SigmaWay Blog

It’s every marketer’s dream to be able to lay their head to rest at night with the knowledge that when they wake up, your bank balance will be just that little bit bigger. The passive income dream is common enough among marketers and entrepreneurs. But it’s always been an elusive goal. The dream of making money while you sleep often remains exactly that, a dream.

It’s difficult, but not entirely impossible. There’s countless examples of solo entrepreneurs, small businesses and huge corporations that have automated much of their income with much of this proliferation due to continuing advancements in technology.

Sure, we all know that email is also one of the most versatile methods for automating your income. Email is still the great lever for success. You can embrace it and live your passive income dreams, or ignore it and continue to work hard for little to no reward.

Read more about different automation campaigns here:  https://blog.crazyegg.com/2016/04/08/drive-revenue-while-sleeping/

Starting a small business can seem tough and impossible at first when, there is so much to do on the front end before you even open the doors for your customers . We are now in the age of the art of technology which uses cloud computing to store all of our information and access if from anywhere we are. Not only does this make operating a business easier, but it makes the process much more efficient. The cloud can be your secret weapon to any aspect of the start-up process of your business. Here’s how.

Read more at:  http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/6-ways-use-cloud-start-business-01669177#o3OZvYPJyqBGeKit.99

Many entrepreneurs who are about to launch a startup, at the very introductory stage think about what is going to happen at the end. The thought process includes how they will encash the funding in lavish parties or the big checks brought in when the company is bought under some stalwarts of the industry. While keeping up “high hopes” proves to be motivational for them, the experts have expressed this habit to be a mistake.

David Skok is a Boston area entrepreneur who has founded four start-ups and is a regular blogger touching on relevant topics reaching out to people just like him. Skok is one of the experts who is skeptical about using external factors such as accumulated wealth as a driving force for beginning entrepreneurs. He says - “The big lesson I learned was that, in the start-up world, if your primary focus is on making money, you usually won’t make money.”

Know more :  http://www.business2community.com/leadership/the-entrepreneurial-paradox-01689339#Mb6MJc1MVAxSYSjV.99

Innovation is a very critical aspect to any business strategy. The ability to think “out-of-the-box”, makes any business stand out among others. While most regard innovation as a necessary stimulus to any business, but they look at innovation milestones as a fortuity in terms of strategy and shy away from further strategic planning or making any formula for success in terms of innovation. This, is however not the ideal way to deal with innovation. Given below are a list of keys to ensure business innovation.

1.       Having a dedicated innovation team: The most important ingredient to induce innovation is to ensure a team of creative, intelligent and dedicated people to be included in the business. To include them will provide the ticket to multitask, collaborate as well as read minds well ahead of time.

2.       Innovation Labs: This is to enhance the ecosystem of our business. With an innovation lab, a group is created that is consistently and exclusively focused on innovation.

To know more : http://www.business2community.com/business-innovation/7-things-must-succeed-innovation-01680313#K5sQRxXK0sCrXcW3.97

Content Marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategy. Despite its effectiveness very few businesses know how to utilize it efficiently. To build a solid content marketing you must set KPIs and project ROIs wisely. Comments, page views, bounce rate, average time spent on your page, social sharing and keyword ranking are crucial KPIs to determine your content marketing success. An editorial calendar on the other hand helps you stay updated with the overall progress of your company’s brand story. Whom you hire for content marketing must have a good understanding of how to be professional and courteous along with innovation and creativity. The attempt should be to extract more value out of it. Your content should be promising and trustworthy. Tracking analytics and documenting all processes help you improve the content. To use educational and entertaining contents for increasing the customer conversion rate is the optimal way to utilize content marketing. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/277700

The number of private companies going public has been drastically falling in the past few years. The question that arises while observing this trend is, whether a successful company should consider the thought of going public at all. Understanding today’s tech investment environment is a prerequisite to answer this question. The new crowdfunding rules have made it easier for small businesses to raise funds, in such a stage the more important question is how to use this piled up cash. Surely raising more funds and going public is a huge accomplishment for a business, but what is more important is to sustain steady growth and innovation. The factors that you shall keep in mind while raising fund is that the idea in your head truly fulfills a market need, your business partners and investors are picked smartly and you do not look at VC funding to answer for your growth. To answer whether to go public or not you must look at what is best for your company give the current scenario. Read more at:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279563

Prisma can be considered as one of the best examples of viral marketing in 2016. Social media sites are flooded with pictures from this application. As a marketer what you need to see beyond these pictures is why the simple photo filter app is gaining popularity with no efforts to promote it at all. The users promote the app on their own, for reasons like the simplicity of the application and easy integration of the app with the social media. Another smart trick that Prisma teaches us, is to offer a better alternative to products already being used by the customers instead of trying your luck with something totally new. The way Prisma used IOS to tease Android users and build the urge in them for the app, is another very smart technique to popularize your platform. Resist the urge to market more than needed instead let your customers market for you. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280101

Sales Promotion helps you develop a loyal customer base. Promotion is a powerful way that helps customers to know about you and your brand. However, if something goes wrong the same promotion can permanently tarnish your brand reputation. Letting your customers test the product you launch after the proper quality check is an impressive way to gain popularity amongst your customers. Predicting what can go wrong and taking appropriate measures so that the things don’t go wrong can save your reputation from being tarnished. To have a knowledge of the probability of occurrence of such wrong actions is also very helpful. Despite the precautions if anything goes wrong, the best solution is to stay calm and hunt at a better alternative. It’s important to identify whether wrong promotions will cause small problems or have a catastrophic effect on the brand. One should base his promotion decision on this identification. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279220

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a good long term choice as it encourages business growth.

1. It optimizes business processes: - it minimizes or eliminates redundant business processes by using identical business processes for a particular task. This increases efficiency as the business can now focus on more strategic job duties.

2. It replaces robust manual back office processes by fully digital back-office functions.

3. Data driven decision making processes are important for a business to prosper.

4. Security provided by ERP solutions will minimize intrusions and data breaches

Thus we can say that ERP solutions helps to gain long-term position and the business will grow in leaps and bounds.

To read more follow:- http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/inside-erp/5-ways-erp-solutions-encourage-business-growth-74045

An ambitious businessman owning a small business will like to keep track of all the activities in his business. At this point in time, anything that comes for free and easies your task is welcomed. Buffer is a tool that helps you to manage your various social media accounts efficiently without any sort of hindrance. Outlook is another very important tool that makes your life with emails very easy going. OnStar is of relief when you are on the roads. Waze saves you from losing time in traffic jam, it’s an app that gives you alert about traffic jams and accidents when you enter a destination. Triplt, on the other hand is a tool that helps you stay updated with your bookings in hotels, restaurants or flight reservations. It saves you from bearing the pain to go through printed travel reservations. Time saved with the help of these apps can be used to accomplish other important tasks. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270400

In order to have an extensive customer base, inclusive of people from all over the world you need to check how efficiently you manage one of the most difficult tasks of targeting the right group of new consumers. When you know you are the lucky one to take birth in digital era, then be luckier and use it to sell information and subscription to the world. Sometimes staying quiet might help so please do not engage in any sort of politics over social media, which relates to the sentiments of your customers. This goes without saying, appear in all major social platforms and avoid the smaller ones. Boosting about the quality you provide accompanied by strong testimonials might help you to draw attention of the new customers. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279226

An image speaks a thousand words but a video speaks thousand sentences. May be this is the reason one should pounce on the opportunities like Periscope, Blab and Facebook Live Video that allows you to reach out to your customers using video livestreaming. You can use Facebook Livestreaming to Livestream either with the entire audience or just the selected followers. It also allows you to save the video for later use. Using the mobile app Periscope you can broadcast to your twitter account (it’s a must) followers. However, you need to ensure that you save the Periscope’s stream or the autosave broadcast setting is enabled. Whereas, Blab.im saves you from any such obligation to integrate with any social media sites. These apps can be used to launch a product, give live training, build customer support and to boost the live events in your business. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279538

Ever since its launch in 2012, Snapchat has been growing its customer base massively.  In the competitive environment in which a startup constantly strives to prove itself it becomes necessary to have transparent and clear communication. A startup can build transparency and trust by leveraging useful snapchat features. Using the short lasting snaps one can establish brand persona amongst targeted audience. Using geo-filters and 3D tickets to tell stories about your brand that leaves a longer impact on the customer’s mind is also a good way to keep your customers glued to you. Startups can also use the app in order to campaign or receive customer feedbacks. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279635

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

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

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

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