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Technology

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

/ Insights      / The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

The rise of smart phones as the dominant mobile technology has unlocked thousands of potential practical applications to both the general public and the business community.

The ability to build and host software applications that are tailored to the phone (mobile apps) has led to large companies and independent developers publishing more than 1.4 million apps each on the Android (Google) and IOS (Apple) platforms.

The majority of these apps are developed for the mass market, with the goal being to get as many downloads as possible to the target audience. As the market has developed and become serious business, the apps have become valuable products in their own right.

It is now common to see mobile applications – from both a practical and gaming perspective – being advertised aggressively on and offline.

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

Generic Apps are developed with the target audience in mind. Market research and testing may take place before launch to refine things, but ultimately the app is not developed for the individual or the business.

This can be a limiting factor, particularly for businesses that want to use mobile applications to streamline and optimise their operations.

The alternative is to have apps developed to solve a specific problem that an individual or company has. Typically these are commissioned by companies due to cost but it is not unfeasible for an individual to get a bespoke app built.

Why Use A Bespoke App For Your Business?

A bespoke mobile app is designed to meet the specific requirements of you ,the end user. It can take into account the unique aspects of your business and what it needs to achieve.

The advantages of getting an app made for you is that it can help solve unique issues, give you control over the software that you are using, and generate a unique asset IP for the business.

The downsides mainly involve the cost and the need to ensure that you capture your requirements. But, if you find the right company, these issues can be managed and mitigated effectively.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

Is Your Website Active Or Passive?

/ Insights      / Increased Cloud Usage During The Pandemic

Increased Cloud Usage During The Pandemic

Does your website work for you? Does it generate revenue even while you are snoozing, after a hectic day?

If the answer is NO, then our answer is Active website! With the amount of consumer traffic that occurs online, it is no secret that your business needs a website to embrace the times. But it doesn’t end there. Making sure that your website is active can put you leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors.

 

With the advent of digital technology your website is like a shop window, and if you cant engage customers then you loose them. The simple way of engaging them is adding interactive elements on your website like Image galleries, videos and product catalogues. These not only make your website look attractive but also allow visitors to spend more time on your website thus providing more value for your brand.

 

Secondly, Capture Leads!!! Yes, your website can capture leads. By providing interactive elements for the customer to contact you easily, it generates leads for your business. A simple pop up asking for their email-id opens up opportunities for future business transactions and a channel to showcase your products and engaging the prospective customers.

 

A truly active website is capable of reaching your customers beyond the realm of simply advertising to them. Through various add-on features available for your website, you can actually have your website perform basic customer service duties for you. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could implement an online booking system that allows customers to reserve a table at your venue.

 

Go on then, tweak and turn your passive website to a sassy active one!!

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Apps Technology

3 Mobile Apps that Help Businesses Save Time

/ Insights      / 3 Mobile Apps that Help Businesses Save Time

3 Mobile Apps that Help Businesses Save Time

A successful business mobile app is one that is easy to use and navigate whilst allowing a business to complete tasks in a more effective way.

The right apps can save business owners time, effort, and money. There are literally thousands of apps on the IOS and Android stores that are specifically designed for this purpose, with an almost equal mix of success and failure.

We have filtered this down to three that could instantly make an impact to your day-to-day business life.

Expensify

Whether you are self-employed or part of a limited company, monitoring and recording expenses is essential to ensure that you pay the right tax at the end of each financial year.

Expensify is a comprehensive expense report-generating app. It syncs up with your credit cards and bank accounts to log expenses, can scan paper receipts via phone camera, and creates reports and analytics.

Expensify allows you to do this, meaning that you can avoid the time and effort of keeping track of expenses, and receipts.

LinkedIn

Although it is a social media tool, LinkedIn is also the equivalent of an online rolodex of the business world that you can use to keep track of all of your contacts and the people you meet. In fact, rather than trading business cards at a networking meeting, you could add them on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn enables you to keep track of all of your contacts in one place, and stay in touch with them, and keep an eye on any changes in their status.

Invoice2Go

Admin is an unavoidable part of business, and invoicing is vital to ensure you get paid what you are owed in a timely manner.

Invoice2go lets you provide bills, credit memos, purchase orders, and estimates to clients as you complete the job. It then allows collection through PayPal and access to a reporting suite.

The problem it solves is being able to generate invoices in a quick and timely fashion without creating additional paperwork.

If you have a business problem you think an app could fix, or just questions about what apps can do, why not give us a call.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

Facebook And Business

/ Insights      / Facebook And Business

Facebook And Business

Want to increase the visibility of your Business online, bear the following points in mind:

  • Target the right demographic audience,
  • Communicate with customers directly,
  • Personalise your web content,
  • Use the media channel to reach over 1 billion.

Well, there is an easier way to achieve all this at once – Simply use Facebook!!

Gone are the days when you thought social sites are personal, to keep in touch with your friends and couldn’t make an impact or affect your professional life.

Facebook has provided many features for ease of Business:

  1. Ads Manager – create, edit and analyse facebook ads.
  2. Measure performance of the ads using Performance metrics.
  3. Business Fan page for marketing, driving online Sales, increasing Local Sales and raising Brand Awareness.

More than 1.3 billion people use Facebook on a daily basis to connect with what matters to them.  Relevant and engaging photos, videos and links make Facebook Adverts a powerful way to find new customers and build brand loyalty and increase Brand Awareness.

As experienced Facebook advertiser Freddie Jansson said in an interview:

“A large part of companies’ potential customers are there. Therefore, in my opinion, all companies should have a Facebook page where they can interact with their customers … No other advertising channel, at least where you can communicate, can compete with those numbers.”

For all those sceptics out there, consider this – even if only one of your competitors launches a successful Fan Page, that competitor is likely to corner the market on Facebook and build a following long before you do.

The bottom line is – stake your free claim early to establish your business as the industry leader before the competition has a chance.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology web

3 Tips for Hiring a Web Design Company

/ Insights      / 3 Tips for Hiring a Web Design Company

3 Tips for Hiring a Web Design Company

If you are starting a business, the easiest and most effective means of gaining global visibility is a website. A website can even be built and put in place to generate awareness of your business before you fully launch.

Finding the right solution to building your website can be overwhelming: there are tens of thousands companies in the UK and across the world all vying for the opportunity to build and host your website.

We have put together a guide of three tips when hiring a web designer.

Define Your Digital Strategy

Whether you are a small company or a large corporate, the value you receive from your company’s website will depend upon your ability to define the purpose of the website.

Having a strategic business plan and realistic goals can help you to design a successful website. In general, if the business has a story to tell about its services, achievements, satisfied customers, and great team members, you can build an interesting and engaging website.

Consider who your target audienceis, and what you are trying to achieve.

Choose A Company With Design and Technical Skills

If you engage a professional website design and build company to develop the website for you, it is important to note that Web design and build are two separate skills: and a good web development company will use both graphic designers and programmers together to build your website.

Hiring a Web Design Company

With so many potential options in the market of web design companies, it can be hard to find the one that is the right fit for you, and which shares and can realise your vision.

Therefore, we recommend that you do your research and take your time. The first step for many businesses is speaking to companies with whom they work and getting personal recommendations.

Speak to more than one company, and choose the one that understands your needs the best. Of course, in order to do that, you must first identify, and be able to communicate your needs.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

Is Social Media for Business worth the Hype?

/ Insights      / Is Social Media for Business worth the Hype?

Is Social Media for Business worth the Hype?

The allure of social media is getting harder to avoid in recent years. No matter who you speak to, social media is apparently the solution to all your business’s ills. Even our accountant is an evangelist, and for those who are not digitally native it may be a bit overwhelming.

The hype is huge, but are the returns worth the investment of time, effort and money?

The short answer is: possibly. Whether social media is worth the hype for your business will depend on the type of business you are in, the behaviours of your target market, and the digital strategy being employed.

Only once you have an understanding of these areas can an accurate analysis of your business from a social media perspective take place. The way that you use social media will vary greatly depending on the product you are selling.

Consumer Behaviours

The key factor to using social media to promote your business, is whether your target market uses social media. If so, what platforms do they use? How regularly and in what way? Once you understand these factors, you can tailor your message to suit your customer and what they are looking for from social media interactions.

Transactional v Relationship Based Businesses

If your product is transactional then the strategy will revolve around offers and short term wins. However, if your product is relationship based, then it is more about building a rapport with your audience and building long term funnels.

Finding the Right Strategy

The right strategy will take into account the behaviours of a business’s target market as well as the type of products/services that are being sold.

The right strategy varies from business to business, but is always grounded in the brand identity and message of the business both offline as well as online, as if these do not match the presence will be seen as false and damaging to the business.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Marketing Technology

Why You Should Consider a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency

/ Insights      / Why You Should Consider a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency

Why You Should Consider a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency

A full service digital marketing agency is designed to allow companies to outsource all of their digital marketing services to one company.

This is useful for many small businesses, who may find digital marketing a confusing industry: the huge amount of data involved makes it difficult for a layman to make an informed decision about the best course of action.

Therefore, small businesses need a resource that can guide them through digital marketing in a way that is tailored to their individual business situation and goals.

At Aspiring Panda, we know that what works for one company will not necessarily be applicable to another, particularly in the fast moving digital marketing sector. Taking this into consideration, we have built our business as a full service digital marketing agency so we can guide our clients through the digital marketing landscape.

Why Consider a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency

There are many different aspects to digital marketing, from web design, pay per click advertising (PPC), social media, mobile app development, and search engine optimisation (SEO).

In order to be utilised effectively, each of these requires specialist skills. There are a great number of companies that can help with these individually. However, for many businesses finding and managing these resources independently is a costly and time consuming operation, and requires almost as much time and attention as doing it in-house.

Furthermore, by hiring these professionals individually, the onus for an effective strategy may lie with the company rather than with its suppliers.

A full service digital marketing agency will have access to professionals across these different platforms, and will be able to advise and apply these skill sets as required in line with a pre-agreed digital marketing strategy.

This allows the hiring company to deal with only one agency, which will help keep managing the project simple, maintain a focus on the overall goals of the project, centralise accountability, and save time.

Therefore, hiring the right, full service digital marketing agency is the easiest way for companies to optimise their digital marketing.

If you have any questions about digital marketing, do give us a call.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Marketing Social Media Technology

Why Email Is More Valuable Than Social Media

/ Insights      / Why Email Is More Valuable Than Social Media

Why Email Is More Valuable Than Social Media

Email marketing should be a key component of the modern digital marketing campaign; although not as trendy as social media, it has the potential to garner greater long term returns to the business.

This results from the fact that, although social media is a great way of building awareness of a business, it is transient. People engage with a message for a short period of time and then move on, this means that they can quickly forget about your business and will need regular reminding and interaction.

This is where email comes into its own. Email marketing is an opportunity to regularly contact people that have opted in to receiving regular updates about your business.

Therefore, many successful digital marketing funnels use social media as a driver towards the email list rather than to the company website or product pages.

Here are some of the factors that make email addresses more valuable than a like or follow on social media.

Build Relationships and Trust

The ability to build a relationship and trust with potential customers using email creates additional opportunities. This is because potential customers get to know your business over time and learn about what you do at their own pace.

Increase Revenue from Existing Customers

Email marketing can also be used to communicate with existing customers. This increases customer retention, and can in turn increase sales by promoting sales and other offers to existing customers.

Audience Segmentation

Email marketing also allows businesses to tailor their messages to specific sets of people that have shown an interest in a specific product or service. This tailoring of the message makes readers feel that communications are more relevant. This sense of personalised approach can drive sales.

Given the points above, we believe email marketing should be an important consideration when deciding the right digital marketing strategy for your business. There are many different pieces of software around that can help you run email marketing campaigns, we will cover these in more detail in future blogs.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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