Security of Personal Information and Funds:

Like anything else, trading platforms and their users are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Choosing a platform that prioritizes the security of personal information and funds is of utmost importance. Look for platforms that utilize strong encryption protocols, such as SSL/TLS encryption, to protect data transmission and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Platforms that offer two-factor authentication provide an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide a second form of authentication, such as a unique code generated on a mobile device, along with their login credentials. Another security feature you should look for is maintaining segregated client accounts. This ensures that client funds are kept separate from the platform's operational funds. This feature helps protect client funds in the event of the platform's financial difficulties.

Reliability and Infrastructure:

You have to rely on your trading platform for consistent access to the markets and accurate trade execution. Research the platform's historical uptime and downtime records. Choose a platform with a high uptime percentage, which means that it keeps disruptions at a minimum and is reliable during trading hours. Reputable platforms have redundant systems and backup measures in place to ensure uninterrupted service, even in the event of technical failures or unforeseen circumstances. The platform you choose should have a reputation for reliable and fast trade execution, minimal slippage, and low latency. Delayed or inaccurate trade execution can significantly impact trading results.

Platform Security and Reliability:

The trading world is heavily regulated, so that the platform is certified by recognized authorities and complies with industry standards for security and financial practices. Review the platform's security and privacy policies, terms of service, and client fund protection measures. Look for transparent and comprehensive documentation.

User Interface and Trading Tools:

In addition to security and reliability, evaluate platforms based on their user interface and how easy it is for you to use it. Choose a platform with an intuitive and user-friendly interface that facilitates efficient navigation, order placement, and access to essential trading information. Remember, what works for everyone else might not work for you, so choose wisely.

Trading Tools and Features:

The trading tools on a given platform are its bread and butter. They should align with your trading strategy and style, and have features that will make your job easier. Customizable platforms are always best, so you can tweak them to suit you even more. Some platforms specialize in certain things, which offers dedicated features for futures traders, including real-time data, advanced charts, risk management tools, and comprehensive futures margins calculations.

Mobile Accessibility

Consider whether the platform offers a mobile application that allows traders to access their accounts and trade on-the-go.

User Reviews and Reputation

Read user reviews and testimonials to gauge the experiences of other traders. Look for platforms with a positive reputation for security, reliability, and customer support.

Customer Support

Consider the quality and availability of customer support provided by the platform. Look for platforms that offer responsive and knowledgeable customer support channels, such as live chat, email, or phone.

Education and Research Resources

Evaluate the platform's educational resources and research tools. Look for platforms that provide educational materials, market analysis, news updates, and other resources to help you make informed trading decisions.

Pricing and Fees

Finally, it has to fit your budget. Compare the pricing and fees charged by different platforms. Consider factors such as trading commissions, spreads, deposit and withdrawal fees, and inactivity fees. Balance out how the fees align with your trading style, how much you plan to trade, and what you can justify in your budget.

Selecting the right trading platform is a more important decision than you might think. Make sure you make the right choice by keeping these 10 factors in mind while you make your decision.

The post 10 Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Online Trading Platform appeared first on Datafloq.

With so many applications, employees can also have a lot of passwords. The more passwords there are in your organization, the more risk you have of a data breach. Passwords are hard to keep track of, and many employees choose simple ones that are easy to remember. Plus, managing all of those passwords gets very complicated. Because of this, many organizations are finding it beneficial to make the switch to single sign-on (SSO).

What is SSO?

Single sign-on allows users to access many different applications or software with a single set of credentials instead of a set for each one. Many organizations implement it for their employees or their customers, and it makes things simpler for everyone.

How it works is that the SSO solution integrates with the applications, which trust the original SSO program. When the user enters those credentials, an authentication request is sent to the applications to allow access for the user. The user will not have to track many different passwords, and the organization is protected since there are fewer opportunities for password breaches.

Benefits of SSO

Nobody likes to either memorize or have a file of all of their passwords for the applications they use on a regular basis. Implementing a password manager with SSO provides many benefits through simplifying the authorization process. Here are some of the top ones.

Better Security

You might think that having many passwords is actually a good thing. With so many passwords, a hacker couldn't possibly access all of them, right? Plus, it seems apparent that having one password for everything means that if that password is compromised, everything can be accessed.

The good thing is that these concerns are unfounded. If you have a strong security culture within your organization, it makes you more secure to use SSO. The more passwords your employees have and the more they have to do to keep you secure, the more likely it is that there will be lapses. For example, instead of having one very strong password, an employee might have several mediocre or weak ones that are easily memorized.

An SSO password can be very strong, and combined with either two-factor authentication or biometrics for extra security. That way your employees only have to manage one complex password, plus access can only be achieved if the employee or another designated device is present at the time of the request.

Better Productivity

It might not seem like it, but using SSO can improve the productivity of your workforce. They will not have to deal with signing on to many different applications in the morning or have to sign in to them all again if they get timed out. Logging into all of these apps throughout the day can waste a lot of time. On top of that, the more passwords they have, the more often they have to update them. There is also more of a chance that they have to reset forgotten passwords, which is also a waste of time.

The fact is, having password difficulties is annoying. Forgotten passwords, or even software glitches, can lead to frustration and interrupted productivity. With SSO they can work without any interruptions after they've signed on, and your employee morale and job satisfaction will be better for it.

Customer Experience

While SSO is very beneficial for employees, it will also help with your customer experience. You want customers to buy into using your services and software. If they are having trouble using your applications or accessing them, then they will be dissatisfied. You might be losing customers and you don't know why.

With SSO, it streamlines all authorization processes for customers. They can log in and access any applications that you have available. The last thing you want to do is make things more difficult for your customers. SSO provides an easier way for them to interact with your brand, which can only be a good thing.

Less IT Investment

If you are part of an enterprise business or at least have an IT department, then SSO can help to reduce their burden. This can help with your staffing costs and your overall IT budget. A lot of the work that IT departments do is related to password issues. With SSO you can almost eliminate password problems since there is less of a chance of forgetting one. Plus, the SSO service is specifically designed to help with authentication, so there is less of a risk of software glitches or other problems like auto-fills that create confusion.

The post 5 Benefits of SSO & Why You Must Implement It appeared first on Datafloq.

While data tends to refer to numbers, those numbers can tell a story. When it comes to website design, data helps you understand your audience better, enabling you to choose a design that will appeal to them. You can offer a superior user experience, which will help you funnel them to the pages you want and convert them into customers.

What is Data-Driven Website Design?

You might not realize it, but your existing website was probably designed using some sort of data. Marketing companies use studies to understand what appeals to consumers and implement them as best as possible. However, that data may be based on the general population and not the specific audience at which the design is aimed. Data-driven design is the process of taking customer and audience data and designing your website based on that information.

Designers can use tools that you probably already have in place to make design decisions based on the data they produce. These tools include A/B testing, user surveys, and Google Analytics, and more. The goal is always to develop a website that is high-performing and gives the user the best experience possible. If the user experience is poor, then users will click away in a heartbeat. The longer customers stay on your website, the more likely they will be to make a purchase.

The best data-driven designs will not just help you build a profitable and effective website, but they will also be flexible for future changes. If something isn't working, you will have the information you need to decide whether to fix it and how. You can respond to your customers preferences as they evolve, and reap the rewards when you do.

It's important to remember that data isn't just about numbers. While statistical data is incredibly important, you also need to consider factors that can't be reflected with numbers. These can include opinions, emotions, and observations of behavior. This type of information is called qualitative data, while quantitative data refers to the numbers. Both of these types can work in tandem to provide the data you need to create your website.

Benefits of Data-Driven Design

Now that you know what data-driven design is, the real important thing to know is how it can help you. The fact is, it can make your website more effective in several ways. It's important to remember that you are not the best judge of what makes a good website for your business. You have biases and your own preferences and pet peeves. Data takes your bias out of the equation and helps you make decisions that reflect what your visitors and customers want instead of what you would want or what you think they would want.

Data-driven design helps you get in the heads of your audience and customers. You can better understand them, and therefore build a website that works for and appeals to them. Connecting with your customers is not just important for building your website, but also for encouraging customer loyalty and crafting social media posts. If you aren't using data, then you're just shooting in the dark and hoping for success.

With proper SEO data-driven web design, you can do even more than provide a quality user experience for visitors. You can also help yourself by being able to track everything users do on your website. Everything a visitor does from the moment they land on your site will tell you a story. It will give you crucial information such as:

• where a visitor came from, whether it be from an organic search or by clicking on a social media post
• how much time they spend on each page
• what pathways they are most often taking to get to the page where you want them to go for conversions, etc.

How Will You Use This Information?

This information will help you create a better website and better marketing materials. Having a data-driven site also means that you can continue collecting customer and visitor data well after your design is implemented. You can continue to tweak it and encourage its evolution as user behaviors change and you make new discoveries.

This information will help with your overall marketing efforts as well. You can:

• measure how well each method is working
• make better investments in your marketing
• be more efficient and effective the better you use the data you get.

Marketing, whether it's SEO or otherwise, is what will bring more visitors to your well-designed and optimized website.

The upshot of this is that you will make more money. The more users you bring to your website, and the more effective your marketing is, the more conversions you will get. By focusing on data, you will have the information you need to make the best possible choices and develop the right strategies for success.

How to Implement Data-Driven Design

The first step is to identify something about your website that you want to create or update. If you already have a website, it might be a page that your analytics have shown is not performing well. Perhaps your visitors aren't making it to your sales page, for example.

Then, analyze that information and create a target for that page or element of your website. It might be something as simple as getting more visitors to that page or reducing the bounce rate. You should have a specific target, though. This usually takes the form of a percentage, such as improving page visits by 10% within a specific time frame.

Then it's time to test.

Testing and Decision-Making

Form a theory as to what you think might work to get more visits or to decrease the bounce rate. Then you can implement that change. It might be making a change to reduce load times, or adding an engaging image or video.

Over a certain period of time, you can measure whether that change has made a difference. If yes, then you've found success. If no, then you need to come up with a new hypothesis. Make sure that you also consider how much you will need to invest into making the change, so you can be more strategic with your updates and testing.

You also need to decide on whether you will collect qualitative or quantitative data to prove your hypothesis. For page views and bounce rates, you will be tracking numerical data. However, in some situations, you may want to survey your visitors or get opinions in another way. Surveys, for instance, can provide you with data related to customer and visitor preferences and opinions.

At the end of your testing period, you can gather all of the data and make your decisions based on that information. It's important to remember that there are two prerequisites to ensuring that the gathered data is relevant:

• an appropriate amount of time must have passed
• a large enough sample

If you've only had three visitors involved in your testing, that will not be enough data. Once you have all of your data, you'll present it to your team members and determine how to proceed.

In Closing

Data is everything to any business, and not just when it comes to keeping track of sales. You need to understand how your customers think and what will engage and inspire them to buy from you. That's where data-driven design for your website comes into play. It can allow you to get the best picture possible of what makes your customers tick. With that information, you can build a better website, connect with your customers, and grow your revenue to new heights.

The post What Is Data-Driven Design and How Can It Help Your Website? appeared first on Datafloq.

Businesses Must Adapt to Technology

One of the key aspects of an innovative business model in today's world is how it approaches technology. Businesses should not be looking at technology as an investment with very little impact on how the business operates. All too often companies look at technology through the sphere of how they currently do business. Investments in technology should also indicate a willingness to fundamentally change the structures of the business itself. Customers are changing, and new technologies must be geared towards providing what customers need, whether that's a new product or a better user experience on the website. Adopting new technologies to change the way a business operates will cost more upfront, but will pay off down the road.

Talent Is Crucial

Yes, talent is always crucial, but it's never been more important to find exactly the right talent. What kind of talent do companies need? They need at least one person who doesn't only use technology, but can also identify ways that it can be leveraged to help the business. They need to be innovative thinkers who see the potential in things and will help to make smart investments in the technologies that fit best. Companies can no longer own excluding rights to technologies, since they now tend to be shared resources that are open to any company that pays the licensing fees. That means companies need to be smart and strategic when choosing what will give them an advantage over the competition.

The Platform Economy is Here To Stay

Emerging technologies are changing business, there's no doubt. However, technologies are also becoming businesses, too. The platform economy is massive. It provides the growth and proliferation of technologies to create connections between consumers and what they want and need. Amazon is a connection between retail and consumers, for example. When building their business plans, companies must account for platforms. Either they need to find a way that their product can be accessed through a platform, or they need to develop a platform for their services. Today's consumers are looking for simple ways to make purchases, and businesses that add seemingly unnecessary layers to making those purchases will get left behind.

Platforms have become increasingly important for businesses to use to their own advantage, as well. For instance, an innovative business model should integrate open innovation into their plans and work culture. A platform can help achieve this. Through open integration platforms, companies can connect with those who are creating and developing the most cutting edge technologies. They can access the greatest minds in their industries, and build relationships that will help them grow for the future. These platforms make innovation easier, and if a company isn't innovating, they will not be able to keep up.

Focus on Business Needs

Investment in technology should be about improving the business first, as opposed to simply chasing the newest technologies. This means putting the needs of the customers at the forefront of any business plan, and planning to have to innovate to anticipate needs down the road. Anticipating is an important distinction from reacting to customer demands. If you are reacting, your choices will not be creative or innovative enough. For instance, if Netflix had reacted to customer demand for faster turnaround times when it was mailing DVDs by sending them through courier, they would have failed quickly. Instead, they pivoted to providing content online, and are now a behemoth that has effectively ended in-person movie rentals.

Nevertheless, a company should not just invest in the latest technologies for the sake of it. There should be experimentation to see what works, but major investments should always be made when the business is certain of its impact. That's why the right talent is so important to make these distinctions that anticipate what will truly be impactful going forward as opposed to the shiny new current fad.

Pricing Has Evolved

One of the lesser-known technologies that has had a major impact on business plans in many different sectors is pricing algorithms. Targeted prices offer a better experience for consumers with more options, and allows companies to be more efficient with their pricing. Algorithms get more sophisticated all the time, but they have the ability to calculate how much consumers will be willing to pay for certain products and services, and how that price can differ between products or with different options added in. Sports teams were early adopters of dynamic pricing algorithms that went beyond simple calculations for paying more for closer seats. They started charging more for important games, allowing customers to get cheaper prices to see sports, but only for games that were considered less desirable. They could still sell out the most expensive games, since they often involved rivalries and generated a lot of interest.

Testing to Make Decisions

One of the best things about innovative business models is that everything that is implemented can be tested. There are analytical tools for all sorts of business metrics that can help with decisions on pricing, marketing, manufacturing procedures, and everything in between. Innovative business models allow for pivoting when something isn't testing well, and now those pivots can happen within days or weeks, as opposed to sometimes months and years in the past. Companies can be leaner, and better positioned to stay competitive, even if they make a mistake.

There's no doubt that emerging technologies will continue to shape and change the way we do business. Companies must recognize this, and shift their business models to allow for more innovation and flexibility to meet consumer needs in a fast-paced and digital world.

The post How Emerging Technologies Have Made Innovative Business Models a Necessity appeared first on Datafloq.

Branding

Your branding is a function of creativity and personality, right? In a sense, yes, it absolutely is. However, that can only take you so far, especially if you are a small startup. Paying for branding materials like logos can become expensive fast when you start hiring graphic designers and others to produce them. However, AI can help you create a unique logo, and perform other branding tasks at affordable prices. You simply enter in some key words about your brand, along with your colors, and the logo maker will produce a selection of logos from which you can choose. The process takes minutes, and it can save you both time and money.

Speech to Text

PR is all about communication, and the more ways you can communicate, the more people you will reach. It is essential to provide your audience different ways of consuming your information, but it can be time-consuming. If you want to make people aware of an important press release, speech or interview, text to speech AI technology makes it easy. It will transform any written text into speech that is natural and lifelike. That way your audience can consume it even if they have vision problems, or if they have long commutes.

Create Relevance for Site Visitors

Your website should be the hub for your brand. It should attract and keep the attention of visitors, and encourage them to perform the actions you want them to perform. The same goes for your clients' websites. AI can help make websites engaging and relevant to each visitor. It can surface news items, content, and advertisements that are relevant to their interests.

Social Media Followers

Trying to grow your social media following can be hard. It takes time and effort, and you need to produce good content to draw users in. Not only that, but to keep them you must do this consistently. One of the ways to build up your following is through advertising, however, you don't want to waste money advertising to users who would have no interest in your feed. To help grow your Twitter followers and get Facebook likes, AI can target specific users that will be most likely to engage with your content. That way you are being efficient with your advertising budget while also gaining motivated followers to your social feeds.

As you can see, there are a few things that AI can do to immediately help with your PR and marketing efforts. AI can help any firm, even a startup, compete at the highest levels no matter what their budget is.

The post How AI Can Impact the PR and Marketing Industries appeared first on Datafloq.

Understanding Your Target Audience

No marketing plan can be successful without first understanding the audience you are aiming at. Everything you do has to be tailored to that audience. You can't guess this aspect of the process, so having the data will help you make informed strategic decisions. You can use data to figure out what types of customers are bringing you the most value, whether that means sales, or engagement on social media, or any other metric. You can track what methods they use to interact with your brand, and how those contacts convert into sales. Once you have enough information on your target audience, you can create a marketing funnel that caters to these behaviors to help maximize your returns.

Personalization to Your Audience

Sometimes in marketing, the most important thing is timing. Your message has to be sent and received at just the right time to affect the behaviors of potential customers. Relevancy is just as important because if your audience can't relate to something, then it will not connect with them and it will not lead to engagement. With big data tools, you can get real-time insights into the people who are actively interested in your product. If you combine this with an automation tool, you can catch potential customers when they are most susceptible to buying your product or interacting with your brand and give them content that they will connect with.

Forecasting

To move forward in marketing, you often need to look backwards. Using historical data, you can better plan for the future. Algorithms based on statistical data can provide you with the odds of certain results over time, and even the likely behaviors of your potential customers. Once you have these odds, you can better forecast how successful each aspect of your marketing strategy can be.

Stay On Top of Industry Trends

Successful marketing campaigns need to stay trendy at all times. Once they get even a little stale, the results can plummet. By using big data tools, you can collect information from many sources, including what your competitors are doing and what is happening in the industry as a whole. This will give you an understanding of what is working and what isn't, and how you can tweak your strategy to increase returns. The key will be knowing what to do with this data about trends. You will have to decide for yourself if keeping up with the trend is what you need to do, or whether it will be a better approach to be an outlier and go against the grain. The data can help you with this by giving you the information you need to decide whether a trend is falling and you should pivot, or whether you need to invest.

Pricing

Establishing appropriate price points can be very hard for businesses and marketers, but analyzing your data can help you make informed decisions. You can monitor the prices for all of your products and determine what consumer interest is at those points. Using this data, you can adjust your prices correspondingly so that you can get the most out of every sale you get. Not only that, but data can provide you with the insights you need to take the step of offering sales and inducements to customers. This can include pricing something as a loss leader or even for free in order to get customers to buy something else or join your mailing list, for instance.

ROI

In the end, it really boils down to your return on investment (ROI) when it comes to a marketing strategy. You might think you have some really effective content, but if it's not resonating with consumers or it costs too much to produce, then it's not actually helping you. Analytics can help you drill down and figure out exactly which activities are improving your bottom line the most. You can track consumer actions to your initiatives, in what way they responded, and how invested they were in something. That way you can get a better handle on your true ROI, which will help you pivot when you need to and plan future marketing efforts.

Constant Improvement

Things move fast nowadays, and your marketing strategy needs to be able to keep up. You can no longer afford to stay stagnant if something isn't working. In the past, there was a lag between producing marketing content and understanding the results. This is not the case anymore. Using big data, you can constantly check, re-check, and test everything you do to make sure that it is operating at its peak effectiveness. If there's a certain type of content that gets more engagement than others, then you can produce more of it. If specific buttons on your website aren't getting clicked at the rate you need, then you can edit them. Your marketing strategy can be nimble and can pivot on the fly successfully without having to completely overhaul your strategy. Big data and analytics can help you do that to stay ahead of the pack.

What you need to remember is that big data is already a major part of your competitors' SEO marketing plan. If you are going by your preconceived beliefs, or simply taking a cookie-cutter approach, then there's a good chance you are falling behind. Embracing analytics means that you will always have the information at your fingertips to make the most informed decisions possible that are less susceptible to personal biases and emotional reactions. Find the tools that work well for you, and apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing plan. You will find that the more you know, the better your results will be.

The post How to Use Big Data to Perfect a Marketing Plan appeared first on Datafloq.

The people responsible for bringing us the idea of database marketing, and subsequently CRM systems, are Robert and Kate Kestnbaum. They changed the way direct marketing works by implementing new metrics like customer lifetime value and applying financial modelling to marketing strategies. The Kestnbaum pair later collaborated with Robert Shaw to incorporate new metrics like telephone and field sales channel automation, campaign management and coordination, marketing analytics, and many more.

With time, great leaps in computer science came and made it possible for CRM systems to become the robust software that many businesses rely on today. The latest novelty of a now well-known system is the Cloud-based CRM.

Storing all of your customer information on a cloud-based server has its benefits, but it seems that not a day passes that we don't hear about a security breach. This is obviously something that worries anyone who might decide to shift from an on-premise CRM to a cloud-based one.

The Sky Is The Limit

Recently cloud services have had a huge increase in popularity. The European Commission cloud computing study shows us that 23% of companies are using cloud technologies to run their business application software.

Here are some irrefutable reasons why so many companies are deciding to take the leap from an on-premise CRM to a cloud-based one:

Easy installation

CRM systems in the past were known for their somewhat complicated installation. A cloud-based system puts this worry to rest. With a modern system, there's no need for you to pay for software, hardware, and server maintenance, or even have an IT person always present. Data migration and even upgrades can be done remotely for you.

Working around the clock

One of the greatest perks of a cloud-based system is its availability. Speed means everything in today's sales arena, and if your customer management abilities are slowing you down, you're bound to miss out on potentially life-changing sales.

With the power to access your CRM from anywhere, at any time, and also from any device that has an internet connection, your sales have the potential to skyrocket. Your central database will be in the palm of your hand at all times, which is a must for any business that aims to stay competitive today.

Continuous Operation

As someone who relies on a CRM system, the worst scenario you can find yourself in is its potential malfunction. Along with losing money, you could also lose customers, which is much worse.

With a cloud-based system, this situation is almost impossible to happen because every part of the cloud has an online backup. Online backups are used in systems that can't afford to lose even the slightest amount of data. There are different types of online backups, from RAID levels to Server Mirroring and High-Speed online mirroring, each providing high redundancy.

Is Standing On a Cloud Safe?

When it comes to handling and securing consumer data, it's of vital importance to make it unreachable to any hacker out there. After all, the whole point of the data game is to use that knowledge for the benefit of your company and customers.

Security

As mentioned before, your customers are your most important asset, so their information needs to be treated as such. If you opt for a cloud-based CRM, it's very likely that the online service is much better equipped for deflecting possible cyber attacks than your in-house server. Cloud companies‘ only duty is to provide continuous service with no security breach and no chance of malfunction. For this reason, cloud service providers have their own security teams and use SSL encryption between servers and the end device.

Data ownership

Some people might think that cloud service providers end up owning the data you upload to the cloud. This is a misconception, but an understandable one, because what actually happens is that some providers limit access to the data uploaded.

Without having full control over your data, you won't be able to download or transfer it when necessary. This is easily avoidable by choosing a service with tools that allow you to transfer data.

Double-edged sword

Considering the great power of a Cloud-based CRM, you must make sure that your teams' responsibility is on par. One of the most obvious and somewhat uncontrollable security problems is device theft. Some of your employees will surely use BYOD with access to your CRM apps, and when one of them goes missing, your data might be compromised.

Luckily, preventing this is easy enough with two-factor authentication. That way, even if someone has your login information it will be impossible for them to compromise your security.

Final Thoughts

With CRM systems being a fairly old concept, they have no choice but to adapt and implement all the technologies that might help improve their service.

Cloud computing is one of these technologies that are responsible for the latest incarnation of CRM systems, and understandably it comes with certain concerns. In this case, the benefits outweigh the risk, as cloud services are continuously improving on their security policies. This being said, the only way for CRM systems is forward, evolving with the needs of their customers.

The post Cloud-Based CRM System: Is it Safe and What are the Benefits? appeared first on Datafloq.