Search Engine Optimisation - How to get found?

A simple reason for writing on this - many of you must have found this blog by a google search. One of the biggest questions in the marketing world now is 'How to get found?'by a prospective buyer / user in the target segment. It is a non-surprising fact that most of the educated urban population use an Internet search engine to find choices for their purchase. From sofa to software, I have used google personally for making a purchase decision.

It is still a MYTH to understand the google algorithm completely and use it for our advantage. Though there are many said to be experts on the industry claiming to give you a first page result, the organic listing always rules the game. A set of experts say, 'To be a consistent result on a search, we should have genuine and relevant content consistently' while the others say it is just the matter of techniques and tactics on dealing with a search engine.

Be whatever the route to hit the search engine, optimising a company's website for the search engine is always an advantage.

Marketing Automation - My view

It's time we starting hearing new terms in marketing many years after popular terms coined by Philip Kotler and peers. One of such and most loudly and frequently heard is Marketing Automation.
Marketing automation can be defined as simple as automating marketing process. But it's impossible to automate all the processes involved in marketing. Because it demands a lot of human skills and intelligence to create and implement marketing strategies. So marketing automation attempts to automate as many marketing activities as possible by using technology. It is simply reducing human efforts by using technology.
Marketing automation is widely used for repetitive tasks. As we all know, marketing function broadly has two type of functions viz., internal marketing management and external customer / prospect engagement activities. We can use marketing automation in both of these to functions to an extent. In internal marketing management, marketing automation helps in reducing the time consumed to plan, communicate and track the progress of marketing strategies. For example, if you need a new print advertisement copy has to be created, you can write a description and send work order to the designing team and also can track the work status by using a software. It is more similar to the CRM system.
In the external marketing function, i.e., customer engagement activites, you can automate certain communication strategies to your customers or prospects. For example, if your marketing strategy requires to send emails to prospects at a specific time, you can automate the process of sending out the emails. You can even send the email to multiple recipients with different content. All of this can be scheduled for an automatic sending at the scheduled time. Here we can automate the process of sending the emails but we cannot automate the process of deciding which content to include in email.
Hope I have tried to give some level of definition for Marketing Automation.

Commodity Branding - A Brand new perspective.

Branding a commodity has always been seen as an impossible thing to do for the ones who never attempted and it's been a triumph for many of those who have done it!

Rice, water, dal, salt are no more just the generic names. They are now product categories in the new world of branding.
Success in branding a commodity lies in the very first decision of whether to brand the commodity or not. Once you decide to brand a commodity, you'll be introduced to a set of challenges that you need to face. One of them is creating differentiation in a generic commodity. If you can do it in the first P i.e., Product, it's good. If not, you need to play game out of the rest of Ps. Because you connot create a brand without creating differentiation. The main purpose of creating a brand itself is to differentiate itself from the rest. So you need to find out ways to differentiate your product from the ones that are in the market. This differentiation can be created in stand.

Target Segment Analysis

Irrespective of our offerings, it is very crucial to understand our target segment. Target segment is the set of people that we are going to try to sell our product or service. This basic concept is applicable for any business including the ones selling diamonds to the ones selling idly on the road side. All your marketing communication techniques and strategies are decided by the taste and preference of the target group. In fact they are the ones who decide the success or failure of any product!

Blogger.com - Positioning Advantage

I had a discussion with my friend today in the evening about having a personal blog. we were trying to figure out any other blog provider other than blogspot.com (this is how refer to Blogger) . Though we considered wordpress and few others, we could not recall anything as good as blogspot.com. This clearly means the positioning advantage of Blogger, owned by the Giant Google. Why do you think, Google being one of the biggest brands in the world, did not endorse blogger by lending its name?

This is because of the clear Brand positioning. Sounds technical? worry not! Brand positioning is nothing but keeping our offering (product/Service) in the right place of the consumers' mind. I could feel a sense a confusion in your mind, "placing in consumer's mind??" is it psychology? definitely not. But it is a simple common sense. Google wants its customers or even general public to remember "Google as a searching engine and not anything else". Likewise, they wanted Blogspot to be remembered as a "Blogging spot and nothing else".

I can hear a voice from your mind shouting, "why not?" Why don't google endorse blogspot? the reason is, it will dilute the brand positioning of the parent brand Google search engine. This dilution would result in lower level of Brand recall. Brand recall is how easily a consumer can think about a particular brand when he thinks about the solution that the brand offers.

Hope I have clearly created and clarified a confusion!

My dear marketing - Intro

This blog is to express my views on the marketing world. It is going to be an evidence for my witness of the singular, remarkable, and sometime even unremarkable moves in the marketing play field. You do not need to be a marketing adept to understand this blog, because of the simplest of facts that this is going to be a layman's view on Marketing with simple explanations for complex jargon.

You are on the right track to knowledge. I am telling this because of the simple reason that you are reading this blog right now!