Online Election Campaign – not a myth anymore……………….!!!
US election 2016 was observed as a classic example of how online media can have impact on the elections. From that time onwards, every election across the globe sees the scope of online media campaign in a much wider canvas and started using online media more effectively.
The 2016 presidential campaign in US started from June 2016 onwards, from the start itself the country was waiting for Hillary Clinton to be the next US president, every exits pol and to all the three presidential debates, she only scored and on every phase of election campaign Donald Trump was way behind Hillary Clinton.
But to the surprise of whole world, as the results came in on election night, November 8, 2016, Trump won in multiple states that had been predicted to go to Clinton. In the early morning hours of November 9, media sources declared Trump the winner of the presidency, crediting him with 279 electoral college votes where 270 were needed to win. Clinton then phoned Trump to concede and to congratulate him on his victory, whereupon Trump gave a victory speech. His victory was widely described as a “stunning upset”, since most pre-election polling had predicted a Clinton win.
One of the reasons for this “stunning upset” was the effective use of online media for his success. The whole Trump campaign got deep rooted impact on the voters by propagating the various stands he projected thru online campaigns like his opposition to illegal immigrations, patriotism projection and various trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, earned him support especially among voters who were male, white, blue-collar, working class, and those without college degrees. His success was based on how effectively he can convert unbiased voters to his side by making use of the immense potential of online media.
How to create a Successful Social Media Political Campaign
It’s widely accepted now that social media and online campaigns are playing vital role in election campaigns and in that line to build a successful strategy for political social media plan, few of the best and effective tips to think from before the announcement of someone going to run to his eventual election are listed below.
Be ready with your Social Media Political Campaign
Election announcement and candidate announcement will happen on time, but before that itself you have to be ready with your plan of branding and that will become the foundation for your online campaign during the election to address your voters.
- » Assigning a professional social media team to handle your online campaign can be the first step. Having a social media team with inclination towards your political background will be the best choice, who can help to manage your social media accounts, create content according to your ideas, design positive posts, respond to comments and support to grow your social media following.
- » Have a detailed discussion with that social media team to convey your vision and to create a political social media strategy, which includes social media calendar, engagement goals with your potential voters and even to plan your budget for paid campaigns.
- » Optimize all of your social media accounts and make it a platform to provide authentic information about you and your visions for the future.
- » Target PERSONA identification and development of strategy accordingly. Target PERSONA is the specific crowd in your society, who can vote for you, these are the people you’re trying to reach to win your election so you need to have a firm understanding of their needs, behaviours, what social networks they’re on, and what is most important to them.
- » Your personal social media accounts should not be used for online election campaign, advising to have separate political campaigns with separate accounts exclusively for that purpose. Utmost importance should be given to avoid blunders being posted and secondly even putting strange suggestions are fine, unless you yourself have a perfect answer for that suggestion raised.
Use social media tracking tools like Social Walls and Social Media Monitoring tools to keep up with:
- ➼ People engaging with your political campaign accounts
- ➼ Trends on current topics important to your political campaign
- ➼ Your key political competitors
- ➼ Addressing the thought process of the unbiased voters
- ➼ Engagement of new voters and their feedbacks
- » All the social media platforms should be effectively used to reach every segment of the society. LinkedIn mostly used by high level professionals, FB for all level of peoples including families, INSTAGRAM by youth and even celebrities, Twitter a totally different category, so you should have a good understanding of where the target audience is for your political campaigns so make sure you’re engaging with them on the right social networks.
- » Your vision and plans should be clearly tailor-made for every segment of the society and to your target PERSONA. Make sure that those personal messages and designed posts got resonates with them and that impact should determine the success of your election campaign.
- » Your messages and posts should be different for each social media platform, this is not only to avoid content canonical issue, but every other social media is having a different style that people follow and we need to understand and accordingly plan our posts and strategy.
- » Maximum try to use your own photos and videos for getting more engagement and that way becoming closer to your target PERSONA. Video posts gets maximum reach and that reason its always advisable to have video posts also and to have a YouTube channel for the campaign.
- » Make use of all online communities to the best, as these communities are platforms to initiate discussions and to get correct feedback from cream layer community, particularly about your political campaign or topics that are important to the campaign we are planning.
- » Try to create statements or plan which can become viral, not everything will become viral, but if you are successful in creating something in the process, that will give popularity and brand image will definitely have a positive impact.
- » Online media is a two-way communication path and from that you can get feedback immediately. We need to get maximum feedback on the political campaign, positive or negative. It’s a quick way to get a sense of what’s important to the supporters and critics of political campaigns. It also shows your followers that you care about their needs and desires.
- » To your political campaign website and email signature need to add all your social media accounts and thus reach and branding can be enhanced.
- » Online social media contest on serious social issues is one another way to get followers engaged and to to share the contest’s social posts on their social profiles getting more views with each share.
Every other person who is having plan to run his election, already knows the importance of social media and digital marketing/branding and only challenge is to find the right online digital marketing service provider and how to do things in the right way.
The simple steps to develop your election campaign strategy are;
- ➼ Develop your online brand
- ➼ Develop a clear online strategy for your election campaign
- ➼ Identify your target PERSONA and leverage targeted Ads
- ➼ Tell your story effectively thru all online platforms
- ➼ Make use of all social media platforms
- ➼ Make use of website for data collection
- ➼ Have news letters and email campaigns for maximum engagement
- ➼ Frequently measure your results
- ➼ Always be ready to change your strategy
According to the recent Wall Street Journal report “spending on political advertisement is projected to hit a new high in 2021, surging $ 3.6 billion above the previous spent.”
It’s imperative that, you need to go beyond the tradition election campaigns and need to embrace the new trends and join the power of online marketing for your success.
"Think beyond limits and enjoy success by embracing the change to new media marketing."
Dr Girish Krishnan.
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishkrishnannair/
Recent Posts
Digital Marketing Tips for Businesses to Survive COVID -19 IMPACT?
Across globe the impact of COVID-19 on every business domain are not in a stage of prediction and how the consumer buying behaviour and habitual changes also in dilemma. The future is still uncertain and how we all are going to impact is in darkness, on the onset, its highly imperative to think and plan your marketing investments and digital marketing budget.
Consumer behaviour pattern changing and individual industries impact are the major areas to be considered when planning of the future advertisement campaigns and digital marketing strategies. Across the globe every business is going to depend upon the new media marketing concepts and the need of developing a proper digital marketing strategy is becoming inevitable to sustain in the market. To be more precise, the future is for those business peoples who understands the need of digital marketing for making in through the tough times ahead.
Digital Marketing Tips/Strategies for Businesses Affected by Coronavirus
One successful little step gives you the courage to take another, and that one makes a difference, too. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
Across the globe everybody is in dilemma due to the impact of COVID-19, all are anxious, but apart from all this, the worst part is not doing anything and simply waiting for the tide to be over, which includes your digital marketing strategy. There are lot of simple things which you can do continue your consistent online activities which can help you creating positive results even during this potential downtime.
Few of digital marketing strategies to help your SEO, and your business
• Google My Business updating should be always on
In spite of your business being open or closed, updating Google My Business should be a continuous process. Google is having so many standard procedures updated for this period, like Maps will display if one business is temporarily closed and all. On the onset, we need to constantly update our Google My Business profile.
• Few recommendations as follows:
| You Can Do . | You Should Not Do . . |
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Its always better and advisable for local businesses to regularly update the Google My Business page, when “nearby” or “near me” searches are common nowadays.
• Give more focus on Customer Service and ORM activities
These slog periods should be effectively use for increasing your online branding and to enhance your online reputation to the best. Several international brands are having content hubs to project their brands to general public and thus achieving branding. We can create blogs, posts and lot of general awareness things and should be engaged online on a regular basis.
This is the right time which everybody should make use to project their strengths and what all specific services they are doing for their clients and to focus to project the positive image in the online space with professional Online Reputation Management activities.
• Be ready with answers for every Google searchers
Now when outside movements got restricted, peoples got glued to online and lot of peoples are using Google more than usual. We should be ready in our website with answers for what most of them searching in Google.
With this you are indirectly getting an opportunity to increase SERP ranking and be at the top of Google search and then it will lead to inbound organic reach and more business.
• Google Ads Campaign for more effectiveness
This period there will be a drop in business for every domain and the best way to anticipate this drop in business is to initiate Google Ads Campaign. Both Google and Facebook Ads will give more positive leads and your expected revenue dip can be maintained to survive this COVID period.
Professional setting of Google and FB Ads can reach your targeted clients and they will know that you are still active and they will contact you for their needs. This is one of the best and cheaper way to reach your target persona during this period. Apart from that, we can use these advertisements to promote discounts and other offers to attract the customers and engage them and prevent your revenue drop.
• Utilize Social Media
This is a time when people are using and spending more time on all social media platforms and this is a very high potential opportunity for every business, we need to explore all the possibilities and use social media channels to be in touch with the potential clients on a regular basis.
Thru effective using of social media, you can update information about all your services to your client base and potential target segment. Social media platforms are the best and cheaper alternative to create wide awareness and branding for your services during this pandemic period and thus ensure your business will not get affected much.
” I personally find several peoples stopping their online activities since business is not happening due to COVID impact, at the same time, there are peoples who exploring new avenues and other possibilities to enhance their business and they only going to survive this global impact of COVID-19. You have to go for it, you need to leave your comfortable zone and explore more to get the best out of online media in multiple ways and that is the real need of the current situation. ”
Dr Girish Krishnan.
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishkrishnannair/
Recent Posts
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS CONSULTANCY !!!
Today Business consultancy is happening more thru professional freelancers and virtual teams who envisage the success as one of the client team member, unlike the previous mindset of a consulting firm with most sophisticated infrastructure and located in the posh part of the city were gone.
By 2020 across globe the concept of business consultancy will fully reach to the hands of such freelance consultants or contract workers and that means companies will start depending more on such peoples for their productive growth.
Great things in business are never done by one person…… They’re done by ……………. TEAM OF PEOPLE.
A professional business consulting firm needs to develop Strategies for Success for their clients after understanding their business platform. They need to empower brands and business to achieve their true potential by adapting the existing business modes and then develop proper strategy according to that and execute that strategy along with the client for their success.
As a Strategic Consultant of an international Digital Management Consortium, few of my thoughts or assumptions on the future of Business Consultancy are mentioned below;
Consultancy Industry is evolving and having drastic changes as today any information under the Sun is available in finger tips virtually, or to be more precise the Internet penetration across globe and the availability of several groups on the World Wide Web that tailor to professional development in every field. Several of the vital information or insights which consultants provided a decade back is readily available free of cost in the Internet.
As Technology continues to improve along with the availability of data and ease of communication, the new generation Consultants should be more techno savvy and with more relevant educations to specific industries. He should be able to eloquent the value and quick ROI of their services and satisfy the growing needs of customers with high expectations.
In another 10 years or before that, Consultants will use artificial intelligence to enhance service offerings with the support of BIGDATA and could be able to suggest or recommend new concepts with the support of data available.
The role of consultants will change from those creating ideas or concepts behind a boardroom door. In place of that the future consultants will be acting as one of the team member of the organization and will be expected to lend their expert solutions and supporting growth throughout their engagement with the client.
During the next 10 years significant developments are expecting in the consultancy domain and a fully fledged consultant need to provide end-to end customized solution for his clients. The role of consultants will not be restricted only to Organizational structure but need to support or develop even the organizational contributors such as ; employees, franchisees, contractors and even part-timers. His service need to extend on supporting to build team according to specific project, coach and train all parties involved and handhold them or guide them to assure successful implementation of the project.
The future consultants will be those who could create an environment that combines professional consultancy with the science brought in by the growing technology. This combination could bring to the table, years of experience of business understanding, wisdom of ages, tried and tested frameworks on management decisions along with new-age weapons of data and algorithms.
Recent Posts
HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY!!!
Digital Marketing is today’s trend and every futuristic company is having one or other digital marketing company working for them, but the real question is if these agencies who sprang up like mushrooms are addressing the real concerns of their clients, it comes as a surprise when most of the campaigns or activities fail to live up to the expectations of the clients or the promises given.
As a marketing consultant, when am speaking with clients, everyone mentioning that they are having a digital marketing agency working for them and only few are so much excited about the agency and a big chunk of them are either not aware of the results or having a shady response, several clients who are investing heavily on Digital Marketing also come with comments such us:
- They bring us on the first page of Google, but not sure if it did anything for my business.
- Measurable results are not seeing as per the investment done.
- Tangible results are not showing as per the given promises.
- I feel more confident in the traditional marketing.
- Now am going to do campaigns directly to save cost.
On the onset, it’s high time to think what went wrong, if the Digital Marketing company is not professional enough to handle your case or you are not investing your part with the agency or the whole strategy developed was not right for your type of services. However investing time and money with a wrong Digital Marketing company is not only an economy loss but you will tend to move away from the concept of Digital Marketing itself.
Finding the right Digital Marketing Company is the key for your business success and that decision should not be an impulsive one, rather you should have a clear understanding on your needs, your target results and who is professional enough to make you achieve your organizational goals. The following points should be clear from your side before proceeding to hire a Digital Marketing Agency;
- Role to be played by the Digital Marketing Agency.
- Investment plan for the same.
- Time period which you want to achieve your target goals.
- Time you or your team can invest/support the agency.
- SWOT analysis of your team.
Once the above points are clear, you can proceed to hire the right Digital Marketing Partner for your specific requirement and budget. The following points will help you in identifying the right Digital Marketing Partner who can support you in establishing yourself and who will be providing effective ROI.
Getting engaged with the right Digital Marketing Agency will have direct positive impact on your business not only in short term but also for achieving long term business goals. It’s important to work with capable professionals who understand the business trends and who could translate that into business making use of the wide scope of the digital marketing domain should be your choice. You need to identify an agency who covers the entire gamut of business and that list might include the following;
- Creative in concepts
- SEO –Search Engine Optimization
- SMM – Social Media Management
- Search Engine Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Analytics
- Online Advertisement
- Content Marketing
- Web development and coding
- Marketing Automation
- Inbound Marketing
- PR and Reputation Management
- Blogging
In general few things you need to check and understand before finalizing the agency are listed below, since you are going to invest your time and money with them, furthermore you should have confidence in giving your brand to their hand and that reason you have to double check the reliability of the agency with whom you are going to associate;
- It’s always better to work with an international agency, their cross cultured and multinational experience will reflect on the QOS and lot of industries good practices will be in their standard working model.
- Low cost should not be a decision factor, low cost usually mean low quality services. Instead of low cost you should be focused on the results/targets what they can promise. If you are looking for an agency who could handle all your online requirements for a cheap cost, then results may not be positive, better than that will be to associate with a reputed agency and negotiate for a better deal in the initial period. Once ROI got assured over a period, you can accordingly steer your budget.
- Work with agency and peoples who understand your business language. In the initial interactions with the agency peoples itself you should identify that they are having not only technology know-how but could able to understand your business needs. They only could transfer the technology know-how to results in the long run.
- Credibility factor also need to check before the association. Need to check the details of clients whom they are already working. Their association with Government bodies and domain expertise and all can be checked. Their website checking and direct client interaction and will sort this out.
Association should be a long term for getting effective results, whoever you are finalizing should be given opportunity to work in a long term and then only the agency could understand your core ideas and thus support you in not only in campaigns but act as a positive contributor to your long term strategies.
- Digital Marketing Agency selected should be able to work along with your company and the mode of operandi should be giving the feeling that they are your extended marketing support arms.
- They should be capable enough to understand and translate your company’s vision and long term objectives in a better way thru online activities.
- They should be someone who can give creative suggestions and feedback according to the online trends.
Digital Marketing Mix, something different from the traditional marketing mix, but handling the same 4P’s of marketing namely – Promotion, Price, Place and Product. But how these can be effectively addressed by a digital marketing agency need to be checked.
Since you are promoting your product thru virtual space, you cannot play on the quality of the product, since customers are getting or find product reviews and consumer feedback ready in the online space and if the product quality is low, very high chances of negative impact for your product.
Price of the product also matters highly, until you already created a proper branding for your product in the online domain, your product will not start moving online. Likewise promotion also should be according to the online market trends and should be planned by proper analytics and consumer behavior tracking. Finally where you have to showcase your product also matters to reach your target segment.
All these points how effectively a Digital Marketing agency can handle should be given importance, or to be more precise what are the major attributes which an agency should have to address the above concerns should be watched with top priority.
- Marketing Attributes – Today everybody agrees on the point that online marketing is really vital, but for doing marketing online the agency should have in-depth knowledge in all the concepts of traditional marketing and expertise. You should ensure that the agency is having team who are having marketing domain experts.
- Technology Attributes – The Digital Marketing agency should be well versed with the trends and technologies on how the search engine algorithms works and need to check their association with Google and other companies to know how they are getting updated to the latest trends in the industry on technology aspects.
- Psychological Attributes – The third and the most important attribute to check is how effectively the Digital Marketing Agency can incorporate the Psychological aspects into digital marketing strategies of your company. You will get all analytical reports and feedback by doing the right campaign, but need to check if the agency is having experts who can understand these reports in a psychological point of view and develop strategies accordingly for the future and when psychological triggers are well placed within your marketing strategies, you can be sure of your success rate.
To conclude the same, choosing the right Digital Marketing Agency for your business is vital and the above mentioned are few of the important points to consider in the peripheral level, however the list can be more and depending upon companies and their needs we can still research further.
However, Digital Marketing will be the backbone in all type of promotional activities in the future and your success will be in identifying the right digital marketing agency for your business.
Dr Girish Krishnan.
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist
Recent Posts
BE A “LEADER”
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”
Leadership is the art of persuasion—the act of motivating people to do more than they ever thought possible in pursuit of a greater good. A true leader influences others to be their best. Leadership is about social influence, not positional power.
The growth from one of the ordinary citizen Mr. M K Gandhi to the one and only Mahatma Gandhi was a classical example of how a leader should be. Gandhi could establish himself by leading through examples, he works along with the people as one among them, empowering the general public and practice what he preached, like spinning yarn to make his cloths or washing his own dishes etc. Gandhi as a true leader empowered his followers towards success with a long term vision, self confidence and stubborn on strong principles of righteousness.
Mahatma Gandhi proved by his life that leadership is action, not position. You just have to do things that make people want to follow you and you can be a leader.
Few leadership lessons we can learn from Mahatma;
- Lead through examples – Your life should be your teaching.
- Rules for everyone – As a leader once you are setting a code of conduct, you must be the first to follow the same, otherwise your followers will never follow.
- Commitment to the cause – Once the goal is set, you should dedicate fully to obtain the same and also remind your followers frequently of your destination and progress that’s been made towards the same.
- Never ask your followers to do anything which you wouldn’t do yourself.
- You should be prime contributor to the cause as a leader.
- You should learn to admit your mistakes and do the needful to correct them openly.
If you want to be a leader, you should be optimistic and your actions should be proactive. Few of the traits which projects leadership qualities are listed below;
- A leader should be an out of the box thinker and they should add values when ever they see an opportunity.
- Leader should be confident on their talents and should also posses’ ability to express their limitations.
- Leaders should be optimistic and should be able to see possibilities on every difficult situation.
- Leaders should be open to change and should look for better possibilities at every point of time.
- Leaders should posses the ability to take decision on the right time.
- Leaders should be accountable for his action and also for the whole team’s action.
- Leaders should be humble in all aspects with a strong mindset.
- Leaders should be passionate for what they are standing for.
- Leaders should be self motivated.
- Leaders should give more priority to the team than self.
- Leaders should be adaptable and open to learning.
- Leaders should be pious and should have heart of empathy.
Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence and inspiration. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire team-mates and customers.
Dr Girish Krishnan.
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist
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7 Steps To Grow Your Small Business
While mentioning this proverb, I rarely find happy faces during the climbing stage or to be more precise entrepreneurs across the globe, find this stage as the most difficult stage to sustain.
In 1998, two Stanford University graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin started their office in a garage in California, but nobody knows it would grow to become the biggest network in the world – “Google”.
Like Google, if we take HP, AMAZON, MATTEL, MICROSOFT or APPLE they all have such humble beginning from garage or single room office and grow to the top. While admiring the growth from such a low profile, we all need to comprehend how meticulously they climbed up the ladder with strategic planning and choosing the right area of their growth to success.
Seven Steps To Grow Your Small Business – in this blog seven steps or strategies for every small business to grow in my perspective was noted down, an organization can follow several different avenues for achieving profitable and sustainable growth, here generic steps which are simple to adapt are explained.
These seven steps to success was something which I feel good from my experience working with various local and international business groups, where am focusing mainly on Mentorship, Business Support, Organizational Development, Networking and Investment opportunities.
7 Steps To Success …….
1. Market Penetration – Concentrated Growth Strategy.
One of the most common growth strategies is to focus on what you do best by emphasizing your current products in your current markets. This strategy is also called the concentrated growth strategy because you’re thoroughly developing and exploiting your knowledge and expertise in a specific market with known products.
Market penetration refers simply to growing with existing products in existing markets. This can be achieved by attracting new users in existing markets by two ways. One is by attracting and gaining competitor’s customers. Another is by influencing current customers to use more of the organization’s products / services. Market penetration generally involves the least risk and the deployment of minimal resources.
Tactics commonly using in market penetration;
2. Geographical Expansion – New branch or Franchise Once you feel your business got fully settled but not achieving the necessary growth from your area of operation, one of the immediate options is to expand your operational horizons geographically. Opening another location or geographical expansion refers to growing with existing products in new area or location. This step involves decision about the target niche, entry mode and control system. You should be accountable about the profits and surplus money that you are generating from current locations. While opening branch offices are good for the growth factor, few of the points to be overlooked are on the increase of recurring cost by ways of man power and infrastructure. Here comes the opportunity of Franchising for geographical expansion. Franchising is a very good option to grow your small business successfully. Understanding your business inside out is very much important before franchising a business. From a startup franchiser point of view, first concentrate on developing a business model and the administrative and legalities that involve in franchise business. The future of business is with entrepreneurs who are coming with effective franchisee models and focus on proper retail management.
3. Launching New Products Or Services Developing a new product in the same target after understanding the market is one of the effective ways to grow your small business. When planning to launch a new product, primary focus should be given to People and not the Product. This strategy requires good innovation capabilities and market research. An organization can grow by simultaneous movement into new product and market domains. Launching new product is of course a very resource intensive strategy. A classic example of growth achievement by product innovation can be seen in Gillette’s success in India. Their success in India hinged on its capacity to innovate their product for Indian market after understanding the consumer attitude. Through effective product innovation and proper launching strategy Gillette could shift from a market-driven to a market-driving approach and achieved tremendous growth.
4. Vertical Integration Vertical Integration is something happening in today’s global business world for the growth of business, this is often closely associated to vertical expansion, which is the growth of a business enterprise through the acquisition of companies that produce the intermediate goods needed by the business or help market and distribute its products. Vertical expansion is also known as vertical acquisition, which can also be used to increase scales and to gain market power. The acquisition of ASIANET COMMUNICATION LTD by M/s Star Group is an example of forward vertical expansion or acquisition. ASIANET is a satellite TV company though which Star Group can distribute its media content, news, movies and television shows Alibaba, the fastest growing Chinese online company makes use of vertical integration to its full potential to gain more market share and today Alibaba is not only online portal but beyond that and built its leadership in the market by gradually acquiring complementary companies in a variety of industries including products, delivery and payments.
5. Diversification Diversification is one among the main growth strategies defined by many management gurus, but it also has the highest level of risk and requires the most careful investigation before proceeding. Diversification is a strategic decision to be taken by organization, to enter into a new market or industry in which business doesn’t currently operate, while also creating a new product for that new market. Apart from the risk part of great uncertainty on organizational success, diversification might necessitate significant expanding of human and financial resources, which may detract focus, commitment, and sustained investments in the core industries. Therefore, a firm should choose this option only when the current product or current market orientation does not offer further opportunities for growth. Even though there is risk involved in diversification, we have several examples where organizations achieve tremendous growth by diversification;
6. Merger & Acquisitions Strategic alliances of two or more companies for growth and market expansion is something very common these years and we have witnessed several of such huge merger and acquisitions in recent years also. Few of such Merger & Acquisitions are as follows;
7. Online Presence & Social Media Optimization Finally the impact of Internet on the business world got already accepted and everyone geared up to make use of the wide scope of online business for the growth of the business. It’s not only online presence but today the total shift happens to digital marketing of business over the traditional print media and other advertisement medias. The main deciding factor over why online marketing is more beneficial for a business than offline is because this is where 90% of your customers will be. We are in a new era where so many people of different ages and genders are all accessing the internet globally. For your business to be an ultimate success, you will need a combination of both online and offline marketing however, online marketing is where you will be able to connect with your audience on a broader scale. When analyzing the Internet’s effect on the global market and small business, it is important to remember that the Internet carries information as well as commerce. The effects of instant information can be as powerful as the ability to reach a worldwide audience. But small business still needs to carefully examine the effects of the Internet on international markets to understand whether or not an online presence is the right move. For any small business, online presence and social media gives immense scope for growth in many ways, particularly social media gives great marketing opportunities and benefits such as:
- PRICE ADJUSTMENTS
- INCREASED PROMOTION
- MORE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK
- PRODUCT IMPROVEMENT.
2. Geographical Expansion – New branch or Franchise Once you feel your business got fully settled but not achieving the necessary growth from your area of operation, one of the immediate options is to expand your operational horizons geographically. Opening another location or geographical expansion refers to growing with existing products in new area or location. This step involves decision about the target niche, entry mode and control system. You should be accountable about the profits and surplus money that you are generating from current locations. While opening branch offices are good for the growth factor, few of the points to be overlooked are on the increase of recurring cost by ways of man power and infrastructure. Here comes the opportunity of Franchising for geographical expansion. Franchising is a very good option to grow your small business successfully. Understanding your business inside out is very much important before franchising a business. From a startup franchiser point of view, first concentrate on developing a business model and the administrative and legalities that involve in franchise business. The future of business is with entrepreneurs who are coming with effective franchisee models and focus on proper retail management.
3. Launching New Products Or Services Developing a new product in the same target after understanding the market is one of the effective ways to grow your small business. When planning to launch a new product, primary focus should be given to People and not the Product. This strategy requires good innovation capabilities and market research. An organization can grow by simultaneous movement into new product and market domains. Launching new product is of course a very resource intensive strategy. A classic example of growth achievement by product innovation can be seen in Gillette’s success in India. Their success in India hinged on its capacity to innovate their product for Indian market after understanding the consumer attitude. Through effective product innovation and proper launching strategy Gillette could shift from a market-driven to a market-driving approach and achieved tremendous growth.
4. Vertical Integration Vertical Integration is something happening in today’s global business world for the growth of business, this is often closely associated to vertical expansion, which is the growth of a business enterprise through the acquisition of companies that produce the intermediate goods needed by the business or help market and distribute its products. Vertical expansion is also known as vertical acquisition, which can also be used to increase scales and to gain market power. The acquisition of ASIANET COMMUNICATION LTD by M/s Star Group is an example of forward vertical expansion or acquisition. ASIANET is a satellite TV company though which Star Group can distribute its media content, news, movies and television shows Alibaba, the fastest growing Chinese online company makes use of vertical integration to its full potential to gain more market share and today Alibaba is not only online portal but beyond that and built its leadership in the market by gradually acquiring complementary companies in a variety of industries including products, delivery and payments.
5. Diversification Diversification is one among the main growth strategies defined by many management gurus, but it also has the highest level of risk and requires the most careful investigation before proceeding. Diversification is a strategic decision to be taken by organization, to enter into a new market or industry in which business doesn’t currently operate, while also creating a new product for that new market. Apart from the risk part of great uncertainty on organizational success, diversification might necessitate significant expanding of human and financial resources, which may detract focus, commitment, and sustained investments in the core industries. Therefore, a firm should choose this option only when the current product or current market orientation does not offer further opportunities for growth. Even though there is risk involved in diversification, we have several examples where organizations achieve tremendous growth by diversification;
- Shift of HCL from Hardware to Software.
- Move of Apple from PCs to Mobile devices.
- Move of Virgin Group from music production to travel and mobile phones.
- Walt Disney moved from animated movies to theme parks and vacation properties.
- CANON diversified from Camera into an entirely new range of office equipment.
6. Merger & Acquisitions Strategic alliances of two or more companies for growth and market expansion is something very common these years and we have witnessed several of such huge merger and acquisitions in recent years also. Few of such Merger & Acquisitions are as follows;
- TATA STEEL – CORUS, merger made TATA the fifth largest steel producer.
- VODAFONE – HUTCHISON ESSAR, made them one of the top telecom player.
- RANBAXY – DAIICHI SANKYO
- TATA MOTORS – JAGUAR LAND ROVER
- VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS – VERIZON WIRELESS.
- AT&T Inc. – TIME WARNER
- MICROSOFT – LINKEDIN
- COMCAST CORPORATION – AT&T BROADBAND
- GLAXO WELCOME PLC – SMITHKLINE BEECHAM PLC
- JP MORGAN CHASE &Co – BANK ONE CORPORATION.
7. Online Presence & Social Media Optimization Finally the impact of Internet on the business world got already accepted and everyone geared up to make use of the wide scope of online business for the growth of the business. It’s not only online presence but today the total shift happens to digital marketing of business over the traditional print media and other advertisement medias. The main deciding factor over why online marketing is more beneficial for a business than offline is because this is where 90% of your customers will be. We are in a new era where so many people of different ages and genders are all accessing the internet globally. For your business to be an ultimate success, you will need a combination of both online and offline marketing however, online marketing is where you will be able to connect with your audience on a broader scale. When analyzing the Internet’s effect on the global market and small business, it is important to remember that the Internet carries information as well as commerce. The effects of instant information can be as powerful as the ability to reach a worldwide audience. But small business still needs to carefully examine the effects of the Internet on international markets to understand whether or not an online presence is the right move. For any small business, online presence and social media gives immense scope for growth in many ways, particularly social media gives great marketing opportunities and benefits such as:
- Promote your brand and business.
- Effective communication to customers about your product
- Customer feedback mechanism will be active.
- More reach and branding.
- Effective client relation management possible.
- Target oriented marketing possibility.
- Cost effective compared to other solutions.
- Personal communication possible.
- Fast and easy to manage.
- AMP for more effectiveness in the mobile devices.
- Mobile Apps development.
- Online payment gateway integration.
- SEO and SME.
Dr Girish Krishnan.
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishkrishnannair/
Business Consultant and a Digital Marketing Evangelist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishkrishnannair/
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12 EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS in 2020 .
Digital Marketing or New Media Marketing is the trend and every entrepreneur started investing their major share of marketing budget for digital marketing for getting more effective results. But the question is about the ROI, is everybody getting the needed results according to their media spent in social media or just investing only.
Here am trying to list out a dozen of social media strategies for more effectiveness and these strategies for success are from the working experience with clients of different sizes and diversified requirements. The below mentioned 12 steps are just the starters for a more result oriented long term digital marketing plan. However, for effective implementation of total online communication plan you need to associate with a professional digital marketing agency.
Strategy without Tactics is the slowest route to Victory & Tactics without Strategy is the noise before Defeat.
Sun Tzu
1. SWOT analysis
First step before initiating a proper social media plan is to understand more about your present status in the market. A clear understanding about your Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats prevailing in the market will give an additional edge on formulating your social media plan. I always suggest my clients to do social media spent only after securing your online position at least to the level of your competition, for that SEO should be the first step before spending a single penny.
2. Be ready ONLINE
Before starting implementing your derived social media plan, you should be ready online with a proper website and all social media widgets. Your website and social media pages should provide a first good impression to the visitors and for that you should be ready in all modes. Both your website and social media pages should be updated with latest and relevant information on a regular basis and also should be dynamic is responding to their queries.
3. Fix your target
Those who start implementing a strategy after fixing their target are likely to reach their fixed target much earlier than the others and that reason you need to think about your marketing and communication goals before initiating social media plan. Your social media plan should be designed as per your long term business goals and that will help to communicate to the target segment thru the right channel.
4. Different Social Media with different roles
What you can do in FACEBOOK will not be the same in LINKEDIN or likewise there are so many social media options and we have to clearly understand each of them and their impact and accordingly steer our social media campaign. When we are implementing our social media strategy we should understand that several of the social media platform are places to exchange with your followers and not for proper branding.
5. Study your competition
Today your success depends on not only your target clients alone but also how your competitors cater to them, we need to check and understand their online presence and market grader before jumping into huge media spent for effective results. We need to have a clear online audit of our competition in a particular market and after getting each of the market grader we need to channelize our social media plan and overcome the competition.
6. Identify your TARGET PERSONA
Your TARGET PERSONA is the peoples who will fall in the bracket of who can be your future clients. By proper segmentization and filtration we can effectively target all our social media spent to that segment and thus can ensure more productive leads and ROI. There exist perception in the market that more leads for the media spent is good, but we need to understand the need of getting productive leads than those irrelevant leads for our solution. These unproductive leads causes lot of wastage of time and money for the stakeholders that are involved in the consumer journey before the actual purchase and if you check the actual conversion, that will not support the media spent. Effective usage of our media spent after identifying your target persona and reaching them will get more ROI.
7. Make your menu interesting
People tend to follow brands who address their pain points and not brands who are trying to sell something. You need to position your brand/services in social media in a way that it will address a specific need of your target PERSONA. Here the content part plays a vital role and there you need to have a clear understanding of the client psychology, listen and answer their questions, it will provide information for you to create more content.
8. CONTENT is the KING
TARGET PERSONA based social media plan is more effective and for that we need to create the content accordingly and explore all possibilities. Write blog posts and social media content, and use a lot of visuals like beautiful pictures, and info graphics to attract more attention to your message. On FaceBook you can be more informal, on Instagram you need to be visual, and on LinkedIn, you need to show your expertise. Be very careful with the message tone, invite the reader to engage and interact with the message.
9. VIDEOS for better reach
Research shows that video content get much better reach than text and image content, this we need to understand and accordingly plan to insert video content in your social media plan. According to the latest online senses, there is a projection that videos will rule the internet traffic and this trend may continue until 2020 or more. Having a good video presentation about your service/product will definitely ensure good reach since viewers will share video more than text message.
10. Ensure effective two way communication
Unlike all other traditional media, social media is a two-way communication platform and that is the charm of social media and at the same time if we couldn’t manage the communication properly, it will have negative impact. All our social media presence should be open to receive positive and negative comments and we should be ready to address each of them effectively. Proper and fast response on social media will increase the integrity of the brand and will get wide spread appreciation on knowing how you are addressing positive and negative comments on social media. Ensure that there is continuous communication with your followers and that will have positive impact of your brand.
11. Keep monitoring the performance card
Social media analytical tools help to track everything on social media, for every media spent we can get analytic reports and understand the consumer behavior and which content gives maximum reach and brand identity. Further, you can identify your website traffic generated from your social media content and accordingly steer your media spent and content. This should be an ongoing practice till you reach satisfactory level of followers.
12. Dynamic approach gives results
Online Digital communication is the most effective way to increase your performance, but at the same time we need to constantly evaluate the results with social media analytical tools and accordingly change our strategies and media spent. To be more precise we need to have a dynamic approach and we should effectively change our online strategies according to how market react and consumer behavior. If we can identify which social media is giving maximum results on particular segment accordingly media spent can be directed and thus the total media spent can be limited to our budget and get the needed results.
The above 12 steps are just starters for your successful social media plan which need to follow the seven course plan of action or more according to the type of product and market scenario. There exist a complete professional set of activities which need to be handled by experts for getting expected results. However, would like to mention that today and in the future your product/service/brand will definitely need to have a professional social media plan for success.
Be with the right digital marketing partner who can develop STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSfor your service with optimum investment and those who can promise ROI.
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