Marketing Mixes

Successful webinar marketing for businesses

arpita — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:38:22 +0200

Webinars can be a powerful marketing tool for a business on a low budget. It can promote an idea and bring in new audience. There can be several webinar topics and events you can host to attract the potential customers and maintain an engaged audience. To make your webinars stand apart from run off the mill training videos, make sure to offer unique and original content.

Some of the interesting ideas and topics can follow these outlines —

1. Hook your product to latest technology trend
How does your product related to latest technology trend? It can help your audience understand your product offering better. Present it as a part of your product story and have room to grow it into a possible series of webinars.

2. Debunk myth or notion associated with your line of product
You can always find misconceptions associated with your line of industry or product. Use it to your advantage and host simple webinars to debunk them and find new followers. Keep it short and simple!

3. Share new market studies, research or polls regularly
Regular updates relevant to your target market can get them hooked to your webinars. Share unique insights, conduct polls and share results to find new audience and quality traction.

4. Share Story, milestone or achievement
The better your customers know your product’s story the more they are emotionally involved with your cause. Share your tiny achievements, milestones and moments of euphoria with them from time to time and make them a part of your product journey.

Have fun connecting to your users and gaining new audience!

thenextweb: (via There Are Now 427 Million Europeans Using The...

arpita — Thu, 31 May 2012 11:40:59 +0200

thenextweb:

(via There Are Now 427 Million Europeans Using The Internet: IAB)

thenextweb: Chances are that, by now, you’ve seen this...

arpita — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:26:38 +0200

thenextweb:

Chances are that, by now, you’ve seen this often-shared video about the social media “revolution”. Stunning statistics abound and it’s been one of those justification moments for social media addicts worldwide. But are those stats even real? What if they’re just random numbers floating in bits and bytes? That’s what our friends at The Poke have had to ask. In order to get to the bottom of things, they worked with the foremost authority in parody statistics, Made-Up Stats to produce the video that you really should be sharing instead. (via Social Media is Made-Up Stats)

13 Questions for the Perfect Marketing Strategy

arpita — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:52:45 +0200

agilecoreconsulting:

Consumers respond to emotions and values associated with a product or service, so what is the emotional value that your business provides? Cant think of one? Follow the questionnaire and you will be halfway onto reaching your right audience, who care about you and your business. Any business should ask themselves the following questions before they draft their first marketing strategy.

What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?

How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?

What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing

What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?

What does an ideal client look like?

What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?

How will your market become aware of your business?

How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?

What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?

Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?

What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?

What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?

What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?

Agile Core Consulting: The Perrinial Roadblock to Agile : Views and Opinions

arpita — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:01:55 +0200

Agile Core Consulting: The Perrinial Roadblock to Agile : Views and Opinions:

agilecoreconsulting:

There have been numerous roadblocks to agile methodology and still continues to be on the list of should we/should we not for the corporates. Agile is the most liberating management styles and clearly maps quantifiable output with a role/stakeholder. Agile consulting, deals with these issues and…

Emerging economies - Technology adoption & IT spend trend 2012.

arpita — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:36:31 +0200

I recently came across a report stating that emerging markets are the most aggressive ones as compared to the developed European or American market when it comes to adopting to cloud technology. Among the Latin American cloud adopters, the companies of less than $1B in revenue, 36% of their total applications software is in the cloud. On the other hand, at companies of greater than $1B in revenue, 42% of their applications are cloud applications.

Cloud technology is a boon to the companies to keep their overheads low and improving their flexibility like never before. The benefits are multi-faceted such as improved application and system performance, reduced IT costs, increased standardized business processes, increased flexibility in ramping up or down resources to name a few. So the interesting question being how come European and American companies lagging behind?

Large American and European companies are still tied to their age old legacy systems and applications which are either difficult to shift to cloud or not compatible. Meanwhile aggressive forecast in technology spending for emerging markets show a very positive picture for their counter parts in Asia Pacific and Latin America. The following are the excerpts from the Gartner Report—

1. Latin America will generate nearly $326 billion in IT spending in 2012, of which professional markets will represent 48.4 percent of the total IT market in reaching $157.7 billion in 2012. Consumer markets in Latin America will reach $168 billion in 2012.

2. IT spending in the Middle East and Africa is expected to reach $244 billion in 2012, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa accounting for nearly 35 percent of this revenue. The Middle East and Africa professional markets represent 38 percent of the total IT market in the region, and will reach $93 billion in 2012.

3. Central and Eastern Europe are expected to generate nearly $158 billion in IT spending in 2012. Professional markets will represent 48.2 percent of this, totaling $76 billion, while the consumer market is predicted to reach $81.7 billion. Russia’s share of IT spending in the region in 2012 is expected for be nearly 45 percent, followed by Poland with 11.8 percent, the Czech Republic with 7.7 percent and Hungary with 3.7 percent.

4. IT spending in emerging Asia/Pacific countries is expected to reach $496 billion in IT spending in 2012. Emerging Asia/Pacific professional markets will reach 42 percent of the total IT spending in the region, while consumer IT spending will reach $288 billion in 2012.

In summary, we are looking forward to a total sum of $1.22 Trillion worth of IT spending by the emerging economies in 2012 which is almost 31% of the worldwide total. Companies trying to reap benefits from the above statistics should be establishing direct sales offices and more reliable channel partners in the emerging markets.

With plenty options available in the market it becomes more challenging for the companies to sell products to audience who are now looking for more and more niche products for themselves. The one size fits all technique used by legacy application providers do not work anymore. Cloud technology has brought in not only flexibility for the buyer but also for the vendors in being able to create newer products and experiment with innovative and creative ideas. A win-win for whoever can catch up to pace and reap the benefits of cloud while its still hot.

Skill and Wealth generation through policies

arpita — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:20:00 +0100

In a world with ever increasing population and increasing level of education expectations, every individual is looking for a higher paying job. Government is certainly aiding this move, and why not? An educated nation ensures growth and independence for individuals, so whats the trouble? The trouble being changing economic scenarios with outsourcing and geographies which are being typecasted as manufacturing hubs or technology hubs and so on, although in reality each geography is still left with a big bunch of unemployed workforce and an inevitable economic recession which follows. What can be done? - Stop outsourcing? Create policies against outsourcing, educate workforce for higher level jobs? These are the few points which we have a look at and possible scenarios to improve the condition in coming years.

To look at the root of the problem created with outsourcing, everyone points fingers at the corporate firms. A pyramid can be used to describe the way corporate structures are globally and I find its uncanny resemblance to a food pyramid. The people most essential for the organization to work seamlessly are located at the base of the pyramid, the higher the level they are important and “good to have” but in lesser numbers. So obviously the workforce which is needed in abundance is located right at base and companies located at high cost regions need to shell out more to get same results as companies at low cost regions. Anyone with a bit of common sense would say, why not shift the basic operations to lower cost region, bring in higher revenue and specially when everyone is competing now on a global arena and global players in every market. A business at the end of the day is there to make money and alongside help the geographies it is located at,in a flat world today the benefits are no longer contained within national boundaries. There are no boundaries at all.

It is too late to stop outsourcing, it is almost as difficult as turning back time, with a global market scenario made of global players. The cost of operations go high because many a times government policies are in place to ensure better working conditions for everyone, which comes at a cost. Lower cost geographies work at times at inhuman conditions with very low wage structures. Changing local policies is not in the hands of the corporate companies so they decide to move basic jobs outside of the country. What makes accepting outsourcing difficult is that the common sense of deciding to outsource was made by 1/2% of the wealth makers or the top tier of a company. The workforce didn’t have a say and they are the one who also get unemployed.Being skilled saved the 1/2% of the world’s population who also possess the worlds 38% of the wealth? Looking at the skill pyramid we can make the following observations —

1. Majority of global population belongs to Tier 1 in the skill pyramid.

2. For Tier 2’s Occupational skills make them employable and in a better state but can become challenging depending on cost of living and willingness to work for lesser pay.

3. Tier 3 individuals survive irrespective of the geographic location. But it took time and effort to get where they are today.

So the countries where the jobs are being outsourced to are the lucky ones? Not really.The countries which are getting jobs from outsourcing might be thinking of outsourcing as a boon but in reality over the period of time -

– Teir 1 will soon ask for benefits and timely salary raise. The cost disparity will reduce over time for the companies.

– Tier 1’s children would aspire to move to Tier 2 and higher in coming years- reducing the workforce population.

– Inevitable rise in costs in 10-15 years will cause investments running dry as outsourcers will be looking for more lucrative locations and will move out to newer and cheaper destinations.

Something to worry about for the outsourced destinations is not to become dependent on the foreign investment for too long. They should invest in building infrastructure and support for independent growth in the absence of foreign investment as companies come and go as per their business convenience and the growth of a nation isn’t their primary concern. Its the concern of the government, they should make policies to aid development of the country and promote education and entrepreneurship.

So at the end of the day, who do we blame and point fingers at? No one as no one person is to blame. Education alone cannot be the solution,as higher education ensures better employ-ability and comfortable wealth conditions for individuals. Although definition of higher education has been changing over the years and double degrees and masters along with doctoral are fantastic for now but how about the future? The answer might lie with uniform global policies for trade etc.

1. For example, Uniform global policies for various industrial sectors to provide uniform ground for operation – although some might say some countries would not agree to global policies, but basic set of rules like ban on child labor which country in right mind can say no to that? Better working conditions for workers? Etc.

2. More jobs for basic skilled individuals? Encourage entrepreneurship, or run government aided cottage industries, upgrade skills of the basic workforce if they get unemployed instead of providing them with monetary aid, continuous education programs for new generation to promote education for all, offer jobs at outsourcing rates locally?

3.Businesses need to make profit but they are also accountable for the chaos created by them in the market. Companies who outsource should be encouraged to contribute in local job creation by either means of skill training or perhaps encouraging entrepreneurship and aiding educational development and in proportion to the outsourcing. When a 200,000 jobs get slashed for creating new jobs in other market, a slow transition to equip skills for the to be unemployed should be done.

This is a very raw summary of the various dynamics at work around the globe today. Constant struggle of the nations at reducing poverty and facilitating growth is making the gap wider among the rich and poor further. Collaboration is even further encouraged among the companies, governments and nations to encourage a balanced approach at growth, much similar to a diet of a human being.

cinnamoncinders: xamunteam: Xamun is now live and online for...

arpita — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:32:50 +0100

cinnamoncinders:

xamunteam:

Xamun is now live and online for business! It’s now up and ready for both Corporate and Freelance users. Check us out at www.xamun.com and don’t forget to follow us on twitter for more updates.

YAYY CONGRATULATIONS!!

Tata India's one of the biggest conglomerate and its aggressive takeovers

arpita — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:38:40 +0200

Tata India's one of the biggest conglomerate and its aggressive takeovers:

The country’s biggest manufacturer is Indian. What does it seek from and give to Britain?

Facebook : Change is the word

arpita — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:01:00 +0200

Oh yes tell me about it, my friends and colleagues keep expressing their frustration and distress over the ever changing layout of the Facebook and honestly its quite irksome. Ever since Facebook has existed since 2005, it has undergone changes every single year and at times as much as over 2 times in the same year. Yes it has been a long and irritable journey 2005 - 2011, and I believe its going to continue for quite some time to come. Irrespective of how much people hate Facebook’s habit of changing their layout way too often, it has shown a constant positive growth in its user. Question is if people hate the change so often, how does does Facebook survive still?

Some of the observations with respect to Facebook and its change has been as follows :

1. More the change = More annoyance = More the discussion with peers and friends.

Like we all know, ” There is no thing such as bad publicity”, now imagine millions of people using your application talking about your product with their peers, some who are active others not, so obviously people who are using it can participate in the discussion and be one of the “in” or “cool” people. Others who feel left behind start checking out what is the buzz all about, and well the change isn’t that bad that people stop using it. Repeating this over and over again creates free publicity for the product at virtually no associated advertising cost!

2. Regular users = Brand Ambassadors = Cool People = Increased Stickiness to product.

Like we discussed in the above paragraph, only the people who use the application on the daily basis are aware of the change and can participate in conversations with peers, so people start using the product to be able to participate in social conversation offline. Hence, willingness of people to use the product irrespective and wait for the next change to take place.

3. Regular change = Incremental newness = Improved interest.

On contrary to the annoyance to the change of its layout and some features, Facebook manages an incremental newness(novelty) to its product, and hence there is a minor learning curve just when people were getting used to the product and getting comfortable. Just before the product becomes rudimentary and loses its novelty factor, a newness is introduced by the Facebook in terms of the changes and despite the dislike to the change and the fact again something needs to be learned people complain and unknowing renew their interest in the product. I made a rough sketch to explain the effect.

In short, the change might or might not have been a positive additions each time, but certainly it has ensured continual growth over the period of years and promises to be a trait to watch out for the upcoming cloud based products. I wont be saying that its applicable to social products alone and not business, because over the period of time the line separating social and business would be getting thinner and thinner. People spend equal amount of time and sometimes more on trying to catch up with others from their work and who says mixing work and pleasure is a bad thing?

An important point remains for discussion and a critical one too, how to select the point of introduction for a new feature? Too early and you leave your previous feature short of being appreciated fully, too late and people are already bored and some might have even moved on to the next shiny novelty around the corner. In the fast changing world of business and cloud applications, “change” remains a critical component, being able to deliver new features, new tweaks every now and then to their customers and results into a self driven marketing engine for the product. What better can any product want? Like the FMCG’s say - All new and improved and whats better is Facebook doesn’t even need to spend a penny to let people know.

Google+ Open to All!

arpita — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:14:58 +0200

Google+ Open to All!

Xamun: Spread the Good Virus: How to Make Viral Videos

arpita — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 11:56:23 +0200

Xamun: Spread the Good Virus: How to Make Viral Videos:

xamunteam:

Being a Communications graduate I always had this mentality that what we should invest on and improve is our creativity bank. When I was a student I thought, sure, okay, there is plenty of room to make mistakes, do something out of this world, think outside the box, try to disprove theories and…

Freelancers and the new revolution

arpita — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:41:00 +0200

Revolution?Yes, you read it right, freelancers in our generation and generations to come will be how the majority of the work force would prefer to be and the thought alone is quite revolutionary. The last revolution which we had observed was that from industrialization and hence the rise of white collared and blue collared discrimination. Everyone wanted to be a white collared professional and being blue collared meant similar 9 to 5 slavery but without the similar working conditions or perks. Now the freelancers are a new breed of professionals who are neither white nor blue collared, they got no collars actually, more of t-shirt individuals.

US alone has 42million freelancers as of 2010 and from a recent survey conducted the US freelancers comprise only 50% of the global freelance market. Out of this huge market about 25% of the total freelancers have been truly freelancers ever since they started working and the rest have been driven to freelancing for either economic conditions or their desire to be more flexible in terms of work environment and terms of employment. Technology also needs to be paid its due credit and with the advent of remote working made possible with websites like www.freelancers.com and www.e-lance.com and skype, freelancing is becoming a more favored option among professionals.

So how happy are these guys? Do they like being freelancers? To answer these questions, we have interesting facts from a survey conducted of 3,700 freelancers, and 90% of them are truly happy with their work life and furthermore around 43% of them get paid lesser but also they work lesser than before. The number of full time freelancers has gone up by 18% over just 3 years (2007-2010) and so did the number of female freelancers. Only 21% of those professionals worked for more than 7 years in an organization. But sadly 48% of the freelancers faced troubles with timely payments from their clients and it remains their biggest headache till date.

Looking at the software side for this huge market, all there is at present at the moment are some project management software and mostly timing, billing and invoicing software applications. It sounds pretty simple and easy and sufficient at first, but is it all that is needed for freelancers to work with ease? Currently 36% of this group of professionals get their work from referrals, rest comes from social media and freelance listing websites, clearly there is no way for them to manage leads better and co-ordinate with them. There is lack of a solution which would help them focus on their business aspects and tell them how well or how poorly are they doing. Analytics for freelancers, client management solutions and some collaboration tools are the software applications this market needs. If the solutions are integrated on a single platform and on cloud, that would be cherry on top perfect!

Does America Need Manufacturing?

arpita — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:32:00 +0200

Does America Need Manufacturing?:

Just when one thought that a country can alone survive using knowledge and services, it is shocked today to find itself lagging behind in terms of automobile technology and manufacturing. It has a huge number of unemployed mass and is scrambling hard to gain its balance back being strong. Does it mean changing its strategy to include more of manufacturing and less of software a vital key to the situation?

Online Ad Spend to Overtake TV by 2016

arpita — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:31:58 +0200

Apple days: When hardware turned pretty

arpita — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:04:00 +0200

There were days when hardware was simply a box with support for the elegant software to run, enable it to be functional the way it was supposed to be, apple changed it. It was almost like a revolution how the boxes started looking pretty, simplistic and yet elegant, be it a cellphone, a laptop, desktop anything and everything. However, Apple wasn’t a hit in a day, it evolved and the evolution caught up with the whole world.

The story of the hardware evolution it is pretty much like the evolution of the legendary apple logo. In its initial days it depicted newton with an apple, depicting innovation and ingenuity, among the trees and scenery and other not so essential details. Moving on, the essentials were separated from non-essentials and we have the multi-colored apple, and the changes were not just in the logo alone but also in the looks of the hardware. 1998 marked the launch of iMac and the iconic new apple logo, very bare minimalistic and quite stripped down from the traditional overload of features but in hardware and the supporting firmware. It was not a very welcome thing as far as I remember, people complained and then they loved it. And then everyone wanted the way apple was, simple and minimalistic.

Today every cellphone wants to resemble an apple iphone, every laptop wants to be thinner and sleek and most of all with elegant streamlined. Apple has even influenced the way software that run on the phones, how they look and function, it is no longer complex, menu after menus, it is all laid out in front of you. So far, only commercial software reflect the apple influence, it is not far that all business applications try to reflect the same as well. After all, the apple products are used by professionals across the globe. The following charts show the breakup by age for both iPhone and I touch products—

Clearly,78% of iPhone users are in the age group of 18-49, working professionals and hence they are also used to the way the apple software works stripped down and simple, covering just the essentials. Business applications and software products today, if they want to capture this huge market of professionals has to be present in the appstore of apple and also live up to the definition of software defined by apple. Gone are the days when you have highly complex, convoluted menus and boring interfaces, design takes precedence and sure does simplicity. Welcome change for sure, for everyone.

Thank you apple, you “Finally” changed it for all of us!

Google+ User Statistics

arpita — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:33:31 +0200

Google+ User Statistics

Taking saas to market : Which Channel to chose

arpita — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:26:00 +0200

Software as a service model is bringing specialist software to small to medium size businesses like never before. Its a great news for the SMB business owners, and the market size is huge across the globe so why hasn’t the saas caught a wildfire by now already? Aren’t there Independent software vendors(ISVs) who are making such software? Of course there are saas ISV’s but there is a middle problem, the channel. So far, the traditional software were expensive and to implement the same took ages and then further time went in training people for using the software, the very difficulties had created a huge middle market called as Value added resellers(VAR) whose bread and butter were earned from re-selling such non-saas software.

Now for the saas, the implementation time, the huge at a time expense and to top it all, the extensive training are all cut down to the point of extinction. The modern saas software are all easy to use, pay as you go model and instantaneous to start using, hence the role of the VAR is cut down to almost nothing. So the middle market which used to be the most important channel for traditional software’s can no longer be considered for the modern saas software, there is barely any money to be made by them apart from the meager commission fee on the low cost software.

There have been suggestions of using banks and telco’s as the resellers as they are the ones who have a huge repository of the SMB’s and have a strong billing and collection system in place. But are they the right candidate to partner with for selling saas to SMB’s? The concern of the telco’s remain how to sell their packages of hardware incrementally such as phones and notepads to the huge SMB network and bundle the software application along the way. The SMB users across the globe are not entirely happy with the telco service providers for various reasons such as bad network, incorrect billing statements, difficult to get support from customer care which is more often than not lousy, so expecting them to sell and keep customers happy is not a very bankable idea for the saas ISVs. Second option suggested has been the banks. Banks are even less successful at the job than the telco, they might be excellent with their finance but expecting a bank to sell you a business software is more often than not quite an amusing idea to most of the people you may ask. Unless the bank is suggesting you some personal finance and other finance related software, which makes sense.So who fits the bill now?

The channel partner for the saas ISVs has to be a company which has a close online relationship with the SMBs. If you are expecting to sell an online based software your channel partner should be based online too. People use several online products today day to day in their lives, google, facebook, amazon and so many more. Perhaps these could be the channel partner ISVs should look for? Google is already running its appstore and is populated with many software with a live feedback from its current users. Its certainly lacks the famous human factor as once was the concern when online applications were coming up, but the very reason can be its strength. Because of low investment in manpower, these channels would be able to make better money than the traditional VARs.

There are only few big names who are currently doing this and hence there is a huge space in this arena for new players to come and grab the opportunity. Maybe saas will be a wildfire once the channel partner goes online too?