Posts in Business

10 Ways to Cut The Perfectionism Syndrome

Business Friends Health Startups

The biggest hurdle entrepreneurs or marketers face while working on their next big project is the “perfectionism syndrome”. And it is rightly said if it is perfect it is late. We all at some point in time get stuck because of the pursuit of an ideal result or perfect product and in the end, we end up getting nothing.

For my personal blog, I struggled big time, I have been trying to make something worthwhile for a long time but didn’t do anything at all. I have also been writing a book but every time I open the draft I end up adding new chapters in the menu rather than finishing the ones I have started.

This approach or attitude affects your creative goals and hugely impacts your overall professional performance. And you slowly start to lose the track of time. You feel you are busy most of the time. You start to feel your teammates are not adding value the way they should. Your timelines are not matched, and slowly you start to lose credibility.

I have been a victim of perfectionism syndrome for a really long time. In fact, this perfectionism syndrome has cost me my startup, and my friends like colleagues, and I was even on the verge of losing my family. This pursuit of perfectionism kills everything.

By now you would have also realized at a certain point, that you would have also been through this phase or you may still be in this kind of situation. Trust me, it has not done any good to anyone. What would be the solution? How do avoid it at work or in life? I don’t want to generalize it, but here is what I am trying to do which has helped me to a great level.

  1. Accept flawed work as far as it is better than nothing
  2. Setup strong processes that avoid mistakes
  3. Train your teammates as much as you can
  4. Start trusting other people and their calibre
  5. Follow day discipline (Wakeup time, breakfast time, office time, lunchtime, prayer time etc)
  6. 15 minutes of workout to relieve your stress (this is minimum & yes better than nothing)
  7. Read 2-3 Pages of some good books before you go to bed
  8. Make sure no screentime at least before 30 minutes you to go bed.
  9. Break down your tasks into smaller achievable goals.
  10. Always start your day with easy tasks and finish them fast

This has been helping me to a great extent, finishing the stuff that I had started long back but never finished them on time. Smaller wins are always better than the end goal, you may or may not reach there, but you and the people associated with you will be happy with your smaller wins.

Write to me in the comments about how you are handling this, I would really love to hear it out. Thanks for reading, let’s catch up on Instagram and stay connected 🙂

https://www.instagram.com/faizanization/

Digital Strategy: 5 Parameters to Check if you are on the right path

Business Digital Marketing Digital Strategy
digital marketing strategy evaluation
Digital Strategy Test

Your organization has a department of digital marketing. It is working day and night. Campaigns are on the track. You are spending significantly. However, sales and revenue level is not constant. Activities are many but results are few. Whether you have the right digital strategy or not?

Hold on! we will together evaluate your strategy this time with the 5 well-researched points. They are the backbone of a digital strategy, and if you feel you are hammering them, ROI is gonna multiplex. It’s our claim!

Five powerful ways to know if your digital strategy is correct

1. Measure the value of website traffic

Measuring the value of website traffic is super important. Marketing efforts can bring many site visitors through page rankings, paid advertisements, etc. But measure whether your website traffic is bringing out any value or not. Are they contributing to ROI calculation? Is your web traffic staying with you for a long time? Are they converting into leads? Are these leads converting to customers? What is the percentage?

Action: Use Google Analytics, Hubspot or any other marketing tool to analyze your website traffic. See which source is bringing the results for your business. Rework on your digital strategy or tweak if needed.

Tip: Use better CTAs across your website to get better results. 

2. Check the alignment with trends

Following digital trends is vital to come out of the history pages. You should know what is going on in the market, what your prospective customers are inclined towards, what updated resources are in use in the market, what innovative approaches your competitors are following, and so more. In short, try to be relevant and create a better impact. 

Action: Follow ThinkWithGoogle, Google Trends, Sites like Social Bakers & stay updated on the trends & competitors.

Tip: Keep an eye on what your competitors are promoting through Facebook, using the Facebook Ads library.

3. Is your digital strategy clear and precise?

Check whether the digital strategy is precise or not. First, examine your specific marketing goals.

Your goals can be, for example,

  • number of visits on your website
  • number of shares on social media
  • number of positive Google reviews
  • number of leads
  • etc.

Secondly, set timelines for each goal.

Thirdly, examine frequently whether the goals are aligning with timelines or not. AND most important: Check whether your objectives are aligned with your business goals. If you are only using like ads to drive likes on the page, you should not expect people to visit your website, if you are only using boost posts to get likes on a post you can’t rely on the same to drive your leads. 

Have very clear objectives that connect well with your business goals. 

Action: Follow the objectives & KPIs part in this post: 7 Proven Steps to Succeed In Social Media Marketing (Follow step 1)

Tip: Keep your goals in numbers with monthly milestones. 

4. Reexamine buyer persona

Any marketing strategy must have a well-constructed customer profile. Whether you are writing a blog post, updating a social media post, revamping the website, using backlinks, or launching a campaign, it should be targeting your potential audience directly.

If your evaluation of followers says- you have 1000 followers, but none of them can be your customer, what’s value then? 

Action: 7 Proven Steps to Succeed In Social Media Marketing (Follow step 2)

Tip: Always use a minimum viable audience and keep optimizing on the same. 

5. Do you have a content strategy?

Your content strategy starts with understanding your consumers, understanding their pain points and providing them with the right solution. In simple words, your content should be the spokesperson of the services you offer. Help, your prospects as much as you can with your content so they believe in your authority and pay you for your services.

Keep it simple, there are only two things a content can do; Educate or Entertain, you need to pick which track you would follow based on your target audience.

Sit down and evaluate your digital strategy, we are sure these points will help you evaluate things better. Let’s connect soon to discuss your project. 

Action: Follow the same post mentioned in the above points and look for Step 4.

Tip: Create content pillars for different objectives & different target personas.

I am sure, by now, you are in a better position to evaluate your digital strategy. You can also follow this post to understand social media strategy in a better way: 8 Questions to Create Effective Social Media Presence.

Dubai is the best place to run your business Post-Pandemic

Business Dubai

We will always be thankful for being in UAE during and post-pandemic. And this is not only for us but for many entrepreneurs who are running their business in or from UAE. 


Here are a few major reasons: 


1) The market opened up way before other markets. A positive vision led all of us to stay motivated and kept us all working. While the rest of the world was still struggling to move, Dubai was all open (with COVID restrictions) to run and grow your business. 

2) Visionary leadership, ease of doing business, ease of working for yourself if you are a freelancer, quality of life, facilities, healthcare, entertainment, public transport & everything you need to make your life easier.

All you need is a clear vision, strong belief and a drive to not give up. Things will surely work out whichever industry you are in.

3) It is not immaterial to talk about the tax benefits as well. With world-class infrastructure, amazing environment & ease to do business, if you also get low or no tax, you are in a tax-heaven. 


If you are a UAE based company & struggling to grow your sales, struggling to get leads, do reach out to us, lets connect over a coffee or a zoom call & we can surely fix your issues with lead generation & customer acquisition.

Time to recognize social media as the marketing marvel

Business Social Media Marketing


Globally, around 3 billion users are estimated to be on various social media sites. Most of us would check our social networking sites at least once a day.

The popular social media sites where the majority of the global population are on are, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat. And you can see a lot of people spending time on TikTok these days. In China the most popular social media network is WeChat. And how can we remove WhatsApp from being a social media platform. It has friends, families, groups and now even stories.

There are many more social platforms but as a business owner, you need to decide where you want to market your products based on your target customers. Today, most people are online not just to interact with family and friends, but to know what’s going on around the globe, and also to know the latest trends.

Social Media is the ideal market place to be, set your goals and reach out to the masses. If you as a brand do not have goals or have a strategy, you are missing out on the opportunities to grow your customers, increasing your brand value, and losing out on your market space.

Knowing your market

There are a number of social platforms where you can market your products on. It is very important to first identify which platforms or channels would be most suitable to your business needs.  You need to set clear objectives and goals, understand and study all the social media platforms and prepare plan before you jump into promoting anything.

It is imperative to have a clarity on the following:

  • What do you want to achieve?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What message you want to convey to your audience?
  • And where would they hang out on social media?

Have clear objectives or goals you want to achieve through social media;

  • Create brand awareness and identity
  • A positive association with the brand and the audience
  • Boost your website traffic
  • Increase your conversion rate
  • Interact and improve communication between you and the audience Once you have a goal and strategy, you can create your content in the form of blogs, videos, and images.
  • Social media is an ideal platform to launch a new product, promote your existing product, and make big announcements.

Creating Brand Awareness

Social media is a profitable platform where you can increase your brand’s visibility.  The more your brand appears on various social platforms; it is more likely to remain on the audience’s’ mind. More and more organizations are acknowledging how important it is to engage on social platforms and promote their products.

Create campaigns that will resonate with your audience and would  remain in their minds for a long time. Some of the successful social campaigns are for Dacia UK, Red Bull, and Absolut Vodka that have boosted their sales quite instantly.   

Cost Effectiveness

Social media marketing is cost-effective, and you can see the success rate on a real-time basis. Even marketing campaigns with small investments can give you results.

Once you understand how it works, you will be more confident to invest more. Investments in campaigns and online interactions will give you good conversion rates, and you will see good returns for your investments. Social sites have click to action button that drives an instant conversion rate and boosts sales.

Know your customers

Social media gives you the opportunity to analyze and understand your audience.

Every platform has its respective analytics section that gives you detailed insights about your audience. Right from age, gender, and location to their interests and opinions help you strategize marketing plan that’s relevant to the like and dislikes of your audience.

The insights further enable you to optimize your ads and achieve a better ROI. The reactions and comments that you receive for your ads will allow you to judge the sentiments of your customers towards your brand.

They will help you understand whether your communication is working in a positive or negative way. The conversations that happen on social media also give you a chance to tailor communications as per the latest trends.

Creative and Engaging Posts

Digital marketing agencies invest a lot on talents because major brands trust them with their creativity and marketing their products online. Digital marketing agencies play a crucial role in portraying a positive image of their brands and driving traffic through their creative DM’s and posts. You can see my Blog related to  Qualities that make you an amazing Social media Executive.

The success of each post is closely measured by the brands.

Every brand is aggressively competitive and ensures their social team or digital agencies are creating conversions and have positive ROI’s.

Lead Generation

One of the key benefits that social media provide today is the ability to capture leads. By reaching out to your target audience through Lead Gen ads, you give them an opportunity to express interest in your business. Social networking sites offer various formats to collect leads while giving the audience a chance to learn more about your products or service. The best part is that these ads are cost-effective and offer precise targeting.

Influencers

During the traditional marketing days, sales were boosted by word of mouth. Similarly, today we have influencers on social platforms to boost your brand. You can also learn more about Influencer Marketing & its Benefits.

They have a huge number of loyal followers on their social account. Your association with the influencers can give a tremendous boost to your brand. The key is to find the right influencer for your brand. Instagram and YouTube have an overwhelming number of social influencers who can boost your sales and increase conversion rate.

Conclusion

In this millennial age, social media platforms are not just a means to have an online presence, but it’s a necessity for every brand to grow in the market. It is essential for creating a brand image of your product, to create engagement with customers, and to maintain customer loyalty. You brand profile is like a human personality for the customers who are interacting with your page. It is critical that you interact and keep your brand as human as possible and ensure that your strategy attracts your target audience and help you create a niche community for your brand.


Contributed by: Sharmila Fernandes

11 Most Common Digital Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid

Business Digital Marketing Featured

Have you tried digital marketing and it did not work for you? Have outsourced it to someone but you were not satisfied with the results? Have you stopped investing in digital as it does not get you the results you need? Well, read this blog and you might find the digital marketing mistakes that you would have probably made. Those might be the mistakes which lead to failure of your campaigns.

If you are yet to start, here is how to be pro-active and avoid all the common mistakes that can become a reason for the failure with digital.

Let’s consider the fact that digital marketing is not the silver bullet you have been looking for to solve all your business problems. However, it is surely going to be one of those important steps which would lead to your success.

The most important thing to understand about making a digital campaign successful is to avoid common mistakes that are well known and can be avoided. You can get carried away with the excitement and start doing or implementing something that is not required and that would not actually fetch any results.

This post is going to be about those common mistakes that most of the business owners or startups make that leads to failure or rather unsuccessful attempts with digital marketing.

1) Having no clarity of objectives & KPIs

You need to be super sure what do you want to achieve from digital and above that what to actually expect from which channel. All you should do is define your objectives or goals aligning them with your business objectives. A lot of you might put engaging your audience as a goal or objective. That’s great but you focus on something which can’t guarantee if people are meaningfully engaging with you. Just getting likes is not the criteria for anything.

Always focus on the real engagement, getting people to call or message or share their queries or give you feedback, just pressing like button is the side effect of thumbing they keep doing every day.

2) No understanding of the target audience and targeting the wrong people

This should not be the scenario usually, but with most of the cases, people make this mistake. When I say this should not be the scenario, I feel every business owner or business manager, or sales manager or marketing manager always understands who is their target audience, so why should they not target them right on digital channels? Assuming every business understands where is the acceptance of their products and services, they should first create their target audience.

Once they have the demographic and psychographic analysis of their target audience, they can know better which channels to target and how to target on social media channels. When you don’t do it, there is a higher possibility of your campaigns being failed or not being accepted by the audience, because you are not showing your ads to the right people.

Follow this post to learn more about targeting and creating target personas: http://bit.ly/SMMSuccess7Steps

3) No competitor data or analysis to compare or benchmark

We love to live in a bubble of our own assumptions and hypothesis. And that my friends become a parasite for the business. Not doing research and not looking at the moves your competitors can be really dangerous for the business.

Thinking of what we are doing would work, without checking if the competitors already tried, succeeded or failed. Whereas you know what has worked, what did not work in the same domain you can craft your campaign or strategy accordingly.

Most of the first-timers with digital, don’t actually do it and when they fail, they blame the medium. I blame them!

4) Neglecting your campaign insights, analytics etc

You have set your objectives, you have done your homework with your target audience, you are sure this campaign would work but what if you are not tracking it properly. Everything can be right and just because of not tracking the insights of a campaign can lead to another failure.

It is always recommended to monitor your campaigns closely, keep monitoring which ads are performing better, which types of posts are getting more engagement, from which platform you are receiving most of your leads etc. Look at as many aspects as you can and then decide how to move forward.

You can’t just set the campaign “Live” and forget about it. It needs optimization based on the results you get. If you don’t understand the details, hire someone who can do it for you but don’t let it unattended.

5) Jumping on new trends without having a clear goal or objective

Facebook launched blah blah blah or x y z, you jump your focus to the new tech when you actually have clarity if it is for you or not. The new trend could be in social behaviour, social media usage, social media technology or anything. If you jump your focus their, you need to be super sure of what you are doing, if not just wait for the right time.

People jump to one thing from another, they start to do everything, whereas it takes time to get something established.

6) Lack of Planning & Synchronization

If the campaigned is not planned and timed well, it does not translate great results. If you want to achieve great results from your campaign you should have patience. It would require lots of planning about everything involved in the campaign.

What has happened before and what is coming next is really important. You can’t just do a one-time thing. Your planning should be in sync with what you di earlier. It would help you to get better results.

7) Not paying attention to online consumer behaviour

We talk about it, we put it in the presentations, but when it comes to actual implementation most of the digital campaigns are literal translations of their offline campaigns. To win digital, you need to think digitally all the time. Sometimes which works offline might as well work online but that will not be the case always.

You need to understand how consumers behave online, what they like, what they dislike, how they interact with content online, how they make purchase decisions. When you consider all these parameters during the planning process, you would definitely come up with a better plan.

For God sake, stop considering Social Media as just another medium to distribute your ads!

8) Doing Things in Isolation 

One of the most important factors that affect your online campaign is not to synchronize it with each of your team members. Everybody should participate actively, this should not happen that half of the people in your team do not even know about it. You need to get everybody in sync and launch it with a bang.

Marketing or digital marketing team should bring all the other departments onboard and then execute the campaign. It not only gives you a morale boost but also helps you building employee advocacy which helps in translating better results from the overall campaign.

9) Neglecting/Underestimating the Importance of Social Media Platforms & Mobile

I clubbed two important reasons in one. Because somehow they are related to each other. Let’s talk about the first one first. If you don’t value social media in your overall digital campaigns. You are surely going to lose a huge amount of money that social could have saved for you. The CPC (cost per click), the CPL (cost per lead) is way cheaper than the other digital channels. Above all social media gives you the opportunity to put yourself as a brand and connect with your audience meaningfully.

You are likely to lose the battle when social media is not given a priority.

There are people who value digital and they understand the worth of social too but their focus is never mobile. The entire world is using mobile devices to surf the internet and if you are not focused on mobile then who are you talking to? When you don’t plan your campaigns and creatives according to mobile devices it won’t lead to great results.

10) Not Spending Money Wisely

There are people who don’t invest a dime and yet say the digital channels suck. I am not talking to those people at all. Let them first taste the water and then will talk about the nectar. I am talking to those people who have spent huge money on digital and still struggling to find the value.

There are hundreds of factors that affect the selection of medium and then the budget of the campaign. One thing you should always keep in mind that you need to have a balance in your spend on Branding Vs Sales. You can’t just go sales sales sales always neither going only for branding would help your business to grow.

When I say you need to have a balance, you need to spend wisely on every campaign. Sales should always be a focus of your tactical activities. However, ongoing spend on social media helps you build a brand presence which one should not ignore. As mentioned in the previous post, even for lead generation social media is giving amazing results, for even highly targeted niche.

11) Not Utilizing Influencer Marketing Wisely

Influencer marketing is a great way to bring word of mouth online. People who have authority in their domain by creating content and gaining followers can help you reach out to a larger group of people without spending hugely on advertising. When considering Influencer marketing, don’t rush to celebrities. Look for micro influencers (10k to 30k followers). They have sufficient followers to help you spread your reach and limited attitude not to ruin your campaign.

Select the right people to work with, and plan your activity well in advance with the influencers too. Don’t just invite them to attend your events, have them try your product or services, let them experience and talk about it accordingly. You can follow one of my previous posts on Influencer marketing here: http://bit.ly/InfluencerMarketingKnowHows

Be reasonable with everything you do!

If you want to get amazing results from your digital campaigns, you need to be reasonable with all the factors. You can’t be biased about the channels, you need to look at the data and see how your audience is going to perceive this campaign. Use common sense and invest time & money wisely on the right channels. Learn from the mistakes of others, don’t get carried away with every trend and always make wise decisions.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post, let me know in comments what you think about the failures in digital marketing and how to tackle them.

The Most important Sales Checklist for every Entrepreneur!

Business Digital Marketing Featured Sales

Entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow should accept the fact that the world has changed and they need to disrupt to survive. You can’t any more work in silos and win the battle alone. You need to explore the power of collaboration and then negotiate the deal to crack it.

Every sales effort, be it for a luxury brand or for an insurance policy, needs to be driven by data and should be in accordance with how people would react to it. Social media has changed the entire consumer buying journey. You need to understand how to connect with your prospect or lead at every stage of buying journey. You can’t just use one medium to do everything (unless it is social media in general).

Prospect to the Customer journey

A typical approach of converting a prospect into a customer could simply go like this:

  • You reach out to people through social media ads
  • They start to follow you on your page and blogs.
  • You build consideration amongst these people about your brand and business through value-driven content (blogs).
  • You offer them discounts through emails and chatbots
  • Once they show interest you can follow up on individuals through WhatsApp, email or call.
  • In short, the entire sales process is now driven by digital tools and so your daily checklist would be created accordingly.

Now to understand there are certain things which are to be taken care of by your Marketing or Content team or person, e.g. Social media ads, blog posts etc. Your role would be to pursue your lead through different channels in a not so pushy way and make sure that the conversion actually happens.

All you have to do is to put this as a checklist in your task app as a daily repeat task (use Evernote or Basecamp or Flock or whichever software you are using) And make sure you follow all these on a daily basis and not miss a single one any day.

Point#1 Check your Sales Objectives & Targets 

You need to remind yourself and actually check what and why do you want to achieve something. You should have your sales objectives clearly defined, you should also have your targets set for monthly sales and daily sales. Revisiting every day your target would help you keep motivated and it would work as a reminder that you need to work really hard to up this game.

Point#2 Create Daily Agenda

You could be an amazing negotiator, you could be a super salesman but you need to have your daily plan of what all needs to be done today. This can typically include:

  1. Followups required for previously contacted leads
  2. New lead calls/emailers/WhatsApp messages
  3. Meetings/Online demos/Skype calls with most interested clients
  4. Research and study about the new leads

Don’t push yourself too much, all you need is to have things logically in your list. You understand your business and your sales process better, you would be the best person to create your daily agenda. I would recommend you to do it compulsorily.

Point#3 Revisit Your Customer Personas

You should always have your ideal customer persona or persona of your existing customer. Revisiting the customer persona would make you understand your existing leads in a better way.

A typical persona would have demographics, psychographics and pain points of your ideal customer, and how would you connect with them. When you visit a typical target persona you can know which leads would fall in which category and how effectively you can initiate your communication.

A typical persona looks like the following (if you have not created personas, I would highly recommend checking this post about success steps in social media where you can read the step 2 to find out how to create a target persona: https://faizanization.com/7-proven-steps-to-succeed-in-social-media-marketing/ )

sample target persona

Point#4 Keep your emailers and messages handy 

You should not be writing emailers every day. Create email templates for introduction, followup and almost every regular email that you need to send. I am not asking you about the regular promotional emailers. You need to have templates defined and being revisited every day for the everyday emailers.

It won’t just help you to save time but to improvise your communication with your clients on a daily basis. The only key is to first have these templates created and then revisiting them every day to improvise. Every time you read something that you wrote, you can make changes for the good on every revisit.

Point#5 Research Your Leads and Do a Qualification test

Before sending any emails or making a call, it is crucial to do research about these leads or contacts that have been shared with you. You can check the following in each of the lead and see if they qualify as a lead by comparing with your personas:

  • Check their social media profiles
  • Check their business website
  • Check their personal blogs
  • Look for their presence online by doing Google search
  • Match the details with your personas if this lead match with your criteria or not

Point#6 Second Followup 

The reason for keeping it as a checklist point is to emphasize the same on a daily basis. Most of the sales people you would speak to would say this that sales actually happens after the second follow-up.

Always have a system to follow up on your leads, don’t automate your followups, customize it for each of your important leads. Automation would definitely help when it comes to a large number of leads and product being a low price product.

However, with high price products and less number of leads, especially with the service sector, automobile, and real estate, it is super important to send a custom followup email or message or do a call according to that specific lead.

Point#7 Cold Emails/Contacts

To achieve your goals, sometimes you can’t rely on your leads coming from ads and website. You need to go one step ahead and speak with the people who might be your customers.

You have your target personas with you, all you have to do is to reach out to these people through LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram and tell them about your services/products.

You need to be super creative with your communication. Communicate with them as you are solving their problems with your products or services. Or show them that you are helping to save their money or help them achieve a better life.

Keep this checklist in front of your work desk or use software to not forget about it. If you are an entrepreneur have your co-founder to report about your tasks daily, if you are an employee or a salesperson, share this report with your boss too.

It will help you to not miss things and get amazing results for your business 🙂

 

Social Media Marketing MasterClass – August 2018

Business Content Marketing Digital Marketing Events Featured Influencer Marketing Social Media Marketing
social media marketing pune

Social Media Marketing Masterclass Pune

Are you a business owner who is struggling to promote your business with social media?  Or a marketing professional who is willing to disrupt and learn the modern age digital marketing technologies? Are you a student who wants to build a career in the ever-growing industry of social media? Or a brand manager who would like to learn social media to keep up with the latest trends? Are you an everything digital enthusiast who has never been exposed to the true power of social media marketing? Or a freelancer who wants to grow his customer’s list through social media?

If you want to get results from social media for your business or brand, we have a solution for you. Meet me in one of its kinds social media marketing MasterClass where we will learn the skills and strategies to win social media marketing.

Key benefits of joining our workshop

  • A comprehensive workshop for start-ups, SMEs, CEOs, thought leaders, artists, students, and freelancers to learn social media marketing.
  • From the basics to the secrets of social media, you will learn social media in an interactive format with me who has spent a decade working with digital marketing.
  • At the end of the workshop, we will make sure you are ready to market your own business, your own personal brand or the company you are working with through social media channels.
  • You will also get a chance to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy for a business with examples of big brands.
  • The course will also help you to grow your personal brand, build an audience and become an Influencer in your domain.

Topics to be covered in the MasterClass

-> Digital Marketing Ecosystem
-> Content Marketing & Digital Channels
-> Social Media Marketing
-> Content Creation & Curation
-> Social Media for Customer Support & ORM
-> Social Media Strategy
-> Social Media Advertising (Paid Ads)
-> Influencer Marketing
-> Social Media Tools
-> Connecting the dots with social media case studies or success stories

Here is the format/agenda/schedule of the workshop

social media marketing workshop

Other Key-Takeaways

  • Certificate of participation
  • One-to-one consultation for your business or your career
  • Three months execution plan for your business / your personal brand, that you will follow by spending one hour every day
  • Weekly webinar access (for three months)
  • Strategy framework template
  • Customer service process framework template
  • Free PowerPoint templates to create social media posts easily & amazing slideshow presentations easily.
  • Free social media calendar templates & some other cool stuff to make your life easier.

Download the Workshop Brochure:

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE BROCHURE FOR DETAILED CONTENT OF THE WORKSHOP FROM THIS LINK: http://bit.ly/SocialMediaMarketingMasterClass

Register yourself for the workshop:

Get your queries solved:

If you have any doubts or queries before registering for the event, feel free to connect on the following number, simply call or click the same to send a message on WhatsApp

+91 7028668473

Why Social Media Marketing?

if this question of why social media marketing still haunts you and you are still wondering why you should learn social media, this could be most probably because you belong to the any of the following:

  1. Somebody tried social media for his/her business and have told you it does not work.
  2. Or you have tried using it but have not seen any growth.
  3. You may still be living in ignorance and never tried to figure out if it could benefit your business.
  4. Probably you are a traditional advertising guy still sleeping in the print or TV world
  5. You understand the value of social media but don’t think you can learn it yourself.
  6. Or you don’t think if it would be useful for your business.

The reason could be any of the above or could be one that is not even listed here, whatever your reason is, let’s try to communicate that with some factual arguments.

The answer to why Social Media?

(The beauty of Social Media Marketing)

Social Media is such a beautiful tool that has been created as a blessing for everyone. Be it a consumer or a business owner. Here are a few points that clearly distinguish social media marketing:

  • Majority of humans now to spend a fixed number of hours daily on social media channels.
  • People love to follow & communicate with brands on social media that they use in their personal lives.
  • As a business, you can engage with your audience in real time.
  • You can reach out to the right audience based on demographic and psychographic targeting.
  • You can get feedback on your product or services you are selling.
  • There are a great possibility and ease of building a community of your loyal customers.

In addition to the above-mentioned points, the following slides will give you some more reasons to love social media:

Don’t waste time, as we have limited seats, book your place now for an amazing social media session:

See you at the event 🙂

The Two Extremes of Entrepreneurs in India

Business The Real Hustle

The Real Hussle #1

I am not a second generation or third generation entrepreneur to have business in my blood, I am neither an IIM A grad who has a super strong network of VPs to close million-dollar deals over a call. I am just a hard-working professional who has failed, succeeded, then failed, then survived and managed to have a decent lifestyle like another salaried guy. (All that being an entrepreneur)

This is my attempt towards sharing the knowledge and experiences I have gained over a period of time while working with startups as well as brands and the mistakes we usually make. I am going to call this series of posts as “The Real Hussle!”. To answer the most obvious question that you would ask, why this name? Let’s find out:

 

  • The word hustle has been associated with entrepreneurship for long now
  • From the successful entrepreneurs to wantrepreneurs everybody calls them up as a hustler.
  • The word is another hype after the advent of social media
  • Put the hashtag #hustle and look at so many just trying to portray their hustle
  • Documenting your hustle is not a bad idea, it will help you build your personal brand but still, people are simply misusing it
  • People waste time on social media channels, they procrastinate, spend time talking and not executing and still proudly put the status “Hustle Mode On!”

Well, I think I have given enough lines to read and you can create your own conclusion and understand the name of this blog series. So, without wasting any more time, let’s get to today’s discussion:

The start-up ecosystem is too much overrated in India. What looks at YourStory has a long story behind and newcomers need to understand that. (I am not against YourStory they are doing an amazing job) Just having an idea is nothing, you need to give blood sweat and tear to your idea and execute it in the best way possible. Spend days and nights to acquire customers or sell your product. And above all, there are still several reasons why your idea might not work.

And why do you have to chase millions? That’s the first question. If you talk about entrepreneurship being your passion, it does not necessarily mean you should become greedy! You can simply make a product profitable and have the salaries of your employees released on time. Get your fair share every month and scale it. Or simply automate that system and move to the next big thing. You need to focus on building something which is valuable and is going to solve a problem. If you are not doing it, you are doing something wrong.

And there is another breed of entrepreneurs who stay in business for 5 years or less and you won’t see them again. It’s not like they are not smart people, or their product or idea was a total disaster, most of the times it is the attitude of the entrepreneur which takes the whole company into a big hole of debt. I would like to tell everyone calling themselves entrepreneurs and innovators, please have your sales plan ready and do some actions!

So two extremes, one being a total money minded having a great sales deck and trying to do everything to show the excel sheets growing. And another not giving a damn about numbers and too much focused or in love with an idea that might not even sell.

Like, I have met people working on something for two years now and still, their product is not launched. Man, it is a serious crime! You have wasted your time, even if you are trying to build Tesla, you are screwed! You are not Elon Musk. Period.

Another example of an entrepreneur who launched something 4 years back and still not profitable. Don’t you see? There is something fundamentally wrong! Why can’t you move on with something else or hire smarter people who can sell your stuff?

Let’s try and understand what we need to do? Can we simply have entrepreneurship as another respectable profession where you get in only because you want it and you are passionate about? You are not here to make millions or to build a product by wasting 4-5 years. You become an entrepreneur and decently manage a livelihood by doing things right as a Grocery Store Guy. He does not call himself as an entrepreneur or businessman but just look how beautifully they make sure to grow their stores; first by increasing the products they sell and then going to multiple locations and all going cash flow positive. If you can have a great idea, first get it evaluated, not by listening to your own guts but looking at the data and insights.

Go full time with your idea if you see the potential and literally try to build your business like a ‘baniya’. Don’t wait long to become profitable, you should think of profitability from the day one and try to achieve it smartly. There is always a possibility if you have a great product you would make millions or even billions. The only thing you need to do is to go slow and steady with a clear plan.

 

 

5 common reasons why startups fail?

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Why Start-Ups Fail?

There are times you get stuck and don’t know how to move forward. You tried everything(according to your understanding) but nothing worked out for you. You invested a lot of money on media ads but that as well could not fetch you any significant results. Do you think your marketing strategy was wrong? Or you did not have the right sales team in place? Has the blame game already started? You Mr Founder who are you pointing fingers at?

Stop the crap and let’s get back to the whiteboard. Blaming others for failures would lead you in other holes of darkness. So stop it, and let’s find out what actually went wrong by simply reverse engineering what you did.

The last thing you need to blame is “Marketing” because you as a brand or a business can never be completely dependent on marketing tactics. The product & brand together should be so powerful you would have just needed the marketing to spread the word. So, I am going to list 5 reasons that entrepreneurs ignore in the first place which eventually leads to failures and closure of the business. Let’s find out.

1) Hiring a Wrong Team in the Initial Days of the Startup

The reason why startup fails? For a startup, the right team is as important as developing the right product. You need to find the first few members of your team, ready to shed blood, sweat and tear for your vision. If you have found one, amazing. But if not you are losing a lot of potentials.

What startups usually do? They think of hiring people instead of getting them onboard as co-founders. One it makes you pour in a lot of money second you don’t get the kind of work you could have achieved through a co-founder.

Another mistake that a startup does is to hire freshers for your most critical days. Well, I am not saying freshers are not talented but there is a great need in the early days of a startup to have experienced leaders who can make sure they are on the right path.

2) Procrastination

The young guns think that they are hustling day and night whereas most of these startup junkies are only procrastinating and not building anything at all. (I am gonna write a full post on this topic but let’s try to understand this in brief here)

Reading startup articles, reading startup stories, watching Shark Tank series and discussing the same with colleagues during work hours is nothing but a waste of time and pure procrastination.  You can’t build a product by only reading articles and browsing through Instagram Quotes. You need to take actions and bring results.

In initial days, startups fail to have deadlines as they are busy procrastinating and think they are hustling. As a result, it delays their launch, it creates a bad impression on customers and ultimately they end up selling to no one.

3) No Focus on Sales & Profitability

If you don’t trust me that is okay, but I can give you a reference of thousands of successful entrepreneurs who have said it loud and clear over and over again to focus on “Sales”. If you want to build a product that will make you millions or want to sell a service that will attract a huge number of customers, you need to focus on sales from the day one of your operations. if you want to know more about sales & Profitability please go through my Blog The Most important Sales Checklist for every Entrepreneur! A lot of entrepreneurs those who come to us have this common mistake of not having a sales team or a salesperson. Most of the times even the entrepreneurs are not ready to do the sales!!! Can you believe it?

The ideal way to succeed for a startup is to have the core focus on sales strategy. How are you going to solve a problem and how will you monetize that is the key to success. And focus on selling your solution will keep you in the business. If you will focus only on the product, you might lose a lot of potential customers during the period of development and testing. Start selling even before the product is ready. Yes, you heard it right. You will have a clear idea of whether it will sell or not, what people actually want and you will have the first share of your customers before the launch. It is always good to do a pre-launch campaign with an offer that can attract customers. Hire a good partner who can help you with your sales strategy from day one of your operations.

4) Building Multiple Products even before 1 is successful

If you are a product company and trying to sell multiple products, I can understand. But if you are a startup and haven’t launched a single product yet and focusing on multiple, you are wasting precious days of your life. It won’t come back trust me.

Simply cut all the crap and focus on 1 thing, build it, launch it, scale it and then move to the next one. If you try to focus on building multiple businesses together the chances of failures will increase by 10x or 20x. It is always better to have one thing to make its mark in the market, give you a name and brand, then moving to the next will help you further grow your business.

I am not saying to not diversify your sources of income, if you are into development taking the training over the weekend, that is okay. But do it only if you need it, either for money or to fetch clients. But don’t get into anything else you can survive while you are working on your product. Once you have reached a point where your services or products are scaling and your middle management can handle the business, start looking for something else or look for growth opportunities in the same business.

5) Wrong Approach Towards Branding & Marketing

Most of the startups consider visual design as their brand and going out everywhere is marketing. Well, in this short blog I am not going to explain what a brand is and what marketing actually means, however, I will try to point out to the wrong approach we take and what should be the corrective way.

When it comes to brand building, it is about creating values, having solid reasons of your existence, building an amazing culture, following proven processes that are driven by data, and building your brand strategy accordingly. The visual identity is a part of branding which as well is very important. However, as a startup, the focus should be on building core values and culture within the company that would eventually reflect in your products and services.

Let’s dig more on the wrong perception of marketing?

Marketing is not about creating an ad and distributing it online and offline all the places. You need to have a solid marketing strategy to help your business grow. The first thing is to have clear objectives, align those objectives with measurable results/KPIs. Understanding your market segment, benchmarking your competition, looking at what worked for others and what made others fail, creating a communication strategy, deciding core pillars of communication and having a yearly plan. If you are not doing it, you can’t blame anyone for the failure of your marketing but yourself. So it’s better to strategize first and then give it to your subordinates to execute the same or hire an agency for that reason.

We all have made mistakes and keep doing it every day. I am sure we can relate to at least one of these mistakes and surely have done one in the course of being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is really a tough path and we need to be extra careful to avoid every possible mistake we can do.

 

If you feel, the article was worth reading, share it with other fellow entrepreneurs too and have a discussion with them on how to avoid these mistakes. Feel free to drop your suggestions and feedbacks in the comments below, I look forward to hearing from you.

13 Quick Social Media techniques to get great results in 2018

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Are you a business owner? or a marketer? or someone who is trying to sell/promote through social media? You must be looking for ways to get better results from all your efforts on social media. In this post, I am going to summarise 13 methods that you can include in your practice to improve results of your social media activities.

First and foremost you need to have a great content strategy, you need to find out what your audience like what are the best ways to connect with them, what type of content works where. What would be your key communication pillars, how strategically you would connect with your audience etc. etc. Once you have developed a content strategy the next mentioned techniques will help you optimize your content and bring you fantastic results from social media.

Here are 13 amazing techniques that you can start implementing quickly to get results from your social media efforts:

  • Posting frequently (having planned calendar of posts, which has a lot of own benefits.) Now, less is more, focus on creating quality content, have 3-4 posts per week planned for Facebook. Instagram & Twitter would need more posts to stay up in the game.
  • Using brand hashtags along with relevant frequently used hashtags (for increasing the discovery of your content)
  • Posting on right time (I personally use Socialbakers to find out what is the best time for my content to be posted on social media channels). It would help you get maximum engagement from your audience, as you will be posting your content when your audience is live.
  • Create native content for each platform, Video & Voice are really big, your content should have a great mix of the both. Every platform is unique and they have evolved around the unique type of content. What works on Facebook might not necessarily work on Instagram, you need to understand the value of each platform and create content for each platform separately.
  • Having an ongoing budget to boost your posts (organic is dead, like literally dead) You need to invest money to reach out to the people and your content would do the rest. I am not asking you to buy likes or fans, I am asking you to run ads so that your communication reaches to your targeted audience, if your content is good enough, your audience will engage and will eventually take actions that you want.
  • Responding to each fan comment/message/mention even if it just says “Nice post”. Every fan is really important, you need to respond to everyone who is interacting with your page. It will help you build a community of your loyal fans who would eventually become your advocates.
  • Try to give a persona to your brand, people should feel they are talking to a human, not a robot.
  • Bring Social media Influencers onboard, Influencer marketing is going to give you great results on social media. (Not doing it is simply loosing)You can check my video here to find out why a business should consider influencer marketing:
  • Recognize your fans, reward your brand advocates, try to build a community of your fans and followers.
  • Run contests and giveaways to keep the community engaged.
  • Ask opinion, conduct polls and let your audience
  • Keep monitoring the results and insights on a weekly basis and optimize it on a month on month basis. (Make use of the platforms like Socialbakers)
  • Tap into the key moments of the year and try to add value to your content (post relevant content on different occasions)
  • Do trend scouting and try to meaningfully be a part of the trend (Tweet something relevant about the trending hashtag and try to add value)

There is no silver bullet for social media, it is purely a creative space, don’t clutter the timeline with buy now kind of stuff, try to connect meaningfully with your audience. As they say, “Social media is all about Give Give Give & then ask” 🙂