The web may have broken down many geographical barriers. But a raft of cultural and communications challenges remain for SMEs targeting international growth… Reaching and engaging with international audiences demands an intimate understanding of their cultures and customs, laws and languages, practices and tastes. Browsing the local Rough Guide simply isn’t going to cut it. But how many would-be international marketers really take this truism to heart?
Shouting about innovation won’t get you sales. Rather, B2B marketers must define and demonstrate their ‘value proposition’: their new products’ true value to customers. The trick is to engage with those customers from the outset…
Technology is rapidly and fundamentally changing the way most people do their jobs, disrupting the nature of work and increasing the demand for new kinds of digital skills…. The impact can be felt in all kinds of jobs. Gone are the days of copywriters simply writing copy, for instance. Now they also need to be familiar with search engines and social media to know what will make their work more.
Why ‘doing it yourself’ can be worse than not doing it at all… Business leaders are, by their very nature, DIYers. That’s not to say they spend every spare moment prowling the office corridors, spanner in hand: even the most sanguine of entrepreneurs would draw the line at servicing the company boiler. (Well, hopefully.)
Ever feel like your business is driving you, rather than the other way around? If so, you may be suffering from a Goal Alignment Problem – aka GAP…
How the world’s leading auction site is transforming terabytes of raw data into valuable business insight: helping it better understand its customers, improve satisfaction levels, and maximise sellers’ profitable revenues… At any given point in time, with around 350 million items listed for sale, eBay stands or falls on its ability to harness, analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from 10 petabytes of raw data it holds in its Hadoop clusters.
Social media misconceptions: These days, most firms acknowledge the need to incorporate some form of social media into their marketing – not least because, well, “everyone’s doing it”. And no wonder. Facebook alone provides an online home to 2.6bn active users (Source: Statista,2020).
“Content Is King” It was the 3rd of January 1996 when Bill Gates coined the phrase ‘Content is King’.
Effectively harnessing the enormous quantities of data your business accumulates day-to-day can help you get ‘up close and personal’ with your customer base – delivering razor-honed messages and offers directly to the most narrowly defined ‘micro’ market segments. It’s over three decades since former Hewlett Packard CEO Lew Platt remarked, “If only HP knew what it knows, it would make three times more profit tomorrow.”