In one of my articles about Marketing in the Metaverse, I wrote; “I am not sure what will be left about meaningful human interaction if a substantial part of our day-to-day life will be conducted virtually. That will depend on whether virtual reality is better than reality.
But since we now care about nothing else other than profit-making, the metaverse has mouth-watering promises to businesses”.
“Being in the real world is very important, but the metaverse is about making quasi-real in the virtual world, and I can’t see the point of doing it,” he said
You would rather be a polished avatar instead of your real self? That’s essentially no different from anonymous messageboard sites. Headsets would isolate you from the real world, and I can’t agree with that. Headsets are simply annoying.
Ken Katuragi
He especially finds the idea of wearing VR and AR headsets in order to experience the metaverse “simply annoying”. The 71-year-old Kutaragi believes that people would rather have tech blend in with the existing reality.
I agree with him. If our agreed mantra is to be “realistic with oneself”, then the metaverse may not be such a good idea. Because it separates you from reality.
What do you think of the Metaverse? I personally think each one of us will have to wait and find out whether a “polished avatar” of you is better than “the real you”.
Business intelligence is among the most powerful tools that any business can use. They help companies stay ahead of their competition, as well as optimize potential revenue streams. In addition, it enables you to organize raw data into something that offers easily accessible information you can use to make decisions.
Having the right BI and BI tools can give you the edge you need to win, especially with your sales and marketing. Here’s how business intelligence can empower your sales and marketing and what you can do to take full advantage of it.
Business Intelligence Increases Organizational Efficiency
Business intelligence is more than simple analytics data, software, and the tools that come with it. When it comes to sales and marketing, you want everything to run like clockwork. With the right intelligence, you can create data to help with a more efficient workflow with your team.
BI provides leaders and teams the ability to access data that gives a complete overview of their organization. This data includes the company’s operational capacity, processes, systems, and ability benchmarks of every department – even every employee.
With a holistic view of how the entire organization runs, teams can develop efficiency models and improve company workflow. Some adjustments here and there might mean nothing to some companies, but they can transform into a few percent increase down the line.
BI Powers Data-Driven Decisions
Company-wide business intelligence is crucial towards data-driven decisions. No company can survive randomly guessing what’s the next move, where to optimize, and what direction they need to go. So instead, successful companies use data to predict the company’s direction, from financial data to customer data to even productivity analytics.
Marketing, for example, needs accurate market data to understand customer segments. They need business intelligence to identify proper verticals and the opportunities that come with them. For sales, you want data on customer trends, buying cycles, and even the churn rates that you have.
With the data for these areas in play, management can decide where to focus their efforts. It can help them make decisions based on numbers and insight, like the geolocation of where products sell the most or which ones to discontinue.
Sure, over-reliance on data to make your decisions can be problematic, as it can reduce the agility you need to react to your market. This makes it essential for any company to understand how to make the most of their BI and use it as a starting point for creative problem-solving.
Business Intelligence Helps Increase ROI
Return on investment or ROI is a must in any organization. No department can survive without proving to the company that any ROI is generated from their team, so business intelligence offers such data to them. In the same vein, marketing and sales teams need BI to align with organizational strategy to improve their income generation and reduce costs.
BI enables companies’ marketing and sales to set crucial key performance indicators (KPI) and metrics for success. When these align with the company’s strategy, teams will get precise results on their performance and see adjustments needed to improve ROI.
Business intelligence helps boost return on investment by aligning marketing activities, processes, solutions, and outcomes with established strategic objectives. This helps drive accountability within the team and identify areas where business efficiency can be further improved.
Sales teams can also use BI to analyze how the organization’s manufacturing process works. By doing so, they can create predictive models that align supply chain decisions with existing demand, helping maximize production efficiency when it’s needed.
BI Tools Create Powerful Data Dashboards
Companies who use business intelligence rely on dashboards – reporting tools that aggregate analytics information to enable teams to monitor and adjust business practices. They communicate insights and show anything that the team needs to be concerned about, especially trends that can help improve marketing and sales.
The right BI dashboard can help collate all the data you need, combine them into a data warehouse, and answer queries as required by an end-user. This will help with better reporting efficiency down the line and condense pages upon pages of information into a single page snapshot.
Business intelligence dashboards should also help cut your marketing team’s analysis time by a significant margin. When it does, it can communicate how the business is truly performing and increase your team’s informational awareness. It can also assist in visualizing complex relationships between KPI and their real-life viability.
Business Intelligence Enhances Customer Experience
Customer experience is king when it comes to sales and marketing teams. Business intelligence impacts this experience, as well as customer satisfaction towards products and services. This fact comes from several vital touchpoints that every team needs to keep tabs on.
For example, BI can help educate customers regarding details that most clients are not privy to. If a customer contacts you, chances are they already have the information they need to shop around for better products and services. Business intelligence can help you leverage what the customer truly wants.
BI also helps you track sales that you win and lose and service experiences within your organization. In addition, you’ll find detailed reports on market trends, market segments, and shifts in trends that will tell you which patterns lead to better customer satisfaction down the line.
BI Identifies Fresh Opportunities And Helps You Act On Them
Business intelligence gives marketing teams an insight into the company and knowledge of its own capabilities. A marketing team that knows what the company can and cannot do and its potential can show the right message the company needs to deliver. In addition, BI helps identify market conditions and see where new opportunities exist.
To gain a competitive advantage, a company needs to know what trends are going upwards and respond to them faster than the competition. Agile marketing practices rely on down-the-line decisions, as well as reduce potential flanking. Data from BI helps decision-makers react as swiftly as possible without fear of crucial mistakes.
With correct reactions to market trends, it helps the organization identify the most profitable customers. Marketing teams can retarget their efforts with little hesitation, while sales teams can adjust their conversion paths. It anticipates customer needs and provides the best possible time to enter and exit a market.
The Bottom Line
Business intelligence in sales and marketing can be crucial in articulating strategies that work. It will help build business roadmaps and create data that will generate measurable ROI down the line. BI is beyond a buzzword – it is a systematic way of decision-making that can spell success or failure for your company.
Sophia Young
Sophia Young is a Content Writer and Copywriter who recently quit a non-writing job to finally be able to tell stories and paint the world through her words.
The importance of social media marketing for small businesses has increased substantially in recent years, as more and more companies look to get their message out to as wide an audience as possible.
Let’s be honest, Instagram is one of the top social media channels without a doubt. But as a small business owner can you use this platform to get the best results?
Yes, you can. It’s no secret that Instagram has become a channel used by some of the largest companies in Tanzania. And these large companies have used their brands to push themselves to the next level and dominate the space on Instagram.
Currently, Instagram seems to be the latest and greatest way to market your business. However, it’s still a challenge if you don’t know what you’re doing. This is especially true if your business is relatively small.
Small business owners have a lot on their plates, doing everything they can to stay in business. One important task that often gets neglected is marketing their business online
The main reasons why small businesses should consider using Instagram for marketing are; building your brand, helping people understand your business, and connecting with new customers.
Is there a way for the little guy to get in the action? Yes, this post is written specifically for small businesses to help you determine how you can use Instagram to grow your business, and avoid some of the common traps that other small businesses have fallen into when trying to use Instagram to their advantage.
1. Start with your bio
Did you know, it takes less than 7 seconds for someone to see your bio?
Your bio is the first thing that potential customers see on your profile when they search for you.
We all want our brands to be approachable, relatable, and memorable. This is why bios are so important – not only do they help create an emotional connection with your target audience, but they also make finding you online easier. When people read your bio, they have a better idea of who you are, what you do, and what makes you different from everyone else.
The best way to fill your bio is by being authentic. Make sure you use real information, such as brand name, rather than making an impersonal bio.
Even if you think your bio is perfect, just re-write it a couple of times until it’s better suited for the role you want to play.
2. Find your ideal customers.
One of the best ways to find your ideal customers is to look at user accounts on Instagram and look at what they post about the businesses they’re following.
You can even analyze which accounts they follow based on the types of posts they send out, the images they post (e.g., product shots, promo photos), and the keywords they use in their captions. This is a powerful analytical tool and it can help you find the right Instagram followers for your business very quickly.
3. Create content
You know your target audience, but do you know what kind of content will make them engage with your brand on Instagram?
Content is king. If you want to drive leads and engagement, you need to create content that addresses their issues and concerns.
Whether it’s about their favorite sports team or their latest fashion trends, make sure your posts are designed to engage with your audience as effectively as possible. Bloggers who create content regularly are more likely to see higher engagement on their accounts.
4. Post-high-quality photos
The trickiest part of creating product photos isn’t thinking about what you want the pictures of your products to look like.
It’s thinking about how you will get the product photograph right. When you take a group photo of all your products, everyone looks like they belong in the same photo.
But if you all take different pictures of the product separately, with slightly different lighting and angles overlaid on top of each other – no one looks like they were taken at the same time.
Don’t worry, you don’t need professional skills or even a good camera to succeed. Your phone creates magic with this simple application; Adobe Lightroom, Canva, Pixlr, Inshot, and PicsArt.
These are applications that are very simple to use and edit your content through your smartphone.
5. Use hashtags
You want your Instagram posts to be memorable and easy to share, so use Instagram hashtags that will help you stand out from your competitors.
Be strategic about how you use them. For example, don’t use the same tag three times in a row. Or choose one that’s highly popular among your users.
The key is knowing when to use them and when to avoid them. First make sure people are using them, stay relevant to the brand and create branded hashtags. Also, monitor competitors and key industry figures and use event-specific hashtags.
The proper using hashtags in your social media drive more people to your page. Also, it interacts with your content and expands your brand presence.
Conclusion
With the right Instagram marketing strategy, you can make your business look more professional and generate more leads. This means more sales and more money in the bank!
There is a lot that can be done by simply creating an Instagram account for your small business but it’s not enough to just pop out a picture with your company logo on it and call it a day. There are so many Instagram accounts out there and so many ways you can promote your business with just a few clicks of Instagram.
More and more people are using Instagram to discover brands, learn about new products and services and connect with others who share the same interests as they do. For this reason alone, it’s worthwhile checking into how Instagram can help your business grow.
This article was written by Nasra Mohammed, a Digital Marketing Specialist at Bridging Technologies Ltd.
The introduction of Facebook Shops could be the end of e-commerce websites as we know them. On Tuesday, May 19, 2021, Facebook launched Shops. A new e-commerce feature aimed at helping small businesses create shops on Facebook and Instagram where they can upload their catalog.
This will bring an Instagram shopping tab, shoppable live stream, and more.
The shops will be powered by third-party services such as BigCommerce, woo-commerce, and Shopify. It is clearly Facebook is aiming to turn the social network into an all-in-one shopping destination.
In a Facebook Live, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are seeing a lot of small businesses that never had an online business get online for the first time. He also added,” if you can’t physically open your store or restaurant, you can still take orders online and ship them to people.
This innovation has come at a perfect time where there is a surge in internet use with people looking for things to buy online while staying at home.
What does this mean to e-commerce websites?
It’s obvious that Facebook is eyeing big on e-commerce by bringing dawn to social shopping. The platform comes with features to enable a user to complete payments within Facebook without the need to leave the platform.
Could this be the death of e-commerce websites? If people will be empowered to shop and engage with their friends within one place, what will happen to classified platforms and other e-commerce sites? The competition will take an entirely new heightened level.
But here is the thing, while shops are free you’ll probably need to spend a few dollars to push your products to reach more buyers. In this case, you probably still need to list your product on other established buy and sell platforms.
Reaching people on Facebook isn’t free anymore, you can prove that by observing the dwindling engagement in Facebook pages.
Facebook Shop has begun to roll out in the USA, expecting to reach other users sometime this summer.
In 2022, Google will eliminate third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. Something which Safari and Firefox have already done. But what does this mean for marketers?
Third-party cookies have been key drivers of the advertising economy for the past two decades. At Tanzlite, we have benefited from a wealth of user information from people visiting our websites and used such information to create personalized content and ads —thanks to cookies.
But with cookies gone, what will be the alternative for the advertising industry?
One thing is clear, that advertising as we know it will change. It will be difficult to personalize ads and retarget users as we used to.
But What Are Cookies?
Cookies are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer or phone when you visit a particular website. Their main purpose is to improve your experience with the website.
The two most important types of cookies;
First-party cookies: These are stored by websites. They enable these websites to remember a user’s settings and they can significantly improve the user experience. These cookies will not be affected by the changes we are talking about.
Third-party cookies: they are created and stored by external sites, and not by the site the user is visiting. They can track the user as they move across domains and retarget them with personalized messaging.
What is Driving These Changes?
As privacy concerns continue to rise in the online community, cookies have caught the attention of lawmakers and regulators. Businesses are now required to keep transparent data records.
According to a study by Pew Research Center,
72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms, or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits.
Cookies have been enablers of various tracking techniques that have contributed to people losing trust in the online world. This has also led to an increase in Adblocker usage and a shift to privacy-focused browsers like Duck Duck Go.
What Will Happen Next?
Advertising existed and thrived for decades before data technology came into play. This realization gives a relief that marketers will find another way. There is no need to worry.
Besides, tech giants such as Google and Facebook (who rely on advertising revenue) will surely find an alternative.
Facebook for example benefits hugely from personalized ads (retargeting) that are backed by third-party cookies. Google, on the other hand, is already cooking out some privacy innovations that will be effective alternatives to tracking.
Africa’s internet economy is growing FAST! It looks like we are a few steps away from reaching the Africa we want. The new report by Google and the World Bank’s IFC has just foretold that.
According to the report titled e-Conomy Africa 2020, Africa’s internet economy is expected to reach $180 billion by 2025. Which will account for 5.2% of the continent’s GDP.
The booming population, urbanization, improved internet infrastructures, and a growing number of tech talent are among the factors for the promising internet economy in Africa.
Currently, Africa is home to 700 000 developers and venture capital funding for startups has increased year on year for the past five years, with a record $2.02bn in equity funding raised in 2019, according to Partech Ventures Africa.
“The digital economy can and should change the course of Africa’s history. This is an opportune moment to tap into the power of the continent’s tech startups for much-needed solutions to increase access to education, healthcare, and finance, and ensure a more resilient recovery, making Africa a world leader in digital innovation and beyond,” said Stephanie von Friedeburg, interim managing director, executive vice president, and chief operating officer of IFC.
Africa’s Internet economy is transforming development on the continent by fostering economic opportunities, creating jobs, and providing innovative solutions to complex challenges, like access to healthcare, education, and finance.
