Category: Business

Home of Performance was recently recognized as an Authorized Partner by monday.com, an agile project management platform capable of driving company transformation by improving performance, encouraging collaboration, and increasing productivity. 

Regarded as one of the best enterprise project management tools, with features such as resource and project management, time tracking, communication, reporting, and file sharing, monday.com describes itself as “the visual platform that handles everything.”

As an official partner, HOP is able to assist clients in configuring their monday.com suite to meet their specific requirements, and educate them on how to make the most of the service once it is implemented.

About monday.com

Monday.com is a Work Operating System (Work OS) that enables teams to confidently manage projects and workflows. It’s a simple yet intuitive Work OS that allows teams to define workflows, adapt to changing demands, provide transparency, collaborate, and eliminate tedious manual tasks.

Used by over 100,000 teams and organisations across industries, monday.com contains an ever-expanding range of work blocks, unique platform features, dashboards, automation tools, and process views that enable teams to thrive in all parts of their work. Regardless of whether an organisation is a large firm, a small business, or a nonprofit organisation, monday.com’s high-tech interface allows businesses to design a custom workflow application tailored to their exact needs. The Work OS allows employers to keep their remote teams aligned and streamline collaboration, administration, and tracking from one platform, no matter where they are located.

Working With A monday.com Official Partner

A SaaS-based collaboration and productivity tool that allows businesses to manage their work better, monday.com helps businesses stay agile.

“Monday.com has been an integral part of our project management success and has helped us scale our projects while still maintaining quality and speed,” shared John von Hofsten, Founder and Managing Director of Home of Performance. Speaking about the partnership, he said, “We have always sought partnership programs with platforms we use ourselves, since this gives us insights on the power of the platforms and prepares us to support our clients to leverage the same.” 

Being an authorised partner means that HOP has been thoroughly vetted by monday.com for platform experience and competence. This means that they are experts in customising your monday.com suite to meet your specific requirements. 

As an authorised partner, Home of Performance also has direct access to the latest product information and releases, and can assist you in making the most of new features as soon as they are available.

About Home of Performance

Home of Performance is a full-scale boutique digital marketing agency that is guided by the true ‘Digital Partner’ approach for its clients. Gaining traction as one of Dubai’s most advanced digital performance agencies, HOP is a data-driven, customer-focused and creatively-fueled team of passionate and highly qualified digital consultants to deliver high impact business growth in a short period.

Offering their services for some of Dubai’s fastest-growing, most innovative and creative businesses, HOP challenges conventional strategies, placing outcomes, information and creativity at the core of their model while delivering knock-out performance through in-house experts.

To learn more about us and our services visit us on www.hop.rocks

Got questions? Reach out to us.

Home of Performance was recently recognized as a Certified Agency Partner for HUAWEI Ads in the MENA region. This allows us to tap into the HUAWEI device’s broad user base, assisting our clients in successfully amplifying their brand messages across the HUAWEI ecosystem. Utilizing HUAWEI’s advertising technologies and toolsets for brands and agencies to strategize, HOP can set up and manage ad campaigns.

Speaking about the partnership, John von Hofsten, Founder and Managing Director of Home of Performance said “We have focused on growing with strong partnerships since the beginning of HOP. As an agency, this will enable us to use the platform to reach a wide range of smartphone users and help our clients achieve their marketing objectives.” 

About HUAWEI Ads

A world leader in telecommunications, HUAWEI’s industry-leading equipment is present in 170 countries. The HUAWEI Ads platform provides mobile marketing capabilities with access to more than 730 million potential customers on its mobile ecosystem, the third-largest in the world. 

The platform’s underlying algorithms and architecture give advertisers the ability to reach savvy smartphone users through unique and value-driven ways. Leveraging the synergies between HUAWEI’s devices, apps and open capabilities, it also supports a broad range of mainstream advertising formats across display and search channels, including native, banner, video, and rewarded ads.

How Does It Change The Advertising Ecosystem?

This real-time advertising platform, exclusive for HUAWEI devices, provides a unique and data-driven approach to reach a wide level of the audience.

The platform also includes the HUAWEI Ads publisher service, which allows developers to integrate the HUAWEI Ads kit and generate additional income from their apps. 

It also has benefits like:

• Precise Targeting: With more than 700 million registered users, the platform is the best way for advertisers to reach a premium global user base. Advertisers can also utilise the advanced re-targeting and user profile tags to increase conversion potential and design ad content based on specific user attributes.
• Ad Placements: The platform helps advertisers to choose the right placement options which include direct on-device placements, custom placements on the HUAWEI App gallery as well as on search and display ads. 
• Data-Driven Results: It offers advanced tools like smart bidding, and target return on ad spend bidding in order to better assist advertisers in reaching their marketing goals while remaining strategic and cost-effective.

To learn more about the platform, click here – HUAWEI Ads

About Home of Performance

Home of Performance is a full-scale boutique digital marketing agency that is guided by the true ‘Digital Partner’ approach for its clients. Gaining traction as one of Dubai’s most advanced digital performance agencies, HOP is a data-driven, customer-focused and creatively-fueled team of passionate and highly qualified digital consultants to deliver high impact business growth in a short period.

Offering their services for some of Dubai’s fastest-growing, most innovative and creative businesses, HOP challenges conventional strategies, placing outcomes, information and creativity at the core of their model while delivering knock-out performance through in-house experts.

To learn more about us, click here – HOME OF PERFORMANCE

Got questions? Reach out to us.

Most of us have been impacted by the current situation in one way or another. For service providers, most probably you have seen retainers being cut and planned projects pushed to the future. 

For any operation that offers B2B services, this is the harsh reality of any time. It can happen during a “non-corona year” as well. Right now it just happens to a lot of companies at the same time. For us who operate in UAE or for that reason, any country where monetary support from the government is not to be counted own – It’s up to ourselves to manage the situation. 

I will share my best practice on how to handle it without having to save cost or reduce staff – And ultimately put your company in a better position than it was going into the epidemic. (I do know that this differs from vertical to vertical and I’m only talking based on my own experience)

1. Increase your sales efforts

When revenues are down – The No 1 priority should be on increasing your sales. This needs to be done hands-on from the top of the organization. Increasing sales comes down to 3 key core pillars

• Activity (No of Meetings, Quotations, Strategy documents, etc) Make sure that you increase the number of activities that drive sales. Don’t look too much at the numbers you need to get in terms of total revenues, focus on the path that will lead you there. It’s much to easier to “control” the number of meetings you are having than exactly how much your sales will produce a given month. Having control of your sales process is key to succeed, put yourself, and your team in a position where you can decide to win every day. 
• Average deal size – Make sure that you price your services at the right level of pricing, but the easiest way to increase your revenues is to increase your price, which might be difficult at this moment. But I’m not talking about increasing your standard rate. Bundle your services, give more to your clients and price it at a discount, always try to find what additional value you can bring to the clients. It may turn out that you can increase the engagement from your clients and your billings at the same time that you can lower their total cost. 
• Hit Rate – It’s a given, the better you are at closing your proposals or meetings, the more you will sell. Make sure you know the foundations, stakeholders, budget, and timing. Qualify your prospects early on not to waste time. Make sure to customize your offering and that you actually understand what challenges the client is facing. Being able to close a lot of deals comes down to understanding the prospect. Make sure that you put ample time in the start to understand their situation and business. You will realize that selling is very easy when you just listen and try to avoid selling 🙂

2. Increase your marketing efforts

Comes hand in hand with sales. But it’s vital to focus your marketing efforts right now. Put as much as you can of your allocated budget towards the end of the funnel marketing. Branding is amazing, but if you need to increase your sales tomorrow – Focus on the quick wins. Make sure to know your high converting channels, whether its email, paid search, social, etc. And leverage your money towards that. Use your SM channels to work on your brand positioning. If you have done your homework from the start it should be fairly easy to get an instant overview in your CRM where your clients are actually coming from. If you don’t, make sure to set it up now and you will benefit in the future. 

3. Make your clients understand you are in this together  

Selling is always important – But more importantly, it is to retain your current clients. Make them understand that you are in this together – Talk to them weekly, ask them how you can help, if they need relief in any way – Give it! Its an investment in your partners, just like they once have invested in you and your team – its now time to give back. If it means pausing, pushing payments, or to add added value, I always try to do this. I promise you that people remember this. Other than I believe its good for business, I also believe it gives me more business by referrals. 

4. Leverage your current offering and add more services.

For an agency – the current situation has led to a lot of companies freeing up staff, this means more outsourcing. Review your services, add more services that are aligned with your offering and that are in demand. For a consultancy, I think the key to success is to keep the ear close to the ground and make sure to offer services that drive value at the moment. More services mean more revenues and tighter collaboration with your partners. Of course – this only works if the services make sense in terms of your offering.

Ultimately it comes down to having a strategy and plan that are aligned with how you wanna run your business. For myself, these pillars do not really change whether its a Pandemic or not. We always try to focus of end of the funnel marketing, we always focus on selling, we always try to make our partners feel we are in it together and we always seek to leverage our current offering. The great thing about this strategy is that it works in both good and harsh times 🙂

Got questions? Reach out to us.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Google made its second major update of 2020. The update was confirmed on 4 May by @searchliason  and named the “May 2020 Core Update.” The update will go on for 2 weeks from its initial date of release

The rollout takes one to two weeks, according to Google, before all improvements are official.

What to Expect 

In the past core updates from google, we have a mobile-first indexing trend, volume, consistency and relevancy  of the content of . The goal is to provide users with the best search results. 

However, the nature of Google’s search has also transitioned as a result of COVID-19. When you browse the Internet, people equate everything with the current pandemic. 

As the update is the first to be completed in the crisis at COVID-19, SEOs and other experts must carefully study the problem, given the volatility of the search rankings. 

Impact Of  “May 2020 Core Update” 

As Usual Google has not revealed much about the changes that this update will bring into the web world. So as long as Google confirms it, we can’t be 100% sure what serious impact it has on the performance of the websites. But looking back at the previous core updates and the reports that goes till date  has started giving an initial signals of the niche that has been seeing some ranking volatility since the “May 2020 core Update has been announced 

• Health
• Technology
• Finance
• Dating

These are the sectors that have  been affected by the “May 2020 Core Update” as per reports. 

What Can We Do

1. Focus On Quality of the Content

As it is said 70% of the SEO revolves around the Content. When we say content, the google algorithm has come a long way on this. Still I see business focusing on very outdated practise of squeezing in Keywords. Volume is ofcourse Important but what is more important is the relevance of the same. You don’t want the target users to land in at the wrong page. 

Google always prioritizes high quality content. The study or the analyzes of a topic should be original and should be accurate. Don’t  go for vague clickbaits that deceives the target audience that affects the bounce rates. Give importance in providing content that is comprehensive, valuable and is relevant to what it is to be. Support the content with insights and analytics that supports the subject. As to say, Content relevant to the context performs better. 

2. Update All the Thin Content

As per the Initial Reports, the sites that have been affected by the May 2020 core Update is the site with thin content are losing their positions. So Make sure to optimise the thin content. It should be absolutely relevant to the search intent of the user which has landed him to the specific page or topic.

This is a very important topic that needs to be addressed as Google Updates are focussing more on search intent, where the user  gets the most in depth and detailed answers to his search queries. Keep following our content hub, where we will have In-depth blogs on Importance of topical content and the Importance of Content Depth.

3. Variations is Local Search

Not Confirmed but still there are many reports that suggest there are variations showing in Local Search results.  

Should We Be Worried

Many businesses who have suffered ranking  variations in search results as a consequence of the core update, no need to panic “you have not broken Google Webmaster Guidelines or endured any manual or algorithmic intervention.”According to Google that these updates may have websites that have unexpectedly gone down and vice versa. What you need to focus on is the Content. Keep focussing on creating quality content. While doing the same ask yourself these questions

• Does the content  have the in-depth  knowledge that lets your audience trust it?
• Are you creating content that is free from easily detectable factual errors?
• Does the content lack consistency or structure?
• When viewed on mobile devices, does it provide a better user-experience?

What’s Next

Since nothing regarding the impact of the current update has been officially confirmed by Google, we need to wait patiently before taking any actions on the website. Keep providing the users with relevant and comprehensive content. Keep on Track with @Searchliason as he keeps you posted on this Core Update.

Got questions? Reach out to us.