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Technology

UK App Development Does Not Have To Be Too Expensive For Small Business

/ Insights      / Case Study – UK App Development Does Not Have To Be Too Expensive For Small Business

Case Study – UK App Development Does Not Have To Be Too Expensive For Small Business

App development can be a daunting task for small business owners, given the perceived complexity, cost and time frames that are associated with app development.

However, with the right app development company that understands the needs of the business and has the right development skills and structures an app can be an affordable and effective enterprise solution.

This can be a challenge as there are so many companies from across the world offering app development using different technologies and at highly variable price points.

The key is finding a developer that understands the needs of the business and can craft a digital solution that works for the business, rather than implementing an out of the box standard solution as that is what they are able to deliver.

Case Study – Vidazone

This month Aspiring Panda have been working with Vidazone an event Wi-Fi provider based in Peterborough to create a demonstration app for a business event in which they are exhibiting.

The challenge of this app was to develop it to strict timelines and in budget, whilst giving the functionality to allow it to be successfully published to the app store.

Our team worked with Vidazone to create a flow for the app, that was designed to demonstrate the power of event apps as part of the events marketing lifecycle.

After a short development cycle we were able to produce the app and it is now live on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. This will mean that 95%+ of the visitors to the exhibition will be able to download it directly during the exhibition.

We look forward to working with Vidazone to implement live versions of the app for event organisers across the UK and beyond in the coming weeks and months.

Quote from Vidazone Owner Chris Smith

“Vidazone have had an excellent experience developing our demonstration app with Aspiring Panda who have hit short deadlines and produced work of a high standard”

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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

Get Social Media Training At Our Harrow Office

/ Insights      / Get Social Media Training At Our Harrow Office

Get Social Media Training At Our Harrow Office

In May, Aspiring Panda will be hosting a nationally recognised social media expert to deliver training to local businesses on how to define their social media strategy.

The course will be run by Kristian Downer of DowSocial who we work closely with, on our digital marketing.

What is the course about?

Staying up to date and running a successful social media campaign is becoming increasingly challenging as social platforms change and evolve. Online audiences are bombarded daily with hundreds of messages and online content, making the task of measuring ROI (return on investment) rather challenging.

This social media training course is designed to be informative and interactive. The core focus of the course is on revealing new trends, understanding audience behaviours and social media principles that will enable you to create successful social media campaigns for lead generation and nurturing existing customer relationships.

Who should attend?

This training course is targeted at users of social media who want to achieve a greater understanding of how to implement and integrate social media to develop increased brand exposure, online reach and acquire new business.

Typical attendees are marketers, business owners, community managers, PR professionals, publishers and account managers.

What is the course outcome?

Following this training course, you will be able to:

  • Design a social media strategy plan
  • Choose the right social media platforms to use
  • Confidently use content and communication strategies that work
  • Adapt the language and tones to suit each social media platform
  • Integrate social media and offline marketing methods
  • Understand the methods and tools to generate new leads
  • Track and measure social media campaign success or failure

We look forward to seeing at you at this and future events at our office in Harrow.

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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

Three Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

/ Insights      / Three Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

Three Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

Social media is an increasingly important part of the marketing of small businesses across the UK. With more than 30m users of Facebook alone, it is getting harder and harder to ignore that your target audience is active on social media.

For business owners that are resisting moving their business onto social media it is likely that they are missing out on opportunities and risking getting passed over in favour of companies that are more proactive with their digital marketing.

If you are on the fence, here are three ways social media can help your business succeed:

Generate Referral Business From Existing Customers

Existing customers are often the most effective way of getting new business as they refer their friends and colleagues to your product or service. Social media is an incredibly powerful way of harnessing this and broadcasting the goodwill your existing customer base has for what you do.

Target & Advertise To Potential Customers

Social media is powerful for businesses, in part due to the data that the platforms create and store about their users. Harnessed effectively, this can be used to advertise your business to exactly the people you want to target.

This means that you spend less money on traditional less well directed advertising platforms such as print or radio advertising.

Customer Service

Whether you are on social media or not, your customers are talking about you both the good and the bad. If you are on social media then you have an opportunity to see what they are saying about you, reinforce the positive and fix the negative.

After all, there is no more powerful an advocate than someone who has a negative experience that is given excellent customer service.

If you are unsure how to get a strategy that works for your business contact the Aspiring Panda team.

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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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web

Many London Business Websites Still Not Mobile Friendly

/ Insights      / Many London Business Websites Still Not Mobile Friendly

Many London Business Websites Still Not Mobile Friendly

Since Google changed its algorithm in April 2015, having a website that is mobile friendly has become vital. However many London businesses are still not compliant and may be missing out on opportunities to reach their target customers.

What Is Mobile Friendly

Mobile friendly is a term to describe a website that has been designed to display websites properly on smartphones and tablets. Sites that are not mobile friendly may be shrunk to fit all the information onto the screen, or be too big and going well outside the boundaries of the screen.

This makes them hard to view and navigate when using a mobile device, which is something Google wants to avoid when it points you to a website via Google Search.

How Do I Check My Site

Checking your site is mobile friendly is simple, all you need to do is run your site through the Google mobile friendly test

Why This Matters

More than six months after the change a large number of small businesses are not yet compliant and are therefore less visible in Google search. This is important as Google is the dominant platform people use in the UK to search for information.

In the UK Google is used for nearly 90% of all searches making it important to be as visible as possible.

The Challenge For London Small Business Owners

Despite the changes being live for some time, many London business websites are still not mobile friendly.

This can be for a number of different reasons, but we believe that many still do not know how important a change this was.

Keeping track of the latest digital marketing trends can be difficult for small business. Knowing which announcements and changes matter is not always easy to determine and neither is the correct fix.

If you are not sure where you stand with your website or digital marketing, give us a call and we can give you the information you need to keep your website up to speed

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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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Apps Technology

Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

/ Insights      / Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

Smartphone technology has become a daily part of our personal and business lives. With more than 46m smart phone users in the UK, there are huge opportunities for businesses to use technology as a means of generating growth. One way of accomplishing this is by using mobile apps.

Because of the huge potential of this technology, one of the most common questions we get asked is “does my business need an app?”

The answer to this question can usually be broken down into three more specific areas that will depend on the nature of the business and its customers:

  1. Can an app be used to improve the customer experience?
  2. Can an app be used to drive customer retention and revenue?
  3. Can an app increase efficiency within your business?

If the answer to any of these questions is positive, there may be potential to develop a bespoke app for a business that will meet their unique requirements.

Can an app be used to improve the customer experience?

Apps that are most regularly used by customers are those that improve the customer experience. A great example of this is Uber. By making the ordering of a taxi simple – and often cheaper – the app significantly improves the customer experience, making the app indispensible to the user.

Can an App Be Used To Drive Customer Retention?

Apps can also be used to tell customers about special offers or products, to drive revenue, and to retain customers.

This is achieved with the use of a piece of functionality called a ‘push notification’. These notifications can keep an app relevant and drive usage by pushing a message from your app onto the home screen of a users device. If an app can help increase revenue from existing customers then it may provide value to a business.

Can an App Increase Business Efficiency?

Apps can also be useful when used internally by a business. As most members of the UK workforce possess a smartphone, mobile apps can be used to keep business owners up to date on activities within a business, or to make processes more efficient.

An example of this could be financial management software that is available via an app, or a mobile app that can track the progress of an order through a factory.

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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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SEO Technology

Simplifying SEO For Businesses

/ Insights      / Simplifying SEO For Businesses

Simplifying SEO For Businesses

The term SEO for businesses is enough to make owners and marketing managers shudder and think about anything else. SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation – has long been considered one of the dark arts of the internet.

Something that businesses have to outsource and pay a shady company a lot of money in order to rank highly on Google searches, unsure of what they are really paying for or whether it will last.

Change Has Come To SEO for Businesses

This is no longer true: SEO is no longer about building backlinks and “gaming” the system. Google have changed things and put a focus on creative content and social media.

This means that there are now two important aspects to the SEO of a business website: the on-page optimisation, and the content and social media.

What is On-Page SEO Optimisation?

On-page optimisation is the way in which a business website is set up to appeal to search engines. These factors can include setting up the right website keywords, making your website easily crawlable (searchable) by search engines, provides a good user experience, and that all content is unique and adding value.

See Moz and their great blog about on-page SEO

Content and Social media SEO for Businesses

Otherwise known as off-page SEO, content and social media are about encouraging businesses to visit and share the content on your website. Traditionally, this involved getting websites to link to yours, and whilst this is still important it has to be organic or you could get penalised by Google.

Creating engaging and shareable content is now key to ensuring that you have a website that Google wants to rank on its search results.

For a good blog on this see this by Digital Media Role

How Do I Improve The SEO for My Business Quickly?

There are a number of different free tools for analysing your site including www.semalt.com, who offer a basic review for free with options to upgrade. There are no simple fixes or cheats to rank your website well, just the right website format and great content.

If we can help you get your head around this then 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

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!!

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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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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.

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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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