MARKETING
How Service Management Software Help Improve Performance of Security Business
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.
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.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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