Effective Content Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses

Content MarketingIn this digital age, content marketing has become one of the most powerful tools for connecting with your targeted customers. Inbound marketing combines search, and social media services to exhibit your insight so as to draw more audience to your website. Top enterprise brands rely on content marketing agencies for their marketing strategies to execute on a global stage and stay organized.Many content marketing companies have sprouted up the marketing strategies to help brands educate and earn the trust of the audience. That’s why more than 80% digital marketing professionals advise business owners for strategic marketing in the year 2017 that will help increase sales and growth.Why Content Marketing Strategy.• Less expensive
• Enhance brand awareness
• Generate traffic to your websiteContent marketing is a process that requires regular, consistent delivery of focused content to increase your visibility and demonstrate your expertise. It’s important to document your marketing strategy that should include your goals, research, tactics, and metrics to get useful results.Below there are some points to go through that will make your content as the center of your digital marketing strategy.1) Make an authentic brand storyCreate content about your product or services that meet your customer interests, needs, and expectations. It is the most important part of content marketing strategy that helps to connect with your potential clients.A brand story must be real, authentic, and honest that describes your company existence, product description, brand names, titles, and taglines.If you don’t have a brand book or formal rules for preparing a brand story, begin by looking into similar brands over the Internet.2) Build brand awarenessYou can build brand awareness by highlighting the features and benefits of your product through marketing contents and promoting it on social media sites and other business sites.Writing fresh contents on your website or blog, creating infographics content, videos, animations, etc. are some of the practical ways that can drive-in traffic or convert the visitors on your site.3) Effective content marketing formatsWhile creating content, you should know the topic to write, and the format to use for business success. The content marketing formats contain the full range of contents used to resolve the customer issues at each stage with detailed information.Some of the marketing formats like blog posts, articles, reviews, video contents, newsletters, whitepapers, eBooks, etc. are very helpful in attracting new customers and closing leads.4) Monitor your sales performanceWithout appropriately measuring outcomes, you can’t know whether your marketing strategy for content is working. You can’t see the mix-ups, and can’t even recognize your chances.There are several content marketing metrics to focus on like website traffic, links, likes, shares, comments, sign-up, downloads and lead conversion.By measuring the right metrics on-and off-site content, you can easily set your objectives and desires and see the content marketing results.5) Paid Content PromotionPaid advertising platforms allow you to promote the content to a particular group of audience, qualified drive-in traffic, and leads, and develop your customer base. Paid ads are expensive and help you generate high ROI.Some of the paid advertising methods that used for promoting contents are Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, LinkedIn, Twitter, email newsletters, events, etc.Promoting your content via paid media or ads can help the targeted audience to notice your contents that result in better conversions.ConclusionMarketing will see a change towards being more customer centric rather than conceptual. People are getting hammered thousands of times a day by marketing now, and we need to make it accurate and relevant for them to take interest as well as actions. We are looking to find the niche market our customers are in rather than focusing on only what we do. These are some of the content marketing strategies that can help your online business presence.

IT Building Blocks: The Essential Elements of IT Foundation Management

Foundation Management defines the scope of a foundation by all of the technologies that contribute to the reliable, secure and compliant operation of the business. This definition requires ITFM to embrace all technologies regardless of who made them, what they are, or where they physically (or virtually) reside. All organizations have hardware and software from different vendors in their I.T. Infrastructure and most organizations have a mix of technology platforms. Because of this, Foundation Management cannot be achieved without the ability to bring any type of technology under systems-based management.The specific scope of a given Foundation is most often determined by the flows of information that are available and relevant to the achieving of a business goal. That business goal can be anything that is important to the business.In addition, ITFM is an essential part of the strategic CIO’s game plan behind providing the kind of leadership that addresses CXO concerns and supports the executive business role of the CIO. Foundation Management is a key imperative to protecting the organization’s Brand, delivering customer satisfaction, increasing margin, and by decreasing litigation and regulatory penalty vulnerability.In this regard, Foundation Management serves to protect the organization from the occurrence of negative events that can lead to financial loss or reportable negative incidents while creating the forensic evidence to prove such events or incidents never occurred in the first place; shutting down misplaced, frivolous or opportunistic threats.Flows of Information
ITFM recognizes that IT devices – both hardware and software – can produce information about their operational status, health, and activity in a number of different ways that often require specific technical capabilities in order to interact with that information. To meet this challenge, Foundation Management defines the management scope as “all flows of information relevant to the business goal at hand.”The “flows of information” concept enables ITFM to embrace a much broader set of technology than infrastructure or systems approaches do traditionally do – increasing the organization’s ability to perform proactive response to conditions that can adversely affect business operations before the adverse affect actually occurs. This also opens the technology management practice to devices that are not normally considered part of the I.T. infrastructure though they are imminently relevant to business goals.Non-Traditional Devices
By extending the scope of ITFM to technology traditionally not considered part of the I.T. Infrastructure, any other device (hardware or software) that can “talk” can become part of the Foundation Management strategy.For example, building security systems that may be an important part of an organization’s security and compliance practice can be incorporated into the Foundation. Fire alarms, power supplies, power delivery systems, lighting and HVAC may also be relevant and be incorporated into the Foundation to support systems reliability, threat detection, risk mitigation and cost management strategies.The same may be the case for industry-specific devices such as medical equipment or distributed utility systems with “smart” controllers capable of generating flows of information. The discerning factor in Foundation Management is not so much what purpose a device services, but whether or not it can produce a flow of information, and if so, is that flow of information relevant to the business goal.Location Independence
Considering that the scope of Foundation Management is driven by the flows of information that are available and relevant to a business goal, Foundation Management naturally extends across geographical boundaries. For Foundation Management to serve its purpose, both devices and people must be engaged in the Foundation wherever they may be – including multiple physical device locations, Cloud Computing centers, and people any where an internet connection exists.This even extends to virtualization where virtual machines “move” under the virtualization paradigm to different physical devices as needed to balance load and efficiently use available resources. Foundation Management makes no assumptions as to where devices, applications or data resides. Instead, Foundation Management acts from the perspective that the devices, applications and data that form a Foundation must be managed as a coherent whole regardless of where they are, where they were or where they may be in the future.In respect to people, Foundation Management meets the need for experts to provide Foundation oversight, conduct routine operations and perform remediation on the Foundation as a whole – or any part there of – regardless of where the expert is physically located. In this way, Foundation Management is able to reduce the cost of managing the Foundation with remote monitoring, management and remediation; provides the I.T. organization the tools it needs to develop a solid Foundation Management strategy; and supports even the most complex outsourcing scenarios with ease.Building Block – Real-Time (milliseconds)
The term “real-time” no longer has a definitive meaning that can be referred to when this term is used. Instead, the term “real-time” must be defined for each use-case where it is employed.For Foundation Management, that use-case is an elapsed time in milliseconds for detection of events that have occurred – applied across the entire Foundation.This is necessary in order to ensure that the Foundation can detect the events that are likely to affect the reliable, secure and compliant operation of the business early enough to perform remediation that in most cases can avert a disruption to business operations.Early detection often leads to remediation that is far less costly than the more extensive remediation efforts required to address issues in advancing stages of disorder or breakdown.Further, Foundation Management recognizes that the process of Detect, Diagnose and Treat (for all devices in the Foundation) must be optimized to the greatest extent possible to maintain Foundation health. Foundation Management embeds an optimized business process for Detect, Diagnose and Treat in order to minimize the cost to support the Foundation while providing the highest service level possible.Building Block – Forensic Evidence
Underpinning the entire concept of Foundation Management is the need to create comprehensive forensic evidence of events and actions. This is essential to the goals of security, compliance, and systems reliability.The term “forensic evidence” is used to denote records that are universally time-stamped, digitally signed, and system recorded. Further, these records must be unalterable – so that they can serve as demonstrable and definitive evidence of what has actually transpired within the Foundation as a whole and on each and every device within the Foundation.In Foundation Management, forensic evidence becomes a “living history” of the events that have occurred and actions that have been taken in relationship to these events. Foundation Management provides a baseline set of records that directly support the organization’s compliance and security objectives.The importance of this aspect of Foundation Management cannot be overstated. These records are the front-line defense of the organization in protecting the organization from regulatory penalties and opportunistic litigation – situations that routinely have a high associated cost to the organization for combating these threats and an exorbitant cost when the organization loses to such challenges. For example, class-action lawsuits regarding data privacy can easily reach into the millions of dollars.Building the forensic evidence of events and actions that occur in a Foundation provide that definitive set of records that can shut down opportunistic ligation and regulatory compliance probes cold. Not only does Foundation Management create these records, it also serves as the front-line defense to ensuring that the organization does acts in a way that meets operational requirements and resolves potential threats before they can become costly incidents of record.Including actions (documented down to the keystroke) in the forensic evidence strategy makes Foundation Management a closed loop system of record. While events tell part of the story, the actions that people take complete the story of what really happening and provide the organization with the transparency required to meet even the most aggressive litigation threats and stringent compliance requirements.

Baby Boomers Have Retirement Regrets

If you were born between 1946 and 1964, then you are officially in the baby boomer age group. That being said, during the year 2010, all baby boomers were turning 46 to 64 years old! Are you part of this oh so famous group, if so, Jeanie Ahn of Yahoo Finance wrote in an article today that if you talk to enough baby boomers or new retirees about what they wish they could do differently, chances are many of them would mention a retirement plan do-over of some kind.
And even if you’ve managed to build up a sizable nest egg, executing on the right way to withdraw those funds is just as important as saving. Crucial mistakes along the way can jeopardize the money you’ve worked so hard to save up.

Below are some of the costly mistakes Dorrell says you can avoid:

Regret #1: Relying on your pension

Two summers ago, I think I got about 55 phone calls from clients who expected that they would continue to get a pension from [their company], and all of a sudden they were getting called to a retiree meeting where they were being told: “Here, we’re going to just cash you out,” or, “You can continue with an annuity with this company that we’ve partnered with, but we’re not going to do it anymore.” Others have said, “It’s your responsibility to invest it or put an income stream to yourself from it.”

My advice for people who are left with a bucket of money is to invest it safely. The last thing you want to do is put that money in the stock market and risk it – that may mean back to work you go! And who wants to do that in their 60s?

I would suggest safe bank-insured investments like CDs or money markets. If you can stomach a longer-term investment for a better return, then utilizing a fixed index annuity with an income rider to guarantee an income for life, similar to a pension, is recommended.

Regret #2: Having too many accounts

The most I’ve seen is 16 different retirement accounts at different institutions. It becomes overwhelming. So while they’re trying to have this nest egg, what ends up happening is they have a bunch of scrambled eggs. They have things all over the place and they laugh when we talk about this, but it is a source of concern because they just tend to not open those statements.