FAQ

Corporate Identity (or CI) is the image projected by a company in public and within the firm. CI is mainly visible in the form of slogans, logos and designs. However, corporate identity also covers the values of the company, the culture, philosophy and the way it communicates. Corporate identity is not a random product, but rather a central part of the strategic planning of a company.

The UPS (unique selling point) is the unique characteristic which makes my product different from that of competitors and offers my customer the decisive advantage. Today, products from different suppliers are often very similar or even interchangeable, which means that it can be very difficult for a company to find the UPS for its product.

Whereas the USP describes the unique functional benefit of a product, the ESP (emotional selling point) is the emotional purchase trigger. Customers connect certain feelings, dreams or values with a product, which they do not associate with other brands or products. By giving its brand a heart and soul, a company can build up a long-term emotional relationship with its customers.

You can use a business avatar, also known as a buyer persona: visualize your typical customer by using characteristics such as demography, profession and psychographical features. Consider what is important for this customer and what problems you can offer solutions for.

Yes, because representatives of your (potential) clients are active on social media networks, both in a private and business capacity. Consider carefully which social media channels your target group use and establish your presence there.

Whereas outbound marketing brings advertising to its customers (e.g. in the form of printed adverts, TV advertising or mass e-mails), in inbound marketing, the customer comes to the company. This can be achieved, for example, by offering your target group good and useful content in videos or blogs and by being active on social media channels, thereby motivating potential customers to turn to your company when they need a certain product.

Employer branding is aimed at a company’s employees and at potential job applicants and covers all ways in which the company presents itself as an attractive employer. The goal of employer branding is to increase the efficiency of personnel recruitment, to attract qualified applicants to the company and to encourage long-term ties to the company among current employees.

This is the path taken by the customer from noticing the product for the first time, to finding information about it, buying the product and recommending it to others. You should accompany your customers on this path to ensure that they choose you.

The AIDA model describes the 4 phases of the customer journey before a purchase decision is made. The four letters stand for

A – Attention

 I –  Interest

D – Desire

A – Action.

Despite being criticized for its simplicity, this 120-year-old model is still used as the basis for marketing measure decisions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the systematic forming of customer relationships and the processes involved. Using CRM systems, contact to customers and customer relationships are planned, documented, controlled and nurtured, whereby the customer is placed at the centre of all company processes.

You will find a diagram showing this under Audience – Users Flow.

You will find a report for all pages under Behavior – Site Speed.

Yes, to avoid having to customize them every time, click on “save” next to the report name.

You can add segments to your audience overview in order to subdivide users. You can, for example, filter by age, method of access or browser. You can also import segments from the Gallery.

Yes, you can do this using the “Demographics Overview”, which can be found in the menu under “Audience”.

Under Audience – Technology – Network you can see Internet providers and company networks. Using a Google search, it is usually possible to determine the company concerned.

No, in the Gallery you can download templates for dashboards and reports and save yourself work.

You can set up user-defined messages in Google Analytics under Admin – Personal Tools&Assets – Custom Alerts.

Google offers a free and well-implemented app for this, which shows you the most important overviews on your mobile phone.

Yes, the German company eTracker, for example, offers a fee-based tool. It is the most-used fee-based tool in Germany.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The aim of this optimization is to ensure that your website appears as close to the top of the search engine results as possible.

The socalled search engine crawlers search the Internet systematically, collect the information on the Internet pages and save it on servers. An index is then drawn up from the collected data. Similar to the index of keywords in a book, this virtual index contains the index keywords and information on which Internet pages contain these terms. When a search is launched, the index is searched and the user receives a list containing the most useful and relevant results. The order in which the results are shown on this list, the socalled ranking, is influenced by ranking factors, for example the content and structure of the pages and links to other pages. The algorithms used to evaluate the usefulness of Internet pages and to determine the ranking are generally kept secret by the search engine operators and are constantly being adapted to current developments.

No, because all your pages are potential entry points for your customers! If all the pages of your website are optimized, the number of entry points increases.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sollte man auf zwei Weisen betreiben: On-page und off-page. On-Page bedeutet, dass Sie die Inhalte Ihrer eigenen Seite optimieren. Off-page-Optimierung ist die Verbesserung der Verlinkung zu Ihrer Seite, zum Beispiel durch Social Media oder externe Links.

You can use Google’s Statistics Tool or Analytics or do exactly what your customers would do, i.e. do a search using different keywords.

Yes, definitely. Search machines love to see a website which is regularly updated and will rank it higher.

Search engine crawlers, or search engine bots, examine websites so that they can be ranked on the result pages of the search engines according to their usefulness for the user. In order to guarantee the crawlability of a website, the crawlers must be able to find the website easily and have access to the important data for them so that they can read and evaluate them.

Your keywords should be as precise as possible. The more general the keyword, the more often it will be used. This makes it more difficult to get good results.

They are very important! The more other websites provide links to your website, the higher your ranking by the search engines will be, because it shows that your website is relevant for a certain subject. The quality of the website linking to yours is also important here.

Yes, this is important. Social media does not just help to make new customers aware of your company. Links from different platforms to your site also usually result in a higher ranking by Google. These measures which have an outside influence on the ranking of your website are known as “offpage optimization”.

Good data management is the basis for a functioning company. Important data have to be prepared and saved so that they are correct, complete, current, comprehensible and can be accessed quickly and easily by those who need them.

Your data are of good quality if they are suitable for and good enough for their intended purpose. There are different types of data quality:

• Intrinsic data quality:
  • Is the quality of the data itself good? Is all the information correct, objective and credible?
• Context-related data quality:
  • Do the data fulfil the requirements of the situations in which they will be used? Are they relevant, current, complete and usable for the particular situation?
• Terminological data quality:
  • Are the data understandable for the user, consistent and precise?
• Accessability quality:
  • Can the user access the data fast and easily enough?

Clean data are essential for the success of your business and, among other things, mean the following for you:

• efficient, correct and fast business processes
• increased customer and employee satisfaction
• better-quality analyses and reports
• more efficient warehouse and order management
• optimization of hardware and software resources, such as memory and computing power
• easier resource planning
• improved data protection and protection of critical information
• simplified and improved controlling

A data bank is a collection of data which belong together and serve a particular purpose. The main task of a data bank is to save large quantities of data efficiently, consistently and permanently and to provide it for users and application programmes when needed.

Data models are the basis of your data bank.

In the so-called conceptual data model, real objects are shown in a model. Data, for example of a company, a department or a business process, are recorded and documented with their connections. The relevant objects (e.g. people, firms or orders) and their attributes (e.g. address, date, product) are defined and placed in relation to one another. At first, the data model is set up independently of any software and is the long-lasting basis for the structure of your data.

Using this model, a logical data model is drawn up, whereby data-processing details are added e.g. field formats.

In a final step, this data model is implemented into a particular data bank system, i.e. the data bank model is transferred to the required software.

This abbreviation stands for Digital Asset Management. It is the saving and management of digital content, in particular of media such as pictures, videos and texts, in a central data bank.

It is very important that when collecting data in your data bank you do not omit or forget important information. To prevent this, you can define obligatory fields in the input masks of your data bank. The input of a set of data can only be completed if all obligatory fields have been filled in and all required information has been entered. In addition, you can specify value ranges and data formats at this point so that intelligent input masks can check the data on entry for plausibility and the correct form.

During data cleansing, data which are incorrect, old, duplicated, inconsistent, inexact, wrongly formatted or irrelevant are located and corrected. Duplicates are removed, data are formatted uniformly in the required format, incomplete data are completed on the basis of existing data or by pooling data sets, and incorrect data are replaced or deleted.

Redundant data are data which are either duplicated or irrelevant. A simple example of this would be a file on your computer which you have saved to different places on your hard drive. Another example would be a data bank which not only saves the order number of each order, but also saves the address of the customer each time. If several orders are placed, the address data is saved several times. If the customer’s address then changes, all data sets have to be altered. Not only do these redundancies cause anomalies in your data banks, they also use memory unnecessarily.

In order to avoid redundancies, the data structure has to be split. The address of your customer is stored in one place only and is found via a reference. This process is known as normalization.

A project is a one-off, objective undertaking with limited financing and time schedule. The solution of a complex problem is usually approached interdisciplinarily, whereby the goal is clear at the outset but the approach is unknown. A project team is put together for this special undertaking and its members work together for the length of this project. Examples of such projects would be the development of new products, services and organizations or the implementation of strategies.

Project management is a leadership and service task which includes the initiation, planning, controlling and completion of projects. The project work is supported efficiently and expediently and controlled using various methods, aids and techniques.

A good project manager should, of course, have experience in project work and know and master all the important instruments and methods which can be used for successful project management. As project managers are responsible for the coordination of all work linked with a project and for the achievement of the project goals, they must constantly monitor the whole project and make sure that all team members work together. Communication skills, sociability, a strong power of persuasion, flexibility and the ability to work under pressure and overcome hurdles are just some of the social skills required for a project manager to be successful. If there are no free capacities or no suitable candidate is available within a company, an external project manager can be engaged for the length of a project.

Stakeholders in a project are all individuals or groups who have a legitimate interest in a project or are affected in any way by the course or result of this project. Stakeholders can be active (e.g. team members, customers, suppliers) or passive (e.g. the local residents affected by a building project or the family members of a project team member), who are indirectly affected by the project and its effects.

In order to divide the project into clear sections, the whole project life cycle is subdivided into single, consecutive project phases. There are usually four project phases or sections:

Defining Phase
In this phase the idea for the project is born, for example a certain need or problem is recognized. A plan is drawn up to decide whether and how the project can be carried out, what the exact goals are and what resources (e.g. personnel, funding) would be necessary. The defining phase ends with the approval of the project and a written project contract.

Planning phase
In this phase, the concrete approaches for the project are developed. All necessary steps to the so-called milestones are planned in individual work packages and a time schedule is drawn up. Possible risks and how these would be dealt with must also be identified. In this phase, it is particularly important to determine the responsibilities of each of the team members. The smooth running of the next phase depends on the thoroughness of this planning phase.

Realization Phase
The actual project work begins with the realization phase. This is when the plans drawn up by the project team are put into action. The previously defined work packages are executed, continually checked and controlled. If, in the course of the project, the intermediate results or the path to these results do not match the original plan, the project plan may have to be adjusted.

Concluding phase
The concluding phase closes the project life cycle. When the project has been completed and accepted by the initiator, the project team takes stock of the project. The experience gained from the project can be used as the basis for similar undertakings in the future. The project team is dissolved and the cost centre closed.

Deliverables in project management are measurable and clearly identifiable results or work products at the end of a project phase. This could be a product, a service, reports, analyses or trained personnel. The deliverable is checked for accuracy and quality, is approved and can, if it is an intermediate result, be used as the starting point for the next phase.

The SMART rules state how the objectives of a project should be formulated in order to achieve the required result. A target should be:

S =      specific: as clear and precise as possible
M =     measurable: with at least one measurable indicator of progress
A =      accepted: agreed on by both the initiator and the recipient of the brief
R =      realistic: the target is realistic (deadlines, resources)
T =      time-bound: there is a stipulated deadline

Before the next phase of a project can begin, the previous phase is normally completed and the results approved. However, individual project phases can overlap, which means that a new phase can begin without the previous phase being completed. If the risks involved are justifiable, the time schedule can be tightened in this way. The project management can decide to use fast tracking if the next phase does not directly depend on how and with what result the previous phase is completed.