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WHY DIGITAL MARKETING IS ESSENTIAL IN 2020?

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It is 2020. Obviously, we need innovative technologies. We are heading forward with new digital marketing trends and hope for the best in 2020. We can never feel free and secure without being online. It is not just about social media; we can be online through various means too.

Here, about 33% of people spend their time on social media, 16% on online TV, 16% on music streaming, online press has received 13% of people, and 22% on other variety of sources. These people are also trying to use the internet effectively in order to develop the business industry. They must identify it through online tactics due to which it can show its brand to targeted audiences. This is the reason digital marketing became one of the most important parts of the business field.

Digital marketing presents every business digitally up to the audiences. Customers will be able to know about every product and service of the business of their interest and need. Brands can be noticeable only due to strong and effective digital presence up to target audiences.

This is much easier than offline and physical business. You can conduct various events and campaigns to update sales information, to present a free demo, etc. This effort helps in generating leads, conversions, customers, etc. Some of the reasons to use digital marketing strategies are described below.

Also Read: Sachin Dev Duggal’s Start-Up Is Helping To Strengthen The Digital Marketing Community

Get high-rate conversion

No other channels can beat digital marketing to generate a high rate of conversion. You can get a higher conversion rate after having forward on forming leads, number of sales, subscribers, and obviously after having maximum traffic. It can be generated after conducting online events or campaigns through various channels like SEO, SEM, SMM, etc. Thus for the advancement of any business conversion rate would be exceeded after having digital strategies in 2020.

Also Read: BOOST MEDIA- Providing High-Class Digital Marketing Services since 2011

Interact with target audiences

Digital marketing is essential in 2020 because it helps to interact with the target audiences smoothly and transparently. If you prepare a simple pamphlet or brochure for the advertisement of your business, it may reach up to a certain number of people but ads do wide advertisements. This ad proceeds to certain demographics. Ads are for them who are interested in your product and who really need you. The ads can’t go wasted if anybody doesn’t see it.  This is the capacity and power of the digital world.

Also Read: Sorav Jain: An Indian Entrepreneur Crusing Down the Bay of Digital Marketing

Brand awareness

You have to be in contact with your customers after any business contract. Communication with your customers will let you be aware of your services and if they satisfy you, customers. If you solve their problems immediately, then they will be attracted to your service and your brand will be inside the heart of those customers.

They will be sure about your dedication and attention to the business. Reputation of every business is not decreased by their brand; it would be so due to less attention of business towards their customers.  

Also Read: Oodle Defined A New Way Of Digital Advertising

Generate Better Revenues

After conducting best events and campaigns, every business organization can earn better revenues than the organization that is running without digital strategies. Digital marketing can change the pattern of marketing. Through various channels of digital marketing, you will target millions of audiences.

After that you will be presenting and informing about your service and brand to them. And finally, you should motivate those targeted audiences to be involved with you. If this continues for a long period of time, you will have you will earn continuous leas and maximum conversions.

None of the business entrepreneurs will face the problem to reach tools and services personally. You will be interacting with them through digital tools that are available in 2020. So I am saying digital marketing is best in 2020 to generate better revenue.

Also Read: Fiverr: A Two-way Platform for Selling and Buying Digital Services

Cost-effective

Digital marketing is affordable to every type of business organization because digital strategies are cost-effective. Even small business that is running their business with minimum capital can use digital marketing strategies for bests result.

This they can have better leads and conversion too. If products are advertised digitally by running them on various channels like Google, social media, etc, it would get more attention than the products advertised physically. So both small and large business organizations can use digital marketing strategies in limited capital with the best returns. 

Also Read: Daniel Hegarty: The Founder of Habito, UK’s Digital Mortgage Broker

Reach mobile users

In this 21st century, everyone is using smartphones and spent most of their time being online. Half of them discover unseen and latest brand while searching. Mobile marketing is only the way by which customers can’t ignore the advertised product.

Therefore, always focus your business to make poplar through social media, email marketing, ads, etc. Be concentrate on optimizing your website and making it mobile-friendly. Due to which everyone will be able to be updated about your every campaign, videos, blogs, events, etc.

Also Read: Gearing Up for the Future: Story of Responsive web design(RWD)

Make business trustable

There are unlimited opportunities for business but if it is not done properly, it can harm the same business badly. Through strong and effective websites, it is possible to get the trust of customers. After using your product or after getting services from your business, they feel free and confident to use your brand in the future.

Smartly.io

How Smartly is Making Millions By Giving Life to Ads

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Almost every company wants to take their business online, and if they aren’t, it is because they already are online! In a heavily digitized world, a business can stay relevant only if it can attract people online. Doing so is becoming more and more difficult due to the sheer volume of competitors online. Social media marketing is a sure-fire marketing method used by most modern companies nowadays. Let us take a look at a company smartly that made full use of this to propel itself forward. 

About the Founder

Ovaska grew up in Helsinki, studying Economics and Finance with Statistics and Mathematics on the side. He began his career as a researcher working on how Russian’s economy impacted Finland’s economic growth. He soon got restless and left to start Aaltoes.com at his university in 2008. That company became a leading university-level startup association for entrepreneurs.

Tuomo Riekki
Image Source: Google Images

It was through this initiative that he met his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki. When Tuomo’s startup ran out of funding, the duo got together to build a company. They began with FunRank before moving on to Metrify and finally settled on Smartly.io.

Past Efforts

Prior to Smartly.io, Kristo Ovaska and his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki, started Metrify, which made value predictions for gaming companies. The company began in 2012, a year that marked the beginning of the big data analytics bubble. Around that time, most gaming companies acquired customers using outdated methods and hence was not visible.

Metrify used their analytics to predict where to invest their acquisition money. Around this time, Facebook went public and so needed to make money. Facebook knew that mobile-gaming companies had the money they needed and would be good buyers. They also had the data that such companies needed, and so the gaming companies moved to Facebook.

Early Struggles

Slowly these gaming companies began to pump in money, and their advertising helped attract people to Facebook’s News Feed. This huge shift into social media advertising became Smartly’s stepping stone into the industry. The duo opened in Germany, coding and rapidly scaling their features. The company began as an eight-member team partnering with Rocket Internet. The company scaled rapidly and doubled its size every month for the next ones.

In six months, the company became profitable going international thanks to Rocket Internet. Facebook trusted the small team from Helsinki so much that they recommended them to several big customers abroad! So much so that they now have customers such as Ubisoft, Uber, and eBay, helping manage over $1.8 billion in ads.

Growth and Future Plans

The company doubled its headcount from 150 to 400 within a span of 18 months. Similarly, they expanded their office chain from seven to seventeen. The rise of Facebook Stories has also helped the company improve its visibility and reach. The company raised €100,000 in 2013, following it up with another €1 million a year later.

The company became profitable in 2015 and raised an additional €20 million, two years before. Almost 25 percent of Smartly.io is in the hands of the employees themselves. Recently, Smartly.io, raised $20 million through secondary funding thanks to Highland Europe. The company recently announced hitting a $1 billion run rate with over 500 happy customers.

 With a headquarters in Helsinki, the startup has a very Nordic working culture, which celebrates communication and freedom. The workforce hierarchy is very flat and straightforward regardless of position and seniority. Currently, the company has employees in several cities from around the world like New York, Helsinki, Dubai, and Sydney.

The team plans on expanding their creative side by offering the tools to ad teams. They have launched in alpha phase with Pinterest recently. They are also in talks with the likes of Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite : A Platform to Manage All Your Social Media Accounts

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Imagine being a food blogger, having dinner with your friends in a beautiful restaurant and putting up a story on Instagram, and at the same time, tweeting about the unsatisfactory service of that place. Well, as much as we love to keep us updated, we also enjoy letting people know what is going in our life as well. This isn’t pretty bad after all, is it? Many of us love following up the newsfeeds in social media platforms. But, there is already plenty of them, and at times, it really becomes a nightmare to manage them all at once. Some of the major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, and every nine out of 10 people are users of more than at least one social media platforms.

Ever heard of Hootsuite? People, who are smart enough, have already installed the Hootsuite app on their mobile phone, a platform that is programmed to manage all your social media accounts through a single interface. Created by Ryan Holmes in 2008, this social media management platform is serving throughout the globe witnessing more than 16 million users to date. Ryan Holmes along with Dario Meli and David Tedman launched the product in December 2008, and Holmes is still serving as the CEO of the company.

Dario Meli

Meli studied Commerce, followed by graduating with a degree in Digital Media from Vancouver Film School. He joined Invoke (founded by Ryan Holmes) in 2004 and served as co-CEO. Apart from co-founding Hootsuite, Meli is also a co-founder of BrightKit, Foodee and Quietly.

David Tedman

Ryan Holmes hootsuite
Image Source: forbes.com

Tedman also graduated from Vancouver Film School who is an Angel Investor and till date has invested in many companies like Hack Capital, FutureEngine, Hazel, Koho, Foodee (co-founder) and many more. Tedman is mainly focused on tech-startups and hence invests in the new start-ups of the tech domain.

Ryan Holmes

Growing up in a small farm in Vernon which didn’t even have electricity, Holmes really surprised the entire world with his passion-driven a successful career. Holmes started programming from a very young age and also won a programming contest in fifth grade. His first business was founding a paintball field which was followed by opening a pizza restaurant called Growlies in Vernon. But, this definitely wasn’t the aim of his life.

Holmes sold his restaurant in 1999 and moved to Vancouver and learned web development which helped him found his digital media agency, Invoke. And, it was in this agency where Hootsuite tool was built by the employees of Invoke to help the businesses to manage social media platforms for marketing. The product was built in 2008, and it detached from the parent company in 2009 after the Series A funding round.

History and Success of Hootsuite

In 2008, Hootsuite was launched as a tool on behalf of the company, Invoke, and it named the product as BrightKit. Initially, when the product was launched it helped a user to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single interface. The user interface appeared in the form of a dashboard from where one can manage all the accounts.

In November 2009, the company expanded its management for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. In December 2009, Holmes raised a funding of $1.9 million from the Series A funding round, which led Hootsuite to establish as an independent company. The investors included Blumberg Capital, Hearst Interactive Media, Geoff Entress and Leo Group LLC. By the end of 2010, the company witnessed a major success, i.e., 1 million users. The figure becomes twice in the next year, along with raising $3 million in the capital. In 2011, the company also acquired TwapperKeeper and Geotoko.

2012 was a big year for Hootsuite, as it raised $20 million from VC Omers Ventures, acquired Seesmic (one of its competitors) and reached five million users. After this fund, the company’s net worth rounded up to $200 million. In early 2013, the users of Hootsuite already reached 7 million, and in August 2013, the company raised $165 million in Series B funding. In the same year, Holmes was named one of the most powerful people of Vancouver, with Hootsuite’s growth curve not showing any downfall anytime soon.

In 2014, Canadian Startup Awards, Hootsuite was named Employer of the year 2013 with users hitting the buzzer of 10 million. In this year, the company raised around $60 million and acquired Zeetl. By 2015, Hootsuite became a billion-dollar company with more than 1,000 employees. The next year, the company made a few more acquisitions, and in 2017, it crossed 15 million users.

Currently, the company’s headquarters is based in Vancouver, Canada, and it has offices in 13 locations around the world.

buffer

Tweeting the Right Way : Success Story of Buffer

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, Product Management, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

With the Internet having expanded exponentially, in the past two decades, it is harder than ever before to keep people engaged. Whether it is a fashion brand or a blog, it is no longer easy to keep customers interested, because there is just so much competition out there. With over 124 billion business emails being sent and received every day, how do companies and brands stay relevant? The only way to stay ahead is to have the right content development and marketing strategy. Having the right digital marketing strategy can now make or break companies, and that is where companies like Buffer help make a difference.

Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich founded Buffer in 2010, and it has over the years developed to become one of the biggest players in the social media marketing management niche. The company banked over $1 million in cash recently and even raised more than $3.5 million in the capital. They have also experimented with several things, such as making the hiring and recruitment process a lot more transparent, investing in employee training and even trying out self-management. These pendulum shifts in management did not hamper Buffer but rather contributed to its growth, so much so that, it has over 700,000 users a month now.

The Founders

Being an entrepreneur is not just about mergers, acquisitions and bottom lines, but rather, it is an emotional rollercoaster that is fascinating. No story is more engaging in that aspect than Leo Wildrich’s; the man who co-founded a company that hauls in profits over $10 million a year.

Buffer founders
Image Source: flickr.com

Leo Widrich was born and brought up in the quaint Austrian town of Melk, and dreamt of becoming a professional footballer. Though a part of the football academy in St. Pölten, a knee injury at 15, saw him bid farewell to that dream and focus more on his academics. Once he was done with school in Vienna, his fellow schoolmates inspired him to go to college abroad, and so he did, choosing to attend Warwick Business School. Here, he met Joel Gascoine who, at the time, was working on a prototype for a social media management software. The two friends decided to join forces, and soon enough, the small idea grew till it became a full-time job, which made the pair quit college and move to the Silicon Valley.

Founding Buffer

Seven weeks into the company’s inception, users started paying for the service, and angel investors contributed 400,000 euros just before their personal investment ran out. Buffer, which started off as a tweet scheduling app soon evolved into a social media management app which makes over $4 million a year. Buffer now helps startups manage their Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn marketing efforts, and has turned into a kind of entrepreneurial necessity.

Initially, Joel wrote the code and Leo Widrich marketed the software. Early on, Buffer had difficulty finding a voice because most top blogs refused to air their pieces. As a result, Leo set up the Bluffer blog and began by writing the blog’s initial pieces. Starting with three articles a month, demand quickly led to him writing over four articles a week. Thus, the wheels were set in motion, and Buffer started gaining momentum. Ten months later, Buffer had more than 100,000 users, and this prompted the duo to leave for Silicon Valley to start their fundraising.

The Success

Following the shift to the US, Buffer started recruiting more writers to keep up with the demand. Over 45 writers posted as guests on Buffer, and slowly yet surely, the tribe began to grow! It was not just the number of writers that grew, but also the frequency of posting. From three articles a month, the Buffer blog now posts almost daily. They got themselves on an AngelPad platform, raised multiple rounds of funding and grew to amass over a million users. The company even acquired Respond to expand their business. Over the years, they revolutionised the industry by bringing forth unique policies that celebrated transparency and even survived a compromising hack.

Presently, the company boasts a team of over 80 employees spread across the world, working in over 15 different countries. Since their early days, Buffer has emphasized on providing a great environment for their employees, and this, in turn, has led to the great employee and customer satisfaction. Having proven their mettle time and time again, the company now helps brands as large as GitHub, Shopify, Huckberry and Microsoft do their business.

Having shaped their entire company policy around customer satisfaction and brand building, helped Buffer grow an extremely loyal customer base of over a million users. Maintaining a high-quality blog has also gone a long way in helping them keep their customers engaged. Most of their blogs now garner up to 4000 shares on Twitter, with some of them occasionally hitting 8000 shares. Hence, it is easy to see that Buffer’s success is mainly due to a well-established and thought of marketing strategy, which is exactly what it helps other companies do!

Leo Widrich’s story is so much more than just a success story, but rather is a testament to the human spirit and is an inspiring tale of pushing and discovering yourself. From travelling the world, enjoying the best of things, Widrich moved to the woods and found himself. More than anything else, this story re-iterates how important it is to stay true to yourself even when it isn’t easy to do so.

sharechat

ShareChat Raises a $100 Mn in a Twitter Led Funding Round

Leave a Comment / India, News, Product, Social media, start-up, Tech News / By

After a long struggle, India has also become home to many creative and useful startups, and even the global tech companies agree with that. Following that very fact, Twitter, one of the biggest technology company, just closed the D series funding as the lead for a four years old Indian company ShareChat.

Where Twitter led the funding, major investment brands including TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital took part in the investments, among which a few are the company’s existing investors. With the latest round of funding, the company was able to raise a $100 million, and with that, the company now values at about $650 million. Till now, the company has raised around $224 million.

ShareChat is an Indian social network that allows people to chat in the regional languages. This is the reason why despite tens of popular chat apps, ShareChat has grown to tens of million users in just four years. Twitter also sees the potential in the startup that is why it took the privilege to lead the funding for the company.

sharechat
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

There has been no statement from Sharechat on the matter. But the managing director of Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari said in a statement, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”

Twitter just appointed Manish Maheshwari in April 2019 for its India office after it started facing a decline in its growth in India. After his appointment in Twitter, Maheshwari has said in a statement, “With premium Indian content on the rise in multiple regions across the country, I believe we are scratching the surface of what’s possible with Twitter in India.”

ShareChat supports almost every regional language except English, which has been the unique feature to attract its 60 million users to the platform. And, the company has no plans to change that in the coming future. So investing in ShareChat can be a step forward for the company to expand its limits to different regions, regional languages and people from different background.

kik

Ted Livingston : The Journey of the Founder of Kik Messenger

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Establishing a new innovative start-up is the ultimate dream of every young entrepreneur out there. And, especially, if a mind has both excellent technical skills and impressive business strategies, wonders can be created. But, how many of us realize that the real voyage begins after one has accomplished his or her dreams? Because with great power comes great responsibilities. Reaching the zenith is easier than holding onto it. It is obvious that one will face ups and downs during the entire journey of success, but one must be strong enough to not give up or choose a wrong path.

Ted Livingston, founder of Kik Messenger and an incredible tech genius, was sentenced to death in 9th June 2019 for committing fraud, drug trafficking and an endless chain of illegal activities. He confessed all of his crimes saying that he did everything to save his company from bankruptcy, though the press release gives enough evidence of Kik’s short-term success. He started the company after he was rejected by RIM (Research in Motion), which led him to join the Velocity program, and finally, open his own start-up. So, let’s have a look into Livingston’s life before he hit such a massive crisis.

Early Life

Livingston was born in 1987, in Toronto, Ontario to a prosperous family. His father was a financial advisor, and his mother worked in the advertising sector. From a very young age, Livingston showed a great interest in building robots, and he joined the robotics team of his school. He went to Crescent School in Toronto and graduated from there in 2005.

Higher Studies and Early Career

Ted Livingston founder kik
Image Source: Twitter

Livingston pursued a Bachelor’s degree in mechatronics at the University of Waterloo, but he dropped out later. During his time at the university, he took part in the Waterloo co-op program and landed placements at Honda and City of Toronto Government.

In 2007, he started working as a Systems Engineering Project Coordinator at RIM, and then, as a Technical Product Management Coordinator. The internship was a part of his engineering course, and, Livingston once said about it that the best part about the internship was having a smartphone with a full data plan which was very expensive at that time.

Since he acquired a very lucrative position at RIM, during his internship, he got to work with every product manager individually and learnt a lot of new things. He was so good at his job that his boss advised him not to go for a full-time job in RIM and rather open his own company. This was all the motivation he needed, and hence, he turned down the job at RIM in 2008.

Founding KiK

Ted went back to Waterloo to complete his Bachelor’s degree, but somehow he ended up participating in the Velocity program followed by founding KiK. At first, Livingston created KiK Music, which was then known as Unsycned for RIM (later known as Blackberry). The app was connected to BBM to allow users to share soundtracks via messenger. But, KiK had bigger plans, which were blatantly turned down by RIM. So, Livingston and his team started working on the Kik messaging app on their own, and it was released on 19th October 2010.

While messaging apps like WhatsApp and Ping were already ruling the market, KiK hit one million users within 15 days of its release. Pretty impressive for an infant company, isn’t it? Though KiK was initially released for iOS and BlackBerry, BlackBerry removed it in November 2010 from BlackBerry App World followed by filing a lawsuit against KiK, which was settled later in 2013.

Success of KiK

In 2014, KiK raised $38.3 million from Series C funding followed by $50 million in the next year, thus resulting in KiK’s total worth to $1 billion. Gradually, KiK decided to raise funding in cryptocurrencies, and it raised $125 million cryptocurrencies through an ICO in September 2017.

In June 2018, Kin Coin (for cryptocurrencies) was released officially in Beta version, and in the next month, Kinit Beta App was released which was exclusively for the US residents.

Death Sentence of Livingston

The news of Livingston’s death sentence hit like an unexpected jolt to the world. He was accused of multiple reasons which included conduction of an illegal ICO, drug trafficking, prostitution and fraud. And finally, he was given a death sentence by an SEC Commission.