PiousMilk.com is an organic farm of desi Gir cows that give collects and distributes A2 milk in and around Noida. Pious Milk is the name of the organization floated by the group of professionals from CA & MBA (IIM) backgrounds who share a passion for making available pure, organic, and unadulterated food for all.

Webicules Technology is an active IT partner of PiousMilk.com since 2016. We manage their website, SEO activities, and digital marketing. To know more please do contact us.

Problem Statement / Scope of Work (SoW):

Tools & Technology Used:

Features:

Website Link: To visit the website of Pious Milk click here.

Client Testimonial:

Very good website design

I am very pleased with the website designed by them. The SEO activity and digital marketing campaign has helped us to reach more customers in Noida. I highly recommend Brijesh and his team. Thank you Webicules.

Abhinendra Sharma Pious Milk Webicules Technology
Abhinendra Sharma
Director, PiousMilk.com
Noida, India

Once you have set up a Facebook page for your organization/company and have garnered a fat number of fans on your page, it is time to efficiently convert these fans into your leads (and customers, eventually). There is no sure-shot way to ensure this, but there are a few options that have been proven successful with respect to this topic. Read on to find out more:

  1. Add relevant content to your Facebook page description

This is one of the first few things that one should be careful about, when it comes to creating and managing a Facebook page for an organization/company. Adding relevant description on your Facebook page can not only take its popularity up by several notches, but it can also be instrumental in making people curious about you and your company. Curious people will check your website. The aim of the description is at least fulfilled and you will be surprised at how big a difference this can make in the incoming traffic on your site.

  1. Add visual content

This is a no-brainer. You look at what appeals you more. So, on the same line, one is bound to look at a picture post first rather than looking at a text-post. To cash in on this wonderful concept, try to add a lot of visual content on your Facebook page. And now that you are there, ensure that you are uploading pictures of good quality and not any mediocre quality- you do not want your fans to zoom in on the pictures or squint their eyes really hard to understand what is written on a picture post. This could annoy them, and you could lose your potential customers right there.

  1. Write less, show more

Now that we have established that visual content is preferred over written content, it is also advisable to know where to draw the line with your text posts. Keeping it short and catchy helps a lot more than long text posts do.

  1. Share what others are sharing

Always abide by the golden rule with respect to sharing content- do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do what you would want others to do to you. Similarly, if you want your content to be shared by others, well, you know what to do here.

  1. Share blog posts

One more way to engage your users on your website is by sharing your company’s interactive blog posts. If there’s something other than your products/services to see on your website, chances are you will have traffic coming in to see that content. Of course, it is imperative that your blog posts are interesting and aren’t entirely about your products/services or your organization.

If you are a business person, it is almost alright if you do not know everything about inbound marketing, but if you are into marketing, it would be a cardinal sin to not know about inbound marketing. But for all purposes, here are a few tools and tactics that one needs to remember when incorporating inbound marketing techniques into their business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization is one of the ways used to drive traffic to one’s website for lead-generation. It involves quite a few strategies in which the main aim is to utilize a user’s organic search to drive them on your site. The best way to ensure that a user does click on your website’s link is by including keywords in your content that you know would be used by the users in their searches on the same topic. Once the user puts their query in a search bar, the words used in their search will be used by the search engine to accordingly come up with the best-matched search results. This is the aim of search engine optimization- to somehow come in the first few search results by using the keywords, which are most connected to your topic/content.

Blogs

You need content to show to people. You need content to show what you are doing at your organization. You need content to show your existing products and services. You need content to explain your future projects. You need content to drive traffic to your website. You need content for everything. Content is what takes you to places. Goes without saying that content creation should happen at a regular pace. Having a well-maintained blog, which is also regularly updated, has the potential of driving a huge amount of traffic to one’s site, if the blog posts are properly syndicated and shared from time to time on various social platforms.

Events & Webinars

Events are a great way to not only socialize with your customers or leads, but also to promote your existing products/services. One could also use this opportunity to showcase their upcoming products/services, if any. Webinars, which is the short-form of web-based seminars, are just as useful. They can come handy to hold a discussion between experts from your industry and who can generate a better brand name for your organization.

Social Networking Sites

The first question that one may wonder about is, ‘Okay, I have the content, but how do I make people see my content?’ That’s only natural. Social networking sites serve as the best solution for this problem. Knowing how to share your content on these social networking sites is not even difficult. It’s like using social networking sites as one does on a regular basis, only with the exception of using it for professional purposes. These sites have been proven to drive the maximum traffic to websites, thanks to the strategically placed ads and posts, which have the capability of gaining one’s customers’ attention, if they are designed and syndicated properly.

We listed a few techniques of outbound marketing in the previous article (if you haven’t read it as yet, you could read it here). Moving on the same line, we are enlisting a couple of more ways of outbound marketing here. Read on to find out more about them:

  1. Print advertising

As much as people would like to believe that the print media is dying, it really isn’t. It might have gone down in its popularity over the usage and preference of digital media, but there is little evidence about print media dying for another one decade at the very least. Magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and other publications are some of the examples here, wherein one could use any of these for the purpose of outbound marketing. The underlying idea here is that a lot of people are still in the habit of looking forward to reading a physical copy of a newspaper before doing anything else. More specifically, the elderly population relies on print media for their daily intake of information and entertainment. Hence, it is advisable to not completely ignore the print media, since it still includes a large sect of people who are reading newspapers and magazines, among other publications.

  1. In-house sales

Once you have the leads, somebody needs to take it upon themselves to convert these leads into customers. Just possessing the leads’ list does not necessarily mean that these leads are ready to become your customers as yet. Every organization is advised to hire a competent sales team, which is capable of turning every lead into a customer, no matter what the odds are. Only when one has a clear idea of what they are trying to achieve, is when they can actually achieve it. Owing to the aforementioned concept, it is imperative that the sales team is not only knowledgeable but also persuasive and sensitive towards client needs.

  1. Email Marketing

There is a very fine line between being annoying and useful. Email marketing aims to test that quality in every marketer. While it is very easy to go overboard with sending out emails to your customers to either generate leads or for lead-to-customer conversion; it is just as difficult to know where to stop. Email marketing also serves as an interesting way to know how to convert your leads into customers, or offer your existing customers a chance to purchase a few more of your products/services. Wikipedia goes on to describe email marketing also as, “it usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness.???

All in all, a lot of ways are available for one to experiment with outbound marketing techniques. Although, it is always advisable to experiment with outbound marketing with a hint of inbound marketing techniques in order to yield maximum profitable results.

There’s no denying that inbound marketing strategies are usually more assertive and result-yielding, but there are a few things that even inbound marketing cannot ace. This is where outbound marketing comes into the play. To come up with a complete and holistic marketing plan, one should ideally include both the inbound and outbound marketing technologies to achieve the desired outcome. Some of the outbound marketing technologies are:

  1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

While browsing various social networking sites and other commercial websites, have you ever come across ads, which sometimes have a tiny caption saying, ‘Promoted Ad’? This is what PPC advertising is all about. You pay for every click that your ad gets on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! These ads mostly show up on either side of the page or at the top of the page. Every time a user clicks on your advertised ad, you have to pay up for that click.

  1. Direct Mail

Although, there is a norm that implies that direct mail doesn’t really help in the long run, but when it is done strategically and thoughtfully, it could prove to be one of the most beneficial strategies, especially for targeted communication with one’s customers. It not only lets you target your audience very specifically, it also gives one the option of being really creative with the subject line and other content-related aspects of direct mailing, which could generate a lot of leads.

  1. Content Syndication

There is absolutely no denying that content is the whole box of wax of your lead-generation strategies, but it is essential to realize the value of this content being syndicated on different platforms. If you keep creating content without ever caring enough to distribute this content over different platforms, then the entire process will later or sooner be rendered futile. The whole point of creating content is to generate leads for your business. If this content is not seen by anyone, then how is it serving any purpose at all? So, content syndication is important and one of the major outbound marketing techniques.

  1. Events

Organizing and executing successful events also give a huge boost to a brand by letting the company engage with its customers on a more personal level. One entire event not only takes care of promotions, but it also serves as one of the most preferred ways to market a product or a service by the company.

  1. Broadcast marketing

Although, this method is probably one of the oldest ones, it still somehow has a strong grip on people in general. Nobody would stop watching the television or stop listening to the radio for a few more years to come. Yes, a lot of this has shifted to online streaming of shows, but one can’t deny how ads still have a way to lure the elderly population in who aren’t much active on the internet.

Now that we know what business blogging is, it’s good enough a time to discuss its benefits. And why not, really? Everything that is implemented for a business has to yield some results; otherwise, there is no point in implementing it in the first place. Such is the case with business blogging as well, and these are some of its benefits:

  1. Blogging gets traffic to your website

Think about it- how many people actually type in the name of your company in the search bar to get to your site? Very few. So, the chances of finding customer through this way are low. Then there’s another way out- buying email lists. Although, this should be made clear right here before you start thinking of this as an option for your business module- this isn’t only unethical, but also illegal. Then we have the option of paid ads, which are awfully expensive, to be honest. They are also directly proportional to the amount of traffic one experiences on their website. More expensive ads mean more traffic. Stop the ads, and your traffic would also stop. Now, how many people get directed to your site because they saw something related to your organization and it got them curious? Quite a few. This is exactly how blogging works. It creates traffic for your site, which could later on be converted to leads, and eventually into customers. Every reader that comes to a company’s blog is a potential customer and the content of your blog goes on to decide whether this person would actually be converted into a customer or not.

  1. Convert this traffic into leads

Now that you have your traffic in place, you need information. The great thing about using blogs for traffic generation is that most of the traffic directed towards your website would be people who are genuinely interested in your products/services/company. So you have people who are already interested, but now you need their information. It’s fairly simple to understand. Think of it as the barter system of the ancient days. In order to take something, you need to give something. This would mean that if you want contact details from your traffic or if you want them to register on your website, you need to offer something to them. Add a call-to-action to every post, which could ensure that you have people registering on your website. Basically, offering anything that would make your customers exchange their information with you is a win-win situation. For example, a lot of sites offer huge discounts for registration on their sites, which the customers can avail at the time they make their first purchase at the said websites.

  1. You earn customer trust and loyalty

Once you have established a continuously-updated blog for your website, you would see a couple of changes. You would see a few people who are regularly visiting your site, while there are a few who are constantly sharing your posts on their Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Pinterest. You would also see a few regular customers. This has all happened due to the fact that your blog is kept constantlys updated. If you also happen to solve customer queries by writing a specific post for a problem, your customers would feel cared for, and this always goes a very long way. Additionally, consistent creation of useful and meaningful content will help you establish your company as a trustworthy entity in front of your customers, which not only benefits you as a company but increases your ambit of influence, too.

It is a very natural question to ask yourself before you plan to start a blog and write for it regularly- is it going to provide any value? This question becomes even more relevant if you happen to be business blogging- is it going to provide any value at all to my business?

What is a blog?

Before we get down to tackling any of the said issues, it is quite necessary to sort out a few things. You may ask a very obvious question- what is a blog? Well, a blog is a place that you create on a website and post short-form content on it pertaining to various topics, which could be out of a hobby or a profession. This content is called blog posts. Now the next obvious question should doubt the existence of blogs- what is the need for a blog and why do they even exist? The answer to this is simple enough: you need online visibility. What is online visibility, you’d ask? You need people to see what you are thinking and what you are creating with these ideas of yours, which would translate into these ideas being written down in a creative fashion to have as many readers for it as possible.

What is a business blog?

Now, we tackle the main question- what is business blogging? It’s simple, yet complex to implement, if not done properly. Business blogging is, as the name itself suggests, a particular manner of blogging, which is solely meant for your business. All the blog posts on this blog should ideally be pertaining to the central business model of your organization. The topics are more or less pertaining to what you do and what products/services you are offering to people. Naturally, the blog on your website would cater to people, who are interested either in your products/services or in the topics that you write about. In either case, you are generating traffic on your blog. The point is to create online visibility for yourself, which means your blog’s ability to be seen on the internet, as and when someone looks for a topic similar to yours. You blog with specific keywords, which help your blog pop up on the first few pages of a search result- and this is exactly the aim. As a business blogger, your first aim should be to get your page up to the first page of a search result. The day you start seeing this, you know you are doing it right. You’re blogging it right.

How is a business blog different from a normal blog?

Another understandable doubt would be to wonder about the difference between a normal blog and a business blog. A normal blog could be written on various topics ranging from food to fashion to technology to feminism to the aviation industry to plastic bottles. You get the drift. It could be practically about anything at all under the sun. One could be earning for their personal blog or not. It depends upon a lot of factors. But a business blog’s sole aim is to generate traffic, which gets converted into leads, and finally into customers. A business blog’s aim is to generate moolah at the end of the day.

Why does one business blog?

The first and foremost aim of creating content is to have it seen and approved by people. One should make sure that the content is being seen, because that’s actually is its primary reason for existing. Yes, there are other ways of directing traffic towards your website, but the chances of that happening on its own are pretty low. So, the next best thing to do is to create opportunities for people to engage with you, which would convert these people into leads and customers sooner or later. A brilliant way of getting this done is through search engines. But to make sure that you are at the top of the range with respect to search engines, you need to ensure your content on your website (and particularly on your blog) should not only be up to date, but should fetch as many shares and likes on your posts as possible for the simple reason of, ‘more people means more customers.’

Really long story somewhat short, business blogging is an effective way of ensuring that you have one extra way of getting more customers for your business.

This is probably the nth time when the importance of a customer is being discussed yet all over again. The entire world runs on the simplest of concepts- every company needs customers. This is as easy to understand as it is difficult to actually implement. Businesses fall into the trap of targeting the wrong audience as their customers, and eventually pay for it heavily in the form of losses. So, how does one understand their customers and target the right ones for their products and services? This article is going to give a fair idea on how to go about recognizing the right customer for your organization/company/business. Read on to find out more:

  1. What are you solving?

In marketing, it is important that you understand your company so well that you not only know the solutions that you are selling, but also the various problems that your customers may have with respect to your products/services or in general. If you know what you are solving, the answer comes a tad more naturally. This will help you in the advanced stages of identifying your customer base/target audience for you.

  1. Paint your customer.

This is one of the most interesting stages of this procedure. Paint a picture of your ideal customer for reference. Take in consideration all of the problems that your customer may be facing, all the things that your customer likes or dislikes.

Start by grouping them into different categories according to your needs and expectations. Which area are you aiming at? What is the geographical location of a certain set of people? Are these people married or single? Are there more females in a certain area than males? The more specific you are with your research, the better the results will be.

  1. Gauge your market

What is it that you are offering to your customers? Is it relevant to the people you are aiming at? Moreover, how are your customers going to like your products/services keeping in mind the research data you have with respect to your customers’ likes and dislikes? These are some of the questions that need to be tackled very carefully.

You can’t hope to sell lipsticks to children and still expect your products to actually sell. Similarly, you shouldn’t ideally be aiming the females if your product is an aftershave. Do you get the drift? You have to know yourself and what you are offering on order to reach the right customer. It is always more beneficial to know your areas of expertise. Do you know the areas you excel at as a company? Where your products/services are mostly sold at? Do you have a stronger retail presence or online presence? Do you some specific domain knowledge or some extra knowledge about a particular geographical location and its climate? A lot of these things help in the long run and, of course, in understanding your customer really well.

Now that we know a little bit more about various marketing channels, it is time to understand the different strategies involved in picking the best one for your brand/organization. By this time, you must have also realized that going all out in a single go is possibly not the wisest of decisions when it comes to picking the most suitable marketing channel.

Pick and stick to one!

Although it is understandable that one would one to get all the attention from all the marketing channels available, it is usually advisable to start with concentrating on just one channel at the beginning. Being all over the place for marketing would only go on to complicate the entire process without yielding many satisfactory results. So, if you are starting with social networking sites, make sure you pick one of the sites and get done with its initial marketing work before you graduate to another social networking site. When the initial work for all the social networking sites has been laid out properly, one can start using all of these sites simultaneously and may even use this as the basis for another marketing channel.

Target the ones who are listening

It has been said over and over, but too many people miss out on the importance of knowing your customer well. This is of paramount significance that you know whom you are targeting before you market a product or a service. Knowing your customers and knowing where to find them are two things that can dramatically change one’s marketing strategy. You would not want to advertise a product, which is meant for the elderly population, on Instagram because chances are they would not even be there. Similarly, advertising a funky clothing line on Snapchat and Instagram makes a lot of sense, since that is where one would find youngsters, who would be willing to buy the said funky clothes.

Plan and schedule your content

Time is everything and it is important that one understands it well as a marketer. Managing time is one area that every marketer needs to be an expert at. Instead of managing all the different channels yourself or through the help of your team, use internet marketing tools that not only manage your content for you, but also post it on your behalf as and when you schedule them for posting. Another point, which is worthwhile to note, is that one can create content and store it for future use. It is also suggested that one writes a few articles for their blog before it is scheduled to go live. Doing so will help in organizing your content better and getting it out at the right time without letting your customers feel like you are spamming them. Posting relevant content as and when it should go out makes a huge impact on your content is being viewed by your customers. If you don’t post enough or on time, you face the danger of losing your customers’ interest. On the other hand, if you post too much, you face the same danger yet again considering this could come across as spamming to your audience.

We know about marketing, sure. But what does this fancy MBA-like term, ‘marketing channels’ mean? Marketing channels are nothing but just the various mediums using which a marketer could use to communicate with their customers, clients, potential customers, leads, etc. There are a number of mediums to facilitate this procedure. Some of them are:

  1. Social Media Sites

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. are all great examples of social networking sites. These sites collectively serve as one of the best ways to get to your customers or potential clients for your products and/or services. The idea here is catching your customer when you know they are relaxing and are looking for some entertainment on these sites. The underlying essence here is that you as a marketer would not want to disturb your customer when they are caught up with their job or any other more important work. A marketer could also give their interaction with the customers a personal touch by interacting with them more often on these sites. A simple act of either like’ing a comment or replying to a comment on your page or answering a customer’s query quickly or sharing engaging posts shows that you are proactive with your brand and care about your customers. This goes a long way than it shows at the beginning of it.

  1. Blog

Blogging is a great way of letting people know what goes inside your organization. You can always post behind-the-scenes posts on your blog, apart from educational and relevant posts. This helps your customers gain a wider idea of your company and how your work around with difficulties and issues. A blog could also contain some successful case studies with respect to your organization’s work, which could help you to channelize your customers’ trust in your favour. Apart from this, your blog could contain specific meta-tags, which would generate traffic for your blog by utilizing these tags for search engine optimization.

  1. Websites

It is always a good idea to have a website for your organization because your customers are online. This is where they are going to look for you when they first hear about you or what you are offering to them. Not having a website for what you are doing is almost equivalent to negating your presence in the marketplace. The website could just be a very basic one with all the necessary information pertaining to your products/services or it could be an elaborate one, which could be acting as one of the big revenue-generating machines for you. As a marketer, the choice between the two is yours to make after properly assessing your requirements from a functioning website.

  1. Direct Mails

Although a little outdated, this is still one of the active marketing channels, nonetheless. Emails could be used for very specific purposes and not to spam customers. As it has been said earlier on as well, there is a very fine line between marketing aggressively and spamming aggressively. Keeping the same in mind, ensure that as and when you send out an email to your customers, it contains some useful information or anything that has some substance to it, and isn’t just one more of those spam emails. There has never been a more sure-shot way of losing your (potential) customers than by spamming them on emails.

  1. E-newsletter

E-newsletters are publications that are released by business organizations for their customers. An e-newsletter could contain relevant information on various topics, which may be of interest to your customers. By regularly distributing e-newsletters, an organization not only stays in touch with their customers and subscribers, but this could also be used for the promotion of one’s products and/or services.

So, you have decided to make your company take a step ahead and get into vlogging for effective social media marketing for your brand. Vlogging is a brilliant way of interacting with your customers and potential customers, wherein you not only inform them about your products/services in a plain, boring fashion, but in the most entertaining way- you are using a video! There has never been a doubt that visually-rich content has always had an edge over every other form of content/text. Any content that is visually appealing has a way of attracting more people since it is visually aesthetic and pleasing. However, there are always mistakes that even the best of vloggers can make, which could be avoided with the advice provided in this article. Read on to find out more:

Posting Exact Post Everywhere

We know that we have asked you innumerable times to keep sharing your content wherever you can, because why not? More sharing would imply more people actually going through your content and eventually increasing your customer/audience base. But, there’s a small difference here when it comes to vlogging. Sharing the same post on Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram could lead to your customers getting bored of your brand and, more dangerously, your content. They could even sometimes skip your posts altogether since they would be under the impression that you’re only re-blogging/re-posting, which could consequently lead to your new content also getting ignored. So, to save yourself from this trouble, always make sure that your content is suitably designed and curated for whichever social media platform that you are sharing your video on.

Not Making Interesting Videos

Okay, this one’s a toughie. Nobody wants to believe that their content could be below-average. Or even bad, sometimes. But, let’s face it, too. There is always a possibility that your videos are not that interesting, which is why there is low to no traffic on your website through your videos. So, ensure that your content is interesting, while also ensuring that you are not deviating from the main theme of the video. One could include light, good-natured, and harmless jokes in their videos just to ensure the same. Behind-the-camera shots could be shared on Instagram, while a few video bloopers could be posted on Facebook.

Not Interacting With the Customers

This should be considered as one of the cardinal sins. Not interacting with the customers or potential customers will always result in the loss of business sooner or later, since lack of interaction shows lack of interest. So, even in your videos, ask for viewers’ opinion on the ideas that you are talking about in the video. Similarly, always make sure that you are replying to their comments on your videos. Obviously, one could always choose to ignore the nasty comments (if there are any), but it always advisable to reply to all the comments on your videos. Retweet some of your customers’ posts as well to show your interest in them. You could also like a few comments on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram. Your customers provide business to you, and they are the be-all-and-end-all of your business model and this should never be forgotten.

Sharing Too Much or Not At All

This has always been the kind of problem, which nobody really knows a solution of. Sharing too much could look like you are spamming your audience, while not sharing enough might show your lack of interest in your customers.  So, where to draw the line between sharing too much or not enough? This should ideally be left upon you as a vlogger. You would know the perfect balance between these two extremes. Find that balance and stick to it. Additionally, do not always share posts that specifically pertain to you and your brand only. Support others and share their content, and you would have the same benefit give back to you by these people. Remember the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The Vanishing Act

Not being consistent on social media platforms, where you earn your customers and potential customer, could have the biggest impact on your image as a vlogger and a marketer. People take such qualities seriously and they would remember how you are only when you need some work done. So, to avoid this, be as consistent as possible on social media platforms.

We have seen many trends emerge in the space of social media marketing in the last couple of years. Some have been a hit and are still prevalent, while others did not last as long. Let’s have a look at the major trends of 2016 that have dominated the market so far:

Shorten it!

Content is always given the first preference, true. But we need to understand that bombarding our potential clients and customers with a lot of content could appear like we are spamming them. There is a very fine line between marketing aggressively and spamming aggressively. And this goes without saying that we absolutely cannot spam our customers. This has finally caught on this year. You get see shorter and shorter content attached to ads, but these shorter content ads are quite powerful. We also see marketers finally understanding the value of one’s time and respecting it by not making one’s audience read exceptionally long write-ups. This not only eliminates the possibility of losing your reader’s attention in the midway, but it also ensures that it keeps the reader engaged until this lead is converted into a customer.

Video Blogging and the Related Jazz

This is one of the most interesting faces of social media. With the passing of each day, people are realizing the value of visually appealing content. The math is pretty simple here- any content that is pleasing to the eyes has got to be more appealing. With this realization came the understanding of pleasing the audience with video content. Advertisers and marketers all over the world have been pressing on the importance of vlogging since a long time now. Following this, came the trend of live streaming, in which the user live streams whatever they are doing to their followers for marketing a product, for a Q/A session with respect to one’s organization, etc. This seems to be really picking up as young entrepreneurs are increasingly taking it to the internet to directly talk to the audiences, which may be of use to them and vice-versa.

Change in the way social media platforms act

There is barely any denying that the three giants of the social media marketing world are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Although all these three individually cater to different needs and demands, they all fall under the same umbrella of social media marketing platforms. As I had stated in one of the previous posts on this blog, Facebook is friends and family-centric, LinkedIn is more professional and caters to career-oriented people more than anything else, while Twitter can be considered as the bridge between these two. The shift is slow but definitely moving towards newer apps, such as Instagram and Snapchat. Celebrities, such as Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, and Jeffree Star, have used both of these platforms through and through to market their respective makeup and apparel lines. And all of these brands are the hugest brands at the moment, thanks to their really effective branding and marketing done on Instagram and Snapchat.

We all have seen this happening at least once in our lives. A brand, which is known for various good qualities, such as purity and its commitment towards serving just about the best, is brought down to the level of dirt for faults of its own. There are some brands that are able to recover from this huge impact on their brand’s image, while there are a few, which do not cope so well with the debacle.

So, how can one avoid such a situation without damaging their brand’s image even further? There are a few ways to ensure that such a situation never occurs for your brand, such as maintaining the quality of the products that you are marketing; keeping a check on the ingredients that are going into the edible content, and sticking by the promises that you make to your customers. If the organization still somehow witnesses a downfall, there a couple of strategies that could be utilized to mitigate the damage as much as possible. The following are a few examples of the same:

  1. Have a back-up plan: Many do not realize the value of being ready in the face of a danger. It is easy to think that a backup plan does not come in handy ever, if you have never faced a similar issue with respect to your brand. Nevertheless, a basic plan outlining how to go about a certain crisis should always be in place. Along with this, employees could also be informed over the same subject so that they are better prepared to deal with customers, as and when there is ever a need for the same.
  1. Talk: We must understand that communication is the key to every problem in the digital world (and otherwise too, of course). While every other marketing strategy would work just as much, but nothing could work as well as communication does. We underestimate the power of talking to a customer and we make the mistake of not knowing their grievances before putting across a solution. Additionally, we often undervalue the power of listening as well. If we listen carefully to what our customers have to say, half of the problems could vanish, since the answer to the problem lies in the problem itself.
  1. Digital Marketing: There’s no denying that traditionally marketing a product is always the first choice for a lot of big brands, but there’s also no denying that digital marketing is just as important. Many big firms have come to realize the significance of the same in the last few years. When you are interacting with your customer on a digital platform, your customer is bound to feel closer to you. In the same way, when one is interacting with their customer on a digital platform, the customer is also bound to trust you more than they would after seeing an advertisement of your product in a newspaper or on TV. Personal interactions with the customers build customer loyalty and trust, which are two of the most vital components for a successful strategy. Once it comes to mitigating the damage done on a brand’s image, digital marketing has been proven to be really effective, considering how talking could reinstate faith in your customers, while making them believe that you as a marketer are just as concerned about your customers’ safety as they are.
  1. Effective PR Campaigns: An effective PR strategy could mitigate more than one can even imagine. And, a good PR strategy coupled with social media marketing could work wonders for a damaged name. Think of Nestlé Maggi’s ban in India and how it rebounded from it. This would be an example of the aforementioned. Many celebrities in the past have also used public relations strategies to do damage control for their name in the entertainment industry. Similarly, various brands, which have had the misfortune of witnessing a tarnished brand name, have yielded quite a lot of profitable results by using both the PR and social media marketing strategies together.

The mobile era has taken the entire world by a storm. From being able to shop for almost anything to staying in touch with one’s family and friends, the mobile age combined with the power of internet, has largely become a ubiquitous and dominant part of our lives. When we can buy whatever we want off the internet, it is only fair to be able to earn the money for this shopping from the internet again. Owing to the digital age that we are all living in, it is not surprising to see more and more companies/organizations going online to recruit their prospective employees.

Although it is not always feasible for many people to apply for a job online when they are caught up with their daily tasks, such as working a 9-5 job, travelling, etc. Most of these people would ideally either wait to get home in the evening to apply for a certain job that they found online or wait until the weekend to do the same. Now the problem that arises with this is the fact that in this busy lifestyle of ours, it is rather easy for the candidate to forget about this job opening in its entirety. The opportunity to hire a new employee is thence lost. This is where mobile recruiting comes into the play.

So, what is mobile recruiting?

Wikipedia describes it as, a recruitment strategy that uses mobile technology to attract, engage, and convert candidates. Sounds really good to me. But how does one go about hiring candidates using the mobile technology? In order to answer this, it is important to understand the technology in question. In the simplest of words, it means any form of technology that is mobile in nature, i.e., something that could be carried around on-the-go (think of mobile phones and tablets). It doesn’t need any reiterating that mobile phones have largely replaced the place of a desktop/laptop from our lives. Therefore, this seems like a logical fair step to integrate the procedure of recruiting with the brilliance of the internet and mobile technology. This is how we come upon the term of mobile recruiting. The people involved in the department of talent acquisition would understand the relevance and significance of mobile recruiting, especially because that’s where all the people mostly are- on their mobile phones.

How to go about mobile recruiting?

According to Kelton Research, as many as 86% of candidates look for a job by starting the search for the same on their cell phones. This goes on to show that a huge number of people are going to apply for a job online, which would also mean that their impression of your company would be based on what they on your website on a mobile phone’s screen. For the same, ensure that your company’s website is mobile phone responsive. Put yourself in this position- would you be impressed enough with a company to apply at it, if you have difficulties reading their website content on your mobile phone? User experience with respect to a company’s website is very important since one wrong step could make you lose out on potential employees.

How to deliver a user-friendly experience?

When a candidate is looking for jobs on their mobile phones, they expect fast and relevant results without much of a hassle. Clearly, copying another site or its layout isn’t even an option. It wouldn’t ever work. It is suggested that one invests enough time and resources to deliver a rich, user-friendly experience to the candidates. Another point that should be ensured while on the topic of a rich user-friendly experience is making the application procedure as simple as possible. This would go on to imply that the application to a job should not consume more than one click. So, your website need not only be mobile phone-responsive, but should also enable the candidates to apply with just one click. The entire procedure should be this concise, owing to the fact that if there are multiple clicks involved, the candidate may just give up on the application procedure and abandon it altogether.

Go back to it over and over

Like every other strategy, which is crucial to a business model, a mobile recruiting strategy is just as vital to the business organization. Once a good mobile recruiting strategy is in place, the team in charge of it should make sure that it is constantly updated and that the experience of a candidate is as user-friendly as possible. If it takes more active efforts on a regular basis to better the various aspects of a mobile recruiting strategy, then the company should hire a capable team for the talent acquisition department to ensure the effective functioning of this strategy.

Let us establish one thing- to build a start-up organization from scratch requires an ungodly amount of courage and patience. What is especially even more tricky is to have a social media strategy for a startup. A social media strategy could be looked at as something that is really essential for a startup or as something that might be interesting to work with at times but not always. But there is one thing, which has to stay consistent irrespective of what the case may be- one needs to be cautious of their online presence and social image. One wrong move and it could tarnish your brand’s image before it has even picked up any pace.

Why is a social media strategy needed? The answer to this question would be simple: more than anywhere else, your audience (which comprises your potential customers) is on the internet. So, it only makes sense to target the spot where you will get the maximum number of hits, right? Going on the same line, we now face the question of how to make an efficient social media strategy for a startup. It is fairly easy to plan a social media strategy, although it almost passes without mentioning that a social media strategy can only be successful when it is constantly looked after, even after one starts yielding profitable results from it. There are a few things that should be kept in mind while designing a social media strategy:

Have a Plan of Action

It is so easy to think of big things and never really get around to doing any of those big things. To avoid any of such failures, it is essential for every entrepreneur to have a solid plan in place for their social media strategy. A good social media strategy is thoroughly researched for and has all kinds of details related to the budget allocated for a social media strategy, resources used, selected social networking sites, targeted audience, etc.

Choose Your Target Audience

This is one of the most vital steps of building a social media strategy- deciding who your audience is. Marketing your products and services to a sect of people, who do not even need these products/services in the first place, would be a huge waste of time, money, and effort. Again, marketing your brand in front of an audience, which doesn’t have the requirement of the same, is worse than not having a social media strategy at all. Always be sure of who is watching you and who would want to buy from you. Knowing your customers and their likes and dislikes is the key here.

Treat Every Social Platform Differently

If we look at the three giants of a social media strategy, they would be Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others. Although they are all social media platforms and each one of them could be used to market one’s products/services, all these social networking platforms cater to a varied set of users and are different from one another. Facebook is more fun-oriented and is mostly used to connect with one’s friends and family. LinkedIn is through and through a professional networking site, and is used by professionals all over the world to stay in touch with other professionals. Twitter could almost be treated as something that is in the middle of both LinkedIn and Twitter. It is not out and out professional and it is definitely not only for friends and family. Knowing the platforms well will further help a person in understanding the kind of platform that would work best for a specific need.

Budget It Right

From buying the paid services of online platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, to buying social media followers, there are a number of ways to reach out to your potential customers. Facebook and Twitter boast of paid advertisements and can help one reach out to a huge number of people for their brand’s online recognition and acknowledgement among masses. Although the best route to take while building a social media strategy is to create a dedicated team of social media management. This has been proven as the best investment for an effective social media strategy.

Talk to Your Customers

One of the most brilliant aspects of social media marketing is that it lets one speak to their customers and take their feedback/reviews/preferences. A customer is the best investor for a business setup and we must learn to work around this concept to achieve the maximum output from it. If it takes a little bit of an effort to build a relationship with your customer, then go ahead and put in a that extra bit of effort. It is worth every minute of talking to your customers, considering they are the ones who are indirectly building your company.

Go Back to Your Strategy Over and Over

The one thing that every social media marketer should do is to go back to their social media strategy and make changes to it according to the current need. This also happens to be one of the very few things that marketers tend to go wrong with. Not going back to your strategy to see what has been working and what isn’t working will affect the entire strategy in the long run. After all, needs change with time and this impacts the way customers look at your brand.

We’re living in a digital world– just how many times have we, individually, heard of this saying? In fact, in the last one decade, the term ‘digital marketing’ has been thrown around so many times that it has gained a lot of (underlying) meanings. So, then what is digital marketing, really?

Wikipedia describes digital marketing as an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Needless to say, the era in which we are living belongs to the customer. Everything is designed with the hope of attracting more and more customers for businesses. After all, customers make a business really grow. A lot of marketing techniques and formulae will be rendered useless, if there are no happy customers in the first place. If we picture the same setup, let’s assume, from twenty years ago, things could be mighty different. For starters, our world wasn’t called a digital one back then. In that day and date, most of the businesses thrived on outbound marketing, wherein the marketers would ask the companies to go all out and reach their customers, according to the companies’ whim and fancy. Though, with the advent of inbound marketing, the marketplace largely became customer-centric. The customer became the cynosure of all the marketing activities/techniques/strategies. Because the formula to success here was simple- if you have your customers on your side, you have most of what is required for a successful marketing strategy.

The entirety of digital marketing depends upon the internet for its survival. There are various ways in which one can digitally market themselves or their company or their products and services. To begin with, one can use social networking sites to digitally market their products or services (think of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. for the same). Following this, one could also use all-in-one platforms, such as Shopify, Google Shopping, Ebay, Amazon, Flipkart, etc.

On the internet, a digital marketer needs to constantly remind people of their existence for the sheer reason of neck-deep competition that is prevalent in any marketplace nowadays. There are far too many digital marketers on the internet and each one of them is trying to cash in on the opportunity of digital marketing, just like you. Another way of catching your customer’s attention is to be visible on the platforms that they use for entertainment, owing to an intelligent and educated guess that if they are on an entertainment platform, then there’s a bright possibility that they have time at their disposal and may even want to check out your products.

One more interesting (and rather interesting) aspect of digital marketing is that it is not limited. It is not bounded by any physical boundary. You have to use your imagination, and it could just be the next best thing to digitally market yourself or your brand. On similar lines, it is quite easy to catch your target audience’s attention on sites like YouTube and other online video streaming platforms. Again, it is easy, but one must be efficient with their marketing in order to not annoy their customer by posting a product video right before your customer was about to watch a video of their own choice. The product video should be exceptionally gripping and powerful. Why am I using the adjective, ‘exceptionally’ here? Because we must understand that we are disturbing the privacy of a customer by barging in on their personal time to advertise something to them. If the video isn’t exceptionally good, then make it. Anything mediocre shouldn’t be tested with the customers, since that could be a potential failure. The customer might just not watch the video (or even skip it, if there’s an option for it). So, to avoid all this, make sure that the content of your product video is exceptionally strong.

Now coming to the customer, a digital marketer has to be extremely cautious of what they are offering to the people. Apart from being careful with respect to the offered products/services, a digital marketer also has to stay watchful of the changing social expectations- a few things will be accepted by the masses, while there’s a chance that a few others might not even be remotely acceptable by the masses. Another noteworthy point is the number of times a digital marketer reaches out to their (potential) customers; going too far with the entire digital marketing approach could be detrimental to a business’ growth, while not reaching the adequate number of times one should reach out to their (potential) customers might result in loss of customers.

Let’s break this down and try to understand the meaning of inbound marketing in simpler terms. Ever heard of the (in)famous chase game? It goes something like this: whatever that one chases after, it only goes further away from them. It also seems like the law of the nature- one doesn’t always get what they want. Although, if there is a way to attract that ‘whatever’ towards yourself without actively chasing after it, chances of finding that ‘whatever’ chasing after you are much higher. This is the chase game. Now, why am I explaining this here? I am doing so because I am going to draw an analogy here, and consequently liken the outbound and inbound marketing techniques with the aforementioned example.

What is outbound marketing, really? It is the concept of reaching out to your customers and initiating a conversation with them with the hope of talking them into checking your company and its products/services, at the very least. So then, what is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is the direct opposite of outbound marketing. In it, engaging and relevant content with respect to one’s company is generated and syndicated on different platforms with a target audience in mind. With this, one hopes to generate traffic, direct it to their company’s website, and generate further sales from this point onwards. This way, you are persuading your potential customers to come to you, instead of this process going the other way round with outbound marketing techniques. See, how that worked out? You have your customers where they want to be and that place is of high interest to you, as well.

But, what is the reason behind the huge success rate of inbound marketing? The reason is that once relevant content is put across various social networking sites and when people engage with that content, there stands a massive chance that this content is going to push/attract a stranger to click the link of your website, and thereby, results in converting a stranger into a visitor of your website. This content could also be added for your search engine optimization results and blogging, among other ways. Once you have the visitor on your website, it is important to realize here that this may not be all; in fact this is just the beginning of everything. Creating traffic that will go to your website is great, but this traffic isn’t going to generate any revenue for you. Once you have visitors, you must look to convert these visitors into leads. How does that happen, again? It’s simple. Collect contact information of these visitors and build your database. One of the most utilizable and useful tools to do the same is forms asking for your customers’ contact details when they visit your website. Call-to-action buttons work just as brilliantly. Now that the visitors are converted to leads, it’s time to convert these leads into customers. This is the crux of it all- customers. Your marketing strategy should be calculated enough to pull you through all the way till here. Additionally, it should be strong enough to pull you all the way through to generate revenue for the effective functioning of your company.

An effective marketing scheme or strategy, whether it is inbound or outbound, should not ideally be ever ignored. A marketing technique is an ongoing process. Your customers expect you to be around at all times, and not only when you need them to generate sales for you. As much as they need you for their requirements, you need them just as much for your business. Moreover, customers value companies that look after them. With a proper brand trust built around your business model, more and more customers will come through as customers, since your existing customers would talk among themselves, pass on recommendations, rate your products/services, and eventually be instrumental for your business. So, it is a must to keep your target audience happy by regularly engaging with your visitors, leads, and customers in order to achieve a positive word-of-mouth, while hopefully increasing your current customer base.

A business needs customers to grow- this is the most basic logic behind every business plan. So, the next logical question would be, how does a business organization find its customers? Or how does a company spread the word about its existence, brand image, and its (new & existing) products? For the aforementioned question, a company needs to understand the concept of outbound marketing. As the name itself suggests, it is an approach, which is outgoing in nature. In simpler terms, it aims at initiating a fruitful conversation between a company and its customers.

Outbound marketing includes the usage of general and broad media, such as television, radio, magazines, and newspapers, among other mediums. For more specific purposes, it could be utilized in the manner of one-on-one meetings with potential clients or customers. Additionally, it could be conducted in the form of cold calling and blanket emails, which target a large number of people. All of these strategies are adopted in the hope of generating sales. Once leads are generated, the company’s sales representatives take over to cater to the sales.

The concept of outbound marketing is simple- know your customer personally and make your first impression the best one, since first impressions are always important in marketing. Your customer learns to trust you or not on the basis of how you have interacted with them. From this point onwards, various other strategies are incorporated by the company for further development, but this remains as the most important aspect of all businesses all over the world. Gaining customer trust and loyalty is by far the most vital step for any business organization.

Many experts believe that outbound marketing is increasingly becoming obsolete with the impressive advent of inbound marketing technologies. Having stated that, there are still many companies that spend over 90% of their marketing budget on outbound marketing. So, for which kind of customers does outbound marketing work? There could be a general answer to this question, as everyone, at one or the other time, does get affected by outbound marketing. But to answer it precisely and somewhat accurately, there is a greater chance for outbound marketing to work for middle-aged to older population, owing to their inclination towards the traditional method of gaining information of the world around them. Since these customers are more accustomed to watching television or listening to radio programs in their free time, their chances of being impacted by outbound marketing are stronger.

Every market has its own needs and requires its outbound marketing strategy to be designed according to these specific needs. For difficult markets, an aggressive marketing campaign is required, while new products or services may need more explanation, persuasion, and patience with the customers. It could also prove to be highly harmful, if one is ignorant and unaware of the marketing world and its neck-deep competition. Pick any market, and it has to have a fierce market out there with every brand trying to push their products/services forward in order to further expand. So, it is imperative for marketers to understand their customers well and to know what would work with them and what really wouldn’t, because like they say, know your customer well and your battle is already half-won!

Whenever someone talks of health, fitness, and workouts, our tendency is to either avoid the topic or may be sometimes take an offense over it (okay, maybe it’s just me). But the point is, in this hectic lifestyle, it is no doubt that working out regularly and ensuring that you are eating clean and healthy is a little bit of a challenge. Can’t deny that, won’t deny that. So, when we all have the facility of carrying a smartphone, why not use it for yet one more advantage and aim for a fitter lifestyle. Read on to find out more.

  1. HealthifyMe

We are yet to discover another app, which is so simple to use yet so brilliantly smart. This wonder of an app lets a user record their basic, like weight, BMI, height, etc. to get started. Then the app prompts the user to set a target weight, if the user is specifically looking for weight-loss/gain. After one is done with the set-up of a target weight, the app provides a detailed version of how many calories should a person consume, how many calories should a person burn, how many litres of water should be taken in order to hit the target weight in the selected amount of time. It doesn’t really end at this- it helps people record their daily meals as well, starting with providing them the caloric content of everything, ranging from full-fledged Indian meals to something as small as a hard ball candy.

  1. Zombies, Run!

It is always an added-incentive to one’s runs, if they’re getting something as an award for completing their run in the desired amount of time. Especially, when it becomes a game, it’s harder to resist. With the help of this app, the faster you run, the closer you are to completing your goal of collecting supplies for your base camp, and helping other humans survive the zombie apocalypse. There’s a reason why this app is so famous- unlike other gaming apps, it doesn’t let you become a couch potato when you’re playing it.

  1. Fitnet

When there’s so much work that your workouts go for a toss, you know it’s time to download this app. This app comes loaded with a vast variety of 5 to 7 minute long super-energised powered workouts, featuring circuits and HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts. What’s more? This app in one of its kind comes with the option of a selfie camera which lets the user monitor how closely they are able to imitate the workout moves shown on the screen of the app.

  1. Daily Yoga

Yoga is effective and quite therapeutic at the same time. While you may struggle to find the time for a regular yoga class, you may not anymore struggle with the actual good session of yoga. This app comes with a ton of long yoga videos, which are all shot in high definition quality to help you do your yoga at the comfort of your home or wherever you are comfortable.

  1. Stronglifts 5X5

With the advent of circuit training and HIIT, it has become almost impossible to keep a track of all the number of reps that one does in a session. With Stronglifts 5X5, that might not be a problem anymore. This app keeps a clear track of the number of reps, number of rounds, and the number of sets and supersets that one has to do in a particular workout. What a great time to be alive for all the forgetful ones!

  1. Prisma

This app, in an extremely short duration of time, shot to fame, and for all the right reasons! Prisma, which is so far only available for iPhones, happens to be one of the most interesting photo editing apps nowadays. Going a little beyond the ordinary, this app lets one edit their pictures by adding one of the available 33 filters, and turn these photographs into classic works of art. The effects of the paintings like The Great Wave or The Scream are some of the painting effects that one can use to turn a mundane photograph into a great piece of art.

  1. Hello Weather

Weather apps tend to either go overboard sometimes with their unnecessary information about weather complete with the heavy graphics or not take off at all by providing less-than-required information when you really want to know what your next week for holiday is going to look like. Hello Weather realises the gap and the balance between the two extremes and provides a very balanced mixture of the two worlds. It has a very neat sheet of just the adequate amount of weather information that one may need with simple-yet-feature-rich graphics, which aren’t heavy enough to freeze the app ever.

  1. Cheatsheet

You know how you go to a friend’s place quite often and need to use a certain code to get through their building’s security measurements, but you can never really remember it on hand. Or picture yourself not remembering your new house’s street number. Or not being able to recall your hotel room number. You get the drift, yes? What if you’re a tiny bit forgetful about small things like these in life? Cheatsheet is the answer to this, so that you can take care of the big things. Cheatsheet is a smart app, which records small bits of information like all this by letting the user select an icon, feed the information on a note, and save it. When there are enough number of sheets prepared by the user, they can be easily managed by the user by simply re-arranging/ordering them as they please. When you’re done, it will be added to your Today Widget. Pretty cool, huh?

  1. Citymapper

If you identify yourself as someone who is a little geographically challenged (no offense, we all are, at some point in life) and often find yourself in a new city due to work or whatever, then Citymapper is the app that you need. Any city that is in demand, will find itself on Citymapper, and you can smoothly find your way from Point X to Point Y without much difficulty. Being lost is going to be a thing of the past.

  1. Snapseed

This app, like any other editing app, lets you do the basics of cropping, re-adjusting, re-positioning, auto-fixing to a photograph, but where it really steps its game up is when one is faced with the versatility of its filters. There are plenty of options like blurring a specific part of a photograph or the entire photograph. The photographs can also be given even more creative effects, such as a gothic touch to a photograph with the grunge effect of the app.

  1. Duolingo

Again, find yourself in a new city, which does not speak your language? Or stuck with business guests from Germany and you speak only English or vice versa? Then this is the app you need for your rescue. Duolingo presents its users with a variety of fun-packed quizzes in different languages, which seldom become monotonous. Aimed at perfecting one with the basics of a foreign language, this app gets it right on point.

  1. Kitchen Stories

If you are fond of cooking and have little-to-no patience to carry your recipe books around at all the times, welcome to Kitchen Stories. Unlike other cookery apps, which just give its user a compact version of what is written in an actual, physical cookbook, Kitchen Stories seems like the kind of app which someone has made with a lot of thought and care. It provides its users all the recipes with a step-by-step photograph of every stage of the cooking while providing more than enough information on ingredients and the steps involved. Cooking on the go may not be such a big task with this app around!

Every year the difference gap between practical, usable gadgets and fancy-but-probably-not-that-useful gadgets keeps shrinking. From having seen a skateboard that could connect to an iPhone via an app (and for what reason, only God would know better) to being able to switch the lights off with a blink of eyes, we have come a long way and have seen many gadgets in the last few years. So which are the ones you should invest your money into? Read on to have an idea:

  1. Oombrella

How many times have we gone out and realized that we should have carried an umbrella? Sometimes, it even seems like forgetting an umbrella at home is more common than the occurrence of rains. But with this invention, one can hope to eradicate this as a problem for once and all.

Oombrella is a smart-umbrella that is designed to alert its user if they are forgetting it behind. Additionally, it predicts the weather for the user for an added benefit. “Rain, rain… go away,??? no more maybe?

  1. Vivid Wellness Bracelet and Pendant Trackers

A lot of people find think wearing fitness trackers on a daily basis isn’t a feasible option simply because of its appearance. After all, looks do matter. Mira’s new additions to their fitness tracker range are these extremely cute Vivid Wellness bracelet and pendant trackers. Unlike the traditional fitness trackers, these bracelets come in two finishes- Rose All Day and Heart of Gold. Tracks calories, records the number of steps taken in a day, AND makes one look good as well.

  1. WonderCube Mobile Phone Accessory

What may look like a tiny metallic cube actually turns out to be one of the biggest mobile phone accessory solutions- “All-in-1 Cubic Inch,??? as its manufactures like to say. It serves as a keychain. Keychain? Well, yeah. But that’s something that should have been put at the end of its uses. Now, to begin with, WonderCube has a built-in cable, which could be used to either charge a mobile phone (with the added help of a small 9V battery that could be purchased easily from any supermarket) or could be used to sync the phone’s contents with another device. It could also be used as a mobile-holder by sticking the WonderCube with the help of its micro-suction cup plate at the back panel of any phone. Moving on, this wonderful thing could also be used for extra memory space with its built-in memory card reader. At the end of everything, it is a tiny LED torch just as well. Impressive? VERY!

  1. Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator

What do you expect from your fridge when it becomes a smart-fridge? Well, to answer your question for you before you do, Samsung has come out with its version of a smart-fridge, which goes by the name of Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator. To list just a few of its functions, this fridge will connect to your house’s WiFi connection and do almost everything that your smartphone is capable of doing. It can play music with its built-in speakers, organize events with the help of a connected smartphone, and one can easily order groceries by using the apps available on the fridge’s display. And, then there are cool fridge-related options too, obviously.

  1. Petbot

For most of us animal lovers, it is painful to leave our pets behind when we go for work every day. And it has to be even more difficult for our pets- after all, they aren’t able to see the only people they know for straight nine to ten hours. With Petbot, all these problems might come to an end. This device has an in-built camera, which would allow the pet-owner to see their pet when they are at work or away from home. It doesn’t end at this. You can talk and give instructions to your pet, and if they do as you instructed, there’s an option of rewarding them with a treat using the Treat Dispenser function of Petbot. The gadget also has a ‘Bark Recognition’ technology, which the gadget uses to alert you if your dog is barking more frequently than usual. And it can click your pet’s pictures for you, too. Pet selfies at work? Wouldn’t that be the loveliest?

It has been adequately established that social media marketing is extremely beneficial for a business setup. For reasons known and unknown, consumer behavior could depend on a number of factors, which could sometimes be understood by assumptions, and at other times, one can analyze this changing behavior by the usage of an effective social media marketing strategy. Read on to find more about the same:

  1. Know Your Audience

This is the smallest yet the most important part of one’s social media strategy. Knowing one’s audience provides the opportunity to test the waters before stepping in. The essence here is to know the right from the wrong, the relevant from the non-relevant, the best-suited from the not-needed-at-all options that one may have as a social media strategist. You wouldn’t want to release a beauty product (let’s say, a women’s perfume) for an audience, where the majority comprises males- you will not be able to create an interest in your audience, you might lose customers, you might generate no sales, and eventually your strategy will fall apart. As aforementioned, knowing your audience is key.

  1. Target Your Audience

Now that you understand your audience, select your target audience. This will be going one step ahead after understanding your audience. Targeting men for a women’s perfume wouldn’t make much sense, and similarly, targeting women for an aftershave cologne might not be very sensible. These are just examples to broadly illustrate how targeting works. In reality, the questions regarding whom to target and how to target them could get a little tricky, but it is never impossible to target the intended audience.

  1. Set Goals

After understanding and targeting your audience, it is imperative that one charts out a plan to clarify the goals that are expected to be met using a social media marketing strategy. If one doesn’t know where s/he is headed, any kind of marketing strategy cannot and will not work to yield any result. Knowing what you want is the first step towards actually achieving that objective. It always helps to know if you are able to increase the number of your followers, fans, visitor-to-customer conversions, etc. It also lets you understand and accordingly make future strategies.

  1. Using the Right Content

It is of utmost importance to know what your customers are looking for, which eventually also lets one understand which kind of content should be put out for the people. Sharing content that appears like it is spam is a sure-shot way of losing customers. The focus should rather be on sharing content, which is entertaining and, yet at the same time, it should possess the potential to convert your website visitors into customers. It should also be worth a share by your visitors. If your post is engaging enough to be shared by your customers, then chances are that your sales are going to go up, since after all, a customer would trust another customer more than they would trust the company, which is selling to them.

  1. Add Visual-Appealing Content

As human beings, we are more susceptible to visual content than any other form of content. If you present an attractive picture in a post, which is able to convey the meaning of your post, then the possibilities are that your post’s readership/viewership is going to increase by manifold. On the other hand, boring texts tend to put a reader off and eventually not fetch fruitful results.

  1. Add an Interactive Blog

It is always a good idea to add a blog to your company’s website to engage your website visitors into the internal working of your organization. The blog could contain information about the upcoming events/services/products of your company. It could also contain educational and inspirational article/posts on relatable content for your targeted audience.

  1. Consistency: Re-post and Re-blog

Social media marketing isn’t a one-off process. Instead, it is an ongoing procedure. We can’t expect our results to keep coming in, when we aren’t actively working for them. In the same way, if we neglect our social media strategy once it has been implemented, it may show a lack of interest from the company/organization’s side, resulting in loss of customers or reduced sales.

  1. Use Paid Tools

Although, a super-effective social media strategy is supposed to be absolutely free of any cost, but if your budget allows you, up your game and use paid advertising tools, such as LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and Google AdSense, among others.

  1. Competition-progress Ratio

Understanding that this is an ever-changing world would always help with the planning of one’s social media marketing strategy. The competition in the market is high and it is only going to climb even higher, so it’s of huge significance that there’s always a team of specialists tracking your progress with respect to your social media marketing.

Share

Facebook
Linkedin
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp