SigmaWay Blog

Big data analytics can analyze the past behavioral data of humans. It is highly correlated to future outcomes.  The most important task is to understand how much emotional extent can be predicted accurately. By analyzing critical reasoning and judgmental decision, there will be higher chances to predict more efficient human behavior. Social media plays an important part by providing more sensitive data having higher emotional quotient. Search dynamics also help to predict future trends. Therefore, combining big data, transaction data and social data along with shopping behavioral data opens a new horizon which enables marketers to influence human behaviors and perceptions. To read, follow: : http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2016/02/02/has-big-data-taken-the-human-out-of-human-behavior/#2280493b170c 

Earlier, organizations need to analyze the impact of external factors on the basis of performance. They used old statistical modelling tools and took months of data collection and analysis and guessed the external factor which had more impact on the business. These models became outdated as soon as they were developed as external data were constantly changing. During the economic crisis, companies did not understand the economy. But, nowadays, as consumer behavior and other useful data sets have become more available, businesses can address challenges and opportunities by improving bottom line profits and helps to generate higher revenue by following correlation of real time data model.  For more read the article written by Rich Wagner (President and CEO of Prevedere) at : http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/transforming-an-antiquated-business-intelligence-process-/a/d-id/1324197

Customer Relation Management is a combination of technology and collection of database of sales contact. This combination can be positively used to make a marketing strategy. This can be used to create awareness among the different departments of the organization, regarding the important actions that a customer has taken. Automated alerts can be sent notifying the important actions relevant to a team. Consistent messaging is required at times to stay in touch with the customer. This can be either with regard to feedback. Thus helping in getting insights of the customer. These practices help in understanding your customers in a better way. This improves your customer loyalty, hence resulting to improved engagement. Read more in the article written by Bruce Swann (Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign) at: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/5-ways-crm-data-benefits-your-marketing-strategy/

The use of analytics can bring major change in the hospitality sector. It is important for hoteliers to understand the preference of the guests, purchase behavior and profitability in order to increase the brand loyalty. By using analytics, it is easier to do segmentation according to booking trends, behavior and other constituents. To know more about the use of analytics in the hospitality sector, read the following article by Bernard Marr (Contributor at Forbes)-:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/01/26/how-big-data-and-analytics-changing-hotels-and-the-hospitality-industry/2/#7135d10f19b6

Any decision pertaining to designing products, environments and brand experience is closely connected to the use of colour because it depends on the buying behaviour of customers, brand perception, strategic differentiation, and user experience. But availability of information related to colour perception is limited. Organizations are using big data to analyse colour preference and perception which contains over a 100 years of data. They divided their study into four categories regarding colour data, analytic and insight:

1. Colour competitive intelligence is relevant for aggressive in brand competition.

2. Colour legal intelligence helps to identify the colour norms available to different countries.

3. Colour Research Intelligence collates colour studies that have been conducted over the past century, world-wide, about the industry and product segments.

4. Colour listening intelligence signifies how much buzz about a particular colour is popular in the market.

These all studies benefit other companies by creating their own colour mix to attract new customers, branding and dictate consumer preference trends.

To read, follow: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michellegreenwald/2016/02/17/a-new-comprehensive-4-in-1-big-data-resource-to-aid-color-innovation/#6e729df04012

The super bowl is the place where the big corporate battle within themselves to win a commercial spot. They use real time data. The use of real time data is helping marketers to solve some of the continuing mysteries of media value and also helping brands to understand the connections between paid and earned engagement. Want to experience more, then read this article by Rob Salkowitz (contributor in Forbes)-: http://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/02/07/whos-winning-the-super-bowl-ad-battle-live-blogging-the-big-game-with-real-time-data/#208c134c44c6

Social Media Crisis leaves a lasting and damaging impact on the brand's reputation. This involves strong, negative emotions which go viral in a very short duration of time. If the crisis does not take care of promptly and thoughtfully, the risk escalates. This situation can come from anywhere, from the least expected sources. But the key lies in properly responding to it, rather than reacting. In such situation, it is essential to have a crisis management plan handy. If the mistake has been on your part, acknowledge it and respond very carefully. It is important to have a crisis management strategy and its proper execution. The negative emotions can be appeased by a good customer loving response. Read more about this at:   http://www.computerworld.in/feature/how-handle-major-social-media-crisis

People spend more time on the social media nowadays. So, marketers are targeting their customers on the social media platforms. As a result, organizations having a social media presence are generating greater ROI. Social Media is a new communication channel that presents the combination of communication and information. With the integration of powerful search engines, people use it as a source to search for information. Organizations can also check what people are saying about others. Marketing is about your presence at the place where your potential customers can be present. Salespeople are a source for news for their clients on these social networks. There has been a decrease in the budgets for marketing with the help of social media, without affecting the marketing strategies. Read more about this at: : https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/2016/02/16/social-media-marketing-investing-roi-imi

Staying up to date with technology is essential. It can determine the success and failure of the business. Technology plays an important role in following ways –

·         Online Presence: Starting or running a business is simply not possible today without an online presence. An effective digital marketing strategy can help immensely in increasing brand awareness.

·         Marketing Strategies: To land more people on your website, you will need content marketing techniques and email outreach campaigns. Moreover a good PPC campaign can help in targeting the right customers without spending too much on marketing.

·         Stay up to date with available technology: Always be equipped with the latest hardware and software in the market to increase your speed and productivity.

·         Stay up to date with software solutions: Solution like cloud computing will save your data online which can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

Read the complete article here: : http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/marketing-strategies/improve-your-business-by-adapting-to-modern-technologies-71423

Digital Transformation has brought a lot of advantages as well as challenges. In the race where everyone is rushing to get digital, customer experience holds the highest priority. Digitization not only affects the internal working structure of the organization, but also affects the customers of the company. Digitization is taking place in every sector. So those who keep themselves isolated from this will be marginalized completely. With the expense of mobile technology, users are getting very comfortable with remote control. The daily access to the digital world has brought a huge change in the customer behavior, so the digital strategy of an organization must be comprehensive. To improve the customer experience, all the departments must be working together. Moreover more the digitization, higher the amount of data. Data must be from the various departments must be integrated through a good communication channel. Read more about it in the article written at: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleurope/digital-marketing/pac-study-customer-experience-in-the-digital-age/

From a consumer's perspective brand equity research, usually involves collecting data on consumer mindset. It measures of brand equity from the consumer through surveys. The data is used to assess the consumer’s perceptions towards the brand. From a firm’s perspective brand equity research involves the use of observed market data to assess the brand’s financial value to the firm.

The Net Promoter Score shows how much loyal are the customers. High score of NPS means the growth of the company and how the growth is achieved. Rating a company on the total value the company offers, compared to the total value offered by other suppliers of similar products/services, the Net Value Score is calculated. The benefits are -

1. It enables us to easily compare one company with another in a similar field.

2. NVS measures value and therefore is a good predictor of the likelihood of a company winning or losing market share.

3. Determining the Net Value Score is simple.

Read more about it in the article written by Julia Cupman (VP of B2B International) and Paul Hague (Director):

https://www.b2binternational.com/publications/brand-equity-research/

The goal of marketing technology is to deliver "the right message to the right customer or audience at the right time," says Jake Sorofman, research vice president at Gartner. Marketing technology has evolved into a combination of complex software and data. Tools which are used today with marketing technology also create new complexities and difficulties. It can't solve the ad- waste dilemma. This means that the marketing team wastes billions of dollars on digital ads that no one sees. Marketing tech can't tell about the impact an advertisement had about the brand to the viewer. Read the complete article here: http://www.cio.com/article/3024934/marketing/how-and-why-marketing-tech-fails-to-deliver-on-its-promise.html

There is a lot of confusion building around marketing tech and ad tech. Are they same or different? There are minute differences between the two. Let's see what they are. Marketing technology comprises of tools that manage marketing processes, customer analytics, digital content and workflows. It covers all aspects of marketing, SEO, and even ad tech. It is basically the understanding the customer and optimizing data science around them. Programmatic buying and selling of advertisements are referred as ad tech. Both of these technologies also share many similarities. Read the complete article here:  http://www.itworld.com/article/3030325/marketing/what-the-hell-is-the-difference-between-ad-tech-and-marketing-tech.html

There was a time when all the retail stores were taking their business online. But now the well- flourished online stores have begun to establish their brick and mortar stores. In addition to the online setup, they are now even working on traditional retail. An online presence has become crowded and expensive. According to a report, there are more than 800,000 online stores, all competing to attract customers through the gateway of Google. By opening the physical stores they aim to create awareness and attract more customers. They have seen that this creates awareness for their brands and drives a lot of traffic to our website, as well and accelerate the e-commerce sales. Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/30/future-of-e-commerce-bricks-and-mortar

Business Plan is a systematic evaluation of the business goals, the reasons behind attaining them and tailoring a plan to reach up to them. The reason for the failure of many businesses is that they don't start with a business plan. It is essential as it helps in realizing the vision of next 2 to 5 years. So the start- up can always keep a check whether they are proceeding in the right direction. Must haves of a business plan are: Business Overview, Market Analysis, Marketing Strategy, and Financial Information. Before you start writing your business plan, you should honestly evaluate yourself and decide if your business idea has a good chance of success. Write down about how you intend to make money, what will be your business model. Start with your company description. A thorough description of the business environment and analysis of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats supports its marketing strategy. Financial information, gives the details of how the company will run the finances in the upcoming years. Read more at:  :  http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/four-major-types-information-presented-business-plan-9328.html

Contextual Integration refers in identifying meaningful relationships between different information types. This gives a multi-dimensional view of the data rather than a single access point. The best approach is to analyze these volumes of data from different perspectives. The traditional way is to follow a fragmented approach. The web teams, marketing and sales team will look at the different statistics offered by data. This lengthens the time to take decisions and also introduces inaccuracy. The need is to look at data from many angles to create a multi- dimensional profile of the customer. Then predictive analytics can assess and lead to intelligent messaging. Machine Learning is also helping to improve these predictive analytics algorithms by checking it on the real time data. Read more about it in the article written by Dominik Dahlem (Senior Data Scientist at Boxever) at: http://data-informed.com/contextual-integration-secret-weapon-predictive-analytics/

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that focuses on display ads to the visitors after they have left your website. It is a cookie based technology. It has proved to be of benefit to B2B businesses, according to the statistics. Retargeting can be done in three ways.

 1. Pixel-Based Retargeting: The marketer places JavaScript code on his website which drops a cookie on a visitor's browser.

2. List- Based Retargeting: The marketer prepares a list of contacts from email marketing campaigns or for some other source. It then serves them with a specially targeted ads on the Social Networking platforms.

3. Search Retargeting: Search retargeting targets user audiences based on previous keyword searches, they have conducted on search engines such as Google, Yahoo & Bing.

There are many tools available in the market that can be used to design the strategy for retargeting. Read more about it in the article written by Jessy Smulski (a valued contributor to Business 2 Community) at: http://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/tips-retargeting-b2b-leads-beginners-guide-01441414

The smart span filtering algorithms of the internet service providers make it difficult to reach the user's inbox with advertisements. So to take benefit of the email marketing, you need to keep few things in mind. One needs to integrate a HTML button in your email that is coded as Call to Action (CTA). These make the emails responsive. HTML buttons help in building and engaging traffic. A well designed HTML email reinforces your brand even in the email. The HTML button is visible before the images get loaded. According to a report, the majority of the online purchasing begins from the mobiles. So the emails should be very responsive for these devices. The three components needed for this are: Right breakpoints, Larger Text on Mobile Devices, CTA buttons. Read more about it on: http://blog.marketo.com/2015/12/3-email-marketing-must-haves-to-conquer-the-inbox.html

Start-up and entrepreneurship is not only regarding ideas you have, it also regarding the execution of that idea. Great ideas without execution and follow-through stand nowhere even if you have a good idea. The important things one need to do, if one wants to achieve success with your ideas are:

1. Be confident.

2. Accept risk.

3. Define your purpose.

4. Create a plan.

5. Assemble a like-minded team.

6. Constantly build momentum.

7. Anticipate obstacles.

8. Establish a professional/personal balance.

9. Set micro-goals.

10. Be patient.

To read in detail, follow the article by Jonathan Long (Founder and CEO, Market Domination Media) at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269869

Most businesses need a combination of multiple marketing techniques to exhaust the full potential and make it more productive. Though internet usage is increasing each day, but offline marketing channels still involve lots of customers. Best marketing strategies merge both offline and online marketing. This might seem a difficult task, but machine learning models make it easier. These lessons from the data field which channel, in what way, and at what time will be most effective for the particular set of customers. This is called intelligent messaging. Thus leading to maximize success of marketing. A significant increase in the success rate has been observed in the marketing strategies using these techniques. Learn more about it in the article written by Brendan O'Kane (managing director and chief executive officer of OtherLevels) at: http://www.itproportal.com/2016/01/04/intelligent-messaging-big-data-machine-learning-a-powerful-combination-for-multi-channel-marks/