Advantages of Social Media Marketing

In the world of business, marketing is essential. However, in our new digital age, traditional marketing is becoming increasingly ineffective, and a new form of marketing is on the rise. Because of its many advantages, social media marketing has become an almost essential part of any business’s attempt to establish a firm footing in today’s competitive market. When considering the pros and cons of different marketing methods, think of all the time and money that was traditionally spent on marketing your products or services, and compare it to what it now costs to market your business on social sites.

Originally, businesses paid out of pocket for advertisements on television, billboards, or in newspapers. Eventually, these strategies came to the point where they were not cost effective in the least. Of all viewers of advertisements, only one to two percent actually contacted the distributor and was interested in their product. Why was this? One of the most interesting advantages of social media marketing is that when viewing television, advertisements often irritate and interrupt viewers, causing most of them to be uninterested in the advertised product. With social media, the targeted audience not only watches the advertisement, but also participates in it.

Participation is a key advantage of social media marketing. Online, people willingly participate in activities and blogs that market your company for you. When the customers become involved with your business or company, they not only care about your products, the come to care about your business. Social involvement with customers usually leads to an increase in clientele and customer satisfaction.

Another advantage that comes with social media marketing is that online advertising with sites like Facebook is one hundred percent free. You no longer have to rent a billboard or air time on the television or radio. You do not have to pay for ink and paper and distribute fliers about your business. You can do it all electronically and be much more productive. Almost every human being, in the United States at least, has heard of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Most of them have profiles. By marketing your business online, a completely new world of advertising opens up.

With all these advantages, a business almost cannot survive in our world without internet marketing. The best thing about it though, is that it is affordable, effective and can work for anyone. Any business, no matter how small, can effectively market itself online.

Advantages of Digital Catalogs For Your Business

Business are ready to shift gears from old marketing techniques to digital media and content for brand promotion using digital catalog mediums such as websites, newsletters, mobile and tablet apps, CDs and e-mail. Business owners dream of establishing the products and services on top of the niche and trade.

Technology comes in a plethora of media tablets, mobile applications and solutions, capturing the hearts of business owners and entrepreneurs, highlighting the advantages of digital catalogs in business regardless of its size.

Consumer’s Benefits and Convenience

A business using digital catalogs like an iPad application or any type of mobile platform provides benefits and convenience to consumers. The heart of every business is to provide customer satisfaction.

Using them in business as a distribution channel to provide services and sell products will gain effective customer interaction. Consumers can access products and services, anytime and anywhere in the world. No hassle, fast delivery, easy navigation and secured system will build loyalty and interests.

Maximum ROI

One of the advantages of digital catalogs in business is the maximum return of investment. Instead of the traditional marketing communications such as newspapers, yellow pages, radios, and billboards that cost an insurmountable amount, a business using an iPad application for virtual catalog will save a significant amount of printed and distribution cost, and it can penetrate into larger audience both local and international.

Brand Awareness in Social Media

When they are combined with rich media and content are able to open the key for brand awareness. Various industries from apparel, real estate, home improvements, fashion, beauty and more leverage on the influence of social media.

Consumers who can access digital catalogs for shopping and browsing products and services can share their engaging and rich experience via social media. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ buttons pinned up to sites and virtual shopping stores can build your brand in broader audience.

Real Time Tracking

Another advantage of digital catalogs in business is the real-time tracking of performance and publications. Using them in business allow you to record and track the end-user’s buying patterns and habits in iPad apps catalogs with virtual shopping store. A business using a system can improve the weak areas of the company.

The real-time tracking system in digital catalogs analyzes the visitors’ behavior and records. Some points that can help the company strengthen the weak areas on total hits, geographic location of visitors, purchased products of consumers, frequent purchase products, click on advertisements and sales agents tools and stock inventories.

Advantages of Promotional Duffel Bags

Are you trying to promote your business through a fast method and you also want your product to reach far away areas but limited budget is restraining you from doing so. Well then it is important for you to know that expensive marketing is not the only way for promoting your business. A wise idea can become a good alternative for all those expensive marketing schemes.

Using promotional products for your business promotion is a really good option. Using this idea for your business promotion is an effective way of promoting your business in a limited budget. It is not the only advantage of using promotional products for the promotion of your business but there are several other advantages too. Practical application by using products for the promotion of your business will surely do much better than just an ad in the newspaper or a one-sided campaign.

When you are thinking of using products for promoting your business, how does the idea of using promotional duffel bags for this purpose sound like? Well if you choose these bags for your promotion it is surely a wise choice as this choice of yours offers a great deal of advantages for your company. Here is an overview of some of the advantages that you will get by using bags as your promotional product.

One great advantage of using these as your promotional product is that these are the products which are of great demand in the market and people always need them for different purposes but the branded duffel bags available in the market are quite expensive so many admirers of duffel bags do not get the delight of having duffel bags as these bags are out of reach for them. So if you are using promotional duffel bags as your promotional product then you can provide many admirers of duffel bags with the delight of having duffel bags. So this is of great use for you as it will flourish your brand’s image through one to one advertisement at a wider level.

They are also useful as they are used for carriage by different people to different places like at a picnic or for a travel tour or to gym. So when people carry your promotional duffel bags to far away areas your company’s name will also reach those places in an effective way without you putting much effort for it. And in this manner this wonderful product can publish your logo in different parts of the world.

Now if you are thinking of ideas how to make your promotional duffel bags more and more popular as they can only be popular when they are used more and more by people. You really don’t need to worry as there are many methods for this too. For example you can distribute in a gym as people coming there use quite frequently.

So now when you have to choose a promotional product which can promote your brand’s name at a wider range, you surely know which one to choose.

Advantages of Office Furniture Liquidators for Sellers and Buyers

Offices and businesses own a large amount of furniture in the form of cubicles, desks, chairs, sofas etc and they cost a lot of money. After sometimes, the company may decide to remove the existing furniture and replace it with a new one so as to redesign the office or giving it a totally new look. Companies may also want to get rid of the furniture if the business is downsizing or if the business is coming to an end. Merging of two businesses also results in rendering a significant amount of furniture useless.

Keeping an unused inventory wastes a lot of space and it is also liable for taxes, so it is best for the companies to do something about it.

What Can Companies do with the Old Furniture?

A company can get rid of the furniture either by throwing it in the trash, donating it, or selling it to some new company.

  • Throwing in the trash: If the furniture is still under working condition, then throwing it in the trash is not a good idea. It’s true that the value of the wood decreases with time, but it still has some significant value which can be helpful in recouping a part of the investment which the company made in buying the furniture.
  • Donating the furniture: This can be seen a charity work and it does provide some tax benefits. But many times other businesses, even the new start-up ones, don’t want to feel like they’re dependent on someone else’s charity, and so they don’t want donated furniture.
  • Selling the Furniture: Selling of the furniture can be done either by the company itself or through a furniture liquidator. If the company decides to do the business itself, then it will have to spare some time and delivery cost in order to finalize the deal. Liquidator firms, on the other hand, undertake all the removal and shipping processes and they also provide a better bargain as compared to what companies can get itself.

    Liquidation firms also have cubature trucks which make transportation of furniture easy.

    It’s true that the companies won’t get any tax benefit by selling, but the value they’ll get will far outnumber the tax benefits.

What are the Benefits for the Buyers?

Strong and durable woods are not cheaper, and buying new furniture for the office can swallow a huge portion of the budget. Buying used furniture at low costs can help businesses, especially the small and new ones, save a lot of money.

Also, new and customized furniture takes at least six to eight weeks before getting delivered. This time can be saved by buying used furniture from a liquidation firm.

Environmental Benefits: If the furniture is still usable, then throwing it in the trash is certainly not good from the environmental point of view. Also, buying new furniture means more cutting of wood. Liquidation of furniture can save the environment by accumulating less wants in the landfills and by preventing the cutting of the trees.

Advantages of Review Sites Templates

We all know that designing review pages is a relatively hard and complex job which requires a lot of your time, skills and patience. And a lot of people do not have all these three requirements in the right combination, so having a ready-made review site templates offer just the perfect solution to their problem.

A lot of internet marketers have now realized the power of review site templates. No doubt about it, it really has the power to help you earn some serious income. And it is affordable compare to other page designs by the professionals. You can still be into professional-made pages, however this will require a large amount of money and sometimes the designs does not fits your expectations, and luckily there is now a ready made review site templates that can be use. We must know first the advantages of review site templates before we get into it. Here are some of them:

1. The ready made review site templates are easy to use and very affordable. If you are just starting out on your internet marketing, or do not have funds to finance you projects, this is the best for you. You can customize it in just 1o minutes. With customize-made sites, however, you may need to wait for weeks just to have your site ready. And you are not sure if they capture your ideas correctly for your site.

2. Hundreds of designs are available to choose from. You can design your own page on your own, unlike if you hire a professionals, they might not give the exact design you wanted.

3. The review site templates are fully customizable. You do not need to worry if your site will look just like the others. You can tweak it any way you like to come up with something unique. Most of the websites that sell these templates offers a lot of add-on features that you can use to make your site stand out from the other. Most of these are also compatible with most HTML type website editors so you do not need to worry about it, too. Just make your site unique and the best.

4. And lastly, most of the review site templates have a professional look. It is better that your site will exude an air of authority and credibility. Otherwise, your business will fail. No one wants to do a business with amateurish looking site. So, eve if you are not professional designer, you can still have a professional designed site.

You just need to exert effort on your site. Think how can this will affect your business. Even though you are not professional in designing a site and make it looks good, well, it is now possible for you, because there is a ready made review site templates available.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Tutoring From a Business Perspective

Technology has improved significantly over the last 20 years to the point where it is now quite easy and cost-efficient to provide tutoring services online. While many independent tutors and tutoring companies view this as a favorable change in the industry it also poses many threats to existing businesses. Many articles look at the advantages and disadvantages of online tutoring from the perspective of the student – this article will explore this topic from the perspective of the tutoring business.

Advantages

The availability of technology for online tutoring is most advantageous to new tutors or tutoring companies that are not yet established in the market. Online tutoring requires low start-up costs, it opens the tutor up to a much larger market and offers more flexibility for scheduling. Let’s take a look at each of these advantages one at a time:

Lower barriers to entry

Although many independent tutors also have low start-up costs, if you are a tutoring company and decide to go the online route, you can avoid many of the expenses associated with starting up a traditional tutoring company. Traditional companies often require an office for administration or where tutoring takes place, marketing through local media, driving to meetings to prospective clients, etc. Online tutoring companies do not require an office other than a home office and definitely do not require a building for teaching students. Online marketing is lower cost and can be targeted more directly than traditional marketing, and talking with clients can be done online or by phone. These low start-up costs make it much easier for new businesses to start online.

Larger market

Traditional tutoring companies are limited by geography – they cannot cost-effectively serve students outside of their geographic area due to time-constraints related to transportation and the cost of transportation. For this reason, tutoring companies have much smaller markets and can only enter new markets by adding new locations. Online tutoring businesses do not face this limitation. They can reach anyone with an internet connection and the only real limitation is language. For this reason many individuals prefer to start an online tutoring company so that they can reach a much larger market. This can be a very good strategy if your company teaches a highly specialized subject that would not have enough people locally to support the business.

Tutoring companies can also hire tutors from a much larger area and may be more successful in finding top-quality teachers in the subjects they offer.

Flexibility

Online tutoring companies have more flexibility since they can choose to teach students in different time zones. Tutors that are only available to teach in the late evening can easily teach students from a later timezone where it is afternoon. This makes it easier for independent tutors to fit their tutoring into their personal or work schedule.

Lower operating costs

The ongoing operating costs of running an online tutoring business are also lower than traditional tutoring. Some of the eliminated costs come in the form of building leases, phone, transportation and marketing. Online tutors can do everything from their home, they can use free or low-cost online phones like Skype for communication and they don’t have to spend money driving to the tutoring office or to clients’ homes.

Disadvantages

Many of the advantages of online tutoring can also pose challenges for tutoring companies. We’ll look at the disadvantages below one at a time.

Lower barriers to entry

Low barriers to entry make online tutoring attractive to new tutoring companies, but for incumbents this is a negative since it makes it easier for new companies to enter the market and compete with them. This ultimately leads to more price competition and lower profit margins.

Competition from other markets and other countries

Online tutoring overcomes the geography barrier which is also a disadvantage for existing tutoring businesses. This means that instead of facing competition only from tutoring companies in their immediate market they now face competition from tutors in other parts of the country and in other countries all-together. Many online tutors are from countries like India where the cost of living is much lower. Thy can teach American students online and charge a rate that is still much lower than standard rates in the United States, yet still well above the rate they would earn for tutoring in their own country.

Technology limitations of students

While most people have a personal computer at home and internet access, many students who need tutoring do not have the required technology to receive online tutoring. In addition to a computer, a high-speed internet connection is ideal, a headset and microphone are needed for talking with the tutor, and hardware such as a writing board may be required depending on the subject. This means if your business wants to provide only online tutoring there will be many students that you cannot reach.

Effectiveness

While online tutoring can be effective, there are certain subjects where face-to-face communication and explaining concepts on a sheet of paper are more effective than communicating online. It can also be more challenging to keep students engaged when tutoring online, which can have a negative effect on the student’s progress.

Online tutoring creates both opportunities and challenges for tutoring businesses. By understanding and evaluating these challenges, tutoring companies will be better prepared to respond to them and adapt their business strategies to the changes it brings the industry.

Advantages of E-Learning & How To Create An App For It

Education is no more confined to the walls of schools and educational institutions. With the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, it has now become possible to facilitate learning experiences online and beyond the boundaries of schools and institutions.

eLearning has been gradually grabbing up space in the apps market and the reason is the widespread education industry. There’s literally no limit to the number of categories, learning fields, languages, or cultural peculiarities involved in it. Besides, students or young learners are striving hard too to do better than others. The idea of eLearning apps is to help them compete in the rat race by letting them read, learn, and absorb knowledge beyond their textbooks. However, getting an app developed is not that easy and instant. You need to decide first who will be the audience. Kids, young students, and grown-up are the user groups that can benefit from an eLearning app. Second, you need the conceive the idea or purpose of learning the app will serve. It can be about providing reading experiences (of any course materials, books, etc.) video-based learning, online aptitudes, tricky riddles and question-solving, language learning and many more.

If you’re thinking about making your entry to the education industry with one purposeful learning app, here is a guideline.

Decide the type of leaners to target

Among the three defined users groups, decide whom do you want to help out with your app. The kind of app you want to develop depends on that. For instance, if it targets kids, consider focussing on puzzle solving, numbers and alphabets learning through games, or elementary topics learning with fun interactions. On the other hand, engaging young scholars and adult students mean getting the app featured with any online tutorials, practice sets, eBooks and study materials, online conference or discussion form, or learning videos by teachers.

Consider the features of your eLearning app

To make your app fun as well as engaging to the users, make sure you incorporate the most interactive features.

  • Gamification: It avoids making the learning experience dull. Gamifying the learning process with rewards, badges, or power points will make the experience fun-filled for the learners.

  • Cloud storage for the database: There should be a secure database in the form of cloud storage from where learners could quickly access all whatever information they need.

  • Virtual classroom: In whichever category your app belongs, make sure it offers a virtual space where learners could come together and interact with each other. Besides, the classroom must be having writing tools, whiteboard, video recording, and share features.

  • User account and dashboard functionality: Make sure your app should enable students to maintain an independent user account, where they could keep track of their learning courses, tests attained, videos downloaded, etc. in a dashboard.

  • Other features: Try implementing other interactive features speech-recognition, social media sharing, push-notifications, and multi-language support.

Consider monetisation approaches to earn from your app

After settling with your eLearning app idea, it’s time for you to decide how to make money with it. Effective monetisation approaches that will let you earn some good returns are in-app purchases, freemium policy, paid subscription packs, and partnership with schools and big educational organisations. Taking with app marketers will further help you in monetising your app and can even help to optimise your app store submissions.

Hire a mobile app development firm

Lastly, to assure the success of your eLearning app and make it really big as your contribution to the education industry, partner with a competent adept mobile app development company. Surely, you need a team having technology expertise in both iOS and Android and experience in widespread app categories to kickstart your app idea.

Entrepreneur Advantages and Disadvantages

Entrepreneurs enjoy the freedom of making their own business decisions and becoming their own bosses. In addition, they also gain the stability and control that could never be achieved as a regular employee. If you have been dreaming of becoming one of these entrepreneurs, you should find out the disadvantages and advantages of taking on this role.

Advantages of Entrepreneurs

Excitement: compared to being regular employees, entrepreneurs enjoy much excitement beginning from the planning stage of the business up to development and realization. Thrill-seekers obviously love being entrepreneurs as they are exposed to too much risk. You should never forget, that all business risks that you agree on taking, should be calculated.

Salary Potential: most people who are employed generally feel that they are not being compensated for the work they do. In addition, they must follow the salary structure set by their employers. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, earn money that is commensurate to their efforts.

Flexibility: having control of work schedules and commitments makes the life of these entrepreneurs enviable. They are able to take vacations anytime and spend much quality time with their families.

Independence: for people who love the idea of not being answerable to anyone else but themselves, becoming an entrepreneur would surely be wonderful. They would be able to make decisions without the pressure of getting fired.

Disadvantages of Entrepreneurs

No Regular Salary: when you start a business, you should be prepared to leave behind the security of having a paycheck each month. Even successful entrepreneurs experience lean months when all financial resources are being taken up by the new business.

Work Schedule: although they have the luxury of a flexible schedule, entrepreneurs also make sacrifices especially during situations that require them to work longer hours. Unlike regular employees who are not worried too much about the status of the business, entrepreneurs must make sure that everything is going well.

Administration: because they own the business, all major decisions are made by entrepreneurs. This is quite a burden and handling such responsibility is quite difficult. Every decision directly affects the future of their businesses and avoiding costly mistakes is imperative.

After comparing the advantages and disadvantages, you will have to decide if you can realistically handle all the responsibilities of owning your own business aside from being prepared for all the risks you have to take. But if you look closely, being an entrepreneur is still desirable especially with the sense of fulfillment and accomplishment they gain from beating all odds and overcoming all challenges. As long as you have passion and commitment, you will be able to handle these disadvantages beautifully.

Advantages of Niche Business Marketing

The best way to achieve success on the Internet is to find a niche business market and research that market to find out if there are people searching for that product, the cost of the product, the delivery of the product (digital or by mail) and what kind of affiliate tools are available.

You don’t have to create your own product at first, so you are going to be selling someone else’s product. However, before you do that, you have to do some keyword research to find out what people are really searching for. You can use Google AdWords Keyword tool to do so.

Can you define niche marketing?

This is the smaller part of something bigger. In marketing terms, that means a small group of people in a certain group who would be looking for your product.

This is what niche marketing in general really is. However, here are some examples to help you to understand better.

1. If you are selling baby diapers, your niche market would be parents who have just given birth.

2. If you are promoting canvases, your niche market would be artist and not a building contractor.

3. If you are marketing hammers, the reverse is true that your niche market would be building contractors and not the artist.

4. If you are selling a book about menopause, your niche market would be women over 50 years old and not men.

5. If you are doing a promotion about starting an online business, you need to find out the different forums that newbie marketers hang out and not where the guru visits.

I hope this explains and helps you to understand what is niche marketing.

Advantages of niche marketing

This has many advantages, but the one that stands out more is the fact that you are targeting a specific group of people who are already hungry buyers. That makes your work much easier than just putting up a product and hope that someone buys it.

Once you identify your audience, you will then go ahead and search for an affiliate product that your audience will want to solve their problems. So you have become the middle man – the person who listens to the need of your prospect and find the exact solution to their problems.

You would then go ahead and begin to do research, write articles with valuable information and submit then to article directories. Put up a blog or squidoo lens and put information daily on these portals that will help your target audience to find some of the immediate solutions they will need. This will let them begin to trust you and then they will buy from you. It is that simple.

Beginners’ Guide – Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

We all are beginners at some point. For the beginners the biggest challenge is to know the advantages and disadvantages of Social Media. Today we are going to talk about the Social Media – Advantages and Disadvantages. Many small business owners have not yet taken advantage of social media to help grow their business. It has become so vital for us to stay connected and convey the right message. To get the best out of this platform here are some tips and guidance for the beginners to know.

First of all some facts and figures of social media sites:

  • One in every nine people on earth is on Facebook
  • Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users everyday
  • One in four Americans watches a video online everyday
  • During the second half of 2010, LinkedIn membership base grew, on average, by 1 million new members every ten days

Connect: Facebook helps you connect and share with people in your life. Just think what was your life before Facebook invented? Was it more relax, exiting, boring or challenging? In Facebook we can create a personal profile, add other users as friends & exchange messages. If we talk about LinkedIn, it gives us the opportunity to connect with professionals across the globe. Whether you are using it for personal growth or spreading your business. It also gives you the opportunity to connect with business minded people like you. If we talk about Twitter, it is simply amazing! Twitter is a real time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas what you find interesting. It gives you an opportunity to know what’s happening around the world in 140 characters long tweet!

Interact: With your connections Facebook gives you an opportunity to let people know about you. You can share your photos, stories and create fan page. As a business, Facebook pages are a good source of feedback on your product/services. In LinkedIn you can interact with professionals on one single platform. You can discuss business, resources, ideas, learning opportunities and lot more. In Twitter, tweets are text based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the followers. On a personal level Twitters allows one to communicate with friends and families. On business level it connects your current & potential customers with your product & service.

Exchange: With the use of Facebook, we exchange joy, fun, sorrows, help and many more things at one place! Facebook slowly also being used like email. So this is one of the cost-effective ways to connected. With the use of LinkedIn we exchange professional expertise along with useful information which eventually enhances our professional brand. It also exchanges stronger business ideas with each other. On a business level, it helps us to exchange feedback, comments which eventually lead to increase business. On a personal level, it helps you in personal development. Twitter is a powerful tool for exchanging information and news as Twitter user often link to useful sites or articles & can be source of alternative news.

Disadvantages: As we discussed the Advantages of Social Media but we cannot ignore the Disadvantages just to be more secure on online platform.

Think about the viral potential of media. When news are negative and bad in taste, the same will happen with that brand. It is hard to undertake damage control when you are dealing with social media. Your name might get spoiled within hours. The best example is MacDonald’s Twitter promotion. According to Mail Online news article – Mac Fail! MacDonald’s Twitter promotion backfires as users highjack hash tag MacD stories to share fast food horror stories. Opponents accused the burger franchise of making customer vomit, serving pig meat from gestation crates and dishing up a burger containing a finger nail. Another disadvantage is to face threat from fake profile and ID. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of Facebook. People often use fake profile to insult or harassing someone. Students who are Facebook addicted do a bad result on his or her exams. One of the major risks of social networking and the Internet in general is breaches in privacy. These sites collect considerable amounts of personal information, with email addresses being one of the most collected pieces of personal data. Also these social networking sites possibly reduce persons’ compassion. You can check Twitter updates from your phone and send messages from anywhere. Social networking sites have the potential of having spreading negative or Anti-social messages. Amongst

As discussed above there are both Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Networking. One thing is clear; it is up to the person how he/she wants to get benefit from Social Media platform. In life we are often subjected to good and bad choices it is only we ourselves, who can decide what we want.

Exit mobile version