Being an entrepreneur doesn’t just happen overnight and the dedication and habitual commitment that comes in the run-up to success is something that is often not seen. Creating routines for yourself, as an entrepreneur, and setting yourself up to be in the best position is something that is very grounding in a world where business can be uncertain. Some of the best entrepreneurs swear by the habits they’ve created for themselves and the habits that you can establish and commit to will contribute more to your success than you may think.

Wellness is Key

Ensuring you are the best version of yourself for your business will be reflected in the way you take care of yourself. Ensuring that your body and mind are in alignment with the way that you want to function is key. Making sure you are not burning out will result in your entrepreneurial spirit is at its peak and ensure that you are the best version of yourself. Statistics have shown that the use of wellness apps has significantly increased over the last three years alone so there is a range of ways to maintain wellness in your life.

(Image Source: Statista)

Establishing a good workout routine as well as mindful practises, such as meditation or even a mindful walk will set you up to release your anxiety in a healthy way and is an excellent way to weave this into your routine. Carving out time for movement is pivotal to resetting yourself when you need to.

Make Use of the Morning

Even if you are not a morning person, creating a morning routine for yourself can help you to feel less flustered and be something that you can control. A morning routine doesn’t necessarily have to revolve around productivity but can be an excellent way to do things for yourself before the chaos of the day begins. Whether this be reading a chapter of a book whilst enjoying your coffee, or taking a more luxurious shower making the use of the morning time, will have you feeling set up for what the rest of the day has to bring. You can try waking up earlier by setting your alarm earlier in 20-minute increments every day until you establish a regular wake up time for yourself. 

Don’t bite off more than you can chew

When it comes to being an entrepreneur, multitasking can be a gift and curse. Sometimes taking on too much can be your ultimate demise. By effectively managing your time, you can allocate certain time to certain tasks without being coded by everything else that you have to do. An effective way to schedule your time in a predictive manner is time blocking. Time blocking is a way of blocking your time in sections and focusing on one thing and one thing only at that certain time. This way you don’t get your wires crossed and you actually get your task list done. For example, taking out 30 minutes to delicate just to emails so you’re not tackling them throughout the day and distracting yourself from other tasks. 

Owning your schedule and sticking to it will allow you to feel in control of your time and allocate the dedicated time and focus to your outlined tasks and to-do list. Creating your time blocking to-do list the night before can be a great way to unload your head at the end of a busy day, and then reevaluating this in the morning can help you feel more organised. 

Exit your comfort zone

As an entrepreneur, making time to try things out of your comfort zone will ensure that you don’t feel stagnated. Whether this is trying a new business plan, or dedicating time every week to learning a new skill from scratch, will contribute to you being a well rounded and more balanced person. Exiting your comfort zone will ensure that you come off autopilot from time to time and can be factored in as part of your routine so it doesn’t feel overwhelming.  

Make a note of it

Writing down what you need to do, will help clear up your headspace and help make a plan out of something that is just an idea. To-do lists and schedules are a basic yet foolproof way to organise your time and get those thoughts out of your head and onto paper. Some people prefer to take notes digitally, but if you’re more of a pen and paper kind of person, then allocate certain notebooks to certain tasks and seek productivity in organising your thoughts. 

Cementing these habits are just some of the ways that you can habitualised certain traits as an entrepreneur and help yourself feel more organised and less likely to spiral into a pit of worry and anxiety which are an entrepreneur’s worst enemy. 

Brand awareness is a crucial component of any business strategy. It ensures that the consumers know and understand the product and goals of the company. A brand awareness study enables you to know the percentage of target customers aware of your brand.

To form a complete marketing strategy, brand recognition and brand recall is the first step. It creates the top portion of your sales funnel. The more your brand is recognizable; the better lead generation happens in your sales funnel.

Therefore, giving brand recognition studies proper importance is a must for every company. In this article, we will discuss various aspects of brand recognition studies.

What is Brand Recognition?

Brand recognition is the ability of the customer to identify and recognize a particular brand.

When people are exposed to several products, they tend to recognize some of them immediately. This is a likely situation in supermarkets where the consumer is presented with a selection of brands. In this situation, the customer tends to choose the most recognizable brand that comes to their mind.

On the other hand, some brands come automatically to the consumers’ minds even when they aren’t presented with choices. For example, whenever you think of luxurious cars, Mercedes, Rolls Royce, BMW comes to mind.

The most successful recognition comes when the consumer is aware of your brand without being explicitly exposed to the name. If the consumer recognizes your brand by visual or auditory cues, such as jingles, packaging, or logos, it adds more value to branding.

Brand recognition is crucial for new companies that still need to solidify their presence to their target audience. It allows them to reach their target customers and market their products effectively.

Brand Health Study

Brand health study allows you to determine how people know your brand. It is very crucial to form your market strategy and uphold your brand’s image. While conducting your brand health study, you should consider the following studies:

• Brand Image Study: In this study, you gather feedback from both external and internal sources to know how your consumer’s perception matches your brand’s identity.

• Brand Trust Study: Trustworthiness is a great asset to have in your corner. There are numerous businesses online. Therefore, if you want your consumers to come back to your business, you will need to build a strong trust-based relationship with them.

• Brand Loyalty Study: Brand loyalty enables your loyal consumers to transform others into your consumers. However, you will need to know the frequency of customer transformation by calculating loyalty levels.

• Customer Profile Study:  Change in your customer base determines where your business is going. According to your customer change, you will need to pivot your product or message or both accordingly.

How to Conduct Brand Recognition Studies?

There are mainly two ways to conduct your brand recognition study, online survey, and telephone survey.

More and more companies are now leaning towards online surveys for convenience. As more people are now using electronic devices, smartphones and accessing online for a prolonged time, online surveys are becoming more efficient.

However, if a company can assure high convenience, talking through the phone can bring more personalized results.

Pros and Cons of Online Survey

Pros:

• Online surveys are more convenient as the customers can respond at any time.
• Online surveys cost less than traditional telephone and in-person surveys.
• You can sample faster with online surveying.

Cons:

• Most online forums maintain anonymity. Therefore, some vital information gaps can be presented.
• You cannot get further clarification in an online survey.
• Online surveys require a certain amount of technological expertise. It can make some audiences unavailable to participate in the survey.

Pros and Cons of Telephone Survey

Pros:

• You can target people of specific demographics and locations for your survey
• Telephone surveys allow you to gather  in-depth information about your branding
• Telephone surveys are more personal than online surveys

Cons:

• Telephone surveys are costly and time-consuming
• With telephone surveys, it will take a longer time to generate and sort samples properly.

When to Run Your Brand Recognition Study?

Conducting brand recognition studies once a year gives you a perspective of what you are doing right and what needs more work. However, it is also a good practice to run the study before launching a new marketing campaign.

Your brand recognition survey is a benchmark of your branding initiatives. It works as an indicator of the performance of your branding initiative. With proper analysis, you can increase your branding success and have better results in the future for your company.

With new marketing strategies, you are reaching new prospective customers. Therefore, you need to make sure that your branding resonates with your company’s morale. Also, it allows the consumers to find and learn about your products and services.

Without proper study, your branding opportunities fail. When your branding fails, it hurts your company severely.

Final Words

Branding recognition studies show you how easily you can reach your consumers with your product. For any business, this is a  crucial metric for success. Therefore, careful surveys and evaluations are essential for this initiative.

The goal of brand recognition is to make your customer think about your product whenever they need it. And for successfully doing that, there is no alternative to thorough research. You can also look for online survey software to help you conduct these surveys.

Kanban boards are undoubtedly a very good tool for improving workflow efficiency. It allows teams to have a clear view of all work items and control them at different workflow stages. Of course, when considering the creation of a Kanban board, you should keep the team’s needs and Kanban board examples in mind. Therefore, the application of Kanban’s may vary from team to team.

In the following article, we have collected and introduced some good examples of Kanban practice.

Ø Basic Kanban board example

The basic Kanban board is a great start for teams not familiar with the concept of a kanban. It typically contains three to four columns and is not complex. This simple kanban board is a great way for beginners to visualise their work and establish a foundation for highly efficient workflows. Here, the Kanban is applied most organically.

Ø IT Operations Kanban Board Example

The IT operations team has the problem of not being able to prioritise work in the best way. It is due to the huge amount of tasks that IT must perform. The Kanban Board can visualise the workflow and bring significant benefits to the IT operations team.

In addition to using columns to distinguish between flow stages, the team uses Swimlanes to avoid priority conflicts and better understand the importance of the task. After all, Kanban Boards help IT teams plan better, focus on better and shorten delivery times. Based on the capacity of your organisation, your IT team can handle a variety of activities.

Ø Simple kanban board for task management

Managing all team tasks and tracking individual Progress can often be a big headache for project managers. With Kanban Boards, teams can visualise all functions in one space and organise them in an easy to read and understand. Each team can:

• Use the status field to visualise and prioritise the process.
• You can extend complex process steps into your operations and track sub-tasks separately.
• Sort items using rows and swim lanes
• You can show dependencies between tasks to know when each task runs.

Ø Simple Marketing Kanban Board

Marketing teams and projects are known to contain a variety of efforts and variables. Therefore, it is best to use a separate Kanban Board system specialised for different types of processes for effective task tracking. This prime example of a Kanban is set up to trace social media marketing works.

The backlog gathers ideas and marks which tasks to proceed with. Task In Progress explains what the organisation is currently achieving on. You can swiftly recognise whether your operations are designed, copywritten, or reviewed in the secondary process. In addition, all live promotions are recorded in the “In Campaign” field, making it easier to manage. Finally, the line is used to distinguish between weeks and is to be able to plan social media calendar on board.

Bottom Line

All kanban board examples are designed to meet the needs of a particular team. Grasp the needs of your team and build a board along with it. To find the best structure for your team’s work process, you should always improve your kanban board. Depending on the work focus, team functionality, external factors, etc., you can build a Kanban board in various ways. Creating the optimal version of the board is an ongoing process and should reflect all the work environment dynamics.

All eyes will be on Scotland between 31 October to 23 November 2021, as they host the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26). The COP26 summit aims to bring parties together to hopefully accelerate action towards the Paris Agreement objectives and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. TCOP summit is not only an open forum between nations and global leaders – but large businesses also attend, including a selected few international conglomerates, financiers, and investors. It is well recognised that their presence is crucial due to the part businesses and other significant organisations play in shaping the green economy.

The upcoming COP26 global summit is being seen as an important event for agreeing on the many needed changes to fight climate change. It is the first summit since the 2020 deadline for various elements of the landmark Paris Agreement – which was adopted by 196 countries and territories at COP21 in 2015. It is also a principal focus for China and the United States, which are together accountable for more than 40% of the world’s carbon emissions.

There is substantial political momentum from most nations when it comes to wanting real and lasting change. This includes the joint statement made by the United States and China in April 2021, which pledged together they will cut their carbon emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. The United Kingdom has been targeted with reducing emissions by 78% by 2035.

The current analysis is showing the world nations are not yet doing enough to combat climate change. The planet is on track to warm between three and four degrees Celsius 2100 – this could have some disastrous outcomes. The sea levels will rise, and sizable areas of Earth will become uninhabitable. What happens at COP26 will have a direct impact on the world and our lives. It is clear the importance of COP26, but how does it affect businesses, and why should a company pay attention to what is happening at the conference.

COP26 Will Impact Consumer Behaviour and Business Revenues

People are becoming increasingly aware of the climate crisis, and it is influencing consumer behaviour. As a result, consumers expect businesses to consider sustainability and are willing to pay a premium for services and products that actively care about the environment. The EY Future Consumer Index focused on consumers beyond COVID-19 – reporting that 64% of consumers will pay more attention to the environment, 59% will shop local, and 40% will pay more for sustainable products.

Sustainable consumption is a trend that does not look to be slowing down, and businesses have an opportunity to create value and boost revenue by responding to consumer environmental expectations. For example, some companies have started differentiating themselves by applying carbon footprint labels to share the environmental impact of their products to consumers. The trend of environmentally conscious brands is likely to be accelerated post COP26.

Create New Business Models and Innovation

New business opportunities will be created through the advancing technology, falling cost of capital for green investments, improved regulation for high-emission assets, and increasing price of carbon emissions. In addition, the improved environmental practices may involve the creation of new business models and entirely new products and services. For example, some companies are now looking into alternative building materials that use recycled materials like glass, plastic, and paper.

The rise in carbon pricing significantly impacts opportunities for businesses looking to develop products and solutions that generate carbon credits. Green businesses such as seaweed farming that captures and sequesters carbon or filters that directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will likely thrive post COP26. All business types can get valuable insights into what they can do to become more sustainable and discover potential innovation opportunities by engaging with what is happening at COP26.

Sustainable Businesses Attract and Retain Dynamic Talent

It is not just consumer behaviour that is being impacted by an environmental awakening – people’s job choices are also being affected. Research conducted in 2019 found that 73% of workers wanted their employer to improve its sustainability record. It was even recorded that 24% of those surveyed would turn down a job opportunity at a company with a poor sustainability record.

For businesses that seek to attract a young workforce, the younger generation tends to be especially alarmed by the climate crisis. For instance, Gallup research found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 34 are concerned about global warming – compared with 56% aged 55 and older.

It is vital that companies do not just claim to be green – they need to show how they are sustainable and what measures they have in place to improve further. Engaging around COP26 indicates that the business recognises the impact of climate change and wishes to be part of the solution.

Boost In Green Investments

Green assets are already incredibly desirable for investors as they are expected to deliver some lucrative long term returns. For example, renewable energy companies have been experiencing massive interest in solar energy stocks. Nonetheless, COP26 is expected to boost the green finance market further – especially as one of the summit’s primary goals is to support private finance to establish a whole-economy transition to net zero.

The investments will progressively flow in the direction of companies and countries which are considered green – placing extractive and polluting business models at heightened risk. This will coincide with a closer focus on “greenwashing”, which will drive standardisation, provide clarity around what is classed as a “green project” or “green finance”.

In addition, greater caution will reduce opportunities for regulatory arbitrage, blocking companies from transferring assets to countries that do not make the environment a priority. For example, the European Union is considering a carbon border tax to reduce unintended consequences of its emissions trading system.

The Bloomberg New Energy Foundation estimates that between $78tn and $130tn of new investment will be required by 2050, in areas such as power generation and hydrogen production, to facilitate the environmental targets set by governments around the world. Therefore, businesses should look out for green financing arrangements (both positive and negative) that are expected to come out of COP26. They should also keep a close watch for any specific to their areas that may affect their business – such as clean air policies or environmental habitat protection.

The Takeaway

With the daily pressures of being in business, especially with the added challenges caused by the pandemic, many companies may not take much notice of COP26. However, this is one of the main reasons why those who take the time to follow this year’s climate change conference will be at a competitive advantage – they will be more aware of the emerging environmental trends, which mean so much to consumers and staff.

Climate change is now realised to be one of the most significant business risks and leading commercial opportunities of all time. The businesses which are wanting to manage this risk and take advantage of this opportunity to protect and create value from sustainability for their company should pay close attention to COP26.

A domain name is a human readable string that defines an area controlled by the owner of the domain name. When a person types your domain name into their web browser, they are directed to that piece of internet real estate that you control. For instance, google.com takes you to a Google controlled website. Domain names make it easier to navigate through the internet and, because they stand in place of IP addresses, they save us from having to memorize a long string of numbers to get to a website. Because a domain name takes a person to that piece of internet real estate that you control, it reflects on a business and its brand. The very best tech businesses realize this and make sure that they have premium domain names.

The Cost of Domain Names

A website needs two things to exist: a domain name and a web host. It is impossible to have a tech business, or any online business, without having a domain name. It is fundamental to having a website. The question is, how much does a domain name cost?

On average, a domain name will set you back somewhere in the region of $2 and $20 a year, depending on any specials or discounts you get. The latest domain extensions, such as .app, are on the upper end of that scale, or sometimes even above it, because they have just entered the market.

There is no set price for domain names, but unused domain names are very inexpensive. Domain names, like any asset, can be bought and sold, and there is a market for them, on platforms such as Afternic and GoDaddy Auctions, so you should look there to get an idea of prevailing market rates.

If you want an already used domain name, then you should buy it through a broker service such as Go Daddy’s Domain Broker Service.

Premium Domain Are Very Valuable

Premium domain names are, like great brands, short, easily memorable and deeply tied to a specific business, industry or product. The cost of premium domains ranges from thousands of dollars to tens of millions of dollars. For instance, when Gannett Co., Inc sold domain name cars.com, that particular domain name fetched a price of $872 million. According to GoDaddy, the most valuable domain name right now is carinsurance.com, which it values at $49.7 million.

Premium domain names cost so much because they reflect the values, standards and ideals of a brand. They help to build trust in a brand. Supposedly, when a person goes onto cars.com, they feel a great deal of confidence that they will be able to find quality information and the vehicle of their dreams. People who visit cars.com see the website as an authority in its area, trust it, and value what it gives to them. All that drives the value of the domain name. It means that whoever owns cars.com has to spend less on marketing than if they set up a rival website and tried to do exactly what cars.com does.

Defining the price of a domain name is not an exact science. Even the best appraisers make, at best, very good estimates of value. Technology & ecommerce businesses need premium domain names because their businesses are mediated by software. They cannot exist outside of the internet. And because of the massive market opportunities within the tech & ecommerce space, the competition for eyeballs is insane. Your business needs a premium domain name in order to stand out from the crowd and be more easily discoverable by customers.