Posts Tagged
marketing
Marketing is the cornerstone of any successful organization. After all, it connects your product with customers. Earlier, the process was manual. Lately, it has become mobile and social.
The evolving paradigm has also led to a change in the type and nature of tools used to measure marketing efforts. For example, web-based marketing automation software has replaced manual modes of marketing – and with good reason. You can these apps to automate your marketing processes. They streamline your processes, operations and enable you to quantify your efforts. What’s more, these apps allow you to connect across multiple platforms including the web and social media.
The notion that social media is the next big thing in sales seems to have fallen flat on its face. Virtually every study conducted has shown that Facebook and Twitter campaigns only increase brand awareness. As far as driving traffic to your website and converting visitors into customers, email is still king.
A recent study of companies that used a dedicated email marketing client, good newsletter content and personalisation for each reader reported open rates of over 30%, with similar click-through rates – leading to above average conversions. This kicks Facebook’s ass.
Now, the guys behind the industry favourite ‘Mail Chimp’ have been working hard on a new product. It’s called Mandrill and solves many of the nagging issues of traditional email marketing. They claim it trumps the competition by a long-shot. Let’s take a look.
Usually, I stumble upon a cool app, play with it for a few days and then write the review. In this case, it’s a bit different. I have been following Brightpod right from the start (which I guess is little over a year ago) for two main reasons.
First, it’s from the team of DeskAway, a fairly successful project management app that has been around for a long time now. Personally, I consider it to be a real project management solution in a sea of stripped down task management apps. So, I was looking forward to see how they execute their new venture in the Web 2.0 era.
And second, the app targets a niche – marketers – which is a strange thing for a SaaS app. Usually, the goal is to shoot for the stars and go about fighting a ton of competitors, and end up grabbing a negligible piece of the pie. However, Brightpod from many angles appears to cannibalize the potential customer pool of their flagship product. So, it makes for an interesting case study if you are a cloud business enthusiast like me.
Alright, the story time is over and now we are off to the fun part – taking Brightpod for a spin!
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“What do you have to say for yourself?” is the question your Twitter account answers.
Opinions, experiences, current geographic location and ability to find hilarious links are what set one tweeter apart from the next. The platform itself evolved from a simple ‘status update’ tool to a flourishing ecosystem of people interacting, sharing and discovering.
As with any ecosystem there are those on top and those at the bottom. The higher you are the more active followers and influence you’ll have. This is a fairly useless observation for those who use Twitter to find news and check up on friends. But for people who use Twitter to interact with a community, market their product or service or research a segment of people, analyzing a Twitter account is a top priority.
Here’s a few tools that’ll will check out your Twitter, tell you what’s going on in the world and how much power you hold in it. (more…)
The downfall of many new business and products is that the creators loved their idea too much. A quick search for failed tech products will reveal thousands of cool gadgets and gizmos that while awesome, clever and unique, never made enough sales to break even. The inventors loved their pride and joy so much that they assumed the rest of the world would care. But products can be like first-time parents showing off a snotty, crying bundle of burden.
Google has developed Google Consumer Surveys to help anyone decide whether or not to go ahead with an idea. By simply asking their target market “Hey, what do you think of this?”, business and individuals can act on information instead of blind ambition.
The name, however, makes Google Surveys seem like a half baked web app already replicated a hundred times over around the web. Maybe it’s something cooked up on an off-day at the Googleplex in California?
When you’re launching a new product/service or announcing a new offer, it’s important to give customers the information they need to close the loop – and it doesn’t hurt to look good while doing so. That’s where landing pages come in – by definition, they’re attractive, concise, to the point and present customers with a way to opt in to whatever it you’re selling. So how do you create an absolute deal-clincher of a landing page?
Lander might be a good place to start. The app allows you to build landing pages using a simple interface with powerful features, publish them and analyze your conversions as they happen. Could this be the new secret weapon in your arsenal of marketing tools? Let’s put a page together and find out. (more…)
Way back in 1989, when the idea of using computers to manage customer relationships was still in its infancy, a guy by the name of John Ferrara founded Goldmine Software which would spend the next decade pioneering CRM software solutions. In 1999 he sold Goldmine to a South African firm. But that wasn’t the end of John. He’s back with Nimble, a CRM web app for today’s world where social media is king.
Nimble promises to integrate a salesperson’s efforts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and a plethora of other avenues one might use today to keep in touch with their customers. Keeping your existing customers happy is increasingly important, since, according to some, it can cost fourteen times as much to get a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. Anything to help you keep in touch with your existing customers and network is a plus, so let’s check Nimble out and see if it really can.
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting SpyderMate SEO Tools. The developer describes SpyderMate SEO Tools as a suite of unique and powerful SEO tools structured to make managing multiple SEO campaigns easy. The Scorecard tells you how your web site is currently performing from an SEO perspective and tracks progress over time. The Auditor tells you what you need to fix by thoroughly crawling and analyzing any web site. The Low Hanging Fruit report helps you find keywords for which you could.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
Launching a new product or service via the web is no easy task in today’s fast-paced market. There’s plenty of competition and many variables involved in determining whether yours will be a success or failure. One of the metrics marketers use to determine how well their promotional web pages are doing is called bounce rate – the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which a user left your site from the landing page (the higher the rate, the less effective your page is).
Unbounce is an app built to tackle these challenges and then some. With Unbounce, you can create great-looking landing pages with ease, test them for effectiveness in lead generation and publish them to kickstart your business too. There are a lot of great ideas behind this app and they’re well-implemented too – but will they help you turn out a winner of a landing page? Let’s build one ourselves and find out.
Given the explosive rise in Internet usage over the past few years, businesses are now turning to the virtual world of the Internet to advertise their products and services. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook are now commonplace for advertising as they offer a number of advantages over traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper or magazine adverts. Internet-based advertising is often a whole lot cheaper than print advertising and it can reach a much larger catchment area, often outside the traditional catchment area of the business.
The key question for businesses now is: how can they harness this increase in internet-based advertising and, most importantly, can it create revenue for the business? The whole area can be a bit of a minefield to businesses who have never ventured into the world of online advertising before but luckily there are some helpful tools on the Net designed to guide businesses through this minefield.
Raven Tools is one of these. It has a wide range of tools depending on whether you use SEO (search engine optimisation), social media networks or Google products such as Analytics and AdWords. This could be a real advantage to any online business looking to broaden its horizons.
Let’s take a look at Raven Tools in a bit more detail.
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