Tips For Promoting Your Business Page On Facebook - Prabhakar

Tips For Promoting Your Business Page On Facebook - Prabhakar

   July 14, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Tips For Promoting Your Business Page On Facebook – B2B Marketing And Sales Tip 

Written by Ellie Mirman, blogger at the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog and Inbound Marketer at Internet Marketing company HubSpot.

So you’ve got a Facebook Business Page… Now what? Building a Business Page is one of the best ways to increase your presence and engage more potential customers on Facebook, but it’s more than just clicking “Create Page”. As you venture out into the social media world, here are a few tips to help you promote your Page and reach more of the 100 million Facebook users.

Create a Facebook Business Page worth becoming a fan of.

To quote David Meerman Scott, nobody cares about your products and services (except you). People care about how you can help them solve their problems. To extend that thought to Facebook, don’t use your Facebook Page to talk about your products all the time. People aren’t interested. Instead, create some interesting, useful content that people want to receive. This could be blog posts, whitepapers, or simply discussions.

Take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook.

Facebook provides great opportunities for viral marketing. Facebook creates a “News Feed” of your friends’ activities on Facebook, like posting photos, changing statuses, or becoming fans of a Page. What this means is that every time someone interacts with your Page in some way, that action is published across all of their friends’ News Feeds, giving you exposure to that person’s entire network. The best way to take advantage of this is to engage your users and give them more opportunities to interact with your Page, for example, by fostering discussions, inviting them to events, allowing them to post links. Leveraging the power of the News Feed is a critical part of establishing your presence on Facebook and building a fan base for spreading your messages.

Don’t forget to draw on your network.

All promotion does not need to take place within Facebook. Feel free to email your opt-in e-mail list, blog about your Page, and post a link to your Page on your company website. The best people to help you build up your fan base for your Business Page on Facebook are those people already subscribed to your blog or engaged with you in some way.

Optimize your Page for Facebook – and public – search.

Another way to get found and build your fan base is through Facebook’s search. Facebook – like all other search engines (Facebook was noted the most used people search engine) – has an undisclosed algorithm that ranks search results in a way that aims to return relevant and useful results to the searcher. The best think you can do to show up higher in these search results is to build a large following of your existing fans, because entities with a larger network tend to show up higher in search results. Also note that Facebook Business Pages are public and indexable by search engines. This potentially gives you exposure to those searching in broader search engines like Google. To make the most of this, start lots of engaging discussion threads on your Page, so that if someone is searching in Google on that very topic, they can stumble upon your Facebook Page and discussion thread.

Get an extra push with Facebook Ads.

If you want to give your Business Page an extra push at the beginning, you can also buy some advertising slots. Note that Facebook ads are much less effective than the viral marketing options on Facebook, and the click through rate for Facebook ads is notoriously low. Facebook advertisements show up on the sidebar as users browse through their friends’ profiles, groups, and so on. When you set up your ad, be sure to include “social ads” – these draw on a users’ network to see who in their network has already engaged with your Page and shows, for example, “Jim Smith is a fan of Company ABC” next to your ad, potentially improving your click through rate. Also, make sure that you give viewers a relevant reason to click on your ad by inviting them to connect with industry peers or offering a free whitepaper, for example. Also in this vein, note that you can target your ads by age, gender, interests, geography, and other factors, to reach users who may be more interested in your Business Page.

Bonus Tip: Measure your results.

Once you’ve built up your Facebook Page it’s good to measure what you’re actually getting out of your social media program. Some metrics you may want to measure are:  number of fans, page views, and unique users. Facebook’s “Insights” provide some of these metrics, including demographic data. You’ll also want to track actions beyond your Facebook Page, namely, website traffic, leads, and sales that come from Facebook. Hopefully some of these tips will help you get your Facebook Business Page off the ground and build it into a valuable channel for reaching your potential customers.

All this said, social media, including Facebook, is by no means static. It is constantly changing and we, as marketers, are constantly learning the right way to leverage these channels for marketing. If you want to see what we at HubSpot have done, you can become a fan of our Page at http://facebook.hubspot.com. And, if you’re looking to network with other marketers on Facebook, you may be interested in the Facebook Pro Marketers group, a group for marketers passionate about marketing. Perhaps there we can continue discussing ideas for marketing on Facebook.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

how many Italian are really needed Data center

how many Italian are really needed Data center

   July 08, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Data center, how many are needed really to the Italian?

The Agency for Digital Italy has started to rationalize the regional level. But it opens the debate, two national Ced in Rome and Milan will be sufficient to ensure greater efficiency and cost cutting?

Luke Beltramino, Managing Director TelecityGroup Italy

If the premise is positive, the declination is negative. The Italian state, according to the orientations of the ' Digital Agency Italy - Agid, wants to streamline and optimize the system in the data center of the central public administration (PAC) and the PA in general. Protagonists and perpetrators of this - needed - the revolution will be the regions. In essence, they will be created from scratch in each of the 20 different Ced Italian regions. This means the creation of 21 local agencies if we consider the two autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano.

As pointed out by the "Courier Communications" on June 9, in the regions of ICT professionals working fine. Nevertheless, the wealth of data centers of the PA is estimated to amount to 1,033 units in the Pac-only, to go up to 4000 considering all the PA (Agid position paper "Guidelines for the rationalization of the ICT infrastructure of the PA").

According Assinform, the annual expenditure on ICT in the public administration would amount to about five and a half billion Euros and 30% of this is due to the data center management (2011 data). Among the data center of the CAP and the local PA (Regions, Local Authorities, Health), would be used more than 20 thousand people. Most of the organizations and industry observers agree that the current assets in the data center is inherited from the past, policies and guidelines for energy efficiency are inadequate, human resources often poorly trained and motivated people.

 Faced with this scenario, you need a radical change. What to do? The solution, in my opinion, is to centralize the data center, as it is indeed taking place in other advanced countries. As for Italy, I think the PA would require only two data centers, one in Rome and one in Milan, a city that already hosts two major national Internet nodes.

Centralization I wished he historical evidence. A data center is more efficient as it is larger and more modern in their security systems and energy efficiency. Building one / two / three or even more depending on the size Ced territorial in each region would simply lead to a proliferation of diseconomies of scale. Instead, the data center of the PA should be made in the most strategic points of convergence and connectivity of electrical infrastructure, features that are missing in the majority at the time of the Italian regions.

The government's plan defines, from a somewhat questionable, enhancement of DC national and regional portals of local autonomies and municipalities. All this will undoubtedly lead to the creation or use of obsolete structures. These will be positioned to come in areas with poor services and Internet bandwidth to be achieved and will require investments that can be used for this purpose. What sense does it build a data center in those areas where there is no connection to broadband? Failing that, it is important to remember, currently covers 12% of the entire Italian territory.

The data center model relies heavily on a centralized ICT scheme. In this system, the centralization of infrastructure in a single location can be supplemented by a second location of the backup conjunction with the development of the entire national territory of the broadband data transport services and Pac and PA in general: in this way all the country should enjoy the efficient distribution of services.

The centralization of data centers is even more motivated by the desire to apply the model to the cloud services of Public Administration. The European Union has placed at the center of its Digital Agenda for the spread of cloud computing. The EU is thus estimated to reach 2.5 million new jobs by 2020 and an increase in GDP of 160 billion Euros, or about 1% of European GDP. The model first Cloud has the advantage of being centralized in a main data center that is then subjected to operation of backup in mirror in a structure appropriately distant.

Cloud enables abroad already evolved forms of shared services . In many parts of the world have been set up projects by central governments as well as provide services to the decentralized bodies. And 'this is the case, for example, of solid experience in Australia and Singapore. Several government to promote foreign countries for some years now initiatives to cloud-based shared services , ie develop application components and portals where the government can procure services in decentralized mode self-service on-demand . And suffice it to mention the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative in the U.S. or the G-Cloud Marketplace in the United Kingdom.

The investment in data center should be done at the central level in locations well served by broadband, with the presence of multiple operators TLC, where there is plenty of power and space available for future growth. The savings in the proliferation of data centers could be used for investment in infrastructure bandwidth, and ultra-wide, to enable the population to have access to the services of the PA from all over the country. Avoiding construction of dozens of new data centers in the country and building only two, it would save more than five billion euro, which could be used just to the spread of broadband and ultra.

The centralization of data centers, finally, should be fully in the direction of what is making the government led by Matteo Renzi , based on principles of centralization, rationalization and simplification of processes, with a view to spending review. The regionalization of ownernship data center probably arises from a misconception: that of Federalism at all costs (and not coincidentally the Senate reform is based on a federalist logic). If it is true, overt and accepted by all the principle that services should be "close" and paid where the consignee is the final user, the data center industry, paradoxically, provides the opposite of that possibility: the services will be much closer to the citizens as the data will be managed and will transit in centralized data centers that is modern, efficient and safe.

corrierecomunicazioni.it - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Italy Telecom Data Center-SHELTER THE CLOUD - start tomorrow the exhibition

Italy Telecom Data Center-SHELTER THE CLOUD - start tomorrow the exhibition

   July 08, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

 From 8 to 31 July in the space TIM4Expo Triennale (Milan, viale Alemagna 6) will host the photographic exhibition "Italy Telecom Data Center - SHELTER THE CLOUD", made in collaboration with Magnum Photos and Expo 2015

 The project was born from the idea of ​​enhancing the intangible reality of cloud computing through images and videos of Telecom Data Center Rozzano Italy to give visibility and aesthetic dignity to the "central nervous system" of the Digital Expo and All Digital Smart City Expo Milano , 2015.

 In fact, all of the technological infrastructure of the Universal is based on Cloud Computing and resources will be physically allocated at the Data Center Rozzano, in a special area dedicated to enable full security in the processes of interaction with the Expo "virtual" and with the innovative services available in the exhibition area.

 "Telecom Italian Data Center - SHELTER THE CLOUD" represents a journey into the world of Cloud Computing, Digital Expo and the Digital Smart City Expo Milano 2015. A journey that takes the form of a photo shoot made by three of the most important photographers international agency Magnum Photos: Paolo Pellegrin, Peter Marlow and Harry Gruyaert. Through different points of view were given a personal representation of technology and innovative services at the base of our daily digital life.

The exhibition will be open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10:30 to 13:00 and from 14:00 to 19:00.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Dont make tricky campaign in Email Marketing for Business ROI

Dont make tricky campaign in Email Marketing for Business ROI

   July 07, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Don't make tricky campaign in Email Marketing for Business ROI

Email promoting has been around since the Internet was invented. Although some spam filters have been able to remove unwanted messages from going into an individual’s inbox, when marketing via email is done right, it is helpful for the recipient and the sender. The solid advice, below, will show you how to earn more and keep your customers happy, at the same time.

Do not continuously insist that your subscribers “Buy Now.” People can recognize this kind of approach easily. If you do so, your work looks like spam. Trust me, all of them know you are trying to sell a product or service; however, you will realize greater success if you first build a relationship with them and then promote both yourself and what you are offering, professionally. Your customers will appreciate you not doing this, and this will increase the odds of them purchasing one of your products.

Don’t email people that you do not know. Otherwise, you risk being known as a spammer. People will not recognize your brand and will not trust you at all. They will just send your email to their spam folder, and it will be a huge waste of your time.

Any content you intend on emailing out should be proofread and edited. Accuracy is important in all forms of correspondence, including emails and newsletters. Before you ever hit “send,” test your email layout to ensure your satisfaction with the way it looks. If you have put any links in your emails, make sure they are able to be clicked.

Make sure that email formats are tested. Put your important information and any new offers near the beginning of your messages. But you should try different formats to see which one gives you the most responses. When you find one that works, stick to it. When you do this all of your customers know where they need to look for when searching for information they are interested in reading.

Continue learning about email marketing techniques through all the resources available to you. You will find a lot of helpful books or websites. You should also try to attend local email marketing classes and workshops.

Your marketing emails should contain rich content to complement the request for business. Information that is useful to readers and can’t be found on your site is particularly appreciated. Also give your valued subscribers some exclusive offers only available for people on your mailing list. Send greetings for holidays or a personalized message for birthdays for instance.

Test a variety of different formats for your emails. Your email should be like a funnel, with the most important items at the top and the least important items at the bottom. But keep trying new formats and ideas until you discover the one or ones that provide you with the greatest number of responses. When you determine what works, continually use it. This will ensure your customers will know what they are getting from your emails and where to go when they need more information.

In order to ensure that every single customer on your list has given their permission for you to email them, you should have customers opt-in to your list twice before you send the first email. While it may seem like overkill, it is a great way to guarantee that your customers actually want emails from you, which could save you from future trouble.

It’s a great idea that you require people to double opt in if they’re wanting to receive emails from you. This may appear like an unnecessary extra feature, but this can, in fact, ensure that only those who sign up who are genuinely interested and this eliminates trouble for your company.

Branding is something that extends throughout your business, even down to marketing via email. For this reason, you should be careful to develop a well-designed template for your marketing materials. Make sure to include your company logo, with color complimentary backgrounds, and professional fonts that are an accurate reflection of your brand. This will enable your customers to quickly recognize the source of the email.

Keep in mind that major holidays are not the best time to send out important emails. This is because people are usually out of their office and not next to their computers, so they won’t notice your emails. There are always exceptions, though! This may include emails regarding things like Black Friday and other sales or specials that go on.

Don’t use images for important information in marketing with email. A lot of email clients do not display images right away. This could possibly make for ugly messages or ones that are unreadable if they rely too much on images. Make sure that the most crucial information is readable and that images have alt tags.

Be certain that every recipient of your email messages has indicated a willingness to accept them. Skipping this step may not only cost you subscribers, but they may talk to others, which can further damage your business’s reputation. Some ISPs and web hosts will also refuse to do business with you, which isn’t exactly good for a business that relies on the internet for survival.

It is a legal requirement to get someone’s permission before adding them to your mailing list. If you do not, your emails will be viewed as spam. You will quickly lose subscribers and be banished to the junk mail pile. If your ISP gets many complaints, they could block you from sending emails because you can be viewed as a spammer.

Your opt-in should have a field for customers’ first names at the very least. This allows you to personalize the message to each subscriber. This will help build customer relationships.

Use email previewers to your advantage when using preheaders. Simply put, a preheader is the highlighted first line of email text. Email providers such as Gmail put this section of text right after the subject of the message, and therefore it is easy attract the attention of your reader.

It is important to only target people who have agreed to be contacted with your email marketing campaign. The people you add will be left angry, leading them to report your email and cause you a headache. Also, it is possible that the host of your e-mail service will remove your account.

Directly Opted

Be certain your email marketing plan has an option for unsubscribing or opting out. There is a cost to sending email, even if it is small. Furthermore, the negative publicity and blowback from being seen as an aggressive spammer is not only bad for business, but can result in blocks and black listings online.

Stay away from including emails on your emailing database that have not been directly opted-in by the specific subscriber. Padding your list with subscribers who have not directly opted into receiving your marketing via email can build ill will towards you by both the email owner and your potential clients. Additionally, ISPs and web hosts won’t hesitate to cancel spammers’ accounts.

To increase the size of your mailing list, include simple ways for potential customers to opt in to receiving your emails. This can be done on your website by making a link that subscribes to your newsletter.

Try testing the layouts of your messages on various platforms. Once you have perfected your materials, test them using all major browsers, various email clients and different operating systems, including Linux. A message in Hotmail may look entirely different from a message opened in Gmail.

Grabbing the reader’s attention is key in a successful email marketing campaign. You might have to tweak things a bit before everything falls into place. Changing components that aren’t working is key. Test out new techniques continuously so you can stay on top of marketing.

In order for your subscribers to feel special, try to personalize the emails you send them any way you possibly can. If it feels more like a form letter to them, they are more likely to just delete it or block it from receiving any more. Adding in their first name is very easy, but take it step further. For instance, you should have information that tells you when and where a reader subscribed, as well as why they did so. This information can be used in your emails.

Your marketing emails should be reasonably short. Your language should be as direct as possible. This will demonstrate your respect for the value of your readers’ time. This will also prompt most readers to take in the full message. Remember the importance of this, as your important links and content will probably be near the end of the email.

If you are doing it properly, your marketing with email efforts won’t even seem like a sales pitch to your readers. If you make your emails interesting and informative, a reader might actually look foward to seeing them in their inbox. This is beneficial to more than just your brand. It also might bring you customers who are more than willing to purchase your products and offerings. Use these tips to take your email promoting campaign to the next level.

Use social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to help expand your email marketing efforts. These networks make it easier for customers to share your information with others, and you can grow your mailing list organically by interacting with visitors at your social networking sites, drumming up interest for your content.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

   July 07, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

Look no further than email marketing to find the answer to what will generate a 4000%+ ROI (Return on Investment). Hands down, email marketing is the most cost effective and efficient marketing channel at your disposal. So you ask yourself, “Why aren’t I making a 4000% ROI on my email campaigns”? The answer is simple, mobile. That’s right mobile – a smartphone is killing your chances of garnering the huge ROI numbers you should. Let’s look at what you’re doing wrong or not doing at all.

Consider these statistics; 58% of all US adults own a smartphone. Here’s the breakdown by age groups:

• 18-29     83%
• 30-49     74%
• 50-64     49%
• 65+         19%

Now consider that 66% of emails are opened on mobile devices and of that, 38% are opened on an iPhone. More people open their email on an iPhone versus a PC as a whole, which is 34%. Personal and business lives are melding together into one device and everyone, including your competitors, are competing for attention.Optimizing your emails for mobile devices is a sure way to get ahead of the curve with studies showing that only 11% of emails are optimized for mobile. 

Lack of mobile optimization is stopping you from converting readers into leads and leads into sales.While 69% of smartphone users will quickly delete an email that is not optimized for mobile, 61% of smartphone users will immediately leave a website that is not mobile friendly. An email marketing campaign is only as successful as the revenue it generates.The 5 most relevant and important steps to take moving forward are:Design for mobile users. Ensure you design your email creatives to be responsive.

The majority of mobile email clients, including the iPhone’s native mail application, have images enabled by default. Can a user go into their settings and turn them off? Sure, but most people don’t take the time or extra step to do so.Make sure your call to action is clear and in their face. Make it a bold, obvious statement. This is an important step and not just for mobile email campaigns.Make sure your unsubscribe link is not to close to your call to action. Making this critical error can cause your loyal customer to opt-out.Ensure the email addresses in your list are valid and deliverable. 

Sending to dead or undelivered email addresses is nothing more than a waste of time and can irreparably damage your IP reputation. Be sure to clean and validate your email list at least twice per year.The best advice I can give is test your email creatives to your own smartphone. Be sure it is appearing correctly and displaying properly on both iPhone and Android devices. After you have tested your responsive email design and you are sure it looks right and displays properly, then and only then you can deploy it to your newsletter or customer list. If you have followed these basic steps, you should see a big jump in your open and click rate as well as conversions and ROI.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

   July 03, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Online retail marketers spend a significant amount of time and money attracting visitors to their stores, converting these visitors to customers and retaining them as customers over time. Content marketing helps at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Right at the top of the funnel, content marketing in the form of blogging, visuals, videos, guides, articles and media engagement all work to drive relevant traffic through to a store as well as kick off brand awareness. When visitors start to browse through products in your store, content marketing in the form of product videos, quality reviews (user generated content), FAQs, product description and images come to play with converting traffic to sales. Finally, customer loyalty efforts geared to generating more repeat customers are largely fueled by an email marketing strategy that imperatively connects with your brands overarching content marketing strategy.

It is vital to measure the effectiveness of these measures as a guide to future efforts. 

The word “metrics” is on everyone’s lips in the content marketing world, as metrics are a gauge on the effectiveness of marketing spend. There is, however, a slew of different metrics available to marketers. Which ones merit scrutiny?

1. Returning visitors

This is an important metric from a content marketing viewpoint because visitors who return to your site directly — who aren’t funnelled there by other marketing channels — are a guide to how useful people found content from your site the last time they came.  In other words, it’s a measure of how good your content is!

The quality of your content matters because it increases the “stickiness” of your site, and because it increases the likelihood of turning visitors into customers. Furthermore, high quality content that delivers return visitors is one of the means by which you can build relationships with your “top 1 percent” customers.

Ideally, what you want is your top 1 percent customers returning often, rather than many “bottom 90 percent” customers returning once or twice. That’s about targeted content and fragmented phased-out content that stimulates audience suspense similar to TV sitcoms.

2. Pages per visit

The average number of pages a visitor looks at during a browsing session. This figure provides some indication of site engagement in broad terms. If visitors read only one page, it indicates they aren’t finding the site very useful. If they stay and read 10 pages, they’re obviously seeing value in what your site has to offer. In e-commerce, this is a vital metric because visitors are most likely “window-shopping” on your site. The longer a visitor spends on your site, the more engaged they are and more likely they are to buying.

A vital part of this is bounce rate – how many visitors simply bounce right off the site after viewing only one page? Factors known to increase bounce rate include page load times, as well as a poor connection between content marketing and site content. If your content marketing attracts visitors who are basically uninterested in what you do, they’ll bounce. This is worth looking at in isolation as well as part of the whole picture provided by pages per visit metrics.

3. Time on site

Time on site indicates the amount of time a visitor spent doing anything at all on your site. As such, it indicates interest, engagement and likely purchase. As a general indicator of site performance, this is key. It’s also important because more engaged customers are usually better customers. Comparatively high time on site is an indicator of commitment to your brand – a feature of the “top 1 percent” customer. You can break down the time on site figures to see which people are spending more time with you, allowing you to optimize your content for the customers who make the biggest difference to your company.

4. Increased traffic

Increased traffic is the basic aim of content marketers. From social media to your blog to your sales pages, good content marketing should increase your traffic.

For e-commerce, more people coming in through the door means more sales and more revenue. Again though, it’s wise to differentiate between more traffic and more useful traffic. More visitors who display lower secondary conversion, lower pages per visit and so on, are not necessarily what you should be looking for. Boosting traffic should be seen as a way to increase the number of potential top 1 percent and top 10 percent customers coming to your e-commerce store. That’s about targeted content.

Engagement Metrics

5. Sharing content

How much of your content gets shared across social networks? That’s a key metric for content marketers in any sphere: it’s a measurement of how many people think your material is good enough to show their friends or pass on to professional contacts. It also feeds into your social marketing strategy: knowing which channels your content is shared on lets you know which channels to concentrate on, and which to optimize your content for.

From an e-commerce standpoint, sharing content is another indicator of the engagement of your top 1 percent customers. Higher engagement from this group is disproportionately rewarding in terms of sales and per-sale revenue. called “comments per post,” and it measures the number of times visitors post responses, feedback, reviews or any other form of commentary. This is a key metric for content marketing because it’s a measurement of engagement. This can provide insight into the topics that customers want to engage with.

Specifically for e-commerce, a reviews section provides an important guide for future customers. Customers and prospective customers take reviews extremely seriously, and they make a major difference to sales. From personal experience buying running shoes online, I value reviews from customers in specialist running online stores against reviews from behemoths such as Amazon or eBay because my inclination is that specialist store customers would be more discerning and knowledgeable. Online retailers should create a stimulating experience that encourages reviews and user-generated content in general — there is so much value to be had here.

7. Time

Most social media management tools offer metrics that let you find out what time of day and which days your posts see the most engagement. Obviously, you’d expect different demographics to have different engagement profiles – if you sell products aimed at middle-aged fishermen you’d expect to see a lot less action at 2 a.m. than if you sold concert tickets to youth-oriented events, for instance. Checking out when your audience is active lets you build your posting schedule around those times. You can take that information and measure it against your conversions at your store.

Suppose you get the most social media engagement at 9 a.m. on Thursdays, and most of your sales are at 9:30 on Thursdays. A link that fast seems unlikely to be causal. But what about secondary conversions? A spike in social engagement, followed by a spike in traffic, followed by a spike in sign-ups, all suggests that your social and other content marketing is working extremely effectively.

Business Metrics

8. Conversion rate

In online retail, sales are primary conversion metrics. Drawing a direct link between content that you create at each stage of the marketing funnel and your sales can be tricky, but multi-attribution modeling helps establish a link to sales conversions more easily. Also consider measuring “secondary conversions” such as email list subscriptions, buyer guide downloads and any form of engagement that requires commitment on the part of the visitor. Growing an email list is a vital conversion metric to measure.

It is a vital metric because it indicates a wider spread of visitors who might not be buying yet, but they’re interested enough to download material, to sign up or to otherwise indicate their interest. Additionally, higher engagement is a characteristic of the top 1 percent of your customers – the ones who actually contribute the most to your success.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is a measure of how much a customer is worth to your company overall, across the time of their association with your company. The average customer is going to make around two purchases throughout their association with you. The top 1 percent of your customers will, measured across their CLV, be worth around 30 times more than the average – reason enough to concentrate on these high-value customers.

Analyzing customer lifetime value lets you see whether you’re getting the customers you want. It’s actually more efficient to appeal strongly to a smaller number of customers than to appeal weakly to a larger number of less engaged, less interested customers who will, ultimately, spend far less with you. If you’re appealing to high value customers, your content marketing strategy is working!

10. Revenue

Finally, what it’s all about. Revenue is the most important metric, for obvious reasons: you can’t pay your employees with click-through, or make a house payment with secondary conversions. But how do we look at revenue from a content marketing perspective?

One way is to track purchases through the whole process, and see what content they viewed prior to the purchase decision. If a visitor viewed three pieces of content on your website and then made a €90 purchase, each piece of content is worth €30, right? Sort of. But that’s too simplistic for such a complex picture. It doesn’t take into account social marketing, or repeat customers – in their case, you’d need to factor in the content they looked at last time too. Use purchase value/pieces of content viewed as a rule of thumb, but remember how vague it is. It will give you an average at best.

Another way of looking at revenue is to measure conversion value. It’s a broader approach that looks at all the costs involved against the sales value and it usually means looking at the mass of sales.

Conclusion

The most useful metric for tracking success overall is customer lifetime value measured against the aggregate cost of customer acquisition. Customer acquisition costs include all marketing costs, not just content marketing. But content marketing costs will be significantly reduced per customer if those customers have high lifetime value, because high lifetime value customers are interested in more of your content, so less of it “misses.”

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Backlink Profile Monitoring with Majestic SEO

Backlink Profile Monitoring with Majestic SEO

   July 03, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Are you monitoring your back-link profile?

It is no secret Google have become very aggressive when it comes to links and link building strategies: highly optimized anchor text links have suddenly become toxic as they are unnatural. So perhaps branding is the way to go and people are thinking twice before placing questionable links on their money sites.

While link building is still an essential part of your SEO strategy, there is another aspect you need to consider as an everyday part of your optimization efforts: Monitoring your backlink profile.

Related Articles : 

Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business

Qualified B2B Leads with Inbound Marketing, Blogs and Social Media, How

Building Your Powerpoint Presentations for Business Follow This Rule

Backlink profile monitoring should be an integral part of your ongoing SEO activities. You need to know who is linking out to you, and if there are any suspicious activities, in order to react in real time and avoid a disruptive, (or devastating), penalty.

How you can use Majestic SEO to monitor your backlink profile?

Majestic SEO offers 2 different ways to monitor your backlink profile:

Via a Tracking Report. The link tracking report from Majestic SEO offers a view of Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and other link quality characteristics such as external backlinks, referring IPs, referring domains, and referring subnets: link quality characteristics of any URL or website over time, updated on a daily basis. This report is useful in 2 ways:

It allows you to follow the link quality of a URL and see if there is any correlation between a change in a URLs position and whether the change was caused by an increase in good (or bad) links. These flow metrics start calculating many link iterations away from the URL you are tracking – meaning there does not have to be a change to the pages that physically link to you, for there to be a change in the page’s fortunes on the web.

It offers an overview on the rate of growth of your Inbound Links (IBLs). The daily report offered by the tracking report offers strategic insights on a day-to-day basis which you can use to understand what is happening:

• There has been a spike in new IBLs, where are they coming from?
• Are they related in any way to a viral activity performed by the Social media Team?
• Was a link picked up and passed along on Twitter?
• Did the R&D team publish a white paper?
• Was a newsletter published offering a download?
• If the answer to any of these questions was YES, then you are safe and should be ready to bet those links are all legitimate.

But what if the answers to all these questions was NO – nobody did anything of the sort; there were no Social Media initiatives, no newsletters, none of your content went viral – then where are these links coming from?

Spikes in the IBL profile should be looked at with suspicion – they could be coming from a site which has nothing to do with us and could have dropped a run of site link in their navigation bar or footer… this deserves your immediate attention. 

In this case we can see there is a certain trend in backlink profile, then a sudden significant growth over a few days; (in this case the IBLs shot up from just under 12.000 to 24.000). These links were found to be coming all from the same site, a very big portal with thousands of pages that had placed a link in the sidebar.

In very competitive markets competitors can organize a negative link building campaign to discredit you by adding thousands of low quality links, and then by doing so, impacting your trust flow, and boosting your citation flow. The tracking report will keep you up to date and in a matter of days you will be informed of the presence of these undesired and hostile links.

Tracking reports offer top level numbers and information but not the actual links; (they can be found in the Site Explorer under the New tab):

Inbound Links Discovery with Majestic SEO

You can see the spike noted in the previous screenshot taken from the tracking report. By hovering over the dates Majestic will reveal total number of backlinks identified and date of discovery; (which is not necessarily the date of creation).

Inbound Link Analysis using Search Explorer by Majestic SEO

Clicking on the date will retrieve the links and allow a detailed analysis. If the links are legitimate you keep them, if they are not your only option is to disavow them: by doing so you are telling Google you have nothing to do with that inbound linking activity and are taking appropriate action to distance yourself from them; (and by doing so renouncing to any link equity coming from them). The disavow will feed into your link profile and these links will be removed from your link graph. In this way you are preventing any retaliation on behalf of Google when the day of reckoning will come … prevention is better than curing.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business

Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business

   July 01, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

What I love most about getting to focus the majority of my work on social customer service is that there are actually ways to measure that you're making a difference to the bottom line. First let's distinguish between two type of numbers.social customer service

Vanity metrics. Numbers that look good on a chart when they're trending upward but really don't prove a lot on their own (followers, likes, members, comments,  retweets, etc.)

Value metrics. Numbers that may use vanity metrics as part of larger formula and produce a measure that shows you're moving the needle on something your VP cares about. Think decreasing transaction costs,  increasing agent efficiency or increasing NPS.

I know all of you who are currently only reporting on vanity metrics are now are now standing up and yelling, "Damn straight, we want value metrics!" Here are a few ideas:

Transaction costs. This is a pretty straightforward formula. What you're really figuring out is the cost of servicing a customer viaTwitter vs. telephone.

Determine the cost of a call.

Determine the cost of a tweet.

Determine what % of Twitter transactions would have been painful enough to warrant the customer actually calling? (I wouldn't presume every tweet would have been a call).

Derive your "estimated" cost savings per month.

Then do the same for Facebook, and generate the average transaction of servicing over social media.

Finally, get someone credible in the organization to reality-check your calculation.

Agent efficiency. This formula can range from simple to complex, depending on how air-tight you want to make your story. Some standard call centre metrics are fine to start off with. Time to Respond (TTR) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) will work. Take a look at what these metrics look like for you traditional channels  vs. social over a period of time and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Social is designed to be the fastest service channel on the planet. Oh right, if you aren't piping your serviceable issues from social media into a case management tool that can report on these metrics, it will be much harder to do this.

 Customer satisfaction. So now you've proved that you can service customers faster AND cheaper, but are customers happy with the service? Let's find out. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a pretty standard CSAT metric these days. My experience tells me that when you start to measure this you'll be hated by the rest of the call centre managers because your score for social will be so much higher. The way I'll describe it is just for Twitter and is a little manual but I think it's a good place to start and get a bit of a baseline. Here's how it works.

Each week, grab a certain number of Twitter handles from customers that you serviced within the last week. The more the better; not everyone will respond.

DM them and ask the NPS question in a fun way. "How did we do? On a scale of 1-10 would you recommend our service to your pals?"

Throw all the responses into a spreadsheet and calculate your Twitter NPS. Do the Snoopy dance.

Book a meeting with the VP to let him or her know how much higher the call centre NPS is now that you've averaged your score into it.

Some of the more robust listening tools try to calculate NPS using their sentiment engine but it never hurts to ask people directly too.

So there you have it, a few ways to measure the actual value of your social customer service in a way in which your VP will take you seriously instead of staring at your report and asking, "What's a retweet?" -  3 Social Customer Service Metrics that will Make You a Rock Star

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Transformers Age of Extinction - stop sequal with same name

Transformers Age of Extinction - stop sequal with same name

   July 01, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

'Transformers: Age of Extinction' is a blockbuster man versus aliens spectacle that deals with loyalty and honour, where "human freedom is at stake and innocent people die all the time".

The film is propelled with fuzzy logic that involves humans and two sets of giant shape-shifting mechanical creatures -- the Autobots and the Decepticons -- and it definitely evokes mixed reactions. Confusing for those uninitiated into 'The Transformer' series, it proves to be an average yet exciting epic fare for others.

The narration begins with the prelude that cannot be differentiated from the main story and reveals that millions of years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed on land, an intergalactic alien invasion caused a near extinction with their superior ammunition that turned living organisms into "Transformium" - "a metal that makes Transformers".

The film then zooms into present day and takes off, years after the "Battle of Chicago" from its 2011 release - 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon', in which the Decepticons were defeated by the human-robot alliance.

Optimus (voiced by Peter Cullen), the leader of the Autobots and his colleagues have been shunned by those in power for being a threat to humanity. Threatened, they go into hiding.

The US government is hell bent on taking them off the planet for good and is assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black ops team.

Meanwhile, KSI - a research group that hopes to build a "better Transformer" led by CEO Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), finds a metallic dinosaur fossil in the Artic that could "change history". He collaborates with Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), the man behind the black ops team, with an ulterior motive.

On the other hand, an ingenious inventor and scrap dealer Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) finds Optimus Prime, who is trapped in a truck mode, damaged almost beyond recognition. It's only after he does some work on the core unit of the truck, which stimulates it back to action, that he realises what he's found.

Tessa (Nicola Peltz), Yeager's daughter and his business partner Lucas (T.J. Miller) advise him to hand over this robot to the government, but Yeager isn't so sure. By the time he's made up his mind, it's too late.

The CIA tracks Optimus on Yeager's farm. They descend there in order to kill him. Yeager saves Optimus's life which puts Tessa, Lucas and even his daughter's secret boyfriend Shane's (Jack Raynor) life at stake.  -Review: 'Transformers: Age of Extinction'

What follows is a loud action-packed drama that includes screaming and carnage, with the climax taking place in Hong Kong, where the heroes pursue the antagonists and the dangerous energy source, "The Seed", that they possess.

The actors, led by Wahlberg and Tucci, perfectly match their robotic counterparts. Wahlberg excels as a concerned and overprotective father and similarly Tucci, backed with a meaningful personality arc, delivers beyond the character. Unfortunately, given the limited opportunity, the chemistry between Peltz and Raynor is missing.

This being the fourth edition, director Michael Bay has ably and artfully managed to hook the audience with a whole new set of human cast, introducing a few new Transformers and giant scale action that is amazingly staged once again.

The comic relief comes in the form of a slew of tongue-in-check dialogues and self-reflexive gags from the previous editions, which makes the dialogue sound cliched and underwritten. It works for the film, but at the same time it reveals a lethargic output from the creative team.

Similarly, if one scans Ehren Kruger's screenplay with a microscopic lens, you'd notice the impressions of numerous films like 'Iron Man', 'Terminator 2: Judgement Day', 'Super 8', 'Jurassic Park', and 'Armageddon', to name a few, woven into the fabric of 'Transformers: Age of Extinction'.

Overall, with blatant product placements, technically brilliant visuals and matching performance, the film is a worthwhile watch.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Marketing Strategies for Developed And Developing Markets - Prabhakar

Marketing Strategies for Developed And Developing Markets - Prabhakar

   July 01, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Interest in developing markets such as China, India, Brazil and Russia has increased rapidly over the past ten years, meaning that market research and intelligence agencies are exploring a wider variety of geographies than ever before. This presents numerous challenges throughout the market research process, for fieldworkers, managers and analysts alike. This article discusses perhaps the most important issue of all – the different insights that tend to arise in different geographies. In particular, how do the critical marketing success factors in the developing and developed worlds differ from each other?

Developed And Developing Markets Product

In most business-to-business markets, customers regard product quality and durability as a ‘hygiene’ requirement; performance must be high in order for the supplier of that product to even be considered. Companies with low quality are not in business for long, leaving serious market players to differentiate on the extended offer – service, brand and the like. In developing markets, good quality is often not even a hygiene requirement, let alone a differentiator. 80%-90% of buyers of pump and instrumentation products in Russia or China are happy to buy products that last 18-24 months whereas their Western counterparts demand a lifespan of 6-7 years or more. This results in a preponderance of low-quality buyers in the developing market, and quality becomes a key differentiating factor for the small group of customers that demand it.

To the Western company with a high cost-base and high-quality product, the best strategy in a developing market is to cream-skim the market by targeting the 10%-20% of quality-focused buyers. In developed markets, suppliers are best advised to focus on service quality, knowledge and people, while of course maintaining high quality standards. -- Recommended Marketing Strategies In Developed And Developing Markets

Developed And Developing Markets Price

Value-added pricing is common in developed markets – that is to say buyers are willing to pay more for a superior offer, usually based around service, brand, consultancy and other benefits beyond the product itself. In developing economies, the willingness to pay extra for a superior offer is far less prevalent, with most b2b buyers relating price primarily to quantity.

Developing markets 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Western clients tend to premium-price in developing markets, communicating high quality to a small part of the market and receiving high margins in return. Even companies that are relatively undifferentiated in their home markets frequently succeed when premium-pricing in developing countries. Consumer brands such as Pizza Hut have experienced huge success with this strategy.

In developed markets, the picture is far less clear, with customers generally more demanding and high-quality competition more prevalent. This is where specialist pricing research comes into its own, be that competitive pricing intelligence or more model-based techniques such as SIMALTO and conjoint analysis.

Developed And Developing Markets Place

Western businesses frequently underestimate the difficulties associated with routes to market in developing economies. Whereas market channels in the company’s home market may be long-established and familiar, channels in a developing market may be unrecognisable, fragmented, ephemeral and highly dependent on local knowledge and relationships. Many Western consumer-facing companies are experiencing real success in developing markets in this respect, with shampoo and cosmetic providers, for example, making huge profits in rural cities via local distributors and retailers. Industrial companies have been slower to build up their knowledge, many still relying on generic import-export agents and a low-quality, poorly trained salesforce. Underestimating the importance of a permanent on-the-ground presence and even local-language capability is another common mistake.

Developed And Developing Markets Promotion

In any b2b market, promotional messages should focus on customers’ ‘hot buttons’: product quality or price in developing markets; and in developed markets, service, brand, consultancy and other value-added messages. Promotional routes will also differ. While direct mail is increasing in prevalence in most developing b2b markets, it is still a scarcely used and ineffective marketing channel in these countries. Relationship-focused promotion, such as trade shows and site visits, is key, since trust in brands is in short supply.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More

Make smooth and fastest Distributor Network, How

Make smooth and fastest Distributor Network, How

   July 01, 2014       prabhakardalvi

---

Increasingly distributors are replacing direct salesforces in industrial marketing. They cost less, they absolve the manufacturer from the burdens of credit control and they provide a wide geographical spread of stocking points. But in appointing distributors the manufacturer loses control of the sharp end where the sale takes place. How can the principal identify weaknesses in a distribution network and what can be done about them?

The first indication of a weak distributor could be a fall in his sales performance. The manufacturer has the advantage of being able to compare the sales of each distributor and plot all their performances over time. A weak distributor can be spotted as one whose sales performance is out shone by others. - Sharpening The Distributor Network

Of course relative sales performance may not tell the whole story. Distributors live in a competitive environment and some may suffer exceptional competition from other firms in their area. Nevertheless the warning bells will be sounded, and the principal will be able to discuss the problem with the distributor in good time.

World of Industrial Distribution changing with B2B Revolutions

Using Distributors with Time and Stratergy - Prabhakar

Qualified B2B Leads with Inbound Marketing, Blogs and Social Media, How

A second indicator of a weak distributor could be the growth of complaints which find their way back to the principal from customers. The nature of the complaints could be significant. Are they concerned with lack of stock, difficulty in obtaining sales service, poor back up, high prices, etc? The complaints can be logged and become an important discussion point for resolving with the distributor.

A third means of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of distributors is to pose as a customer. The Market Research Society sanctions mystery shopping as long as it is carried out within its code of conduct. The depth of investigation which can be undertaken as a supposed buyer can vary from the odd simple telephone call to a nationwide programme of organised visits.

Certainly the principal should telephone distributors from time to time to see how they react to a general enquiry. Things to look for are the speed and efficiency with which the telephone is answered and the ability of the receptionist to direct the call to someone who can handle it. However, if a larger study is to be undertaken, it must be coordinated and carried out in a professional and unbiased way. It will therefore require the services of a team of interviewers who can measure the response of the distributor at each stage of the buying process. The important things to look out for are italicised below.

Reception. This is most important since it is the first contact with the potential buyer. It is an area which tends to be handled badly, with inefficient receptionists who garble the name of the company and show conspicuous indifference to satisfying what may be an enquiry from a customer.

The sales person's initial approach. The prospective buyer is eventually routed to a sales person who should attempt to establish needs. In a recent mystery shop we carried out, the interviewers were told to enter the distributors and record the way in which they were approached by sales people. In one instance it became clear that even after three-quarters of an hour, the sales staff were not going to turn the conversation to business. The potential buyer might be there still if he hadn't finally taken the initiative and stated the nature of his enquiry.

Describing the product. Sales people are most at home when they can describe their products to a customer. However, it is not unusual for them to concentrate on product features at the expense of customer benefits.

Handling the competition. In most markets a customer can be expected to shop around. It is revealing, therefore, in mystery shop to ask the sales person to justify the company’s products. In a commercial vehicle dealer study where interviewers posed as potential buyers, one salesman was so flummoxed by the question, "Why should I buy your vehicle rather than a competitor's?" that he confessed he could not think of an answer!

Getting hold of the product. When a customer decides on the product, quite probably it will be wanted straightaway. Availability is therefore important. If the distributor does not have products in stock or cannot get hold of them quickly, the sale may be lost.

Providing a demonstration. Just as distributors' sales staff can give an acceptable description of their products, so too they are quite good at demonstrations. In the case of office equipment distributors, a demonstration is nearly always part of the standard sales routine. However, in the vehicle research referred to earlier, one-third of the distributors had to be prompted to offer a demonstration.

Offering discounts. Distributors frequently conflict with their principals about the high price of the products they sell. Yet in a recent survey on office equipment a quarter of all distributors offered a discount without being asked. A further half made the same offer after being asked. It seemed that distributors were all too eager to use price as the main sales weapon.

Following up the sale. Once the potential customer has left the distributor's premises, it is important that the enquiry is followed up either personally or in writing with a quotation. In the vehicle dealer study only a half of the "customers" were sent a written quotation even though all had asked for one.

Mystery shopping can expose weaknesses in the many stages of the distributors' selling procedure. It may be a valuable lesson for the principal to extend the research to include some distributors outside the company's network.

Making Correcting Weaknesses for Best ROI

The golden rule for helping a distributor improve its operation is "explain and train". Before raising criticisms of the distributor's business, however, the principal should attempt to understand the nuances of each locality. There may well be causes which are temporary or peculiar to a distributor, and these must be taken into account in any recommended changes.

A common weakness among distributors' sales staff is their failure to discover a customer's needs and relate the benefits of products to them. The sales person may fail to probe to find what the customer wants; may concentrate only on selling what the company has to offer. It may be thought easier to sell on price rather than push the benefits. The sales person needs training but this may not be within the facility of a small distributor. The principal should therefore assume the responsibility for both the sales product training and showing how to approach and convert prospects.

The principal may wish to manipulate the performance of the distributors' sales people by offering them sales incentives. Distributors have mixed views on principals' incentives. On the one hand they provide a boost to the sales staff's salary and so allow the distributor to recruit a higher class of personnel. On the other the distributor who allows a principal to make a payment to sales staff must concede a loss of control.

The installation of systems and procedures at dealers can help eliminate some of the weaknesses. For example, if it is important that a follow up takes place after the initial sales call or demonstration, it would not be difficult to set up a system which reminds the sales of this next step.

Systems can be devised for every part of the sales sequence. For example, a rule could be made that the telephone is answered before it rings more than three times; another might ensure that a customer is not kept waiting for more than five minutes in the showroom. Restrictions could be placed on the offering of discounts.

Of course all procedures and rules need policing if they are to be continuously observed. Further, it must be recognized that within a small distributor, overt bureaucracy is unacceptable and often unnecessary. So any procedures suggested to the distributors should be simple. They should be sold-in as ways of helping the distributor improve performance. A heavy hand is unlikely to work.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

Read More