Final Blog - Week 15

My Final Blog

Can’t believe that this semester is ending!! Time really flies and now when I look back I can see how enjoyable this entire journey was (as I mentioned in my first blog…)! Now we all are ready to fly, touch the sky and so on….

I really gained a lot from this class, first of all writing blogs …I have become a great fan of this platform and now I will miss it! Initially it was so hard to even write one or few sentences in a blog, breaking key boards…biting nails etc etc…but now it has become so easy , feel so confident to share my views, wait eagerly to see people’s comments and having fun reading fellow student’s posts!! I can see a lot of improvements in everyone’s posts also!!

I do not have a real business but after this class I am getting real customers!! I may have to delete my business pages after this class!

I used to use Facebook but had no idea that a business page can be created which is directly reaching its target market, so specific and so easy, and then it allows scheduling posts, auto post to twitter, analyze my reach and helps to adopt a suitable marketing strategy ….just amazing, mostly free of cost.

Google+, Pinterest and Twitter are so easy to use and linking all the social media together is so easy and helpful. I liked that integration part a lot, at free of cost we are on so many platforms.

Apart from the social media platforms we also learned about marketing strategy, target market, SEO which will help me a lot in future. Came to know the importance of images and videos to promote a business. How to attract customers to my pages/sites and keep them busy with some activities or offers etc.

The entire subject is very challenging and competitive, we have to always keep us updated in these areas and keep an eye on our competitor’s social media platforms and provide something more than them through our social media strategy. To gain from it we have to provide some quality time as nothing is really free in this world! Customer centric social media strategy is a huge advantage for any business.

Finally, congratulations to all of us, we did it and best of luck everybody!!

Week 14 - By Sunday

Which tools to implement , why , how frequently and a strategy

The size of my business is small, I will have only 4 product lines, among them I will try to portray some unique ones (Jhumka, Earlobe design, Stone studded etc). Later on depending upon the demand I may extend the range. Also I will be the only person in my business and of course not much budget for marketing. So for me best is a website which I have already created (needs some upgradation) and a server site for which I have to pay.

For the rest I would like to adopt the free platforms. I may open an email account as glamhindjewelry@hotmail.com where I will create groups of customers like Earringcust, Necklacecust etc. I need to check the email account on a daily basis, and reply back to my customers within 1-2 days. If there is any issue that may take longer, then I will tell them the reason of delay, basically I will try to be as transparent as possible.

I will use blog every alternate week to provide information about the cultural influence on the jewelries of India.

Initially for 3 months I will post the Blogs, link with website and the Facebook page with informative posts (the way we did in the class). Then depending upon the likes, engagement etc I will start showing the products and their price ranges and I will get an idea about which product is liked by most people. I believe to start my business I need to put a considerable amount of time and effort to market my product and ideas, once I get a satisfactory amount of response to sustain in the market then I can only focus to day to day activities like Facebook/Twitter posting / following and customer service through email / reply to blog / personal messages (everyday 2 hours). Once a while blog and sometimes Pinterest / Instagram and Youtube (once in two weeks).

Every week using the Google analytics will be very helping to see how my business is doing (every weekend 1 hour). Accordingly I will plan the strategy for the next week, whether to create a blog writing competition or send your photo wearing my stuffs etc.

Basically I will try to keep it pretty simple, manageable and organized.

Week14 - Comments

I provided my feedback to :

1. Mack Hillenbrand
2. Mary Bishop
3. Kathleen Cansler
4. Craig Stevens

Week 14 By Thursday - Strategy

Planning Future Strategy

The most important thing to remember is - social media is not “Just” Marketing. During this semester we have learned about all the popular platforms. Now it is time to refresh everything that we learned and finally decide our own individual marketing strategy. I strongly believe that whatever strategy we adopt the key word is “Customer Satisfaction”, for that we need to be transparent and keep them happy.

Before adopting any strategy we must consider the following factors :

·         Company size

·         Budget and Resources

·         Manpower

·         Industry

Also there are so many free social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube but the challenge is to maintain a balance between whether to adopt too many or too less. It is always better to adopt only few of them so that it could be managed easily. Regular updates on those sites are highly recommended.

I am a big fan of website, although nowadays Facebook is as good as a website and even the plugins are helping in selling goods/payments. But still I would love to have a website, which will have great contents and follow all the standards of SEO so that my site can be found easily. There I will provide all my links, and in my business initially I will use Facebook, Twitter,Blogs, Pinterest/Instagram and Google +. Google + will help me a lot to analyse by status. Later on I have a plan to use Youtube videos with Indian festivals and the importance of jewelries in those functions, and the link will be in the homepage.

As a strategy I will use Facebook on a daily basis, posting contents, sometimes schedule the posts on a particular time of the day and provide the link to my blogs. Blogs I will write once or twice in a month where I will provide information , the background story and the uniqueness of the design as a series, so that people will look forward to my next release. In Pinterest I can post some photos twice in a week.

After website, my main focus will be on customer handling, wherever they make any comment or ask for any information I will get back to them as soon as possible. It could be through e-mail or blog comments reply or in Facebook messaging. In all the social media sites my contact numbers will get displayed in bold, so that they can reach us fast.

FaceBook analytics

Week 13 By Monday

I have received around 31 likes on my business page and after that I was able to view the Facebook Insight. It is an amazing tool. It gives us a clear picture of what is going on. The overview gives us the statistics of Page likes, Post reach and Engagement. This is the image of my present Overview :

Beneath this we can see data about our most recent page posts, including the type of post (link, photo, etc.), targeting, reach, clicks, and engagement (likes, comments, and shares) alongside the amount spent promoting our posts using Facebook Ads. 

Basically I can see everything that I have learned so far :

By clicking on the header for each portion to view more detail we can see the following.

Likes

The Likes tab shows page’s fan growth. One can use the date selector to view data from the last week, month, or quarter. As you hover over your total page likes graph, you can see the number of likes you had on a particular date. Which is amazing!

You also can see where your page likes come from. People can like your page using the like button on your page or from page suggestions, ads, and stories about others who have liked your page.

This tab helps us to gauge whether the page is growing at the rate we expect.

Reach
We come to know about how much reach our Facebook posts have received from organic and paid sources. It also gives us a breakdown of negative actions such as the number of times our posts have been hidden, reported as spam or caused someone to unlike our page.

Most importantly we can see our total reach from any activity related to our pages.

Visits
The Visits tab is one of the most informative. Here we can see the areas of our Facebook page that people visit most, including our timeline, info and photos tabs.

 Posts

The Posts tab starts off with a graph of when our fans/followers are online.

By toggling over to Post Types we can find the types of posts on the page that get the most engagement.

People

It gives us the most important information that is demographic information about our fans.

By viewing this tab I know whether I am able to reach my target market. If not, it might be time to take a long look at the strategy, ad targeting, and other efforts to grow my Facebook page.

I had no idea that at free of cost I can do so many things to promote my business! Thanks to Facebook Insights.

Week 13 by Thursday

Visit the Google analytics for business page and pick out which features you think would be the most beneficial to your business to check regularly and why, then write a blog post with this information.

I should first focus on SEO while creating my website. It is free and  the most effective one. Based on that idea I have a plan to implement the following in my web page.

Search engine Optomization(SEO) :I know there are many competitors, but my objective is to not only to sell the costume jewelries but also to provide valuable information about the culture, diversity and history of India and how they are connected to these jewelries. I need to work hard on my content and optimize my website so that Google can find it easily. Mostly people wear them or order them by looks, but when they will know the background of those jewelries they will feel more attached to them. So my website will provide all the information, I will try to divide it broadly to North, East, West and South India and portray the cultural values, uniqueness and popularity of those jewelries. So the following keywords will help a lot to make my site unique.

I gave “Jewelry from India” as my see key word, and I got these suggestions (with the help of Google webmaster):

Search Term	Total
india stamp jewelry silver	11
dreams of india jewelry	10
india jewelry	6
india send jewelry free shipping worldwide	5
jewelry from india	4
silver jewelry india	2
gold plated jewelry in india	2
j0705 india labradorite hearts sterling silver ring wholesale sahasa jewelry	1
designer diamond india jewelry	1
cheap bridal jewelry from india	1
hand carved rosewood box india jewelry boxes eziba

I think it is a good list and I can use some of them in my website by modifying a little.

Also I can use the following words in my website to attract more visitors:

Diversity of Indian Jewelries depends upon cultural diversity of India

Mangalsutra, Kundan, Filigri, Beads and Lacs.

Beauty and the East

Elegant pieces of costume jewelries

Traditional and sentimental value

Stunning necklace

Cost effective

Silver Kundankari

Peacock design

Pearl chokers

I have also followed these : Page titles, Page Description,URLs (with keywords) and a good content.

Social media optimization

I love the idea of using www.youtube.com.

For my website I am planning to use the videos for each group (earrings,   necklace, sets and anklets) where the women are wearing them in different occasions.

I will also use https://www.facebook.com/ to promote my business, where I can request my friends to like them and post them again, and also their friends can like them (going viral).

I love to use www.shutterfly.com  a lot for my personal use, but I can use it as business purpose by creating an album of my products and posting the link on www.youtube.com  or other site.

I should try to track

1. Page views

2. Engagement

Later on I can track my blogs also with the help of google analytics. The Pageviews metric is the total number of pages viewed; repeated views of a single page are also counted. Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed on a web page.

Google analytics will also tell me how much time people spend on my site, in increments of seconds, and how many pages they view. I want people to stay longer on my site as my website will provide a lot of information.

Understanding mobile traffic to my site can give me an indication of whether we need to design the site to accommodate both mobile and desktop traffic, or whether the traffic justifies a separate mobile site.

So basically I will start with the above tools and eventually as the company grows I may try for the paid tools like Adwords.

       

Week 12 by Monday - coupon deal

Think about a coupon deal you could develop. What product or service do you think would be one that would increase traffic to your business?

Promotion is the process of communicating with customers. For marketing purposes, communication of products and services contributes to the persuasion process to encourage consumers to avail themselves of whatever is on offer.

The main thing the company will do is to use the social media, it has Facebook and twitter accounts and through them it will connect with people. If customers give a “like” in Facebook account of GlamHind or follows GlamHind in twitter they will get a 10% discount.

Secondly it has a good website, which is informative and user friendly and attractive at the same time.People would love to browse it.

GlamHind Jewelries Website

Thirdly at selective point it will try to directly connect with the consumers.This way the customers will feel special.

Excellent customer service: There’s no advertising like personal recommendations made between friends and family. The best way to encourage this type of “viral marketing” is to provide excellent customer service. Since it is web based company and customer service can be provided only through email or phone, the company needs to put sincere effort to make its customer(s) happy.

Packaging - presenting the product in a desirable and appropriate way. It will be done in India, so the company might use images of 4 very traditional jewelry (of its product line) in the 4 sizes of the box for more attraction.

Public relations activities and other forms of publicity – It might distribute some flyers to those areas where Indian people gather as a community, for e.g. “Saikat” in San Diego. They can again communicate about GlamHind to their neighbors and friends.  

Special promotions - e.g. buy one get one free. For GlamHind , initially buy one necklace and get the earring (of similar design, but a cheaper one) free. Product Release will be through website, email and social media accounts. Also occasionally it will offer free shipping. 

These are the marketing strategy that GlamHind Jewelries will adopt to make it popular.

Week 12 By Thursday - Additional Online Marketing Tools

What four additional online marketing tools do you believe could be important to the growth of your business? 
How could you integrate them into your current strategy?

I may use these four tools in future for my business:

1. Instagram (Statigram)

Statigram is a website that allows us to access the world’s largest social mobile community. Statigram lets us to view, measure, manage, and promote our Instagram account. Instagram is an essential tool for visual branding and communication. It has 90 million active monthly users, but Instagram lacks in tracking lead conversion, optimization, community and engagement tools and analytics, Statigram makes it up.

I will use Statigram for my business as pictures of my products is most important for spreading my business.

It will help me to do the followings:

·         Promote my Instagram account across other social networks with feed tabs or photo widgets.

·         Manage my community and their comments on a user-friendly platform.

·         Analyze my activity through professional statistics.

·         Engage my community with photo contests.

I can easily introduce the link in my blog or integrate with my Facebook business page.

2. LinkedIn

    It is a more professional network and that’s why great for any business. It is been used for many purposes like - networking, job searching, hiring, company research, and connecting with affiliates, including alumni, industry, and a variety of other business related groups. I already have a personal account in LinkedIn but for my business I need to create a business page. It will help me a lot to do free marketing. It is the best platform for lead generation and making new contacts for any business. Now it has 250 Million accounts.

            In my business page I will talk about my products and ongoing offer. Also I will keep posting news related to my business. It will be great to start a discussion like: “which earring design you prefer? The peacock style or the Ear style? Please explain why!” This is called engagement. Posting needs to be on a regular basis. This way I will be able to promote my business. I will include the link in my website and also link with my Twitter business page. The recommendation feature will help my business to grow.   

3. Yelp

Yelp is built on the ratings that anyone can give a business or service. 

Anybody can comment about a business or service and it is totally one-sided, so it could be good or bad for the business. Yelp users can also add images to our Yelp page.  Business owners are encouraged to manage their Yelp Review site. There is also the option of using Yelp advertising. I would love to use this tool and constantly check the reviews about my business. It is always good to know how many people are talking about my business and what are they talking about. A business owner should monitor this site regularly so that if there is any negative feedback he / she can immediately contact that person or try to resolve the issue and encourage him to write something good. 

4. Google+

In Googlle+ sharing becomes very easy. The circles are group of fans or friends, while posting we can choose a group or many groups. But for business purpose it is advisable to post for everybody.

The features of Google+ are:

Profile, Circles, Communities, Photos, Hangouts and Mobile.

Estimated monthly visitors – 1, 20,000,000,

Since I am working with an imaginary business I have not created any business page in Google + but I have created a personal page and I will join many communities for sharing views, to gain knowledge etc. Hangouts are similar to Skype and helps a lot in business meetings. It is a great marketing tool.