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Get to know the five latest breakthroughs of the digital marketing world

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Marketing|Get to know the five latest breakthroughs of the digital marketing worldA few years ago, concepts like artificial intelligence, voice and image search, and data-driven actions were incredible. Yet, they were idealistic ideas that would never make it a reality. Now, however, these are some of the most prominent forces shaping digital marketing. These new trends make marketing more targeted than ever and allow you to connect on a much deeper level with your customers. There’s no doubt that the upheaval of 2020 helped accelerate some changes that the marketing world was already seeing. It also helped create a great deal of uncertainty, making marketers realize that they needed to learn how to adapt to a rapidly evolving digital market. With this in mind, we can’t say for sure which trends will reign supreme in the coming years, but some latest breakthroughs do come out on top. Below, we’ll discuss some of the top breakthroughs in digital marketing and how you can incorporate them into your marketing strategy.

Voice over internet protocol

VoIP is one of the most popular digital marketing tools these days, especially given the pandemic’s outbreak. Simply put, VoIP is a technology that turns your voice into a digital signal, allowing you to make phone calls directly from your computer. However, it also comes with a host of other features, including video calls, emails, and text messaging. VoIP can help streamline your business communications immensely by giving you a unified communication service that caters to all aspects of client relations. Going through different communication channels can be incredibly cumbersome for your communications team and can lead to delayed responses. Through VoIP, a centralized system helps you keep track of all queries and lets you address all concerns timely.

It is also much cheaper and easier to install than any other communications software. It doesn’t need any wires or complicated set-up. All you need is a working internet connection, and you’re good to go. When picking a VoIP provider, there are various factors you need to consider. You want a versatile provider who offers many services and can evolve with you as your business needs expand. You want an affordable budget with high-quality service you can rely on easily. However, it can be challenging to conduct such extensive research alone. Instead, you can work with a communication licensed operator like GetVoIP to avail of the best services as per your needs.

Progressive marketing

No matter what your niche is, progressive, inclusive marketing is one of the most pressing needs of the digital marketing world. Your marketing strategies and services now need to accommodate minorities and marginalized groups to create an inclusivity and acceptance atmosphere. Brand discrimination has played a vital role in shaping intolerant societal attitudes previously. Now it’s time for all companies, regardless of niche, to cater to discriminated groups. While this may be more of a social shift, it heavily influences marketing campaigns globally. Most shoppers now refrain from investing with a company that doesn’t reflect that inclusivity and diversity are essential.

By matching with customer values surrounding acceptance and diversity, you are likelier to build long-lasting relationships with your clients. Furthermore, by catering to a more diverse audience, you get the opportunity to bring in new customers too. Even incorporating various faces in your marketing campaigns or speaking about essential issues in your campaigns is going in the right direction.

Visual content

SEO optimization is one of the best ways to get immense organic traffic to your brand and fast. However, SEO rules keep evolving as user preferences change, and search engines adapt to give viewers the content they want. One of the latest breakthroughs in digital marketing is the increasing popularity of visual content. People prefer websites with visual content much more than readable ones, and 91% of all consumers now prefer visual and interactive content over static media.

The increasing rise of image-based platforms is indicative of the popularity of visual content nowadays. Visual content allows you to take storytelling to another level and make your message much more immersive. There are various ways you can incorporate visual content in your strategy.

Images are an excellent way of showcasing your brand’s best features in an attractive, eye-catching format. Infographics allow you to inform your client while retaining their attention. Videos are another beneficial way of giving your client a lot of information in a short time for better retention. However, it’s not just your clients that prefer visual marketing. Search engine algorithms now consistently rank webpages with optimized visual content higher than those without, letting you attract traffic hordes.

Customer segmentation

Customer segmentation has been around for a while, but only now is it emerging as a revolutionary breakthrough. Customer segmentation revolves around the idea of challenging marketing norms. Instead of creating more extensive campaigns that cater to a broad audience, customer segmentation allows you to make smaller campaigns that cater to targeted groups.

Segmentation enables you to understand better the differences in your customer base and better suit their preferences.

You can create separate email campaigns for big and small spenders or create special offers based on gender or age. You can also understand which clients prefer your services and develop tailored newsletters to make more sales. Customer segmentation can help you save a lot of money and guarantees a more significant ROI than traditional marketing modes.

Semantic search

Semantic search is another up-and-coming trend in digital marketing about the study of semantics. Search engine algorithms now increasingly consider the context. To optimize for semantic search, you need first to analyze what your customers are looking for when they discover your brand. You want this analysis to be comprehensive, and you should understand the experience, answers, and content that your audience wants. You want to offer clients content that answers their questions and content that is people-optimized, with no keyword stuffing. Other areas to focus on include topic optimization, which helps organize your website for viewers and search engines alike, and internal linking.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that the digital marketing world is evolving incredibly fast and getting much more sophisticated. These latest breakthroughs allow you to adapt to rapidly changing trends and ensure that you can form long-lasting connections with your clients. Furthermore, these breakthroughs offer a more significant ROI than traditional marketing strategies and prove much more lucrative for your business in the long run.

Mistakes That Can Trip Up Your Small Business

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Small Business Mistakes|Mistakes That Can Trip Up Your Small BusinessWhen you’re starting a business, it’s easy to start running under your own momentum without really having an opportunity to stop and think things through as well as you should. While having that enthusiasm and energy is crucial for getting things lifted off the ground, you should make sure that you’re not making any of the following mistakes that can trip you up before you even get started.

Forgetting the business plan

You might have a basic plan of what, exactly, you need to do, but a business plan takes things into a lot more depth. It plots out the internal organization of the business, how you carry out work, and what targets you need to reach in order to grow. It can help you set a direction from the business from day one, meaning that decision-making from that point on has a path to follow, making some choices much clearer.

Not separating yourself from your business

You may be the proud owner and operator of your business, including its sole staff member at the start, but you shouldn’t be the business. Look at this Infile LLC Service review and learn about how starting a limited liability company can make sure that you’re both legally and financially protected from any consequences of running your business. Otherwise, you can be found legally liable as an individual in the event of the lawsuit, for instance.

Not knowing your place in the market

Before you start pumping money into marketing and outreach, you need to know where, exactly, in the market your business fits in. This Inbox Insight review can help you find a team that can help you learn more about the market, its availability, and the competition that might be out there waiting for you. As such, if you find a niche that’s uncovered, you can find a place for your business, or you might have to start off more competitive, offering what the others in the market do not.

Not understanding the customer perspective

It’s easy to know what services and products you are selling from your own perspective. However, in order to market and sell it effectively, you also need to see what your customers see in it. As such, you need to think about what basic needs or wants your products and services fulfill, what pain points they hit, and what kind of lifestyle of future they help your customers and clients see, as a result.

Doing everything yourself

At some point, you’re going to need help to deal with the sheer amount of responsibilities you acquire as your business gets up and running and you grow. Employing some team members to work alongside you might be preferable but, if you’re not at the stage of hiring just yet, you might also want to consider outsourcing some of your admin work to a virtual assistant.

Your small business needs every advantage it can get when it first starts off. Consider the potential mistakes above and what you’re doing to combat them, making sure you got your bases covered before you rocket off to stardom and success.

Moore’s Law in Software Abstraction

StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Moore's Law|Moore’s Law in Software AbstractionThe future of computing performance lies in software and hardware parallelism. Simply put, application programs must be expressed by splitting work into numerous computations that execute on separate processors which communicate only from time to time, or better yet never communicate at all.

For much of the last 30-years, programmers have not needed to rewrite their software in order for it to get faster. It was expected that software would run faster on the next generation of hardware as a result of the performance gained by shrinking transistors and squeezing more of them on a piece of silicon. Hence, programmers focused their attention on designing and building new applications that executed accurately on existing hardware but — anticipating the next generation of faster hardware — were often too compute-intensive to be effective. The demand for next-gen hardware has been significantly defined by software pressure.

The sequential-programming model evolved in that system as well. To create more capable software, developers relied heavily on high levels of sequential programming languages and software abstraction — reusing component software and libraries for common tasks.

Moore’s law helped to propel the advancement in sequential-language abstractions since expanding processor speed covered their costs. For example, early sequential computers were programmed in assembly language statements, which have a 1:1 mapping to the computer-executed instructions. In 1957, Backus and his colleagues recognized that assembly-language programming was difficult, so they launched the first implementation of Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. The IBM programmers wrote in Fortran, and then a compiler translated Fortran into the computer’s assembly language. The team made these claims:

  • Programs will contain fewer errors.
  • It will take less time to write a correct program in Fortran.
  • The performance of the program will be comparable to that of assembly language.

These benefits of high-level languages are now generally accepted. As computers increased in speed, modern-day programming languages added an increasing number of abstractions. Modern languages such as Java, F#, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript provide features such as automatic memory management, object orientation, dynamic typing, and static typing, among others — all of which reduce the programming burden. They do that often at a performance cost, but companies chose these languages to enhance the accuracy and functionality of their software, which they valued more than performance. While the initial transition from hand-coded assembly language came with performance gains, these higher levels of abstraction often result in performance drawback.

Understanding the “memory wall”

With the programming changes that are required to move from single to multi-core processors, software developers are finding it ever more challenging to deal with the growing gap between processor performance and memory system, often referred to as the “memory wall.”

The memory wall reflects a constant shift in the balance between the costs of computational and memory operations and adds to the complexity of achieving high performance. Effective parallel computation requires coordinating computations and data — the system must collocate computations with data and the memory in which it is stored. And while chip processors have achieved great performance gains from technical advancements, main-memory bandwidth, energy accessibility, and latency have scaled at a lower rate for years.

The result is a performance gap between memory performance and processor that has become more and more significant. While on-chip cache memory is used to bridge the gap partially, even a cache with a state-of-the-art algorithm to predict the next operands needed by the processor cannot close that gap effectively. The aggregate rate of computation on a single chip will continue to outpace main-memory capacity and performance improvements. And thus, the advent of chip multiprocessors means that the bandwidth gap will almost certainly continue to widen.

To keep the memory from strictly limiting system power and performance, applications must have locality and the amount of that locality must increase. To boost locality, it is imperative to design software in a manner that will reduce (1) the communication between processors, and (2) data transfer between the memory and processors. In other words, make data travel less and minimize the distance that data needs to travel.

Mind the Gap

With the benefits of Moore’s Law winding down, the burden of increasing application performance should, ideally, be shared by software developers and hardware designers. But emerging new technologies may obfuscate those responsibilities with an interesting hybrid solution. Recent achievements by companies like SimpleMachines have given birth to new software and new hardware that synchronizes to eliminate this gap – all without the original software developer needing to be aware of the underlying transformation that takes place and without the hardware designer ever needing to know what application will be running.

The keys to these new technologies are two breakthroughs: 1) A new compiler design that focuses on understanding application intent rather than instructions and then converts that algorithm into a series of processes that are each optimized to reduce data transfer, and 2) a chip architecture that dynamically changes the computation flow to address the locality issue based on algorithm needs. These breakthroughs offer a radically new way to efficiently solve a problem that would otherwise be extremely time and capital intensive to address and does so in a way that is future-proofed against future enhancements that would otherwise only continue to increase that gap.


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Dr. Karu Sankaralingam Karu Sankaralingam, PhD, is founder/CEO/CTO of Madison, WI-based SimpleMachines, Inc. (SMI). Dr. Sankaralingam started as professor of Computer Science at UW-Madison in 2007. He has 17 patents and has published 91 papers. Founded in 2017, SMI is an AI-focused semiconductor company. For more information, please visit https://www.simplemachines.ai/.

Becoming A Master Of Social Media Marketing

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Social media marketing|Becoming A Master Of Social Media MarketingSocial media marketing can be a minefield. New trends seem to pop up every day, and it’s so hard to keep up with what’s hot and what’s not. Becoming a master of social media marketing can totally transform your path to success, boosting your products and services onto the screens of potentially millions of users all around the world. So, how can one crack the code of social media marketing? Luckily it needn’t be as tricky as you expect, as there are just a few key tips that you can make the most of to ensure your brand can benefit from the rise of social media in no time at all.

Perfect Your Aesthetic

As soon as a potential customer clicks on your social media profile, they’ll form a first impression that contributes towards whether they say or go. The aesthetic that you pursue for your social media profile is so important, as you must be able to draw people in and encourage them to click through your posts to find out more! Perfecting your aesthetic should be your first port of call, so decide on a colour scheme and theme that your posts can abide by to maintain a recognizable aesthetic that can attract new customers to relate to your brand and appreciate your posts. Look at other similar brands for inspiration on what your customers like, as certain styles are a lot more successful than others.

Spread The Word

Simply posting great content isn’t enough to draw in the attention that you need to benefit from social media marketing, as you need to put effort into spreading the word about your brand. You can begin by adding popular hashtags to your posts that relate to the post as well as your products or services, such as #foodgram for restaurant businesses, or #fashion for clothing brands. Many people follow hashtags and regularly search for new content using these pathways, so you can begin to attract potential customers to your new page! In recent years the rise in influencers has been considerable, and many of the most well known social media moguls make thousands per post. Enlisting an influencer to promote your social media page is a great way to spread the word about your brand, as they will already have a large platform to hear your message!

Be Interactive

Making an effort to be interactive with your followers is essential when looking to maintain a strong social media following. You can reply to their comments on your posts to answer any questions that they may have about your brand, directing them towards your website to find out more and make a purchase! You can post things like questionnaires and polls to figure out what your followers want from your brand, helping you to stay on the ball with current trends and changing expectations.

Becoming a master of social media marketing has never been so simple when you can take the time to make the most of the brilliant tips and tricks decsribed above.

3 Major Challenges Financial Institutions Face When Implementing Business Insight Technology

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Financial Institutions|3 Major Challenges Financial Institutions Face When Implementing Business Insight TechnologyIf you’ve been in the market for new business insight technology, such as a financial services analytics solution, the benefits of these are obvious. Promises made by your technology partner, such as increased analytics capabilities and improved compliance with regulators, are probably at the top of your mind. But you must also remember that any new technology you onboard will bring change to your bank’s operations—some of which isn’t welcome just yet. It won’t be as simple as rolling the software out across your enterprise, then expecting everything to go smoothly from thereon.

It’s usually the job of a bank’s chief financial officer (CFO), chief risk officer (CRO), or chief technology officer (CTO) to oversee tech implementation. If you’re in any one of these positions, you must be wondering how you can complete your implementation or modernization initiatives with the least amount of friction possible. It helps to know the challenges associated with introducing this kind of technology, so that you’re better prepared to win staff buy-in when needed. To guide you, here are some common obstacles to implementing new business insight technology. You’ll learn what drives these problems, as well as how to address them and guarantee an integration process that’s as smooth as possible.

A Resistant Culture

The first challenge that you’re likely to encounter is a familiarity bias within your institution. People may be partial to the bank’s existing way of doing things, especially for major tasks like financial analysis and reporting. They might be intimidated by the new software, as this will be their first time to see robotics and machine learning applied in banking processes. Or, they may be skeptical about whether it’s worth the cost, or the risk to a high-stakes profession such as finance. This kind of resistance is possible across different levels of the enterprise, from upper management to rank-and-file banking staff.

Those directly in charge of onboarding the technology must accommodate these doubts and prove that the new software isn’t as scary as it seems. Try to illustrate in concrete terms that the tech will serve a very practical purpose. It will make the task of deriving insight easier—not harder—to do.

Also worth explaining to your colleagues is that the tech will put you in a highly competitive position: that of an early adopter. It will allow your institution to master important business trends faster than your peers. You’ll also be better equipped to leverage your brand as a forward-thinking and future-ready one.

Admittedly, it may take some time for your institution to get over its initial resistance. But eventually, they will see for themselves that the investment is a rewarding one.

The Need to Align Technology with Human Capabilities

The next major challenge is ensuring that staff can sync up their human abilities for deriving business insight with that of their new technological counterpart. After all, it isn’t only technology that you should depend on to improve your bank’s situation. You also need to pay attention to the technology’s intended users and how the tech can enhance the way they work.

The staff who are in charge of financial analysis and compliance will likely have to adjust their workflow to accommodate the technology. So even if you’re onboarding a solution that’s easy to use, it would still be prudent to schedule further training with staff. You should also ensure that your bank’s IT staff are properly oriented on basic troubleshooting. If technical analysts run into sudden problems like server errors, at least your IT team will know where to start.

One thing’s for sure: the use of AI and machine learning in financial services analytics doesn’t necessarily mean that work done by humans is obsolete. The tech can actually enhance the quality of human staff work while relieving the latter of the more rote aspects of financial analysis. A smooth transition into staff members’ workflow and some additional practice with the software will make all the difference.

The Fear of Breaches to Data Privacy and Security

The final challenge pertains to assuring stakeholders that the bank’s financial data will be safe. Since banks handle huge volumes of sensitive customer data, this anxiety is very much warranted. It isn’t only money that a bank would stand to lose in a major data privacy breach or system-wide error. The institution could also lose the trust of its customers and the general public, which takes years to build.

You must have enough proof that the new business insight technology isn’t weak against malicious attacks and isn’t easily compromised by human or server error. That’s why it’s crucial to sign on a technology partner of good repute, with an established track record for information security. Look for clear and strong policies on their part for how to protect sensitive data. Your technology partner should also demonstrate an adherence to a security standard befitting of your bank. Lastly, they should be forthright with you about how to work through the worst-case scenario and craft an effective recovery plan.

Conclusion: Overcoming the Challenges, Reaping the Rewards of Using Business Insight Technology

Given that new business insight technology is such a high-stakes investment, it’s all right for the decision to be subjected to scrutiny. The bank’s stakeholders deserve answers to their questions, and they deserve proof that onboarding the software will be beneficial to the institution.

If you adopt a solution you truly believe in, your enhanced ability to derive and act on key business insight will speak for itself. Don’t be afraid to invite conversation about how the technology will change things for the bank, and its potential for improving everyone’s analytics capabilities.