Unprecedented growth of e-commerce industry, has given marketers a hard time to acquire and retain shoppers. The retailers need to have the right insight in collecting analyzing data as well determining the actions that will resonate with consumers and deliver best experience. 1) Marketers need to have a long sighted approach towards consumer lifecycle and tactics within their acquisition. It helps in identifying the consumer goal from specific interaction and what this long term engagement will offer to shoppers. 2) The shoppers needs to develop the capability to anticipate shoppers actions and to do marketers must learns individuals likes and dislikes, their interests and most of all be able to discern individuals intent from collected rationalized data. 3) E-Commerce brand should use ensure that their data must be collected from each interaction and across every touch point to create one cohesive customer experience. Lack of persistent communication within various interaction units hurts the data aggregation and analysis. Read more at: http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/keep-one-step-ahead-of-your-e-commerce-competition/

Retailers face hectic flurry for organizing and planning for big sales, poor inventory management system can sabotage your sales even with great customer services. Negligence may lead to small discrepancies such as colour, sizes which can destroy customer relationship and cost valuable revenue. Accurate and timely delivery requiring effective management of omni-channel system is crucial for customer satisfaction beyond friendly services. Small to medium business should focus on mobile access, real time access of disparate data, sales forecasting and product management for prior inventory. Delay in information and updates of innovated products and services will lead to disrupt business as it leads to unrealistic promises which can’t be completed in time window. Your need to empower your sales person with latest technologies and real time inventory information. Delivering products to customer on time is as sales, when investing in newer solution, its important to plan for short and mid-term growth. Changing inventory multiple times would cost resources, but will be necessary if you fail to take proper decision now. Read more at:- http://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/dont-leave-customers-empty-handed/

This year's blockbuster Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw more than ever selling which implies that in future, marketing will be imperatively focused through internet transactions. International survey suggests that more than 151 people shop online. Buyers hit physical stores for available door busters. With online shopping, they get to browse around other brands and pick other things of interest. The Interactive Advertisement bureau reports that people still visit showrooms to double check prices of commodity before purchasing online. Soon special days like black Friday and Cyber Monday would loose their importance. Read more at:-http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/what-you-need-to-know-about-new-retail-realities/

In a recent survey, it was found that top uses for Big Data in digital marketing include: 29% - better understand customer insights, 18% improve the supply chain, 16% power campaigns and promotions. Marketers must use online data as the fuel that drives success when it comes to digital marketing and they must collect and integrate these online data sets into a marketing database. The information being generated from Big Data can be segmented into six specific categories: Web Mining, Search Information, Social Media, Crowd Sourcing, Transactional Data, and Mobile. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/big-data-drives-digital-marketing-success-01345766#uSzYX0oZgtDE3Sgp.97

The rapid growth of e commerce has been a hot topic in recent years. With e- commerce flourishing, digital marketing has also become popular. New technologies are emerging and helping companies to sell their product and find new customers through web marketing. Marketers have found a way to boost digital marketing. They are using behavioral triggers. This is a way to find out the customer’s internet search history, particularly window shopping details and detects the customer`s potential demand for a particular product and links them with the seller through pop up ads or banners.  To know more, read: http://www.cio.com/article/2941358/marketing/digital-marketers-look-for-behavioral-triggers.html

With the rising popularity of mobile apps, it has become a necessity for businesses to have a mobile-first approach. Before adopting a mobile-first strategy, the following factors should be kept in mind:

(i) Businesses should be familiar with the platform they use. Familiarity with advertising budget and the ability to hire professional web designers and developers is also required.

(ii) Apps should be built with a goal in mind. Apps can be made to boost sales, retain old customers or some other purpose.

(iii) To stand out in the crowded app market, marketing the app needs to be useful and purposeful.

(iv)  Apps should be unique in experience and significantly different from the company's website. Apps should be able to provide a simplified customer experience.

(v) Apps should be tested before being launched as a bad experience will have a negative impact on the targeted customers. Read more at:https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/7987-is-mobile-first-right-for-your-business

Traditional advertising is what most people think of when talking about advertising or marketing. This includes the "usual" venues for media placement such as newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable television or outdoor billboard. Online advertising also plays a fundamental role in achieving various advertising goals. Tayven James in his article in innovation enterprise.com highlighted the lucrative role of traditional advertising and listed several reasons for it which are as follows:

1. Your demographic might not be "up to speed".

2. Traditional advertising adds weight.

3. Offline ads can boost your online marketing efforts.

4. Offline targeting can lead to better online results.

To know more about traditional advertising, please follow the link: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/why-traditional-ads-can-boost-your-digital-presence-in-2015

Nowadays, like other fields, big data insights affects strategies of digital marketers helping them to create effective campaigns. The discovery of various marketing technologies makes it clear that, companies are keen to invest in this. Sentiment Analysis tool is unethical but not illegal and is really helpful to find opinion –rich information to be acted upon. This “opinion mining” with the help of other tools can actually manage conversations about a brand when used with some other tools. But the drawback of it is we never know if the analysis becomes misleading and leads to the loss of a brand. There are many more such tools used. This proves the relationship between big data and digital marking has transformed into a more sophisticated one. Read more at:  https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/where-big-data-marketing-meet

Though underestimated at times, social media marketing is fast becoming a vital necessity for success of business. Due to complexity of the nature of data analysis and increasing number of social media platforms available, the task of adopting the best social strategy may appear confusing. For more productive use of social media for marketing, the author suggests the following: 1) Creating outstanding and attractive content like images, text documents, etc. 2) Adopting social marketing instead of impersonal digital marketing.  3) Developing two way communication channels with the customers.4) Doing proper research. 5) Monitoring social media 6) Being genuine Read more:-  http://www.business2community.com/social-media/key-to-mastering-social-media-marketing-01248568

Movies are big businesses where a lot of money needs to be spent so that box office hits. Prediction of this hit is an impressive science. So studios nowadays depends on its blockbusters by making early prediction to carry their less profitable films. So, companies uses a number of different metrics to predict the sentiment towards a movie. Analytics has spread its arms from Hollywood towards the World’s Biggest Film Industry, Bollywood. Social Sentiment Index (SSI) reveals measures about successful films. It is argued that it might hamper creativity and risk-taking factor in the movie industry. Thus it might affect small films to even take a chance. Read more about this interesting article at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/can-social-media-analytics-help-end-box-office-flops

The key to successful digital marketing lies in its content. Original, interesting and varied content will catch customer’s attention. Digital marketing campaigns should be both written and visual, rich in information, images, videos etc. One should keep an eye on metrics to make a note of most attracted posts so as to improve one’s content. As almost every individual now possesses a smartphone, marketers should make sure their advertisements are mobile friendly. Social media, with its rising popularity, can be used as a platform for marketing to specific demographics. Customer’s trust might show up the brand loyalty, increasing the chance of sharing and promoting their marketing on social platform. Read more about this interesting article by Maria Maguire (International Events Director) at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-your-digital-marketing

Social media is no more just the place to catch up on old school friends and college buddies; it is now being used for diverse activities. People, nowadays, are using social media to look for products and services, research and review companies and ask for recommendation from friends. Social media has now become the place for branding, opening channels of communication with customers, building loyalty, being transparent and establishing goodwill. Reaching out to customers is far less expensive on social media enabling marketers to achieve higher marketing ROI. Digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing techniques as consumers these days are more tech savvy and active on social media. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-advertising-roi-01247591

A firm needs to build a firm base that gradually can destroy others. The amount of information produced by social media platforms is an excellent way to measure a business’s both real and potential value. 56% of marketers named the ‘inability to tie social media to business outcomes’ as the central challenge to measuring ROI from social media. Gauging customer demand prior to launch using social media helps minimize risk, especially for entrants. Social media data can be correlated with an organization’s KPIs to know their impact upon one another indicating its usefulness. Allowing big data analytics capabilities to the social media platform helps firms to cross-reference social data to other data streams from their business. Read more about this article at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/social-media-analytics

Data, guided by technology, always provides precision to a marketer’s intuition. While technologists favour conservative decision-making on the basis of comparative testing, marketers prefer taking risks and walking the extra mile. Now-a-days, as a company's profitability depends on its digital marketing capability, to a large extent, customer data and analytics, mostly decides a company’s success rate. On the other hand, technologists also facilitate in isolating the redundant tools and programmes in the system, thereby cleaning the system and reducing unnecessary expenditure. The right marketing technology makes the decision-making process less complicated thus proving once more, the importance of the relationship between marketing and technology.
Read more at: http://www.cio.com/article/2933479/marketing/how-to-strike-a-balance-between-marketing-and-tech.html

Sigmaway uses data analytics technologies to deliver business insights from your marketing data. Contact us at contact@gosigmaway.com for a demo.

The success mantra for a perfect digital strategy is to deliver the right message (RM) to right person (RP) at the right time (RT). But we are often overwhelmed by popular trends and forget to look beyond them. Here is an inventory of strategies one can follow to find an optimal solution (might not be the trendiest one). Avinash Kaushik (author) in his blog Occam’s Razor talks about the 5 myths of digital marketing and analytic:

• Programmatic Platforms are a panacea.
• A data first strategy is a winning formula.
• All we need is Facebook, forget our websites.
• The web is dead. Mobile web is dead. Apps are the past present and future.
• Cookies! Cookies are all we need.

For more insight into this piece don’t hesitate to follow http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-deadly-myths-de-mythified/

In this competitive world, relying on one or two marketing channel is not a right decision. If you want to have a competitive advantage, use omni-channel marketing. Omni-channel marketing is about teamwork and using various marketing channels towards a single goal and delivering customer satisfaction. Key to omni-channel marketing success is analytics. Analytics and predictive modelling helps in gathering data, segmentation and provide relevant information. Companies can use internal data assets with external market intelligence to drive a decision. Tying customer's digital information with strong database helps in delivering personalized messages to customers.  Analytics provides metrics which helps in comparing channel performance. Helps in combining 1st party and 3rd party data. Read more at: http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/19/129314.html

U.S. is seen as trendsetter in terms of digital marketing. Though, it’s not the only country in this space, but still people look up to it, to know what’s coming next. In his article at The Guardian, Luke Carrell, Strategy Director at We Are Social, has shared few digital marketing trends that are doing the rounds in US. They are:

• Personal branding for (mostly) good
• Social thinking
• Push into consciousness
• Innovating from within
• Branded content

Albeit, not exclusive to US, these trends shows us the future of digital marketing globally.

To understand them in detail, please visit the following link:

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/jun/01/trends-us-digital-marketing-landscape

In this fast changing world, entrepreneurs need to keep up with the trends to make their companies stand out. To keep their business afloat and growing, they need to know about all fields related to their business, including marketing.

Digital marketing is the trend these days. So, to help entrepreneurs update their knowledge on this front, Neil Patel, Cofounder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics, in his article at The Forbes, has shared six must know points on digital marketing. They are:

• It’s more than PPC ads.
• It costs money.
• Content is king.
• SEO is not dead.
• Mobile optimization is de rigueur.
• Conversion optimization will give you the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time.

To know more about these digital marketing key points, please visit the following link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/05/04/6-things-that-every-entrepreneur-must-know-about-digital-marketing/

“Small Changes, Big Impacts” – that’s what hacks are according Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, Research Director at Gartner for Marketing Leaders.

In her article at Forbes, Kirsten has listed 10 digital marketing hacks, that you can implement immediately and see dynamic changes in your marketing activities like:

• Cost Savings
• Time Savings 
• Demonstrable ROI

Some of these digital marketing hacks that were voted the best at Gartner Digital Marketing Conference are:

• Be Your Customer
• Implement Interview Projects
• Fail Fests – Embrace Innovation & Failure
• Steal Ideas from Other Industries or Disciplines

To know more, please visit the following link and make few choices for your organization:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2015/05/27/ten-digital-marketing-hacks/

The increasing importance of digital marketing is forcing every organization to use digital marketing. Here are some tips for organizations which are planning to use digital marketing:

·         Hire someone who has knowledge about digital marketing or learn how to use digital marketing.

·         There are various ways to analyze digital marketing, but some of them may suit you or some not. It is important to keep on trying new ways.

·         The best type of digital advertising reaches its audience by consent. Maintain a link between consistent efforts and spamming.

·         Try to make your advertising, mobile-friendly because mobile revolution is the next revolution.

·         There are various tools that allow for a do-it-yourself approach and leverage content across platforms.

Read more at: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/051215/dos-donts-digital-marketing.asp