An Insight of Marketing as an Inclusive Strategy for Web Designers

To get lost in the art of creation is after all that web designers do and sinking in for the first rate websites is the thing of the web designing industry. If you are working as a freelancer or running your own business, it’s necessary to create great design and getting those out in the world to see. This way you promote your abilities as a designer and proactive marketing strategy helps you to drive a constant customer flow. Here’s how you can promote your work:-

Image courtesy:-www.boonex.com

• A Captivating Portfolio

An attractive portfolio is quiet primary thing to have. Your potential clients would see it as your resume which can leave a lasting impression and because of this is very essential. While forming the portfolio, there are several things to consider in terms of the work done and how to showcase it. Highlight your best designs but also serve a varied blend of projects to convey the diversity of your skill set.

• Social Media

Navigating most necessary social media channels is crucial. Avoid spreading yourself very thinly in social media marketing, selecting few relevant mediums and maintaining regular, active presence is more productive. Dedicating time on social media on a consistent basis will make sure of your position in the industry. Continue posting relevant content to your viewers and generate interesting discussions.

Image courtesy:-www.rtwaters.com

• Open Networking

Do not neglect face to face networking because it is easy to catch up online. With so many others, operating online, don’t you get lost in the crowd. Attend conferences, events, and workshops to make your name more memorable to clients. Personal connections are more likely to get business. You should cover all bases

• Existing Clients

Existing clients are valuable resources because, through them, word of mouth marketing works. Ask them to write a few lines about their experience after they finish working with you. Add a testimonial section on your website and feature those there. You can also ask them to give a rating out of five. How much you enjoyed working with a client would prompt a positive response which ends into giving your website a more personal edge.

Image courtesy:-www.prswebsolutions.in

• Content Marketing

Promoting yourself as a designer is not about showing amazing design skills but also showcasing them. Content marketing goes hand in hand with web designing which is not restricted to only blogging. Share great content & provide valuable insights or through the use of Infographics. The key thing is it has to be unique and represents you as a designer. With this, coupled with social media & strong portfolio, you can come across as a skilled designer and an industry expert.

How to Design Digital Experiences for Social Impact

Many people in technology field want to help others using their skills. However, building a digital product which solves the issues of the society is much tough than it sounds. Many launches have been organized but failed. Let’s know the reasons why this experience is so common and how to avoid it.

Since the last century, technology is impacting our lives in many ways and because it is responsible for improving so many things, people view it as a solution for every issue. Though, it doesn’t always make things better. People should choose to use them as it can help.

 Image courtesy:-www.blogsimages.adobe.com

• Trends

Effects which take over the social media are the perfect example. When they catch on and become a habit, people gain wide reach. Twitter and Facebook are the most popular platforms where people can easily share ideas with friends and other people. Many networks fail to save their users from negative experiences. Facebook and Twitter are famous for allowing hate speech and harassment, despite reports being done constantly.

As social media is a useful way to highlight social issues and spur a conversation, however, it can’t change society by itself. We need to modify the way of thinking towards technology. It has to be less idealistic.

• Process Aiding

Technology is great, given that the skill set is limited; it is how the work gets done for humans. There is always more to learn. Before beginning any project, acknowledge and keep aside all your biases. It will only harm you in the long term.

Image courtesy:-www.media.licdn.com

• Do Research

Locate target audience through data found in books and studies. If that doesn’t yield any results, go for empirical research. Through social media connections and shares, a Google results can be garnered quickly.

• Data used in Design

Question your guts every time. Explore on who, why, when, where and what and that will define the how. Look beyond your skill set.

• Sink yourself in

Interact with your customers and audiences quite often. Observe how they think. Come up with those who interact with your audience like constant community organizations which will help you look your project more relevant.

Image courtesy:-www.wonderopolis.org

• Consider Negative Situations

Bad things happen all the time so don’t label them as edge cases. Consider all kinds of situations. Create reserves for the ones where things can go worse than you’d like.

• Adopt a slow pace

Social change takes time. Things won’t change overnight. Issues like sexism, classism, racism and generations still exist. Technology requires people to work. Make sure that your work is taking right direction, only then socially impactful designs can be created.

Top Methods For Integrated Success in Telemarketing

A telemarketing campaign can help you solicit prospective customers; maximize the revenue generation capability multiform and expansion of customer base. It has to be strategized so that it aids in maximizing the revenue generation capability & help in creating brand awareness for target markets. To make sure you benefit from it, follow up the telemarketing cycle steps discussed below:-

• Understand your product

For leveraging the benefits of outbound calling for marketing purpose, you must understand your product and other offerings. This way you would know of your unique selling points.

• Focus on Market Intelligence

Once you do this, you will achieve a position to analyze various crucial market data and take better decisions that are well informed. It will also help you in identifying every opportunity within the target markets and also deciding upon the most result oriented strategy.

• Categorize on the basis of Sales and Revenue have driven aims

Sales specific and revenue driven aims are different from each other and they both require attention and care. Also, specify them to your telemarketing call center partner.

Picture courtesy:-www.chalkfacepros.com

• Define Target Customer and Markets

Businesses should be clear about their target areas regarding customers and market. You can’t go with your product for all age groups and all socioeconomic backgrounds or even all the genders. And even if you do it, you waste your time & efforts.

• Start Prospect List Building

After target customer identification, try and collect contact details of a maximum number of prospective customers and clean your old database.  Clear those contacts that are not responsive.

• Short and Long-term Sales Target

Every target is not possible to be accomplished within a budget as well as a time frame; therefore they need to be categorized in short term and long term. Achieving short-term goals would ensure achieving long term sales objectives also.

Picture courtesy:-www.marketinghog.com

• Comprehensive sales strategies and call receiving scripts

This step will help you blend the strategies of outbound calling with customer engagement initiatives and thus this is important. Call handling scripts has to be such way that it fulfills sales strategies.

• Training sessions and Reports

For the marketing professionals, organize training sessions and make sure of the organizational strategies implemented and carried out an incompetent way. Now evaluate the efficiency of the campaign. Ask the experts to prepare integrated reports and gauge the overall performance of different marketing initiatives. It will aid in a modification according to the ever changing needs and emerging trends in a competent manner.

How VR Alters Everything and helps Connecting with the Customers

Understanding our customer is what we all aim for. Because of this reason, we get out of bed every day and this is what keeps us up at night. Knowing their problems are difficult: from cancer treatment to service providing for autistic children and 360-degree view for shoppers. Product development teams must empathize with the diverse users across all industry types and this difficulty must get incorporated into our software.
Innovative ways to better know our customers and sharing the knowledge across our organizations is what we must be looking forward to. Start experimenting a little bit with teams using VR to conduct customer research on location with real users.

 Image courtesy:- www.cdn.shopify.com

From the hype and games into the useful, practical and widely acceptable way, VR has moved so much.  VR has moved beyond this hype that got created.

Sensory experience, incredibly immersive that allow viewers to connect deeply with those who are being recorded. By seeing someone’s world from their perspective, enable you to empathize with their viewpoint and understand their feelings. VR can be used to appreciate difficulty level of the customer’s needs through recording them while performing the jobs and sharing 360-degree videos widely across the organizations.

You can tell what it would like to be a part of an interacting session with a patient in a doctor’s office or selling shoes in a retail store. By understanding the customers better, it will result in developing much better products than before.

Image courtesy:-www.images.forbes.com

VR research is cheaper than the setup and scaling. Lean mentality team which always tries a minimal viable idea before going all in on an experiment does well. Consumer grade cameras have hit a rapid low in price and are only improving every quarter.

The equipment should be used as such to conduct the research costing less than $1000 entirely which includes two cameras with live streaming capabilities, various Google Cardboard Headsets, all the software and cords required to do the jobs. This is cheaper for technology which was literally science fiction. Most frugal budgets can also afford this setup.

Nikon recently announced that a 4k 360 VR camera costs around $500. You can use it around or by immersing it in water while capturing sharp videos backed with 360 degrees. A year ago, something like this would have cost around certain thousand dollars. Things are moving this fast in this area.

Social Media Strategies to Follow for Client Service Industry

Social media is more than just viral memes and funny videos. If you are a customer-centric business, then don’t miss out on social media to reach and respond to your customers. 67% of the customers, according to a study uses company’s social media site for the services and 89% of the messages go ignored.

Despite the easy and friendly usage, businesses are not doing well in social media when it comes to customer service. However it presents a great opportunity to interact with clients and customers, it might also backfire if not used with best practices. Following are some tips on how to improve the game of social media and bring customer service into the future:-

Picture courtesy:-www.maastrichtuniversity.com

1.Response Regularly

Nature of social media is quick and online 24*7 and that’s what customers expect. Take it as an opportunity to provide excellent one. If you wait to reply, you already lose some valuable opportunities.

2.Add a touch of human element to your brand

You can add a voice and face to your brand because most often the customers prefer to deal with a real person rather than a recorded voice or an e-mail. The responses can be casual but better. Don’t make your customers feel that they are responding to a bot while being professional.

Picture courtesy:-www.4.bp.blogspot.com

3.Hiring for handling social media should be carried out carefully

Either you can carefully handle the hiring process for social media positions; someone who knows the lingo or is savvy with social media, but bears in mind that that person doesn’t necessarily know how to deal with customers, or you can outsource it to professionals who have the right attitude with experience and the right know-how which is the key. Outsourcing companies are a great choice for hiring in-house. Because of their specialization, time is not wasted for training, rather time is saved and so is money.

4.Usage of CRM software as a TOOL

The main aim of social media is to build connections and humanize a business. If you rely too much on the software, you undergo the risk of counter this aim. Our CRM helps you track the record of customers or manage queries with time; still, you need the human interface for the accounts on social media. CRM software is a complimentary tool. The social media team should provide personalized services which are crucial to all customers.

Museums Started Adopting Virtual Reality Technique

A virtual reality presentation model named theBlu has been added to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in between megamouth shark, bison diorama, and a bunch of excited school kids.

In general admission fees of $12, with an extra $10 fee, visitors can put on a VR headset and explore the ocean with blue whales swimming over the head or a group of silvery fish darting by. Visitors can use virtual flashlights to further explore the abyss.

Senior project manager and developer from the VR presentation model say that for the young audience, this thing is attractive. Experiment with VR technology in order to get more people in the door and interested in a wider collection is going on.

Image courtesy:-www.wareable.com

This appeal is not restricted only to tech-savvy teens. Several older adults also come to have a look. This is the first time they were doing anything like this and they were thrilled by the idea.

This kind of exposure is something the virtual reality industry is chasing as a whole. Despite the promise made by VR as the next big thing in technology industry, it’s still to get mainstream.

Venues apart from home are a great space for the public to have their first experience in VR, according to the CEO of the company behind the Blu.

Image courtesy:-www.i.ytimg.com

Wevr gave a loan to the museum, the computers, and headsets. But, the company's broader vision is to make fans of this technology. At some point, perhaps, people will get inspired for buying their own headset and also to subscribe to the VR content produced by Wevr.

Some institutions are coming up with VR tours which allow users to explore the galleries in 3D and 360 degrees for the users that are already comfortable with VR. It enables them to go where people are. It’s no worry that VR will replace what is real. The more the image is digital to publish online, the great attendance it would gather. People when come to know that something exists, they want to experience it in real, original way. And that real life feeling is something VR isn’t yet able to replicate.

The experience is partial; it’s a glimpse or a hint, like seeing something which makes you want to see more. In VR tours, the sounds of museums get missed, the footsteps and whispers of echoes and conversations. 

Know what will become Expensive & What Cheaper under GST

The Goods and Services Bill (GST) is now fully confirmed and is ready to roll out and be effective from July 2017. After late last month, Lok Sabha passed 4 important bills related to GST and they got cleared by Rajya Sabha without any modifications.

Now, only various states need to discuss the implications of GST, before it gets rolled out nationwide.

Image courtesy:-www.gst.tax.com

GST is hailed as the biggest & most powerful financial reform bill waiting to get passed since Independence. GST unifies the nation with a single tax regime which states that even you are selling a product from Assam or Tamil Nadu; it won’t matter from now on.

The common man is, no doubt worried about the real impact of GST on his pocket, and paying heed to this need, we are discussing here the major services which will become expensive after GST gets applied and 7 of those services, which will become cheaper:

Image courtesy:-www.LegalRaasta.com

The Services and Goods going Expensive under GST

• Mobile telephone bills (from existing 15% service tax, telecom bills can now attract 18% tax under GST)
• Courier Services
• Insurance premiums
• Online booking of bus/train/air tickets
• Banking, Investment Banking, Wealth Management Services
• Residential and Commercial Rentals
• WiFi Services, DTH Services
• Metro fares/ Rail fares/ Airfares
• Healthcare/ School Fees
• Ecommerce shopping
• Cold Drinks, tobacco and Junk foods (290% tax on tobacco products and Sin Tax on cold drinks and fast foods already comes under the planning of GST)

Image courtesy:-www.modiachievements.in

The Goods and Services going Cheap under GST

• Movie tickets (Entertainment tax would be eliminated under GST, hence, cheaper tickets)
• Two-wheelers
• Dining in restaurants (With reduced Service tax)
• Entry level sedans
• Washing machines
• Televisions/Refrigerators/ AC (As of now, TV’s and other electronic appliances are charged with 30% tax, which will reduce down to 18% for small-screen TV and 28% for AC, coolers, refrigerators and others)
• Gas/Electric stoves
• Basic food products like wheat, rice, pulses
• Essential food items like edible oil (Under GST, tax on these items will fall from 30% to 28% and in some cases, even 18%)
• Soaps & Oils
• To be unbiased, changes in GST for essential food products and petrol/diesel haven’t been yet announced. But as per the statements issued by GST Council, it is quite clear that all of the impacts on these commodities and services will be positive, and they would become cheap.

Social Media Strategy: Things To Be Avoided While Carving

Now a days about 1/3^rd of  time spent online is on social media. Social media is constantly on the news; buzzing in on our Smartphones and helping customers build relationships with brand. Social media basics all are aware of like answering customers queries, post valuable and educational information and watch the channels 24*7.

To improve the social media strategy even further, have a look at the following practices:-

Picture courtesy:- www.businessnewsdaily.com

11.      Don’t aim too much on the audience size.

To increase the number of followers or likes is short term. If people are encouraged to follow your Instagram account for a contest and they don’t win, you end up losing your followers. If a community is created and valuable content is shared, the audience will grow on its own and sustain-ably. Go for quality rather than quantity.

22.      Avoid jumping in on every cultural conversation

Many articles let out fun aimed for brands and feel compelled to share their opinion on celebrity blunder, world event. Some things are better left as they are.

33.      Respond to positive feedback

Tie a bow on the interaction whenever you get a positive one because the customer is likely to say good things about you again. They get easily influenced by opinion of others, so when the openly express their love for your brand, its valuable. Thank people for their feedback and give incentives wherever possible.

Picture courtesy:-www.shawacademy.com

43.      Don’t avoid nights and weekends

You may be working Monday to Friday but your serving community is global. Spanning the time zones across the world and checking social networks apart from your normal work hours. Think about all the times the whole week you check on Twitter and Youtube.

54.      Do not repost same content on every channel

You might be having a great idea about posting a video or infographic but don’t post it everywhere your brand is present. Each network has different capabilities and audiences. When you publish same thing everywhere, you give your audience a chance to not follow you everywhere. After all, who wants to see the same thing four times?

65.      Review your posts and don’t set excessive goals

Social messages live and breathe the communications which require responses. After scheduling some messages in a day and then not checking what responses it got, won’t do the task. The whole point after all is to be social.

Setting too many goals align with the greater goals of your brand and prove the ROI of being social. But if planned too many, is not a long term thing to do. Focus on increasing awareness, generate leads, converting them, speedy service and up selling opportunities.

Landing URL:- http://surevin.com/social-media-strategy-things-avoided-carving/  

Entrusting Customers with the Help of Self-Service Support

Customer preferences are changing continuously for interacting with the businesses. The support service for customers started with the phone calls to emails to live chats and now self services have become mandatory. According to a new study, 72% of the customers prefer self service support from a company rather than through phone calls or emails. They say that it is a convenient method of addressing the customer care problems.

The expectations from customer service are growing and demand for self service customer care is increasing. The internet has empowered people by giving access to the information they need. People have become comfortable using the search engines to get their answers.

Image courtesy:-www.rankminer.com

• Is this the right platform?

Another survey showed that most of the customers who tried using self service support systems were not able to resolve their issues and contacted an agent. 59% of them expressed their frustration.

Some best methods while building a strong customer help center without getting them frustrated includes:-

• ·         Optimizing results

Make sure you give your customers the results they need. Use proper keywords, their categorization, monitoring search queries so that a better experience for the customers can be created.

• ·         Visible search bar

63% of the customers are frustrated with the placement of search bar. Keep it in the front and center so that the customers can easily find and use it. 

Image courtesy:-www.digitalresearchlabs.com

 

• ·         Knowledge updation

56% of the customers say that their reason for abandoning the support center is the lack of information. Ensure the content updation and FAQ for new products, services, and problems that are added regularly to the knowledge base.

• ·         Design

For the knowledge, content is the king but design also plays a crucial role. It spells the difference between a customer able to enter a website, getting answers and exit satisfied rather than spending 10 minutes frustrating on navigation and solving the query.

A good design and even a well-developed help desk can’t be a customer service. If the customer is unable to find the answers from your knowledge base or if their query is more technical or complicated than what a help desk can solve, the representatives of customer service will have to address these concerns. Outsourcing can be the solution to whether it is a lack of resources that are stopping you.

Partnering with the right service provider can help you in addressing the immediate need that the company is facing currently. It will also help you in improving the processes, engaging customers and follow the best practices for customer service.   

Landing URL:- http://surevin.com/entrusting-customers-help-self-service-support/

Focus of Business: Identifying Barriers to Customer Experience

Positive feedback is important to any brand and is the ultimate aim. With new technologies and devices, the customer has become smart and powerful than ever before. Today, customers decide when and how they want to interact with brands and directly impact the company’s way of selling. Through macro trends like social media, mobile, cloud, Internet of Things and big data, they are forging a new era of interaction and are becoming more disruptive than the technology itself.

The business focus has now shifted from leads to right kinds of leads and on-boarding customers to delight them throughout the entire lifecycle. This is the key which drives loyalty, advocacy, and robust customer experience.

Nowadays enterprise transformations provide a good CRM which gives the power to businesses of any size to apply technology folded into the CRM offerings comfortably. They enable to keep them updated and ahead of their customer’s expectations.

Image courtesy:- www.forbes.com

11.      Artificial Intelligence

Customers experience personalization and relevance through AI by their applied advanced analytics to the sales and customer data. The data sometimes is connected to the transaction history. Then next interaction can be tailored based on this knowledge which is a good way to exceed a customer’s expectations rather than anticipating their needs. This operation depends on collecting accurate data and making use of the opportunity presented by internet of things.

22.      Speed

Intelligence on fingertips is powerful which allows the salesperson to interact with real time customers and also are capable of delivering solutions instantly. As customers don’t wait, they shift easily if they don’t get what they are looking for.

33.      Productivity of Salesperson

The salesperson does not love to enter the details o the customers into the CRM system because if they will spend time doing administering tasks they get to have less interaction time with their customers and hence less time building relationships and closing sales.

Image courtesy:- www.salespop.com

44.      Mobility

Salespersons work best when they are out, dealing with customers understanding them and their needs and not when they do not have the access to the customer information they need. They have to be mobile and be able to access CRM while being on road in order to provide a seamless experience to them. 

55.      Team Effort

Selling is not only for the sales department, its team coordination. The CRM system must be fully available and open for all departments for the knowledge and data to be shared and utilized across teams for a common goal which is providing the best experience to the customers. This makes the process easier and faster so as to offer the right solution. 

LandingURL:- http://surevin.com/focus-business-identifying-barriers-customer-experience/

Factors why Inbound Marketing Outperforms Outbound Marketing

Half a decade ago, outbound marketing was the main thing for any business but in this era of technological advancement, inbound marketing is the new cool which is not only for showing off but to actually use in the business. Especially if you are starting off, you need to take note of it.

If you have more money than the brain, you should go for outbound marketing and focus on inbound marketing if it’s vice versa. This quote clearly elaborates the significance of inbound marketing nowadays.

Reasons for Inbound Marketing to Be More Beneficial To Traditional Marketing

11.     Economical
Traditional marketing which involves advertising on Televisions, Radio, Bill Boards, Prints, etc. requires a huge amount of money compared to inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a realistic and profitable approach, however, it includes the cost to create SEO and content development but comparatively the costs are less than traditional marketing.

Picture courtesy:-www.cdn2.hubspot.net

22.      Personalized

A personalized content is more relevant than ever before. Inbound marketing aims at customer relationship building with the use of customized content. It holds each customer individually and is more meaningful than traditional advertising method, which was primarily used to build Brand awareness.

33.      Works on “Approval”

When people get a call from a telemarketer, they don’t get delighted. The torture is outperformed by inbound marketing as it displays only the content relevant to you and also appears when you approve of it or opt for it. As it doesn’t force you to see anything, you remain the one who decides to go to a website or not.

Social Media sites like Facebook or Twitter displays relevant ads only which are related to something you’ve searched for or often do, for the purpose of re-targeting and even those does not bug you for your time. You can avoid them, unlike Television or Radio Ads which can’t be ignored.

Picture courtesy:- www.jitendermudgal.com

44.      Continuous

Traditional Marketing through several sources can be done once at a specific time span. Then the businessmen have to re-invest irrespective of their returns in the next season. On the other hand, Inbound Marketing through using white paper and eBooks’ can sustain itself. Its content has to be created once and it’s ready. People can download it anytime in future which can generate leads for many coming years.

55.      Time-Saving

Traditional strategies for marketing takes a lot of time to plan and being carried on like Trade fairs or Roadshows. It also requires a lot of manpower. Many parts of inbound marketing can be automated to save a lot of time. It might not be the answer for all the marketing efforts but today in this digitization era, it certainly cannot be ignored.

Landing URL:- http://surevin.com/factors-inbound-marketing-outperforms-outbound-marketing/