Category: Business

Business and finance related helpful articles, business guides, tips to managing your personal finance that includes money saving tips!

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Finance

What Do You Mean by Personal Banking?

Personal Banking

While it sounds pretty straightforward, personal banking has a comprehensive range of services designed to serve the needs of individual people. Personal retail banking is a type of banking service and product line provided by banks to retail customers.

Also known as retail banking or consumer banking, personal banking is a financial service offered by banks and some other financial institutions to individual people. The consumers of this particular banking service are the people themselves, not their businesses or other organizations they own or work for.

To elaborate, consumer banking is the service which is offering to individuals to manage their money. It includes securely depositing their money and earning interest on it while also getting access to credits. Usually, these services include checking accounts, savings accounts, personal loans, mortgages, credit cards, and personal loans. Consumers can also obtain a certificate of deposits (CD) if required.

It is Different From Corporate Banking

Contrary to personal banking, corporate banking is the banking services which provide directly with corporate customers such as corporations, businesses, service providers, etc. Like retail banking, however, the service includes loans, credits, checking accounts, saving accounts, etc. All of these services are designing differently than what is offered to individuals. Catering to the different needs of the companies and offering some suitable solutions to their investment and liquidation needs.

Retail banking is also more visible to the masses than corporate banking, thanks to the way they work. To make banking services more accessible. Banks usually set up many branches in most major cities, bringing banking services to the doorsteps. For corporate banking, most of the work happens directly with the businesses and behind the scenes. Thanks to the internet, however, a lot of consumer banking services can now be performed online. This is what is enabling many challenger banks or modern banks to go totally branchless and to the internet.

These two services are so close, though. The money deposited by individuals in their savings accounts often get loans to corporate clients and businesses. It allows the bank to put money to work and earn a profit, while also paying individuals interest on deposits.

Corporate Banking

Types of Services Offered by Retail Banking

Traditionally, individuals can perform a wealth of financial activities by opening up a personal banking account with a retail bank or financial institute. Depending on the kind of accessibility you need, you can opt for a checking account or a savings account. Often, you can also open an account to deposit a fixed amount periodically to earn a bigger percentage on interests.

Moreover, retail banks also offer individuals to go overdraft, to take a personal loan, mortgage, and other lines of credits. It also enables them to obtain credit cards and debit cards, paying bills and installments, and so on effortlessly.

In this digital age, many fintech banks are offering retail banking services entirely online, and thus, making it more accessible. Some of these hi-tech banks sometimes also offer enhanced services like holding multiple currencies, transferring money and paying bills globally, trading bonds, stocks, and securities, etc.

Banking Services

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Finance

How COVID-19 Has Impacted the Car Finance Sector

COVID-19 impact on car finance sector

COVID-19 has created unprecedented circumstances in almost every industry and economy in the world, affecting businesses and consumers alike. Measurements and restrictions have been put in place by the government to contain and curtail the spread of the virus, safeguard businesses, and protect the NHS.

What is the impact on the car finance sector?

The car finance industry has been hit as hard as any, as new car production halted across Europe back in March 2020. The purchase of new or used cars came to a standstill last year. As dealers were required to close their showrooms and postpone car deliveries.

In this blog, we will discuss in more detail. How COVID-19 impact on the car finance sector was effected globally since the beginning of last year?

Falls in Sales During First Lockdown

According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, between January and October 2020 new-car registrations dropped by 26.8% in the European Union. Eight million cars were first registered during this time, a drop of 2.9 million from the same period in 2019. Spain, Italy, and France were the worst hit – with 37%, 31%, and 27% reductions, respectively.

Sales down

 

A Change in the Dealership Model

National lockdowns have driven significant change in the way customers search for and find car finance. The relationship between online and showroom motor retailer sales has changed with it. Being forced to work from and stay at home means more of us are shopping online. And also relying on the internet to obtain goods and services. This means an increasing number of car dealers and car finance companies are having to embrace digital infrastructure. Which reveals how much COVID-19 impact on the car finance sector was effected.

By now, dealers should be able to switch between the two, as lockdown restrictions continue to fluctuate. Nevertheless, there are rumours that this current lockdown may last until March, meaning digital click-and-collect may be the only option for the first quarter of the year.

Boost in Electric Vehicle Sales

One positive piece of news for the motoring world during lockdown – the electric car market is booming! At the end of September 2020. There were over 164,100 pure-electric cars and over 373,600 plug-in models driving on UK roads.

In fact, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), pure-electric cars accounted for 6.7% of new car registrations last year, making it an extremely positive 2020 for the electric car market.

Boast Business Profit

Consumer Credit and Ability to Finance

COVID-19 has had a major effect on consumer credit and the ability for people to obtain finance. People are low on work, furloughed or even worse completely out of employment. The collective ability to acquire COVID-19 impact on car finance sector or keep up with existing finance payments is becoming less and less. Missed or late payments as a result of this can seriously impact peoples’ credit ratings. It means they may struggle to obtain finance elsewhere in the future.

Getting a Car Finance Deal with Poor Credit

If you have poor credit, as an indirect result of COVID-19 or not, but still want to look into finding a car on finance, you should look at bad credit car finance. This is a deal that a lender agrees to offer someone with a poor credit history. No deposit is required, so you only have to cover your monthly payments that will be spread across 2-4 years.

To assess whether this is suitable for you, a ‘soft’ credit check will be made first to see if the lender can find a finance deal and to check which types are available to you. This will not impact your credit rating. If you are happy with what they offer, an actual ‘hard’ credit check will be made, which will impact your credit rating.

Car Finance

 

The point of this is to take the risk of negatively impacting your credit score with a ‘hard’ credit check at first. If credit is not available to you and you fail a credit check, this will affect your credit score. With a ‘soft’ check, a lender can assess your options without putting a blip on your credit report.

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Marketing

Essential Guide to the Future of Video Marketing

Online Video Marketing

Online video marketing has been a major way to advertise products for years. Ever since more people started watching videos through sites like YouTube and directly on social media channels, it has become apparent that people like the creative self-expression that goes into making your own videos. That means that reaching customers through video was always going to be a logical next step. Below we’ll look at the future of video marketing, including trends, tips, and why video translation services are so important.

Online Video Marketing

The Importance of Video Translation

Companies are increasingly looking for ways to expand overseas. This is where video translation comes into play as an essential strategic move. As Ofer Tirosh, CEO of translation agency Tomedes, points out, “it has never been easier to expand overseas and reach different audiences from behind a computer screen, particularly given the growing dominance of e-commerce”.

Reaching customers through video is an increasingly popular tactic. From 2016 to 2019, the percentage of businesses using video as a marketing tool rose from 61% to 87%. Between the increasing trend of working with a global customer base and reaching that customer base through video, those marketing videos need to be translated with top-notch video translation services.

So, where does machine translation come in? Can Google translate videos? Technically, yes, Google Translate handles speech and even real-time video translation. However, a video translator app cannot translate to professional quality. In one study from 2019, Google Translate’s Spanish translations of patient education materials were only 60% accurate, including 4% with serious errors. That level of inaccuracy could prove disastrous for marketing materials. You could offend a culture with a mistranslation, misrepresent your product overseas leading to a lawsuit or make an e-commerce site impossible to use.

So, the question becomes: How can I translate a video? Simple – just find a video translation service that has experience handling marketing videos above and beyond what video translation software can do. You could find one in your area by searching a local term like translation company UK.

Top Trends Affecting Self-Expression in Video Marketing

When looking at how to handle video marketing, pays close attention to emerging trends. One of those trends is the fact that we’re highly mobile now. That means we’re watching video on laptops, tablets, and smartphones, often while on the go. You’ll need to make sure your videos play well on all of those devices. Mobile video marketing, Fwhere you view videos on the go through a smartphone, is widely predicted to become the norm.

Social media influencers and their form of creative self-expression are also major drivers of popular videos online. Many brands are capitalizing on that by partnering with these influencers to produce videos. For instance, a makeup brand might reach out to a popular beauty vlogger to review a product line that was just released. That way, brand awareness might reach a higher number of followers and the message will gain credibility in the audience’s eyes.

Then there’s Big Data. Big Data underpins how video marketing is conducted. Data-driven decision making will help marketers understand how to reach audiences through video. By analyzing chatbot data, social media responsiveness, and topics discussed online, will help marketers know how to produce videos that will appeal to their core demographics. Through data, marketers can look at what audiences online are talking about and thus what they are more likely to pay attention to.

There’s considerable debate about how long to make marketing videos. However, with the rise of TikTok’s brief form of self-expression, it’s clear that audiences online are very responsive to the short-form, 60-second video format. Twitter launched its 6-second video ads in 2019, and other platforms kept it short and snappy with their ads too.

How to Make Self-Expression Video Marketing Work

With all these trends, it can be confusing to know how to move forward with video marketing. However, some tried and true methods will keep your video marketing efforts more focused:

  • Keeping your target demographic in mind: Like any marketing effort, first and foremost is knowing who you are selling to. Look at who they are and where they hang out. To go back to the makeup brand example, many beauty enthusiasts hang out on Instagram because of the image-friendly format.
  • Keep a close eye on analytics and data: By knowing how different topics perform, you can better assess what your video should cover and how to reach your audience.
  • Always work from a script: Plan your message in script form to get it right before you bring in the actors and video editing crew. Also, if you need video translation, remember that translators often start translating from scripts rather than the finished item (though they can do that too).
  • Give a strong call-to-action: List a phone number to call, a link to follow, a store to visit or some other method where customers know what to do if interested.

By following these tips, you can create a solid video marketing campaign that will work well into the future.

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SEO

How Can I Monitor Website Traffic (Easy Way)

How to Check Website Traffic

Whether you are new to the online world or you’ve always had a web presence getting visitors to interact with your website is essential. The main aim is that they take some type of action and purchase a product or service. But in order to increase your chances of this, monitoring website traffic is crucial. When you understand user behaviour, you will increase your profit margins. There are several benefits to knowing how visitors are interacting with your website such as identifying and resolving errors, monitor how your pages are performing, knowing what type of content is most appealing to visitors and much more.  

How to Check Website Traffic

If you want to know how to identify visitors to your website, keep reading to find out our 6 top tips.   

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is also referred to as direct access; this is when a visitor arrives on your website without having found their way there through another source. Direct traffic can come from a range of sources including: 

  • A link to your website clicked in an email. 
  • When a visitor bookmarks or saves your site in their browser.  
  • When a visitor enters your web address into their browser because they have used it before.  

Measuring direct traffic is important because it’s an indication of brand loyalty. When a high percentage of your traffic is direct, it means that visitors are actively looking for you because they either recognize you or they are thinking of you. For example, when a customer doesn’t have a website in mind and they are searching for a particular product or service; their first point of contact is Google. They will perform a keyword search and click on the first website that shows up. However, when they know what they are looking for and they come directly to you, there is more chance of them taking action when they get to your website.   

  1. Landing Page Conversions

After investing time and money into social media posts and email marketing that target your desired audience, when they click on your call to action, you want them to take action when they get to your landing page. If not, what you are doing isn’t working. Therefore, monitoring landing page conversions is essential to the success of your business. When you have access to what works and what doesn’t, you can make the necessary changes.   

Returning Visitors

When you eat at a bad restaurant, you are not going to go back. The same principle applies to website content. Your total visitors in ratio to your returning visitors will determine whether your content is good enough for your visitors to return for a second helping. When a potential customer returns, it is an effective way to identify website visitor. When planning your content strategy, the aim should be to gain loyal customers who return to your website when they want to purchase a product or service you offer. There are several ways you can evaluate the performance of your content, these include: 

  • Direct URL: Direct traffic typically comes from returning visitors; this percentage will depend on your business model and marketing campaigns. 
  • Social Sharing: If people are sharing your content, it means they think its valuable. When your content has been of benefit to someone, they want to give someone else that same benefit and so they will share it through social media, email, text etc.  
  • Social Media Platforms: If you post your content on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, the platform will provide you with performance analytics such as likes, shares, and the number of clicks your post has received. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who visit your website, and leave as soon as they get there. They don’t go to the menu tap and click through to any other pages, and they don’t read anything on the home page. What this means is that no alarm bell rings for the analytics tool you are using, and so they have nothing to record. The visitor left as quickly as they came, they bounced!  

Bounce rate is a powerful metric for measuring website traffic because it provides you with an indication of the quality of your web page and whether the audience you are targeting is the right one. There are several reasons why a person might bounce out of your website, and two of the most common are a disorganized website, and information overload. In other words, the website was too difficult to navigate and the page was crammed with so much information, the visitor got overwhelmed and left.  

Duration of Stay

Research suggests that the average time a person stays on a website is 15 seconds. If you don’t capture the visitors’ attention during that time, you’ve lost them. According to Jon Lister from Elite SEO, web owners should be more concerned with the length of time visitors spend with their content as opposed to ‘vanity metrics’ such as page views. The number of page views you get is irrelevant if people are not engaging with your content. Therefore, it is essential that you create quality content because Google pays close attention to how visitors navigate through your site. They record things such as whether they click on the back button, and whether they make their way back to the search results because what they found was of no use to them.   

Visitor Flow

Visitor flow refers to the path visitors take through your website. On an analytics tool, this information is presented as a graph and allows you to see the following: 

  • The Connection Paths: Where a visitor starts, where they interact, and where they exit.  
  • Volume: The volume of page views per collection of pages or per page.  
  • Volume of Visits: How visitors arrived at your site. Was it through a campaign? A browser? Etc. 

Visitor flow allows you to gain deeper insight into your traffic progression, which provides you with valuable information about your web analytics in general.  

Final Thought 

To analyze whether your website is successful, you need to evaluate things such as conversion rate, click-through rate, bounce rate and where your visitor traffic is coming from. When you have access to this information it enables you to make the necessary changes to improve your website. Please note, website traffic monitoring is not a one-time event, what worked this year, might not work next year. User behaviour is constantly changing and it’s essential that you are up to speed with it so that you can continue turning visitors into paying customers.  

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Business

Five Clever Ways Businesses Are Going Green

Clever Ways Businesses Are Going Green

With a growing number of the population looking to do business with companies that have highly sustainable and environmentally friendly practices, there’s increasing pressure on any business to improve their carbon footprint and minimize emissions. However, overhauling your entire company’s processes and procedures can seem like a costly exercise that diminishes profit margins and any ability your company may have to grow.

There are, however, innovative and quick ways to implement a greener way of doing business into your company’s day to day affairs. These quick wins can add up to a much bigger impact overall as well as encouraging further change in the future. When people begin to become aware of how their actions can make a significant impact on carbon emissions, they start to behave differently, which can amount to a big impact.

In this article, we list five clever ways businesses are going green so that you can introduce them to your office. They take very little forethought so you can start reaping the greener ramifications almost immediately.

Clever Ways Businesses Are Going Green

Quick Hacks To Make Your Business Greener

Just implementing one or two of these can be beneficial to your company’s carbon footprint, but introducing all of them as soon as possible will have the biggest effect.

Less printing

Start by trying to reduce the amount of paper your company uses. Ask yourself and your employees whether it’s necessary for them to print out as much as they are currently. By reducing the amount that your firm prints, you’re not only saving paper but also reducing the amount of electricity used in the act of printing as well. Ink is obviously also saved and all the plastic parts that an ink cartridge uses.

Making use of reused and recyclable items

So many companies have a culture of buying new all the time. However, buying reused items can be an easy way to cut costs at your company as well as reducing your impact on the environment. Buying new each time you buy any item — be it a desk, chair, or any other type of office equipment — involves more manufacturing than is required if you buy something that is pre-loved. Additionally, making use of older items until they are truly in need of replacing them is key, and increasing the use of recyclable items is also vital. Think about recyclable cutlery for example, but also bigger objects. There are so many ways you can use recycled items these days – right down to your very flooring.

Branded water bottles

Plastic bottles and plastic water cups are one of the biggest perpetrators of litter that end up in our seas and oceans, and consequently our beaches. To try to minimize how many water bottles and cups your firm uses, it’s a good idea to provide employees with a reusable bottle for their desks. These can be branded, further promoting your company as a green business. It may be a bigger investment at first than just providing a water fountain and cups, but over the longer term it will pay off.

Lighting

A big expense for most firms is lighting. For that reason, so many companies try to use the cheapest bulbs possible to minimize costs. In the longer term, however, it can be much cheaper (not to mention much greener) to buy energy-saving light bulbs. They last longer and they also use far less energy trying to power them. In the past, people have complained about the lighting that energy-saving light bulbs have provided – however, the technology behind them has developed so much that you wouldn’t notice any difference now.

Hot desking

Hot desking and other innovative ways of getting your employees to work can have a big impact on your carbon footprint as well as those employees’ productivity. Make it part of your company culture, if possible, to work from home some days and use a hot desk on others. The reason this makes your company greener is that it reduces electricity costs, but also reduces your employee’s footprint by simply getting to work. Other ideas can involve holding meetings where everyone must stand – making meetings shorter, using less energy, and getting more done in the working day.

Quick And Clever Ways Businesses Are Going Green

Quick ways for your business to go green

Implementing green initiatives at your firm will become increasingly more pressing the more that our climate continues to change for the worse. Conserving energy and realizing the impact that each of us has on reducing waste is important, so it’s imperative that we do so during the working day as well as in our private home life. The list above mentions some quick but effective wins when it comes to going green, and there really is nothing to lose but everything to gain.

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Marketing

Best marketing techniques

Business Marketing Techniques

Small companies or startups have no cash, however, they need to do advertising. Rather than zeroing in on expensive marketing strategies, these new companies must focus on some inexpensive promoting techniques. The magnificence of growth hacking is that it draws in substitute strategies for development, techniques that cost less. However, none of the mentioned below marketing techniques are free. Anytime you include individuals, workers, there will be money and expenses involved. In any case, here’s the reason these techniques are so ground-breaking. They don’t need an immense marketing spending plan. All these require is some time, some perceptiveness, and the sort of engaged and driven viewpoint that savvy advertising requires. For the promotion of your business and a boost in sales, you might require newest weekly ads.

1. Facebook ads for targeting people

Best marketing techniques

One of the most impressive digital marketing techniques you can use to advertise pretty much anything these days is Facebook promotions. With Facebook, you can connect with an unmistakable crowd and you can do it without any problem. You can focus by interest, age, relationship status, geographic area, thus a whole lot more. However, the trick here isn’t just about to click-traffic. You need to zero in on transformations and re-targeting through pixels. On the off chance that you don’t have a clue how to introduce the Facebook Pixel on your site, at that point you totally should figure out how to do this as soon as possible. Regardless of whether you’re not running Facebook weekly ads, you can build your audience with a pixel. Pixels track each and every individual who goes to your site, and you can assemble a custom audience around them.

2. Social Media Based Public Relations

Social media marketing

More than 30% of the time is spent on social media. Advertising experts and public relations professionals are rotating their strategies from exclusively focusing on putting their stories in media sources’ distributions to focusing on directing people to their social media profiles as well. To effectively pitch your accounts to journalists and media sources these days, you have to represent the content that performs well on their social media profiles and their distribution. So before you pitch your story, make sure that it’s appropriate and intriguing to the news outlet’s social audience.

3. Cross-promote

One amazing strategy that a few organizations use is cross-promotion. Cross-promotion permits you to join forces with related organizations who can market your product and services, in return for your advertising their product and services. For instance, on the off chance that you are providing grocery services to individuals, you may collaborate with a delivery service and you both promote each other’s services. The delivery service is your cross-promoting partner. It’s a shared benefit and doesn’t need a lot of work by any means.

4. Get More User-Generated Content

Everybody knows that content marketing is successful for inbound marketing. In case you’re not careful, content marketing can be costly. The solution is user-generated content. It involves asking your current customers and clients to recount their own story and compose the content, and you’ll open the channels to huge loads of new and engaging content that your audience will appreciate. Your clients will make and sharing content for you.