9 May, 2024

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where brands collaborate with individuals who have a significant following and influence over a particular audience, often on social media platforms, to promote their products or services. These individuals, known as influencers, leverage their credibility, expertise, or popularity to endorse brands and create authentic connections with their followers.

Here’s how influencer marketing typically works:

  1. Identifying Influencers: Brands identify influencers whose audience aligns with their target market and marketing objectives. Influencers can range from celebrities and macro-influencers with millions of followers to micro-influencers with smaller, but highly engaged, niche audiences.
  2. Campaign Planning: Brands and influencers collaborate to develop a campaign strategy that outlines the goals, messaging, deliverables, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This may include sponsored posts, product reviews, giveaways, or other creative content.
  3. Content Creation: Influencers create content that features the brand’s products or services in an authentic and engaging way. This content may take various forms, such as photos, videos, stories, or blog posts, depending on the platform and audience preferences.
  4. Publishing and Promotion: Influencers publish the sponsored content on their social media channels, tagging the brand and using designated hashtags or mentions to increase visibility. They may also cross-promote the content on other platforms or collaborate with other influencers to amplify reach.
  5. Engagement and Measurement: Brands track the performance of the influencer campaign by monitoring metrics such as reach, engagement, website traffic, and conversions. They analyze the effectiveness of the campaign against predefined KPIs and adjust strategies as needed for future campaigns.

Influencer marketing offers several benefits for brands, including:

  • Authenticity: Influencers have built trust and credibility with their audience, making their endorsements more authentic and persuasive than traditional advertising.
  • Reach and Engagement: Influencers can help brands reach specific demographics or niche audiences that may be difficult to target through other channels.
  • Content Creation: Influencers produce high-quality, user-generated content that showcases the brand in a relatable context, driving engagement and brand awareness.
  • ROI: Influencer marketing can deliver a strong return on investment (ROI) when executed effectively, generating brand awareness, driving traffic, and increasing sales or conversions.

However, influencer marketing also poses challenges, such as finding the right influencers, ensuring authenticity, measuring ROI accurately, and navigating legal and ethical considerations, such as disclosure and transparency requirements regarding sponsored content.

9 May, 2024

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Essentially, it’s a revenue-sharing arrangement between online merchants and individuals (affiliates) who promote their products or services through various digital channels such as websites, social media, email, or blogs.

Online advice to referrals from influencer in social media. Woman holding megaphone for advertising message to clients flat vector illustration. Affiliate marketing, influence, interaction concept

Here’s how it typically works:

  1. Affiliate Sign-Up: The affiliate joins an affiliate program offered by a merchant or company. This usually involves signing up through an affiliate network or directly with the merchant.
  2. Promotion: The affiliate promotes the merchant’s products or services using unique tracking links provided by the affiliate program. These links allow the merchant to track where the traffic and sales are coming from.
  3. Conversion: When a customer clicks on the affiliate’s link and performs a desired action (such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter), the affiliate earns a commission. The action that triggers the commission can vary depending on the merchant’s objectives, such as sales, leads, or clicks.
  4. Commission Payment: The merchant pays the affiliate a commission for each successful referral, typically on a predetermined schedule (e.g., monthly).

Affiliate marketing benefits both merchants and affiliates. For merchants, it’s a cost-effective way to acquire customers and increase sales without upfront marketing expenses. For affiliates, it offers an opportunity to monetize their online presence by promoting products or services relevant to their audience.

Successful affiliate marketing requires finding the right products or services to promote, understanding the target audience, creating valuable content to drive traffic and conversions, and optimizing campaigns for maximum effectiveness. It’s a dynamic and evolving field influenced by changes in consumer behavior, technology, and industry trends.

24 Sep, 2022

Search Engine Optimization

A Search Engine is a programme that is used to search and identify items which are stored in a database which are linked to keywords or characters that are specified by the users and used specially for finding the particular files in the World Wide Web (wwe). So basically, search engine act as a medium of getting the ocean of Knowledge. Some most popular search engines are GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING etc. The use of internet has been increased rapidly in this youth generation and people are investing most of the time for gathering information from the wwe via a search engine. There are two types of people who use search engine. First users are those who search in a search engine to get information. Users do billion of searches in order to get information. Another users are those who try to optimize their websites for getting the top rank in the search result and optimizing an website for Google or other search engine is a very necessary part of getting a large number of audience and the visitors will help to generate revenue for site owners either for the advertisement that is displayed on the website or by purchasing any product from the website.

There are four types of search engines based on how it works

  1. CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES
  2. HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES
  3. HYBRID SEARH ENGINES
  4. OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES

CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES: These types of search engines occupy crawler or bot or spider for crawling and indexing new content to search database. Example of these types of crawl-based search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex etc.

HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES: These types of search engines are also called as open directory system which is depend on human based activities for listing. First, site owner submits a short description of the site along with the category is to be listed. Then, submitted site is checked manually and after that it is added in the exact category for listing. Keywords that entered in a search box, will be matched with the description of the sites. A good site with good content is always greatly accepted and reviewed rather than a site with having poor content.

HYBRID SEARCH ENGINES: Hybrid search engines are the mixture of both the crawler based and manual indexing for listing the sites in search results. Generally, maximum crawler-based search engines such as Google uses crawler as primary mechanism and human directories as the secondary medium. But still there are some manual filtering of search results that occurs to remove copied and spammy sites. Whenever an website is identified for spammy activities the website owner must have to take the necessary actions to remove the spammy activities and he has to resubmit the site to the search engines.

OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES: Besides all the three above search engines there is other some types of search engines and they are depending upon the usage. Search engines have different types of bots for exclusively displaying images, videos, news, products and local listings. For example, Google News page can be used to search news from different types of newspaper. Some search engines like Dogpile, are made in order to collect meta data of the pages. Some search engines like Swoogle helps us to provide exact search results on specific area.

In order to enhance user experience, all search engines need to be optimised. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the sites to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The more visibility the pages have the more it likely to be catch the attention of the customer. SEO is the basic part of a Digital Marketing because people do billions of searches with commercial intent to find out several information about the product or for the services. Hence, search has become the primary source to bring the digital traffic for brands. That is why greater the visibility of the pages the higher it will be ranked in the search result.

However, Search Engine Optimisation has also some drawbacks as SEO is not an appropriate strategy for website. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of designing and optimising search engine ad-campaign and the difference between SEO and SEM is the paid and unpaid features for getting the rank in search result. A successful internet marketing depends upon the building of a high-quality web page and flatter the user.

Search Engine Optimisation may generate a sufficient return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for search and there is no guarantee of continued referrals. On behalf of the application, SEO can be classified into two groups. First one is called the “WHITE HAT”, this one is recommended by the companies as a part of a good design and another one is called the “BLACK HAT”, and these types of techniques are not recommended by the companies and they do not approve that. White hat allows to produce results that will be last long, on the other hand black hat predicts that their sites may be temporarily or permanently once the search engine notices that what they are doing.

A SEO technique will be only considered as white hat if it comes under the search engine guidelines and shows no duplicity or fraud alerts. But white hat is not just about following the guidelines but to ensure the content of a search engine and then ranks in the same content which the use will notice. White hat basically precises content for the user and not for the search engine and after that it makes the content easily accessible to the online ‘spider’ algorithm.

Black hat SEO techniques offers to improve rankings in a way which are disapproved by the search engines. A black hat technique uses the hidden text as text colour similar to the background in an invisible ‘div’ and then positioned off screen. Search engine may penalize the sites that are using black hat, either by reducing their rankings or throwing out their listing from the database.

24 Sep, 2022

Search Engine Advertisement

Whenever we are browsing any search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, we all might have noticed that sometimes an advertisement is displaying on the search engine, this concept is globally known as “SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISEMENT”, abbreviated as “SEA”. The advertisements are often displayed in the form of images or text, shown on the search engine result page (SERP). This technique is globally known as the best source of income for the search engine provider and search engine advertisement is cost effective way to improve business and brands. There is also a technique, is known as Search Engine Marketing, abbreviated as “SEM” and combination of search engine marketing and search engine advertisement is the branch of online marketing and surrounds all elements to enhance the visibility of a website in the search engine result page. Search engine advertisement involves in the posting ads on the search engine result page using the method of “CPC” which is also known as “Cost Per Click” and booking these ads in the search engine result page is based on bids on keywords for which the ads will be placed. A good ranking is always depending upon the optimisation of text ads and offers and clear control of ads will help to increase traffic.

Search engine advertisement is one of the best ways of digital marketing and this will lead us to generate a handsome revenue. One of the main objectives of search engine advertisement is significantly increase the Click-Through Rate (The ratio of clicks per page view) because the number of clicks can be easily increased by the posting of advertisement. The conversion rate plays a major role for search engine advertisement because in the end it determines the costs of the advertisement and then it shows the “Return on Advertising Spend”, abbreviated as “ROAS”. It shows the actual profit achieved per advertising expense in dollars. 

Search engine is also used to bring out advertising pressure by page view from the display campaign. Generally, advertisements are used in the e-commerce industry where search engine advertisement helps to convert the user to a buyer. Hence, the main objective of search engine advertising is the conversion in the form of sales. Some popular search engine platforms are Google ads, Bing ads, Yahoo ads etc.

GOOGLE ADS: Google ads is basically nothing but a product of Alphabet Inc which helps the marketers a higher range of opportunities in the search engine advertising field. There is a technique of placing the ads through ads and that is called auctioning. Later it will define how the advertising costs are. The advertisers will bid on a specific keyword or they pay for clicks. This phenomenon is known as PPC (PAY PER CLICKS) or CPC (COST PER CLICK). Some factors that play a vital role in final placement of text ads or banners are quality of the text ads, quality of the landing page, relevance of the keywords and the positive history of the Ad-word account. Most common forms of advertising that are possible by using the google ads are:

        1.CLASSIC TEXT ADS: An advertiser chooses a specific keyword or         keywords with which their text ads will be displayed on a definite position in the search engine result page which will result in creating the campaign that consists of ad group and each and every ad group is categorised into advertisement that is based on the specified keywords. If any user tries to search any of those keywords the corresponding ad that is linked, will be displayed on search engine result page.

        2.PRODUCT LISTING ADS: Google ads offers us to place the product ads that are directly created from a product file that is brought about by the customer. The modulation is done by specifying the structured data in the data feed.

       3.DISPLAY ADS: These ads are in the form of images or text that are placed on the google networking platform and the registration for this network is done by the Google AdSense platform.

Google AdWords provides us to combine different types of forms of advertisement of search engine advertisements such as, text ads, and display ads, and all these are possible by Google AdWords. That is why Google Ads is the best tool for search engine advertisement in the world. Some other mentionable tools are Bing, Yahoo, Amazon etc.

       4.VIDEO ADS: The advertisers on the Google AdWords programme can also put down advertisement on YouTube. Text or video ads can place for this purpose.

       5.GMAIL ADS: We can also book ads in Gmail accounts if we use the Google Ads. Payment will be initiated via PCC or CPM.

With the help of Ads Express programme, Google puts forward small companies to have the possibilities to use search engine advertisement without creating their own campaign and the files required to generate is done by Google itself. The advertisers only have to provide advertising budget.

BING or YAHOO ADS: Bing and Yahoo together they also provide their own search engine advertising platform and they function as same as Google ads. But due to the dominance of Google ads it is considered as the most useful search engine advertising platform in Europe where as Bing and Yahoo has big craze in the market of USA to use them as a search engine advertising platform.

In search engine advertising platform, there is various kinds of rules for posting ads and they are:

              PPC (PAY PER CLICK): It also known as Cost per click or CPC. Here the advertisers clarify how much they want to pay per click. 

              CPA (COST PER ACQUISITION): Here the advertisers clarify how much they desire to pay per conversion achieved through the advertising measure.

              CPT (COST PER THOUSAND): Here the advertisers clarify how much they desired to pay per thousand impressions of advertisements.

              CPC (COST PER CALL): Here the advertisers specify how much they are willing to pay per visit.

               CPL (COST PER LEAD): Here the advertisers clarifies the amount they are wanting to pay for the leads such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a PDF and all are depending upon the web portal.

24 Sep, 2022

Information Technology Consulting

In today’s modern era whenever we want to get our work done with expert clients with an affordable budget along with the given duration of time, we all need only one platform and that is none other than IT Consulting and Staffing. There are many consulting agencies that help us to achieve our business goals as per our requirements. For these reasons many big company’s or government’s projects are handled by anu such IT Consulting agencies. Their work is only to provide us the best utility services.

IT Consulting and Staffing are same in many aspects because both of these engage temporary employees to get our work done with the given or below the given budget within the given time.

Information Technology Consulting (i.e. IT Consulting) is the technique of work where the consulting agencies show the utility of Information Technology to the organisations about how Information Technology can be used at it’s best.

Staffing agencies help clients to reduce the workload and to look after the budget parameters by providing the client contract workers according to the client’s desirable skills to get the work done. Staffing agencies pay their workers as per the duration of project completion.

There are many differences between these two terms i.e. IT Consulting and Staffing. Let us discuss briefly:

Let us take an example, an organisation got a data entry project with a given budget and time, now the organisation will always want to get the project done with below the given budget and time for its profit. Hence, the organisation will seek help from any IT Consulting agency and the consulting agency will now recruit contract workers as ‘staffing’ with the desirable of budget and time of the Consulting agency and these contract workers will get paid according to their duration of work by the Consulting agency that is why every consulting agencies have different types of contract workers as per the work and in this way everyone gets satisfied with the work.

Basically a consulting agency first diagnoses a problem then advise the organisation or they equip their own method to get results. An IT consultant should have various skills to get their job done such as Advisory skills, Technical skills, Business Skills, communication skills, Management skills, technical language skills and so on.

An IT Consultant can be independent or self employed. An Independent consultant’s bill is similar to the other professionals. The employees of a consulting firm get a high end salary but the staffing agencies’ payment is depend on the percentage of the employer’s hourly wage.

A staffing firm may charge a company 70$/hour but the staffing firm may pay its employee 40$/hour whereas a consulting firm may charge a company more than that. Generally fees for an IT Consulting firm is fixed and it is calculated on daily basis. Hence, many companies are moving towards the role model of a fixed IT consulting role model and this trend will carry on more companies to be required the delivery of IT Consulting services and due to this reason now a days most of the big companies have their own IT Consulting Firm.

There are so many advantages of IT Consulting and Staffing firms and they are as follows:

ACCESSIBILITY OF SKILLED CANDIDATES: Every consulting firms have their skilled manpower. They have short term contract workers who can work with reasonable wages and they work for the client very happily. The main advantage of short time contract workers is to fill up the vacancies without any long process hence it will be ease for them who are looking for jobs out there.

INCREASING THE FLEXIBILITY: These types of IT consulting firms get the opportunity of various types of work with all types of companies that help them to grow the business smoothly and comfortably.

REDUCE THE DURATION OF TIME AND COST TO THE COMPANY: The main advantage of this type staffing firms or consulting agencies is to lower the cost to the company and to reduce the duration of work. An In House Recruitment team generally takes much time to recruit a number of skilled candidates but the Consulting firms already have a large number of skilled man power and this help us to get done our jobs with a highly skilled man power with the lower cost and time. Often various organisations seek help from an IT Consulting firm to complete a sudden project with short time as they have a large number of skilled man power in order to get the job done.

EXPERTISE TO THE FIELD: A staffing firm have so many skilled workers in various fields and they have a great knowledge on specific industry and due to this they have the ability to see the efficient talent which help them to recruit skilled talent for a specific job.

FUNCTIONS FOR EMPLOYEES: Staffing agencies help the job seekers by providing them temporary jobs because all the staffing agencies have seasonal jobs and they recruit employees on the basis of temporary jobs with the duration of time. Whenever this type of agency get project they will look for employee and the employee will sign up with the agency and they will diagnose our skills to recruit in a specific filed as per the recruitment

However, availing these firms help us to lower our burden and we get more flexibility of work and now a days most of the organisations choose these platforms. Above all these firms establish a bridge between gap for the people who are stuck in between jobs and business and all we have to do is to find out the correct skills for a specific task which is often quite a difficult task for these agencies because the hiring process is convenient and these agencies have to handle the paperwork in order to find out the best man power to provide us quality work.

In a word IT Consulting and staffing firm is a boon for the organisations and now a days getting our projects done is not that difficult task.