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5 Battle Proven Ways: Scrutinize Your Brand’s Value


Branding is all about promoting your product or services in such a way that it successfully creates a niche for itself in the market. To be more precise branding is not about getting your audience to choose you over other brands, but to be the only brand in the eyes of your audience who provide what they are looking for.

Well marketing has evolved from offline to online, and now it gives you more scope to know your target audience better and brand your product or services in larger arena, because the internet has the whole world surfing and constantly looking for something new. Therefore, this leaves you to monitor your brands effectiveness in the right way.

Here are few tips on how to monitor your brand’s effectiveness successfully:

1. Engage your Audience:

Marketing is not about campaigns and processions, but it is all about building a good relation with your existing customers. Keeping them happy, content and engaged.  Social media helps you to be a best friend to your customers by providing them with informational brochures, lucky coupons, videos, and funny memes and lot more online goodies.

The best example of branding I saw recently has to be coca cola’s “happiness machine” commercial online. The ad was simple but it successfully engages the audience and in a way it creates happiness in the young minds.

2. Make Your Content Share Worthy:

Create content that is informational, positive and share worthy. Your content should be valuable and people whoever come across your content should naturally get the urge to share your content on different forums, this way you can add on more and more connections among your audience network.

Nothing can be better than creating a viral content for your brand. Viral videos, pictures and information spread like wildfire and this will increase your fan followers in these various social media sites, from Facebook to Pinterest.

3. Tried the 20-to-1 Rule Yet? :

Haven’t heard if this rule before? Well, it means that you have to make twenty relational deposits for every marketing withdrawal. If you want to build a social media platform in which people can listen to you, then you have to be a giver, not a taker. It is all about sharing a useful piece of information and being selfless in giving, because once cannot accept anything without giving in anything. So that in future when you as a brand as a marketer ask for something you will have your fans and followers respond to you.

4. Monitor Feedback:

You should be completely aware of what is happening and what is not happening with your brand. A carefree attitude will only take your brand to shambles. A reputed and successful brand is always open to feedback in the form of criticisms or appreciation.

Create a station where you can monitor what people are saying. This has three benefits- One, you can address your customer’s concerns. Two, you can receive immediate market feedback. And three, it demonstrates that you are listening and are responsive.

5. Engaging Blogs and Websites:

Nowadays every products or services have their own website where they feed in their company profile, strengths and weaknesses, their achievements etc. but having site is not enough, but regularly updating it with newest information’s and news, it should be compelling and make people want to come back for more.

On the other hand it is always an add on if your website has a blog which is creative, fun and interactive. Blogs are medium through which people can know various news and information in a conversational manner. Yes, it is also very important that your website and blog is visually appealing but more than anything else what holds your audience back is the content.

Building a brand is not just about figures and numbers, but it is about creating a lasting impression in the minds of your target audience and keeping your audience as an asset throughout your brand’s lifetime. But to get noticed in the crowd of 50 or more similar products or services can be very difficult and challenging.

Therefore, to all the marketers who are working hard on an effective branding; there is a lot of room for creativity and innovation. Thinking out of the box might not be beneficial all the time, but doing the usual in a more dedicated and interactive way can make you the top most in the minds of your fans. 

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7 Prolific Tips for Team Building

A typical definition for team work would be "a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group.”



Being in a team has a lot to do with your sense of understanding about the mission or objectives of your organization.  In a team-oriented environment, you contribute to the overall success of the organization by working mutually and towards one particular goal!

Creating an effective team can be very challenging; you can’t just assign a bunch of people and put them in a room and just tell them to work together. The first thing you should understand while building a team is the difference between Team and Group. Broadly, a team is in which the individuals are interdependent and have a leader who leads the team, they share their information, knowledge and have the same goal and work towards it. But in a group though it’s known as “group effort”, individuals usually work individually.
Here are ten practical tips to help you get the most out of your team building program:

1. Laying the Foundation, and Understanding Your Goal:

The first principle to a successful team building is by forming a framework for the team members. The importance of team dynamics should be made clear to the team mates.  You can start with addressing the questions like; What is a team. The importance of team building? How beneficial it would be for the organization.
After the introduction, and induction of the new team, clear direction and agreement on mission and purpose should be explained for effective team work. Only when the members have clear expectations for the team's work, goals, accountability, and outcomes; they can be expected to work as a team and achieve their set goal.

2. Say No to Communication GAP:

Most often this is one of the major reasons why teams face a downfall. Communication gap is the Evil, as it kills the unity and interdependency among the teammates. In a team, people should feel free to express themselves and should not hesitate from voicing out his/her opinion.

3. The Stages of development:

Forming, storming, norming and performing are the four stages of team development. One can easily understand what these stages of development consist of; forming a perfect team is very important and the initial step towards team building; soon after that comes in execution of work among the team members which is known as storming. Then comes, setting rules and norms for a healthy development of the team, and that is known a norming and finally the ultimate step which decides whether the team is a success or not, performing.

4. Team Survey:

Conducting a survey on a weekly or monthly basis can be very productive, as it will tell you about the expectations of each individual from the team. Surveys can include topics such as, commitment, trust, communication and conflict resolution. 
Another way for assessing your team is by conducting weekly discussions regarding the teams progress and each team mates individual report can be produced and how many agree or disagree to the report and what changes they would like to bring. Practice regular, informal conversations that keep communication channels open.

5. Acknowledge Each and Every Effort:

Each team member adds value to the team. Take time and acknowledge each team member’s effort and appreciate their efforts. Everybody in the team is different and unique from the other, take time to bring out their specialty and various other capabilities. This will encourage the team members to work harder and bring out the best results.

6. Team Building Exercise:

Team building sessions can be fun, interactive and extremely productive for the team. Team building exercises can be of various types from fun filled activities, brain storming sessions to weekly debates. These kinds of exercises will help your team to bond better and understand each other’s strength and weakness and motivate you to work on it in future.

7. Celebrate Your Work:

Work can get monotonous and boring many a times, hence, it is very important to have laughter sessions and breaks while working. It is very important that the team members share a comfort zone, and that can be achieved only by, legitimizing humor among team members and you will likely lessen their stress and build their bond. Create times for people to laugh together and loosen up.

Conducting monthly outings in the form of dinner, parties or picnics can strengthen the bond between all the team members and this will also improve the attitude in the workplace as well.
Every organization talks about team building, team spirit, unity etc. but few understand how to create the experience of team work or how to develop an effective team. Belonging to a team, in the broadest sense, is a result of feeling part of something larger than being by you.

Ego clashes, communication gap and unwanted tiffs should be avoided as much as possible, because this affects the quality of work and makes the work environment feel polluted. Therefore, you can build an efficient team based on the points discussed and see the progress in the work front.


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Webinar: Make it Your Marketing Friend


If you want to bring in more business, then which way you want to go? 

First option would be running after the people and convincing them, and second make the business come to you. I guess second one is preferable!

But the question arises, how they will come to you? 

My answer would be, you have to be creative. Yeah, in an era where the competition is like anything and every competitor is accompanying with some latest tools and practice, you also definitely need to move along with the trends and updates.


The latest trend in the market is Webinar. 

So, are you aware of that? 
Are you involved with the tool? 
If yes then it’s good for you, but if not, this article is for you only. 

Here I will define the tool Webinar, and will provide you some tips to use Webinar for your business to increase the sales.  

Read More>>>
http://www.thomsondata.com/article/webinar.php


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10 WordPress Plugins That You Can’t Avoid


With over 10 thousand plugins available for download in the WordPress.org plugin repository, it can be difficult to know where to begin!

There is actually more than 10here but some go together and a few alternatives are all about personal preference and you can pick the one you prefer!

For this post though, I want to focus on how you can greatly improve the number of shares and awesomeness of your blog, with some of the latest WordPress plugins.

Here are my top ten picks for you, to increase Social Media sharing of your articles and blog performance.

1. Digg – Powerful and simple social sharing buttons
The first plugin I want to introduce is the well known Digg Digg sharing bar, which recently received a major face lift. Social Proof of sharing is one of the most important things for BlogSpot I found. From Bright Edge’s research, it has proven to increase social sharing by up to 7 times if included.

2. Akismet
Akismet is such an awesome plugin, that WordPress decided to package it with every new install. It’s great for spotting spam and works really well without having to annoy your commentors with unreadable CAPTCHAs.

3. Hello Bar
Hello Bar allows you to add a simple message above your blog to get the attention of your readers. It can be useful to promote a big event, giveaway or to keep an important blog post at the top of your site, so both old and new visitors can see it.

4. WP Touch
WP touch takes your site and makes it friendly for mobile devices such as smart phones running Android and the iPhone. You can customize the layout so it appears optimized for mobile viewing without loading excessive content.

5. Contact Form 7 
Great plugin this, adds a contact form (if you hadn’t already guessed) to your site. You simply add in your email address that you want emails sent to, and any other info you require then copy and paste the simple code it gives you into a page. Give the page a name like hmmm ‘Contact Me’ hit publish and you are done.

6. The Slide
The Slide slides an article on your page in the middle of an article you may already be reading. Using a carefully created algorithm, a relevant article appears to keep the attention of visitors.

7. Follow Button and Subscribe Button
Since social networking is so important, it’s not surprise that a button to follow you on twitter and subscribe to your Facebook fan page made the list.

8. All in one SEO Pack
Although, there exist tons of great SEO solution out there, one of the most reliable and well maintained plugins is the “All in one SEO pack’. Especially if you are not too familiar with any SEO tactics, this plugin makes it dead simple to understand the most important ones.

The plugin automatically generates Meta tags, optimizes your post titles for search engines and helps you to detect and avoid duplicate content. Even if you have very little SEO knowledge, this plugin will be of great help for you.
 
9. Google Site Map
You must have a sitemap to get good results with the search engines. The process used to be all complicated and involve uploading files and all sorts of nonsense. Now this plugin makes it super simple to generate a sitemap for your site. (Don’t worry about the Google name, the sitemap works for all search engines just fine.)

10. Social media widget
The social media widget allows you to place convenient links to all your social networking profiles in one single location.

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Drip Marketing: What & What-NOT To Do When Trying To Ride The Wave!

Is your customer base shrinking? Are your rivals stealing away prime prospects at will? Well, perhaps you haven’t created the right levels of awareness! In this article, John Duff gives you an in-depth look at how to get the most out of your drip marketing campaign.

With the internet throwing up a plethora of new advertising channels and engagement avenues, it’s time to take a look at what you need to do in order to stay at the top of your game. One way to keep ahead of the pack is develop a sound drip marketing strategy, and driving customer engagement. 

In this post, we’ll discuss the possible ways that you can drive your drip marketing campaign to success while keeping it safe from the pitfalls of inexperience
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Don’t Send Out A Tsunami Of Email            

Flooding your prospects’ inboxes with superfluous amounts of information is never the smartest thing to do. 
Everyone knows that, right?
Wrong.
Lots of overzealous marketers tend to believe that the more emails they ply their prospects with, the better the response rate. But quite the opposite is true. Sending out content on too regular a basis can actually drive waves of subscribers away from your drip marketing program.

Read Full Article>>>


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Transactional Vs. Consultative: 4 Key Differentiators



Much of the time, I find that far too many sales reps cannot or just simply refuse to understand the difference between a transactional and a consultative sale. To them, a sale is a sale and the bigger the deal, better the wrangler (read rep). In some ways this is downright true and in other ways that sort of thinking will lead you into a dead-end at high speed. That metaphor implies that you don’t just stop and turn around, but crash headlong into a wall instead – that translates into creating a dissatisfied customer, who will never use your service again and will probably bitch about your brand and the hard time you gave them.


So all you slightly over-eager sales reps out there, here you go: I give you the definitive guide to differentiating transactional and consultative sales.


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5 Sizzling Secrets To Expert Referral Marketing!

Referrals make for great business. There’s nothing that makes me happier than old, satisfied customers sending fresh ones in my direction. And for those of you wondering how to acquire a stream of referrals in a relatively short amount of time, here are a five of the most important things you’ll need to know,


  • For optimum results, your referral program should focus on delivering you leads from several channels simultaneously. However, setting up such a system will require you to dabble in a host of lead generation portals including social media, bookmarking, etc. 
  • In fact, social media is one of the fastest ways to go viral right now, even among B2B circles. All this will also require you to create a consistent, powerful online presence so if you don’t have one yet, get cracking.       
  • Referrals aren’t simply the result of a single delighted customer. It’s a carefully coordinated process that needs to be studied, understood, tested, measured, tweaked and re-implemented.  Each referral comes with at a cost and you’re going to have strike a balance between what you expects to reward each referrer against what you hope to make out of the sale. Also, you may want to implement a lead qualification process to help scale rewards to the profitability of each referral.
  • You won’t be drawing any business in if you don’t get the word out. Advertise your referral rewards program on your website and via e-publications like email newsletters, press releases, sales letters and brochures. And advertise often – a single showing isn’t always enough to burn the image of your rewards and benefits into the average user’s mind.
Often you’ll have grizzled, pitch-worn sales reps tell you that you should ask for a referral the minute you close a deal. Their reasoning usually goes a little something like this – “When you close the deal is when the customer’s sense of obligation is at its highest.” 


Read Full Article>>>

http://www.thomsondata.com/article/referral-marketing.php



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