If you are unclear on how to do competitor analysis, start by asking yourself these questions:

• Who are my competitors? Are they a direct competitor?

Typically, it is a company that sells the same products or services as yours or fulfills the same customer needs you meet. This company could be bigger, smaller, or similar to yours.

• What are their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? This is called a SWOT analysis.
• Are there any gaps in the market that my company can fill?
• Are there any gaps in the products and services offered by my competitors?
• Finally, how can I use this information to increase my company’s market share?

Research your competitors well to get the answer to these questions. 

Why is competitor analysis important?

The benefits of competitor analysis are huge. It can set the rhythm and speed of your business’s success.

Understand your advantages and disadvantages

This is where doing a competitor SWOT analysis helps. Analyzing your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses will help you identify your business’s advantages and disadvantages in the market. 

Determine your past, present, and future business strategies

Analyzing your competitors helps you formulate effective strategies for your company. Knowing where you stand in the market can give you early warning signs of threats and opportunities. Use these insights and foresight to take steps that will lead you to your goals.

Know the objective and profile of competitors

By understanding where your competition stands in the market, you can think of strategies to either beat them or fill the gaps.

Identify what you need to get ahead

You learn from the success and failure of other brands. This analysis establishes the reasons behind the failure of unsuccessful companies, thus helping you identify the key assets and skills needed to beat your competition.

Know your threats to tackle them better

While analyzing your competition, you identify threats and challenges your competitors bring into the ecosystem. It helps you fortify your company’s strategy against the competition.

Leverage category convergence

Brands today are offering products across variant segments. Today brands are competing in segments where they have been historically absent. Hence, consumer perception of your brand plays a prominent role in defining competitive benchmarks.

Sources of information to study competitors while doing competition analysis?

Recorded data: It includes data that is published publicly, such as annual reports, brochures, newspaper articles, and press releases.

Observable data: It is collected from several sources, such as competitor pricing, promotions, and patent applications.

Opportunistic data: This kind of data involves exclusive planning. It is basically derived from customers, suppliers, seminars, and conferences.

Also read – Tips for Launching Successful Mobile-Friendly Online Store.

The post Competitor Analysis: Why is it important for your business appeared first on PayU Blog.

What is brand building?

How people perceive your business is your brand. The brand building process is about creating a unique image for your business. It starts with a strategy to define your brand’s relationship with its customers and how it will get there over time. A brand building strategy will help you be consistent in communication and experience across environments and assets, such as print and packaging, customer service, or social media.

6 Simple steps to build a successful brand

There are different ways you can build a strong brand. But here are six steps to get you started on a successful brand building journey:

Step 1: Determine Your Target Audience

The first thing you need to know when building a brand building strategy is your target audience. You can determine your audience based on age, location, interests, etc. This will help you define what you communicate, where, and how, so your audience can deeply relate to your brand. Depending on your target audience and their needs and aspirations, you can create a brand persona that resonates with them. Over time, your brand will need to evolve with your target audience to stay relevant.

• Pro tip: Start with smaller, specific sets of target audiences. As your brand awareness and loyalty grow, you can expand your audience base to include more diverse groups.

Step 2: Define your brand mission

Your mission and vision statements describe why your brand exists and what it is passionate about. The brand mission is what you promise to do and how you will add value for your audience. It also dictates how you execute your brand strategy daily. It will guide your branding process across channels. All this should help you achieve your brand vision – what you want to be for your audience.

Step 3: Research your competition

Every brand has its unique selling point (USP). Analyze your competition and find out what works for them, what does not, and where your brand can do better than them. The brand building process should focus on that differentiating factor. This will help you define what can set your business apart and use it to your advantage in branding and marketing. Competitive analysis is a continuous process that helps you:

• Define and refine your USP
• Improve your products and services
• Encourage research and development (R&D)
• Benchmark your branding and pricing strategies
• Identify business opportunities and threats

Step 4: Create a strong value proposition

You have studied your markets, competition, and audiences. Use this knowledge to clearly define what your brand offers and why your audiences should only choose you – what makes your brand unique and valuable. Include this value proposition in your marketing communication across channels to create a successful brand. For example, PayU’s scalable and robust platform makes it one of India’s best payment solutions providers.

Step 5: Set your brand markers and guidelines

Brand building is all about making your business recognizable and memorable. And it is done by playing on the human senses, particularly with visuals and sounds. Think Coca-Cola logo or Nokia jingle. Creating such unique and remarkable markers will create a special place for your brand in your audience’s minds. Once you have done that, document how your brand will be represented across channels. These guidelines will ensure consistency and quality.

Step 6: Market your brand

The last step is to tell the world about your brand! Set a definitive marketing strategy and create noise on channels your audiences frequent to grab their attention. Using your brand guidelines and marketing strategy, you can communicate with your audiences in relatable and engaging ways.

Apply your branding in every piece of communication, from packaging to stationary and website to marketing collateral. Identify new channels such as email, web, and affiliates to promote your brand.

Conclusion

Brand building is an ongoing process; you need to revisit it every now and then to ensure your branding is maintained consistently. The process requires expertise, and it is best to get professional help to get the best out of your efforts. You can learn more about branding in our blog on the importance of brand guidelines.

Frequently asked questions about the brand building process

What is brand building?

Brand building is creating awareness and promoting a business using different strategies and plans. In other words, it is building and displaying a brand identity through different campaigns such as on social media, websites, and events. Branding is essential for a company as it is what people see and think about it. It is your logo, tagline, ads, everything!

Helpful articles related to brand building:

• Social Media Marketing Tips
• Content Marketing Tips
• Quora Marketing Strategy
• Video Marketing Tips

Why is it important to build a brand?

Branding is important to build recognition and trust. This can help you acquire more customers and their loyalty over time.

How to plan a brand building process?

You can start with the six simple steps mentioned above to build a successful brand.

What is a brand roadmap?

A brand roadmap comprises concepts and strategies you can follow while building your brand. It includes goals, objectives, and ways to achieve them within set deadlines.

How can you build a strong brand?

We can build a strong brand with various methods and strategies. To start with, one needs to conduct a brand audit of the company. This includes a thorough competitive analysis and identifying your brand’s USPs. Make sure you are original and authentic across communications. Re-analyze your strategies regularly so you can maintain your brand identity.

How does advertising help in brand building?

The motive behind branding is to build recognition and attract more customers. Advertisement plays a great role here. It helps businesses remind their consumers of their presence. Advertisements help build brand salience. It reminds people of the product or services offered by a business by looking at its logo or advertising campaign.

What is brand reputation?

As the term suggests, brand reputation is how people see your brand. Do they see your brand as fun and quirky? Or do they see your brand as an authority in your industry? A good brand reputation means consumers trust you and like your offerings.

The post 6 Simple Steps For A Successful Brand Building Process appeared first on PayU Blog.

Significance of Sales Enablement

Sales enablement plays a vital role in extending the sales organization and providing the things necessary to be successful to salespersons, such as tools, knowledge, best practices, etc. Often, the professionals oppose that sometimes leaders underestimate the significance of their work and so do not appreciate it. The reasons many times are the lack of speaking business language and professionals don’t do the alignment of tasks to their goals. The practice enables overachievers to designate as leaders of the program. The fundamental goal is to give a roadmap indicating how to shift from training to multiple lines of business and be valued as a true business partner. 

With time, selling has become challenging every day. It is because sellers spend almost 60% of their precious time creating, finding, or editing content instead of selling to send to the buyers. But still, it is not enough because 78% of the buyers say that their needs are not met by the quality of the content they receive from these sellers. Thus it is significant to check various ways to help improve the buyer’s experience. 

What Are Sales Enablement Tools?

Sales enablement tools are required for the sales persons to get the task done most properly. Various organizations depend on CRM or the original sales technology. This platform gives beneficial insights for the growth in revenue and performance by decreasing the burden on the team. Some of the tools which help to improve sales and bring the program to life are:

Salesforce sales enablement provides your sales reps with the right type of coaching and content at the correct time for quick results. 

Sales members can fast-track development and onboarding through the help of in-app onboarding and assistance, live engagement insights and customized gamification to drive the results.

CRM (customer relationship management) is a platform that helps build customer relationships, controlling every aspect of your business’s health and collaborating on the deals.

Sales training is another tool, and it can be of various forms, such as modern platforms like Trailhead, a platform for online learning, and traditional in-person classroom layout.

One tool is a strong CMS (content management system) that supports the salespeople and customers and assists marketing and sales in creating, distributing and updating the content.

Sales Enablement Vs. Sales Operation

Sales enablement is a process which provides tools and content and goes to market resources with the motive of success. In contrast, sales operation ensures routine operational tasks’ smooth and efficient running. 

Sales operation also enables the latter to achieve the goals that they set. Sales enablement enables the team to efficiently and effectively attract prospects or customers and provide content and the system they require throughout their buying journey. On the other hand, sale operation ensures appropriate and suitable size quotas are thus correctly assigned to the sales territories.

Conclusion

Sales enablement is a process that provides the team with everything they require to close the deals. There are many ways the help of which it enables to process and profit. Some ways are building a long-term strategy, eliminating conflicting messages, better early communication, optimizing sale pitches, etc. This strategy provides the salesperson with all the requirements for successful buyer engagement throughout the buying process. Thus, the sales leaders help their team to win and achieve more business.

FAQs

The post How Sales Enablement Positively Impacts Your Business appeared first on PayU Blog.

1. Keep the business concept simple
2. The idea behind becoming an entrepreneur must have been the first thing that got you into the business.
3. Businesses that conceive the best entrepreneur ideas and keep them simple are often successful. It is worth remembering that simple business ideas must remain understandable for the lower management, the salesperson, the marketing agency, and the customer.
4. Focus on both – the market and the product
5. As first entrepreneurs, while you have looked for simple, effective, and the best business ideas – is the market ready for it? Does your product offer something unique or solve a problem? What about funds, operational costs, competition, and so on?
6. Adequate market research can give you an insight into the product’s viability, and your well-chosen advisors can add significant value to it.

Pick the Right People

It is naïve to think that you can start your business alone. Choose your core competency and concentrate on getting the process around it right. For instance, if you are a finance person, bring in operations, logistics, and marketing experts to assist you. Also important is having a good team around you. Your mentors will be your eyes and ears, but your wider team will ensure that your cavalry is ready to sell the product when you kickstart production.

Develop a Financial Model

An efficient financial model will also project future incomes accurately and budget with fewer deviations. These days, most businesses seek assisted payment platforms as a part of their financial model.

A new business can reach out to a local and a global market base with PayU. It will help you reach out to the Tier-II and Tier-III customer base with the incorporation of Hindi and other Indian regional languages on the PayU platform.

Keep Emergency Funds Aside

If there is one thing that the pandemic taught small businesses, it was the importance of a contingency fund. Small and new businesses mostly run on shoestring budgets. However, every entrepreneur needs to know that an emergency fund should be created along the way.

Networking

The best business framework can bootstrap its way to stability. But for the quantum leap, investments are the key. Successful entrepreneurs find time to connect with the right people, and so should a first-time entrepreneur. Strong networking skills can result in lucrative deals, collaborations, and, most importantly, investors.

Staying True to the Commitment

Businesses and products are often accused of not being what they used to be. Stay true to the entrepreneur’s business ideas that made it well-accepted in the first place. Once your business idea clicks, the focus should be on maintaining consistency in service or product delivery.

Conclusion

Steps like those mentioned above need to be the guiding beacon for businesses as they start. With these things taken care of, new business entrepreneurship can always be well-placed to take on the challenges as they come.

Wondering what else can PayU help you with? Check out this video to get a glimpse of the opportunities that PayU offers to expand and streamline your business:

Frequently Asked Questions

The post 7 Simple Ways to Start a New Business appeared first on PayU Blog.

Let me provide you with a complete Google My Business guide that will help you spread your business’ name across the internet and attract your target audience.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free-of-cost and convenient tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across the Google ecosystem. With this tool, you can share all the required information with your customers, so they can easily connect with you and know about your services.

Why Do You Need a Google My Business Account? 

There is a straightforward answer to this, and I know you can easily relate to it. Suppose you, as a customer yourself, might be searching for a shop, for example, a cake shop, and if you don’t know the exact location, don’t you think your first response would be ‘Search in Google.’

Thus, similarly, your customer will most likely search for your business on Google and not just your location. They would also like to know your contact no, photos, website link, other customers reviews, etc., and you can easily provide this through Google My Business.

How to Set Up Google My Business?

Follow these simple steps to create your Google My Business profile.

Google My Business Sign up

Visit www.google.com/business to sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have one, you can create a new one now by clicking here. 

Tips– Sign up with your email domain for a business. 

Add your business name

Add your business name, and in case nothing appears on the pop-down menu, select the Add your business to Google option to enter your appropriate category for your business.

Enter your location

If you have a physical shop, i.e., brick and mortar, you can add your shop location, which will later show on Google Maps, so your customer can easily find you.

However, if you don’t have a shop and provide services in a specific area, you can mention your service area.

Fill in contact details and website address

Enter your business contact details and website address, so your customer can effortlessly get in touch with you.

Finish and Verify Your Business

Once all other details are entered, click Finish, and then you’ll be asked to verify your business.

How to Verify Your Business on Google?

Once your business account is set, the next step is Google My Business verification.

Google may offer you an alternative option to verify your business, but most business owners will have to wait for a postcard from Google with a verification number on it.

When your postcard card has arrived

1. The first step is the same, i.e., Google My Business sign-in
2. Click verify my location
3. Enter the five-digit verification code given in your postcard

Now, note that the Google My Business verification may take a couple of days, and till then, you can optimize your listing.

How to Claim Your Business on Google?

If you want to claim an existing Google business profile, you can use the following steps:

1. Log in to your Google My Business. Search for your business by entering the business name and address, then choose it from the search and follow the given steps to verify as owner.
2. Google Search your business and click on Own this business? Or Search your business on Google Maps, and under the Business Profile, click the option ‘Claim this business.’

How to Add Multiple Locations on Google My Business?

If you’re setting up a new shop or want to add additional locations after creating your new profile, follow these steps.

• To the right side of your Google My Business dashboard, click the Add Location button.
• Enter your business name, click on create a new business with this name.
• Complete the form and request verification

You can also go to Google Maps to drop a pin at the location you want to add. Then, in the left menu, click Add a missing location. Complete the form and then click Claim this business.

Can You Do All These Steps with the Google My Business app?

The answer is yes! Most of the recommended steps in this post can be performed by using the Google My Business app.

Ways to Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

Complete Your Profile

The more information you provide in your Google My Business profile, the better your customer will understand your business, which will make it easier to earn their trust.

Add Tempting Photos

Posting lucrative photos is a quiet eye-catcher, and it can be a great advertisement tool that will tell these customers about your product. 

Keep Updating Recent News, Sales, etc.

You can tell your customers about current special offers, sales, happy hours, etc., which will attract several customers to leverage from these offers. 

Manages Your Reviews

Encourage your customers to add their reviews; this will help you better understand your customer needs, and with some good reviews, you will attract even more customers to your business. 

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is used to track your business performance and collect visitor insights. You can track how many people search for you by calling your business, tab on your photos, visiting your website, and more. You can adjust your profile by knowing what keywords, pictures, and actions are most popular.  

Make Payments Simpler with PayU

Having the right payment option that the customer needs is very crucial for your business. A customer could have an unpleasant experience if they have to look for an alternative method of payment rather than their suitable one. Platforms like PayU are a one-stop solution for all payment requirements, providing more than 100 payment options that are easy to use and completely secure. Having a Google business profile will give a massive boost to your business. Your customers can easily reach you and know precisely what they need to be your potential customer. Find out more information on PayU today. 

The post A Comprehensive Google My Business Guide  appeared first on PayU Blog.

As you know, the growth of the business is a function of several factors. Here’s what we’ll be catching up on while talking a bit more about growth.

What are Stages of Startup Growth?

There are three stages of a startup:

• Finding product-market fit
  This stage has lower retention because it is more about acquiring new customers.

• Early scaling
  There is decent retention while the acquisition is doubled in this stage.

• Mature scaling
  The startup focuses on becoming a marketing leader to monopolize it further.

Well Known Growth Hacking Examples

Hotmail used one such growth hack. They hyperlinked Hotmail in every email signature. This got them a whopping 12 million users, of which 2.5 million came due to the signature back when there were only 70 million internet users.

Engineers at Airbnb & Craigslist also figured out one such hack too. They found out they can post on craigslist through Airbnb without using any API with a URL.

Why Move Away from Growth Hacking?

Hacks are short-term in nature as they do not have the same effect when repeated. These hacks do not work every time because these hacks are the rarest moonshots. It is not the way businesses can grow. In hindsight, every organization must adopt an organization-wide growth strategy. Growth comes only using a systematic & structured approach to solve for it. It won’t come by using pop-ups or leads.

How to Look at Growth?

One of the biggest myths startups have about growth is, a growth hacker can magically scale their company. But they need to stop looking for a superhero to solve growth. Thus, it’s necessary to know the factors that drive growth in a company. They are shipping a product, finding a product-market fit & growing the product.

Shipping a product depends on understanding a user’s pain point, validating the scale of the problem, finding out its possible solutions & building a minimum viable product.

Finding a product-market fit is a function of the product launch, receiving feedback, relaunching until there is a flat retention curve & referral effect. This flat retention curve can also be obtained when there’s a strong word of mouth while the referral effect comes into play when there’s a willingness to pay.

Growing the product is dependent on growing revenue. This growing revenue depends on the number of paying customers & lifetime value per user. The number of paying customers is a function of total users & percentage of users turning into paid customers.

The growth framework by Udayan will help you understand the other factors that the above 3 factors depend on. It’ll help you find all the connecting dots to know the points of focus in your business. Click here to check the framework!

How to Build a Growth Team?

A growth team normally consists of, growth lead or product manager, a t-shaped marketer, a full-stack engineer, a designer, and a product analyst. This changes as per the kind of industry because the definition of growth for every industry is different. For example, a delivery service app focuses on operations while a cab service focuses on demand-supply management.

Growth lead in the team prioritizes the growth roadmap, understands how the different tech stacks work, always researches because of being highly data-driven & always questioning the why making them excellent stakeholder management.

T shaped marketer owns the market strategy with proficiency in at least one channel. Being the biggest customer champion in the room knows how to craft a compelling story for your user, highly data-driven, bonus if they can query data on their own, and does stakeholder management from a business point of view.

The product designer owns the entire user flow. 70% designer & 30% visual designer own qualitative data like user research, customer calls, surveys, always question the why & work with tech team & own the UAT end to end.

Full-stack engineers only exist in pockets. The front-end engineer has an eye for great visual detail, demands tracking across all user touchpoints, and looks past just code. Back-end engineer owns API codebase, database scaling, understands DevOps & isn’t shy in using 3rd party tools to ship faster.

Product analyst understands the pulse of the product, automates all dashboards for every single team member, owns growth modeling, forecasting & impact assessments. This individual works with backend engineers to operationalize stuff irrespective of the model type, simple or complex.

Here’s the simplified view of how your growth team should look like.

What Would be Your Advice to Every Budding Entrepreneur?

Here are thoughts by Udayan Walvekar for all startups:

• Think about midterm & long-term goals.
• Prioritize the thing that’ll give 80% of your result.
• Creativity thrives in growth.

Check out this video to know more about growth. 

To see more such events, subscribe to PayU India’s Youtube Channel & stay updated with every event. 

The post Is Growth Hacking Already a Passe? appeared first on PayU Blog.

Optimization is critical for the success of your ad campaign. Optimizing twitter adverts help you control your Twitter Ads buck. Keep experimenting with several existing campaigns in order to understand targeting and creative types.

There are a few terms and processes which you need to be familiar with before starting twitter adverts optimization. Here’s what they include:

Impressions: It means the total number of times your ad has been shown.

Graph: Twitter Graph shows all the important statistics for your ad campaign.

Date Range: It provides a detailed view of the hourly breakdown.

Tweet Engagement: Number of times users engaged with your ad.

Twitter Cards: With this, you can add nice photos, videos, or any other media to your Tweets that can help you drive traffic to your website.

Conversions: Actions taken on your website by users. Action can be a sale or a lead.

Here are some of the best practices to help you optimize your Twitter advert campaigns in the best way:

Fine Tune Your Targeting

Targeting allows your online business to connect only with the intended users. We advise you to run multiple campaigns in order to optimize better. Use one type of targeting option with each campaign. You can target your campaign & create ads by user interest, behaviour, followers, keyword, and location. Each targeting option helps you identify relevant matrices that work for your online business.

Select 20 keywords and identify user engagement on each keyword. It will help you narrow down keywords that matter the most for your business & will help you get free twitter followers. Optimize location in case broad region doesn’t yield target audience. Narrow down to the specific areas in order to zero down geo patterns.

Refine Your Bidding & Twitter Advertising

Twitter adverts provide an “Automatic Bid” option that automatically optimizes your bid while keeping your budget intact. Automatic bidding is cost-efficient as you only pay for links clicked by users.

You can also use the “Targeting Bid” option. It allows you to fix the budget as per identified targeting matrices. Although it costs more you can reach the most intended user base. Try “Maximum Bid”, in case you want maximum exposure.

A/B Testing

In the overview section, you can quickly analyze which Twitter campaign is reaching the people effectively. Always aim for more than 1% engagement rate while defining benchmarks for your Twitter ads. If you are achieving lower than 1%, revise your copy and ad creative.

Ad engagement easily helps you identify which creative is performing better when the targeting is the same for multiple ads. Quickly go to “Edit Campaign” in order to edit copy or ad creative whenever required.

Use Conversion Tracking

Make sure you add a ‘conversion tag’ on your website. Double-check it and specify a key conversion tag for each campaign. It will help you to capture data in the most relevant format. Website tags let you choose whether you want to optimize your Twitter Advert for link clicks or website conversions.

For example, PayU with tags for Payment Gateway might specify the payment tag as the key conversion tag for a “Free Payment Gateway” promo campaign.

Device and Platform Targeting

Make sure you test your Twitter ad campaign for mobile and tablets. Check engagement rates across various devices as it will help you to identify the best performing device for your ad campaign. Make your ads more relative for mobile as users nowadays are interacting in real-time on their smartphones.

Twitter optimization is an ongoing process and the key to achieving maximum engagement is experimentation. Keep using the Twitter targeting option to filter your ad campaign. Also, read our blog on “How to optimize your Google adverts account”.

The post A Quick Guide For Businesses to Optimize Twitter Adverts appeared first on PayU Blog.

Beginning the year 2020 with a bang, PayU is planning to merge operations of our consumer lending business LazyPay with PaySense, India’s fastest growing digital credit platform. The combination will bring together two highly complementary companies, to better serve our customers.

This merger takes us one step closer to achieving PayU’s long term vision of orchestrating a fintech ecosystem in India, by partnering with the right companies and offering multiple financial services. 

PayU will inject a total of upto $200M in the newly-merged enterprise PaySense; $65M of the total amount will be immediately invested, while the balance will be infused in the next 24 months.

Benefits for Customers

While India’s banked population has more than doubled since 2011 to over 80%, credit bureau coverage is still limited. By pooling the strengths of PayU, LazyPay and Paysense, the combined entity will be able to reach out to more new-to-credit Indians, who have a strong appetite for credit.

PayU has a deep understanding of consumer backgrounds, insights into their purchase behavior and affluence levels thanks to our payment gateway business. LazyPay has expertise in driving customer acquisition and engagement and PaySense’s forte is strong analytics, tech & risk management capabilities. Together, we will build one unique platform successfully serving the needs of people who require credit to power their aspirations. 

Leaders Speak

Siddhartha Jajodia, Global Head of Credit, PayU said, “Technology has the power to completely transform people’s access to financial services and the credit market in India is ripe for further digital disruption. This merger is the next step in our journey as we accelerate our vision for credit in India. We’re delighted to welcome Prashanth and his experienced team as we integrate this fast-growing business and build a full-stack digital lending platform aligned with PayU’s overall plan of orchestrating a broader fintech ecosystem in the region.”

Prashanth Ranganathan, Founder and CEO, PaySense added, “Providing more Indian consumers with access to credit is crucial to helping individuals grow and succeed. PayU is a natural partner for us as we both strive to make finance more simple, accessible and transparent. We’re excited to start bringing our personal loan product to more consumers throughout India and truly democratise credit.”

PayU’s unified digital credit platform will enable third parties such as banks, NBFCs and alternate lenders to co-lend and grow assets. It will also enable borrowers to access credit whenever and wherever they need it, in a digital and seamless way. 

As a part of the deal, Prashanth Ranganathan, currently PaySense CEO will lead PayU’s credit business in India as the CEO of the new enterprise. 

Read the full media coverage on The Economic Times, The Times of India, ET BFSI, ET-Brand Equity, Live Mint, Fortune, The Hindu Business Line, Business Standard, The Financial Express, CNBC TV 18, Inc42, Your Story, Entrepreneur, and Moneycontrol.

The Road Ahead

At PayU, our investments are driven by our focus on developing new capabilities that better serve our customers, giving them access to products that best suit their local needs. There is great synergy between the businesses and by leveraging it, PayU and PaySense will be able to use their strengths to reach out to the underserved customers, bringing us one step closer to a world without financial borders, in which everyone can prosper.

We are hopeful of many such acquisitions and developments in the future. To know more about our innovations and products,

The post PayU Acquires PaySense for $185 MN to Strengthen its Credit Business in India appeared first on PayU Blog.

But what is cash flow? It is the net amount of money being transferred in and out of business. In other words, it is the difference between what the company owns vs what the company owes. And ideally, there should a good gap between the two for conducting daily operations smoothly and business growth.

A negative cash flow, on the other hand, affects the ability of a company to expand & explore or even conduct their day-to-day activities. In this post, we will give you some tips on how to improve the cash flow management of your business easily!

1.Deposit Cash Balance in Business Savings Account

Always keep your personal and business finances different. This will make monitoring of your cash flow, tracking expenses, and tax planning easy. If you don’t have it already, open a separate business savings account, with the best rate of interest.

Compare different banks, the interest rates they offer along with the schemes. Also, make sure there are no hidden charges such as monthly maintenance fees, etc. Check that it provides a good return on your money as it is generally much higher than your personal savings accounts.

2. Liquidate Excess, Obsolete Inventory

The demand for products keep changing in the market. And the inventory that you have may get old and obsolete. Rather than clinging on to the materials in a hope that someday someone will purchase them or it will come to use, it makes sense to liquidate or resell it.

Selling your old inventory at a lower price is better than keeping it on the shelf all life! Some money is better than no money. Also, it will take up space that can be utilized for keeping something else. And moreover, not selling it is only adding on to your storage and maintenance cost.

If you have an excess of raw materials or equipment, you can consider re-selling it to other buyers within the industry. But if there are products or services that have gone out of fashion or become old, you can re-sell them by offering heavy discounts.

3. Ask for Advance Payment on Large Orders

If someone places a large or a custom order, don’t shy away from asking for at least 50% advance payment upfront. If it is a customized order, it will be useful for only that individual or organization. Therefore, taking an advance payment would provide you security as well as lessen the risk of getting a late or reduced payment at the time of delivery. Also, it will prevent you to use a lot of cash from your own pocket on the order.

Also, you can use the advance payment in producing the item or product. Customers do understand such things and you can also make it a part of your policies to avoid any arguments.

4. Offer Early Payment Discounts

First things first! Make sure you send out invoices on time. If you have a set procedure of sending out invoices quickly, you will not have to burn your time chasing them. What you can do instead is, send your customers reminders when the invoice is due.

Generally, companies give 30 days after the invoice is sent, to make the payment. However, you can offer your customers discounts for making the payments on time or even before it. For instance, you can offer a discount saying that people who make payments in the first 10 days of sending the invoice will get 2% concession! You might start receiving payments early, making your cash flow better. Make sure you set a procedure for this too!

5. Install Payment Gateway to get Payments Faster

Offer an online payment solution to your customers for quick payments. You can ask your customers to pay online via cards, UPI, wallets, etc. so that there is no issue of sending invoices and receiving payments later.

Payment Gateway such as PayUmoney offers all payments options such as debit/ credit cards, UPI, wallets etc. It is highly secure and convenient to use. Also, it has same day settlement feature for its merchants through which a merchant receives settlements on the same day of the transaction, via IMPS for the amount less than 2lac per day. Therefore, you will get your payments on the same day, the customer pays!

Signing up with PayUmoney will definitely improve your cash-flow and help in the growth of your business.

6. Revaluate Day-to-Day expenses

Managing cash flow is not just about getting more money in the system (inflow) but also keeping a check on the money going out (outflow). Check your business expenses regularly and see if all of them are necessary and the best available option in the price that you are incurring on them.

Streamline your processes with more efficient ones. Make use of various software and tools available in the market to cut down on time spent on lengthy processes such as sending invoices to all the customers.

Know that you do not have to buy everything new. Look around and see what equipment can be bought second hand and is of one-time use only.

Conclusion

Having a positive cash flow gives you a lot of courage and support to carry out new experiments in business. Using the tips above can improve your business cash flow to a great extent. It will keep you out of money stress and help you with your future growth.

As mentioned above, integrating with a good payment solution is essential for getting payments fasters as well as to provide a seamless payment experience to your customers. PayUmoney is India’s leading payment gateway. To know more,

The post 6 Tips to Improve Your Business’ Cash Flow appeared first on PayU Blog.

Coupon Marketing Strategy: Getting The Basics Right

Before we dive deep and understand the execution part of scaling marketing efforts through efficient coupon marketing, it is necessary to understand why you should choose coupon marketing. The top reasons for you to use coupon marketing for your business are:

• Attracts New Customers & Generates Traffic: Coupons are one of the best ways to attract new customers. This can happen by social sharing, word of mouth and viral marketing.

• Helps In Customer Retention Activities: It is necessary to invest some of your efforts in retaining the customers from which you have not heard in a while. Sending coupons to them via emails and SMS and calling them back to your business will ensure your business growth.

• Builds Brand Loyalty: Building brand loyalty is one of the most important parts of growing business. Best coupon marketing has its top priority to build meaningful relations. Coupon marketing plays an important role in this process.

• Gets Relevant Database: As mentioned earlier, there are certain tools which can be used efficiently to create a database which further can be used in your retargeting campaigns.

• Increases The Sales Metrics: Every business has a set goal and at the end of the day, we all want to see the number going up. Coupons are provenly efficient to scale up your sales.

• Easy Controlling & Tracking: With all the easy to use dashboards functionality, it is very easy to control and track the performance of your coupon marketing campaign. Basis the performances, you can decide to plan your next steps!

Read our blog on How Businesses Can Make It Big Using Coupon Marketing to get detailed guide on types of coupon marketing and the best platforms to choose from!

How To Plan Your Coupon Marketing Strategy?

Now that you know why you should use coupon marketing, here is a 4-step guide to help you make the strategy to drive the best results:

1. Determining Your Target Audience

The first step is to understand who your target audience is. The success or failure of your coupon marketing strategy depends on how well it resonates with your target audience.

This means that before you plan on the ‘type’ and ‘platform’ for your coupon marketing, you need to ask questions like:

• what is the age group that will be more open to coupons and offers?
• is there any geographical area that will get the best ROI?
• should the targeting be on the existing customers or bringing in the new customers?

…and so on.

If you plan to target the existing customers, have a detailed competitor analysis in place and go over and beyond what your competitors are doing. On the other hand, if you are looking to target existing customers, carefully analyze their buying patterns and past behaviors and come up with coupons that best matches their buying styles. Statistics show that over 80% of buyers switch brands if offered with better coupons and discounts.

Statistics show that over 80% of buyers switch brands if offered with better coupons and discounts.

Takeaway: Tailoring your coupon marketing strategy to suit the needs and buying habits of your target audience is the best way to boost your conversions instantly. Do not let your customers leave you after redeeming the coupons. Instead, keep retargeting them with follow up coupons!

2. Deciding What To ‘Offer’

Now that you understand your target audience, it’s time to decide what should you offer to them? The best thing to do is offering coupons based on their preferences and choices. This is a very important step while you plan your coupon marketing strategy because this one choice decides the overall success of the entire campaign.

The key is to be careful when selecting coupons for your campaign. Make sure the type of coupons you select are aligned with the buying habits of your target audience.

For example, choose a rupee-based value system if your buyer loves instant saving on the purchase. Or, if your buyer usually shops via a mobile device, send them text-based coupons! You can also choose to send digital coupons via email to the buyers who left on the checkout window.

Takeaway: Choosing the right combination and having a proper plan in place will help you leverage the entire ROI of the campaign!

3. Selecting The Right Platform

After knowing your target audience and deciding on what are you going to offer, the next and the most crucial step is to select the relevant platform. You must be wondering, what are the best places to host these offers to drive tons of sales ready leads? One of the answers is online coupon websites like couponduniya, groupon etc.

Remember, 96% of buyers visit coupon websites before making a purchase!

Other research also suggests that 71% of buyers follow brands on Social Media to stay up-to-date with their latest coupons. Another 58% prefers getting coupons via emails. So you know what are the best possible channels to make a way to knock on the doors of your customers!

Takeaway: When people see coupons on social media, they tend to share the posts. This means free brand promotion, positive sentiments and awesome ROI for your business. Experiment on different platforms and see what works the best in favor of your brand!

4. Analysing The Performance Of Your Campaign

After all the research, planning and execution of your coupon marketing strategy, the last step is to track and measure the performance of the campaign. This will give you an insight if the campaign is working well and getting the desired result or not. And basis the metrics, you can plan to decide on the next steps.

If you provided a link to a landing page, then track the traffic by creating a trackable URL. Another essential step is to dive deeper and understand at which stage did your buyer consume the coupon or left the space. Monitor each step carefully and look for any number that will help you plan the best strategy for the next campaign.

Takeaway: Never work on assumptions when it comes to data. Make a habit of tracking and controlling your campaign from time to time to optimize it the best way! This goes a long way to maintain a healthy coupon marketing strategy.

Planning a coupon marketing strategy is much more than just designing an attractive coupon for your business. It requires a detailed comprehensive management system and that develops overtime. Be ready to offer omni channel experience and build personalized relationships with your customers/ buyers. The numbers and graph for the coupon marketing is only going to soar high. By incorporating the above-mentioned steps in your coupon marketing strategy, you are all set to execute a successful campaign!

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Sign up with PayUmoney to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

The post Beginner’s Guide To Coupon Marketing Strategy appeared first on PayU Blog.