Implement the “5Cs” Strategy Into Your Digital Marketing Mix

Marketing in the digital space has evolved immensely over time. There has been an explosion of new processes, new communication technologies and new marketing channels to advertise and promote your business. It’s a big change now! Everybody is utilizing digital marketing tactics to reach out to their customers, you have to re-invent your strategy to succeed in the ultimate battlefield of digital war. A well-planned set of digital marketing goals will help you measure the performance of your marketing activities and get real results. Implement the ’5Cs’ strategy into your digital marketing mix to get closer to your business marketing goals:

C – Connect: Connecting your brand with target audience is the first step toward marketing success. The customer is the CEO of your business. To create a brand your customers will love you need to connect with them. So how do you make a connection with customers? It’s through social networks, email, website, blogs and search engines. Building a meaningful, emotional connection is vital for establishing successful customer relationship.

C – Converse: Just because you know well about the features and benefits of the range of products and services your company provides doesn’t mean that your customers are also aware of them. Communicating directly with your niche community is necessary to inspire brand awareness. Customers want to be emotionally impacted during their entire journey of commercial existence. Keep in mind some of the right ways of customer communication – send personalized emails, create content based on customer needs and engage in conversations on social channels.

C – Characterize: A business is one that customers only know while a brand is one that they love. You have too many competitors selling the same services as you do. How are you different from them? What is so unique about your products? You need to characterize your business to build a brand that customers love to recommend. You need to convince customers about the benefits that they can gain from using your services. People choose a product based on the value they receive. So be unique, be distinctive to get more recommendations and repeat customers.

C – Captivate: If you don’t understand the value of customer engagement and instead, focus on sales pitch, then you will definitely fail in the long run. Engaging with your target audience is necessary to retain existing customers and attract new ones. To captivate your customers you must provide useful information through all digital marketing channels, make all conversations two-way, serve your customer needs when they want, and become an honest, empathetic & assertive communicator.

C – Convert: The ultimate aim of your digital marketing campaign is to convert prospects into buying customers. Your customer conversion strategy requires a complex combination of value proposition, customer online experience management and customer feedback. Reach the customers at the right time and right content to move them through the conversion funnel.

If your business starts using the ’5Cs’ digital marketing strategy, you will be able to better connect, attract, engage, communicate and convert potential customers. With more repeat customers and more conversions, your business will become sustainable. The 5Cs will yield the greatest wins to help your business grow and get bigger!

Benefits of Sports Nutrition on Your Health

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about sports nutrition and whether or not it’s appropriate for people who aren’t athletes. This is a somewhat understandable fear, as the media at large often likes to sensationalize the diets or supplement regimens of famous athletes. Adding in the media’s fascination with aggrandizing sports figures and elevating them onto pedestal and it’s easy to feel like the rules that apply to them don’t apply to you whether dietary or otherwise. The fact of the matter is, there is a lot that most people can learn from sports nutrition health, and they can gain a lot of benefits from incorporating the dietary insights athletes have learn for their own food consumption.

The ironic thing about this public fear is the fact that most dietary changes over the least hundred years have started out in what it now known as optimum sports nutrition. If you look at the general and fairly predictable pattern for dietary changes and trends, you’ll notice that they tend to start with elite athletes and then trickle their way down to the rest of us. In fact, this is true for certain medical treatments in addition to diet.

If you look at the trends closely, you’ll even see that dietary changes tend to start with the most EXTREME athletes out there professional bodybuilders. This is due to two simple facts. First, bodybuilders regularly experiment with massive body modulation and re-composition in order to compete in their sport. Secondly, bodybuilders tend to be the ones most willing to try absolutely anything. It’s true that most people don’t want to look like a pro bodybuilder or to go nearly as far as they go in their experiments, but those experiments are precisely the reason why meal replacements, protein shakes, multivitamins, weight training, and lower carbohydrate diets and many more breakthroughs have all entered the mainstream fitness world.

In many ways, we are all eating the way we are because of insights found in the world of sports nutrition even if we’re not conscious about it.

So now that I’ve hopefully dispelled some of the fear and unnecessary distance that might keep you from embracing sports nutrition as a great way to lose weight and build muscle as an amateur, what benefits can you expect from consciously incorporating these dietary protocols into your life?

For starters, you are likely to drastically reduce the number of times that you get sick. Professional athletes can’t afford to get sick, and as such they have devised nutritional programs that tend to promote vibrant good health. Professional athletes are also unable to take too much time lying around sore and beaten up from their training, so you can expect to recover faster from your workouts.

If you follow a solid sports nutrition health plan than you are likely to reach your fitness and performance goals much quicker than if you followed a standard American diet or a slightly healthier variation on it. There’s no reason to spend two months trying to lose five pounds when you go do it in two weeks with the right nutritional program.

Overall, optimum sports nutrition is designed to allow the human body to function at its best. That’s something that everyone can benefit from- whether you’re a computer programmer who likes to row on the side, a new mother looking to lose your baby fat quickly, or just an average Joe who wants to look and feel better than ever before.

Changing Trends – From E-Commerce to M-Commerce

One of the most profound paradigm shifts that the retail industry is facing in current times is the gradual but steady transition from retail to e-commerce and now finally m-commerce. Analysis of the retail sector from the past 5 years suggests that the e-commerce is the current game changer which currently has a growth rate twice as that of retail. This shift hardly comes as a surprise given the fact that a number of companies and established brands have already shifted all or part of their businesses online in an effort to capture greater market share and to increase their brand presence.

The realm of e-commerce has once again been hit by a major trend namely m-commerce. With over twenty percent of total online sales coming from hand held devices, businesses are now doubling their efforts towards creating mobile optimized websites and e-stores to cater to the customers on the go. Businesses these days are dedicating a large portion of their research and development efforts on how mobile devices play a role in shaping consumer behavior and their buying patterns. Analysts suggest that the growth of m-commerce in the coming five years will triple, implying that the impact of mobile phones on our day to day activities is significant.

What is more surprising is that the trend of m-commerce is not shifting the focus of sales away from e-tail but rather adding more value to it. Surveys suggest that almost ninety percent of customers use their smart phones in order to inquire about a product, its specifications and prices. The on-the-go ease and benefit allows customers to compare and contrast different products easily. In addition, apart from pre-shopping activities, customers also make use of smart phones while shopping in stores. The truth is that m-commerce is enhancing the overall in-store experience and allowing companies to relate to their customers more closely. In turn, this is driving sales.

Given these facts the main question that now arises is whether companies are paying sufficient attention to their mobile websites or not? According to a survey a number of small businesses do not have a plan to launch their business online. What’s more is that mobile commercialization is not a part of their strategy either, as they feel their businesses and resources are not large enough to qualify for such an expansion. The crux of this discussion is that no matter what the size of your business may be, integrating mobile commerce into your business will give your customers a multichannel experience thus enhancing your customer services and increasing your overall touch points. Mobile commerce offers even more opportunities in the coming years. Apart from reducing the costs associated with staffing, mobile commerce will also allow companies to track their customer locations and to offer them the inventory that is most readily available in that area.