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|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Indian media is growing at an exponential rate. The advent of smartphones and internet has revolutionized the Indian media industry. Backed by the growing economy, India has witness launch of a host of new TV channels and print publications in the last decade. Public Relations has therefore grown as an important part in any company’s activity when it comes to informing general public about news related to their company or products.

However, due to various factors, small and medium, enterprise, individuals, corporates have found it challenging in sending their news to relevant journalists in newspapers, TV channels or trade magazines.

India PR Distribution discovered the solution to the problem by introducing economical options for press release distribution. It is India’s first press release distribution service that sends the press-release to Indian reporters and publications including Newspaper, TV, Radio and others. Reporters can directly contact news sources. The news is distributed to online portals, Indian reporters, and bloggers. The startup is also helping many businesses in improving their marketing and PR campaigns.

Nitin Jain, Co-founder – India PR Distribution, said

We have launched India PR Distribution with an aim to bring relevant stories to reporters and at the same time, provide an easy platform for businesses to send their news to both online and traditional print and electronic media.

India PR Distribution, a new-age start-up founded in November 2017, with a 10 member team is presently based in Gurgaon. So far India PR Distribution has successfully delivered the service to more than 70 clients including Startups, Educational Institutions, and small businesses.

How it Works

India PR Distribution carefully vets every Press Release submitted on its website and checks if the news is worth reaching out the public and the topic covered is fit to be covered in a national newspaper or TV channel. The news is then sent to the Industry specific journalists and publications, therefore bridging the gap between news source and media house.

|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Up to 95% of buyers consider content as trustworthy when evaluating your brand and its offerings, according to insights from NewsCred. If you’re not producing quality content, you’re missing out on an opportunity to improve your brand’s credibility. With 75% of consumers expecting a consistent experience when engaging with your business – website, social media, mobile and even in person, there’s no doubt that great content helps shape the customer experience.

Image Source – Design

Whether you’re a small business or large corporate looking to improve your brand, understanding the latest trends in content marketing plays a crucial role in helping you create a cohesive omnichannel experience for your customers.

Live-Streaming Content Everywhere

While live-streaming was pretty new in the market when Facebook Live was introduced to the public in 2016, more brands are embracing the ‘live everywhere’ trend. Platforms like JW live allow publishers to harness the power of live streaming for fresh promotional and revenue generating opportunities. With everything from corporate sites to social media networks and mobile web offering outlets for real-time video streaming, revolutionizing your marketing strategy is easier. Live streaming wields a digital influence that any business cannot afford to ignore when it comes to brand engagement and monetization.

To take advantage of this trend, pick a live streaming platform that best suits your marketing strategy. Take into consideration how many followers use the platform and how engaged they have been in the past. When going live, make sure not to miss any opportunity to interact. Respond to any comments, questions or concerns. Use platforms like Twitter’s Periscope, Youtube live streaming, Facebook live video or Tumblr to live stream your promotional content. There has never been a time when original content has been so attainable and accessible in the video community. By establishing new channels for digital content creation, such as live-streaming, you can easily foster engaging and rewarding opportunities for your business.

Content Built for Voice Search

Voice-enabled smart speakers are expected to be in 55% of households by 2022, as noted by TechCrunch. There is no doubt we’re in the age of the voice search revolution. Because of the opportunities that this growing trend offers, content writing agencies and marketers are focused on figuring out exactly how to provide better content value. Businesses across different industries are testing out potential integrations between their content strategies and voice search. To succeed, you need to look beyond functionality alone and embrace voice-search marketing capabilities.

With voice search representing more than 20% of queries on Google’s mobile app, it’s important to know how best to use voice-search marketing to your advantage. After years of adjusting digital content to optimize written search, brands need to re-strategize their SEO. The goal is to provide quick answers that help you drive more traffic to your site. This involves doing more strategic keyword research to identify which keywords in your niche result in a featured snippet. Combined with AI and its impact on consumer purchases, voice search can help you gain more entity authority, ensuring your content ranks higher.

Increased Investment in Mobile Content Strategies

You can’t ignore the power of mobile content marketing. Considering how ingrained mobile devices have become in our lives, optimizing content for mobile is something that every business should have embraced by now. By 2019, mobile content advertising is expected to represent up to 72% of all digital ad spending in the US. Advertisers and marketers are increasing their investment in mobile content strategies to remain competitive. Businesses must look beyond photos, videos, and chat for their content marketing and embrace more modern mobile marketing trends like e-books, live mobile streams, mobile alerts and interactive content.

Being a marketer in today’s evolving business world is no easy work. You need to understand new platforms in the market, their impact on how customers engage with brands and stay on top of new developments. Knowing and implementing some of these latest content marketing trends will help boost brand visibility and win the favor of customers.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Denave, a global sales tech organization focused on driving revenue growth for its customers, recently unveiled its sales force automation solution DenSales. DenSales is Denave’s proprietary Sales Force Automation tool that is designed and developed to address all the existing as well as possible business challenges while implementing a feet-on-street strategy. It is a holistic solution for planning and managing the field force program, offering end-to-end visibility to all the stakeholders in the sales ecosystem.

Image Source – Denave

DenSales, available in both web and mobile interfaces, has been created to address pertinent sales process issues such as inaccurate process of capturing sales data, fraudulent reporting, limited stock visibility, absence of structured communication platform, limited first-hand market insights and more.

Commenting on the product launch, Prashant Rohatgi, Global Head – Technology, Denave said

DenSales is a definitive 360-degree sales force automation solution that not only gives an absolute control of the sales process to the stakeholders thus preventing sales leakage, but it is also pivotal towards increasing the productivity of the field team. It features sales force engagement and performance, fraud prevention, on-the-go training, closed loop issue management and market intelligence. It has unique combination of mobile app and web console to capture information faster and real-time dashboards and actionable reports to disseminate seamlessly.

Sharing his views on the product’s future roadmap, Snehashish Bhattacharjee, Global CEO, Denave, said

With DenSales, we aim to make Intelligent Sales Force Automation a reality – one that is intuitive and predictive. It will eventually act as an Executive Assistant to the stakeholders where it becomes their one-stop go-to-platform for all sales force-related business decisions. Most importantly, it will be a business essential for providing that critical last mile visibility, which in the current scenario is mostly missing. The reactions of our initial customers have been very heartening, and we are confident of DenSales becoming a business-essential and a market success soon.

Denave has been enabling sales for organizations since over 19 years now and has influenced more than 5 billion USD in revenues. Denave significantly diversified its service line in 2017 and introduced Digital Marketing and Sales Analytics as new services, contributing to revenue across all industry verticals including technology, telecom, ONG, Consumer Durables, FMCG, E-commerce, mobile wallets & more.

About Denave

Denave is a global sales enablement company focused on driving revenue growth for its customers through a wide range of service offerings. The company leverages latest technology trends and disruptive approach to create effective sales engines. Denave has built multi-industry expertise partnering with global businesses and takes a solution-conscious approach to deliver best practices in sales by leveraging people, processes, technology and innovation to drive revenue. Denave has reach across 5 continents, 50+ countries and 500+ cities globally. For more information, please visit Denave

|In: Infographic|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

It’s always better to retain customers than to attract new ones because the cost involved in getting new customers is much higher. Around 90% of consumers shop from different brands and are not loyal to any one in particular. Therefore, it’s important to focus on developing consistent customer relationships.

Let’s take a look at four of the best ways to do so

1. Get to Know Your Customers

The more you know your customers, the better your retention will be. Do research to understand their needs and desires and what delights them the most. Understand why they make a purchase.

From your previous experience, map your customer journey. Explore the available data and analytics to understand your customers’ behavioral pattern and trends.

2. Standardize the Process

Maintain a standardized process throughout your company for a great customer experience. Create clear guidelines and make sure your employees follow them. Address different situations while preparing guidelines so that your team can be prepared for anything.

Go out of your way to give your customers an amazing experience. Surprise them. Never let the quality of your customer service drop in any circumstances.

3. Train Your Employees Properly

Train your employees, especially your client-facing and client-interacting team members. Hire the best professionals for client handling and then arrange regular workshops to keep them updated. Provide a holistic customer experience on all platforms.

4. Deliver Unified Customer Experiences across channels

To maintain consistency in customer service, it’s important to standardize it across different channels. Customers expect to receive similar experiences on all channels. They don’t like to repeat themselves if they have already told you their issue in some way.

Therefore, it’s important to keep track of every conversation you have with them. Address all of their issues promptly.

Tips and Tricks

  1. Be it social media, your blog, or in a newsletter, stay connected with your customers often.
  2. Find out which social media platforms your customers use the most and accordingly create a strong presence there.
  3. Increase customer engagement.
  4. Feedback is a very important part of building a customer relationship. Listen to what your follower have to say about your product and services.
  5. Show them that you are acting according to their feedback.
  6. Always appreciate them if they say good things about you, and try to solve any grievances they have. Keep in mind that you should never take a reactionary approach with customers.
  7. Make them feel special and let them know that their opinions matter.

Leverage Inbound Marketing

Use customer-generated and influencer content to spread the word about your brand. There is nothing more effective than a good customer testimonial.

A happy customer is indeed a part of your salesforce, as they have more credibility than your salespeople have. After all, trust and credibility are the backbones of a long-term customer relationship.

Check out this infographic to discover more about these customer relationship building tactics.

Infographic Source – SalesMate

Author the Author

Samir Motwani is a growth hacker cut from a different cloth than most entrepreneurs. This action oriented technophile may have been trained as a developer, but is a designer at heart. He is currently the CEO of Salesmate, a CRM tool, that is adept at developing low-cost strategies for startups, and defining best practices for budding ventures. You can find more about Samir Motwani here.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

After months of small scale rollouts, WebEngage has been roped in by OTA major Goibibo to power the brand’s User & Partner engagement strategy and execution. The Mumbai based SaaS company is touted as one of the leading Marketing Automation platforms to come out of India, having over 40k businesses around the world under their belt. Esteemed brands such as Flipkart, Ebay, Avaya, Sendgrid, Pluralsight, Souq trust WebEngage with their user engagement.

Image Source – WebEngage

As India’s leading online travel brand, millions of Goibibo customers frequent their platform to book flights, train tickets, hotels and outstation cab rides every month. They identified the need for an engagement platform to enhance the overall user experience and increase the number of bookings using Personalization and Contextual cross-channel Communication.

Goibibo CTO, Vikalp Sahni, furthered this view saying

We at Goibibo are strong believers in the power of creating an unparalleled user experience. Giving users a brand experience that helps them solve a problem and creates value for them is the end goal. For that reason, we identified WebEngage as the right platform that will help us get to the goal. Their Journey Designer tool has been a revelation, helping us create lifecycle marketing campaigns at scale while maintaining contextual relevance with hyper-personalization capabilities.

Avlesh Singh, CEO of WebEngage, said

Partnering with one of the leaders of the OTA industry is a huge positive validation of our platform, and its capabilities. We are happy to learn that Indian marketers have advanced in the maturity scale, and are embracing innovative tools like the Journey Designer to create beautiful and highly effective marketing strategies that resonate directly with the end user. This partnership recognizes the need for Marketing Automation in the industry, and how our positioning is perfectly poised to cater to that need diligently.

About WebEngage

WebEngage was founded by Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja in 2011. It is a full-stack marketing automation platform that helps B2C companies drive more revenue from their existing customers and anonymous users.

It is a cross-channel user engagement platform which intelligently automates communication across users’ life-cycle. It enables companies to enhance their brand experience with contextual, personalised user engagement via In-App Messages, Push Notifications, Emails and Text Messages and Web Messages [notification, survey and feedback].

|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Sweep-stake giveaways have long been a popular tool for companies looking to increase their customer satisfaction. After all, happy customers means repeat customers. But, did you know that you can leverage the viral potential of the Internet to not only make your existing customers happy, but also increase your customer base and your sales? Let’s look at the steps you must take in order to make your next sweep-stake giveaway a true hit with both old and new customers alike.

Tie Your Giveaway to Your Brand

If you are selling bicycles, you don’t need to give away a laptop. After all, that’s not what your target audience, and most of your visitors, are looking for. Besides, by tying your giveaway to your brand, you can leverage all manner of marketing tie-ins later, thus increasing your reach. Keep your giveaway related to your brand and make sure the giveaway is something that your customers love and would want. No one wants to win a piece of junk. Make sure it is a worthy prize to receive.

Determine All the Legalities

I know this isn’t the most fun part of the job, but before you release any type of giveaway, you must make sure you meet all the laws in the areas you plan on running your sweepstakes. Since this is the Internet, it’s possible that could be everywhere, but it could just be in the country where you do business. For example, you could release your giveaway for anyone in the United States. If that’s the case, you must make sure you meet all the laws and regulations for a sweepstakes giveaway in all of the states where you plan on offering the giveaway.

If you decide not to run it in certain states, you must make that known as part of your announcement and make sure it’s clear to everyone who signs up for the giveaway.

Release the Giveaway Online

Next, you must make this giveaway an online sweepstakes. This is necessary in order to control where it’s released and increase the chances of it going viral. At the end of the day, that’s the goal, and calling in and signing up isn’t going to get the job done. While it is okay to give them the option to enter by another means, make it clear that online is the preferred method of signing up for the sweepstakes.

But, when you do, make sure signing up is easy to do and only takes a few seconds. Long drawn out forms will not be a popular choice. While you need to make sure you collect everything you need to be able to giveaway your prize, don’t collect anymore than you have to, no matter how tempting it may be.

Encourage Sharing from Customers

One of the biggest assets you have are your customers. In the end, it will be up to them to make your sweepstakes giveaway go viral. Encourage them to share your giveaway with their friends and family through social media and email. It will be your existing customers that will help you get the word out, so make it easy to share and make the rules clear so it’s easy for them to get their friends to sign up for a chance to win.

Be Responsive

When your customers do share your giveaway with others, make sure you acknowledge that act as quickly as possible. This means that you must monitor social media and any other channels that could cause your giveaway to go viral regularly. When they share it, respond to it and thank them for the share and wish the new person luck on the giveaway. Engage the customers as they help you get the word out about your sweepstakes and they will return the favor.

Create an Email Campaign

In addition to your normal avenues of advertising, create an email campaign to get the word out. Sure, this will only reach your existing customers, but it should cover anyone that has missed your other online advertising methods of showing off your giveaway. In the campaign, make sure you encourage your customers to share it with others so you can further increase your reach. Just like above, make sure you respond to each and every share you receive.

Giveaway Your Prize

Once the contest ends, you need to follow through and giveaway your prize. Announce who the winner is for everyone to see, but make sure you take steps to protect their privacy. Try saying things like, ‘Congratulations Lisa, from Denver’, or something like that. After you announce it, send the prize to them as quickly as possible. While a good giveaway can create a lot of goodwill, not delivering the promised prize will do far more harm to your reputation. Once it is delivered, encourage the winner to share a picture of the prize and comment on it so everyone can see that you send out your free gift as promised.

Conclusion

All of the steps above should give you more than enough to create and market a successful sweepstakes giveaway. At the end of the day, it’s all about engaging your customer base. The giveaway will get them talking, but true success will be keeping them talking about your brand and your products, but a sweepstakes giveaway is one of the best ways of doing just that for both old and new customers.

|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

India is moving to a golden age of philanthropy that hasn’t been seen since the middle of the last century. Whereas the last period of giving led to the setting up of many of the trusts, hospitals, universities and similar institutions, modern givers are looking to find new ways to invest. Running alongside the new spirit of giving, charities are employing marketing techniques such as viral videos to help promote their causes.

Image Source – Marketing

The Modern Givers

Philanthropists such as Erik Gordon plan whole campaigns looking to building sustainable futures and to tackle the causes of the issues they are addressing. Brands such as Siyaram have started campaigns to encourage their customers to carry out good acts every day. Charities and other non-profits are more reliant on partnering with brands, or appealing to a wider audience in a kick-starter fashion.

Marketing Techniques To Bring In More Engagement

Digital marketing techniques have a lot to teach those who wish to do good deeds. Marketing has become a science over the years, which allows it to be cost effective. For big businesses this can help with profitability but for those wanting to help other it is vital to ensure as little as possible is spent on administrative costs. Before starting any plan to do good you need to know who your audience will be. By understanding your audience you will be able to plan your campaign to suit them. Data harvesting will tell you more about their likes, dislikes and where to best engage them. The best way to reach out to this audience has been proven to be storytelling. YouTube provides services for non profits that can help enormously with campaigns.

The Future Of Giving

The future for those wanting to do good works online will be a far more professional one. Our world is expanding and it is increasingly becoming difficult to be heard in the crowd. It is vital that to get your message heard that you employ all the techniques available. Storytelling, social media, networking and data mining are all tools that will be necessary to succeed. Only by taking these professional attitudes and approaches will charities be able to stand out and be seen.

|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The leading mobile marketing platform, CleverTap, has announced their powerful suite of Discovery Tools, based on automated user segmentation. These tools enable mobile marketers to quickly unearth customer insights and accelerate ROI on their marketing strategies. CleverTap’s Discovery Tools are already being leveraged by enterprise customers to build long term customer value and to create impactful customer experiences.

Today’s customers expect brands to respond to their needs immediately. Businesses that are able to predict and respond to their user’s behaviors in a timely manner are the ones that will win. While progressive marketers have been using manual means of segmenting their users into micro-segments, this is a time consuming and expensive effort. Automated segmentation goes through users behavior data, running different machine learning algorithms and models on this data and is finally able to present interesting segment of users to marketers.

This set of advanced tools will instantly identify champion users, loyal customers differentiated from hibernating users and about to churn users. Automatically exposing these user segments allows marketers to focus their creativity on finding the best ways to engage with these segments – run a loyalty program for champion users and possibly run some win back campaigns on users likely to churn to get their interest back. With automated user segments at their fingertips, marketers can optimize their mobile strategies to drive higher conversions while reducing friction points.

CleverTap’s Discovery Tools Suite includes automated segmentation using the following models

  • RFM [Recency, Frequency and Monetary]

How recently a user has visited your app in combination with how frequently a user visits are valuable insights into how marketers can engage with them. Treating someone whom you’ve seen yesterday or a week ago differently from someone you’ve not seen for a year is critical. CleverTap’s RFM model automatically segments your entire user base into 10 automatic segments [from champions to hibernating users] so that you can see what you are doing right with one group, and what you can do more effectively to connect with others.

  • Flows

Users traverse through your apps via a thousand different paths. Some sophisticated users navigate it optimally, but many others get stuck and need help at different steps along their paths to conversion. CleverTap’s Flows lets you instantly visualize all possible paths of all your user segments. Using conversion percentages, you can identify the most optimal paths in your app. Provide an improved customer experience to user segments that are getting stuck and help them reach their destinations within your app.

  • Pivots

With a few clicks, breakdown your users into weekend vs. weekday warriors; users who consume content in the afternoons vs. nightowls. CleverTap’s Pivots give you unlimited combinations of data visualizations to make your data actionable by providing the ability to pinpoint each cell as a segment of users. Easily discover your best customer segments without needing a data scientist to try hundreds of permutations and combinations to get to the same answer.

Sunil Thomas, Chief Executive Officer at CleverTap, said

Today’s users don’t have the time and patience to visit your app and dig for the information they need. Brands almost need to anticipate and dynamically react to their users’ needs. With the launch of Discovery Tools, we aim to automate a large part of how marketers discover their valuable customer segments. These tools will significantly improve marketing efficiency and help marketers spend their marketing dollars effectively.

About CleverTap

CleverTap helps consumer brands retain their users for life. It? is a powerful mobile marketing solution that brings together user data from online and offline channels on one centralized platform. Everyday, thousands of brands leverage CleverTap’s machine learning models to orchestrate differentiated customer engagement strategies that help marketers drive omni-channel growth. For more information, please visit CleverTap