The world’s labor markets are currently bracing for a mass exodus of workers in what some experts are calling “ the Great Resignation .”

Recent surveys indicate more than a quarter of the global workforce, and perhaps as much as 40%, is considering quitting. Meanwhile, U.S. Labor Department data reveals Americans are already leaving their jobs at the highest rates in two decades.

Why? Because with crisis comes perspective.

As many around the world emerge from the most difficult year in their professional lives, a steady job with fair pay and decent benefits is no longer enough.

Even work-from-home options aren’t enough, with data indicating many workers are itching to get back into the office: 63% of people with kids under 12 and 40% of childless workers are ready for the end of work-from-home, according to a recent Haven Life survey .

If, as employers, you want to keep employees engaged and productive for the long term — which I think you definitely should — let me tell you, the game has changed.

You must now meet a higher standard. You must imbue their jobs with meaning. You must offer work with purpose .

Create meaningful opportunities for employees to become activist engineers

Of course, not all lines of work come with an inherent sense of purpose. This is why nearly two-thirds of employers now offer some sort of paid-time-off program to encourage volunteering. That’s commendable.

But these programs leave it to employees to identify and engage with an overwhelming and often unfulfilling array of volunteer opportunities. As a result, only about a third of employees take advantage of these programs.

To truly inspire employees to make a difference, I implore you to create volunteer opportunities that allow employees to become activists, applying the same skills they use in their day jobs.

One example that I know well is Call for Code, a program IBM launched in 2018 with David Clark Cause and The United Nations Human Rights Office, to provide resources, funding, and open source technology to empower developers to create tech for good.

The response has been staggering, with over half a million developers across 180 countries to date having contributed solutions to address societal problems. For example, four developers from Taiwan, Brazil, Mongolia, and India built an app to bring the power of artificial intelligence and weather insights to help rural farmers struggling with the effects of climate change.

In this way, I view the traction we’ve witnessed with Call for Code as evidence that developers truly crave outlets for activism and a deeper sense of purpose – while also further developing their skills and exercising critical problem-solving skills.

Offer to fulfill “stretch” assignments

Traditional stretch assignments serve an important role by acknowledging the tedium inherent in some roles. But these extracurricular opportunities often wind up being little more than a repository for unwanted, non-critical work.

To foster a sense of purpose in these assignments, you need to — as a business leader — identify or co-create opportunities to give back to communities while honing existing skills.

The health fitness company Equinox, for example, funds The Heroes Project , which provides personal and physical training to severely injured veterans. SMBP, the large recruiting company, donates resume services and career coaching for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

So look at where you can give back and use it to inspire your employees.

Build ecosystems of support

Solving difficult, societal problems requires a variety of expertise and perspectives. But I feel like organizations limit too often the scope of their outreach based on artificial barriers.

When trying to change the world, collaboration with customers, business partners, and even competitors are both necessary and deeply rewarding. This is a wonderful opportunity for deep employee engagement beyond their typical role.

In California, for example, The San Francisco Chronicle heads the San Francisco Homeless Project , which brings together reporters from dozens of competing news organizations and outlets to report stories that shine a light on the city’s homeless population.

In Nigeria, the consulting company Accenture created a new e-learning platform to reach students in Africa in innovative ways, part of the Junior Achievement Nigeria initiative, a collaboration between many of the world’s leading consultancies and banks.

In both cases, competitive boundaries were crossed in the name of purpose, which is a lesson to us all.

Two years ago, before the start of the pandemic, the CEOs of the largest companies in America, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, redefined the “purpose of a corporation.” The statement they issued made manifest the corporate philosophies many companies already held. Namely, that the responsibilities of the modern corporation should extend far beyond shareholders to include customers, employees, suppliers, and communities.

They also understood that today’s workforce needs more than stock options and profit-sharing to stay motivated. They need a sense of purpose. A connection to something bigger.

And to be honest, it shouldn’t take a global crisis to make us deliver meaningful opportunities to the workforce so they can apply their shared desire and aptitude for activism to drive social good.

So as the job markets begin to thaw and competition for talent heats up, I believe companies of all shapes and sizes, in every part of the world, need to start investing in purpose the same way they invest in marketing or product development, for the good of their business, and the good of society.

The first 4 things to do when creating a viable piece of hardware

Here’s a sad statistic in tech — 97% of hardware startups fail within the first 20 months after attracting their first investments. Hardware is… hard, but it’s also what makes these projects interesting. In this article, I’ll give you an insight into how my team and I developed a smart speaker and other gadgets as an example of how to create a hardware product.

I’ll go into how we developed these products to describe what stages of development a device goes through before it reaches store shelves. Hopefully it can help you on your own hardware journey!

Let’s start with the basics. Here’s a typical product development cycle (such as for a smart speaker or a smart screen) from idea to launch. I’ll focus on stages 1-4, the fundamentals.

It all starts, of course, with an idea. Everyone has a lot of ideas, but most are discarded at the feasibility study or proof-of-concept stages. These steps should never be neglected. Otherwise, at later stages of the project, it may turn out that the product is not technically feasible, or the cost of the final device is so high that it reduces the commercial success of the device to zero.

Feasibility study

The most important part of a product’s research is the feasibility study of the product.

You can start by analyzing existing platforms and solutions. This can be done by examining the teardowns of several popular devices from the target category, and making a list of the main components and their suppliers. Datasheets on these components will provide a complete picture of how the components comply with the specification that you plan to implement.

A few words about MVPr (minimum viable prototype), which should not be confused with MVP (minimum viable product). MVPr is an early working prototype with minimal functionality, which is created primarily to confirm the validity of the idea and test a number of product hypotheses.

MVPr is usually assembled from commercially available modules or HDK (hardware developer kits) to minimize development time. 3-4 years ago, developers would have had to work hard to create the MVPr of a smart speaker.

Now, smart speaker HDK are available both from small companies (usually quite affordable, costing up to $100), and from leading market companies such as Qualcomm, Amazon, or Google (such HDKs are often more expensive — from a few hundred to several thousand dollars). Often, access to the SDK, developer documentation, test firmware, and sample applications is bundled with the HDK.

The choice of HDK depends on several factors, such as:

Target OS

Target platform / voice assistant that you plan to use (DuerOS, Amazon, Tmall Genie, Turing, JD, iFLYTEK, etc.)

Planned specification of the device (processor frequency, architecture, number of microphones, etc.)

Marketing study

The marketing study allows you to look at the new idea through the eyes of the user and answer a number of important questions:

Who is your customer? Perhaps the main question is whether it is possible to make a device for everyone. User personas (fictional persons or representations of the user) are very helpful in this matter. Created during the first stages, these personas will continue to grow richer with details throughout development and can be useful at later stages (development of features, development of design language / ID / UX).

What customer problems does the product solve? What is the value of the product for the customer?

Why should users choose your product?

What is the set of USP (unique selling propositions) of your device? What feature/set of features “hook ” the user? Which factor affects user choice more?

How adding a new feature will affect the complexity / success of the product?

Another important initial step is a competitive analysis. No matter how fresh and unique your idea may seem, it is quite possible that something similar has already been invented before. Try to find at least a few competitors and analyze their strengths and weaknesses, technical specifications, and pricing policy.

The technical aspect of a competitive analysis is also very important. The easiest way to understand the approximate cost of your future device and highlight the main components that you have to use is to disassemble a competing device by COGS (cost of goods sold). This may have already been done for you because tear-down and disassembly reviews of popular devices can often be found on the internet.

In the initial stages, both traditional SWOT analysis and less commonly used Porter’s Five Forces model will be useful.

And now, let’s see what happens to those ideas that are turned into products.

Patents

I recommend everyone to think about patents as a priority.

If you do not have the budget or time to file a full patent application, remember that you can always start with “provisional patent.” This application allows you to retain the authorship of the invention for one year until the time of filing a full patent application. The cost of the procedure is on average about $200-500.

Do not neglect a patent search. It is not necessary to immediately resort to using expensive patent offices for patent searches. A preliminary search can be done independently and for free. Below is a list of the main open patent databases by region.

USPTO (USA)

WIPO (PCT base)

European Patent Office

Google Patents

Conducting a preliminary independent patent search is useful, not only to make sure that your invention is unique and does not infringe on someone else’s copyright, but also to see a slice of the industry and understand what is being done or was being done in this area in order to compare your developments with competitors.

For a more thorough search, you can contact patent attorneys to not only check issued patents in open registries, but also patent applications.

Hopefully this article has helped you understand a bit better the importance of feasibility studies and patent research when it comes to making your hardware startup a success.

How my company used social media to increase traffic and revenue — for free

You know who loves to give advice? Everyone. Especially when it comes to marketing. But what do you do when that advice requires a budget—a budget you don’t have? What happens then?

I’m the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women single parents in North Macedonia. Operating from a country with such limited resources can be, to put it mildly, challenging. I founded the company back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local designers, which quickly expanded to cover international designers from all over the world.

Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label. The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I lived in. At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the seamstress became a single parent. I was not only impressed by her strength but also inspired by her tenacity and an iron will to provide her child with better circumstances than she was born in.

That’s when I made the decision to make Bastet Noir , a socially responsible brand. And as the business grew, so did our community of women single parents. Today, we’re proud to say that we work with five woman-owned studios, operated by either women single parents or women micro-entrepreneurs.

What used to be a small, local business has grown into—granted, still small—a global brand with customers from all over the world.

We used every tool in our toolbox to make it happen with virtually no budget—just a pipe dream and persistence and will to make it real. Here, I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it happen.

The power of social media for a local business

Even if you don’t choose to invest in social media, you should still have an up-to-date presence. One way to do this is by automating your brand’s social media, doing things like automatically sharing all new blog posts with your followers.

As a bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited resources, our marketing budget was—and still is—practically non-existent. Everything we make is reinvested back into our community of women single parents, so throughout the years, we had to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was one of the most successful.

Succeeding on Instagram without a budget

Ok, let’s rewind for a second. When we started out back in 2013, Instagram still wasn’t a thing. That’s why it took us a while to get to our desired target market in the United States. When we finally got on the platform two years later, it took us almost a year to decode it and figure out a way to grow and attract the right followers.

Since we weren’t located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia. The only way to target the U.S. was to pay for ads—which we, of course, didn’t have the money for. So how did we make it work? Through a lot of trial and error, yes, but most importantly, by establishing a captivating and powerful story behind the brand.

All of our posts and stories aligned with the narrative we were trying to tell . The gist: we were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially responsible label that worked with women single parents in North Macedonia, and we helped these women earn much more than the industry average monthly income of $300. In addition to the storyline, the feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our label.

We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the copy and research hashtags (we found that sustainability- and small business-related hashtags were our first priority). For all of this, we used the social media planning tool Later , which helped us a lot, especially with the visual part of how the feed would look.

Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media strategy and our content strategy. We began by using People Map to create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog. The app helped us target editors, writers, social media managers for fashion magazines, and women entrepreneurs, all located in the U.S. Once we found their profiles, we found their emails—either from their Instagram profiles or using Rocket Reach .

Note: Be sure to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing prospects and give people ways to opt out of continued communication.

We composed an email to each woman, explaining our business and personalizing it to each recipient to demonstrate our interest (for example, we mentioned what had impressed us about them). Most of them didn’t respond back, but the ones that did were more than happy to extend their selfless help: we got a number of women to do interviews with us for our blog series, Cool Faces of Bastet Noir.

Since all of these women worked for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Business, and Elle, this enabled us to gain credibility. And since most of them shared the stories on their social media accounts (including Instagram), we started getting engagement from their followers. We even got traction on our website, since they were sharing the links on their feeds and stories.

Since advertising wasn’t an option due to lack of funds, this was the only way for us to utilize the power of influencers. Our entire investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to send them the outfit—and all we asked for in return was a few photos of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our blog posts.

You can start small even on social. To help, here are three workflows that can help you automate your Instagram for Business account so you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.

Using Reddit for marketing

Reddit is a bit tricky because many of the communities prohibit advertising and, of course, anything they consider spammy, like sharing discount codes, links to your own website, and even introducing your brand. That means you need to engage with the community on another level. Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that you’re an authority on the topic. Then, if they’re interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If you do it before someone asks, you risk being banned from one of the most engaged internet communities.

We joined a few subreddits, including r/findashion, r/ethicalfashion, and r/Etsy, but r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for us. This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be interested in our brand. We started talking with people on various threads, mostly giving them styling advice. This gradually evolved into me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course. People started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the website. And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.

How to use YouTube for free marketing

We only started working with YouTubers at the beginning of 2020. I guess you could say we arrived a bit late to the party, but in our defense, we truly believed that we weren’t able to afford their rates—which was true to a point. A YouTuber who has more than 10,000 views on a video charges at least $3,000 for a 30-60-second brand mention. And that’s just for a mention, not a dedicated brand video. For a brand like ours, it’s way too expensive.

Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to promote them for free. First, we prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic. We found them by searching on YouTube for keywords like “minimal style,” “ethical fashion,” and “environmentally friendly fashion”—and several variations. Most of them didn’t even respond back, which makes sense. But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that they selflessly offered to cover our brand.

Here’s an example from Chloe Kian and one from Cat Creature . These reviews and their support helped us bring in more traffic to our website and create brand awareness—and as a result, we saw increased revenue.

Using Pinterest for eCommerce marketing

Pinterest is the best social media platform for discovering new things to buy. Since the platform itself is highly visual, people usually go there to organize their shopping lists—that makes it great for any eCommerce brand. And if your store is on Shopify, you can use the Pinterest app to get what they call rich pins, which means that the description and price on Pinterest will be pulled directly from your website.

The best way to increase followers and get repins is to use shared boards, community boards made usually by Pinfluencers (yes, that’s a thing). And how do you find these boards? You can do a little Google search, or you can use PinGroupie like we did. PinGroupie lets you find and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.

If you decide to lean into Pinterest for your marketing, here are 5 tips for using Pinterest for business.

We’re currently members of about eight boards. The most important one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k followers. The beauty of these boards is that, once you’ve been approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of every follower in that board. That means millions of potential customers around the world—without investing a single dime. These boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher on Google.

One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers. Boards with fewer followers probably won’t do you any favors—they’ll just sit on your profile and collect dust.

And there you have it: that’s how we used our no-budget social media strategy to increase traffic and get sales.

This article by Daniela Milosheska was first published on the Zapier blog. Find the original post here .