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September 13, 2019
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Types of Marketing Strategies and Definition

Marketing strategies are used by businesses to promote their products and services. Let’s have a look at the proper definition.

Marketing strategy definition

Marketing strategy is used by different companies to collaborate with their consumers. It is also employed to aware the customers about the features, specifications, and benefits of the company’s products. It is basically focused on encouraging the target population to buy those specific products and services. The marketing strategies might be totally innovative or they can be previously tried or tested strategies.
Effective marketing strategies help to get ahead in the competition.
The marketing strategies might be totally innovative or they can be previously tried or tested strategies.

Points to ponder for marketing

There are different types of marketing strategies available. You have to pick one as per your business requirement. Before choosing the right marketing strategy for your business, consider the following points.

1. Define the target population

The defining the target population is main and necessary step in choosing your marketing strategy. It gives the proper demographics which help in selecting the most appropriate marketing plan for your business.

2. Test your audience

Create a hypothetical process of buying to test your audience. Once you know the buying behavior of your target audience, you can select a more appropriate marketing strategy.

3. Consider marketing strategies

Once you know the demographics; their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. You can select a more appropriate marketing strategy.

4. Evaluate those strategies

Once you have considered the marketing strategies and found the applicable ones. Asses them, apply them and evaluate them. This process must be for testing purposes and the most suitable and productive strategy must be applied.

Types of marketing strategies

There are different types of marketing strategies available. Picking up a marketing strategy includes analyzing the needs of your business, your target audience, and the specifications of your products.
The two main types of marketing strategy are:
  • 1. Business to business (B2B) marketing
  • 2. Business to consumer (B2C) marketing
The most common form of marketing is the business to consumer (B2C) marketing. Let’s explore a bit more.
Following are the different types of marketing strategies available.

1. Paid advertising

This includes multiple approaches for marketing. It includes traditional approaches like TVCs and print media advertising. Also, one of the most well-known marketing approaches is internet marketing. It includes various methods like PPC (Pay per click) and paid advertising.

2. Cause marketing

Cause marketing links the services and products of a company to a social cause or issue. It is also well known as cause-related marketing.

3. Relationship marketing

This type of marketing is basically focused on customer building. Enhancing existing relationships with customers and improving customer loyalty.

4. Undercover marketing

This type of marketing strategy focuses on marketing the product while customers remain unaware of the marketing strategy. It is also known as stealth marketing.

5. Word of mouth

It totally relies on what impression you leave on people. It is traditionally the most important type of marketing strategy. Being heard is important in the business world. When you give quality services to customers, it is likely that they’d promote you.

6. Internet marketing

It is also known as cloud marketing. It usually happens over the internet. All the marketing items are shared on the internet and promoted on various platforms via multiple approaches.

7. Transactional marketing

Sales are particularly the most challenging work. Even for the largest retailers, selling is always tough especially when there are high volume targets. However, with the new marketing strategies, selling isn’t as difficult as it was. In transactional marketing, retailers encourage customers to buy with shopping coupons, discounts, and huge events. It enhances the chances of sales and motivates the target audience to buy the promoted products.

8. Diversity marketing

It caters diverse audience by customizing and integrating different marketing strategies. It covers different aspects like cultural, beliefs, attitudes, views and other specific needs.

Final Word

Marketing strategies have made it much easier to promote products and services. They also limit the strategy to target audience ensuring the proper advancement of the business.
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September 01, 2019

While no one wants to find themselves in the situation, everyone knows there are times when you must physically defend yourself. However, most people are unaware of when and how they can do so without facing legal repercussions. If you’re in a situation where you need to claim self-defense, then here’s everything you need to know.

Imminent Threat
The first aspect of any self-defense case is identifying an imminent threat. The threat is often physical but can also be verbal when it instills fear of immediate harm. Someone threatening to physically attack you, for instance, is a justifiable reason to defend yourself. Offensive words without the threat of harm do not fall into this category.

The second half of this aspect is the imminent nature. If someone punched you then stopped attacking you immediately after, any force used against them is retaliation instead of self-defense. The threat must be taking place at the time you use force.

Reasonable Fear of Harm
You may also claim self-defense in the event of reasonable fear of harm. This is best described using the “park scenario.” Two strangers are walking past each other in the park, and stranger one has a wasp flying by their head. Stranger two attempts to swat the wasp away, but stranger one only sees stranger two’s hand coming towards them.

Stranger two perceives the hand as an attack and retaliates with violent force. Even though the first stranger was trying to help, stranger two can claim self-defense because of how the situation appeared. The fear of harm was reasonable because most individuals would have reacted similarly.

Proportional Response
Defending yourself is 100% legal, but how you do so could change your claim. You can only use as much force as it takes to stop the threat. If someone were punching you, for instance, shooting them would be considered over-the-top in most situations.

However, this isn’t always the case. Your physical strength may not be a match for the threat in question, which would require you to protect yourself using other means. According to domestic violence defense attorneys in Boulder, women facing abuse often require additional force to stop their assailant. Depending on the situation, a weapon may be considered proportional response.

Duty to Retreat and Stand Your Ground
Your duty to retreat simply requires you to attempt to avoid any violence before defending yourself. If you can walk away from the situation safely, do so. Stand your ground, on the other hand, allows you to remain firm and use violence when necessary as long as your defense includes non-lethal force.

There is also a castle doctrine that allows the use of lethal force in your home, but only in the event of an intruder. You should avoid lethal force at all costs unless the situation requires it. However, you should pursue a self-defense claim for non-lethal force anytime there is an imminent threat or reasonable fear of harm.

Keep in mind that self-defense laws change by state and jurisdiction. Legal professionals recommend reading up on the laws in your area, allowing you to protect your rights should a situation arise.


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September 01, 2019
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Finding ways to strengthen your social media accounts can be tremendously beneficial to your brand. Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to find your next project or a local business trying to expand, being able to reach people is integral to our success. Nowadays, we live in a social media-driven world. You simply cannot maximize your potential without attending to your digital platform. While anyone can set up a series of social media accounts, it takes skill to cultivate an organic following. Today, we are going to direct you toward three simple tips that can go a long way toward establishing your following.

Building Your Brand
Alright, so let’s start by simply pointing you to the biggest social media platforms on the internet. While websites come and go, social media platforms are oddly consistent. Right now, businesses need to be focused on establishing a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook account. If you already have a personal account on these profiles, forget about it. Your brand needs to be completely separate from your personal life. Make sure that each account is named after whatever people will be looking for, whether it is your real name or your business name. With that out of the way, let’s begin building our following!

1) Create Professional Profiles – First and foremost, you need to realize that social media is serious business. While the majority of users only scroll through Instagram or Facebook in order to share content with friends, you are different. Take a look at this Twitter feed, for example. This user has anchored their business website into their profile. They’ve also placed a quippy line in their bio which is backed by a pair of professional photos. Now, do something similar for your profiles. You want a quick, catchy, and professional set of social media accounts.

2) Integrate Hashtags – Organic followings on places like Twitter and Instagram begin and end with your ability to use a hashtag. You could have the most thought-provoking content in the world, but if you aren’t hip to trending hashtags, you are going to be lost in the shuffle. We suggest building a list of hashtags that are relevant to your typical posts. Save this list on your phone and then paste the hashtag list whenever you make a new post. You’ll be able to broaden your outreach a considerable amount via this technique.

3) Interact, Interact, Interact – Unless you are someone like Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence, people want to know that you read their comments. You don’t have to respond to every message that people leave, but you’ll want to interact often enough that your followers feel appreciated. Treat every interaction like an opportunity to make a sale, and you’ll soon realize why these interactions are so important.
Building a social media following is hard. There are so many people online that it can feel impossible to gain significant attention. However, with hard work and great content, our tips can lead you to the organic following that will keep your brand afloat.

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August 25, 2019
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Growing any business is, well, tough business. You've got your hand in every pot while simultaneously wearing every hat. You're worrying about marketing strategies, product creation, and growth plans, all in the same day.
With so many ongoing tasks, it can be far too easy to let a little thing like digital presence fall by the wayside. However, that would be a grave mistake.
The Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on what exactly makes people want to complete a purchase from a particular website, and the results were a resounding "trustworthiness." By making consumers feel safe, comfortable and at ease when they visit your online destination, you stand a much higher chance of not just encouraging them to complete a purchase, but convincing them to become longtime users.
Strong website design is paramount in creating this trustworthiness. By presenting an online destination that is straightforward and easy to navigate, users will have a more positive experience throughout your website, making them more likely to complete a purchase. 
So, while things like company transparency, great testimonials, and a solid product are obvious ways to ingrain familiarity to potential customers, website design clearly ranks particularly high when determining if a brand seems trustworthy or not.
In order to stand out from the crowd, there are a few tried-and-true design elements that will transform your website visitors into loyal customers. Don't worry, I'm not going to say something obvious like "responsive designs" -- elements like that are a given.
Here are five top web design and UX trends that will grow your business fast.

1. Video landing page

Incorporating video into your website design is a no-brainer. I mean, 78 percent of internet users watch videos online every week. 
But, don't just embed any old YouTube video. Instead, take your website design to the next level by creating a video landing page.
You could target this video to a direct call to action on a particular web page, a la Salesforce. Or you could take a page out of Baesman's book and create an immersive video that auto-plays on your homepage. Either of these approaches can provide information or drive home the brand's identity -- but both will improve UX and users' impression of your company as a whole.
Not sold? The proof is in the pudding. According to Vidyard and Demand Metric's The State of Video Marketing 2017 study -- which surveyed 159 B2B and B2C professionals and entrepreneurs -- it is predicted that 69 percent of website traffic will be video, while 70 percent of professional participants reported that video converts better than other forms of information and content.

2. Parallax scrolling

While digital experiences have no doubt improved many aspects of our daily lives, it has had one negative impact: People are lazy. So lazy, in fact, that clicking a button is often too far out of the realm of possibility.
Enter parallax scrolling.
This uneven-like scrolling effect has combated consumers' general laziness while remaining engaging and visually appealing. With a simple swipe (a la Tinder), users have easily consumed your information as they make their way down the page.
The popularity of parallax scrolling has also introduced more deep-scrolling and single-page website designs and renders what information is "above the fold" a little less necessary, since it is easier to see what's below, too. Ultimately, that makes prioritizing content easier for you to manage and increases your user's likelihood of seeing everything anyways.
Make Your Money Matter took its parallax scrolling to the next level, with effects spanning an illustrated timeline that goes both horizontally and vertically, ensuring it captivates users.

3. Animated calls to action

Calls to action are a necessary evil in website design. The fact remains that your consumers won't know what to do unless you explicitly tell them. Many. Many. Times.
However, simply telling your consumers what to do just isn't enough anymore, either. They're seeing stimuli and instructions from all corners of the web, so you need a little something extra to help your goal stand out.
Adding a little animation to your important action items might be just the ticket. Whether it's a micro-mini interaction (such as "liking" a Facebook post and seeing the many reaction animations) or a simple effect to catch users' eyes, consumers are more likely to execute the action you're pushing when the call to action grabs their attention and provides confirmation of completion.
Need some inspiration? Airbnb uses its animation app, Lottie, to incorporate subtle graphics animations atop its calls to action throughout its website and app designs.

4. Custom typography

Every website needs text, but the days of boring Times New Roman, Arial or any other basic stock font have long-since passed. Instead, take your message to the next level with unique typography that encompasses your brand identity while simultaneously communicating to users.
This unique typography can take many shapes (literally) or be found in different areas of your design. Some brands may choose to utilize this in their logo design, while other businesses (like mine) will sprinkle custom font throughout the entire design to draw attention to important content, like this newsletter signup call to action (below). Ultimately, the choice in how and where you utilize this trend is up to you.

5. Artificial intelligence

Despite the surge in e-commerce sales over brick and mortar storefronts, people still crave connections, which is likely one of the reasons that artificial intelligence in all its forms is so popular.
AI in website design can take many shapes, but some popular examples include machine learning, personalization, and chatbots. Machine learning and personalization are cut from the same cloth to a degree and ingratiate a feeling of "being special" with users that, in turn, fosters brand loyalty.
Chatbots influence user experience much more directly, though. While they provide an engaging element, the biggest draw to incorporating chatbots into your website design relates to customer service. Users can ask questions and receive answers in real-time -- which is easy to visualize -- and acquire information quickly.
Quartz is a stellar example of chatbots within immersive app design. Through a conversational interface and hilarious memes, users are more likely to return to consume the entertaining content than they are to read a boring news article on another app.
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August 16, 2019
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The best project managers are like axles: They smoothly link management, clients, and staff to keep projects rolling along. If you want to be the top candidate for a project manager job, make sure you can answer questions about your technical competence, business methodology, interpersonal skills, and behavior in the job interview.  

Here’s a project plan to get you ready for your next project management interview:

Technical Skills and Methodology

Your interviewer may begin by asking about your technical skills. An introductory question might be:
  • What software have you used to manage projects in the past?
That question may be followed by a more specific query:
  • If I gave you a laptop to plan your next project, what software would you want on it?
Once you’ve established your technical competence, expect questions about your methodology for handling projects, says Joseph Logan, author of Seven Simple Steps to Landing Your First Job.

Whether you’re a Project Management Professional (PMP) or not, general questions you can expect include:
  • What’s your approach to managing a project?
  • What’s your school of thought on project management? Are you an agile person?
  • How do you do your scheduling?
  • How do you allocate resources? 
  • How do you do status updates?
“They have to have a methodology,” says Donna Farrugia, executive director of The Creative Group, a recruiting firm for interactive, design and marketing professionals in Menlo Park, California. “Maybe they use software or a book, or they just have years of experience.”

If you are PMP-certified, discuss the certification process—when you earned your PMP, what the hardest part was for you, what you liked the most, etc.
 

Interpersonal Skills

Great project managers possess interpersonal skills that help teammates get along.

Questions about interpersonal skills can be general:
  • How do you handle politics?
Or specific:
  • Tell me about a time when you had two key stakeholders with opposing views. How did you manage that?
Your responses should explain how you found consensus while keeping the project focused on its original purpose, Logan says.
 

Project Sponsorship

When you’re asked how you work with project sponsors, your interviewer is looking for two things: how you elicit information from project leadership and how you define “project sponsor.”

Some candidates will say the project sponsor is the person who reviews the project; others will say it’s the person who holds the budget.

Hard-skills questions probe what specific project-management skills you can bring to the organization:
  • Are you trained in supply-chain management? 
  • Do you manage people and projects or just projects? 
  • Are you responsible for delivery and financials or just the administration of the project? Tell me about your recent project’s goals and results.
You also likely get questions about your past performance to uncover your business skills:
  • What were the challenges in your last project? 
  • When the project didn’t go well, what happened? 
  • What happens when your projects fail? 
  • How do you do contingency planning? 
  • What is your favorite way to deliver and present results? 
  • What type of closure processes have you done? 
  • Do you typically revisit projects a few months after delivery? 

Behavioral anecdotes

At the end of the interview, you might get some behavioral interview questions related to the most common issues that arise for the organization’s project managers. For example, if the job involves working with cross-cultural teams, you might be asked something like this:
  • Tell me about a time when your domestic team wanted to approach a project one way and your offshore team preferred a different approach. 
  • What was the issue, and how did you resolve it?
By preparing your answers to common project manager interview questions, you can help the hiring manager appreciate your mix of business acumen, technical competence and people skills needed to expertly manage projects.

Learn more about project management careers and find project management jobs. 
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August 16, 2019
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Over my long career, I have discovered there a number of signs that indicate if people are ready for their next promotion. In my experience, there are three stages of maturity that people go through. I hope this will help you define which you are and therefore what is your next stage of development to get promoted.
Let me explain….
In my early career, like many people, I thought I needed to show people how clever I was in order to get promoted. I would analyze every situation, think through the implications and consider every single permutation. I would proudly go to meetings and explain to people how complex something was and how I had considered every angle before coming up with my solution. Four hours into my presentations people would be falling asleep!
As I climbed the career ladder I came to realize I was taking the wrong approach. I realized a simple truth, perfectly summed up by the Economist when reporting the recent death of Ronald Coase, a Nobel prize winner, who posed a very simple question, ‘Why do companies exist’?’, The Economist stated:
“It is the job of clever people to ask difficult questions.
It is the job of very clever people to ask simple questions”.
This inspired me to write this post. It outlines the three stages of maturity a person goes through in their quest to get promoted and helps ultimately determine their success. Which of the following types of people are you?

STAGE ONE – THE INTERVIEWER – THE ART OF ASKING QUESTIONS

One of the best pieces of advice I was given in my early career was, ‘you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio’. ‘The Interviewer’ asks questions that make people think. But then listens to the answers. This is even more important.
There is a definite art to asking questions. Open questions starting with ‘who, what, where, when and how’ are always the best questions. Avoid closed questions where the person answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, asking “how do you propose to make this change”, is much better than, “are you making a change”?
Asking good questions is stage one…do you ask good questions?

STAGE 2 – THE SIMPLIFIER – THE ART OF MAKING THINGS SIMPLE.

Making things complex is very easy, especially in today’s world, and many people are good at this! Making things simple is very difficult. My advice is that it’s important to understand the complexity of a problem, by asking open questions. Gather the data and then use a phrase I use all the time, ‘let’s take a step back’.
In ‘taking a step back’ you can review all the data and look at the big picture. When I do this I am looking for patterns, insights and common attributes. I have discovered by first looking at the complexity, the detail is essential to discovering the issues, but the key skill is not to wallow around in the detail. It is imperative to take a step back, step up and look at the overall situation.
When you think the time is right you need to ask yourself the simple question, ‘what is going on here?’ Don’t allow yourself to get drawn into having to answer every single bit of a problem. Pareto’s 80/20 rule is essential. It’s essential you look for the 80% of the issue and not try to fix everything; otherwise, you will tie yourself up in knots.
I remember employing a person about 10 years ago who was very good analyzing the situation and very good at thinking of all the problems that could occur. Her big failing was that she could not ‘take a step back’ and look at the entire picture. She ended up being paralyzed by the details and was worried about the 0.001% of a chance that something would happen. I tried to coach her but she didn’t have the ability to change. She ended up tying the team up in knots as she was creating the fear that 0.0001% of chance was actually 50% of times. She never gained the promotion she craved.
Now we put to stage one and two together. Simple, open questions are very effective. For example:
What are we trying to achieve?
Why are we doing this?
What will happen if we do this?
How do we need to tell?
How will we do this?

STAGE 3 – THE INQUISITOR – THE ART OF ASKING SIMPLE, INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS

I remember watching a sports commentator asking a soccer manager a question as they walked up the pitch. The commentator clearly wanted to impress the soccer manager with his knowledge of the game. The commentator’s questions lasted the entire length of the pitch, some 3 or 4 minutes! When the interview finally finished the questions the soccer manager looked at the commentator and answered with one word, ‘yes’! The question lasted 4 minutes, the answer 1 second!
All too often people ask long complex questions. Many times they are trying to show the person how clever they are. I have learned the higher you go in an organization the simpler the questions need to become. Let me be very clear, the implications of these questions and the answers can be very profound and change a whole company, but the initial question is simple. This is the key skill of the Inquisitor.
Let me give you an example. When I was working in corporate life I was running Customer Service and had 3,500 people around the globe in call centers. My CEO called me into his office and said: “Colin, I want you to improve our Customer Experience and do it at least cost”. Simple ‘eh? Not at all! The first thing I did was to go back to my office and think, ‘improve the Customer Experience, what is a Customer Experience?’ I had an idea what I thought it meant but the reality was I had never really considered what those words meant. Furthermore, back in 1997 when I was set this task, no one else knew either. There were no consulting companies to help me so I went about defining what I thought a Customer Experience is. I am proud to say our company, Beyond Philosophy, are now on our fourth version of this as our thinking continues to progress. You can see our definitions here.
The second thing I thought was ‘if I am to improve the Customer Experience the word ‘improve’ means I am somewhere today, and to improve it I should be somewhere tomorrow’. This means I needed to understand where we are today and define the experience we were delivering tomorrow. This led me to ask myself a simple, but in hindsight, an insightful question.
‘What is the experience we are trying to deliver?
A simple question right? You think an organization with over 100k employees and based all over the world would know the answer to that? You would also assume that a person like me who had 3,500 front-facing people would also know the answer. I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong everyone I asked had an opinion of what it should be but no- one knew.
We spent months working out the answer to this simple question. We discovered that the implications of the answer to this simple question are enormous. For example, if you are trying to create an experience when your customers say they feel you ‘care’ for them, what type of people should you recruit? Presumably, people that are naturally good at caring for people? You should also measure that. Were our processes designed to show customers we cared? No. The implications and the list go on…
Asking simple, insightful questions, becoming an inquisitor is the final stage of your development.
From a simple question, you can change the course of a business; in fact, you can change the course of a life and a career.
I will leave you with the economist’s quote again in the hope you remember this and repeat it to yourself during your career.
“It is the job of clever people to ask difficult questions. It is the job of very clever people to ask simple questions”.

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