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How Service Management Software Help Improve Performance of Security Business

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If you are looking for a profitable business idea, then a security business is always a great idea to start with a low budget. With each passing day, more and more organizations are seeking security services. And this is not just limited to the commercial sector. Even residential property owners are turning to security professionals for their expert services. Therefore, if you play your cards right, there is no better time than now to kickstart a profitable business. And if you are already running one, this is the best chance for you to take your company to the next level. In this blog, we have a great tip for you that can dramatically transform your business performance– get a security systems field service software and see the radical improvement yourself!

That’s right, in this age of digital transformation, the most powerful tool you can use to your advantage is software solutions. There are plenty of tools and technologies available in the market to help boost business performance across all sectors. Among them, security alarm software is specifically designed for security businesses. It is a tool that enables you to manage your work orders and optimize team performance with minimum effort. It helps streamline and standardize all your business processes, including scheduling, dispatching, creating estimates, time tracking, generating invoices on-field, sharing customer information with field teams, monitoring technicians’ locations in real time, and so much more.

Regardless of the size or strength of your organization, you can reap heaps of benefits from this cutting-edge technology in improving your team performance and in turn, increasing your profit in no time. Sounds too good to be true? Go through the blog to find out how this is possible for your business.

Automate and Streamline Workflow

The biggest challenge in any field service business is resource optimization. If you somehow manage to utilize your technicians’ time and skills to their fullest potential, the job is half done. And there is no better or simpler way to achieve that goal other than using field service software. With this innovative digital tool, you can view the entire schedule of your workforce, analyze their availability and current location, assign them suitable work orders matching their expertise, and finally dispatch them on time so that no appointments are missed. Essentially, this software adds more visibility to your field operations, thus standardizing and streamlining your workflow. This in turn increases team efficiency and enhances productivity, ultimately leading to better business performance.

Improve Timekeeping

Once you go paperless with high-quality field service management software for security services, you get 360-degree scalability and control over your field operations. Most field service software options come with an efficient time tracking feature, which helps you to keep track of your employees’ total billable hours. Through the integrated GPS-enabled mobile app, your field technicians can clock in and out without travelling back and forth to the office. While this saves significant time, it also helps you to monitor their time spent on the field and plan their schedule more efficiently. This automatically helps to improve your team’s productivity.

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Leverage Cloud Storage

The biggest challenge of paper-based business processes is organization and access to data. We cannot emphasize enough how tedious it is to look for a particular customer’s data amidst the piles of ledgers and registers laying around your office. Not to mention the horror of finding the same file for a repeated job order of some time has passed in the meantime. Even if you get things organized, it is practically impossible to get hold of the information the moment you step out of the office. The solution to all these problems is field service management software for security businesses. They provide a centralized customer database thanks to the advanced cloud storage technology. You can get access to any particular customer data anytime and anywhere, even through your smartphone. Moreover, you can make this information available for your field technicians through the mobile app so that they are well informed about the job details. This significantly increases first-time fix rates and improves your team’s performance.

Optimize Your Calendar

With your security service field service software, you can actively monitor your employees’ locations and progress in real-time and adjust their schedules accordingly. This way, you can maximize their performance in the field. Suppose one of your employees is well ahead of their schedule, you can instantly assign them to another work order near their location. On the other hand, if an emergency service request comes up, you can promptly check your employees’ availability and assign them to the job. In short, the incredible digital tool never lets any business opportunities slip through the cracks, thus increasing your performance to its maximum potential.

Take Advantage of Data-Driven Decision-Making

You will be surprised to know how effective the latest field service software solutions are in capturing and analyzing important metrics for your business operations. Not only do they organize your customer database, but they can also give you all the necessary data you can possibly ask for to run your business smoothly. From active work orders to completed jobs, from customer feedback to job status updates– it gives you complete scalability in your operations. This in turn helps you gain powerful insights into your business performance, enabling you to come up with more informed decisions and effective strategies to implement in future.

Conclusion

In this digital era, going paperless is the best way to improve your business performance. And the key to the transformation is field service software for security businesses. It is specially designed with security companies in mind, and to take care of all their automation needs. From work order management to personnel dispatching, from creating estimates to generating invoices and sharing them directly with the customers– it can perform every important task in a security company and reduce the time it takes to keep things running. As a result, service providers have to spend significantly less time on tedious admin jobs and instead, focus on more important tasks in the field.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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