SigmaWay Blog

The most important aspect of content fundamentals is really defining and understanding the importance of content marketing. There's a lot of noise about content marketing today. Content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant content to acquire, attract and engage the audience. It helps to induce interest in the business with the creation of new ideas. It also builds relationships and fosters conversations.

John W Hayes in his article on business2community.com presented the most frequently asked questions on content marketing and they are:

1. How do you balance thought leadership with giving too much information away for free?
2.  How do you persuade, cajole or bribe colleagues into providing the content you need?
3. What, and how, do you measure the success of content marketing?

 To know more about this study, please follow the link:  http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/top-content-marketing-faqs-01283052

Business Intelligence gives business owners an outline of their performance, which is essential to gain important insights and plan for future growth of the company. Often business owners are caught up in dealing with day today operational problems that they forget to look at bigger picture and plan to remain ahead of the crowd. Paul Robertson, in a blogpost in Phocas advices that business intelligence tools are a must to make informed and accurate decision. He puts forth 5 indications that will help you identify if your business need to upgrade its BI:

• Your idea of business intelligence is a spreadsheet.

• Your business intelligence process is largely manual.

• It takes few days to draw insight from your data.

• You can’t perform in-depth analysis of your data.

• You don’t know how well your business is performing. 

If any of them is affirmative for you then it’s time for better BI. For more insights click on the link http://www.phocassoftware.com/5-Signs-Your-Company-Needs-Better-Business-Intelligence

A project can fail for several reasons, some of which are under our control and some are not. Every project will have certain factors that are not under our control, but with proper attention we can increase our success. The reasons being:- • No clear goals: projects lack clear objectives and also a clear vision of what is best for the project’s success. We can avoid this failure by setting out distinct goals of the project at the very beginning.

• No deadlines: without any milestones, team members do not know whether they are on the right track or not which can cause things to go out of control. We can avoid this failure by setting major milestones, and also keep a check on the progress overtime.

• Budget problems: sometimes, budget problems are out of control since leaders create unrealistic budgets on paper that can never be met in reality leading to failure of the project, avoid this failure by making sure every aspect of the budget is looked into carefully to meet expectations.

• Lack of resources: mostly project problems fall into this category because gathering necessary resources for the project’s success is not an easy task. Avoid this failure by researching, thinking through and studying the resources needed for the project from the beginning.

• Weak management: a project with a perfect plan but poor management can fail easily. Avoid this failure by understanding our own role as the manager and actively controlling the team and project work.

• Scope creep: project scope mostly gets diverted from the original objective to several other unnecessary goals leading to failure. Avoid this failure by always keeping in mind the original motive and sticking to it.

These are few such problems which can be easily avoided to prevent project failure.

Read more at: http://www.smartdatacollective.com/bernardmarr/329018/why-projects-fail-biggest-pitfalls-you-can-easily-avoid?ref=popular_posts

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

Mobile Apps have been at the center of customer based marketing. With the sea of options to choose from, retention of customer is not only about the attractive feature but also about the user experience it creates. Bryn Adler, content marketing manager at Localytics, has a piece of advice, which will help grow your app experience and reduce churn. Here are 7 points to keep in mind:

• No misleading Ads

• Lead with value

• User experience is paramount 

• Use data to track usage, retention and engagement

• Targeted marketing is smarter marketing 

• Feedback is the holy text

• Predicting churn 

For more on this click the link http://www.business2community.com/mobile-apps/making-customers-happy-in-the-age-of-options-reduce-churn-retain-app-users-01271973

Firms looking for potential customers should proceed with caution while deciding on the marketing strategies. The marketing strategies should be not such that annoy customers. Here are some general pointers:
• It is best to come clean about the product and its limitations. There is no sense in hiding weakness initially which might make the customer deflect later due to inefficiency.
• Promotion of the product should be done either through email or phone, not both. Some decorum should be maintained while having a conversation over phone or emailing a customer.
• Demonstrations made to the customers should be engaging and interactive.
• The discussion sphere should not be kept confined to the product only, it pays to enquire about the customer. Even if opinions differ or disinterest is shown by the customer, it helps to give value to the reasons the company got rejected.
Read more at:  http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/5-sales-marketing-tactics-guaranteed-to-annoy-customers-01274974

Annual marketing data benchmark report reveals that around 84% of marketing database are non-functional, 64% of records do not include a phone number and only 35% of emails were identified to be functional. Undoubtedly, this will take the profits on a downward flight. Larisa Bedgood in her post on Datamentors tells us 4 ways we can bring the data to shape and extract higher revenues.

• Begin with Data Assessment

• Establish Business Processes to ensure data quality

• Establish an ROI to fund new marketing database initiatives

• Implement a data management solution 

For more on this click the link http://www.datamentors.com/blog/dont-lose-revenue-bad-data-4-tips-whip-your-marketing-data-shape

With the marketers trying to woo customers with all their grit, it's customer data that has proved to be their friend indeed. Data driven marketing increases the ROI to many fold. This is now a well-documented fact. Larisa Bedgood (author) in an article in the blog Datamentors talks about the following 3 ways to extract more revenue from data driven marketing:

• Break Down the Silos

• A 360-degree customer view

• Personalized experience is what customers want. 

For an extensive account of these 3 keys to higher ROI hit the link http://www.datamentors.com/blog/3-ways-data-driven-marketing-drives-higher-roi

If the country is changing faster than the expectations, then organizations are faced with the challenge of moving with those changes. It is affected by fast evolving markets, ever changing technology, increasing competition and changing preference. So how to react to these changes? First is by gathering intelligence, using big data analytics to discover patterns by tracking commercial data, for example in consumer spending, movements of competitors. Next is to look for the unexpected. This involves constantly improving your business model, inculcating the changes that raise inside and outside the industry. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bensimpfendorfer/2015/07/07/the-agility-factor-in-asias-competitive-markets/

Market intelligence can be used to assist almost every decisions faced by a company. Market intelligence helps a company to increase revenue, profit or market share. Three basic steps on how to go about gathering market intelligence and what types of market intelligence will deliver useful insights are:§ Don’t reinvent the wheel –A huge amount of learning can be gathered using workshops specially if guided by skilled external moderator.
§ Choose your battleground – Clearly stating your key objective will help in your business plan and actions will be taken.
§ Don’t stop digging –It is not only important that market intelligence is acted upon when it is collected but also a constant feedback is needed. Read more at: https://www.b2binternational.com/publications/guide-to-market-intelligence/

Data is collected through various paid, owned and earned media channels. Currently, B2B companies have started to emerge which is indeed a good news for marketers. Forward-looking media companies are investing to furnish superior quality prospects and performance data in order to generate new customers. They are as follows:

1. Data as the new media and marketing currency - Media companies uses data in association to their content and customer's marketing assets.
2. Behavioral prospect data and signal intent - It helps to figure out the best opportunities by encouraging prospects in a more targeted manner.
3. Company content consumption data for account-based marketing - It aims to target companies that B2B marketers finds ideal for their product.

Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/big-data/your-best-marketing-data-provider-may-be-right-underneath-your-nose-01264168

Let’s say you work for a publishing company deciding upon what New Release Newsletter to send to a particular customer. One simple way would be to just ask your customers as to what genre of books they would prefer to read- Preference Modeling-and the decide accordingly what newsletter to send to whom. Alternatively you can try to predict an individual’s buying propensity for a particular genre and send the newsletters accordingly – Cluster Modeling.
Which of the above should you chose to yield more accurate results?
A survey was conducted with a New York based publisher revealed that deciding which genre newsletter to send to whom based on Clusters had a 2-time better open rate, a 4-time better and 7-time higher click-through-rate, than those based on the consumer’s self-stated preference.
The conclusion: It is equally, if not more, important to observe what people do as compared to what they say.
Read more at: http://www.agilone.com/clustering-beats-preferences

 The potential to go public and make millions with an Initial Public offer (IPO) is appealing to most entrepreneurs and sometimes seems the statement of success.  But IPOs are not as pretty as they seem. Planning and executing the IPO is a hectic task, it requires huge research and strategy, which is mostly outsourced to investment bankers who gives a rosy picture hiding some important information you should know.  After the IPO is floated you end up creating a lock up since those shares can’t be sold for a while. Also, not every company is suited for IPO, except those who have a simple business model and a clear cash flow strategy. There is a difference between great valuation and accurate valuation, overvalued stocks collapse as the markets gets smart unless they grow into their valuation. Read more at: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2015/06/23/richie-hecker-understand-the-risks-of-going-public-before-you-ring-the-bell/

Corporates today provide many pro women services like day-care centres, six months-maternity leave, transportation services etc., in fact, sometimes companies hire same number of men and women at entry levels, but still the proportion of women workforce is on a decline. According to Economic Times, a recent report shows that women “invest” in their careers differently. After obtaining a job, the effort to take it further reduces. Post marriage, her career becomes home oriented as she has both work and home responsibilities. Apparently, women who work with same passion as men are tagged “non-family type”. They are not able to develop a rapport with their bosses as strong as men’s. So, retaining female employees depends entirely on herself, the family and the supervisor. Read more at: http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/why-indian-companies-are-losing-their-women-workforce/

19000 students across 340 countries around the world have chosen GOOGLE as their top choice when asked where they wanted to work according to a study. The other companies where they also liked to work in the ascending order were Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. This particular study was conducted by Piazza, a discussion platform used by several students and teachers around the world. Pizza has been doing a great work in the market for recruiters and is an attractive tool. Piazza has also stated that women and men have different opinions in choosing their workplace. Hence, such a software helps the companies know how students see the world right now.

Read more at : http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/where-computer-science-engineering-and-math-majors-want-to-work/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_-7001745546600563025#.mzgrdo:U5OR

Data is the most important thing for marketing today and most marketers understand this pretty well. Simply collecting data won't help. It should be able to tell a story. Insights derived from data are very important. Data should be able to help marketers identify their customers and the appropriate offers for them. In an organization, every department holds some data on customers. The first task of the marketer is to get rid of data silos and gather all the marketing data at one place. Once this is done, robust analytics tools can be applied to the data to generate a singular customer view. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/big-data/marketers-big-data-worth-01263023

Is your CRM system making you work but isn't working out for your company then here are some tips that will come handy. Oliver Lopez, founder and CEO of Structsales, in his blogpost on Hubspot Blogs puts down 5 points thinking along which one can make for a great CRM system for their organization.

• The relationship between sales process and CRM 

• Find your key performance indicators

• Give Reps clear and compelling guideline

• Link sales process to buying process

• What you need in CRM 

For more takeaways from this piece of information follow the link http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/how-to-make-crm-work-for-your-organization-and-not-the-other-way-around

How to make my content impressive and engaging- This is one question that haunts every brand now and then. With standard formatted blogpost becoming too common and dry to consume, the appetite for more creative and engaging content is increasing. Sylvia Jensen, marketing director at Oracle Marketing Cloud, shares 12 awesome ways to keep your brand message relevant and at the same time makes it stand out from the noise. Some of our picks are:

• Framing a quiz, it will be more engaging

• Examine a case study

• Explore different charts

• Put things in a comic strip

• Write a guide or glossary

For more, have a look at http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/12-awesome-content-marketing-ideas-arent-blog-posts-01258747

Gaining insight from marketing databases is proving to be a tedious task for today's marketers. A recent survey has revealed that applying the accurate solutions to analyze and interpret data is the biggest challenge being faced by businesses today. To mitigate these problems, marketers can consider using marketing data management services. With the help of these services data consistency and completeness can be achieved without putting in much manual effort. Extracting insights from marketing databases leads to improvement of clarity and insight on target buyers. Once marketers are able to identify prospective consumers, they can create content that are personalized in nature and hits the targeted consumers. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/big-data/you-love-data-but-your-teams-not-so-hot-for-it-three-tips-to-get-them-on-board-01259909

In business, one not only has to keep a track on competitors and a close watch on the market but also keep a tab on what the customers are feeling, and how they are responding about their products in social media. Luckily with the advancement of data analytics many such tools are available and are becoming popular. One such marketing tool is social mention, which is a search engine which searches any social mention of the topic in social media there are other tools such as quora, tweetreach, etc. These platforms enable a business leader to evaluate customer sentiments and use it for business development. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jayson-demers/7-marketing-tools-to-find_b_7605262.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in