Marketing Archives | Siddharth Pereira

The Three Pillars of Retail for the Year 2020

As retailers and marketers, we’ve spent a good chunk of 2019 promoting products and services without focusing on the three pillars of retail and instead only looking at onboarding new customers. In-turn we were expected to run campaigns that sought creative ways to impact our bottom lines. Semantics3 reported that there are nearly 6 million merchants currently operating in the online trading ecosystem. With nearly 10% of active websites pointing to an eCommerce store, there is no doubt that retail is positively paving the future of things to come in 2020.

If we had to take a look at 2019’s retail performance, we clearly see trends pointing to the most obvious. Woocommerce dominates the SMB market as the number one online retail solution. Closely followed by Shopify and other third-party integrations. Clothing and accessories were the highest products sold and they outperformed almost every other niche out there.

As new small to medium scale businesses begin to throw their weight around and seek the right approach to go completely online, it is imperative to understand that there are lessons to be learned as we start our marketing campaigns into the new year. Truth be told, retailers cannot afford another year like 2019. As a business owner, I understand that you cannot wait to take a bite at this billion-dollar industry, but first, let’s take a step back and look at how we should shed some focus on minimizing financial risks.

eCommerce demands more and it is, therefore, become essential to lay down three pillars of retail success that will ensure the right approach for our business in 2020. It is important that we determine what are our strengths and weaknesses so that we can create winning strategies that last for the year.

Retail Success Pillar One: Understand Customer Data

As retailers, we have historically allowed our gut and passion to suppress facts. The assumptions we make lead to overstocked shelves and graphs of missed profits. I’ve seen too many retailers stocking coats and jackets in April and not being able to ship them out in December. When you decide to connect your customer’s data with your business using these three pillars of retail, you will be able to gain a holistic picture of what you need to do to remain profitable.

Being a retailer, you should be able to map your customer’s lifecycle to your brand and thereby create better shopping experiences. The day you understand your data will be the day you realize your business’s potential. Then, being able to cross-promote products and insightfully combine full-priced promotions will be a breeze. The goal here is to increase revenue and have a long term profit statement while reducing unneeded marketing spends.

Retail Success Pillar Two: Master the Supply Chain

Over the years, we have seen how customers dramatically change their focus. They no longer seek the need to compartmentalize their purchases offline or online. With constant connectivity, their shopping journeys have gotten complete flexibility and it helps them create better purchase decisions.

With the advent of cheaper telecommunication plans, customers turn to their phones to browse the items they want and have the option of collecting their purchase in-store or opt for home delivery. The competition in home delivery and logistics is intense and as more retailers vouch for same-day deliveries (a feat that was impossible 2 years ago), the need to bring a better supply chain management system has become vital.

Retailers need to be able to extend their value proposition beyond competitive prices and instead offer a suite of services, all designed to build better customer experiences. With the help of the first pillar of retail, you will be able to stay ahead in terms of profitability. A well-connected data network will help provide greater insight into consumer behavior thereby allow you to manage your inventory, warehouses, and stores.

Retail Success Pillar Three: Constant Innovation

What most business owners do not see is that retail units are consistently at a tipping point and lean over to the fear of being left behind. Innovation is a double-edged sword. If you are serious about getting it right, you should be aware of how to approach your goals with a focus on constant innovation.

Building for innovation often is misinterpreted and product owners simply reinvent for the purpose of technology. This is far from the truth. Innovations should be within reason and their main objective should be to fulfill the needs of changing landscapes. At the end of the day, retailers and brands that have product strategies and roadmaps always feature a balance of priority and technology. Innovating products should always focus on creating happy and loyal customers. Introduce your new features by emailing customers at the right time and you should see the results pour in.

If you are a business owner, you should know that the intellectual instruction and optimized improvement of these three pillars of retail can never have immediate results. You need to be in for the long haul. If you move toward the need for building customer insights, pairing it with great supply chain logistics and wrapping it up with constant reasonable innovation, you will dominate the better half of 2020.

3 Essential Tools for Instagram Influencer Marketing

Instagram Influencer Rachel Brathen charges upwards of $20,000 for a single post on her Instagram feed. She isn’t alone. There are a plethora of other socialites and influencers across the world that are earning big by simply being an Instagram influencer and ambassador for products online.

Instagram has become a globally accredited and powerful platform because brands and companies see it as the perfect place to connect with their consumers. This means that all consumers these brands attempt to target are all Instagram users that follow their favorite socialites. That’s a potential reach of more than a billion customers.

Nielsen reported that nearly 80% of purchases made online are done through the assistance of influencers or via recommendations. Influence Central (IC) found that Brands have ranked Instagram’s influencers as the most effective product convincing strategy of 2019.

The popularity of Instagram and it’s influencer family is something that has attracted thousands of people just like you. If becoming an influencer is something you have been thinking about and not sure which tools you need to get started with, this should help you out.

SocialMing

SocialMing makes it super easy to automate your Instagram feed. You can schedule posts, images, and videos to be auto-posted to your account whenever you want. It also has an in-depth insights feature that helps you understand how your account is performing as an influencer. I think SocialMing is the only Instagram marketing tool you will ever need to start becoming an influencer. Create a Free Account at SocialMing to start your influencer marketing strategy.

Google Trends

One of the biggest challenges that influencers have is gaining access to new and relevant content that is trending in the niche they operate from. The best way to get onboard is to start using Google Trends more effectively. Watch a couple of videos online that can teach you how to use Google Trends to identify hot topics and trending stories that you want your audience to see. Check out Google Trends to learn how to start building relevant content.

Canva / Adobe Spark

I’m a big fan of pictures, images, and branding. To become a really popular influencer, you need to be able to build quality content that looks great and appealing. I personally recommend Canva’s free account to get you started. Adobe Spark is great too. Edit and style the photos from your phone and then post them to Instagram. Visit the Canva website or Adobe Spark application to get started building high-quality images.

Scoring Insurance Sales with CRM

Within the Insurance sector, there is always a form of anxiety that builds up between agents and insurance carriers. Insurance carriers view agents as maverick service providers that are difficult to control and pass on increased costs and commission rates. Agents, by discordance, view insurance carriers as large, successful businesses with a number of employees, cutting-edge technologies, financial resources and the owner of 85% of the revenue they acquire.

Due to the variable differences between how an insurance carrier works versus that of an agent, the role of a CRM system has become vital for agencies as they have evolved into their own customer engagement models. While this may seem as a great approach, the challenge for many agencies is that they are small and have limited resources.

What needs to be understood is that the business requirements for an insurance carrier with agents deviate greatly from a property and casualty insurance policy that retails its products through the independent agency system. Although there are equivalents between an agency and one that uses independent advisors, brokers, or agents, the all-in-one solution isn’t going to work. Based on how CRM solutions have evolved over the past few years, it has become easy to see why people think that since CRMs perform contact management or sales management, it would be the ideal choice for any insurance company. In fact, if we take a look at various statistics and reports on vendors for CRM solutions, we can see that these solutions have become the “all-rounder” of technology. With the perception that a particular CRM solution will meet requirements for a plethora of use cases, this opinion is an important stumbling block for all insurance companies to be aware of.

It does not take long for insurance carriers to realize that their agents and brokers are ahead in the game integrating and using CRM technologies. As slow as carriers may be to adopt CRM technologies, they have nonetheless implemented it in many ways. The problems with these CRM systems tend to be directly or remotely related to the following:

Insurance products have become commoditized and customers tend to get influenced by multiple channels to make their decision. Additionally, advertising efforts are being spent by comparison portals and aggregators.
Companies continue to face stiff revenue targets spread across too many stakeholders. These stakeholders struggle to deal with too many processes, systems and locations where they reach out to their target audiences.
The challenge herein is to be able to effectively collaborate with a network of agents and other stakeholders so that they get a better view of sales funnels, processes, cycle times and mitigation of revenue leaks.
Other questions include; How to communicate the intermittent regulation changes?, How to influence corporate buying decisions?, How to guarantee optimal service quality? and How to handle a complete portfolio of policy holdings, risk profiles, claims, premiums and other features of the insurance agency?

Expectations from the Industry

The goal any insurance business is to increase the profitability of teams, field-sales representatives and partners. It has become increasingly important to study the background, benefits offered, solutions required and challenges faced by these agencies in their daily business operations. It has, therefore, become vital to:

Increase sales and renewals of insurance products by connecting digital, call center, sales processes & teams.
Increase the engagement rate from bankassurance channels with end-to-end monitoring of branches & relationship managers.
Increase sales velocity of agency partners with mobile productivity tools and tracking their on-the-ground performance.
Increase productivity of all feet-on-street teams with mobile applications and on-the-ground tracking.
Increase efficiency and effectiveness of customer centers by routing the right inquiries.
Build better lead quality indexes by automatic distribution and qualification that verify documents for agents.
Avoid missing or rerouting any policy inquiry.
Instant up-sell or cross-sell opportunities for multiple policies.
Automate application processing & connect all teams in the agency.
Timely and personalized communication for customers and agents relating to renewals and important notifications.
Complete performance reports for teams, products, regions and relationship managers.

Approach for Insurance Companies

The goal is to understand that there are different processes that work for different customer segments. Is the CRM solution able to address this? While there may be a diversification of multiple segments in the industry, it is also important that the CRM provides a sense of a “One Vision” policy across the board. Explainer videos, training sessions, and webinars should focus on the following components as the sales strategy of the CRM:

The system builds different processes for different customer segments.
The system eliminates multiple channels for reporting and instead focuses on data reconciliation.
Provides real-time insights for actions and offers intelligent dashboards for reporting.
Identifies and increases the FTR and TAT for customer servicing needs.
Reduce the cost of existing multiple systems by a considerable margin.
Increase the capability of customer retention.
Offer advanced integration capabilities with better-streamlined processes.
Implement standard integration practices and consolidate data segments across various teams.
Build actionable data for underwriting claims, policy management, etc.
Consolidate partner and customer profiles for agents and third-party stakeholders.
Manage referrals, policy issuances, and the team’s campaign strategy.
Segregate sales processes for corporate, government, retail and wholesale teams.
Develop flexible listings for multiple products and services.
Integrate uninsured leads and build a means to sell to them by knowledge-sharing.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 City Integration
Position insurance offerings strategically to relevant groups of customers.
Build segmentation that archives customer behavior to assist in the planning and prioritization of action items.
Create greater operational efficiency and quick response times to customer queries which in turn increases CSAT scores.
Offer a tech infrastructure worth petabytes of capacity and be able to automatically maintain multiple copies of archived data.
Help businesses build a scalable work-flow that works with the long-term goal of the insurance company.

How to Structure your Digital Team Effectively

When you set forth to create a digital product, you will realise very early that this is a process that deserves multi-disciplinary action that blends creativity, engineering, support, compliance and business strategy.

Due to its complexity, large businesses and global brands undergo various transformations and they struggle when it come to figuring out how they need to structure their digital teams. To succeed, they need to ask themselves several questions that range from;

What is the right way to organise all the necessary roles and their responsibilities?
What part of the organisation should take up capable ownership?
How do we get every team member working together?

Ideally, the optimal structure of a digital team should vary from company to company. However, one effective way of making this approach would be to use a defining framework that would help identify 10 – 15 key roles of the project. These roles can be further divided into three conceptual teams – Digital Business, Digital Technology, and Extended Business. We shall take a look at what these define independently.

The Owner of the the digital business team has a vision that defines the key business and its objectives for the property. This includes target market segmentation and its objectives etc. This vision makes the final decision on the product to take proper direction.

Product Management teams own the product on a daily basis and ties up with other areas of the business to make sure that the value of this digital proposition is realised very early on in the product lifecycle. Product teams tare responsible for commissioning and reviewing research exercises to develop and build the roadmap for the company in terms of business vision and the ability to prioritise improvements and changes.

Program Management, not to be misunderstood for Product Management is responsible for the long term ownership of the product and making sure that all objectives are in place to achieve the roadmap desired by the product team. This can extend to budgeting and resource allocation that eventually comes together to maintain a good release schedule.

UI and UX teams are responsible for the overall look and feel of the product. This team maintains and develops a standard for the product where they outline the user flow and intended usage pattern for some time to come. These teams work with user testing initiatives as well as focus on quality assurance teams to ensure that new releases bring the product on par with the goals of the company.

Content Developers create non-marketing and non-campaign oriented material for the site/product. These include articles, instructions, FAQ and so on. Their primary job is to create content that is easy to understand and at the same time that is consistent with the brand or vision of the business.

Front End Development teams select the framework. They also define the code that will be deployed to the front of site thereby standardising technologies to be used. Tech teams here will also help contribute to writing code that will render in browsers. These languages extend to HTML, JS and Objective C etc. This kind of development drives requirements for back-end teams thereby ensuring that the best user experience can be implemented.

Back-End teams manage all the enterprise responsibilities including inventory, finances and content management systems. They are responsible for enforcing standards that protect the integrity of all systems a business relies on. These teams need to be scalable enough to ensure that they are able to implement new capabilities, features and tech requirements.

These teams have Data Developers that consistently monitor the health of databases, services and infrastructure architecture. The infrastructure built will be able to maintain the physical hardware used for applications and data processing. They also maintain disaster and business contingency programs, while at the same time being able to monitor the scalability and reliability of all physical infrastructure. These teams will also need to proactively monitor the security of the businesses tech requirements.

Quality Assurance, popularly known as QA, maintain standards for code in production and develop automated systems to test scripts that are based on the business’ contingency plan. These teams execute any integration and manifest testing scenarios such that there is a certain degree of quality that is being published. Team members here will also be responsible for monitoring key metrics that could identify potential problems. These are then manifested with documentation to the tech teams to carry out bug fixing or rollbacks. It should be kept in mind that although you may want a trained professional to carry out QA, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that quality is maintained across the board.

Marketing teams are responsible for most key operations. They are the ones that develop campaigns and offers to drive traffic to the site. Their goal should be to focus on numbers while studying every detail through ongoing business analysis. They also manage subscriber lists, CRM systems and make first level reach-outs.

Within the marketing team, there is a Product and Pricing division that is setup to ensure that the responsibility of pricing is effectively measured and offered across all digital properties. In appropriation, they develop, merchandise or license anything sold on the website. They set all pricing and drive the overall requirements for aligning features with new products based on the company’s parameters.

Another essential team within extended business is that of Operations. They are the ones responsible for fulfilling the value proposition of the company. eCommerce sites have operational assistants to handle picking, packing and shipping. Digital video business have searching, vetting and uploading teams etc.

Business Development teams or BD is responsible for creating partnerships that help increase site visitors and help sales teams find a new stream of revenue. The focus here is to shift dynamics from traditional exhaustive channels of sales and introduce new ones where market research dives.

Customer Support is the aftermarket team that is responsible for sharing knowledge of the digital policies, platforms and solutions a business needs to provide. They assist customers with issues and help maintain track performance of satisfact levels.

While this structure may seem exhaustive, most teams differ from company to company. This means that if you have key roles in your business, you will need to create a list of well defined responsibilities that define these processes. Finally, you will need to see how they function together and tweak teams in the most effective manner that is beneficial for individuals as well as the business. The ultimate goal here is to ensure that digital business teams, digital technology teams and the extended business teams are all in sync and working effectively on the projects they are assigned.

5 Essential SEO Tips for WordPress Beginners

WordPress is a super powerful blogging/website platform for every aspiring internet entrepreneur that does not want to limit his/her passion due to lack of technical knowledge. If you are an aspiring WordPress addict, you can build a fully functional website right from scratch by just dragging and dropping different elements using useful WordPress plug-ins like Visual Composer which is an easy plug and play tool that can visually aid you create masterful websites. This is precisely why WordPress powers around 25% of the internet!

As much as WordPress is a life-saving tool for a lot of entrepreneurs, it also becomes a nightmare for some because they think that the work involved in running a WordPress website ends with just making a site! The website needs to be taken care of and worked upon regularly so that Search Engine Optimization or SEO happens for it and it ranks on the first page of web searches. In this post, we discuss a few valuable tips for the entrepreneur starting out with WordPress:

Sidebar Optimization: A lot of people make the mistake of adding a lot of aesthetic features to their sidebar on their website to such an extent that the actual user gets confused in finding the actual call-to-action (CTA) buttons. This can cause a hit on the SEO of your website and hence the sidebar should be optimized to have the most essential features only so that the CTA’s are highlighted to the user without causing confusion.

Organize Media Library: The worst thing that can happen to a website having an amazing Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is having an unorganized Media Library with content here and there which can’t be searched for easily. Creating one single folder for all your media makes it easy to search for any content uploaded on the website.

Create Optimised Permalinks: Permalinks are the parts of the URL which follow the domain name. For example, abc.com/wordpress_article – here “wordpress_article” is the permalink, and it needs to be optimized so that it contains basic keywords to make the search engine spiders understand your URL better and rank it higher for the basic set of keywords which relate to your URL. For example, “abc.com/wordpress_beginners_article” is better than “abc.com/article_to_help_beginners_of_wordpress_to_optimize_their_website”.

Create Titles and Descriptions: Every page has a title and a short description called metadata that shows up when the website-related keyword is searched on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu etc. The title to your webpage should be optimized to give the best possible keyword-rich introduction to your website on the search engine and the metadata is the description which the user relates to the title provided for your webpage. Hence, a relevant copy for your title and metadata can work wonders for your website SEO, and this can be done without any lines of code for your WordPress website.

Optimize Images: Uploading high-quality images can also work wonders for your website optimization. You can also optimize the images on your website by providing title tags and alternate texts for each and every image on your WordPress site. A title tag is a keyword-rich title that appears when you hover over an image on a website. Alternate text is the text displayed in the image placeholder before the image loads, which aptly describes the image using relevant keywords.

Optimize the Landing Page and the Footer: The landing page is the first thing that every user sees when they land on your site and the footer is the common area that a user sees on every page at the bottom. These two elements need to be optimized minimally to include the most essential CTA buttons to provide the best experience to the users on your website.

So what are you waiting for! Implement these easy-to-execute steps on your WordPress website on your own and see the wonders it does for your website soon after that.

The Easy Way to Build a Social Network with Buddypress and WordPress for Free

Face-to-face gossip replaced by Facebook, reading the news replaced by Daily Rundowns on LinkedIn, friends communicating over emails replaced by WhatsApp chats and SnapChat, sharing artistic physical photo albums and catalogs replaced by Instagram and Pinterest respectively. It’s now time to build that social network using just two simple tools – WordPress and Buddypress.

What makes social media so powerful and influential? It is the strong network of people that it builds and the relevant information that it has on each and every user. Many times, we come across brilliant ideas for building a special social network but do not execute it just because we are hindered by the lack of technical acumen we have to build the product. But here, we will discuss how you can build a social networking app of your own without any prior coding knowledge!

BuddyPress, a free social networking site builder plugin that is available with WordPress is a life-saver when it comes to building social media sites from the scratch without prior technical experience. First and foremost, you should have a layout and the basic functionalities in terms of the engagement functions in your social media app as well as the website. Once clear, try choosing a BuddyPress theme that looks similar to the layouts for the website you had in mind complementing the app. Once you find the theme, you can customize it according to the layout you had in mind and voila! You have created a social media website using BuddyPress.

Some of the most popular themes to choose are:

Boss: Boss is a great theme to work with that is easy to integrate with some of the most renowned payment gateways like PayPal. Boss is also highly responsive in case of a mobile site to give a good viewing experience and can easily be converted into a native mobile app as well.

BuddyApp: BuddyApp is one of the most mobile optimized BuddyPress themes out there. This makes sense to use the maximum amount of crowd on social media (read around 90%) access it through their handheld devices or smartphones. Hence, BuddyApp is also a great option to go with.

Kleo: Kleo is highly responsive and is easy to build upon as it has visual composer which you can use to build the website block by block using a drag-and-drop technique.

Now, to convert a BuddyPress powered social media website into a compatible native app, one can use a powerful tool called Canvas by Mobiloud. It converts and configures all the UI elements of the BuddyPress site into a native app ready to be pushed to the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store.

So, what are you waiting for! Don’t let technical knowledge be a barrier between you and your dreams. Use the power of BuddyPress and Canvas to make your social network idea a reality.

Cost of Building a New Website

Ths is a common question that lingers in the head of every person looking to develop a website for their business. However, the question is quite vague in context. It’s almost like asking how much a phone would cost without deciding what features one is rooting for. Therefore, it’s mandatory to choose the features and requirements that best suit your cause before investing in a mobile phone. Similarly, when developing a website, it is compulsory to plot a layout that perfectly describes the purpose of the website being made.

The ‘numero uno’ step for venturing into website development is to get an experienced advisor on board to help you in making calculated and profitable decisions. Now, we come to the other vital part, ‘How to decide the price?’ Well, the first thing is to find out just how much you are willing to pay for the work. Therefore, make a budget keeping your requirements in mind. Be certain about what you want the website to convey to its followers.

Here’s a little cost estimate card released by Jimdo that should give you a fair idea of what you need to be spending on.

‘But, how do I finalize a budget?’ you ask. Well, these are the things you must keep in mind while planning the cost:

Time
Design Skills
Technical Skills
Money

If you have all these skills within you, you are good to go. However, most people lack either one of the skills, therefore, it is advisable to hire professional help to create a swanky website. When you approach professional website developers, they will offer you several development packages with varied rates.

Ask yourself, “What is worth my money?” The catch lies in this question. If you possess either of the above-mentioned skills you can cut down on the cost of development by using a ‘drag and drop website builder’.

A drag and drop website builder is a fully managed platform that handles all the technical and design challenges of website creation. Using a fully-hosted website is widely recommended as it consumes less time, has solutions to all design related problems, there is no need to learn how to code and mostly includes free templates, thus, reducing the cost. Extensively used drag and drop builders are, Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace.

Thus, if you are looking to develop a website for the first time or doesn’t have a high-flying budget then it’s advisable to go for one of the drag and drop builders. So, what you are waiting for? Find your compatible drag and drop mate and get set to go! If you have the juice to get a developer actively working on it, you can head over to freelancer and get a team under $20/hour to work for you.

Once you get the nitty gritties out of the way, you can focus on choosing a good web host like Hostgator or Godaddy to help you get started. Ideally, you should not be spending more than $25/year for web hosting and a domain name for your business.

3 Essential Tools for Startups

So, you’ve taken the plunge. Decided to face all odds and gone ahead to overcome your challenges. I salute everything you’re doing and going to do in the days to come. Building a startup isn’t easy and I can tell you, it’s going to take up a lot of your time and energy. To ease off the planning process and ensure you got all the nitty-gritties sorted out, I’m going to recommend three tools that are going to help organise, plan and simplify your business plan.

1. ProBaux

This little baby is a simplified task management and project planning system that gets everything done. Your startup is going to need a lot of planning in it’s teething stages and there’s no other online tool that gets the job done better. ProBaux allows you to create projects, assign team players and create a sense of responsibility for your people to follow up and achieve results. It’s the only result based project management system out there and has a bunch of features you are definitely going to need. Theres an invoice function that keeps a tab of your accounts, a built in CRM, that allows you to start building up your customer base and a brilliantly well managed calendar system that integrates deeply with your activity planner. ProBaux is what I call an all-in-one toolkit that every startup deserves. While all this is every startup’s dream come true, the real icing on the cake its it’s no bullshit pricing policy. Pay for what you want, however long you need it. No questions asked.

2. Dropbox

This may sound clichéd but file storage is something you are going to need to manage very effectively. There are plenty of cloud storage devices out there but there’s nothing more capable of delivering first and third party integration solutions like Dropbox. With new features being released almost every fortnight, Dropbox has grown to become a name synonymous with every startup on the planet. It’s super-easy share features and privacy controls is what makes it the best among its plethora of competitors. You get to start off with a couple of gigs for free and then upgrade to $9/mo for a heck of a lot of storage.

3. MailChimp

The most essential element for any startup is its marketing and communication. Building a brand cannot be done without the help of communication reaching the right target audience and studying it’s results to help build more effective communication. The only tool I know that allows me to build my communication, establish diversified leads, customers and threats is MailChimp. It’s an amazing system built for mail architecture and it simply delivers what it promises. MailChimp will be the only email marketing tool you will ever need. It will market your product or service, maintain historical analytics of your open rates, conversation rates and at the same time help you optimise your subscriber base to assist you in delivering better quality of content. Mailchimp has some ridiculously cheap plans worth checking out.

With these three tools in place, I can vouch that your startup will be more effective than ever. There are a bunch of other tools you may want to consider at a later stage but if you are just getting started, this is all that you need to be looking at: a simple and effective project management system, a file storage system and an email communication system. Master these tools and you got yourself a startup thats on the right track ahead.

All the best.