Gamification – A New Marketing Strategy for Broader Customer Outreach

The term gamification for businesses simply means creating a gaming strategy that involves platforms/resources like websites, online community etc. for motivating target audience to engage with the brand for better business opportunities. The gamification strategy needs to be designed perfectly for boosting ROI through out of the box gaming techniques. The integrated game methodology triggers active participation of customers resulting in customer loyalty.

Perfect gamification marketing technique is the latest customer relationship management mechanism that engage and retain loyal customers. It not only engages customers but also drives behavioral changes in users and customers that directly integrate with your business goals and strategies. Let’s have an insight about the most crucial techniques and strategies that can make the gamification process the future trend of marketing strategies.

Use Social Media as Platform

Engage your customers with your brand and reward them on task completion, this is what gamification is! Social media is the biggest platform for any gaming methodology to initiate. Majority of the internet users across the globe are connected through social networking website and it is the best place to make its users fond of your brand. You can use several techniques to engage them with your business like for instance, ask for their feedback and offer them reward points on their responses. On social media platform alone you can target millions of users and let them involve in the game plan your business created to follow.

With real games and reward earning activities in businesses, businesses can know the customers through their behaviors and requirements.

Offer Reward Points to Attract Customers

No matter what plan you make to gamify your business, ultimately you have to focus on your customers. There are several corporate giants that have started implementing the latest trend of gamification. For instance, in some games there are websites that offer points and rewards you on completing daily activities like checking emails, referring the website to his/her friend etc. The points collected can also be redeemed in several forms like you get discounts on specific products, you get a chance to get promotional products at nominal price etc.

Some websites that also have mobile app version can gamify the mobile app promotion. They offer discounts or points on downloading the app. This is the tactics used by majority of the eCommerce websites to promote their shop-anywhere approach.

Better Search Visibility

There are websites that ignite the spirit of competition among the users. This not only keeps the users engaged but also invites huge traffic towards the website. Gamification also helps websites to get better ranking in popular search engines.

Top search engines crawls the websites that update their content on regular basis. This gaming technique helps business owners to know their customers better. They track their behavior and considering that they build unbeatable marketing strategies.

Design the Game Mechanism Focusing your Audience

Your target audience is the primary target for gamification. Building customer centric gamification strategies will allow businesses to acquire desired ROI. Design the gaming mechanism with an aim to motivate the players and engage them with your brand. Build and implement gamification strategies that benefit both your business and customers.

This modern age term can help organizations to broader their market outreach, if executed perfectly!

What Foils ERP Project Implementation

ERP is comprehensive software that runs your company efficiently. The biggest challenge is getting it properly implemented. But a great correlation has been found between the problems that result in frustration in the selection process and the issues that can foil the implementation. Some of the widely witnessed implementation factors that have often derailed the overall ERP project, leaving the business in lurch, have been discussed in this post.

Let’s have an insight what those aspects are that can derail ERP implementation.

•     Unclear Objective
•     Lack of Accountability
•     Improper Resourcing
•     Scope Creep
•     Inadequate Change Management

Unclear Objective

Clarity in the ERP goal is of the essence. It may lead to even more conflicts on the goals. Failure to streamline the objective prior to starting the project will ensure that you will fall victim to scope creep.

In case your vendor is professional they may lock down the scope early, ensuring that they know how to success, thus protecting you. You also need to terminate all the assumption that you may have made in the sales process about what could be included. Better get the objectives documented and well evaluated before you finally sign contracts otherwise there is always a possibility of scope creep as your expected scope will be wider than the vendor’s.

Lack of Accountability

Ownership of any project has to occur at every level of the organizational framework, but it must be taken forward in word and action both by the leaders who are at the top of the pyramid.

Understanding the executive ownership is very vital to every company for effective implementation of the project.

Improper Resourcing

After having your goals clear before you and once you have nailed down your project scope – what comes next?

Involving the right people in the project after relieving them from their regular work to devote time to the implementation is difficult but essential. The ground reality is that the resources you need to work on the project are the people who are running your business now and they are already damn packed with a full week’s work.

A methodology design workshop conducted in the absence of right people involved is an absolute disaster and just a waste of effort, time, and money.

Better do not start the project in the lack of right people to work on this project. Finally if your business is seasonal in nature or depends on repetitive boom/bust cycles you must draw a down cycle to keep your executive busy on a business morph projects. Earning enough revenue when times are good is very important, so that in the next down cycle you can keep your executive busy in ERP project.

Scope Creep

The scope creep can be your biggest enemy. You might have an undocumented variation to your project plan that can add a week and $15,000 to the cost impacting other stakeholders or the expanse. It is very much possible. It may happen anytime, if it is not aggressively managed initially.

Inadequate Change Management

People are usually averse to change, which is threatening at multiple levels. An accurate and effective change management should be in place to streamline the work processes before attempting to implement and automate them in the new system. Implementation of a brand new ERP solution is an excellent opportunity to terminate current business processes. Are your people and executives ready to digest this wider change in the day-to-day functioning?

To make your ERP implementation successful, you must ensure:

•     Be focused on results to understand what your goals are and what success looks like
•     Ensure each one of your team has clear vision of project goal
•     Make sure scope is efficiently and aggressively handled
•     Ensure that impact of change on the people and processes is planned and organized

Nonetheless, all these are not that hard actually when you think about it clearly. Aligning all the aspects and factors with the project goal is the core behind a successful ERP implementation. Having a great plan and right implementation process can create almost anything on it as your business evolves.

Social CRM: Answer to Brand Marketing

Today social media and content marketing are the major driving forces promoting business branding and lead generation initiatives. Social media is becoming an extremely controllable and cost effective platform for B2B and B2C companies – especially small businesses, due to affordable content marketing promoting brand engagement, client and even customer service.

Stretching Paradigm of Content Marketing

All the major customer engaging component like blogging, webinars, buyer engagement, white papers, videos, strategic landing pages, email newsletters and other related and supportive web content are driven by content marketing that shares the philosophy, methodology, mission and services of an enterprise. Effective content marketing is not limited to blogging or social media presence. Creating high end webinars is not enough. Today, business – of all sizes and nature – needs to explore diverse content platforms hitting on all cylinders to boost marketing campaigns, lead generation and the showcasing market-leading expertise.

Today’s Social Media

Simply updating published pieces and news capsules to social media platforms is not enough for getting the desired results. You need to have a well defined marketing structure to your social sharing – or else it will end up in social freakiness. It requires a consistent and concentrated content effort to design, strategize, and promote effective, timely, consistent and worthwhile social sharing. This has led to Social CRM for several start-ups to mid-sized enterprises particularly when it comes to social media efforts.

Social CRM enables you engage with your customers and other associates simultaneously across several core social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In fact social media is using traditional CRM software, which is meant to offer single central location to garner, store, process and evaluate present and historical customer data, and giving it a new look.

By deploying social media into your sales, marketing and customer service campaigns you can understand more about your customers’ interests and preferences. By leveraging the huge information available on social media platforms in a meaningful and organized manner, you can unearth several lead and enjoy an improved interaction with your customers and prospects, propelling the overall customer experience, adding to the bottom line business.

Businesses everywhere are leveraging the advantages of social media channels to stay connected more effectively with their prospects and associates. Combining social media activity with Social CRM can help connect and develop long-lasting, mutually-beneficial customer and brand follower associations.

You can also manage your social media initiatives to trigger brand engagement – and content marketing.

In addition, you can also streamline your social media campaigns to stimulate brand engagement – and content marketing.

How Social CRM Triggers Content & Brand Marketing

Social Media Optimization: Social Customer Relationship Management will give your social media campaigns a firm structure – real social media management. Social platforms should be organized like other vital marketing campaign of a business. This platform should be considered as an added bonus to marketing efforts. With Social CRM, your social efforts can collaborate flawlessly with other key enterprise initiatives, like marketing, sales, and customer service, what industry experts consider as a holistic approach to social branding – offering an extensive view of social media campaign successes and failures.

Delivering Customer Care: Social CRM unleash value in every social media interaction with clients, associates and brand fans. It helps a business readily engage with customers in a synergistic manner in order to drive sales, leads, nurture loyalty and catapult revenue. It catapults the overall customer engagement experience, adding value to your business – and trigger related marketing and sales drive.

Tracking Brand Coherence: Social CRM helps you ensure to keep track of your brand’s image across multiple social media channels. By mapping, scheduling and analyzing your social media content, you can make sure your brand’s message has been dispersed appropriately. Retaining brand consistency through social platform supports the branding efforts of marketing tricks and sales strategies – offering a closed loop approach to a centralized, synergetic branding initiative.

Social CRM is not going to fade away anytime soon. Leveraging its productivity and redefining your marketing and other related business efforts can propel your businesses to next stage of global ecosystem.

Innovative Change & Learning Initiative Supports ERP Implementation

Is your focus on the technical side of your enterprise systems implementation is so much that you’re neglecting to help your enterprise to adapt to the changes that the system brings into the way people work? IT sector is undergoing dynamic and dramatic change today, mostly by the evolution of cloud-based platforms and SaaS solution. Despite such ongoing developments, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems retain its relevance of being one of the crucial enablers of most of the world’s commerce and public-sector task. The most neglected aspect in this is dealing with the human and organizational implications of system and process change.

An ERP adoption almost always entails sweeping changes to the way work is done across any organization. It simplifies business processes, reporting relationships, roles, how customers are served, how data is stored and used, and much more. The organization also deploys some number of resources to train employees as part of the implementation, but such initiatives are often insufficient for several reasons. Training needs evaluation is often superficial. Training may be provided too late to pace with the workforce performance and is not reinforced at the right time.

Nonetheless, if deployed and implemented properly, an enterprise learning and organizational change program can entail a crucial impact on the success of the overall ERP implementation. Here are eight most prominent insights into how organization can make it work best by deploying a learning and change management program.

1. Deploy a Right Fusion of Skills to the Training Team: Enterprise learning requires a specialized skill set; not anyone can do it. Just ensure to deploy experienced learning professionals on board. In addition, have a combination of business function abilities and technology. Maintain a right balance of qualified and knowledgeable colleagues amongst the design, build, test and training team. Keep rotating systems and business function members in and out of the training and rotate initiative for stretch of time, while retaining a good team of skilled instructional designers.
2. Deploy the Training Team Early: Systems training is not a generic, off-the-shelf program. Each implementation process is unique given the unique needs of each organization. Deploy a training team since inception as an integral part of the development team. Start with small team whose members can become the experts for each functional area later on and stay with the project till the end. You should also have a mix of roles, like subject matter experts, testers, system developers to actively participate.
3. Initiate Training within a Wider Change Management Program: Apart from developing specific training program or web-based learning initiatives, organizations should think of enabling new behaviors, working associations and organizational structures. It should have a threefold initiated - training, change management and organizational alignment. This approach will ensure that specific learning programs are in harmony with the wider organizational change and that everyone gains right information and support.
4. Make an Iterative Approach to Training-needs Evaluation: Having the training-needs evaluation correct is necessary to the success of the project. The focus should be on the end-user’s performance needs and not just on the technical details of the program. It can be created during workshops with the design-and-build teams; their insights into technical details should be in alignment with the insights of others who understand the wider influence on the overall behaviors of users. Training is about learning the new program that the system supports. Iterative approach is required to define training needs rather defining it all at once. Keep changing the strategy to refresh the needs analysis with every release update of the program to keep it aligned with the system and business functioning.
5. Entail Innovative and Engaging Learning Initiative: Engage in more innovative approaches like online learning, collaboration systems, simulations, and social media. Dedicated intranet sites can be developed to publish news and support literatures, share information and to receive feedback from users. You can also use social media platforms to help everyone to contribute timely information along with user-generated content in text, audio or video form. You can use knowledge databases in wiki formats to standardize ways to accumulate very current perspectives from across the enterprise.
6. Assess Progress and Outcomes Rigorously: Do not limit your training evaluation programs to point-in-time temperature checks and understanding whether a few employees are satisfied with a particular program. Evaluate if the training actually has impacted the business. Engage in producing a more agile and extensive training analysis that assesses user analysis of relevance and impact on individual performance. It should also be assessed for user adoption, process performance and the effectiveness of the change initiative.
7. Align Cost-saving Practices with Value-adding Localization: Customized standardized training approach can be affordable and can enhance the positive impact on users within particular regional geographies. You need to maintain the right balance. Start collecting the crucial part of the training that can be reused. Once you are done, add the local specifics needed or business-driven sub processes. Training in local languages is also necessary. You may also rely on a trainer that can speak the local language and can translate instruction from the master documents, instead of translating complete project.
8. Make Sustainable Training Investment: Often the organizational changes and new ways of working are not sustainable after the initial training period. Data are not updated, accountability gets muddled and budgets dry up. Responsibilities are not well defined for workforce enablement and support, as time goes on. It is ideal to deploy an entity having the incentive and allocated budget to maintain the training programs and change initiative over time.

Gaining More from your ERP Program

ERP is a huge investment, with gigantic impacts on the performance of individuals and the overall organization. Deploying the right training and change programs, people can adapt to the new processes effectively. Organizations can expect to experience improved productivity on the system being turned on, and they can be quicker in exploring and grabbing marketplace opportunities.