by Ayesha Dhurue | Jan 24, 2017 | Content, Marketing
Having a place online where you can understand the dynamics of media websites and traditional blogs, while creating quality content, on the same platform, for your business is a good opportunity. As content creators, you work hard to show your readers the good stuff, not only for the popularity for your business but for publishing a variety of topics — ideas/news/discussions currently trending on social media and search engines. Gone are the days when businesses took months and months to become successful. If you keep publishing new content on a website like Medium consistently, optimize that content for SEO, and remain active on social media, providing the audience with crispy content to read, over the long term you’ll be a hit! Until Medium took over, there existed only a standard method of blog posting for most businesses. Now, with Medium, you can take over, target your audience, generate better leads, and quickly publish crafted content in an organized fashion. There’s no waiting, no fabricated responses, and a completely new option to post on a daily basis that will alleviate your business in a matter of months. I, personally, love Medium because it allows you to care less about social media promotions or backlinks to get your content in front of potential readers. It’s a whole new world with over hundred thousand writers and readers, and you have the token to get your content to all of them. So the possibilities are endless. Create When you first join Medium, signing up is completely free and so is publishing limitless content. You can either opt to register with your Twitter or...
by Amreen Dhurue | Nov 17, 2016 | Marketing, Social Media
When your client asks you for a social media progress report for the previous month, what’s your feedback? Even though there are hundreds of social media metrics you could be tracking, the real question is, do you know which out of those hundreds you’ll find most useful to work with? Are you sure you need a complex excel sheet month after month, filled with more than required metrics, to help you in tracking the progress of your business? Maybe not. In this post, we’re going to talk about the important social media metrics you should be looking at to meet your Social Marketing Efforts. These important metrics will give you all the information and progress you need for your business. This will help you measure your marketing efforts and know if they’re working the way towards better engagement and exposure. #1 : Counting Heads There is real value in knowing what works and what doesn’t, but sometimes it has to be the cost of some really complex and overwhelming stats and progressive data. The number one question to ask yourself before tracking any social media metric is, What are you hoping to get from your Social Marketing Efforts? For our clients, we use SME as the most significant and deciding factor for attracting the audience and increasing engagement. If you are unable to answer this question, ask yourself, Does this (particular metric) help me in determining my decision? The first metric to track for any social media platform is the number of page likes. It’s easy to track the increased number of followers you get on your page,...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jul 5, 2016 | Content, Marketing
Content is a time tested strategy with major persuasive shifts in how businesses and brands communicate, not only to sell, but to bond with people on a more personal, yet easily relatable level. Content marketing initiatives have, over time, influenced directly our online time, from planning to execution. Normal consumers may not realize this phenomenon, but content has drastically changed how they understand and make major purchasing decisions over time. For content creation companies, good content is something that changes with trends, tactics, channels, and even with the way consumers consume content from different demographics. With such content marketing evolution, what exactly do you need to know moving forward? Here my 5 New and Use Content Creating Tactics to consider that will drastically improve your writing skills and make it more unique as per your professional or personal ambitions. TURN YOUR EMAIL INBOX INTO A BLOG IDEAS HAVEN: If you are having trouble creating new content, simply subscribe to different niche blogs and pick up their blog posts to create a well-defined blog idea calendar that can keep you buttoned up for the whole next week, or even month! CHOOSE A FRIENDLY TONE, NOT A METHODICAL ONE: Your writing is more understood, resonated with, and finally, appreciated if its friendly. Consider your writing a clear reflection of you when somebody wishes to speak to you, if you’re monotonous and methodical the first time- your speech is factual, but no companionable vibe, it’s a direct no-no. You want your readers to feel the same way about your writing as they would if they meet you in person- sociable and...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jun 1, 2016 | Advertising, Marketing
Consider this as a quick medium to get you to spending big bucks in online advertising. As you readers already know, online advertising is an enormous scale used by new and prevalent businesses alike to generate more brand buzz, as I like to call it, to expand their reach, find new customer ground and multiply their revenue streams from versatile channels. And hands down, paid advertising is a great way to drive new traffic, discover new leads and increase business effectively, but is it worth the trouble? To begin with, there are few things you need to lay off before jumping into Paid Internet Advertising, and once you’ve got that covered you’ll soon see your desired results and expenditure value with your advertising efforts. Online advertising is more or less finding a needle in a haystack, something that will definitely do the job. Remember, that solo needle isn’t just one lead or channel to acquire results from, but a whole new world of opportunities that help grow your business, scale your sales, and increase brand interaction online. Just by spending considerably less money on paid advertising, you can leverage superior results as opposed to the incalculable leads you may or may not receive from TV commercials or billboard advertising. This article serves as a quick guide to getting started with online advertising, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve just begun or have been swaying in the industry for a while, find what’s below as something that you can store with you for the rest of your advertising days in the business. And frankly, if you’re not from the advertiser’s...
by Amreen Dhurue | May 19, 2016 | Content, Marketing
What happens when you decide to do something new? Take on a task that you know you can perform, and may be you have even mentally and theoretically trained yourself to perform it, what happens then? You still end up making so many errors and feel frustrated about it. Now this is isn’t some philosophical article where I’m going to tell you that failing is absolutely normal and necessary in order to gain success. But I am going to tell you that, as a content marketer, there will arise many such situations where your content will go through at least 5 to 10 editing and changing processes before you actually create something that will earn the most links. That’s just how content marketing works, not life but content marketing and social media strategies. It’s easy to think that for your next content marketing campaign, you will use a set of new, creative ideas to garner not only more links but also more attention, likes, shares, sales, and what not, but it’s a whole different story when you actually have to sit down in front of your laptop and put these new ideas into words. Please let me re-state this point in another manner; what I’m saying is that it may be difficult (for most of us), but it definitely is not impossible. So before you start rethinking your life’s purpose, let’s talk about how you, as a content marketer, beginner or smarty pants, can create content with an improved link-earning potential. Little elements that can change a lot. You were expecting some point by point list but that...
by Ayesha Dhurue | May 12, 2016 | Marketing, Social Media
Are you interested in multiplying engagement on a network that encourages new artists and businesses to establish an online presence? Your Instagram feed remains as positive as your photos, so once you get people, both neophytes as well as recurring, to like your creative photos, you’ve got the only unique advantage of leveraging a good engagement rate from there. Wondering what it is? Let me tell you. [bctt tweet=”Your #instagram feed remains as positive as your photos. ” username=”crazecommerce”] The total number of likes you get on your Instagram photo is the exact number of leads you gain from that photograph. Generally, you set aside a few of those that are your friends or those that are fans, but still, if you really act on it, you can convince your Instagram likes to engage with more photographs, tag their friends to view, like and comment; ultimately you’re narrowing down your users’ search for better visibility and greater engagement. It doesn’t matter if you’re a newcomer on Instagram: even with 5-10 likes for your first photograph, you can headway 25-30 likes on your second photograph if you make a jump on your like and get to know their content as intently as you would want them to know yours. Can I genuinely maximize my engagement rate by the second photograph? Yes, you absolutely can! Just commit yourself to 10-20 minutes for every 5-10 like each day, and see for yourself how well your photographs start gaining exposure and engagement. Especially in the Instagram world, everyone move leads to another, so, if you stumble upon an extremely popular account, you’re less...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Apr 21, 2016 | Design
Website redesigning can be a scary thought for all the teams in your company, from IT and design to sales and even marketing, everyone has to be on their toes in regards to their responsibilities when expecting a complete overhaul when your website’s design is concerned. Since everyone contributes, you won’t find any missing element to work on towards the final launch, but surprise surprise! There is. Most companies often forget to include this one component during a website redesign and most times, they’ve realized it after they’re finalized with their product, leaving them no gap to work or tailor the website further. Even though this vital component isn’t a product of design or of shifting pixels from one edge to another and neither is it a major change that can potentially cost you immense shortcomings, it’s sort of an important one to consider when redesigning your website in 2016. Why Analytics? Analytics are often paused until the website is fancy, shiny and completely finished. And I understand why one would not consider keeping the analytics on during redesigning, instead, keep the old website layout on or in maintenance mode right until the new website layout is patched on. But having analytics on during a complete website redesign can prove to be extremely beneficial as your page viewers can unintentionally direct you to certain navigation errors, and other user experience issues that you would have had to amend later on when the entire website is polished and updated. Wouldn’t it be more efficient if some of your users could do the live testing of your website during the...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Apr 19, 2016 | Marketing, Social Media
The effectiveness of your social media presence can be taken to a much higher level if you are familiar with these 5 important social media tools. Trust me when I say that your boss wants to know these too! And if you don’t have a boss over your professional life, be your own, but get ahead in terms of increasing reliable engagement for your social media clients because it won’t matter to the millions surfing the charged social media platforms that you’re not in front of them, it’s your responsibility as a social media person to evoke the feeling of reciprocal action in your target audience with the use of these 5 social media tools. 1. Creating Quality Social Media Images With Canva, you can create excellent quality images for your social media marketing. With this social media tool, you get to pick from a variety of attractive designs, social media templates (for each particular platform!), background images, fonts, button, stickers, etc. You can create a Canva account for free and get ahead in position to brand your business the perfect way, make your social media images unique, and market your business in a way that it compels customers to click on your next blog post, product image or an ad. You also get an option to start designing for work, personal or educational purposes. This doesn’t affect the design options on Canva, they’re all the same for all of the purposes. If you want to get a step closer to making complete use of Canva, you can upgrade from a free version, but that you can...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Feb 23, 2016 | Marketing
When you’ve got too many WordPress SEO plugins to pick from, most of the times you rely on adept articles that are both most recent (maybe 1-3 months in age) and that have gained a significant amount of social share or response to prove that their credibility is for a fact. As you already know, WordPress is one of the best content management systems that outline convincing and far-reaching rankings for your blog/business/website. But when it comes to optimizing your website for SEO and higher rankings, WordPress offers this great plugin, in both free and paid versions, that will transform how you view content marketing for your website. Yoast SEO If you’re already an expert at SEO, Yoast SEO plugin will keep the posting process extremely simple. And if you’re still under the darkness when it comes to enhancing your to-be-published post so that it gets noticed like it should on Google and across the web, Yoast SEO plugin features easy tabs and a simple posting process to not only let you decide what kind of targeting you want for your post, but it also an in-depth analysis of your content to make it better and more SEO-perfect! How does it work? Yoast SEO was formerly famous as WordPress SEO by Yoast and it is undeniably the most complete and convenient SEO plugin available for WordPress. Bloggers can use it for a direct On-Page SEO since they know a bit or two about the basics of SEO and how it is absolutely necessary to have good SEO for their website. With Yoast SEO, you can simply do the following...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Feb 10, 2016 | Design
It’s a given that your footer is one of the most winning and significant locations on your website and while designing your website’s footer should be as important as designing the header, website footers are often neglected in terms of design on the front-page. Most of the times the footer design for websites are brimming with disclaimers, copyright It’s a given that your footer is one of the most winning and significant locations on your website and while designing your website’s footer should be as important as designing the header, website footers are often neglected in terms of design on the front-page. Most of the times the footer design for websites are brimming with disclaimers, copyright information, and other important informative links. Businesses need to look at website footers differently because users inevitably scroll down to the footer to look up for more information and ways to contact or get in touch with the business. You need to experiment with the footer content of your website to add more functionality, good construction and a creative design template that has the ability to convince visitors to pay attention to your website and serve its purpose. It is important to be mindful while creating your web footer design because many users will scroll to the bottom of the page when trying to obtain contact details and location of your business. You can still prioritize your contact details as well as add more footer content like social media links, special offers, featured products, trending blog posts, etc. to demonstrate different aspects of your business apart from the ordinary layout. Designing a great...
by Amreen Dhurue | Feb 9, 2016 | Marketing, News, Social Media
Now, Instagram users can access multiple accounts by quickly and effortlessly navigating between one or more additional accounts through Profile Options > Add Account. Then just enter the username and the password of the account you’d like to add. Once, you’ve added one new account, you can add more by tapping the username at the top of your profile screen and click on Add Account. The list also displays all your connected Instagram accounts. How do you switch between accounts? Once you’ve linked an Instagram account, you can switch between them by pressing down on your profile icon that displays your profile picture and you’ll see the list of added accounts to select and switch. You can even go to your profile and tap the username at the top of your screen to select and switch. The navigation is extremely simple and simply amazing! Things to know about this new feature: You can link your user account with 5 additional accounts. If you happen to log out of your primary user account and log into any one of the additional accounts you previously linked your primary user account with, please note that in Profile Options > … it will not show that it’s linked to your primary user account. Once you log out of all of your Instagram accounts through Profile Options > … you have removed all the accounts you’ve added to your primary user account. This means that you will have to connect multiple Instagram user accounts each time you log into an account. The settings will not be saved forever, regardless of you logging in and out...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Feb 5, 2016 | Business, Marketing, Social Media
Hashtags have become a powerful tool of discovery and popularity in the social media age. Everyone has their own conceptualized method of using different hashtags for their personal photos; businesses have mastered the art of understanding what hashtags to use as a part of their marketing strategy. This makes even a single hashtag a great asset for businesses to promote and define themselves at great lengths because it’s essential to target different kinds of audiences at once to grow your business and get it discovered. Hashtags were made famous by Twitter, but now the practice of including a keyword or phrase with ‘#’ before it, puts businesses, like yours, on the map of social recognition on almost every social media platform. This gives you the edge and power to harness hashtag use on how to market your business effectively. So, how to market your business by using hashtags? Below are a few easy practices that you can include in your online marketing to promote your business successfully. Identifying The Best Hashtag For some businesses, this comes out of habit. When you’re a business specific to a demanding market industry, you need to have full knowledge of what’s trending and circulating over various social media platforms in terms of hashtag use and its popularity. It is important to identify a starter list of the best hashtags related to your business to understand how to use a hashtag and how you can harness them to market your business. It’s not always encouraging to make note of all the trending hashtags for your business because that leads to overcrowding and makes your...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jan 29, 2016 | News, Social Media
Are you impelled to cripple your sleeping hours because you spend too much time on social media or you use social media more often because you’re unable to sleep? While the linkage between an individual’s sleeping pattern and social media usage is held in common and widespread, a recent study has shown that young adults who spend comparatively more time on social media each day get less sleep than those who surf social media less often. To compare between average and extreme, spending 61 minutes on social media each day and checking different social media channels on an average of 31 times per week caused trouble sleeping at night. Comparatively, spending 121 minutes on social media each day and checking different social media channels 58 visits per week caused higher degree of difficulty in sleeping. While features in the social media spectrum get more characterized, young adults are initiating more and more activities to connect with friends and new people around the world. According to the report, there can be any two hypotheses for an establishment such as this: either a young adult is driven to use social media obsessively because her lack of sleep or she neglects her sleeping pattern to use social media more often than usual. Regardless of the legitimate answer, young adults need to spread awareness among other young adults about the proper use of social media that doesn’t lead to any unnecessary anxiety that’s directly linked with insomnia. As far as the modern society goes, only when young adults raise the awareness about the usage of social media, young adults will rise in answer....
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jan 21, 2016 | Business, Marketing
Struggling with your marketing and brand awareness-when you don’t know about the latest marketing trend that’s shooting up sales, interaction and originality? The best way to stay ahead of business strategies and develop new ones is by identifying fresh new marketing trends. Having perfect knowledge of even one new marketing trend will help show you opportunities to grow your business, bring about significant changes in your involvement in the industry and make it easier for you to grow with the demanding population. With the popularity of website businesses shooting up, a strong marketing plan is essential if you want to grow progressively. We know that with the promise of an authentic and trustworthy website come many marketing channels like email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and much more- but what’s the step that harnesses these marketing channels in a new, exciting and a profitable way? The answer ends with this emerging marketing trend that has the power to change your business just like 2015 to 2016; a whole new paradigm and a whole new perspective. In a nutshell, what are marketing trends? Marketing trends are changing shifts or mediums through with people learn or improvise to communicate better online. It either results in an increase or a decrease in product or service usage. These can mean the following: Changing customer needs. Changing demographics. Social factors like change in social behavior in online networking. Ways customers experience certain technologies online like virtual reality, etc. In an unornamented language, marketing trends are influencing the way businesses and customers exchange information from one spectrum to another. Purpose...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jan 11, 2016 | Design
Hidden menus were subjected to oodles of negative and resistive remarks, but now not only is it adopted by many websites, it is one of the most exciting web design trends to look out for in 2016. The stature of a navicon in web design is worth looking into and websites adopting this trend and this sort of an experience to their design has forced us to absolutely love what the brainchild of hidden menus has to offer to web designers and developers: creative freedom. Hidden menus have redefined the space of menu listings that were once not taken into creative consideration before. The simple and monotonous menu design has become yet another challenging element for web designers to brainstorm and think deep about when creating menus that look compelling, exciting and visually zealous. We’re very much excited and steamed up to see (and experience) how creative web designers engineer the standard hamburger icon, paving the way to visually confident hidden menus, and change the way users browse and construe user experience in 2016. Below, you’ll discover 6 websites that have made use of the brainchild that is hidden menus in website design and how well it works for who they are and what they represent in the internet space. Demodern Demodern is one of the leading digital agencies in Germany. Since 2008 they have been designing and developing digital communication from websites to mobile concepts and wearable apps to event and store installation. Intelart Intelart is a team of well-organized front-end developers who love what they do. They’re the harmonious team of developers and designers you need for...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jan 10, 2016 | Frontpage, Marketing, Social Media
Imaginably, there are many new kinds of “internet” resolutions out there for the year 2016. While some focus on getting away from the internet, some should be to gain, within the realm of limitless possibilities, a community of influencers, learners and everyone in-between. For businesses and individual social media accounts, 2016’s ONLY SOCIAL MEDIA RESOLUTION should be conversation with intelligence and absolute immersion. This means to involve influencers into your social marketing strategies and let your presence dominate like a study in many profound industries where different people have different things to talk about inside their own social media box of engrossment. Read More: The Future Of Mobile Marketing Trends In 2016 The key to the many possibilities that 2016 means for social media, the ability to harness the way content and ideas are discovered, consumed and seemingly inspired millions, is enterprising. The web is getting aggressively active and crowded, still there is an inexhaustible space wide-open for business and individuals to try their hand and converse to share, inspire, motivate and invent ideas and a brand new perspective. The only social media resolution you need in 2016 is to make better, more intelligent conversations with those around you instead of typing a piece to yourself each time you tweet or share a Facebook status. How can you do that? It’s simple. You can ask questions, answer them or invent the kind of content that provokes others to either ask or answer. You can start commenting on content after you’ve discovered, understood them and truly understood them. We see tons of people commenting on content pieces that they have...
by Amreen Dhurue | Dec 22, 2015 | Business, Design, Frontpage
The beginning of any website page design is primarily focused on navigation, color, text, CTAs, and to-the-point information provided about the business. How can you bring in more flexibility between you and your visitors after they’ve discovered your website and what it offers? How can you broaden the communication funnel beyond content and visual elements, making it more personal and customer-centric? You can accomplish all that by the installing a simple live chat feature. Live chat comes in handy, and is deemed extremely crucial for ecommerce websites where customers have more queries regarding the product that they’re contemplating to purchase. Visitors often pose questions, request for more details on any given product or go over for more details about the brand. The trouble that was once seen in online shopping of customers being disconnected from someone who can answer their questions in real time is defeated. Through the feature of live chat support, on behalf of the brand itself, visitors can now navigate, effortlessly, throughout the website to ultimately make a sale. This is emerging as the most basic form of one-on-one communication between a new visitor on-site and the brand. Is it possible to recreate that basic form, so that it can benefit businesses scaling from different genres and standards, other than ecommerce? Yes, it is. With growing technology, knowledge and easy accessibility of information online, people know more about your business services and may have more profound, deep and accurately challenging questions to exhaust. Needless to say, you would want your visitors to post their questions about your business on your website rather than some other business-related...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Dec 20, 2015 | Project Management
This is very common issues many face on Jira. This happens when you add a new custom field on Jira and forget to associate the same with the workflow screen of Jira. You can find the solution for this below: Step 1: Go to settings > Issues Step 2: Go to Workflow Schemes Under Workflow Step 3 : Edit the scheme that require the new issue type to be added- say CC Internal Scheme needs to have Epic as an issue type. Click on Assign once the CC Internal Scheme edit page opens. Then click on Epic and then finish button Post that- just publish the Scheme on Jira, and voila, you’re done!!...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Dec 3, 2015 | Marketing
The mobile marketing industry has faced many emerging trends this year, 2015, and some have turned to ash while some are still dominating the face of market trends, which is cementing market leaders to enhance their online marketing tactics and strategies to stay up on it. The end of each year marks what has been and what will be: this time, mobile marketing steals the limelight for every online marketing trend predictions as we all know that mobile traffic has surpassed that of desktops’. Out of all the inventions and experiments, only a few things have had an impact on the way we work, shop, socialize, and live online. Mobile devices were traditionally meant to be a communication bearer in a very simple and cut-out funnel between two people; but the traditional means are improvised, advanced, and are monopolized in a way that each life experience from shopping, playing, working, socializing to even tracking physical health, can be measured, stored and put to future use. As marketers, there is a whole new parameter of ideas to experiment with and strategies to take out after. Some ideas and strategies may prevail in the marketing industry for a short period of time, leaving only the big ones to dominate the mobile marketing landscape. Mobile Marketing has become more than mere consumption by consumers and profitability of advertisers. Let’s see what it may possibly evolve into in 2016. Social to E-Commerce Promotion Apps that are extremely commonplace today, like Pinterest and Instagram, are taking their first steps into integrating a whole new paradise of allowing users to purchase any product- introducing them into a different...
by Amreen Dhurue | Dec 1, 2015 | Frontpage
While there are apps available for iPhone and iPad for moments of happiness, to entertainment, to dedicated physical training, and to sadness, there are many popular fun Christmas apps to usher in to make the celebration bigger than ever. If you’ve been gifted an iPhone or iPad this Christmas, it’s time you delve deeper into the merrymaking of the holiday season and download the top 10 Fun Christmas Apps that you will love! Give yourself a break from the Christmas-keeping, excessive gift shopping, decorations, and party planning. We bring to you Top 10 Fun Christmas Apps for iPhone and iPad that are all designed to be useful, exciting, information, entertaining, and funny. If you feel the Christmas spirit approaching, prepare for it in a tech-friendly way. Talking Santa for iPhone (Paid) Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Download address: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/talking-santa-for-iphone/id398853199?mt=8 Talking Santa is one of the fun Christmas apps you’ll download. It is a great way to celebrate Christmas with family and friends, especially when you get Santa to repeat your special holiday messages aloud. This app is also joined by the lovable characters from the Talking Tom and Friends collection. You can create and share joyous 3D video animation greetings and Christmas cards will make it one of the best fun Christmas apps that your kids will love too! Photo Lab Picture Editor (Free) Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Download address: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/photo-lab-picture-editor-effects/id441457218?mt=8 This app is an amazing app that provides you with variety of frames to create creative images, offering personalized greeting cards for every holiday, especially for Christmas. You can make custom 2016 calendars,...
by Amreen Dhurue | Dec 1, 2015 | Business
While some of us are content with working a 9 to 5 job, there are some who have the privilege and opportunity to start their own business. They are the ones who want to work for themselves, set their own working hours and be their own boss. While there’s nothing wrong in having such kind of a passion in life, making this dream come true, though, is a whole different story. Starting a business made easy with these 8 business tips: Create a Business Plan It is common sense to create a long-term and strategized business plan before embarking upon the business journey. A business plan helps you understand the different aspects of a business and how you can look into each of them thoroughly and use them to make your business successful. Create a Logo A well-designed logo anchors a company’s brand and becomes the representative of your company on all platforms available in the business industry today. A logo establishes your brand’s identity and is also the most effective and powerful marketing tool ever. In the world where “image” is everything, it is not only important to have a logo, but also to have a pretty unique and impressive logo, one that is professional and personal too. Finance your Business One of the biggest and most fearful challenges of starting a business is to find the right kind and amount of funding to launch your own company, and eventually grow it too. But this isn’t such a huge hurdle it was a few years back, because our global business industry is growing by leaps and bounds due...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Oct 15, 2015 | Business, Marketing
Most marketers have already heard about Marketing Automation and its perks to scaling up marketing strategies and tactics. Today, most companies are adopting marketing automation to enhance their marketing campaigns and to measure success and/or failure more effectively. According to Techopedia, marketing automation is defined as: “Marketing automation is the use of software and Web-based services to execute, manage and automate marketing tasks and processes. It replaces manual and repetitive marketing processes with purpose-built software and applications geared toward performance.” So, is marketing automation a software that tracks every online marketing activity of companies? No. It is much more than just a software. Marketing Automation is a process that not only graduates the system of tracking direct sales and conversions, but it makes your company’s feedback and metrics more effective for the long-run. Marketing Automation is a guide that connects several touch points throughout your campaign such as social media, content marketing and email marketing, and makes data look more friendly and useful for enhancing customer relationships for the present and the future. It can be defined as a marketing channel booster. Many companies that have adopted marketing automation have seen a shift in their metrics in terms of customer relationships, quality effectiveness and conversions. How does marketing automation make marketing easier? 1. While companies manually set up targets and goals for better campaign effectiveness, it can be difficult to maintain a strong communication passage between sellers and prospects. By collecting data on a prospect’s interests and goals, companies can custom-tailor messages and offers to seem more relevant and interesting. 2. Marketing automation helps content get to the right...
by Amreen Dhurue | Oct 9, 2015 | News
After the anticipation of a ‘dislike’ button, Facebook has finally introduced a brand new concept to express views. Facebook is taking reactions to the next level by making it more empathetic with 6 new emojis: love, laughter, happiness, astonishment, sadness, and anger. You can choose from any one of these buttons, including the standard ‘like‘, to express your views on the kind of content shared on the Facebook feed. In September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that Facebook was working on something to branch out from the existing expressing methods for users all across the globe. He suggested that it would be more beneficial and personal when the content that gets shared has a better way of rating. In order to more seamlessly connect people with content, this new feature that will soon roll out across the globe, is either a blessing or a disadvantage. Facebook users will soon get to share precisely how they feel about content shared by anyone (user, page, or ad) which makes companies and organizations on Facebook distinguish between the kind of responses their content is receiving. Further, analytics is more augmented and broadened to measure. But, that’s good for companies and organizations. What about people who use Facebook on a daily basis for revelry? Users who like to share content that is published by other brands and companies will consider this as a powerful tool that’s easier and more solitary as compared to the standard expressing tools. With random, disastrous and impending news, the empathetic emojis uncomplicate people’s interactive abilities but complicates how some publication is perceived on Facebook. When I talk about...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Oct 2, 2015 | Frontpage, Marketing
Bill Gates had conferred groundwork for the importance of content for informative and entertainment purposes for business, sales, exchange of ideas, and other internet transactions, as we know today by explaining why content is king. People are creating content, promoting content, and sharing content with others to a whole new grade. Firms are now advertising for goals that go beyond just selling products or services; they have introduced new horizons in content strategy to build an attractive audience that relates to what the brand (firm) wants to conquer, with a message and a purpose of making a sale. On the other side of the coin, consumers are not only accepting information from firms who are providing it to them, they are actively interacting to promote, support and engage in firm activities, with friends and members across the globe. The boundaries that keep us united aren’t digitally constructed, which means mammoth for both firms and consumers. Content is paving the way for a fitting environment where social media gets dominated by it. Next, it won’t be about how content is manipulating people to accomplish a goal or an objective; it will be about how people are sharing the content that firms introduce to build a following of their own. “Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” – Doug Kessler Content is king where sharing is the kingdom. Content is one side of the coin while sharing is the other side. Without the purpose of sharing, content has no reason to endure in the digital world. There isn’t enough depth and opportunity left when content is not shared...
by Amreen Dhurue | Aug 29, 2015 | Marketing, News, Social Media
In addition to square posts, Instagram users can now share photos and videos in both landscape and portrait orientation. Square format posts have been everlastingly popular on Instagram, but, lately, users have been using image tools like ‘Squareready‘ to fit either a landscape or portrait photograph onto a square format, leaving white or any other colored space on either side of the image (right and left or top and bottom). As popular as this trend took users to post pictures creatively on Instagram, we didn’t quite like the end result. To get your photograph or video in the landscape or portrait orientation instead of square format, tap the format icon on the left side of the post when you’re choosing a photo or video. While viewing the photo or video in the feed, you’ll see a full sized image or video. To keep the clean feel of your profile grid, your post will appear there as a center-cropped square. This update is great for both photographers and videographers because now they get to share better and more creatively. Here are some screenshots of how the Instagram feed would look like with this new orientation update. [Pic credits:...
by Amreen Dhurue | Aug 23, 2015 | Marketing, News, Social Media
Google results will now show tweets based on your search term and its popularity on Twitter. Previously, Google search result pages would only show visible links to Twitter profiles and pages, and not display the tweet of a particular profile yet. For example, searching for “Manchester United Twitter” or “man utd” will show you both the link to MUFC’s official Twitter page and will also display most recent tweets published by their...
by Amreen Dhurue | Aug 20, 2015 | Frontpage, News
Portent.com that provides Search Engine Optimization services has its own Content Idea Generator, which you can use if you’re looking for some outsourced information for your title. You can make use of this tool here, and enter a word or phrase (your subject) that your article is mostly about. Like if you’re curating an article about historical movies, and you’re looking for an impressive title for the article- you can add “historical movies” and you get countless numbers of options. Portent.com provides consulting services at the expert level in the fields of Search Engine Optimization, Content Strategy, Social and other marketing foundations. They also have a “Content Strategy: How to create one” page that provides you with a complete guide on how to write and audit content effectively. And it’s a really long article with exactly 652 steps. I’ve taken a few screenshots of the kind of subject title ideas that’s presented to you once you’ve entered your core keyword or phrase (“historical movies”). This tool can come in handy in brainstorming sessions as well. If you’re lucky then you can curate an article around any subject keyword that you choose to input and also mix and match words around the suggestions posted to keep your article title original and fun! ...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Aug 17, 2015 | Business
It’s time you build an awesome plan for your “big business idea” that you had weeks ago and don’t know how to begin with. This day and age, everyone is inspired to build an empire on their own for their business and excel at what they’re bringing to the world. When the first brilliant idea comes to you, you’re unsure how to set in motion the process of launching your own business. At this point, what you need is a solid plan of getting your facts straight about what your idea means to you (primarily) and then to those who you’re catering (your audience). While creating an online advertising plan, it is important to figure out the business marketing goals first, and then the steps required to meet those goals. There are multi-fold methods that you can use to make the First Business Plan, but I find this one most effective and purposeful. Step one: Write 2 or 3 short statements describing the nature of your business idea. When you can write paragraphs about what your business idea is, it can be slightly challenging to boil down your business’s story to 2 or 3 statements. But by using correct words and discarding statements that are more philanthropic than practical, you’ll understand the rhythm of where you’re letting too much on and where you’re missing out. To write a good business statement that is to-the-point and accurate, define the Mission & Vision statement of your business. A mission statement is what your business is going to be. And a vision statement defines that one primary way in which you’re catering...
by Amreen Dhurue | Aug 11, 2015 | Marketing, Social Media
Hashtags have become a stereotype in terms of discovery and popularity. Everyone uses hashtags for their personal photos, and also those for business purposes. Since the usage of them is widely popular and common amongst everyone, it’s time to unlock the true nature of a hashtag and what power does it hold online. The nature of a hashtag is not just recognition and discovery; what most people have misused their understanding of a hashtag is that it’s meant to convey a message so that people are available to listen. Hashtags were made famous by Twitter, but now the practice of including a keyword or phrase with ‘#’ before it, puts users on the map of social recognition on almost every social media platform. When you post a picture on Instagram of a puppy, you place more than 5 hashtags like: #puppy #puppylove #puppydog #cute #love For some, this comes out of habit. Hashtags shouldn’t necessarily be “word-relevant” because as popular as a trend can become on social media, the usage of different hashtags (a word or a phrase) on a simple picture such a puppy’s can be manipulated to fit in rather than look horrifying in a caption. There are many websites that let you choose the kinds of keywords or phrases you can add to your social media post that generate likes and followers. Not only websites, you can download phone apps to directly choose your genre of interest and then copy-paste an entire list of relevant hashtags that you can directly add to your post. This way, you’re making the process of using hashtags into your social...
by Ayesha Dhurue | Jun 17, 2015 | Design
While A/B Testing isn’t in the spotlight, yet, it has proven to become one of the most effective tools to change the face of design & goal conversions. People aren’t aware of it as much as they should be and the reason behind it is simply unknown. A/B testing can provide insights to your online visitor behavior, goal conversions and bounce rate. The best question you should ask is not the definition of A/B testing, it is how can you manipulate it to your profit? Nevertheless, I’ll provide a quick introduction to what A/B testing really is. It is what it exactly sounds like: you present two versions of a certain element on your webpage (A and B) that leads to the completion of your goal, these versions (A and B) are actively distributed among your online visitors, simultaneously, and in the end with the proper statistics (percentage of increase or decrease in your goal conversions) you decide which version is the winner (A or B?). Yes, it’s that simple. To determine which version (A and B) works better for your online website, you install both versions to experimentation, simultaneously, and you know which one works the best, after a period of time. You can measure the success of each version with metrics that matter most for your website. They can be downloads, purchases, sign-up forms, bounce rates, sales, etc. The kind of A/B testing you perform on your website depends wholly on the kind of goals you’ve allotted. Other than this, there exists no metric or testing strategy that you an set to better benefit from this tool....
