How to Choose a Digital Marketing Training Course?

Do you miss attending your school? I certainly do.

It’s not like we don’t learn much stuff at work – because we absolutely do. But there are times, one misses listening to a lecture, compiling notes and most of all, learning boatloads of new skills.

Given the pace at which new technologies are disrupting the marketing space, it can sometimes feel overwhelming for marketers to try to keep abreast their knowledge by only subscribing to online resources. That’s where classroom learning comes in.

I realized that you, my dear readers, might have a few skill gaps that need to be closed to attain these feats on a daily basis. So, I wanted to share a few tips on choosing a digital marketing course in this blog post.

Why take up a Digital Marketing Course?

There is a rising demand for digital marketing experts, who can transform the online businesses and formulate smart digital strategies to connect and engage with customers effectively and show some significant ROI on their marketing investments.

Learning new digital marketing concepts and selecting the best digital marketing course might be a bit tough process. Since professional digital marketing courses can help marketers learn better, plan and execute better, while advancing their careers, it’s important to take up a Digital marketing course. Whether you are a beginner or an ace digital marketing professional, taking up a digital marketing course:

• Gives you a competitive edge over other digital marketing professionals.
• Boosts your market value to attract employers looking for marketing magicians.
• Strengthens your core concepts in marketing.
• Improves your overall personality and confidence level at work.

How to choose Between a Beginners Level and Advanced Level of Courses?

Modern-day digital marketers are expected to be well versed in a bunch of skills, including content writing, social media marketing, marketing and sales alignment, analytics, and more. But unless you’re ready to put in quite a few years of your life earning a degree in each discipline, you need a much quicker and more effective route to fix your skill gap and keep you relevant in the market.

Beginner’s Level: If you’re simply kick starting your digital marketing career, you need a professional digital marketing course that gives you a basic primer and familiarity covering introductory digital marketing, search engine marketing, search advertising, display advertising, mobile, social, analytics, and video marketing.

Advanced Level: If you’ve spent a few years in the digital marketing industry and now want to advance your career and become a T-shaped marketer (a term commonly used by Rand Fishkin of Moz), you need an advanced level of professional course in digital marketing that helps you specialize in one or two particular skills such as SEO or analytics or Copywriting.

Modern Consumer’s Buying Behavior Has Changed: Has Your Marketing?

5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … Skip Ad > >

I so hate this drill, especially when I hop on to YouTube to watch a Tom Cruise video. I literally despise these pre-roll ads. These ads are so annoyingly right in my face.

I didn’t log in to YouTube to watch a father scolding his son for losing his laptop and then the son buying a refurbished laptop from a popular ecommerce website (Ad Name: “As Good as New”). Though I’m an online shopaholic but at my own convenience and desired time. I mean I don’t love that shopping portal enough to come in between Tom Cruise (virtually) and me and hamper my video-watching experience like that.

I hate such brands that do NOT seek my permission and expose me to their marketing messages hundred times a day. This triggers a barrage of questions in my mind about their marketing strategy (and their marketers in particular!).

I feel so fortunate as a marketer in my career to have seen traditional marketing getting redundant and less effective in the last decade and subsequently wiped out by permission-based marketing in last 2-3 years. According to an Adobe study, marketing has changed more in the last 2 years than in the last 50 years.

As marketers, we need to acknowledge and respect the fact that with technology adoption gaining pace with each passing day, people are are getting better at blocking out these interruptions.

• TV ads…We’ve TiVO/DVRs to skip advertisements. I so love Netflix’s House of Cards, free of advertising.
• Radio ads…Users have XM/Sirius Radio/Pandora/Spotify to cut their advertising reach
• Unsolicited (cold calls)…Fortunately, we’ve national Do Not Call Registry.
• Spammy emails ….I routinely employ spam filters.

As a matter of fact, a large number of organizations are still not convinced about the merits of permission-based marketing for two reasons:

• Their otherwise expensive outbound methods have fetched results for them so far. So new approach means new risk to revenues. And, not many are risk takers.
• Permission-based marketing requires investment in terms of resources, effort, time and money. And, most of all, PATIENCE for long-term rewards.

So, such brands resort to “spray and pray approach” and thus still do “batch and blast” email campaigns and pray for leads online. And when the results do not pour in, it feels like as depicted in the picture below.

I love this brilliant quote from Dharmesh Shah, cofounder HubSpot

“Market unto others as they would market unto you” –@dharmesh#INBOUND15

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) September 9, 2015

The bottom line is that people are now wary of traditional outbound marketing messages and adept at blocking outbound marketers out. Netizens now learn about and shop from brands in a new way – through search engines, blogosphere and social media sites.

To be successful in today’s times, we need to match our marketing mannerisms to the way our prospects gather information and shop for our products.

How?

Generate leads through #Inbound marketing and target customers with relevance marketing.

Options for marketers:

Marketers either need to adapt to the changing shopping behavior of customers or risk extinction. Only mantra for success: GO #inbound

— Raina (@rainamtrivedi) October 24, 2015

Top 3 Personalization Strategies for Non-Retail Applications

2014 was an incredibly exciting year for mobile apps. With a huge advantage of personalization that mobile apps offer over mobile websites, even the most well-known  brick-and-mortar stores have geared their attention to developing more mobile applications in 2015. Using these apps, these stores successfully leverage proximity functions like geolocation, push notifications, etc.  to deliver mesmerising personalized experiences to shoppers, who so obsessively clutch their smartphones these days.

Many personalization platforms today emphasize primarily on retail mobile apps. But non-retail mobile apps can also keep their user community engaged. Read this post further to explore the different personalization strategies that work greatly for non-retail apps.

Many developers feel reluctant to dive into creating apps for non-retail businesses fearing from the exercise of collecting humongous customer data and developing big algorithms. Nevertheless, it’s a myth that we will debunk in this post.

Here are the top 3 personalization strategies for non-retail content.

1. Geolocation content

This is one of the great ways to personalize content. As majority of smartphones have in-built geolocation features, you can easily target users with newsfeed and even connect them with other users in proximity with same interests. One of the brilliant examples to quote here is that of iBeacon that enables mobile apps with its Bluetooth Low Energy technology to understand the location well and deliver relevant and contextual content to user based on location.

2. Recommendations

The better you understand a customer, the better and more educated recommendations, you can offer to your customers/online store visitors. You can extract useful information from your customers during the sign up process or even later interactions with your website. You can use this information for effective customer profiling when they start downloading and using your mobile app. You can track your customers across:

• User sign up process
• Browsing history
• User generated content like tweets, comments, favorites, likes, etc.
• User preferences
• Ratings and reviews

Once you’ve these data points, you can design a better user experience for your customers. Using the user feedback when they browse through your mobile app, you can refine your app further.

3. UGC

Often, etailers commit the blooper of looking upon personalization as a duty to deliver user experience. Personalization also entails the content and contribution of users to shopping environment. While you take all the necessary steps to offer personalization such as collecting customer data, monitoring their interactions with your ecommerce website and accordingly offer relevant and contextual product recommendations to them. You can let users contribute to your personalization strategy through a mobile application. Your private labelled application can serve as a powerful platform for users to connect and engage with your brand, pitch their opinion and experience. This will empower your users to generate their own personalized content and experience.

Let’s take the example of Gaana.com app, a beautifully designed mobile application that makes it easy for users to discover music from the best collection of national and international playlists. Here users take the music listening experience to a new level by creating/modifying playlists depending on their genres/moods.

Such mobile apps enable users to feel valued and ask for their contribution to make it more interesting a platform to visit and revisit to generate more user generated content and get their varied needs addresses on the online platform. It offers them highly personalized experiences.

Open Source: Hype or Hope?

It’s no secret that a paradigm shift from early-adopter novelties to mainstream essentials has taken place on the technology landscape over the past few years. Still there are many traditional tech stalwarts out there who aren’t leveraging the Open Source. So when technology evolves at a faster pace than your company, you run the risk of going extinct. If you’re yet to embrace it, the time to dive into the brave new world of Open Source is now.

Essays by O’Reilly and Searls clearly underline how Open Source  is continuously impacting the technology landscape (but for better!). These informative pieces also emphasize the growing need of adding context to Open Source so that it continues to evolve and positively influence the technology landscape.

Developers are the New King Makers

One key point to highlight here is that Open Source has empowered developers to an incredible degree. It has opened the doors for them to numerous software projects, absolutely free of cost besides giving them the power of controlling the code, applications and complete underlying infrastructure, like never before. The future of the Information and Technology industry gyrates around empowered and agile developers (major credit to Open Source there!). Employers that will recognize the developers’ empowerment and their growing prominence are highly likely to have an edge over those that don’t. It’s a new reality!

Stephen O’Grady, Co-founder of RedMonk

Stephen O’Grady rightly says this:

“Developers are now the real decision makers in technology. Learning how to best negotiate with these New Kingmakers, therefore, could mean the difference between success and failure.”

Right Pick for Your Business

Today, we’re at the cusp of BIG changes on the technology landscape, where mega-trends are changing the way companies do software development. If you own a small business, you’re often cost conscious while aiming to deliver value through your software. Open Source is the perfect pick for you in that case – quite literally, it’s 100% free of cost – all inclusive of accounting software, email servers, operating systems and lots more.

Open source is easy to use and backed up with a solid code, ensured by multiple individuals working on the software. For example, Linux has nearly 10,000 contributors. Its documentation is easily available and there are plenty of guides and literature available on Open Source on the Internet. You can also customize it to match your needs and gain that much needed competitive advantage.

Here are a few best Open Source Software:

• Product Management: Magento, osCommerce and Zen Cart.
• General Purpose: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

More a Social Activity Now

Contributing to open source software is now increasingly becoming a social behavior. This social media activity (Search + Social Media = Social Development) promotes increased transparency, productivity and a brand new style of software collaboration.

Conclusion

If you and your organization are mulling over the plans of joining the army of the increasing number of empowered social developers, now is the time to start. Get started with Open Source today!

Mobile Persona – What’s that?

To adapt to the ever-evolving mobile ecosystem, enterprises need a holistic mobile strategy that unifies disparate systems and works well now and in future too. Building a holistic enterprise-wide mobility strategy requires you to understand your mobile personas (suppliers, customers, employees and partners) – their needs, goals, behavior patterns, preferred devices and technologies across various business functions such as sales, customer support, marketing, etc. The more information you pack into your mobile personas, easier it’d be for you to incorporate relevant mobile capabilities for each of your target personas. 

Studying mobile personas in detail will help you generate a fantastic user experience attuned with the functional requirements of users and empower them with these mobile-enabled capabilities to optimize performance, boost customer acquisition, retention and delight, and drive business growth.

Why Putting Personas First?

Technology and market forces are the two important factors that drive enterprise mobility. With enterprise mobility focusing on front-user interfacing apps, many brands have switched on from traditional emailing to addressing the end user’s mobility needs with persona-based mobility solutions.

With multiple mobile personas for enterprises to handle, enterprises have a gargantuan task of crafting mobile strategies and applications for different platforms and programming languages.  44% of U.S. enterprises are mainly focused on building mobile applications for native devices (e.g., iOS, Android, Microsoft), and 39% that are focused on mobile Web development.

New Persona-based Mobility

The brave new world of mobile interactions has resulted in new mobile business models that focus on fetching competitive advantage for the organizations. Most mobility use cases focus on:

• Understanding customer behavior from multiple angles
• Delivering enhanced customer experiences
• Boosting employee productivity on the go.

It’s no secret enterprises love data, especially when it’s about its different user profiles in this increasingly mobile world. This persona-based data is actionable and there’s nothing sounder than user-centric mobility decisions. As the enterprise successfully crystallizes the user personas, it becomes easy for them to decouple relevant business contexts and build different mobile use cases. This mobile persona building exercise filters the relevant business functions that match up to the specific personas and discover new entry points to serve all users effectively (with security as an essential element across all functional areas).

The success of any persona-based mobility gyrates around the User Experience (UX). With UX packed into productivity tools such as enterprise apps (for sales, CRM, marketing, etc.) and customer apps, enterprises can deliver enhanced productivity for employees and superior customer experiences (like small price tags, easy-to-use and safe payment systems, etc.) for customers, respectively.

Truly mobile users do not like to see the whole dog ‘n pony show. So, mobile engagement across specific points holds vital significance for brands of all sizes today. Leveraging mobile persona data available and predictive models, enterprises can add personalization and intelligence in apps to deliver a great UX for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-employee (B2E) apps.  Many new B2C apps have rich, built-in personas with apt mobile functions integrated to cater to specific user activities in situational needs. Each app must have a unique UX in accordance with each persona’s interaction expectations and mobile behaviors.

To address the mobility needs of each persona, enterprises need to understand the various user profiles and their relationships and behaviors w.r.t different business processes (like talent management, sales, delivery, etc.) and subsets. There is a huge difference in developing and deploying mobile capabilities for enterprise-based and consumer-based relationships.

Evolving Challenges of Enterprise Mobility

With mobility adoption rising more than ever and enterprises leveraging mobile apps to connect with their users, traditional security architecture is not reliable anymore and IT dreads data leakage and security breaches. More than 50% of enterprises support more than one device type thereby exposing the internal network to a wide array of malicious apps.

The three prime factors that contribute in posing enterprise mobility challenges are:

• Proliferated use of mobile devices and apps
• Rising levels of mobile access & unrestrained data sharing across multiple lines of business
• Highly fragmented mobile device platforms

With all these factors working in full force, most enterprises suffer from the below listed challenges of enterprise mobility:

• Security
• Cost Management
• Legal
• Compliance issues
• Enterprise Applications

To address these evolving mobile challenges, enterprises today needs to look beyond lock-and-wipe capabilities and embrace a holistic enterprise mobility model to secure the enterprise across all devices, databases, applications and network.

Conclusion

Today, many enterprises worldwide are grappling with their existing mobile strategies, marred by unworkable expectations, unclear requirements and erroneous organizational policies. Amidst this new wave of mobile capabilities, these enterprises are struggling to adapt and leverage mobile opportunities. The time is right for them to rethink and restrategize their mobility model using a persona-based approach.  It’s critical to recognize the fact that persona-based mobility is not simply an institutional fad.

In fact, it’s a strategic approach to manage mobile environment for different user profiles in your enterprise. Not only, does it change the way your different personas (customer, employees and partners) interact with your brand/offerings, but also helps your enterprise gain competitive edge, enhance business value, productivity and customer satisfaction, while cutting the total cost of ownership. However, these enterprise mobility solutions should be designed focusing more on user experience and core business functions. Wearable technologies will have a significant role to play in the future of Enterprise Mobility as wearable technology and context are inter-linked.

Roses as Gifts: Perfect choice for any or special moment(s)?

“The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.” – George William Curtis

So true.

Are you tired of sending or receiving same, boring fruitcakes, cookies or eggnog as birthday or anniversary, Valentine’s or farewell gifts? Think about a gift that you would love to have in your hand and has a complete, unique story to tell. A gift that is highly likely to bring a smile to every receiver’s face. Yes, you’re right! It’s flowers.

While most (almost all!) flowers are beautiful, the rose stands out owing to its immense beauty, varied colours, subtle fragrance and rich history. Roses add emotions to silent messages of love and covey the right meaning to the receivers by virtue of their varied colours.

So if you’re a sender, you need to be extra careful in choosing the colour since every colour of roses has a traditional meaning that speaks volumes about the emotions of the sender (that’s you!).

Read on to find the meaning of each colour of rose.

Red Roses

Love, Respect, Passion, Power 

Red roses signify true love and romance. Since time immemorial, red roses have been playing a significant role in conveying the sentiment of deep love, respect and passion and spicing up the relationship to an incredible extent. It’s a perfect gift to surprise your partner with a bouquet of red roses on any or every occasion – be it your first date or her birthday or wedding anniversary. The fact that their prices shoot up exponentially on the Valentine’s Day are a testimony to the value it offers to the senders and receivers, alike. Red roses are also a symbol of courage and power.

Yellow Roses

Friendship, joy, new beginnings 

Yellow roses are a symbol of platonic love devoid of romantic depth (simply put, friendship bundled with joy). From olden days, yellow roses have been used to cheer up people, express gratitude or convey the message of get well soon. Yellow roses are a perfect gift to send to new mothers or achievers congratulating them on their recent success or show your care and affection to your loved ones. Yellow roses also symbolise the grit to set up something new.

White Roses

Purity, Innocence, Spiritual love, Loyalty 

As we all know, white colour stands for peace, pristine purity and innocence. Hence, white roses symbolize chastity, spiritual love, innocence and virtues like unending loyalty. A bouquet of white roses forms the bridal bouquet all across the world. These white rosessignify that the bride is ready to commit her undying love and loyalty to the groom. They are rightfully called as bridal/wedding roses. White roses are also looked upon as a mark of reverence.

Pink Roses

Beauty, Grace, Elegance 

Pink roses symbolize beauty, refinement, deep affection and grace. These roses have deep significance and can be commonly seen embellishing bridal arrangements. The sender can easily convey congratulations or admiration to the receiver though pink flowers. These also symbolize the heart-felt appreciation and respect from the sender to the receiver. These lovely roses also are a symbol of fun, sweetness, innocence, elegance and alacrity.

Orange Roses

Intense desire, Fascination, Energy 

Fiery orange roses symbolize different tones of meanings – fire of passion, intense desire, fascination and energy. These brilliant orange roses compete with red roses in infusing passion into romance. If you’re fascinated with someone and wish to express your feelings to him/her, orange flowers can serve as the best carriers of your intense desire for that loved one. You can also gift orange flowers to anyone admiring him/her on recent accomplishments.

Now that you know the true meaning of the different colours of roses, it’s time to choose the colour that is apt for the occasion and send over a lovely bouquet of those roses.

Enterprise Mobility: Is it a Winning Proposition in 2015?

For years, enterprise mobility was related to email, some flashy apps and corporate-issued devices. And during this phase, most organizations considered mobile as simply an extension of the desktop. But now with corporate mobility momentum picking up, companies are beginning to realize the potential of mobile more strategically by understanding varied business contexts and embracing a persona-guided approach. This evolved mobile approach addresses the needs of all user profiles effectively inside (better employee productivity) and outside (better customer engagement) the organization.

Let’s have a look at what Mary Meeker (also dubbed as the “Queen of the Net”) has to say about mobile internet usage. As per her recent predictions, mobile internet usage is picking up noticeably faster than desktop internet usage did and by 2015, “more users will connect to the internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” Businesses that will catch up on this trend will win, and those that overlook it will lose.

Mobility isn’t just an add-on capability; it’s much more than that. It encompasses apps, and devices, software platforms, architectures and databases. As an enterprise, you can’t continue with your piecemeal methodology for managing the mobile environment any longer. Since every persona (employees, customers and partners) represents a unique context, the mobility needs are diverse.

The IBM survey of 600 companies across 29 countries unravels an astonishing fact – only 50% of the companies (with more than $500 million in annual revenues) have comprehensive, strong mobile strategies in place to address the challenge of mobility implementation and leverage mobile opportunities fully. Enterprises, should, therefore start looking at mobility through a persona-centric lens and adopt a holistic mobile business model to drive high performance and gain competitive advantage.

Out with the Old

Mobile revolution has completely gripped the IT landscape and blended into nearly every aspect of your business. This ubiquity of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices and consumerization of IT have urged enterprises to adapt to a dynamic environment in which they need to support employees, customers and partners – all with unique set of mobile requirements. Hence, it’s critical for organizations to incorporate all key drivers of mobility into their strategy to optimize the required business functions and applications.

Enterprise (B2B and B2E) vs. Consumer mobile applications

Technology and market forces are the two important factors that drive enterprise mobility. With enterprise mobility focusing on front-user interfacing apps, many brands have switched on from traditional emailing to addressing the end user’s mobility needs with persona-based mobility solutions.

With multiple mobile personas for enterprises to handle, enterprises have a gargantuan task of crafting mobile strategies and applications for different platforms and programming languages.  44% of U.S. enterprises are mainly focused on building mobile applications for native devices (e.g., iOS, Android, Microsoft), and 39% that are focused on mobile web development.

To address the mobility needs of each persona, enterprises need to understand the various user profiles and their relationships and behaviors w.r.t different business processes (like talent management, sales, delivery, etc.) and subsets. There is a huge difference in developing and deploying mobile capabilities for enterprise-based and consumer-based relationships.

 

 

 

 

 

Enterprise Mobile Applications

• Not commonly found in app stores; most enterprises get their own apps built
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Utilitarian; simplify the business processes
• Loaded with ultimate security features (passwords, encryption/decryption, MDM)
• Native or cross platform (facilitating BYOD) compatible mobile apps
• Focus on boosting employee collaboration and productivity, targeted marketing
• g., CRM apps, marketing and analytic apps, sales force automation, collaboration apps, technical computing apps, payroll apps, etc.

Consumer Mobile Applications

• Easily available in app stores
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Packed with emotional designs to attract customers
• Loaded with generic functions and data
• Standalone app or integrated to a backend
• g., Social-based applications, combined mobility applications, geo-mapping services, edutainment apps, mobile wallet, etc.

The Time to Tap the Power of Personalization is now!

As fast as the modern retail environment continues to advance, the competition is getting really tougher. The multiple device types and screen sizes customers use to shop online add to this complexity even further. This has posed some intense challenges in front of e-sellers to adapt to the changing customer shopping behavior and engage with them across this myriad range of omni channels. Almost 200 million US consumers shop online now; an increase in 20% in just half a decade.

Now the question is – should emerchants like you to get personal with customers? The answer is – it’s time to get started right away! Many online retailers have witnessed a significant spike in metrics after they personalized shopping experiences for customers they serve. According to Forrester, personalization is now the top priority for 55% of retailers. Here are the some supporting statistics to understand how customer behavior has fueled this trend:

• 59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on a personalized online retail store.
• 56% are more likely to visit again the same retail store.
• 40% indicate they buy more from retailers, who personalize the shopping experience.
• 51% are willing to share data to receive a better shopping experience.

(Source: http://tinyurl.com/lge3kck)

Personalization in ecommerce store can be equated with a customer’s interaction with the sales staff in store. On repeat visits, the sales executive might know and understand your shopping preferences well, and can help you with your shopping next time you visit the store or even pre-emptively notify you of the discounts or new arrivals. This creates a long-lasting shopping experience in your mind.

Replicating this kind of memorable shopping experience forms the core of personalization in an ecommerce store. This is significant for both – the retailer and the customer. However, personalization can be successfully accomplished only by those e-sellers, who can skillfully use personalization algorithms to their advantage.

Retailers can segregate their personalization plan into different phases that include:

• Navigational personalization
• Customer-specific personalization
• Personalization using third-party data
• Predictive personalization
• Catering to a segment of one

(Source:http://tinyurl.com/opk44m9)

Retailers can practice personalization everywhere across the complete spectrum of customer’s shopping journey:

• Email messaging
• Website messaging
• Social media messaging
• Mobile marketing
• Packaging
• Customer support, etc.

As customers’ choices vary, each ecommerce store aspires to connect and engage with every customer individually by using recommendation tools or custom product-building tools. Modern retailer see personalization as the key to unlocking the door to a shopping experience that customers can remember and cherish, and maximizing ROIs for retailers and improving business performance manifold.

Does Content Live in a Silo? Hell NO!

The whole marketing industry is going crazy behind Content Marketing these days. But what actually content marketing is? Does it make sense to say that it’s a strategy to use content for great marketing results. But that’s not what it is.

Content does NOT live in silo. It only fetches results for businesses when used in combination with other marketing channels and innovative marketing practices. It’s one of the planets of the vast inbound marketing solar system. Confused? Read further.

Content can fall flat on its face (or be ineffective)  if NOT used with:

SEO – Many marketers think content marketing is all about creating more content and the easiest way to do that is through regular blogging. However even great content can deliver no value, if it goes unnoticed or if your target audiences are not able to find it. SEO is a surefire way to ensure that your remarkable content gets found and read by the right set of people i.e., your target audiences. Marketers should ensure that the helpful content that they create must be optimized well for keywords used by their target audiences to locate certain products or services on search engines. That’s how content attracts organic traffic.

Social Media – With social media euphoria gripping humans across all age groups, geographies and business sectors, almost every brand wants to tap this huge real estate and engage with their target audiences across varied social media channels. For enhanced content reach and visibility, it needs to be distributed imperatively across relevant social media sites (only those where your target market hangs out frequently). Popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. are the online avenues, where readers love to share the infotaining content that you create. Hence as a smart marketer, make it easy for them to do so by integrating social media sharing buttons in each content piece that you push out on the Web. Not only does it increase your content’s reach or effectiveness, but can also help you engage with your target audiences easily and help them address their challenges with your useful content. If your content succeeds in solving their challenges/pain points, no wonder these readers can also become your brand evangelists. So keep feeding them with awesome content on their most favorite online destinations!

Email marketing – Some businesses see email marketing as the most powerful tool in their marketing arsenal to connect with their contact database. Email can really help your content get out there and grab many more eyeballs. Without email marketing, your content’s reach is constrained drastically and can make all your content creation efforts go waste.

It’s damn simple. Content forms the beating heart of your inbound marketing strategy but ONLY when it’s used along with other channels (a few of them listed above!). Don’t sandbox your content. Give it wings and let it soar high and wide to cover the complete horizon of your target audiences.