SigmaWay Blog

Many companies, over the years, have made significant investments, from data warehouses to analytics programs and have pursued the promised benefits of big data and advanced analytics. Data-analytics investments significantly increased value-added or operating profits, the simple revenue impact for consumer companies was considerably lower. The time frame of the analysis is important, since broader performance improvements from large-scale investments in data-analytics talent often don’t appear right away. B2B companies appear to confirm the intuition of executives struggling to uncover simple performance correlations. Read more at: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/big-data-getting-a-better-read-on-performance

All salamanders are not amphibians now! Scientists have developed a robot using x-rays that can mimic the salamanders in the way they move and swim. This robot can shed light on the evolutionary leap that vertebrates made from the water to the land and could also one day be used for search-and-rescue missions or inspection operations. The Pleurobot, as it is called has fewer bones and joints than real-life salamanders. The robot can serve as a scientific tool to investigate how a newer mode of locomotion, walking with limbs, can be added to an older mode of locomotion, swimming. Read more at: http://www.livescience.com/55265-robot-salamander-can-really-move.html

Satisfying the customers mean retailers needs to be more accurate on the business context, needs more granularity in terms of data and insights, and the ability to respond closer to or in real time. This is where big data technologies provide practical solutions that deliver performance and economies at scale. Understanding customer behaviour and its impact on shopping decisions is a relatively underutilized science, therefore only a combination of big data, machine learning and predictive & prescriptive analytics can tap into the real potential of how organizations understand and respond effectively to customer needs today. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.in/interview/big-data-machine-learning-and-analytics-can-help-us-understand-customer-needs-seema-agarwal-manthan

Though influencer marketing is the new kid in the block, the current level of media coverage and discussion surrounding it ensures 2016 is going to be a big year for the strategy. Accepting something new can be a difficult process for an organization irrespective of its advantages. But the market is already past the point of early adoption and brands already vested in influencer marketing are achieving results. Near and long term benefits can influence the momentum towards influencer marketing. Assessment of proper team skills and openly discussing the repercussions of this shift in digital marketing strategy can make the transition much smoother. Authenticity is the criteria that appeals most to a modern consumer. By working with the right influencers and giving them permission to be themselves and deliver the message as they see fit, can be a huge step towards the success of influencer marketing. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30284/three-tips-for-building-internal-support-for-influencer-marketing

Stepping into the shoes of a video content creator can be a scary proposition. Many of us are unfamiliar with the equipment, relevant software or what kind of content our brand/product needs. Analysts predict that most of future content consumption is going to be in a video format. So to do it just grab your smartphone camera. A modern smartphone is good enough for a beginner to start producing quality video. Watch YouTube videos on how to edit clips and add effects to make your videos appealing. Use the freeware available to you like windows movie maker to get yourself off the ground. Go for Simple formats like customer testimonials, Q&As, product demonstrations, executive introduction. While creating the video you should keep in mind the target audiences and the platform it will use. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30276/a-beginners-guide-to-creating-video-content

Jacob Baadsgaard (Founder & CEO of Disruptive Advertising) shows how to determine and track the contribution margin in order to make the marketing initiatives profitable. Basically contribution margin is the difference between the amount of money made from the sale and the variable cost associated with that sale. The easiest way to predict the success of the marketing efforts is by following the rule of thumb.

§  1X contribution margin:- making extreme loses

§  2X contribution margin:- making losses

§  3X contribution margin:- breaking even

§  4X contribution margin:-  starts making profit

§  5X contribution margin:- accelerates the progress of the company

So, higher the contribution margin higher is the profit made by the company. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to get rid of non-profitable aspects of marketing. To know the contribution margin of a company it is essential to know the customer lifetime value, marketing sales and marketing spend. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/contribution-margin-tell-marketing-makes-cents-180717

Larry Page, the CEO of Alphabet (Google's parent company), is funding two different self-driving car startups. He spent a whopping amount of $100 million in order to bring his passions together. Larry Page has also been personally funding one such startup which aims to create self-driving vehicles-Zee. Aero, launched in 2010. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/06/09/googles-larry-page-is-spending-100-million-to-build-flying-cars/#21084c5c5855

32 million Twitter passwords were sold for whopping 10 Bit coins (around $5,775). Though Twitter denies the hacking fact, but as far as sources are concerned, the fact is real. The major fact that can be concluded from this is that it's not tough to hack one's account. Some steps can be taken to insure that your tweets do not fall in the hands of those who would use them for spam links. One step is to get a password manager, like LastPass, who would generate a random password for you which is difficult to hack as the passwords undergo the process of hashing. The second option is going for an OTP along with your normal password for every time you log in. Hacking can only be achieved if you lose your device. Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, all provide this under the 'Security Privacy' tab. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/06/09/32m-twitter-passwords-sale-password-manager-two-factor-authentication/#735a5e622073

In order to build your brand effectively using social media, there are few things that you need to keep in your mind. When branding, one must be smart to choose the right platform out of hundreds of social media platforms. In order to make a social brand effective, one must be on his toes all the time. One shall try and engage with its customers other than just mechanically promoting the brands. Including attractive pictures in your posts and being consistent helps your social brand to reach out to more people effectively. Taking help of already established social media participants can help you to pocket a goal really fast. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278628

To make the data presentable, data visualization is of utmost importance. According to columnist Paul Shapiro data visualization plays a crucial role for marketers because by just looking at large datasets, we can’t get an idea about the pattern of the data. This can be easily done with a help of a scatter plots, bar charts, pie charts, etc. This data visualization makes our data analysis more effective. Here comes in the concept of preattentive attributes. These attributes are those aspects of a visual that our iconic memory picks up, like color, size, orientation, and placement in a few milliseconds. To read more, follow: -http://marketingland.com/brief-introduction-data-visualization-theory-marketers-184112

Financial professionals nowadays is managing price risk to handle many challenges like low price, randomness, oversupply and unpredictable swings. You should always be prepared for an unanticipated rise and drop in prices. You need to be foresighted to be good at managing risks. Having no hedging strategy is a risk in itself. Always have a plan according to your needs and experiences in your mind. Heterogeneity is also crucial for overall risk management. Self-made options, currency hedging and structured products are other important solutions to it. Taking an integrated approach is always a good idea. Gone is the time when the companies used to seek help from large banks. A new trend of working along with non-bank organizations to achieve their hedging goals is gaining popularity. Along with regulatory requirements, it ensures to provide a stable balance sheet and reputation. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/cargill/2016/06/08/manage-risk-with-confidence/#7104ea8f6bd1

According to columnist Brett Middleton the 3 best ways to remarket are as follows:-

1.      Try for conversions by bringing users back: - Users who are showing interest in your website or even a few pages on your website must be targeted to convert.

2.      Go for upselling of current customers: - the current customers are likely to visit your website again and again. So try offering them a higher service or subscription to increase your revenue.

3.      Providing information to the customers as well as retaining the customers is the most important step.

Thus we can say that these will surely arose interest among people (current customers as well as new customers) and the business will prosper.

To read more follow: http://marketingland.com/3-types-remarketing-trying-183494

In the digital world, it becomes important for a small business to keep track of what people are talking about it online. It is very important for the business to highlight the positive reviews and make amends with the negative ones. These reviews can break or make a business, so keeping a check on such reviews using free or low cost tools is a good idea. Setting up Google Alerts that sends you notifications when new content is added for keywords specified by you is a good way to stay updated. In order to track your social influence which closely correlates to the online reputation one can use the tool Naymz. Yext helps you to ensure that information posted on websites is correct whereas Hootsuite helps you bring all your social media networks in one platform. Read more about other such tools at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/277908

Every company which uses Digital marketing focuses and invests a huge amount of time and money in SEO. Initially a company might do well with its SEO, but after a point of time the disaster strikes and progress slows down. Such a “SEO plateau” is bound to affect all the companies at some point of time or the other. Now, to get past such plateau is one of the greatest challenges faced by the companies. Creating content around newly identified keywords helps you surpass your SEO performance.  Working on how your content appears in SERP helps you get more organic traffic. Achieving multiple rankings for your keywords would be ideal. Targeting a larger audience throughout the entire buyer funnel is also helpful. To guarantee break through SEO plateau, one should continually create new and high quality content. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/30241/how-to-get-past-the-dreaded-seo-plateau

Implementation of self-service Business Intelligence (BI) can help you reap many benefits. At times non-technical professionals can make better, faster and efficient decisions by generating their own reports and conducting analyses without any sort of assistance from IT staffs. However, these self-service BI environments must be very user friendly in order to be effective. Agility, bandwidth and personnel are some of the factors that should be taken into considerations by the company before implementing self-service BI. Such self-service BI brings along independence and autonomy from IT with it. Few capabilities that these BI tools must possess are anti-hacking facilities and non-stop operation. This technological tool depends on the Enterprise Data Quality. Data Governance on the other hand helps to provide accurate information using the self-service BI tools. Read more at:  http://www.dataversity.net/self-service-bi-success-depends-upon-data-quality-governance/

LinkedIn is popular as Facebook of the professional world. Employers have less time to spare, so once they reach your profile there are few things that they would want to know at once. What are you doing currently and what job title suits you, will definitely interest the employer. Make sure that the employer doesn’t have too deep dig to find out what makes you credible and how good your writing skills are. You will have to steal the opportunity to brand yourself. Boosting about your skills and the highest professional accomplishments will attract the recruiter’s attention. Highlighting certain tools with which you have some experience can help you get the extra edge. Apart from you, what others have to say about you, also matters to the employer, so make sure you include it. Conveying your passions through word will act like icing on the cake. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278708

Machine learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence that provides a computer with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can teach them to grow and change when exposed to new data. Artificial Intelligence is supposed to be the core of Big Data, producing exponential growth in the volume of data used for scientific research. Out of all two most popular machine learning techniques are, supervised and unsupervised learning. Nowadays, learning algorithms such as Bayesian networks and support vector machines is being used more extensively in daily commercial systems. To learn more read at: http://www.dataversity.net/machine-learning-now/

To optimize our sites for social media sharing, we have to ensure that the content is worth sharing. Showing off high number of social shares can impress the reader. We need to pick a service that fits our website's needs. Allowing integration of Facebook comments is much more user-friendly than creating an account and logging in just to comment. Enriching the content with a picture, title, and description becomes much more appealing to share. We also need to keep in mind the need for optimizing our social images for different social channels. Read more at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/6-ways-optimize-your-site-social-media-sharin

Instagram is the online social hub for marketing strategies now and using some tools to enhance our content can go a long way in promoting a product better and attracting new customers. VSCO, Enlight, Font Candy, Boomerang, Layout, Crowdfire, Iconosquare, Later, Repost, Have2Have.They are some simple but must-have tools on Instagram to ensure the content and promotion of our business is top-class. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/instagram/10-terrific-instagram-tools-business-01588891#sG6ef97W2LxZGPvg.97

Accessibility to big data is becoming difficult nowadays. So, here comes in the concept of Indent data. Information collected about a single entity of a company is called intent data. There are two types of indent data:- 1.   Internal indent data: it is also known as first party data as it is the action which company captures on its own website. 2.   External intent data: It is also known as third party data which is collected by publisher networks. This data is collected at the IP level or through registration of users and cookies. To predict prospects, internal intent data is more useful than external indent data. Internal intent data is commonly used for prioritizing, strategically nurturing programs, campaigning etc. while external intent data is commonly used for targeting advertisement and account list, etc. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/intent-data-mean-data-driven-marketer-177773