You often hear, "we're a mission-driven company." A wide range of for-profit companies have stepped back to redefine, restate, and re-communicate their company mission (and there are some fantastic examples out there!). Why?

As you may have noticed, EnticEdge’s branding has had a bit of a refresh, refocus, and redesign! We could not be happier with the results, and we’d love to share a little bit more behind the scenes with you about the process, and meaning of our new brand identity!

According to Statista, cyber incidents (cybercrime, IT failure/outage, data breaches) are the leading risk to small businesses. Businesses of all sizes should plan for these cybercrime risks by developing a Data Protection Plan. We interviewed cybersecurity expert Matthew Weber to learn best practices for small businesses preparing their plans. Here's what he advised:

You probably hear a lot about value. Be it the financial value of a company, philosophical values that guide your team, the value you’re offering potential new hires, value equation to support competitive pricing analysis and potential market share…but at the core of market traction and growth is the vital value: your unique “value proposition.”

Do you ask your data teams for all available metrics to feel that you are staying on top of your business? It is easy to fall into "metrics overload" with all the data that we have available today. Here are a few tips that will help you put a critical lens over your data needs and achieve quality over quantity for your metric definitions.

As we wrap up 2021 National Entrepreneurship Month, we’re taking a look back at some of the advice that our network of entrepreneurs valued most, and what they would share with any aspiring founders, as well as what our own personal advice would be.

If you’ve landed here, you’re (hopefully) interested in learning more about EnticEdge and our process towards helping your company share its authentic story and build its competitive edge. If you know anything about us at all, it’s probably that we believe that business strategy and design shouldn’t live in silos. Here’s an inside look at how we do it…

Consumers (remember that your business “customers” and “clients” are also consumers) are coming out of COVID-19 caves with big, and varying, expectations. We’re sharing our top 5 tips for navigating the reopening successfully so you can continue to build traction for your company even while the world is undergoing transformation.

The rate of innovation has only accelerated, and world-events like the 2020 pandemic have improved the rate of adoption and on-boarding for new technologies. However, even before this, many companies were starting to take an agile and lean mindset towards innovation, causing a disconnect from more traditional methodologies of consulting. Recognizing this shift, EnticEdge has always had a hands-on, partnership approach with our clients, integrated virtually, with business strategy and UX design combined to execute in our increasingly visual marketplace.

At EnticEdge we’ve always believed that actively seeking new opportunities to be inspired and to learn is part of your own lifelong development cycle. Seeking opportunities to learn doesn’t have to mean going back to school full-time, it can mean reading a new book, attending a webinar, participating in an online course, or even watching a series of YouTube tutorials or talks. Just seeking inspiration in 2021 in unique ways can give you an active role in your own lifelong learning and definitely can make a lasting impact at work. 

Here are a few relevant reminders for our innovative friends internationally working to enter the U.S. market to help support your success. Understanding your specialty area and its correlating market landscape become even more important when you’re jumping into the weave of language and cultural differences. Every single company’s journey is unique and each solution brings its own barriers to market entry. One day your growth in one or two countries will have been substantial, your revenues will be showing acceptance of your product or service, you’ll have tackled your competitive analysis, and potentially you’ll be looking to the U.S. market, here are some things to keep in mind.

We want to dive deeper into why now, more than ever, communicating your value proposition succinctly and clearly is of immediate importance. In today’s blog post, we’ll hopefully convince you of the importance of knowing – in simplified, audience-specific language – your company/product/service’s unique value propositions (UVPs) like the back of your hand.

We recently busted the myth that user research needed to be a complicated and expensive process for your company. So today we want to give you an easy starting point as you embark on your bootstrap journey into user research with user interviews. We’ll start by giving you some background information on user interviews, what makes good user interview questions, and who you should interview before sharing 10 questions you can use for your very own user interviews for insightful feedback on your company’s website.

Visuals get a lot of love in the design space, but we want to stress how vital visual design is when it comes to achieving your business goals. So we’re going to break down how you can leverage visual design in a variety of business interactions, as well as why strategic visual design reinforces business goals and contributes to business success.

We'll walk you through our top tips for insightful user research on a budget. Trust us, you absolutely can rein in the costs of user research if you’re willing to take a meaningful approach to gaining insights from your users and network–and you absolutely should take the plunge into the user research process. Not only will you have a better understanding of your users motivations and frustrations to inform product design decisions, but you’ll be able to view your solutions and your company from a new perspective without insider bias. Ultimately, there are few downsides to iterative user research as it will improve both your design and business strategies and it doesn’t have to be an expensive feat.

Quality content creation continues to be one of the best digital marketing strategies you can undertake. While some still haven’t jumped on board, the entrepreneurial emphasis on content creation is not “just a fad.” The reason content creation yields such a high return on investment is because it’s highly approachable and digestible by target audiences, while also boasting a very low upfront cost. Anyway, here’s everything you should know as you venture into the world of content creation!

While it may not seem like a big deal on a daily basis, having minor differences in what stakeholders believe are the primary values of the company’s offerings makes it incredibly difficult to achieve and sustain stakeholder alignment, and to adapt when significant changes occur and transformative opportunities are possible. With this in mind, we’ve put together 5 tips for cultivating healthy stakeholder alignment (especially in times of change).

Investing in a beautifully-designed and user-centered website is one of the best decisions any company can make, primarily because it will bring your company three things: visibility, credibility, and opportunity. Ultimately, this means a high return on investment (ROI) for any time and money you set aside for a better website. In this week’s post, we’ll break down how investing in your website will bring your company better visibility, credibility, and opportunity, and why the ROI of a user-centered website is so high.

We'll break down everything you need to know about user personas: what they are, how to use them, and how to make your own. User personas are widely-used across disciplines to illustrate a possible representation of a specific target audience or group. They serve as a reminder to all team members, about the real world audiences they are targeting to use their products/solutions/services and the motivations those audiences most likely have.

Squarespace provides a polished, user-friendly design while simplifying website maintenance and updates for stakeholders. Keep scrolling and we’ll break down the key advantages and trade-offs of working with Squarespace.