A complete guide to digital marketing

08 April 2021
17:29

Yes, digital marketing is effective, and you need to understand that it is here to stay. Even in the current times when everyone is going digital, companies still have apprehensions about having a digital marketing strategy. Therefore, it is important to understand the Guide For Digital Marketing and its significance for your business growth and the impact it can bring by increasing your customers, improving your reputation, or elevating your revenues.

Guide For Digital Marketing

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for the business to achieve the defined marketing goals through several digital marketing channels. The senior management or the marketing leaders of a company determine the marketing goals in alignment with the company’s business objectives. Based on these marketing goals, the relevant decision-makers plan the blueprint to reach these goals using digital media, which is defined as a digital marketing strategy.

Differentiating digital marketing strategy from the digital marketing campaign

The decision-makers develop short-term actions or tactics to achieve the defined, short-term goals of the digital marketing strategy. For example, if the objective of your digital marketing strategy is to improve the traffic on your website, you might choose the action of writing high-quality and relevant blog articles, thereby attracting an audience to visit your website. Therefore, writing blog articles to attract an audience is your digital marketing campaign.

Significance of a digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy driven by a Guide For Digital Marketing is important for your business for the following reasons:

A digital marketing strategy enables you to have a clear direction for the way you intend to achieve your business goals, whether it is more traffic, generating more leads, or developing loyal customer relationships.

A defined digital marketing approach lets you compete with other companies in the marketplace who may grab your digital audience if you do not do so.

Digital marketing enables you to know your audience better – what is their purchasing behavior, what are their expectations from you, how they intend to interact with you, what are they talking about you with their connections and many others.

With a comprehensive, clear digital marketing strategy, you can have better clarity on the key aspects that are working and strategies that need improvement; based on this, you can improve upon the not-so-working tactics and harness the successful ones fully.

Digital marketing strategy enables you to try different tactics to test and identify the ones that work for your business in achieving the relevant defined goals.

Digital marketing proposition facilitates the use of multiple online channels or a combination of them, each with their own merits to work with the channels that give you the best results.

You can use a well-crafted digital marketing strategy to communicate with your customers on different mediums in different ways and track their activities to understand their reactions and preferences.

Types of digital marketing strategy

While you may have heard about most of these digital marketing techniques, the critical part is to select the most appropriate technique for your business need. Not all strategies work for all different marketing goals for different industry domains. It is ‘YOU’ who has to understand the business needs, resources available for marketing, and competitive scenario, and then decide the best digital marketing strategy. We enumerate few strategies for you that can help you compete with other players in your industry of operations:

SEO

Search engine optimization is the technique of increasing the website traffic from search engines by showing your website among the top results in the search for specific and relevant keywords.

SEM

Search engine marketing is an internet marketing approach for promoting your website by using paid advertising to improve your visibility in search engine results pages.

SMM

Social media marketing is a digital marketing technique that uses various social media websites and platforms to promote companies and their products and services.

Website design and development

Website design means the designing of the website that is displayed on the internet, while web development refers to the functionality of the designed website. A responsive, visually appealing, comprehensive, relevant, and high-speed website works as an effective digital marketing strategy for your business to drive traffic and generate leads.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy under which you can send commercial messages to potential or existing customers to advertise your products or services, solicit sales, or request business.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing approach through which marketers create, publish, and distribute relevant and valuable content for their online audience.

Video marketing

Video marketing is a digital marketing technique under which marketers create, curate, and publish videos to promote products and services to the targeted audience.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy under which affiliates market another company’s products or services and earn a commission in exchange.

ASO marketing

App Store Optimization marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that improves an app or game’s visibility or increases its downloads in an app store.

ORM

Online reputation management is a digital marketing approach to maintain a good reputation of a business in the customers’ minds through influencing, controlling, or concealing.

Final thoughts

Now, if you have understood the importance of digital marketing for your business growth, select the right approach to get to your goals. You can also approach a digital marketing services provider who can help you with the right digital marketing strategy and tactics to achieve the desired goals.

Technovisors

Technovisors is a leading full-service digital marketing agency excelling in developing and implementing the right digital marketing strategy for you. We design customized, results-driven, and business-specific digital marketing campaigns to achieve your unique goals. Whether you are looking to generate more traffic, increase revenues, improve your customers’ awareness, raise your sales, or develop a strong base of loyal customers – digital marketing is the answer, and we make it possible for you.

Grab the opportunity to achieve your marketing goals

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Importance of EOI, RFI, RFP/RFQ in software selection

08 April 2021
17:17

Software Selection

IT acquisition, be it hardware or software selection, is not an easy process.

The procurement department in companies employs a robust procurement management system to facilitate a streamlined IT acquisition flow. In this article, we will look at the importance of EOI, RFI, RFP/RFQ in the software selection process.

Selecting the right IT vendor requires analysis of software vendors on multiple parameters. You must compare the software features with your requirements, quality of their potential deliverables, client references, pricing, reputation in the market, and many other factors. It is a long process and requires the procurement team to request the vendors for information, proposal, and quotation as and when the need arises in the procurement process flow.

Let’s delve deeper into understanding the Expression of Interest (EOI), Request for Information (RFI), Request for Proposal (RFP), and Request for Quotation (RFQ). We provide you the meaning of these documents, the basic content of each document, and the importance of each in the procurement process.

Expression of Interest (EOI)

While making an IT acquisition, the buyer floats a letter asking prospective vendors to submit their expression of interest (EOI) in supplying the IT solution as per the specifications provided therein. The vendors respond to it and provide the necessary information as to their IT solution, including marketing collaterals, product features, and technical documents.

The procurement department goes through the vendor responses and selects a few based on their merits. Through EOI, the company can develop a database of possible vendors in the market who provide solutions that address its requirements.

Request for Information (RFI)

RFI generally follows EOI, and sometimes when solution vendors are already known, the process starts with RFI.

RFI is a preliminary document used by companies for the IT acquisition to provide all the details on their business need to expect relevant responses from expert vendors present in the market. It is related more to finding as many details about the several solutions available in the market to address their business needs. The company must present all the data and information about its various challenges and expects the vendors to provide information about their offerings, which can resolve the challenges of the company.

RFI seeks information on supplier’s IT solutions, features and functionality, pricing, markets served, customer references, etc.

Request for Proposal (RFP)

RFP generally follows RFI and is more specific. It is a document used in the bidding process to obtain business proposals from potential IT vendors for procuring specific hardware, software, or service. It is a more precise document talking about the business objectives of the project or function, a clear-cut definition of the requirements for the project, and expectations from the vendors.

The key objective of RFP is to give clarity to the vendors on the company’s exact requirements so that vendors’ responses are contextual, valid to the need, relevant, and as per the company’s expectations. RFP seeks information on specific items, performance metrics, instructions of use, due date, technical capabilities, point of contact, and how the solution addresses the business need.

The buyer also specifies the selection criteria, scoring mechanism, and other requirements of the proposal in the RFP document.

The vendor responses to RFP are then evaluated functionally, technically, and economically, and the best possible option is chosen.

Request for Quotation (RFQ)

RFQ is a more detailed document specifying the exact IT requirements of the company. The company is fully aware of its problem and the solution that can address the issue; it is only looking for a vendor who can provide the solution within the cost and deadlines. In RFQ, the vendor is expected to respond to the exact requirement of the company and not suggest creative solutions.

To select the most suitable vendor for your business, it is essential to ask the right questions. RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs are those tools used to ask the right questions for procurement to on-board the right vendor for addressing the business need. These tools give the company an upper hand in conducting a fair and equally weighted assessment procedure to evaluate the IT offerings of all vendors based on several parameters. With these tools in hand, the company can achieve efficient IT procurement, standardization, cost savings, and risk moderation.

Differences between RFI, RFP, and RFQ

We provide a comparison between requests for information, proposal, and quotation as follows:

In the case of RFI, you are not sure of the solution that can solve your problem; in the case of RFP, you evaluate and compare the multiple IT solutions available to you based on many factors; while in the case of RFQ, you compare the vendors on their costing and cost structure.

The questions asked in RFI are general questions for education and information while the questions asked in RFP are specific to the vendor’s offerings and business; on the other hand, the questions asked in RFQ are related to the costing of the solution.

While RFI is casually structured, RFP is more formal and direct, and RFQ is organized and prescriptive.

Companies use RFI in the early stages of buying or when the project requirements are not clear; they use RFP when they have defined needs and are in the stage of transition from exploration to commitment; while they use RFQ when they have precise requirements and are committed to the purchase.

The response to RFI is how a vendor will cater to your business need; response to RFP is the strengths and merits of the vendor’s solution compared to others, while the response to RFQ is the pricing of the solution for the business need.

Technovisors

We provide IT consulting services to streamline your software selection process. We help you with selecting the right tool for your procurement process and help you frame it as per your need. Our professionals have the required relevant expertise in creating such documents, analysing the responses to them, and helping you select the right vendor for your business need.

Looking to acquire an IT solution?