Goal Setting

Five Rules to set yourself up for Success

You think about what you want to be doing in your life? Are you clear about what your main objective at work is at moment? Do you know what you want to achieved by the end of today?

If you want to succeed, you need to set goals. Without goals you lack of focus and direction. Goal setting allows you to take control of your life direction and it also provides you a benchmark for determining whether you are actually succeeding.

To achieved your goal, however, you need to know how to set them.

Here are the Five Golden Rules of Goal Setting.

Rule 1: Set Goals that Motivates You.
Rule 2: Set SMART Goals.
Rule3 : Set Goals in Writing.
Rule4 : Make an Action Plan.
Rule5 : stick With it.

Story telling

When you have a business or starting a new business, you can make a tremendous brand impression and image. Today's the most effective way for building a strong brand by telling stories. Stories are memorable and they stick in people's mind, specially if they attains the attentions of the people's. That making your business and brand more memorable.

Stories make you more credible. Stories are believable and Sometime they even have emotional impact. Sharing real experience of real people actually lends credibility to your business and brand

Efficient and Cost Effective Marketing Plan

In today's competent business environment, mostly firms are trying to build a marketing plan which is better than their competitors. While doing so, most of the time they forget to focus on the core idea and deviate from their origin. Most of the firms are bringing more expensive ways to market their products by celebrity endorsements, bringing models into advertisements, associating famous songs with their products etc. These ways are highly expensive and more or less resemble in ideas. By doing celebrity endorsements, general or low class audience feels little uncomfortable to associate themselves with that particular product. They feel like this product is only for a high and premium class and it is not made for them.

To cater with this problem, one should bring new innovative ideas that are efficient yet cost effective in order to target every class of your audience. This does not mean that you overlook your target market. To support my view point, I would like to discuss the marketing strategy of ZONG, a new cellular service provider in Pakistan. Zong has currently around 4 major competitors in this market. But, Zong's marketing strategy is something unique from them. Instead of bring highly exclusive models or introducing celebrities in their advertisements, they came up with an idea of a simple guy addressing an audience without taking support of any songs or jingles. I also liked their one of the strategies in which they announced the things which are not in their package and that list was basically comprised of the disadvantages which are not in their package.

So, effective marketing plan can be unique, efficient and cost effective without using traditional approaches. The high cost which is incurred for expensive marketing plans can be saved and converted into company's profits.

Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing

When Marketing managers in a meeting ask their marketing executives to come up with new ideas to boost company's sales, they normally go for trade shows, cold calling, telemarketing, email blasts and seminars etc. This is a traditional outbound marketing approach when a marketer pushes his message to audience. Now all of these outbound marketing strategies are getting less effective day by day. 

There could be following two reasons:

• An average people receives  number of calls on daily basis and he is finding more ways to block such approaches towards him by use of spam filtering, call id block etc.
  
• Secondly, in today's world of internet people are less bothered to attend trade shows or seminars, they rather prefer to educate themselves about the product over internet.

Instead of investing company's cost and efforts in outbound marketing strategies where people are trying to get rid of you, you should go for Inbound marketing strategies where you help yourself "get found" by people already in search of your product. It could be done by Search engine optimization (SEO), social media sites and blogs etc.

Small Business Companies and Financial Recession

In these days the whole world have affected by the Financial Recession. Many large companies and big organization faced lots of obstacles while conducting their business, their revenues have dropped down and profit margin is declining. To overcome this they started the “war of Survival” or “War of Competition” Many companies and organization have jumped into that war.

But the Question is arises, how small business companies can survive? They have limited resources and capital and they haven't afford to indulge their self in war. In my opinion the small business companies should adopt the blue ocean strategy, if they do so they will survive in present recession period. And that strategy help them to keep away from that war. They strengthen and increase their market size and share.