SigmaWay Blog

In this competitive world, advertising is very important for getting customer’s attention. But, a small industry has limited budget and they need to develop a successful marketing campaign, which creates revenue for them without expending too much. Here are some tips to grow business with limited budget:
• Make an interesting and short elevator pitch.
• Try to think locally because it can really pay off.
• Collaborate with local business.
• Networking is the best way to grow your business.
• Presenting speeches full of information about the product and benefits, in conference and events can be helpful.
• Try to build relationships with customers.
• Offer incentives and coupons to customers.
To know more tips and benefits of all these tips, please follow this link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246528

Social media marketing is considered to be the best way to reach the prospective customers. But it could be a disaster also, if not done with proper planning and strategy. Jeff Foster (Co-founder and CEO of Tomoson) in his article “How to build a social media marketing strategy that works,” discussed about some tips for building a good social media marketing strategy. That are:
• Understand your goals
• Create measureable objectives
• Characterize your customers
• Look at the competition
• Develop your messages
• Choose a content plan
• Choose your channels

For building an effective social media marketing strategy an organization need to define their mission that could increase their sales, creating brand awareness, etc. One should choose one or two missions at a time to make marketing more effective. To know more about these tips and their benefits, read an article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246085

In today’s competitive world, most of the organizations have a social media marketing as the part of their marketing strategy. But most of the time they won’t get success. Here are some common mistakes are discussed:

·         Choosing an incorrect platform.

·         Doing too much or too little.

·         Ignoring content marketing.

·         Inappropriate content or self-promotion.

·         No personal branding.

·         Canned responses to negative comments.

·         Not aligning with the target audience in terms of tone and messaging.

Here are some tips for choosing a right platform:

·         Facebook can be used for leveraging the community efforts and building trust.

·         Twitter can be used for broadcasting your messages and connect with thought leaders and people.

·         LinkedIn can be used for targeting a professional audience.

·         Google+ can be used for SEO efforts.

To know more about these mistakes and solution, read an article “7 deadly sins of startup social media marketing” by Radha Giri, http://yourstory.com/2015/05/social-media-marketing-deadly-sins/

About 85% of the world's population has email accounts and check their email inbox daily. So, email advertising is becoming very important. Email Campaign is the cheapest way of advertising and generates the highest Return on Investment (ROI). Here are some suggestions by Justin Zhu (CEO of Iterable) on creating good a email campaign:
1. Map out the customer flow.
2. Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much.
3. Embrace marketing automation.
4. Offer value with every touch.
5. Recognize lapsed users and bring them back.
6. Perpetually tinker with A/B testing.
To know more about these tips, follow: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2015/05/05/the-6-rules-for-creating-killer-email-campaigns/

According to Kevan Lee (Content Crafter, Buffer), testing phase in a social media marketing is an important phase, which include "What to test" and "how to test." Some questions you should ask yourself while testing are:

• Which one thing you will be testing?
• What metric will be my best measurement of success?
• Do I have enough data to assume this result will be true and repeatable for everyone?

In this article, the author writes about some tips for improving social media marketing test. They are: testing one variable at a time, look at the right data, compare consistently and check for statistical significance. 

To know more about the test used for various social media marketing sites, read on: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245478

According to Mike Proulx (Executive VP-director of Digital Strategy), social media marketing is also known as advertising. Social media marketing is also called paid marketing, as brands have to pay for showing the messages to target audience. Dick Costolo (Twitter), say that out of 20 tweets 1 is an advertisement. Brands are using social media for marketing as it more automated, targeted, instant, shareable and optimized. There are several ways to use social media marketing for advertising which are as follows:

• Open your wallet
• Play Blackjack
• Show Restraints
• Measure what matters
• Connect the dots
Read more at: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/social-media-advertising/297841/

According to Aaron Agius (Contributor), social media is an effective marketing medium. There are many marketers who use Facebook followers, retweets, etc. to monitor their performance, but there are some other metrics like brand search volume, lead growth, brand sentiment, inbound links, and klout score. Social share provides very little information about the overall effectiveness of your campaign because: Many social shares come from bots.
• Social shares many not come from your target customers.
• Social shares can be from people that are speaking negatively about your brand.
Read more at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244669

According to Monica Zent (CEO & Founder of Foxwordy), social networking just takes a quarter of all time spent online to reach more than 75 percent of all internet users. Social selling, basically, is engaging with your target audience via social media. To leverage the power of social selling you must understand your stakeholders (customers, investors, clients, business partners etc.). Once you find your target, you need to engage with them and for building long term relations, you need to be credible. This strategy helps to generate 50% more sales. Read more at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244293

According to Manish Godha (Founder & CEO, Advaiya Solutions), social media seems to be the most attractive media through which a business can interact with an audience. Individuals allow an exceptional view into their thought processes, by leaving traces of their activities - personal, social and professional - on the internet. Social analytics attempts to draw relevant understanding and inferences from them which could be used by different divisions of various brands. It is very difficult to ensure that the analysis is relevant and reliable. The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment in order to support marketing and customer service activities. It is important that the models correspond to the business context and the intervening mechanics are accounted for. Read more at: http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/social-listening-for-market-intelligence-114092100688_1.html

According to Pernille Bruun-Jensen (leader in marketing efforts for NetBase) both digital marketing and customer care have moved beyond the Web to social media. Marketers have advanced technologies at their disposal. Social data is providing the higher returns on investment that business leaders are asking for. Similarly, emergencies can be detected and prevented before it is too late. To successfully lead in social media and henceforth in digital marketing, marketers need a strategy based on accuracy and speed using real-time tools. Next-generation social analytics reveals not just who is engaging with your brand and what they are engaging with, but why they are engaging. To know more about what next-generation social analytics can do for a brand go to: http://www.adweek.com/brandshare/next-gen-social-analytics-are-transforming-digital-marketing-160064

According to Laura Cole (marketer and researcher based in the UK) content marketing has emerged as effective method for promoting products, sharing information and motivating brand recognition. It differentiates between Public Relation and social media. Social media offers an advantage in case of online brands as it is entirely free to access and enables you to share and promote your content easily. One can reach a larger audience through social media platform. It also allows messages to be tailored and therefore real-time interactions can be generated with customers. This is a huge boon for business owners, traders and entrepreneurs. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/public-relations/social-media-marketing-represents-new-face-pr-01003698

63% of IT pros said that they would not consider a candidate for employment if they saw one to five social media comments about that company and 68% IT leaders said they would not consider a candidate if they saw a single negative social media post about his or her current employer, as seen by the TEKsystems survey. Social media plays a very important role in IT hiring. 68% IT leaders use social media to search for candidates and 82 percent use it to screen them. LinkedIn was rated as the top source for finding prospective employees. Facebook was second with 9%. 75% of IT pros rely on social media with 67% citing LinkedIn as the best source for finding jobs. Facebook came in second at 12%, followed by Google Plus at 7%. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297739/social-media-matters-hiring

According to author Avneet Gupta (Country Manager, IBM Collaboration Solutions, IBM India), with advancement in technology and workforce dynamics, organizations today are totally focused on socially-enabling business developments. By rethinking and reworking the existing processes through a social business lens, the workforce gets more involved, operative and productive thereby delivering great returns for organizations. The biggest concern is therefore to better understand employees along with supervising the transformational changes required for constant innovation and alteration of the workforce. The progressive organizations globally have already invested in adapting to social changes for smarter workforce. Read more at: http://www.indiaonward.com/the-power-of-rethinking-the-work-through-a-social-business-lens/

Social media screening has become common among recruiters and hiring any official and also in many college admissions. It is primarily focused on job candidates and employers, but it can be applied to students, athletes, admissions offices and coaches as well. Employers are "googling" job candidates and searching social networking sites as part of their pre-employment background checks, and admissions counselors and coaches are using similar practices to make acceptance decisions about prospective students and athletes. An article in New York Times reveals that the reasons to reject - and accept - students based on their social media activity are similar to those used by employers. Read more at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/social-media-screening-guidance-individuals-and-organizations-slideshare

 A number of companies are creating new avenues for revenue generation by thinking out of the box and encouraging amateur-made catchy videos on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This approach helps to nurture talent. Famebox, a company supported by Malaysia's Astro Group, is on a project where it aims to create "webstars" and make profits in an unconventional way, by making videos go viral so that they bring in at least a million hits. Revenue can also be generated by sharing with YouTube but it depends on the sponsorships from brands that are looking to advertise on social media. According to Kunal Rao, co-creator of The East India Comedy, the shift to online media for satire and commentary is due to the rising censorship on TV channels. To know more, read at: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-16/news/52873607_1_video-online-social-media-viral

Ideas like appointment and dimension mean lots to several public. We listen to experts asking us  to interrelate with all our admirers, that social media is concerning one-on-one communications in order to be winners. So, can big brand make social media meeting? Are the experts practice  similar for the brand with 500 admirers as for the brand with five million or more? The answer may be yes and no. The solution to the conversation has to do with level, which is the most misread concepts in advertising. level has to deal with percentage and size. When a little school tries to duplicate a social media movement by a superior school, it possibly doesn't be unsuccessful because the audiences are dissimilar in demographics, requirements, or online behavior. So what happens when we are too big to help with every admirer? The key is to range the plan and not the tactic.Read more at:http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-big-brands-build-social-media-engagement

Facebook along with market research agency GfK commissioned a study, according to which more than 60 percent of adults in the US use at least two devices every day, and more than 40% start an activity on one device and finish it on another. Facebook announced this week that it will track users' actions between devices and share with advertisers when an ad or promotion leads to a purchase. Facebook plans to capitalize on the multi-device trend. This will give marketers valuable information to make more informed advertising decisions, it does not pose any threat to users' privacy, said Rebecca Lieb, analyst at Altimeter Group. The information Facebook shares, is neither personal nor personally identifiable, she explained. Facebook is the first company to offer this type of information to marketers. Marketers can find the new cross-device conversions for campaigns within your Facebook Ad Reports. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297575/facebook-track-shopping-habits

According to some people branding is equivalent to ranking but actually you can position yourself at different times in different markets as different things. Branding is a hard-core recognition factor. We are a generation and a nation wanting to be special. We want to be richer, more beautiful, better dressed, and more effortlessly gorgeous than any other generation that we know. Contrary to how many people think branding is not just a logo and brings with itself benefits of it. Branding your business ensures that consumers will know what you're about and so you are remembered. Secondly, people build close bonds with brand identities. Consumers want quality products that they can trust and you gain customer loyalty easily. While Internet branding offers huge opportunities for business, in order for it to be effective, one needs to attract and engage its customers and that is not easy on the Internet. Your Internet branding strategy should make your online brand noticeable and apparent. Think of the message you want to convey and the image you want to be formed and that is your brand. Read more at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/understanding-branding-importance-marketing-your-business

The genuine number of likes measures the success of a brand. Most of the time users are forced to like pages for getting access to apps and games. So it is important that when someone likes a page he does that genuinely so that facebook gets a “quality connection”. Thus brands no longer would be able to force users to like their pages and thus this would be a positive change for brands and agencies as well. As users are shifting towards mobile facebook the “like gate” strategy of making users like pages forcefully won’t work anymore and now brand need to provide stronger reasons to users for liking their page. Thus a genuine relationship is created. Now it should be more important to reach out to customers that count than counting customers.

This strategy would provide grace period for adjusting and affects local marketers mostly. Brands should pamper their customers than just feeding them up with incentives. They should have a long term strategy than a tactical one. Marketers should not only cherish the number of fans but also engage more with each piece of content.

read more at: http://www.marketing-interactive.com/facebook-initiates-new-policy-for-genuine-fans/

Unless cyber bullying is resolved and removal of objectionable content is done, major social media websites and apps are going to get a check from an Australian government official. They might also be named and shamed if they do not act properly. An e-safety commissioner is to be appointed by Paul Fletcher, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Communications, who will be the central point of contact for children, parents and law enforcement agencies. He would also fly regularly overseas to establish informal relationships with people. He would be given the responsibility to travel when any new site is made and make them understand that they might be told to take out objectionable posts if they do not fulfil their expectation.

The sites must have complaining schemes for objectionable content and terms of use defining cyber bullying. Education should be given against cyber bullying. Several sites have objected to the appointment of an e-commissioner because that might threaten free speech and claimed that industry oversight might serve the purpose better. Read more at: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/were-watching-you-social-media-sites-face-being-named-