioned viability of his methods, without looking deeply into the issue, it’s easy to brush this off while still collecting the results.
Are you aware of what’s going on within your business, and how that affects your business plans? With the following advice, we’ll consider all fronts:
Staff Cohesion
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How connected and cohesive are your staff, and the departments they work in? Are you allowing them the chance to socialize during lunchtimes in a separate communal area? Do they have the ability to instant message one another through apps such as Slack, providing an overall business conversation that allows you to generate friendships and good work between colleagues?
You may be providing all of this and more. And yet, it may be that staff are still struggling to appreciate one another, and that negative practices, maybe such as bullying or workplace harassment, are flying under the radar. Any well-meaning manager or boss will be shocked to find out that this is going on under their nose, because unless they’ve been aware of its possibility, they’re unlikely to look for the signs.
Does this mean you need to enact a secret police within your department or make everyone distrust each other through the policies you apply? Of course not. But it could mean that investing in your talent can help you. For instance, funding your HR department well and ensuring they have confidential, separate offices can allow any staff member to come and report the goings-on within your department if it affects them. This can help you keep in touch with how your office is running, and how you may wish to solve it. Remember that people are complex, and sometimes being unaware of those goings-on can be a real blind spot. Sometimes it will be better than you had envisioned, but sometimes, it could be worse. It’s best to prepare for that latter outcome.
Data Reports
Data reports are important to consider, because objective fact is always a better grounding to go off than how you feel things are working out. With the best tools for Facebook reporting, you will be able to engage with your own reach through practical terms, such as how many likes, comments and shares you have received, how many people are following your page each month, and what the general support experience is. Data reports such as this can also help you establish your place within the hierarchy of similar businesses you are competing with, and from there you can try to take some advice from their strategy through careful and close observation.
This way, you can also prevent the very real temptation of following a social media strategy because it’s ‘smart’ or ‘inspired’ or whatever vision you may have. If things aren’t working out, things aren’t working out. It might be that the carefully complex graphic design of your promotion material just isn’t snappy or engaging enough to register clicks and engagement. Perhaps you’re continually seeing complains in your advertisement comment sections about how you’re communicating your services, and you can use that messaging to adjust. Data reports are invaluable, because they can shake the cobwebs from your vision and allow you to see it in its rawest, most rational form.
Consumer Zeitgeist
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The consumer zeitgeist is also important to think of. Trends and market influences can shape buyer behaviors, and also shape their confidence in your brand. For instance, it may be worth considering how Fashion Nova has managed to become a part of hip-hop culture, continually investing in product placement in large-name music videos and utilizing influencers to push their products. Not only did they opportunities become a means in which the usual advertisement practices could be applied, but it gave said companies the means in which to be influenced by and influence the consumer zeitgeist. All of a sudden this brand has become the hot new property, and the association with several cultural figures has only given it more credence in the eyes of consumers.
What Fashion Nova did right was read the zeitgeist, and understand what most young people were trying to emulate when shopping for cool streetwear. They tapped into those new trends and insights, and used it to build their marketing strategy. The consumer zeitgeist you follow is important to think of, but you cannot even start that process unless you’re aware of what it is in the first place. This means tracking your target demographics and understanding just how they change from year to year. With close observation, you may even be wise enough to track their progress as they continue on into the future, giving you the chance to predict possible marketing trends and potentially emulate such success. As this influences your business so dramatically, and may just represent the difference between success or failure, it’s worth taking the time to ensure you keep moving forward to this best result – structuring your team and research policies in line with that.
With this advice, we hope you can stay dramatically aware of what’s going on both in and out of your business.