success mantra-om

21 Ways to Get Inspired (Infographic) 

Researching and Developing Buying Personas

Researching and Developing Buying Personas

You would have thought that companies would have had buying personas nailed by now…sadly in our experience that is not always the case. 
After all, many organisations have been steeped in sales methodologies where org charts, decision makers and motivations are all mapped out over the period of the sales cycle to close the sale. So why are buying personas not being used effectively?
The trouble is that the world has changed from sales cycles to buying cycles and as a result marketing needs to communicate with buyers much earlier and for longer.

Whether your company gets a chance to engage and close business is dependent on:- 



We have seen .... 

The most effective times to post on Social Media

The most effective times to post on Social Media

How to optimize for Conversion Rate?

How to optimize for Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate Optimization: is to raise conversion optimization rate i.e. to generate and direct a colossal amount of traffic to your website and let the hits pile up.
The beauty of this is that you don’t have to alter your advertising expenditure, you just tweak up your approach to make the most of the traffic on your site. A high traffic rate is no indicator of success unless you receive as many conversions.
The objective is to compel the highest number of users to indulge in the process of conversion.
Now just before we go all “Gung-Ho” let’s take a glance to realign a couple of things

• Analyse your current rate of conversion.
  
• Jot down all the troublesome areas you have.
  
• Check if you have an effective Call-to-Action (A conspicuously placed “Buy Now”/“Contact Now” button)
  
• Ensure user friendly U.I. Paired with crisp, clean graphics to ensure the User navigates without any hindrance.
  
• Cohesion is of paramount importance, double check again whether your site is inseparably linked to the product on sale
  

Moving forward, the double checking and realigning things into perspective affect many factors which determine your conversion rates.
You have your Bounce Rates, which give you stats of users leaving after not getting past the first page, followed by Exit Rates which shows you the last page users viewed before leaving. Average Page Views, the number of pages users leafed through before navigating away from your website.

Now the question is why are they leaving? Is your site not compelling enough? Alluring enough? Are there too many Calls-to-action complicating the life out of the user? Are your products loosely linked with your ad? Website’s a bit too intricate and elaborate? 
Let’s not forget about the “split-second” attention of users that goes astray if the content is unappealing, the relentless speed at which the mind either gets attracted or strayed from the content is blinding. The rainbow of moods the user might have, the distractions faced by the user while shopping are uncontrollable forces of nature. What is in your control is to make the content appealing, universally.

We want quick and easy access to the site which makes good on its promise and indeed provides the goods the ad was made for, then we want quick and easy navigation to get or find the product/service we need and to sum it all up; a hassle free checkout which complicate the life out of you.

Make sure you don’t have your website committing these cardinal sins which lead to inevitable failure.
Having an unattractive Website
Make sure you website is not droll and unattractive. Ensure cheap graphics are not used; there needs to be harmony across the page.

Unnavigable WebpageSuppose you’re selling ties. If one has to peel his eyes out to get to know about the product, then you know you’ve lost your potential customer right there. (No information about the ties and the size chart being lost to oblivion would be the catalysts in hiking up the bounce rate, in this case)

Poor Call to Actiononce the user is lost on webpage, all hope is not lost, and they only abandon ship when there is no guide to get them back on track. No “help” button will be the final nail in the coffin, A coup de grace which will further bolster the exit rate on the website.
These reasons, coupled with many more seal the high Bounce Rate of any website, these are cardinal sins you don’t want to commit. Reanalyze your site and make sure your folly isn’t listed above.

performance tuning your email campaigns: Email Marketing

 

Performance tuning your email campaigns: Email Marketing

It’s All About The Click: Email Marketing 

Digital media campaigns across Consumer decision journey

Digital media campaigns across Consumer decision journey

Understanding PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS and their Roles in Web

Understanding PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS and their Roles in Web 

  

8 Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Demand Center

8 Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Demand Center     

Did you realize that prospects complete 60% of their research and evaluation of your product or services before they even want to talk with a sales rep? Prospects are more in control of the sales process than ever before, and this combined with the sales cycle increasing 22% over the last five years and the emergence of new technologies and channels in the marketing space mean that marketers’ job is harder than ever.

For these reasons, more and more companies are turning to the demand center model. A demand center acts as a hub for an organization’s marketing services, technologies and processes. Simply put, it provides a more cost-effective and efficient way to manage all the various demand generation activities, including social media, telemarketing, data management, lead nurturing, lead scoring, CRM integration, closed-loop reporting and more.

For many marketers, a demand center is a no-brainer. But when it comes to building your demand center, it can get a little tricky. Read this white paper to learn about the top eight mistakes marketers make when building demand centers and how to avoid them.

8 Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Demand Center 

Behaviour Driven Multi-Touch Campaign That Delivers Sales Ready Leads

Behaviour Driven Multi-Touch Campaign That Delivers Sales Ready Leads 

So now that you have your marketing automation tool ready, what’s next? Having an effective behavioural driven multi-touch campaign helps you shorten lead time by delivering sales ready leads.
Would you like to be able to improve your lead conversion ratio? Here is an approach taken to design a multi-touch renewal program that has:

• Shorten lead time from 7 days to deliver sales ready leads in 4 hours
  
• Bypass the need for manual intervention
  
• Achieve a lead conversion rate of 40%
  

In designing a multi-touch campaign, it is important to first identify the various touch points in the customer’s buying journey. Understanding the various pain points at each stage helps you gain insights from the perspective of a customer, marketer and sales rep.

Are you targeting the right customer with the appropriate content type? How many and what types of questions are you asking your customer? What qualification processes are in place? Are your sales rep rejecting the leads because there is misalignment between marketing and sales?

Through customer segmentation, you will be able to effectively reach out to the right audience. Next, provide a seamless experience by asking only for relevant details from your customer. There has to be an agreement between sales and marketing on what constitutes to a lead. After which, eliminate unnecessary steps in the process to shorten lead time.

To reap the full benefits of a marketing automation tool, it is necessary to understand how it can be leveraged in your various marketing campaigns. Employ it not merely as a tool, but an extension to your team to drive sales ready leads.

Product Branding Strategy Across Multiple Platforms

Product Branding  _  It is difficult to settle on one product branding definition because branding triggers an emotional connection in consumers.

  

What is product branding? Simply put, it is how a product interacts with its consumer audience through design, logo, and messaging. It is difficult to settle on one product branding definition because branding triggers an emotional connection in consumers. If done well, product branding can be maintained and produce a solid, well-connected connection throughout the life of the product. The challenge, however, lies in new media, licensing and social media, where the “message” might be communicated via the audience and not the expert branding professionals.

Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms looks at three top companies – Sesame Workshop, Activision and Coca-Cola – and how their creative teams worked together in branding a product so that its messages were clear and its design interconnected via numerous platforms.

Although the product branding definition hasn’t changed, the process of connecting consumers with products has. Product branding has challenged creative teams over the past decade as they work to deal with website content, package design, television shows, commercials, events, sponsorships and more. How do top companies like Coca-Cola, Activision and Sesame Workshop allow hundreds of licensees to produce products and still maintain the same concise product branding? Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms give insight into this issues, offering tips on how strong, accessible brands are maintained in the marketplace and consistent messaging even is realized even with hundreds of licensees and multiple brand extensions that can dilute messaging and continuity.

The HOW Brand is synonymous with design, inspiration, creativity and lifelong learning. The printed publication offers how-to columns on ways to build a freelance career, expand marketing efforts and generate more leads and inquiries. The community is made up of top designers, agency executives and in-house creative teams.

Although the product branding definition hasn’t changed, the process of connecting consumers with products has. Product branding has challenged creative teams over the past decade as they work to deal with website content, package design, television shows, commercials, events, sponsorships and more. How do top companies like Coca-Cola, Activision and Sesame Workshop allow hundreds of licensees to produce products and still maintain the same concise product branding? Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms give insight into this issues, offering tips on how strong, accessible brands are maintained in the marketplace and consistent messaging even is realized even with hundreds of licensees and multiple brand extensions that can dilute messaging and continuity.
The HOW Brand is synonymous with design, inspiration, creativity and lifelong learning. The printed publication offers how-to columns on ways to build a freelance career, expand marketing efforts and generate more leads and inquiries. The community is made up of top designers, agency executives and in-house creative teams.
- See more at: http://www.howdesign.com/product-branding/#sthash.YtETewjX.dpuf

- See more at: http://www.howdesign.com/product-branding/#sthash.YtETewjX.dpuf

What is product branding? Simply put, it is how a product interacts with its consumer audience through design, logo, and messaging. It is difficult to settle on one product branding definition because branding triggers an emotional connection in consumers. If done well, product branding can be maintained and produce a solid, well-connected connection throughout the life of the product. The challenge, however, lies in new media, licensing and social media, where the “message” might be communicated via the audience and not the expert branding professionals.
Branding a product was much easier when there were no websites, smart phones, interactive games or social media. Today, creative teams are required to seamlessly brand products across multiple media, using the same voice, design and messaging, often with different creative teams and designers creating separate brand extensions. Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms looks at three top companies – Sesame Workshop, Activision and Coca-Cola – and how their creative teams worked together in branding a product so that its messages were clear and its design interconnected via numerous platforms.
- See more at: http://www.howdesign.com/product-branding/#sthash.YtETewjX.dpuf

What is product branding? Simply put, it is how a product interacts with its consumer audience through design, logo, and messaging. It is difficult to settle on one product branding definition because branding triggers an emotional connection in consumers. If done well, product branding can be maintained and produce a solid, well-connected connection throughout the life of the product. The challenge, however, lies in new media, licensing and social media, where the “message” might be communicated via the audience and not the expert branding professionals.
Branding a product was much easier when there were no websites, smart phones, interactive games or social media. Today, creative teams are required to seamlessly brand products across multiple media, using the same voice, design and messaging, often with different creative teams and designers creating separate brand extensions. Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms looks at three top companies – Sesame Workshop, Activision and Coca-Cola – and how their creative teams worked together in branding a product so that its messages were clear and its design interconnected via numerous platforms.
- See more at: http://www.howdesign.com/product-branding/#sthash.YtETewjX.dpuf

What is product branding? Simply put, it is how a product interacts with its consumer audience through design, logo, and messaging. It is difficult to settle on one product branding definition because branding triggers an emotional connection in consumers. If done well, product branding can be maintained and produce a solid, well-connected connection throughout the life of the product. The challenge, however, lies in new media, licensing and social media, where the “message” might be communicated via the audience and not the expert branding professionals.
Branding a product was much easier when there were no websites, smart phones, interactive games or social media. Today, creative teams are required to seamlessly brand products across multiple media, using the same voice, design and messaging, often with different creative teams and designers creating separate brand extensions. Product Branding Strategies Across Multiple Platforms looks at three top companies – Sesame Workshop, Activision and Coca-Cola – and how their creative teams worked together in branding a product so that its messages were clear and its design interconnected via numerous platforms.
- See more at: http://www.howdesign.com/product-branding/#sthash.YtETewjX.dpuf

Psychology of Pricing - Contextual Prices AND Price Anchoring

 Psychology of Pricing - Contextual Prices AND Price Anchoring

Contextual Prices

Similar to using useless prices, you can guide customers’ choices by giving them a context in which to consider the amounts.

 Let’s say you have three sizes of popcorn at your movie theater (or three subscription models or three sizes of drink at a gas station). You can influence sales to purchase at the middle price point or the higher price point.

If the medium-sized popcorn bucket is the one you want people to choose, space the prices out equally among the three choices. By nature, most customers will select the middle option.
However, if you want people to buy the highest-priced subscription, leave a large gap between the lowest-cost option and the middle-priced option. Then price the other two very close together.
For instance, a small popcorn would be $3.50. A medium-sized bucket of popcorn would be $7.50 and a large would cost $8.00. The mindset here is that “for only 50 cents more” you can get a much larger portion of popcorn. The same is true for fountain drinks at gas stations. Small = $.99. Medium = $1.49. Large = $1.59. Which sells more? Almost always the large for “just 10 cents more.”

Price Anchoring

Want to sell a $1,000 home entertainment center? Show it to customers AFTER you’ve introduced them to a $5,000 home entertainment center. Anchoring works because most of us have a tendency to compare everything else to the first prices we encounter.

The high $5,000 system makes everything else look like a real bargain. The point here is not to sell the $5,000 system, but to use it as an anchor that allows you to move more $1,000 systems.
Like most other marketing elements, choosing the right price point takes testing. Make some notes about how you could possibly use these strategies with your products/services. Then work your way through the options to see which brings the best results.


I’d love to hear what pricing tactics you use and the results you get.

Dan Ariely-Pricing the Economist   

Marketing: Branding Strategies

Marketing: Branding Strategies

Branding Strategies

When a company manages its brands it has a number of strategies it can use to further increase its brand value. These are:

Line extension: This is where an organisation adds to its current product line by introducing versions of its products with new features, an example could be a crisp/chips manufacturer extending its line by adding more exotic flavours.

Brand extension: If your current brand name is successful, you may use the brand name to extend into new business areas. For example Virgin Group extending its brand from records, to airlines, mobiles and banking.

Multi Branding: The company decides to introduce more brands into an existing category. Kellogg’s for example have a number of brands in the cereal market and the cereal bar market. Multi-branding can allow an organisation to maximise profits, but a company needs to be weary over their own brands competing with each other over market share.

New Brands: An organisation may decide to launch a new brand into a market. A new brand may be used to compete with existing rivals and may be marketed as something ‘new and fresh’.

Marketing: Forces that affect consumer buying

Marketing : Forces that affect consumer buying

Understanding consumer behavior helps you identify the most appropriate offering to fulfill consumer demands.

People decide to buy products for many different reasons. The table below shows just a few examples of the forces—cultural, social, personal, and psychological—that most influence individuals' purchasing decisions.

Forces Affecting Consumer Buying

Cultural Forces	National values, such as an emphasis on material comfort, youthfulness, or patriotism	Ethnic or religious messages or priorities	Identification with a particular socioeconomic class
Social Forces	Friends, neighbors, coworkers, and other groups with whom people interact frequently and informally	Family members, friends: parents, spouses, partners, children, siblings	Individuals' own status within their families, clubs, or other organizations
Personal Forces	Age: including stage in the life cycle; for example, adolescence or retirement	Occupation, economic circumstances, and lifestyle (or activities, interests, and opinions)	Personality and self-image: including how people view themselves and how they think others view them
Psychological Forces	Motives: conscious and subconscious needs that are pressing enough to drive a person to take action; for example, the need for safety or self-esteem	Perceptions (interpretations of a situation), beliefs, and attitudes (a person's enduring evaluation of a thing or idea)	Learning: changes in someone's behavior because of experience or study

The Psychology of Colors in Marketing

The Psychology of Colors in Marketing

Thinking about your brand and your logo? You should be thinking about colors. It's a conversation / debate I recently had with a client and a colleague in regards to our client's website design.
There are a lot of doubters in the world of marketing about the roles that colors play in buying decisions.
So let's dive right into the analysis with a question - one that's specifically geared towards the doubters.
What color is associated with Republicans? Democrats? Starbucks? Vimeo?

The Psychology of Colors in Marketing 

Six sigma - cost reduction automating organisational learning using Rapid Authoring Tool

Six sigma  cost reduction through automating organisational learning using Rapid Authoring Tool

How To Choose An Authoring Tool For Your HTML eLearning Development

Lectora11, Captivate 7, and Articulate Storyline are the top tools that come to mind for HTML elearning development. Their key strength – they are able to provide an excellent library of ready templates and resources. But do you know which one is best for your project? Read on…

Let’s begin with evaluating each of these tools on certain parameters/criteria that are important for elearning development. 

How To Choose An Authoring Tool For Your HTML eLearning Development

Brand Strategy Key Concepts & Steps

Brand Strategy Key Concepts & Steps

Before you begin

Before working on your brand strategy, make sure you’ve identified your competitive positioning strategy – your brand strategy will bring it to life.

If you have a brand strategy, make sure it’s as effective as possible

• Poll your customers, employees and vendors. Are their impressions consistent with your strategy? If not, work on the elements you can improve.

Develop your brand around emotional benefits

• List the features and benefits of your product / service. A feature is an attribute – a color, a configuration; a benefit is what that feature does for the customer.
• Determine which benefits are most important to each of your customer segments.
• Identify which benefits are emotional – the most powerful brand strategies tap into emotions, even among business buyers.
• Look at the emotional benefits and boil them down to one thing that your customers should think of when they think of you. That’s what your brand should represent.

Define your brand personality, story and positioning statements

• Think of your brand as a person with a distinct personality. Describe him or her, then convey these traits in everything you do and create.
• Write positioning statements and a story about your brand; use them throughout your company materials.
• Choose colors, fonts and other visual elements that match your personality.
• Determine how your employees will interact with prospects and customers to convey the personality and make sure your brand “lives” within your company.

After Brand Strategy

Together with your competitive positioning strategy, your brand strategy is the essence of what you represent. A great brand strategy helps you communicate more effectively with your market, so follow it in every interaction you have with your prospects and customers.

hypothesis testing is of fundamental importance for market research.

hypothesis testing is of fundamental importance for market research.

Hypothesis Testing & ANOVA - marketing research

This chapter's learning objectives

• The logic of hypothesis testing.
• The steps involved in hypothesis testing.
• What test statistics are.
• Types of error in hypothesis testing.
– Common types of t-tests, one-way and two-way ANOVA.
• How to interpret SPSS outputs.

Introduction

we use descriptive statistics to compare groups. For example, we might be interested in investigating whether men or women spend more money on the Internet. Assume that the mean amount that a sample of men spends online is $200 per year against the mean of $250 for the women sample. Two means drawn from different samples are almost always different (in a mathematical sense), but are these differences also statistically significant?

To determine statistical significance, we need to ascertain whether this finding is attributable to chance or if these findings are likely due to significant differences. If the difference is so large that it is unlikely to have occurred by chance, we call this statistical significance. Whether results are statistically significant depends on several factors, including variation in the sample data and the number of observations.

In this chapter, we will introduce hypothesis testing which allows for the determination of statistical significance. As statistical significance is a precursor to establishing practical significance, hypothesis testing is of fundamental importance for market research.

hypothesis testing is of fundamental importance for market research.

Marketing Automation - Nurturing: Urgency Email Campaigns

Marketing Automation -  Nurturing: Urgency Email Campaigns

Marketers that tightly align with Sales have an opportunity to further their nurture strategy and reach individuals that have progressed into the later stages of the Sales & Marketing funnel. An Urgency Campaign targets individuals that are typically within the Justify phase of the buying cycle. Marketers need to partner with sales to address the sense of urgency that there is in the later stages of the individual's path to purchase.

To help Sales close deals faster, you should consider adding an Urgency campaign to your Nurture Strategy. Let’s get started with creating Urgency campaigns.

Be a (Sales) Hero | Nurturing: Urgency Campaigns

Marketing Automation - The 4 Ps of a Successful Marketing Automation Program

Marketing Automation - The 4 Ps of a Successful Marketing Automation 

At the heart of the myth, is that marketing automation technology will boost your sales and save your business. In fact, marketing automation platforms are only 25% of the equation, if that. I’ve outlined four “P”s of a successful marketing automation program to help set the record straight.

Marketing Automation - The 4 Ps of a Successful Marketing Automation Program