Employee engagement has been a highly talked about topic over the past few years. Enterprises have an increasing need for a solid employee base that fits in with the company culture in order to get the maximum value out of each position and provide end users with an optimal experience. The question of the day is: how can this engagement be brought about, and more importantly, be retained?  I'm going to share with you some of the most important keys to obtaining employee engagement, and even a tool that will allow you to set this up (you guessed it—it's a mobile app!) However this application is an internal one (which means it's not available to the public), that will be used specifically by and for your employees. First it's important to understand what your employees are looking for and how you can best respond to their needs by using a simple app.

Are you considering m-commerce for your business? Whether you’re not completely sold on the fact that m-commerce is necessary, or you’re unsure on how to go about forming an m-commerce strategy, it’s important to start by understanding this new way to buy. Just like transitioning from a desktop product to mobile is an adjustment, the evolution from e-commerce to m-commerce implies a few changes, to be profitable.

You've created your business—now it's time to start your communication strategy! But how can you reach your target without going down the very expensive route of external consulting? Here is what to do. Firstly you should reflect on exactly what it is you are offering (your product or service). Get to realistically know the sector you're working in, without only concentrating strictly on what you offer, and without thinking that your competitors are superior. Then, put yourself in the minds of your clients (before creating your enterprise you probably figured out who your target audience is): What do I think? Am I surprised (positively) by this product?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of this product/service? How would I prefer to buy? To be contacted? From asking yourself these questions you will gather a lot of information that will give you an idea of what the best strategy is for your brand. The possibilities are endless: you can work with SEO, AdWords campaigns, blogs, use an app and taking advantage of push notifications, use a guerilla marketing strategy, send newsletters, concentrate on social networks, create campaigns and competitions on social media, etc. You can improve yourself in many aspects, by using different tools, even open source (and free) and communicate via different channels. Today, I will speak about three strategies that are quite attainable—even with a budget close to nothing. In the long term, they will allow you to increase your internet traffic, gain the loyalty of your community, and simultaneously improve your reputation amongst your prospects and clients. 

Long term customer retention is definitely simpler in some industries than others. Many products and services strategically involve customer exit barriers, such as contractual agreements, high initial costs, fine print, and other ways of locking in the client. In other sectors, (the app marketplace for example, which is often described as competitive and even saturated) this is not quite the case, and some extra work is required to maintain content customers.   Even if your product is unique and of high quality, there will always be a multitude of competitors out there who have superior performance in at least one aspect and are ready to do all they can to capitalize on this and swoop in on your hard-earned customers. When there is no significant obligation or penalty preventing your clients from leaving, what’s stopping them from switching at any given moment? This is where the significance of investing in creating customer loyalty is apparent—neglecting this piece of your strategy can cause a great loss that will be a real struggle to recover from. Here are a few of the most common and detrimental mindsets that are huge drivers in destroying customer loyalty. 

Everyday we face thousands of decisions that can have a major or minor impact on our lives. We choose between products, brands, flavors, smells, landscapes, and even whether or not to take the risk of trying new products. This leads me to some pertinent questions: how is my product distinguished amongst so many similar ones? What are the most important factors for the decision maker? How do people react when facing a decision online? If you want your product to be a top contender in a purchase decision, you need to understand exactly how your consumers make choices online and what you must do to be a part of their choice. Today I'm going to help you understand the thought process of a consumer faced with a decision and what the primary factors are in that decision.   

A typical sequence of events when a company is first created normally begins with establishing the business along with a website, and allowing it time to get on its feet before incorporating supplemental “Add-ons”, such as an application. However, as we’ve said before: apps are no longer an optional, bonus feature, but are rather a must-have for any successful business. Perhaps waiting to create an app isn’t the most strategic choice, and maybe one should even consider it a preemptive step in the entrepreneurial process.  No need to wait around for the physical business to get under way—create the app now and gain traction for later on. 

Mobile devices have been seen as the bad guy in schools for quite some time now, and administration has fought long and hard to stop kids from bringing their beloved smartphones to class (I definitely endured a gloomy detention or two back in the day for texting during Calc). I think we can all agree that mobile devices can certainly play a negative role in school (they can be a major distraction, facilitate bullying/other inappropriate behaviors, the list goes on..), but the reality is that they are not going anywhere. Diane Barry, an 8th grade Spanish teacher describes prohibiting kids from using their phones as “an uphill battle that can never be won, but if kids can put aside their desire to text, check e-mail, and watch Netflix, mobile devices can be a great tool for everyone”. This is perhaps indicative of the fact that it’s time to start embracing smartphones and tablets in school and explore what kind of benefits they can offer in this previously controversial setting. The spread of technology is only going to increase, especially amongst youth, so if you can’t beat them, join them.

Hello GoodBarbers, I'm Giacomo, I'm a strategic planner, and I work with a kind of unusual colleague: a chimpanzee that orbits in "digital" communication space. That is why my business is called Space Chimp Design  and it was founded with the purpose of transmitting a fundamental principle for me: There are no impossible projects (as it would have been impossible for a chimpanzee to be in space before 1961), the important thing is to always think that they are "#StrategicallyPossible".

A huge trend of 2014, videos have become an unavoidable means of communication. Read on to find out why and how to use them efficiently... The video has the ability to greatly increase the popularity of a site, and there are many who can attest to this. The video is a multipurpose communication tool that proves to be pertinent to several stages of client relations: it encourages interactiveness and increases user engagement on sites.  Video content can also, under certain conditions, boost the SEO of your site.  In fact, a video has 53 times more of a chance of coming up on the first page of a Google search than written content does.  However, remember that only written characters are taken into account by Google search algorithms. To improve your SEO through a video, you will have to pay a lot of attention to the title, the description, and the key words you have chosen. If you take this criteria into account, your video should be able to considerably increase your visibility on the internet. To give you an idea of the super powers that video content has in strategic marketing, a study done by Forrester  revealed that "from this point on, an online video may have more of an impact than a 30 second television commercial". So, are you convinced by the considerable advantages that video content is offering us? Now we will have to develop a strategy that defines the type of video and the channels of communication that you should use.  What better way to enlighten you than to show you how we, at GoodBarber, have decided to use the video?

As there are 1.3 million apps available in the market, user engagement has become a key factor in the success of an application. Today, I'll show you how to achieve this engagement on social networks through five steps (Exist, Know, Offer, Identify, Award).  

Huge! Facebook is the largest online social network and according to Facebook stats has more than 1 billion monthly active users. Almost 90% of worldwide active users are using mobile phones to check their news feed, chat with friends and update their Facebook profile. There is no doubt that Facebook has conquered most of the world's internet users and brings to the table a great opportunity for brands, companies and entrepreneurs to launch their products with a low budget or even, for free. The mobile apps promotion are not an exception. In the last two years, Facebook has improved the advertising tools for mobile promotion, becoming more successful than conventional Facebook ads. The variety of advertising formats, the deep segmentation (gender, language, interests, behavior, connections, pages), and the placement of your ads on the News feed helps to increase the number of downloaded apps, the app's engagement and retention of app users. These facts also contribute to achieve a more relevant position through search tools of Google Play and Apple's App Store. But let's understand how it works in detail.

When you design your app, you may choose between a variety of different navigation modes. Some of those navigation modes include icons for each individual section. In this video tutorial, we’re going to show you how to: - Add sample sections to your app to visualize the structure of the menu - Set the icons of your app after you’ve chosen your navigation mode - Upload your own personal icons

With the advent of mass production, mass advertising was invented too. In the 60s, the goal of most marketing strategies was just to get as much views of their ads as possible. Television spots and street posters were the most popular media because with those means of communication marketers could easily and quickly spread their message throughout the whole country. These were the days of glory for marketing agencies like the fictional Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in Madmen; these agencies could make big money with a poster and a catchy line directed to the general “frustrated housewives” category of consumers. The segmentation was mainly demografic: marketers based themselves on age, sex, income and such other general features... No need for me to tell you that their business model would never work today. It has become increasingly complex to segment a market in any sector. Also, the overload of marketing messages that consumers have been bombarded with over the last decades has made them much more insensible to any communication, so to reach them you really have to stand out. This is why it’s important to really know who you are targeting, so that you can give them something thats truly interesting.

As you are already familiar with, you can manage your Push Notifications directly within your GoodBarber backend. But what are some of the key options at hand you should especially pay attention to? Read on for some useful tips to improve your communication.

Stefano Mongardi, an expert of Online Marketing who is also passionate about tech and innovation, tells us everything you need to know to implement a successful e-commerce business and stand out from the competition. Nowdays we're all quite practical with online purchases. We simply land on a website, scroll through the products, decide the best one for us and order it. Seems easy huh? So now you think: "Wow! ecommerce is exploding, let's open an online store and start selling our products worldwide! It's a piece of cake!". Well, actually it's not. Today the competition is fierce and if you want to bring an added value you either have to work really hard or spend a LOT of money to let people know about your great new ecommerce business. You may even have the coolest products in the world, but just being online doesn't mean you will right away get tons of visits and conversions without doing anything.  Most of the times when an ecommerce platform is created, people invest most of their time and budget setting up a PPC campaign on Google, Facebook and maybe even Twitter. The result is: you spend a lot of money and get a lot of vistas but most people won't come back to your website again. Why? Because you offer products and not added value. Don’t forget that your competitors offer the same or similar products. Unless you are the only person in the world selling that specific product, you have to give people some added value to convince them to buy from you and not someone else.

You’ve most certainly heard of the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise funds for the ALS that went viral this summer. You might have even participated! This brilliant initiative turned out to be a huge success and brought more than 100 million dollars to the ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) association. The concept of taking up a challenge and then nominating your friends has been quite trendy on the socials since a while, but the Ice Bucket Challenge went to whole new level, involving thousands and thousands of people around the globe and becoming the hottest social network topic of the summer of 2014. Everything started when Pete Frates, a former baseball player who was diagnosed with ALS two years ago, challenged a friend to donate $100 to the ALS association or film himself dumping ice cold water over his head. The idea was so simple and fun that it caught on like a wildfire. As this action spread, it changed somewhat because even though people were more than willing to donate, they didn’t want to miss out on the experience of pouring a bucket of ice on themselves, so they began to do both. Totally understandable!... ;)

We recently spoke about how to avoid rejection of your app by Apple, and emphasized the importance of proper testing. We believe you shouldn't just be able to test a proxy version that closely resembles your app, but that any GoodBarber user should have the possibility to see exactly what their app will look and feel like, so they can submit it to the stores with peace of mind. 

It's now extremely easy to build an app! Since there are now many app builders, online tutorials and lessons to learn how to program, more and more people decide to launch themselves into the adventure of app building, in hopes that their project will become popular and repay them with monetary profits. While Google has very few requirements you must meet to publish on the Google Play Store, because it reviews your app after it has been published, Apple has a very strict, zero tolerance policy. The goal of this policy is to protect the end users by not allowing bad quality apps that can be full of bugs or that are not user friendly into the store. But is this goal achieved efficiently? My job brings me to work with a great variety of apps, with different content, design and user experience. I have sent many apps to Apple to be reviewed and I honestly have to say that I still do not understand the logic behind their decisions. After all... Whoever has never downloaded a completely useless or horrible app the App Store raise your hand! What I do see is that many app are rejected because the name of an external platform comes up in a video or article etc... Or they say the content targets an audience that is too small.

"Smartphones have become indispensable in our daily life. Their penetration has grown up to 41% of the population and who possesses a smartphone relies on it more and more for an increasingly numerous amount of tasks. 63% of this population accesses the internet from their phones daily and most won't leave their houses without them." (Source: Our Mobile Planet Smartphone Research )

For anyone who publishes an app, getting good ratings in the stores is important. Ratings play a big part in where the app appears in the rankings of the stores. Even if you’re not interested in rankings, you still don’t want your users to start out with a poor first impression of your app even before they’ve started using it.

You spend a lot of time and energy to create your app. But what do you do to promote your mobile application? In this article, we'll review 7 actions you can take to market your app on the App Store and Google Play.

Before getting started with the generation of your iOS certificates you need to be a registered Apple developer. The Apple Developer Program is a $99 yearly membership. Joining the Apple Developer Program is mandatory to publish your iOS app to the App Store. As a member, you can register devices (for Ad Hoc testing), submit several apps and their updates to the App Store.   To enroll as an Apple Developer, go to this link:  https://developer.apple.com/programs     Follow the subscription process and complete your purchase. After the payment it can take up to 24 hours to confirm the activation of your account. When you receive the email entitled “Welcome to iTunes Connect!”, you're good to go ;) Now that you have your developer account set up, you can start generating your iOS certificates, by going to this link  https://developer.apple.com/membercenter

A few days ago, I was talking with Jerome and Arianna about the frequently asked questions we receive from our users, and about the subjects we should handle on this blog to answer these questions. We've realized that you now have quite a bit of experience with our service and you have created apps for wide range of contents. So instead of talking about the technical aspects of the creation of an app, about which you surely already know tons, I decided talk about how to organize your contents in order to deliver the best possible user experience. In this article, I'll give you some insight on what is the best way to plan and design your app. The first and most important thing you should know is who your readers are, so you can find the best way to arrange and structure your app.

That was one of the great features that came with GoodBarber Salvador back in September. Every GoodBarber account has a great web app associated, in addition to the native app for iPhone and the native app for Android.   Your natives apps are distributed in the App Store and in Google Play. But what about the web app?    By default, your web app is located on http://<appname>.goodbarber.com/m/. But you can (you should?) change this URL and choose your own.   For instance, you can decide to link your web app to http://m.yourdomain.com That will be far more convenient for your users to access your html5 web app, right ?   That's what we're going to do together in this post.