Content Marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategy. Despite its effectiveness very few businesses know how to utilize it efficiently. To build a solid content marketing you must set KPIs and project ROIs wisely. Comments, page views, bounce rate, average time spent on your page, social sharing and keyword ranking are crucial KPIs to determine your content marketing success. An editorial calendar on the other hand helps you stay updated with the overall progress of your company’s brand story. Whom you hire for content marketing must have a good understanding of how to be professional and courteous along with innovation and creativity. The attempt should be to extract more value out of it. Your content should be promising and trustworthy. Tracking analytics and documenting all processes help you improve the content. To use educational and entertaining contents for increasing the customer conversion rate is the optimal way to utilize content marketing. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/277700

The number of private companies going public has been drastically falling in the past few years. The question that arises while observing this trend is, whether a successful company should consider the thought of going public at all. Understanding today’s tech investment environment is a prerequisite to answer this question. The new crowdfunding rules have made it easier for small businesses to raise funds, in such a stage the more important question is how to use this piled up cash. Surely raising more funds and going public is a huge accomplishment for a business, but what is more important is to sustain steady growth and innovation. The factors that you shall keep in mind while raising fund is that the idea in your head truly fulfills a market need, your business partners and investors are picked smartly and you do not look at VC funding to answer for your growth. To answer whether to go public or not you must look at what is best for your company give the current scenario. Read more at:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279563

Prisma can be considered as one of the best examples of viral marketing in 2016. Social media sites are flooded with pictures from this application. As a marketer what you need to see beyond these pictures is why the simple photo filter app is gaining popularity with no efforts to promote it at all. The users promote the app on their own, for reasons like the simplicity of the application and easy integration of the app with the social media. Another smart trick that Prisma teaches us, is to offer a better alternative to products already being used by the customers instead of trying your luck with something totally new. The way Prisma used IOS to tease Android users and build the urge in them for the app, is another very smart technique to popularize your platform. Resist the urge to market more than needed instead let your customers market for you. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280101

Sales Promotion helps you develop a loyal customer base. Promotion is a powerful way that helps customers to know about you and your brand. However, if something goes wrong the same promotion can permanently tarnish your brand reputation. Letting your customers test the product you launch after the proper quality check is an impressive way to gain popularity amongst your customers. Predicting what can go wrong and taking appropriate measures so that the things don’t go wrong can save your reputation from being tarnished. To have a knowledge of the probability of occurrence of such wrong actions is also very helpful. Despite the precautions if anything goes wrong, the best solution is to stay calm and hunt at a better alternative. It’s important to identify whether wrong promotions will cause small problems or have a catastrophic effect on the brand. One should base his promotion decision on this identification. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279220

An ambitious businessman owning a small business will like to keep track of all the activities in his business. At this point in time, anything that comes for free and easies your task is welcomed. Buffer is a tool that helps you to manage your various social media accounts efficiently without any sort of hindrance. Outlook is another very important tool that makes your life with emails very easy going. OnStar is of relief when you are on the roads. Waze saves you from losing time in traffic jam, it’s an app that gives you alert about traffic jams and accidents when you enter a destination. Triplt, on the other hand is a tool that helps you stay updated with your bookings in hotels, restaurants or flight reservations. It saves you from bearing the pain to go through printed travel reservations. Time saved with the help of these apps can be used to accomplish other important tasks. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270400

In the digital era where an individual is afraid of losing jobs not to recession, but two robots and machine learning, it becomes important for us to learn about the extent to which machines can replace human beings. In the near future where automation might delete few occupations entirely, it is expected to affect almost all occupations to some degree. Knowledge about technical feasibility is a prerequisite for automation of the activity. The second major factor that is always the reason for concern is cost. The cost of developing such automation system needs to be taken care of. Physical activities are most susceptible to automation. The retail industry is another place where automation would do wonders. However, financial sector lies in the middle range of automation. People managing and developing things can still relax a bit as automation in this field has very low technical potential. The focus should be on automating sectors with high technical feasibility and replacement of workers from these sectors to opportunities where automation is yet to do wonders. Read more at: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/business-technology/our-insights/where-machines-could-replace-humans-and-where-they-cant-yet

In order to have an extensive customer base, inclusive of people from all over the world you need to check how efficiently you manage one of the most difficult tasks of targeting the right group of new consumers. When you know you are the lucky one to take birth in digital era, then be luckier and use it to sell information and subscription to the world. Sometimes staying quiet might help so please do not engage in any sort of politics over social media, which relates to the sentiments of your customers. This goes without saying, appear in all major social platforms and avoid the smaller ones. Boosting about the quality you provide accompanied by strong testimonials might help you to draw attention of the new customers. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279226

An image speaks a thousand words but a video speaks thousand sentences. May be this is the reason one should pounce on the opportunities like Periscope, Blab and Facebook Live Video that allows you to reach out to your customers using video livestreaming. You can use Facebook Livestreaming to Livestream either with the entire audience or just the selected followers. It also allows you to save the video for later use. Using the mobile app Periscope you can broadcast to your twitter account (it’s a must) followers. However, you need to ensure that you save the Periscope’s stream or the autosave broadcast setting is enabled. Whereas, Blab.im saves you from any such obligation to integrate with any social media sites. These apps can be used to launch a product, give live training, build customer support and to boost the live events in your business. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279538

Ever since its launch in 2012, Snapchat has been growing its customer base massively.  In the competitive environment in which a startup constantly strives to prove itself it becomes necessary to have transparent and clear communication. A startup can build transparency and trust by leveraging useful snapchat features. Using the short lasting snaps one can establish brand persona amongst targeted audience. Using geo-filters and 3D tickets to tell stories about your brand that leaves a longer impact on the customer’s mind is also a good way to keep your customers glued to you. Startups can also use the app in order to campaign or receive customer feedbacks. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279635

Though influencer marketing is the new kid in the block, the current level of media coverage and discussion surrounding it ensures 2016 is going to be a big year for the strategy. Accepting something new can be a difficult process for an organization irrespective of its advantages. But the market is already past the point of early adoption and brands already vested in influencer marketing are achieving results. Near and long term benefits can influence the momentum towards influencer marketing. Assessment of proper team skills and openly discussing the repercussions of this shift in digital marketing strategy can make the transition much smoother. Authenticity is the criteria that appeals most to a modern consumer. By working with the right influencers and giving them permission to be themselves and deliver the message as they see fit, can be a huge step towards the success of influencer marketing. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30284/three-tips-for-building-internal-support-for-influencer-marketing

Stepping into the shoes of a video content creator can be a scary proposition. Many of us are unfamiliar with the equipment, relevant software or what kind of content our brand/product needs. Analysts predict that most of future content consumption is going to be in a video format. So to do it just grab your smartphone camera. A modern smartphone is good enough for a beginner to start producing quality video. Watch YouTube videos on how to edit clips and add effects to make your videos appealing. Use the freeware available to you like windows movie maker to get yourself off the ground. Go for Simple formats like customer testimonials, Q&As, product demonstrations, executive introduction. While creating the video you should keep in mind the target audiences and the platform it will use. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30276/a-beginners-guide-to-creating-video-content

In order to build your brand effectively using social media, there are few things that you need to keep in your mind. When branding, one must be smart to choose the right platform out of hundreds of social media platforms. In order to make a social brand effective, one must be on his toes all the time. One shall try and engage with its customers other than just mechanically promoting the brands. Including attractive pictures in your posts and being consistent helps your social brand to reach out to more people effectively. Taking help of already established social media participants can help you to pocket a goal really fast. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278628

In the digital world, it becomes important for a small business to keep track of what people are talking about it online. It is very important for the business to highlight the positive reviews and make amends with the negative ones. These reviews can break or make a business, so keeping a check on such reviews using free or low cost tools is a good idea. Setting up Google Alerts that sends you notifications when new content is added for keywords specified by you is a good way to stay updated. In order to track your social influence which closely correlates to the online reputation one can use the tool Naymz. Yext helps you to ensure that information posted on websites is correct whereas Hootsuite helps you bring all your social media networks in one platform. Read more about other such tools at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/277908

Every company which uses Digital marketing focuses and invests a huge amount of time and money in SEO. Initially a company might do well with its SEO, but after a point of time the disaster strikes and progress slows down. Such a “SEO plateau” is bound to affect all the companies at some point of time or the other. Now, to get past such plateau is one of the greatest challenges faced by the companies. Creating content around newly identified keywords helps you surpass your SEO performance.  Working on how your content appears in SERP helps you get more organic traffic. Achieving multiple rankings for your keywords would be ideal. Targeting a larger audience throughout the entire buyer funnel is also helpful. To guarantee break through SEO plateau, one should continually create new and high quality content. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30241/how-to-get-past-the-dreaded-seo-plateau

Implementation of self-service Business Intelligence (BI) can help you reap many benefits. At times non-technical professionals can make better, faster and efficient decisions by generating their own reports and conducting analyses without any sort of assistance from IT staffs. However, these self-service BI environments must be very user friendly in order to be effective. Agility, bandwidth and personnel are some of the factors that should be taken into considerations by the company before implementing self-service BI. Such self-service BI brings along independence and autonomy from IT with it. Few capabilities that these BI tools must possess are anti-hacking facilities and non-stop operation. This technological tool depends on the Enterprise Data Quality. Data Governance on the other hand helps to provide accurate information using the self-service BI tools. Read more at:  http://www.dataversity.net/self-service-bi-success-depends-upon-data-quality-governance/

LinkedIn is popular as Facebook of the professional world. Employers have less time to spare, so once they reach your profile there are few things that they would want to know at once. What are you doing currently and what job title suits you, will definitely interest the employer. Make sure that the employer doesn’t have too deep dig to find out what makes you credible and how good your writing skills are. You will have to steal the opportunity to brand yourself. Boosting about your skills and the highest professional accomplishments will attract the recruiter’s attention. Highlighting certain tools with which you have some experience can help you get the extra edge. Apart from you, what others have to say about you, also matters to the employer, so make sure you include it. Conveying your passions through word will act like icing on the cake. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278708

Machine learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence that provides a computer with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can teach them to grow and change when exposed to new data. Artificial Intelligence is supposed to be the core of Big Data, producing exponential growth in the volume of data used for scientific research. Out of all two most popular machine learning techniques are, supervised and unsupervised learning. Nowadays, learning algorithms such as Bayesian networks and support vector machines is being used more extensively in daily commercial systems. To learn more read at: http://www.dataversity.net/machine-learning-now/

Being a sales organization, there are few things that you need to take care of if you are lying behind your competitors. An organization in order to be at the top, should always aim at making a trend analysis so as to anticipate changes that could turn into opportunities and threats in near future. In today's world without appropriate digital marketing tools one can never aspire to be at the top. Therefore, choosing your digital tools smartly is always a wise decision. Sophisticated analysis should be used not just for sales optimization but also for risk minimization. Apart from technologies and digital tools investing in human capital can also provide you with that extra edge. A clear vision accompanied by a leadership commitment can always help an organization to stand out from the rest of the crowd. To know more follow: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-sales-secrets-of-high-growth-companies

Traditional structured databases are being replaced by databases which are often used in clouds. Well, the problem that such databases bring along with them is that it's very difficult to back up these databases. However, these databases can be protected through multisite replication. To run a node-level backup of the data on one node of the multi-node system is one of the most common methods used to back up these databases. One can also backup their database using a snapshot. Data IO helps to make this process of backing up databases easy. Read more at: https://storageswiss.com/2016/06/07/backing-up-massive-cloud-databases/

Customers nowadays want the same experience in the B2B world as they wanted in B2C area. As a result, sales leaders are expected to do more with less. So just focusing on technology would not do. To make your product look attractive is always one field where you can work on, to improve your sales. Ensuring that the local sales manager and retailers always stay updated with upcoming changes in the sales process and new sales technology, also helps you to get more demand for your product. In order to enjoy greater market share, a seller should always aim at taking a leadership role in the market. Keeping your sales operation coordinated through centralized systematic organizations is always an add-on. One also needs to be careful about whom is he assigns the task to sale his product, which means that leader of sales operation should be high-potential leader. Read more at: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/looking-beyond-technology-to-drive-sales-operations