An Academy on a Shoe String? Start with VMEdu

To professional educators and trainers, Salman Kahn, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, is a legend, a modern-day Shakespeare of the learning world and “such stuff dreams are made on.” 

Khan began his journey by helping his cousins with their math homework using the Internet and Yahoo’s Doodle Pad. Having three degrees from MIT in math, electrical engineering and computer science helped a lot. Later, he posted the lessons on YouTube; they went viral and now he runs an online educational organization that stretches education into new shapes and new possibilities.

Kahn’s path was pretty unique back in 2009, but now crowds of people have YouTube channels for their lessons. In 2012 60 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. In 2014 more than 300 hours of video were uploaded every minute. The educator wanting to repeat Khan’s experience has a lot more competition than they used to.

To help educators have a place to be seen and heard, VMEdu, Inc. has launched its own cloud-based course sharing platform. The platform took more than seven years to develop and has been used by the company’s training brands—such as PMstudy, SCRUMstudy, and 6Sigmastudy—to establish themselves in their fields and become some of the largest training companies worldwide. Through these brands and the platform, VMEdu has more than 800 authorized training partners (V.A.T.P.s) globally.

The company has now opened its Learning Management System (LMS) to non-A.T.P.s in a program called “VMEdu Authorized Content Providers” (V.A.C.P.). This program enables any organization that has created courses related to any field of adult learning in any language to launch courses on their own website for free—this is where the “shoe string” in the title comes in. In addition to launching and managing the course, content providers get their own mobile app, have the opportunity to sell to the VMEdu Partner Network (800+ Partners), offer their courses on SMstudy and track student progress. 

The company helps content providers “easily create [their] online courses through an easy-to-use cloud interface ‘VMEdu Course Builder’.” The interface allows educators and trainers to upload “videos; test questions; flashcards and glossary; case studies; study guides and more.”

More on the shoe-string thing: the VMEdu website says, “Unlike other traditional LMS platforms, you do not have to pay any licensing fees, buy expensive hardware, or hire expensive software professionals to launch your online courses and mobile apps. There is no cost associated with creating or uploading your courses.”

Some VMEdu Authorized Content Providers will be “the-next-big-thing” in educational innovation and quality. Others are “the-now-best-thing” in quality education built on the most up-to-date technologies and methodologies. Whatever role a trainer wants to play in adult education and professional training, the VMEdu’s Learning Management System is ready to help.

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/An-Academy-on-a-Shoe-String-Start-with-VMEdu

Can You Really go Viral?

Lately, I have been asking myself, “Why do companies really push their marketers to go viral?” Only 15 percent of marketing material actually goes viral, so why not push for something more realistic? I get that companies want to “Go big, or go home,” but this mindset just wastes marketing dollars.

Going viral literally just means the number of views your campaign reached. So, the obvious choice to get your marketing to the masses is social media. According to Jason Akeny, a contributor at Entrepreneur, “Getting your brand noticed via social media grows more difficult with each passing day. Users upload 100 hours of video to YouTube every 60 seconds and share more than 4.75 billion pieces of content on Facebook every 24 hours. Add to that 500 million new tweets per day, and the chances of breaking through to a wider audience can seem virtually nonexistent.”

The companies that have mastered the art of going viral, such as T-Mobile, Similac and Chipotle also have the marketing budget, for lack of better words, to waste when it comes to focusing on going viral. So, what can small businesses do to reach this same level of success? The truth is going viral isn’t an effective marketing strategy. This may be a hard pill for many to swallow, but it is still possible for those smaller companies to go viral, it just can’t be the end goal.

There is also the misperception that if you produce more content then it has a higher chance of reaching more people. But it will most likely just get lost in the social media ocean of information. Companies need to focus their attention on what their marketers are producing; quality not quantity. 

“An assumption can be defined as anything that is considered to be true without proof,” states Marketing Strategy, book one in the SMstudy® Guide. So, going viral is really just that, an assumption. How do we prove how to go viral? As stated in the book, “Competition analysis involves examining the competitive landscape for competing products with a view to understanding the company’s current product portfolio relative to other products and determining opportunities for product differentiation.”

This does not necessarily mean that an analysis should be done for a company’s specific industry, but rather for many industries in order to find that proof. When it comes to creating viral content there is no formula, but evaluating how other companies achieved their success is a good place to start.

Companies that are looking to successfully market their brand (this is what the main focus should be) need to think outside of the box. Madison Avenue has always struggled to market feminine product companies. Women just don’t associate their “special” time of month with dancing on the beach in white pants. In 2013, HelloFlo, a subscription-based company that delivers feminine products right to one’s door launched.

The new brand was barely keeping their head above water when they decided to try something a little different. They decided to be honest. “The Camp Gyno” hit YouTube in the summer of 2013 and within 24 hours it became the ad of the day and reached 6 million views in its first month. Not too shabby for a product that was produced on a small budget.

It is possible for small businesses to go viral, but that doesn’t mean it should be the goal. The goal should be to create quality content that breaks away from the norm and makes people think, laugh, or even cry. Producing a content mill will not reach your prospective consumers, but creating the right content will. Stop wasting your time producing a lot of content when you could be producing the right content. Go ahead, I dare you.  

For more information and interesting articles go to SMstudy.com.

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/Can-You-Really-go-Viral

When is enough too much? Interpreting Marketing Research and SMstudy

Ever look out at the ocean on a cloudy day? The huge gray mass above stretches out to meet the darker gray mass below at a black line on the horizon?

Standing on that beach, some people feel the ocean’s irresistible allure and comforting power. Others feel like they’re being sucked between two insatiable plates that will crush them at that line in the darkness.

An ocean on a cloudy day is an apt comparison for Big Data and metadata. Big Data stretches its expanding, roiling clouds of content over an equally roiling sea of metadata. Both are massive and powerful. They can both be threatening.

The desire to mine Big Data is making billionaires out of “mining equipment companies,” and references to their algorithms, claims of superior computing speed and boasts of expansive storage capacity are everywhere. Big Data is big content, and that content is getting bigger exponentially. How do we find what we need and want? The answer to that question is to be found in marketing research. A company’s marketing research team will develop expertise in web analytics in addition to what they already know about market analytics. They will need to incorporate more and more disciplines to turn data into information, information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.

Once one begins to get a handle on Big Data—or at least has a plan on how to handle it—he or she faces that almost surreal world of metadata. From the murky world of spying, the world learned there is useful information that is with the content but is not the content. “Metadata is the ‘data about data’, or the data that can be taken from an individual piece of content,” says Emma Battle in a blog for Success 360.[1]

In 2010, Raffi Kirkovian, a Twitter employee, published a “Map of a Twitter Status Object” that identifies 37 discrete pieces of information contained in a Tweet other than the actual content of the tweet.[2]

Four years later that seems to have grown, “At 140 characters a tweet seems tiny, but it can yield a wealth of information. According to Elasticsearch, a startup that builds software to help companies mine data from social media, there are 150 separate points of so-called metadata in an individual tweet,” says Elizabeth Dwoskin in a Wall Street Journal blog.

For marketing researchers this can be a bonanza, “A marketer can look at tweets sent by their target audience and see that the majority of the tweets have times stamped after 5:00 p.m. The marketer can then conclude that the best time to reach their target audience on Twitter may be after 5:00 p.m.,” says Battle.

How do marketing professionals go from data to decisions? Through interpretation. The data that is collected and analyzed “is used to enable the team to identify patterns, draw conclusions, solve the research problem, and achieve the research objectives,” according to SMstudy® Guide – Marketing Research, a book in the SMstudy® Guide series on sales and marketing.[3]

The Guide recommends that data interpretation start with three important inputs: the analyzed data, the research problem and objectives. During the interpretation process, “findings from the research analysis are compiled and reported to the marketing team and senior management and are ultimately used to inform marketing and business decisions.” In deciding what to compile and what to report, the researcher will rely on the research problem and objectives because they “provide a focused and definite direction to the data interpretation process,” according to the SMstudy® Guide.

With focus and direction, the marketing researcher uses three categories of tools to identify patterns and draw conclusions that will meet their company’s or client’s needs: tables, charts and expert judgment. Tables such as spreadsheets by Microsoft and Google help researchers organize large amounts of data. Some, like Microsoft’s Excel, provide a variety of filters and grouping tools for this purpose.

There are thousands of charts available to the market researcher. When one uses the term “chart” to be a category name that includes diagrams and graphs, the number of methods for visually displaying often complex relationships explodes. TheSMstudy® Guide highlights bar charts, stratum charts, pictograms and cartograms for their usefulness and broad-based familiarity.

Once one has an excellent collection of tables and charts, something is still needed to make complete sense of them all: expert judgment. “The ability to appropriately interpret the data develops with experience. Inexperienced researchers can sometimes interpret data in a preferred way because of their comfort level with a given method. A researcher should try to seek the opinions of industry experts and research experts, who can provide valuable inputs in choosing the best way to interpret data within the given constraints,” says SMstudy® Guide’s Marketing Research book.

When relevant inputs are processed with appropriate tools, the researcher draws conclusions that are used to solve the research problem and inform marketing decisions. In short, accurately interpreted research means you know the problem AND the best solution options. And knowing is a great feeling between the clouds and the ocean.

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/When-is-enough-too-much-Interpreting-Marketing-Research-and-SMstudy

Doritos #CrashTheSuperBowl

A 30-second spot during the Super Bowl can cost upwards of four million dollars, so it better pack a punch. It appears that the Frito-Lay’s marketing team agrees. For the last ten years, Doritos, a Frito-Lay brand, has asked people from around the world to submit a commercial to the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. The winner attends the game, receives one million dollars, and lands a “dream job” at Universal Pictures.

This year marks the 11th and final competition and there are three finalists in the running. The first commercial, “Ultrasound” isn’t for the faint of heart, but is hilarious. “Swipe for Doritos” is a play on a popular dating app, Tinder, and “Doritos Dogs” is very cute and very clever. Who doesn’t love dogs? The three commercials are quite different, but they all have one thing in common, you will most likely be sporting a six-pack after viewing them from laughing so hard.

Go to https://crashthesuperbowl.doritos.com/finalists/ to vote for this year’s winner.

With the use of the hashtag, Doritos is able to access all platforms of social media for maximum reach, relationship, and reputation. According to Digital Marketing, book two in the SMstudy Guide®, “Social media channels provide a good marketing medium for businesses to run offers and promotions to engage audiences and reach desired objectives. These offers and promotions are typically valid for a fixed time frame, require audiences to participate by discussing their experiences while engaging with the brand and offer attractive rewards to audiences that engage with the brand.”

The three finalists were announced on January 4th and now people will have until February 7th, the day of the Super Bowl, to see if their favorite won.

The Doritos #CrashTheSuperBowl was the first of its kind. It paved the way for companies such as Chevrolet and CareerBuilder, who also pursued online commercial competitions, but Doritos was the only campaign that succeeded. Last year’s fan favorite had more than seven million views!

A study done in 2015 by Medill IMC’s Spiegel Digital and Database Research Center showed that people who participated in the contest were more likely to buy the product and thanks to these participants, sales increased by 42 percent in the first week (post events) and continued to increase by 35 percent by the fourth week.  

With the success that has been generated over the years with this campaign, it will be exciting to see what Frito-Lay comes up with next. 

For more interesting articles about Sales and Marketing, visit - www.SMstudy.com/articles

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/Doritos_Crash_The_Super_Bowl

Sales training, not just for sales teams anymore. SMstudy is for everyone.

As companies continue the eternal pursuit of streamlining, a little bit of universal sales training can yield major benefits. Basic understanding of the aspects of the sales process is a benefit for all members of a company regardless of position or department.

Some very real advances in efficiency can be achieved when everyone speaks the same language.

Ever feel important communications get lost in translation from one branch of a company to the other? Since sales is usually a crucial element of any company, it benefits everyone to have an understanding of sales processes and its terminology.  When everyone speaks the same language, everything goes more smoothly.

According to Will Brooks, executive vice president and director of marketing at The Brooks Group, “Communication is enhanced once everyone is fluent in the selling process, when the dialogue around specific accounts and stages in the buyer’s journey becomes more efficient—both within the sales team and across departments. Congruent terminology and standard definitions of each stage in the buying process reduces miscommunication and unifies the sales and marketing departments.”

Continuity of Message = Efficiency

Another important benefit of universal sales training; the continuity of company communication, both internally and externally. A consistent informed message that permeates a company will make a stronger clearer message to potential customers. As customers are brought in to the sales cycle, they will continue to receive a consistent message that in turn leads to a seamless customer experience. 

Brooks notes, “Customer service can better understand the customer’s needs once they have received sales training, and when marketing understands the sales process, they can provide tools and resources that are aligned with how sales is selling. The promises sales makes to customers should mirror the messages that marketing sends out, and alignment between these departments ensures that’s always happening.”

SMstudy works very well for any company considering a company-wide sales training program. It’s convenient and offers flexible training opportunities that work within the timeframe of a staff members’ busy schedule. The SMstudy Guide® and all its resources, including training videos, study guides, test questions and more, is ideally positioned to provide a positive sales training experience for everyone. 

Find more interesting information on sales and marketing at smstudy.com.

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/sales-training-not-just-for-sales-teams-anymore-SMstudy-is-for-everyone

Happy Customer, Happy Life

Just as every married man can attest to the fact that “a happy wife makes a happy life,” anyone interacting with customers will agree that a happy customer makes a happy life as well.

So, why would a sales team not use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system when it’s been shown to improve customer happiness? The truth is that very few opt out of a CRM system, since there are just too many good, sound reasons to incorporate the tool and in essence create a win-win situation for the sales team AND customer alike.

According to SMstudy, a CRM system is used to track the various stages in the sales process. It also assists in managing a company’s interactions with a customer, thus allowing a company to manage information about customers and customer touch-points in order to maximize customer loyalty.

Based on the information available in most CRM systems, a company is able to provide a high degree of personalized service to the customer in the form of customized products, services and promotions. Personalized services are also key to maintaining and building customer loyalty.

A typical CRM System has four processes:

1. Knowledge Discovery– This is the process of analyzing customer information through contact with a company’s products or services. CRM systems enable the company to analyze the data and draw meaningful insights.
2. Planning– In this process, the output from the knowledge discovery phase is used to develop strategies for personalized marketing and promotional activities.
3. Customer Interaction– This is the process where the actual implementation of the various programs and strategies occurs. These programs and strategies target various customer touch-points and/or company channels.
4. Analysis and Refinement– In this process, customer feedback and responses from the various programs implemented are analyzed as part of the ongoing communication and review process.

In his article, “The five biggest benefits of CRM systems,” Patricio Robles notes, “In today's ultra-competitive markets, the companies that manage customer relationships the best are more likely to win than those that don't.”

Robles goes on to list the top five reasons why a company should incorporate a CRM system. They include:

1. Efficiency – not only does a CRM system clear up any inefficiencies related to manual customer management, but also “the ability of popular CRM platforms to integrate with other systems, such as marketing automation tools can enable companies to interact with customers in ways that they wouldn't have the resources to do otherwise.”
2. Collaboration – Complex customer lifecycles require the ability for many to work together. “The use of cloud-based CRM platforms allows employees in multiple departments to more effectively manage their customer relationships and to see the big picture at any time.”
3. Data – Access to data, the ability to analyze data and present it clearly are all integral to understanding what’s happening with customers. “Popular CRM platforms typically offer a variety of homegrown and third party tools that enable companies to understand their CRM data and learn things about their customers that wouldn't be possible otherwise.”
4. Increased accountability – Consider a CRM system as the safety net catching all who may have “fallen through the cracks.” “A well-implemented CRM system helps employees across departments understand their responsibilities to customers throughout the customer lifecycle and when those responsibilities aren't met, it's easy to identify what went wrong, where, who fell short and how to make sure it doesn't happen again.”
5. Improved customer experience – As we said earlier, this is the ultimate benefit of all. “Customers are more easily and accurately segmented, their needs identified, and because the status of a company's relationship with them is accurately tracked, companies can interact with them meaningfully at the right times, leading to more sales, faster sales and higher customer retention and satisfaction.”

Happy customers make a happy sales and marketing life.

To read more articles about sales and marketing, visit www.smstudy.com/articles

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/happy-customer-happy-life

Mac v. PC: Distinct image, Distinct Choice

When purchasing a computer, a person will most likely ask themselves; Mac or PC? Well, in 2006 Apple released a series of commercials addressing that very dilemma. The “Get a Mac” campaign made the answer to that question crystal clear. The commercials starred Justin Long as a laidback Steve Jobs look alike personifying a hip Mac computer. The Mac (aka Justin Long) paints the picture of a PC as a nerdy and awkward member of a cubicle farm, but in a nice way.

 

The commercials were very funny and cute, but were also aggressively competitive. The kind-hearted Mac always turned out to be the good guy, letting the poor sad PC know that even though he was better when it comes to pictures, video, and music, you know… “iLife,” he does confess that PC still has a great app… its calculator.

According to Marketing Strategy, Book 1 of the SMstudy® Guide when forming a brand, a company should, “create a distinct image of a product or range of products in the customer’s mind.” Apple stepped out of the box to provide the public with not only an image, but a personality as well. Mac is a hip young man that promises to be reliable and live up to his promise. Apple took it a step further by also creating an unflattering image for their competition, a drab looking computer that will most likely malfunction or freeze at any point in time.

Prior to the “Get a Mac” campaign, Apple’s sales were on a steady decline while PC’s dominated the market. Apple noticed that while its sales were low, they were voted higher in an American Consumer Satisfaction Index survey. . So, the company decided to play to their strengths, and PC’s weaknesses.

According to Marketing Strategy, Book 1 of the SMstudy® Guide, “The image communicates the promise of value the customer will receive from the product or products.” The image of Justin Long promised creative freedom as well as reliability because that is exactly what Mac computers are known to be. The majority of PC users are aware of the malfunctions that often occur, but Apple wanted to drive the message home to the general public in order to promote its brand. One of the biggest issues with PC’s is their lack of creative control, which is something that Mac’s excel in.

This created an instant increase in sales of 12 percent in the first quarter and by the end of the fourth quarter sales had increased by 39 percent. In fact, sales increased so much that Microsoft launched a rebuttal commercial, thinking that they could use the same format of commercial and be just as successful. Unfortunately for the company it wasn’t the commercial that sold the product, it was the product itself. 

For more interesting articles about Sales and Marketing, visit - www.SMstudy.com/articles

http://www.smstudy.com/Article/Mac-v-PC-Distinct-Image-Distinct-Choice