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LIVE: Rahul Dravid appointed head coach of Indian men’s cricket team

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Rahul Dravid, cricketer

Live news updates: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding a review meeting through video with districts having low Covid-19 vaccination coverage.

The Taliban government has banned the use of foreign currency in Afghanistan in a surprise move that could further weigh on an economy struggling with a cash crunch amid widespread hunger, Bloomberg reported.

China’s new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases spiked to a near three-month high and tighter curbs to contain the spread are expected in the capital Beijing ahead of a key gathering of the highest-ranking members of the Communist Party next week, said Reuters.
Ride-hailing firm Ola has reported its first operating profit of Rs 89.82 crore for 2020-21, even as its revenue declined 65 per cent to Rs 689.61 crore amid Covid-19 induced lockdowns.
[“source=business-standard”]
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Online Marketing

Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Business

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Business

When small businesses get started, their focus is often on how to get the first customers through the door. They may rely on traditional forms of advertising, such as print ads, coupon mailers or even outdoor advertising. Businesses may believe that since they offer a good product or service, it’s just a matter of time until customers find their way to them.

While this strategy may bring in a trickle of business, there is a better and easier way. Small businesses should consider the global marketplace of prospects online and benefit from converging their traditional and digital marketing. No small business, no matter how new, should overlook digital channels as a way to generate leads and convert interest into customers.

Let’s look at the benefits of digital marketing and the ways online platforms can be used to help grow your business.

Benefits of Online Marketing

The potential customers you can find online is a much larger group than you’ll ever be able to attract only locally. Using digital marketing techniques, you can reach a global audience in a way that’s cost-effective, scalable and measurable.

Some of the key benefits of digital marketing include:

  • The ability to interact with your prospects and learn exactly what they are looking for i.e. get to know your customers better!
  • The ability to reach out to anyone and anywhere as there are no geographical boundaries with digital
  • Target the right audience at the right time – personalization is simpler with digital marketing
  • Communicate with your prospects at every stage of the buying process
  • Save money and reach more customers for less
  • Get to know your audience and drive engagement to create brand loyalty. Get some inspiration from the power of customer loyalty schemes.
  • Track and monitor responses to your marketing efforts easily and instantly

Getting started on digital marketing for small businesses

With endless opportunities, digital marketing can seem intimidating if you’ve never used it for a business before. There are a variety of platforms and digital marketing terms that may make it seem like a bigger project than it is.

Small businesses can believe they don’t have the time or money to compete online. As a result, many prefer to take things slowly and stick with one or two forms of traditional advertising, assuming that their business will evolve as time passes.

The fact is the marketplace is competitive and while word of mouth and customer recommendations can help drive traffic, customers will struggle to find your business unless you show up in the places they spend time. After all, 4.6 billion people use the internet for many reasons. That’s 60% global internet penetration according to Digital 2021: Global Overview Report.

So delaying building a presence online is not an effective approach. The best way to ensure success is to promote your business on a global scale and use targeting to attract customers that are interested in your service or product.

Realize Your Customers Are Online

When someone is interested in your business, whether it’s in your niche or they are curious about your brand, the first thing they will do is research online and see what they can find out about you.

In today’s digital age, customers expect to find a website and social media presence. They may be looking for reviews so they can learn what other people are saying about your company and whether it is a good place to do business. For local businesses, 87% of consumers read online reviews – a growth of 6% from 2019 to 2020.

So if a potential customer can’t find you online, they may conclude that your business doesn’t appear to be legitimate. There is a very good chance that a lot of these prospects may decide not to take your business seriously and they will quickly head somewhere else.

Tip: Find out 10 Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Their Social Media Presence. 

Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing Online

For your business to be successful, you need to pay attention to what your competitors are doing and learn from it. Don’t think of your competitors as someone to beat, but as people who have something to teach you.

When you look at what your competitors are doing online, you will get some idea of what is and isn’t working. Most likely, whatever type of business you are in, your competitors have established a web presence. What kind of content do they use, is there a blog, or do they promote visual content such as videos?

How do they communicate their brand and what makes them unique? How well do they engage with the audience? Can you do better?

A great way to find out what your competitors are doing is to conduct research. Find out what platforms they use, do they focus on keywords, are there influencers they use to drive traffic? Luckily there are some great online tools that can help you do this:

  • Semrush – great for keyword ranking and keyword traffic
  • Ahrefs – useful for discovering competitors’ most linked content
  • Moz – another platform for keyword ranking
  • BuzzSumo – track popular content types and influencers
  • Google Alerts – a tool for tracking mentions of any competitor your choose to track
  • Ontolo – a great tool for backlinks and content marketing

There are also some awesome tools for customer insights to feed into your persona development and content marketing.

Be Accessible to Your Customers

As we already discussed, your business needs to be present where your customers and that’s online. Whatever product or service a person looks for, they will most likely start their search with Google. If you have no online presence, then you won’t be found, and you can’t compete.

If you have an online presence but your competitors are easier to find as they rank higher in search, you still might not be found. Along with creating a website, learning what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and why it’s important will help you outrank competitors by being the first name that a prospect finds on a Google search.

Keywords are crucial in making this happen so make sure you understand the best keywords (long-tail and short-tail) for your business. Use this simple infographic to guide you through the five steps of keyword research.

You should also include simple questions prospects may want quick answers to, such as where you are located, your opening hours, and details of your product or service. By looking at your website and competitors’ websites side by side, your prospects should be able to compare hours, prices, special offers and more to make the best decision for them.

We’ve developed this handy guide to SEO for small businesses if you need help getting started.

Let Customers Come to You

Think of digital marketing as a way to make yourself accessible to the people you’re trying to target. The reach of your business can reach well beyond your locality and scalability becomes a reality.

Through a web presence, your business is open for business even when you’re not! You can create an environment where your customers can contact you day or night.

This means that customers and prospects can send you emails with questions, make purchases and browse your inventory in a few simple clicks. In addition, potential customers who have no way of physically coming to you can still do business with you through an e-commerce function or simply by using social media.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

The beauty of digital marketing is that it allows you to engage with prospects. You can get to know them and their pain points to provide a solution. On social media or through a blog you can start a conversation or run a survey to gain insights. Pay attention to any comments or survey responses.

By interacting with people online, you can start to get to know what they’re looking for. What are their pain points of issues? What keeps them up at night? Use this information to offer solutions through your product or service. Using digital marketing helps you take the guessing out of who your customers are so you can personalize communications and refine targeting.

By doing this, you will build a relationship with your customers. You become much more than a business, you become a trusted partner. Remember, people are also more likely to buy from businesses that they have already bought from and had a good experience with.

Do more marketing for less money!

Few forms of advertising are as cost-effective as digital marketing. Small businesses and start-ups are always trying to achieve as much as possible through their marketing on a budget.

Advertising online can stretch your budget further and will allow you to refine your target audience. Social media is particularly good for this as it enables you to set a daily budget for a discrete audience that has an interest in your brand or ethos. Most importantly, it allows your business to exclude the people that would never buy from you – saving you time and money!

The key with advertising on social media is to select the platform that will work best for you and your brand. Don’t pick TikTok just because it’s trending or advertise on LinkedIn when you’re not trying to generate B2B interest. Research social channels, check out a guide on social media demographics to find one that matches what you’re looking for and run some simple tests to see what messaging and content works.

If you need help with budgets, check out this great digital marketing budget toolkit.

Transform the marketing capabilities of your small business

Are you looking to develop a website that can generate leads? Or maybe you want to set up a Facebook campaign to see the results. The first step to achieving these goals is to develop an understanding of digital marketing and how it can have a positive impact on your business. DMI’s Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.

[“source=digitalmarketinginstitute”]

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Internet

TAXABILITY OF ECONOMIC IMPACT PAYMENTS IN THE USA

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das
tax-economic-impact-payments

Over the past year, many people in the US have filed claims to get economic impact payments. However, there is one question that has been popping in everybody’s minds is whether the economic impact payments available to Americans taxable. The forthright answer to this question is that the IRS does not consider Economic Impact Payment as one’s income, and hence nobody owes a tax on it.

When we talk about Economic Impact Payment, assumptions like “Stimulus check adds to your taxes” come around. Such assumptions are completely baseless because stimulus payments do not add to your income and thus do not add to your overall tax obligation. Rather, this Economic Impact Payment, also known as stimulus payment, is a tax credit. A tax credit is a payment received that reduces your taxes instead of increasing them. For instance, if a person in federal income taxes owes $3,000 and gets $1,000 as stimulus payment, the tax bill comes down to $2,000.

Another assumption that many often make is that IRS will reduce the future tax refund when one files his tax return in the coming year. Well, this conjecture is not true. The payment will neither reduce a taxpayer’s refund nor increase the amount they owe when they file their 2020 tax return this year. One more query put forth frequently is whether or not the economic impact payment will affect a person’s eligibility for various government programs. It is clarified that the impact payment sum will not affect the income to determine eligibility for federal government assistance or other government benefit programs.

Who is not eligible to qualify for an Economic Impact Payment?

If you fall in any one of the below-mentioned categories, you are not eligible to claim the Economic Impact Payment (EIP):

  1. You do not possess any qualifying children, and your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) is greater than
  • $198,000, when filed jointly
  • $136,500, if you are the head of household
  • $99,000, for other eligible taxpayers
  1. You are dependent on another taxpayers’ tax returns. This category includes children & students dependent on their parents’ tax returns and adults who rely on their children’s tax returns.
  1. You are a non-resident alien
  1. There is no social security number that validates your employment.
  1. You had already filed Form 1040-NR or Form 1040NR-EZ, Form 1040-PR, or Form 1040-SS for 2019

Any incarcerated individual or claim for a deceased individual, an estate, or trust are not covered while claiming the Economic Impact Payment.

How do I know about the sums available as my Economic Impact Payments?

For the first Economic Impact Payment, you must have received IRS notice 1444, and for the second Economic Impact Payment, you are supposed to receive Notice 1444-B. If you are eligible to receive the payments, you need to refer to these notices while completing your 2020 tax return. These notices have the necessary information that will help you determine the amounts you need to include while filing your Recovery Rebate Credit Worksheet and while calculating your credit amount through your tax preparation software.

What is the meaning of Recovery Rebate Credit?

The recovery rebate credit is a form of tax credit available against your federal taxes applicable to your 2020 income. It is authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the COVID-related Tax Relief Act. This credit will either enhance your tax refund or decrease the amount of tax liability that you owe. The Recovery Rebate Credit was to be paid in two advance payment rounds during 2020 and early 2021. These two advanced payments of the Recovery Rebate Credit are known as first and second Economic Impact Payments.

People who have received the full amounts of both Economic Impact Payments are not supposed to fill in any additional information about the Recovery Rebate Credit on their 2020 tax returns.

What is the full amount available under the Economic Impact Payment Scheme?

The first phase’s Economic Impact Payment was $1,200 for singles, $2,400 for the married couples filing jointly, and an additional $500 for each qualifying child. Simultaneously, the Economic Impact Payment in the second phase was $600 for singles, $1,200 for the married couples filing jointly, and an additional $600 for every qualifying child.

Suppose you have received the full amount of both the first and second Economic Impact Payment, according to your eligibility. In that case, you do not need to provide complete information regarding the Recovery Rebate Credit on your income tax returns for 2020.

As mentioned earlier, the US individuals who got the full amounts of both the Economic Impact Payments are not obliged to offer the Recovery Rebate Credit details on their 2020 tax federal tax returns. They have already received the full amount of the Recovery Rebate Credit as Economic Impact Payments.

Other general eligibility requirements to claim the Recovery Rebate Credit are as follows:

  • You need to be a US citizen or US alien resident in 2020
  • You are not dependent on another taxpayer for the tax year 2020
  • You have a social security number valid for employment and is issued before the due date of your 2020 tax return (including extensions).

Even if you are liable to file a tax return as per regular provisions, you shall have to file Forms 1040 or 1040-SR to avail of the Recovery Rebate Credit.

There are some extra guidelines and noticeable points that need to be kept in mind by the taxpayers residing in American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands:

If you reside in a US territory, you are requested not to complete the Recovery Rebate Credit Worksheet. Please do not enter an amount on line 30 of Form 1040 or Form 1040-SR.

The eligible residents in American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands can apply for the credit with the respective territory’s tax authorities. Territory residents can direct questions about Economic Impact Payments or the 2020 Recovery Rebate Credit to their respective native territories’ tax authorities.

What if you do not have the relevant notices to claim the Recovery Rebate?

If you do not have notices, you can still extract the necessary information required for claiming a recovery rebate from your online account. You can view the sums offered with your first and second economic impact payments through your online account.

Clarify your tax apprehensions with the Taxation Experts at Initor Global USA!

Initor Global US has paved its path to stand among the most prominent tax preparation outsourcing companies in the United States. Amidst these times of revival from the COVID-19 impact, we support different accounting firms and CPA practitioners and contribute towards rebuilding various businesses. When you need matchless support for your tax and accounting endeavors, you can partner with the top outsourcer of tax preparation outsourcing services. Contact us now!

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Internet

The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta’s ‘average user’ data

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

facebook

Fall 2021 has been filled with a steady stream of media coverage arguing that Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram social media platforms pose a threat to users’ mental health and well-being, radicalize, polarize users and spread misinformation.

Are these technologies—embraced by billions—killing people and eroding democracy? Or is this just another moral panic?

According to Meta’s PR team and a handful of contrarian academics and journalists, there is evidence that social media does not cause harm and the overall picture is unclear. They cite apparently conflicting studies, imperfect access to data and the difficulty of establishing causality to support this position.

Some of these researchers have surveyed social media users and found that social media use appears to have at most minor negative consequences on individuals. These results seem inconsistent with years of journalistic reporting, Meta’s leaked internal data, common sense intuition and people’s lived experience.

Teens struggle with self-esteem, and it doesn’t seem far-fetched to suggest that browsing Instagram could make that worse. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine so many people refusing to get vaccinated, becoming hyperpartisan or succumbing to conspiracy theories in the days before social media.

So who is right? As a researcher who studies collective behavior, I see no conflict between the research (methodological quibbles aside), leaks and people’s intuition. Social media can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.

Averaging’s blind spot

To see how this works, consider a world in which Instagram has a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effect on the well-being of users. A majority, those already doing well to begin with, find Instagram provides social affirmation and helps them stay connected to friends. A minority, those who are struggling with depression and loneliness, see these posts and wind up feeling worse.

If you average them together in a study, you might not see much of a change over time. This could explain why findings from surveys and panels are able to claim minimal impact on average. More generally, small groups in a larger sample have a hard time changing the average.

Yet if we zoom in on the most at-risk people, many of them may have moved from occasionally sad to mildly depressed or from mildly depressed to dangerously so. This is precisely what Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reported in her congressional testimony: Instagram creates a downward spiraling feedback loop among the most vulnerable teens.

The inability of this type of research to capture the smaller but still significant numbers of people at risk—the tail of the distribution—is made worse by the need to measure a range of human experiences in discrete increments. When people rate their well-being from a low point of one to a high point of five, “one” can mean anything from breaking up with a partner who they weren’t that into in the first place to urgently needing crisis intervention to stay alive. These nuances are buried in the context of population averages.

A history of averaging out harm

The tendency to ignore harm on the margins isn’t unique to mental health or even the consequences of social media. Allowing the bulk of experience to obscure the fate of smaller groups is a common mistake, and I’d argue that these are often the people society should be most concerned about.

It can also be a pernicious tactic. Tobacco companies and scientists alike once argued that premature death among some smokers was not a serious concern because most people who have smoked a cigarette do not die of lung cancer.

Pharmaceutical companies have defended their aggressive marketing tactics by claiming that the vast majority of people treated with opioids get relief from pain without dying of an overdose. In doing so, they’ve swapped the vulnerable for the average and steered the conversation toward benefits, often measured in a way that obscures the very real damage to a minority—but still substantial—group of people.

The lack of harm to many is not inconsistent with severe harm caused to a few. With most of the world now using some form of social media, I believe it’s important to listen to the voices of concerned parents and struggling teenagers when they point to Instagram as a source of distress. Similarly, it’s important to acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic has been prolonged because misinformation on social media has made some people afraid to take a safe and effective vaccine. These lived experiences are important pieces of evidence about the harm caused by social media.

Does Meta have the answer?

Establishing causality from observational data is challenging, so challenging that progress on this front garnered the 2021 Nobel in economics. And social scientists are not well positioned to run randomized controlled trials to definitively establish causality, particularly for social media platform design choices such as altering how content is filtered and displayed.

But Meta is. The company has petabytes of data on human behavior, many social scientists on its payroll and the ability to run randomized control trials in parallel with millions of users. They run such experiments all the time to understand how best to capture users’ attention, down to every button’s color, shape and size.

Meta could come forward with irrefutable and transparent evidence that their products are harmless, even to the vulnerable, if it exists. Has the company chosen not to run such experiments or has it run them and decided not to share the results?

Either way, Meta’s decision to instead release and emphasize data about average effects is telling.

[“source=techxplore”]

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News Update

Shakti Mills gang-rape: Bombay HC sets aside death penalty 8 years later; a look at the case

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Shakti Mills gang-rape: Bombay HC sets aside death penalty 8 years later; a look at the case

In August 2013, a 22-year-old photojournalist was gang-raped inside Shakti Mills in Mumbai. Later, an eighteen-year-old call centre employee reported that she too had been gang-raped, on 31 July 2013, inside the same mills complex.

Eight years after a Mumbai trial court sentenced three accused to death by hanging in the 2013 Shakti mills gang rape case, the Bombay High Court on Thursday set aside the death penalty awarded to three accused and send them to life imprisonment.

The bench, while pronouncing its order, said that it cannot ignore the fact that the offence has shocked the collective conscience of the society and rape is a violation of human rights, but the sentence of death is irrevocable.

It added that courts have a duty to consider cases dispassionately and cannot ignore the procedure laid down by the law.

It added that the convict shall not be entitled to parole or furlough as they cannot be allowed to assimilate into the society and as there is no scope for reformation.

What happened in 2013? 

In August 2013, a 22-year-old photojournalist was gang-raped inside Shakti Mills in Mumbai. Later, an eighteen-year-old call centre employee reported that she too had been gang-raped, on 31 July 2013, inside the same mills complex.

The incident triggered outrage across the country. People from all walks of life, political parties, media associations and Bollywood demanded the harshest punishment to the perpetrators.

In April 2014, a sessions court in Mumbai held five persons guilty in the gang-rape of the photojournalist at Shakti Mills in Mumbai. Three of the five men convicted — Vijay Jadhav, Qasim Sheikh alias Bengali and Salim Ansari — were held guilty of both crimes.

A session court had in April 2014 convicted Vijay Jadhav (19), Mohammad Kasim Bengali (21), Mohammad Salim Ansari (28) and Siraj Khan for raping a photojournalist in Shakti Mills on August 22, 2013.

Jadhav, Bengali and Ansari were sentenced to death as they were earlier also convicted for the gang rape of another girl in July 2013. Siraj was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Shakti Mills gangrape Bombay HC sets aside death penalty 8 years later a look at the case

Shakti Mills in Mumbai where the 22-year-old photojournalist was gang-raped in August 2013. Firstpost

Under Section 376 (e) of the Indian Penal Code, a repeat offence of rape is punishable by death. In March 2013, the Centre amended the rape laws in the country, introducing several stringent provisions, including section 376 (E). This section says if a person, who has been previously convicted for rape under the IPC section 376, is subsequently found guilty of a similar offence, the courts can sentence him to imprisonment for the rest of his life, or, even award the death penalty.

Following is a brief chronology of the gangrapes (of photojournalist and telephone operator) in the Shakti Mills compound in 2013.

Photojournalist gangrape case:

August 22, 2013 – A 22-year-old photojournalist visits the desolate Shakti Mills compound in Central Mumbai for an assignment accompanied by a male colleague. Five accused, who initially offered her help, later rape her inside the mill compound.

August 23, 2013 – The Mumbai police solve the case with the arrest of a 17-year-old accused. The rest of the accused are arrested in a week.

September 19, 2013 – Mumbai Police files a 600-page charge sheet in the case. In all, 13 charges are pressed against the five accused including that of gang rape, criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and wrongful restraint and sections under the Information Technology Act.

[“source=firstpost”]

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Internet

The ingredients of the Internet

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das
The Internet is a global network of computing devices communicating with each other in some way, whether they’re sending emails, downloading files, or sharing websites.

A world map with icons of computers on top: a laptop in Brazil, a laptop in Russia, a server in Africa, a phone in Sydney, and a phone in NY. Arrows go between the computers.
The Internet is an open network: any computing device can join as long as they follow the rules of the game. In networking, the rules are known as protocols and they define how each device must communicate with each other. The Internet is powered by many layers of protocols.
To create a global network of computing devices, we need:
  • Wires & wireless: Physical connections between devices, plus protocols for converting electromagnetic signals into binary data.
  • IP: A protocol that uniquely identify devices using IP addresses and provides a routing strategy to send data to a destination IP address.
  • TCP/UDP: Protocols that can transport packets of data from one device to another and check for errors along the way.
  • TLS: A secure protocol for sending encrypted data so that attackers can’t view private information.
  • HTTP & DNS: The protocols powering the World Wide Web, what the browser uses every time you load a webpage.
You likely use the Internet every day, but you’re probably new to many of those acronyms. In this unit, we’ll learn more about each of the technologies underlying the Internet.
[“source=khanacademy”]
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Online Marketing

Basic Understanding of E-Commerce

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The Different Types of e-Commerce | Trellis Inc.

Simply put, E Commerce is ‘Using Electronic Platform for Business Transactions’. It is also called a ‘Virtual Market Place’. Every minute millions of people from all over the world are logging into the Internet looking for some information, for product, services, to look for news, download music, for online shopping and so on. Every individual is looking for something that he would like to obtain or buy online instead of having to go through a physical transaction. Imagine what this means to the business organisations. If they are able to identify and access those individual users who have a specific need or want, they have a ready customer in waiting.

One could wonder whether it is the online community or the technology that is paving way for E Commerce. The answer is that both these factors are driving the E Commerce. The technological developments are providing the backbone for business transactions to take place and the growing volumes of users buying online is making it possible for E Commerce and markets to grow.

E Commerce is characterized by Business to Business and Business to Customer business models. We are very familiar with the Business to Customer model for banking; insurance as well as online shopping, online booking etc that have become very popular and accepted modes in our daily lives. On the B to B front too, business organisations have re-engineered their Business processes including Advertising, Marketing, Sales Order Management besides Supply chain management and Customer Relationship management to suit the E Commerce mode. Dell has successfully adapted ‘online selling’ model on a global scale. It allows the customers to ‘configure the model’ and to ‘Order Online’. Once the transaction has been successfully carried out and payment has been received, Dell executes the order and ensures that the DELL Products are delivered at the Customer’s door step within seven working days. DELL has not only used E Commerce successfully as its major selling channel, but at the backend they have put in place ‘Built to Order’ process where in the Computer is assembled against the specific customer order and is delivered to the customer. By integrating E Commerce and its Manufacturing process, DELL has managed to do away with holding inventories and managed to bring its costs down.

E Commerce has become a major business process for Global organisations and Multi National Companies. Most MNCs depend upon ‘Online selling ‘as well as ‘Online Procurement’ on global scale. E Commerce has made it possible for them to access global markets as well as source raw materials from across the world. Besides, E Commerce has brought down the cost of selling as well as cost of procurement drastically adding to the bottom line. In the consumer world, Insurance, banking, airlines and hospitality sectors have stood to benefit from E Commerce model of selling.

E Commerce is a reality. Several multiple technologies, platforms, agencies and networks make it possible for E Commerce to happen. EDI and Online banking and transactions have been the major enablers that have made it possible for business transactions to take place.

It is simply amazing to think that with the click of a button one can buy, sell or affect financial transactions worth millions of dollars in a few minutes. However this is true and E Commerce is the future.

[“source=managementstudyguide”]

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Online Marketing

What is Digital Marketing and How Do I Get Started?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Digital marketing, online marketing, internet advertising…whatever you call it, marketing your company online is a big deal these days. After all, internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade and this shift has massively affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses.

So, what is digital marketing? Digital marketing is like any other type of marketing—it’s a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. The real difference is, you connect with and influence those customers online.

What is Digital Marketing?

Basically, digital marketing refers to any online marketing efforts or assets. Email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing and even blogging are all great examples of digital marketing—they help introduce people to your company and convince them to buy.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing assets and strategies businesses use to reach people online:

DIGITAL MARKETING ASSETS

Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset. It simply needs to be a marketing tool you use online. That being said, many people don’t realize how many digital marketing assets they have at their disposal. Here are just a few examples:

  • Your website
  • Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms, etc)
  • Video content (video ads, product demos, etc)
  • Images (infographics, product shots, company photos, etc)
  • Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc)
  • Online products or tools (SaaS, calculators, interactive content, etc)
  • Reviews
  • Social media pages

As you can probably imagine, this list just scratches the surface. Most digital marketing assets will fall into one of these categories, but clever marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to reach customers online, so the list keeps growing!

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES

The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies most businesses are using:

PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll go over in a second). Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising” (again, we’ll get into that shortly).

PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING

Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort (for a more in-depth comparison of paid search and SEO, check out this article).

PAID SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat will allow you to run ads on their site. Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that might not be aware that your business, product or service exists.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art and science of improving your online user experience. Most of the time, businesses use CRO to get more conversions (leads, chats, calls, sales, etc) out of their existing website traffic.

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

NATIVE ADVERTISING

Ever get to the bottom of an article and see a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising. Most native advertising falls under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks (“you’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, native advertising can be a bit hard to spot, since it is usually mixed in with non-paid content recommendations…but that’s kind of the point.

EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of different ways to market your business online, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs (for an in-depth comparison of these options, check out this article).

Does Digital Marketing Work?

Digital marketing is a great option for any business. At Disruptive, we’ve used digital marketing to help all kinds of businesses grow—from mom-and-pop shops to internationally recognized universities and beyond. That’s the beauty of advertising online. If you know who you want to target, you can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere.

However, that being said, certain types of businesses will benefit more from certain types of digital advertising. As a quick overview, let’s take a look at which strategies tend to work best for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and business-to-business (B2B) companies:

B2C COMPANIES

Generally speaking, B2C companies have much lower price points than their B2B counterparts. After all, it can be a little hard to sell a $150,000 drill bit (believe me, they exist) to a harried mom. But a $10 pair of kids pants? That’s a fairly straightforward sell.

The good news is, because B2C companies aren’t trying to sell incredibly expensive products or services, they don’t need big sales teams or complicated marketing funnels. All they have to do is get their products or services in front of the right audience with the right messaging and the rest should take care of itself.

As a result, the primary goal of most B2C companies is to get people into and through their marketing funnel. For example, if you can get that harried mom onto your kids clothing website and offer her an exciting deal, there’s a good chance that she’ll buy today. You don’t need to build a ton of brand awareness or trust before you can close a sale.

With that in mind, B2C companies often see great results from higher-funnel marketing channels like social media marketing or paid social advertising. These channels do a great job of getting your business in front of potential customers who might not otherwise know that you exist.

Now, supplementing with other digital marketing strategies like paid search or SEO is always a good idea, but if you have to pick one channel to start with, paid social advertising or social media marketing are great options for B2C.

B2B COMPANIES

In contrast, paid search is a great option for B2B companies. Most B2B companies have very specific niche audiences that can be hard to target using social media. However, if you sell $150,000 drill bits and someone searches for “diamond-tipped oil drilling bit manufacturer”, you want to be the first result they see. Yes, you might pay more for your click than you would with paid social advertising, but with a $150,000 price tag, it’s money well spent.

In addition, most B2B companies have a much longer and more involved sales cycle than B2C companies. If you’re selling a $150,000 drill bit, most people probably don’t come to your site, give you a call and say “I want one.” As a result, longer-term strategies like content marketing or email marketing are often necessary to close a deal.

Of course, the right blend of digital marketing tactics will vary from industry-to-industry and business-to-business, but simply comparing B2C to B2B should help give you a sense for how different strategies can be better for certain businesses. Not every strategy is right for every business, but with a little trial and error, you should be able to identify the most profitable approach for your company.

How Do I Get Started?

The good news is, getting started with digital marketing is fairly easy. Most online advertising platforms make it easy to sign up and create your first campaign (it is how they make money, after all). Here are a few links to beginner guides for several different digital marketing strategies:

  • Paid search advertising
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid social media advertising
  • Social media marketing
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Content marketing
  • Email marketing

The core of every successful digital marketing campaign, however, isn’t a guide. Regardless of which strategies you choose to use, here are 4 questions you need to answer before you get started with digital marketing:

1. HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO MAKE?

To figure out what you need to spend on digital marketing, you first need to clarify what your goals are. How you approach digital marketing can vary quite a bit depending on whether your ultimate goal is to drive clicks, conversions or leads, sales, revenue or a certain return-on-investment (ROI).

When you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of any marketing effort should be ROI. After all, if your digital marketing spend isn’t driving profitable revenue for your business, why are you marketing online?

Clicks and even conversions are great, but your company doesn’t make money from clicks (in fact, you actually spend money on clicks) or conversions. It makes money from sales.

With that in mind, the first thing you need to determine before you decide what your digital marketing budget should be is to decide how much revenue you want to drive. Once you know that, you can use that information to determine how much ad spend it will take to reach that revenue goal.

2. WHO ARE YOU MARKETING TO?

Once you know how much money you want to make from digital marketing, you need to identify who you are marketing to. This is critical, because different buyer personas require different marketing tactics. And, even more importantly, different buyer personas turn into different types of buyers.

So guess what? If you don’t understand your buyer personas, you can’t create an effective digital marketing strategy!

If you’ve got a sales team, talking to sales can be one of the fastest ways to get a decent buyer persona together. After all, they’re the ones who talk to your customers the most, right?

However, even talking to your sales team and doing a little research isn’t enough to really get at the level of detail you need to put together an effective digital marketing plan. To do that, you need to get on the phone and call your actual customers.

Ask how they found you, why they converted and what convinced them to pay you. This information will give you a ton of insight into your marketing and sales process that you can use to both improve the performance of your advertising and choose your marketing budget.

3. WHAT ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS WORTH?

Typically, people look at buyer personas as a good way to craft an effective marketing strategy. Buyer personas are great for this, but they are also an important part of putting together an effective digital marketing plan.

For example, imagine you are advertising for a SaaS business called SaaS-A-Frass that has the following pricing structure:

AdWords Buyer Personas Example | Disruptive Advertising

In this situation, you’re probably targeting 3 different buyer personas:

  1. Small business “Steve”
  2. Mid-market business “Mandy”
  3. Enterprise business “Edward”

Small business “Steve” has much smaller and simpler business needs than Edward or Mandy, so he’ll probably choose the Starter package. Mandy will probably want the Professional package and Edward will likely need the Enterprise package.

Assuming that Steve, Mandy and Edward stick around for an average of 14 months, 4 years and 9 years, respectively (average lifetimes for a SaaS client) and buy 5, 20 and 100 licenses (again, respectively), here’s the lifetime value for each of these personas ( [licenses/mo] x [# of licenses] x [typical customer lifespan in months] ):

LIFETIME VALUE

  1. Steve: $1,750
  2. Mandy: $72,000
  3. Edward: $1,590,000

These numbers look really exciting, but not all of that money is profit.

A normal SaaS company pays about 22% for fulfillment, 9% to sales and has a 40% overhead, leaving them with about 29% of the lifetime value of each client to play around with. That means to simply break even, SaaS-A-Frass has to spend less than the following to acquire a customer from Facebook:

MAXIMUM ACQUISITION COST

  1. Steve: $507.50
  2. Mandy: $20,880
  3. Edward: $461,100

If SaaS-A-Frass can keep their acquisition cost below this threshold, they’ll make money. If it costs more than this to acquire each of these customers, they’ll lose money.

See why buyer personas are so important to budgeting?

Of course, it’s unlikely that the market is saturated with Edwards, so SaaS-A-Frass will need a mix of these deals to hit their revenue goals. That mix will dictate their Facebook budget.

So, if SaaS-A-Frass is willing to spend $0.18 on marketing to produce $1.00 in lifetime value (for a 11% total profit margin), SaaS-A-Frass’s can afford to pay the following for each buyer persona:

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST

  1. Steve: $315
  2. Mandy: $12,960
  3. Edward: $286,200

If SaaS-A-Frass can’t produce paying customers from a particular buyer persona at a price point below this threshold, they probably shouldn’t be marketing to that buyer persona.

However, if SaaS-A-Frass’s digital marketing efforts are currently producing buyers from each persona at these CAC (or even a CAC below these thresholds), SaaS-A-Frass can use that information to then calculate their marketing budget.

4. HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO SPEND TO REACH YOUR GOALS?

At this point, things are pretty simple. Just take your CAC, average purchase order value and average number of purchases (if you have a subscription model, you can just use the average lifespan of each buyer persona here) and plug them into this calculator!

The default for this calculator shows the monthly budget and ROI for SaaS-A-Frass, assuming that SaaS-A-Frass wants to produce $2,425,500 in new revenue from digital marketing each month and they’ve determined that to do that, they need their marketing efforts to produce 100 sales a month (90 Steves, 9 Mandys and 1 Edward).

Per our example, a new Steve pays $125/mo for an average of 14 months, a new Mandy pays $1,500/mo for an average of 48 months and a new Edward pays $15,000/mo for 108 months.

Plugging all of that into the calculator, SaaS-A-Frass will need to budget $348,300/mo to achieve their new lifetime revenue goals.

See? I told you this part is easy! To make things even better, you can use this calculator to calculate your overall digital marketing budget or you can pick a specific strategy and use it to figure out whether or not a given strategy makes sense for your business. For example, if you need a CAC of $75, but your average cost-per-click on AdWords is $25, AdWords may not be the right digital marketing channel for you.

Now, as you might imagine, this approach isn’t a perfect estimate of what it will take to hit your revenue goals. This calculator is only as accurate as the information you can give it. But, it’s a lot better than picking your monthly at random and hoping that digital marketing will produce the results you need.

How is Digital Marketing Different on Mobile?

As you can probably imagine, digital marketing on mobile is very different from digital marketing on desktop. These days, these differences are particularly important because smartphones are now the primary device people use to interact with the internet.

With 60% of internet activity taking place on mobile devices, the shift from desktop to mobile has had a profound effect on digital marketing.

Last year, Google Ads got rid of the sidebar ads on their results pages to create a consistent experience between mobile and desktop. Facebook Ads still shows sidebar ads on desktop, but only shows in-stream ads on mobile. Shorter blog posts outperform longer blog posts on mobile…and the list of differences goes on and on.

To be honest, in today’s digital marketing world, it’s a good idea to assume that people will encounter your marketing on mobile and then adapt your strategy for desktop as needed.

In addition to optimizing your ads for mobile, it’s also important to think about your site and landing page experience. Sure, your website might look beautiful on desktop, but if it’s impossible to navigate on mobile, you’ll end up alienating a significant percentage of your web traffic.

At a minimum, you should have a mobile-responsive website, but ideally, your mobile experience should be specifically designed to facilitate an effortless mobile experience (not just an adapted version of your desktop experience).

Whether most advertisers realize it or not, digital marketing is primarily a mobile experience now. The good news is, if you’re relatively new to digital marketing, you don’t have to worry about reinventing the wheel. You can start by coming up with compelling mobile advertisements and then adapt as needed for desktop.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is the marketing of the future. In addition to all of the benefits we’ve discussed throughout this article, you can track the results of your digital marketing efforts with incredible accuracy, which means it is easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work.

Incidentally, if this article has convinced you that you need digital marketing (or need to up your digital marketing game), but you’d like some help identifying the right approach, let us know here or in the comments! We love helping businesses grow with digital marketing.

[“source=disruptiveadvertising”]

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Online Marketing

Marketing on the Internet — who can benefit from an online marketing approach?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Top 15 Advantages of Internet Marketing for Your Business - EDKENT® MEDIA

Abstract

The research builds upon the literature in electronic commerce and past research in marketing with the objective of understanding factors that impact a product’s adaptability to online marketing. A review of marketing channel choice literature reveals a set of factors and channel choice functions that are considered important in making channel decisions. Using this as a basis, four major channel functions, namely, product customization, availability, logistics, and transaction complexity are considered relevant in understanding the implications for Internet marketing. By building upon previous research in the area of channel selection, we provide a means of classifying Internet marketing initiatives based on product characteristics. The classification scheme based on product characteristics can help analyze the significance of each factor on the success of a firm’s online marketing approach. Further, the classification scheme is used to discuss decision support implications.

[“source=sciencedirect”]

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Online Marketing

The History and Evolution of Digital Marketing

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The History and Evolution of Digital Marketing

In a world where over 170 million people use social media on a regular basis, every working professional is expected to be familiar with at least the core tenets of Digital Marketing. In simple terms, Digital Marketing is the promotion of products over the internet or any form of electronic media. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, “Digital Marketing is the use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to targeted consumers and businesses.”

People are consuming digital content on a daily basis. Very soon, traditional marketing platforms will disappear, and the digital market will completely take over. There are a number of advantages in Digital Marketing. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is more affordable.

You can reach a larger audience in a shorter time period. Technological advances have resulted in considerable attrition of the customer-base of traditional marketing agencies & departments. People have moved on to tablets, phones, and computers, which are the areas where digital marketers have gained the most ground.

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. The Web 1.0 platform allowed users to find the information they wanted but did not allow them to share this information over the web. Up until then, marketers worldwide were still unsure of the digital platform. They were not sure if their strategies would work since the internet had not yet seen widespread deployment.

In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which HotWired purchased a few banner ads for their advertising. This marked the beginning of the transition to the digital era of marketing. Because of this gradual shift, the year 1994 saw new technologies enter the digital marketplace. The very same year, Yahoo was launched.

Also known as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” after its founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo received close to 1 million hits within the first year. This prompted wholesale changes in the digital marketing space, with companies optimizing their websites to pull in higher search engine rankings. 1996 saw the launch of a couple of more search engines and tools like HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa.

1998 saw the birth of Google. Microsoft launched the MSN search engine and Yahoo brought to the market Yahoo web search. Two years later, the internet bubble burst and all the smaller search engines were either left behind or wiped out leaving more space for the giants in the business. The digital marketing world saw its first steep surge in 2006 when search engine traffic was reported to have grown to about 6.4 billion in a single month. Not one to get left behind, Microsoft put MSN on the backburner and launched Live Search to compete with Google and Yahoo.

Then came Web 2.0, where people became more active participants rather than remain passive users. Web 2.0 allowed users to interact with other users and businesses. Labels like ‘super information highway’ began to be applied to the internet. As a result, information flow volumes –including channels utilized by digital marketers- increased manifold, and by 2004, internet advertising and marketing in the US alone brought in around $2.9 billion.

Soon, social networking sites began to emerge. MySpace was the first social networking site to arrive, soon followed by Facebook. Many companies realized all these fresh new sites that were popping up were beginning to open new doors of opportunities to market their products and brands. It opened fresh avenues for business and signaled the beginning of a new chapter to business. With new resources, they needed new approaches to promote their brands & capitalize on the social networking platform.

The cookie was another important milestone in the digital marketing industry. Advertisers had begun to look for other ways to capitalize on the fledgling technology. One such technique was to track common browsing habits and usage patterns of frequent users of the internet so as to tailor promotions and marketing collateral to their tastes. The first cookie was designed to record user-habits. The use of the cookie has changed over the years, and cookies today are coded to offer marketers a variety of ways to collect literal user data.

Products marketed digitally are now available to customers at all times. Statistics collected by the Marketingtechblog for 2014 show that posting on social media is the top online activity in the US. The average American spends 37 minutes a day on social media. 99% of digital marketers use Facebook to market, 97% use Twitter, 69% use Pinterest and 59% use Instagram. 70% of B2C marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from brands that they follow on Twitter. 83.8% of luxury brands have a presence on Pinterest. The top three social networking sites used by marketers are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

The digital market is in a constant state of flux. A Digital Marketing professional must find ways to keep up with this change. They need to be able to keep an eye out for emerging trends and the development of newer and smarter Search Engine Algorithms. After all, nobody can afford to get left behind in this race.

Check out our Digital Marketing Course sensing an opportunity, Google began to expand, introducing such products as AdWords, which are 3 line ads that show up at the top or to the right of search engine results, and AdSense -which is a cost-per-click advertising scheme. In time, Google realized the value of analyzing the content they received and then target ads based on the interests of the users, and thus became a major player in the world of business.

Join our webinar with bestselling author and email expert Matt Bailey and gain a refresher on what email activities are ethical, borderline, or illegal, especially a year into the mandate for GDPR compliance.

Here is a video explaining how can you become a Digital Marketing Specialist. Hope you find it beneficial.

[“source=simplilearn”]

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