While social media networks started as a way to connect with old friends and meeting new ones, a lot has changed. Today, social media platforms are seen as one of the best marketing strategies for both big and small businesses.
With social media platforms in their mature stage, we see many businesses which have taken advantage of the opportunity to build communities of fans, raise brand awareness, and to find as well as educate prospects. On the other side, you have the B2B marketers who have also been evolving.
However, none of this would have happened if buyers hadn’t changed their behavior. The reality is that buyers are feeling more comfortable with social media and being targeted in social media. In fact, three-quarters of social users are following the brands they are interested in.
So, what has once started with the goal to create a buzz, it has all evolved into conversions and interactions. These are the network effects that marketers try to leverage every minute of every day. With memes, hashtags or shock content. The aim is to get individuals to like, retweet and share the content provided in hopes of getting more and more exposure by leveraging a single person’s network and hopefully their influence within that network.
Leveraging the Effects of Social Media Networks
#1: Building Social Proof:
When you are looking to increase your conversion rates, you need to know that building social proof is one of the best strategies that you can adopt. The truth is that logos, testimonials, reviews, and trust seals are crucial. And you can get all these by legitimately using social media platforms.
#2: Social Selling:
No matter if you are trying to sell a physical or a digital product, the truth is that social media platforms are not only a great option but in today’s marketplace a mandatory branding tool. (Showing my age): Think about Social Media today the way companies thought of the yellow pages in the days of yesteryear. One of the things that we keep seeing is buyers trying to meet and talk to vendors. So, it is extremely important that you maintain active profiles and that you ensure that you offer advice and build trust with these buyers since they may buy from you.
However, increasing your revenue is not dependent on indirect ways. The reality is that you also have the chance to do a more direct selling. After all, most social media platforms are transforming into large stores.
#3: Ad Re-targeting:
I believe no one can even question the power of ad re-targeting. The reality is that people need to visit your website a couple of times to make a purchase. While in the old days you would pay for them to visit your website once and they wouldn’t go there again, today, you can use ad re-targeting to show them the way back into your website. At their second or third visit they will be more willing to buy from you, increasing your overall revenues. With the use of tracking technologies and personalization this can be even more engaging and exponentially more persuasive with each site visit.
In case you don’t think this is a powerful tool to use to leverage the effects of social media networks, you may not know that organic content receives a limited reach.
The name that comes to mind when speaking of Social Media is Facebook, but there are so many others depending on who you target market really is. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and the list goes on and on.
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#4: Competitive Analysis:
One of the things that many businesses do (and that you may be doing as well) is to check out your competitors’ social media pages. After all, you’re eager to know how you can make as much (or more sales) than them.
So, most businesses keep looking at the shares and likes. However, there are other metrics and aspects that you should focus your attention on.
When you are defining your content strategy, for example, it pays off to take a look at what our competitors are doing. You may get some ideas in terms of content but also on the way they are distributing and sharing it.
Either way you look at it, like it or not. In the current age, you must have a social media presence, but beyond that you need a social Media/Content Strategy. One that serves the aims of the business. What are you posting, what conversations are you engaging in what groups are you subscribed to that will help you drive sales, awareness or attendance? These are key. A lot of people are on social media, but that is very different then having a social media presence which is also different from having a strategy that supports the aims of the organization. Ignore this if you will and suffer untold financial losses not just in terms of what you can account for but also in terms of substantially missed opportunities for growth, content co-creation, partnerships and explosive brand exposure.
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For some time now, Near Field Communication has taken mobile device connectivity to a whole new level, and this is one of the most promising advancements in digital technology. The NFC developed by the combined effort of Phillips and Sony has risen dramatically in popularity and is widely becoming accepted as recent smartphones, and other mobile devices are equipped with the feature.
Many people would prefer to buy an NFC-enabled smartphone in recent time, but many others may not know what this NFC fuzz is all about. Let’s dig a little deeper into what it is as well as see how I have deployed it personally.
What is NFC?
NFC (meaning Near Field Communication) is a wireless technology that makes use of the magnetic field of every device to connect to other NFC- enabled devices and share data. We observe the practical application of NFC while making payments at pay points where you can swipe your smartphone or card over a machine, and that’s it. Even with our smartphones, we find it easy to connect with other mobile devices by only bringing them a few centimeters close to themselves so that they can share data across the magnetic field.
What’s Special about NFC?
NFC has made it possible for you to make cashless payments via your mobile devices without having to carry your cards or wallet. Your mobile device serves as a virtual wallet and then by bringing it a few centimeters close to the NFC-enabled payment machine at the payment terminal, your transaction is completed. That simple! This saves a lot of time trying to deal with cards and pins and also relieves you of too many cash transactions. It is super-fast.
Just like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the NFC connects to devices wirelessly, but it is different from these technologies in the sense that, it can only operate at very close proximity (within the magnetic field of the devices). Its proximity is synonymous to the Radio Frequency Identity, but NFC allows data to transfer faster compared to RFID and Bluetooth, and may not handle huge files.
Soon mobile devices that are not NFC-enabled may find it challenging to compete in the market because most phone users transact regularly and will be very comfortable making payments via their smartphones and at a swift pace. Although this technology is not yet universally adopted as the primary method for payments, it is an auspicious tech advancement that can change the face of cashless transactions entirely.
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NFC for makes it easier to do business with you.
So, this technology piqued my interest about 3 years ago and I did some digging. A lot of technical specs and documentation was found. So, I got creative and decided to think about how I could leverage this for myself. What I found was amazing. I got a hold of business cards with and RFID tag embedded into the paper. The provider offered a website that allowed me to control the actions of NFC enabled phones once my card was scanned. I could do things like pull up my contact information to be saved as a contact directly to the user’s phone. Imaging that? No typing by the user, just scan my card and click save. Nice. But what else? I also realized that using this technology I could launch a website once the card was scanned. So, I deployed that as well. Yup, now with just the scan of my business card, users get taken to the purchase page for my book Meta Leadership on Amazon.com.
See the video here:
N FC Business Card
What this means is that technologies that seem next level or extremely cost intensive are really not and can be put to use by a variety of businesses in a variety of industries with little cost.
So, I ask you again, If I was able to deploy this technology making it orders of magnitude easier for users to purchase my book, why haven’t you made it easier for your customers to give you their money?
I want to thank the brilliant people at Moo.com for providing this service and making it easy to implement. You are a credit to your professional and your customers are provided a uniquely wonderful product well worth the price.
Don’t forget to pick up a copy of my book Meta Leadership available on Amazon and check out Moo.com for more information on NFC enabled business cards.
What Are Dark Factories?
In case you never heard the term “dark factories” before, then you need to know that this is attracting a lot of people. The term dark factory is based on the event that you have programmed robots or machines working for you on a 24/7 uninterrupted production. So, there won’t be any delays, no labor disputes, not heating or lighting bills, noting. There will only be programming robots working for you.
The Model Of The Future
Matthew Carr, the Emerging Markets Strategist at The Oxford Club, recently illustrated how dark factories are a reality that is approaching soon. The reason why he made this statement was based on what is happening in a company in China — the Changying Precision Technology Company. According to Matthew, this company may well be the first manufacturing company we are seeing that using the dark factory model.
This mobile phone company used to employ 650 workers and now it only needs 60. What the company did was that it replaced all these workers by robots. Overall, they put 60 robot arms to work and they eliminated 90% of the human workforce. While this is clearly a step into the dark factory definition, we have to say that no one was expecting it to work so well.
Overall, the results were incredible. Not only productivity increased by 250% as the product defects decreased by 80%.
According to Matthew, “The robots run 10 production lines, going 24/7. The only human workers left are there simply to ensure everything runs smoothly. Changying Precision Technology believes the number of humans can be reduced to as few as 20.”
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Amazon’s Is On Its Way
While you may be thinking that this is only happening in China, the truth is that Amazon is trying to do the same (or similar). The biggest online retailer decided to increase its robot workforce by 50%. They already represent 45,000 that are spread over 20 different order fulfillment centers. In case you don’t find these numbers impressive enough, 45,000 are more robots than the Netherlands army.
Amazon continues to have a lot of employees — 200,000 full-time and seasonal.
Are Dark Factories A Drastic Change?
While numbers don’t lie and we just showed you two examples of companies that are evolving to dark factories, the reality is that there are people who don’t think this is such a big change. One of these people is Yan Vermeulen, Partner at Odgers Berndtson Singapore and Head of the Southeast Asia Industrial Practice. According to Yan,“In principle, I don’t think dark factories are a drastic change. Factories have been getting more automated for many years. The only difference is turning the lights off, but this is more an economic decision than anything else. However, the shift to dark factories will take out manufacturing employment in commodity segments that don’t need either high manpower involvement or high technology involvement. So, there will always be industries that either require a lot of people to assemble or manufacture, or need high-end engineers on site for production.”
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Applications of Machine Learning
Machine Learning has grown therefore pertinent that it is actually taken into consideration an important asset in different markets of the economic climate consisting of:
Financial Services: Financial Institutions as well as other financial services has employed machine learning to help stop scams through spam obstructing as the device learns to block e-mails, data, as well as software program that share a certain level of correlations to avoid deceptive actions. Likewise, the financial field makes use of ML to recognize necessary ideas on records which helps determine assets possibilities and also aid clients recognize when to trade.
Healthcare: Machine Learning has created possibilities for improved medical prognosis by the creation of wearable tools and sensors to keep track of a patient's health progress.
Authorities Agencies: As a result of the comprehensive quantity of records on call to the government, they have actually depended on Machine Learning to assist take care of these records and help strengthen services and also monitor modern modifications in autonomous nations.
Oil as well as Gas: This market being one of one of the most notable sectors of the globe economic condition needs Machine Learning evaluate information about minerals in the ground and anticipating refinery sensor failings.
Transportation: This is just one of the major sectors where Machine Learning has actually created a wave with the creation of self-driven Google vehicles which reaches gain from the way it is actually steered in time and after that it takes control of the steering coming from there as time go on.
Retail: This is actually one more market where Machine Learning possesses a notable impact as our company may find it evidently in store recommender systems where the recommendation maker profits from previous knowledge to accurately forecast what a certain customer will like and encourage them.
Machine Learning is actually an encouraging advancement in Artificial Knowledge as well as technological improvements generally. If you have any sort of wish for organizational lasting Feasibility, this is actually most definitely a technology domain that information in your company ought to assigned to examining further.
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