Having a passion for the business you manage is paramount for success. However, this alone is not enough. As well as all the tender, love and care you have to offer, you also need a whole host of skills and fundamentals to survive long term, before succeeding. It’s therefore important to understand business planning, finance, strategy and marketing. Consider popular fundamentals that competitors are using – are they worth your investment? The answer is, probably.

Marketing

Marketing is a broad term and it’s a concept that is far much more than simply advertising your services or a product. It’s important to adopt a detailed market strategy, as this is how you will identify and interact with your customer and cater to their ever-changing needs. This allows you to deliver a strong value proposition whilst uncovering market segmentation, your target market, differentiation and product positioning.

Google Analytics

Businesses are all about numbers, and this is something even truer for new businesses. You must be well informed of just how much traffic your website is generating and where that traffic is coming from. This will help you to learn about the demographics of your target audience – and Google Analytics is a great place to start. This is one fundamental that’s easy to use and highly innovative.

You’re able to view the countries your website has been visited in, as well as the percentage differences in traffic drivers, and their most important numbers. These key numbers are broken down by the day, week, month and year – it really couldn’t be any more detailed. The figures are easy to see as they are displayed in clearly marked charts and graphs, and so couldn’t be easier to understand.

Unified Communications

Communication in the business world is very important, but if your communications aren’t unified, you may be wasting time and money, as well as losing the competitive edge of your business. Unified Communications provide access to cross-channel communications including video conferencing, PBX and VoIP telephone systems, audio communication and instant messaging. Of course, understanding how unified communication platforms are different is important because you don’t want to make any mistakes or use platforms that aren’t relevant to you.

This cloud-based platform makes way for conversations, communications and collaboration to happen anywhere, on any device at any one time. It also means that both business owners and employees can choose the best type of communication for the task at hand, whether that is remotely, on the road or at home.

AI Chatbots

Artificial intelligence doesn’t’t necessarily mean robots roaming about the office. Chatbots are all the rage too. Just last year, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft declared that “bots are the new apps“. Over 100,000 Facebook Messenger bots now exist with the likes of Starbucks and British Airways now requesting that customers interact with their AI bots. This helps to automate the mundane monotony of business communications and allows employees to complete the most important work.

So, more often than not, in the business world, fundamentals equate to increased output and decreased spending. They make life easier for employees whilst increasing productivity and lowering costs. Such costs can then be placed elsewhere in the business, helping expansion and in turn, driving profit. Whether you get Unified Communications by Gamma or focus on marketing, its important you know business fundamentals.