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Showing posts from February, 2019

Bargain Bin

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Bargain bin refers to the unsorted selection of merchandise that has been discounted in price like software, CDs and tools. The major reasons for providing discounts can be the due to the closure of a production company, a steep decline in the popularity of an item in the aftermath of a scandal or a fad, or because a particular product line being discontinued. The term bargain bin originates from the fact that such items would be found in an isolated bin and not on store shelves. A similar term, “Bargain basement”, is now used as a synonym which means a basement in downtown department stores. Here, merchandise for clearance are placed regardless of which section of the store it came from. If a seller wants to sell different types of products as soon as possible, which may be due to various reasons, he keeps all the products in a single box rather than keeping it at their designated shelves and sells at a heavy discount rate so as to attract more customers. The reaso...

Attack Marketing

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Attack marketing or guerrilla marketing or ambush marketing is a type of marketing that incorporates a set of creative and strategic techniques which are used to build and raise public awareness that surrounds a person, place,  b schools in kerala event or a product. It utilizes the strength of social interactions to execute non-traditional marketing campaigns so as to drive sales, increase brand awareness and to create a long term buzz for a specific business. This marketing strategy is used by various marketing, advertising, public relations, and promotional event marketing agencies to promote products and services of popular brands and events all around the world. It can be altered to fit the marketing programs for all budgets be it small or large. For example, Coca-Cola’s “Happiness” campaign is one of the best examples of a successful attack-style marketing campaign. Filmed and released on YouTube along with a tag “where will happiness strike next?” this campaign ...

Omnichannel Marketing

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Omnichannel marketing is referred to the process of integrating an organization’s channels, processes and strategies to gain the ability to engage with its consumers at any time, from any place and from any device. It has become key to the success of marketing as customers engage with the organization in different ways like in a physical store, via websites, mobile apps, virtual catalogs and social media. They also interact with businesses through smartphones, tablets, computers and laptops. The challenge for businesses is to make all these interactions seamless, effective and consistent for all its customers. Consumers expect more personalised communication when interacting with businesses through various channels and devices and those who do not keep up that level lose their ground to its competitors. One of the biggest challenges faced by organizations taking up omnichannel marketing is to break free from traditional marketing campaigns. This strategy requires an entir...

Drip Marketing

The term drip marketing is referred to a communication strategy that “drips” or sends a pre-written messages to the customers or prospects of a company over time. These sets of messages are often sent in the form of email marketing, although other types of media can be used. This automated strategy is different from other kinds of database marketing – firstly, the timing of the messages follow a pre-determined course and then secondly, the messages are dripped in a series which is applicable to a certain behaviour/status of the recipient. The type of media used for drip marketing can be  E mail : through email marketing and it is associated with low cost and thus, making it the most commonly used form of drip marketing. Direct mail : more costly as it is enables drip marketing techniques through standard postal mail. Social media : principles of drip marketing can be applied in many social media marketing tools so as to schedule an updation series. Drip ma...

Digital Asset Management

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Digital Asset Management (DAM) is referred to the process of the content management system (CMS)that stores and manages rich media or digital data like photos, music, video, animations, podcasts and other multimedia content and also managing its digital rights and permissions. It involves creating an archive, developing an infrastructure to preserve and manage the digital assets of a business and search functionality that allows its end users to identify, locate and retrieve an asset. Digital asset are those assets managed and stored in a digital format detailed by its metadata describing asset content, means of encoding, ownership and access rights. In simple words, DAM is a group of database records that contains metadata explaining the file name, its format and details regarding its content and usage. This can be used to create and manage database and helps a business to store rich media cost-effectively. DAM is categorized into many- brand asset management, libr...

Closed-Loop Marketing

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Closed-loop marketing is referred to the process of marketing that depends on data & insights from closed-loop reporting. The term “closing the loop” is associated with the process of sales team, reporting to the marketing team about the status of the leads they received that helps the marketing team to evaluate their best and worst lead sources. To be an effective marketer, one should be able to link every lead or customer back to the marketing efforts that brought them here. Through this method marketers are able to prove their worth and understand how to reach their targeted audience more efficiently. The first step in closed-loop marketing begins with the visitor arriving on the website and a cookie being set on their referral source. When these visitors browses through the website, the cookie tracks the visitor’s each and every actions. The visitor then converts into a lead by filling and submitting the form used to capture leads. Finally, the prospective lead becomes a c...

Blue Ocean Strategy

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Blue Ocean Strategy is referred to a market with no or less competition for a product. This strategy is centred on searching for business where only a few firms function and with less or no pricing pressure. It can be applied across different sectors or businesses and is not limited to any one. The term Blue Ocean Strategy is coined by professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and used in their book “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant” in the year 2005. With intense competition among businesses, firms try their best to gain market share and with pricing pressure influencing their functioning, their existence in the market in under threat. This situation arises when a business is operating in a saturated market, referred to as Red Ocean. When there is limited scope for growth, firms look out for verticals or avenues to find new business where they can capture a market and enjoy uncontested market share...

Break Even Pricing

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Break even pricing is a practice in accounting pricing where the price point at which a business’ offerings will earn zero profits on a sale i.e., cost is equal to revenue. Break even pricing is a common accounting tool that is used by businesses to set a strategy for pricing for their product portfolio. It is calculated by the management of a company to make informed decisions if in case it wants to put a check on costs or increase production. The business can choose to set a price that is lower than the break even point. But, here, the business would be gaining revenues and would not be earning profits. The main motive of businesses in this case is to increase its market share rather than increasing their profits earned. Mainly, ecommerce firms are operating with this method but they have been able to tap into the market share. Break even pricing helps a company to set the lowest acceptable price and it is calculated by using the formula: (Total fixed ...

Quality Score

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Quality Score is referred to the Google rating for the quality and relevance of both the keywords and the PPC ads done for a business, product or service. Quality score is used to determine the Cost Per Click rate (CPC) which is then multiplied by the maximum bid to determine its ad rank in the ad auction process. It depends on multiple factors like click-through rate (CTR), the relevance of each keyword in the ad group; quality and relevance of landing page; relevance of ad text; and historical AdWords account performance. When more and more people clicks on your ad then it’s a strong indication to Google that the ads drafted are relevant and very much useful for the users. Accordingly, Google rewards you with higher ad rankings and lower cost. By optimizing the quality score of your ad, you are setting up a higher Return on Investment (ROI) as lower cost per conversion is directly linked to better ROI rates. To increase your quality score, do a keyword re...

Churn Rate

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Customer churn rate is the percentage of the subscribers or customers who have canceled or has not renewed their subscriptions during a certain period of time. It is an important metric for businesses whose customers pay on a recurring basis like that of SaaS or other subscription-based businesses. If your customer does not stick around your business long enough for you to regain your average acquisition cost of customers i.e., CAC, regardless of your monthly revenue, then the firm is in trouble. Customer churn rate can be reduced by starting the customers off on the right foot by giving them a welcome email, dedicated 1:1 and online customer onboarding or by creating educational content on blogs, social media, etc. This educates the customers and gives a feeling of optimal value for your product or service. Then, ask the customers for feedbacks at key moments to re-engage with them. Build a good rapport and faith with customers through proactive communication. And fin...

Smarketing

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Smarketing is referred to the process of integrating sales with marketing processes of a company. Its objective is focused on the sales and marketing functions to have a common integrated approach or targets. This process can lead to an annual growth in revenue of up to 20%, as per a study conducted in 2010. The objective of smarketing is to promote a product or service offered by a company to its potential buyers and also integrates this process with the activities of the sales department. Sales and marketing departments of a firm should be able to meet frequently to agree on a common terminology and should use data throughout the entire process in sales and marketing to identify good prospects and to follow up on how well they are being followed up. Smarketing works to its best levels when a business follows closed-loop reporting by tracking its success with particular prospective customers from the marketing stage through direct sales efforts. It is believed...

Niche Market

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A niche market is the subset of a market in which a specific product is focused on. It defines the product features that aim at satisfying specific market needs, price range, production quality and demographics of the targeted audience. It is considered as a small market segment. Every product cannot be categorized by its market niche. It is highly specialized and aims in the survival of the firm among various competitors. Established companies like Hewlett-Packard also create products for different niches like the all-in-one machine for printing, faxing and scanning manufactured targeting home office niche. Product vendors and other trade businesses are referred to as mainstream providers or otherwise narrow demographics niche market providers which are colloquially shortened to niche market providers. Marketing a product or service to a niche is much easier when compared to that of a broad market since a niche has more elements in common be it in terms of needs...

Bounce Rate

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Bounce rate is an internet marketing term that is used in web traffic analysis which represents the percentage of users visiting a website and then leaves or bounce rather than continuing browsing the website. It is calculated by counting the number of single web page visits by a user and divides it by the total number of visits. Bounce rate (in percentage) = Number of visits in a single page by a user / Total visits to the website Bounce rates are helpful in determining the effectiveness or the performance of an entry or landing web page in generating interest of users. The web page that has a low bounce rate means that it is effectively causing visitors or users to view other pages of that website. High bounce rates indicate that the website is performing ineffectively without attracting the interests of visitors. They usually visit an entry page and leave. Interpreting bounce rate measure should be relevant to the business objectives of a website and also its de...

Earnings Per Share (EPS)

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Earnings per share (EPS) is the portion of a firm’s profit that is allocated to each share of common stock. It serves as an indicator of the profitability of a company. It is calculated using the following formula: EPS = (Net Income or Earnings – Preferred Dividends)/ Weighted Average Common Shares For example, a firm reported net income of $4 million. During the same time period, the firm has a total of 10 million shares outstanding. In such situations, the firm’s quarterly earnings per share or EPS would be $0.40 i.e., $4million/10 million shares = $0.40 EPS is a carefully scrutinized metric which is used as a barometer to gauge the profitability of a firm per unit of a shareholder ownership. As such, it is a key driver of share prices and is used as a denominator in the frequently used P/E (profit to earnings) ratio. To calculate EPS, balance sheet and income statement are used to calculate the weighted average number of common shares, dividends paid on the ...

Call to Action

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Call to action (CTA) is a marketing term used widely in advertising and selling where any device is designed to prompt an immediate response or encourages an immediate sale. CTA mostly refers to the use of words or otherwise phrases that can be incorporated into ad messages, web pages, sales scripts, etc. that encourage consumers to take prompt action. In marketing, CTA is an instruction to the audience group which is designed to provoke a quick response usually using verbs like “call now” or “find out more”. Other types of CTA might provide consumers with strong reasons to purchase something immediately like that of an offer which will only be available for a limited time period or during special deals. For example, order before midnight to receive a free gift with your order, two for the price of one for first 25 orders, etc. Marketing materials like brochures, flyers, catalogs, etc. make use of call-to-action in which instructions are designed to show customers how to...

Conversion Rate Optimization

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Conversion optimization aka Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers by taking any desired action on a webpage. Online CRO was born out of the need of e-commerce marketers to improve the performance of their website in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble. Internet marketers produced measurables to improve website user experience due to the growth of competition in the early 2000s. And in 2004, new tools for experimenting website design and content variations were developed to determine which one performs best. This form of optimization increased in 2007 with the introduction of Google Website Optimizer which was a free tool. As per the study conducted in 2014, the majority of the respondents considered CRO as a crucial system for their overall digital marketing strategy. CRO seeks to increase the number of visitors to a website that takes a specific desired action like submitting a w...