In January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we saw a considerable amount of new tech items launched and introduced to the public. While most were upgrades of existing technology and devices (smartphones, smart TVs, and other consumer electronics), there were some that really drew our attention.

Even if it’s hard to judge if a new product or piece of tech is a trailblazing idea, there were innovations that really aimed to change our perspective. We saw common products injected with internet connectivity and capability, becoming “smarter” by being able to provide additional information on top of the usual tasks they’re expected to do. Add in a certain level of automation and you get everyday items actively gathering data from their environments, and possibly adjusting their performance to match the needs of the people using them.

Improving common household items through the “Internet of Things” concept also opens up new possibilities for businesses. Small improvements such as activity and location tracking, data gathering, and automated sending all have the possibility to change the way businesses interact with and sell to their customers.

Interconnected devices and household items will work together to make your day

Now that IoT is becoming increasingly well-known, we’re exploring ways to make the most of these connected “household” things. Initially, we’re able to connect one thing to the web, and are already amazed with all the added functionalities we can get from it.

For example, by connecting your fridge to the Internet, you’re able to wirelessly check its contents, create a shopping list based on your current inventory, or even count the calories of whatever is in there. The common telephone, when connected to the Internet, improves it drastically. It paved the way for affordable global communications used by enterprises.

Amazingly, we’re already moving past that phase to a new level of IoT development. We now know that if we “inject” a bit of internet connectivity into a common household item, we’ll be able to discover new uses from it.

Now, we’re starting to string together these interconnected items and create a life-altering experience.

We’ll be able to look at things differently and see if these things can redefine some of the most mundane chores that are currently part of everyday life.

If we look at the bigger picture, this interconnectedness of common household items can prove useful for big businesses. We could see multiple devices from one maker, all working together to provide a better experience for the users.

For example, Nokia is venturing into health tech in the form of sleep tracking. Their aim is to give users insight into their nighttime habits. Their product, Nokia Sleep, is an internet-connected pad placed under the mattress to track your movement, brain activity, and other data to analyze your sleeping patterns. What they aim to learn about is the quality of sleep that you’re getting and gain insight into how they can improve it.

With all the data gathered, Nokia could introduce other products like a lamp/night light, music player, and an automatic recliner which would all be interconnected. All you need to do is sleep, and based on your sleeping patterns, these devices will all work together to provide the best quality of sleep for your specific needs, from selecting the best lighting condition and background music to optimizing your sleeping position. It could even be possible to integrate it with your phone system so that it can filter calls or alerts by importance. This information can then be used to develop or sell new products, increasing the value per customer and overall business performance.

Going back to the fridge example, perhaps grocery stores will be able to send you coupons for products your fridge realizes you’re almost out of, or recommend recipes based on ingredients in your fridge and let you know what final items you need to buy to finish the recipe.

All your household devices will be listening to you, and you’ll probably want them to

The number of smart speakers or voice assistants available in the market today is steadily rising, and this could be proof that we’re warming up to “willingly” connect our homes to the Internet. But having an always-on smart speaker listening to everything you say is just the start of the interconnected future that IoT promises.

Other items, especially the ones we use regularly, will have the capability to “listen” to their users and gather every bit of usable data. Some devices and apps are already gathering audio information to customize ads, and the ability to target and customize to your exact wants and needs will only improve with time.

One example of this is the GoBe 2 smart-life band from Healbe, a California-based maker of fitness wearables. The GoBe 2 is capable of tracking your calorie intake, detect minute changes in your bloodstream, your heart rate, and sleep quality. What makes the GoBe 2 unique is that all of the information gathered will be uploaded to the cloud, to an online portable accessible to your trainers, nutritionists, or wellness coaches.

This takes tracking to a new level, as it gathers data not only for your personal consumption, but for those providing services to you. This way, another pair of eyes will be on the lookout for your health. It also gives them more data to create customized offers or promotions, perhaps for a yoga class to help you relax or a vitamin to supplement your nutritional plan, which should benefit you as a customer as well.

If we magnify this and apply it to all businesses, this presents a massive opportunity to properly learn about your customers.

Makers of “smart” devices can gather data from their products in order to learn about specific habits of their users, which can then be re-used in many ways. Ideally, the data gathered will be used to benefit the users and not the company, though there will be countless opportunities where both will benefit.

With IoT, the world is changing before our eyes – are you ready?

The concept of IoT is slowly opening our eyes to a world of interconnectivity. It’s not just about our computers and communication devices, because even the humble toaster sitting in the kitchen can be made “smarter.”

What matters is how open-minded we are to these changes, because our willingness to use them and be tracked by them will make or break IoT. And if we look at the bigger picture, the evolving concept of IoT can also shape the way we do business, as it opens us up to new products and services and changes the ways businesses and their customers interact on an everyday basis.

How do you feel about the increasing use of IoT – are you more excited about its potential for connection and convenience, or concerned about data and information privacy issues? Let us know in the comments below.

The post How the Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the business-customer relationship appeared first on Trade Ready.

Knowing the latest social media trends is the key to keeping up with its fast-paced nature. This is especially important if you are involved in social media marketing, because if you’re not able to keep up with the latest trends, you could easily get overwhelmed by your competition.

The following are some of the most important social media marketing trends and stats today. Learn more about them and see how you could relate it to your business.

1. A younger audience can be more likely to convert to sales

The Internet is a very big ocean to fish from, so casting a line without knowing what to look for is very inefficient. Even if you’re focusing on just one social media channel, it’s still important to know your audience, and see if any of them fits your target consumer.

According to research by MarketingSherpa, adults aged 18-34 who are active online will likely follow a brand through social networking sites.

See if the product or service you are offering fits your audience, or else your marketing efforts will just go to waste.

This is why Instagram is the preferred social media platform of lifestyle brands that cater to millennials. According to ScienceDaily, 90% of Instagram users are below 35 years old. They are assured that most of their post views are by potential customers, increasing the possibility of converting their social media interaction to actual sales.

2. Visual content is vastly more likely to go viral

Having many friends or followers on your social network accounts doesn’t really matter if none of them interact with your brand. If there’s really an engagement between your brand and your audience, they should be liking, commenting on, or sharing your posts. This is why you should make every post count, to attract their attention and to encourage them to take action.

Visual content is the key to make something viral – it is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other kinds of content, according to HubSpot. Your marketing strategy should include ways of creating visual content for your audience, be it image posts, videos, or even livestreamed events.

3. Hashtags can help, but aren’t a one-step key to success

Social media is a good testing ground for new strategies and campaigns. One reason is that it’s relatively cheap, and you have access to a very wide audience. There have been successful campaigns before, but as they get copied by every other online marketing team, the effectiveness of such campaigns decreases.

A good example would be the use of hashtags to promote content. A Locowise study found that hashtags had no effect on engagement rates for Twitter posts. Remember when almost every brand on Twitter were spamming their posts with too many hashtags? Turns out, it’s not really helping them get a better engagement rate.

What matters more is the content that you post and share. It’s better to just focus on the quality of content, instead of spamming your post with crazy #hashtags.

4. What’s most important for you – engagement, total users or influencers?

Speaking of engagement rate, Hootsuite found that Instagram has the highest per-follower engagement rate, at 4.21%. This is 58 times better than that of Facebook, and 120 times better than that of Twitter.

If you don’t have enough resources to manage all the possible social networking sites available, choose and prioritize the one that has the biggest upside for you.

For example, Facebook may not have Instagram’s engagement rate, but they have the most monthly active users at 2.01 billion. Twitter may not have the numbers of the first two, but the ability to follow and getting followed back by various brands and influencers is unique only to this platform.

If your budget allows it, you can also have a communication and collaboration platform that lets you manage all three at once, as well as other platforms like LinkedIn or Snapchat.

Staying ahead of the curve is a never-ending effort

The Internet has paved new ways for us to do things, including marketing and advertisement. Social media became a strong channel to market products and services, and it empowered not only known brands, but also startups and small businesses. We need to constantly evolve our practices so that we can keep up not only with the competition, but also with the innovations and the technology that’s constantly advancing.

The post 4 social media marketing stats to help small businesses improve results appeared first on Trade Ready.

Communicating with different people from different locations is as simple as clicking a button. And that’s just for an individual user; businesses have started using social media to their advantage, to market and sell their products and services online worldwide.

Social selling is defined as the practice of having representatives or “salespeople” use various social networking platforms to interact with buyers and learn more about their buying preferences. Their aim is to educate and build relationships with these potential customers.

They do this by giving them the right product/service information and discussing it with their target buyers. Education is they key here, as these salespeople help increase the knowledge of their target buyers in order to convince them to purchase a product or service.

On the other hand, social media marketing uses social networks to spread brand recognition or promote products or services. Instead of relying on representatives or salespeople, it uses campaigns in the form of shareable content, advertorials, surveys, and contests.

The aim of these campaigns is to get liked, commented on and shared the most, so that knowledge about the brand, product, or service will be spread to a much wider audience than just the original fans/followers on social media. It is important to establish a social media presence on the platforms frequented by your target audience so that when you start a new campaign, you already have a lot of people to share your content.

What do social selling and social media marketing have in common?

Since both approaches involve social media, it is easy to confuse one for the other because of their similarities. One is that they have the same business goals: develop customer relationships and get recognized (brand recall) by more people.

They aim to achieve these goals by educating buyers about their brand and what they offer, in order to establish trust and ensure continued patronage and support for future releases.

Both social media marketing and social selling then aim to measure the return of investment on social media. This is because campaigns on social media channels usually eat up a sizable chunk of a company’s marketing budget, according to this 2014 study.

Social media marketing and social selling also share the same content needs. Both require branded and third party content that educates buyers about the industry or segment, the brand, the offerings, and more. In the case of social selling, the kind of valuable content needed includes whitepaper, infographics, images, and other shareable content that can contribute to the customers’ knowledge about the product.

These are shared by the “salespeople” tasked with selling the brand on social networking sites. These people include actual employees working for the brand, or sometimes, hired “influencers” – well known personalities with a sizable following.

What are the biggest differences between them?

The main difference between social selling and social media marketing is who is responsible for the success of the approach. As mentioned earlier, social selling is carried out by the salespeople who distribute the content in order to educate the customers.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is done by marketers through different campaigns. Customers often engage a faceless, nameless corporate account with social media marketing, as compared to social sellers who are usually individuals with a recognizable name and face.

Social selling usually focuses on a smaller group of customers compared to social media marketing, which communicates to larger groups and segments. Social sellers aim to address individual customers’ needs, going as far as engaging them one on one, in order to properly educate them about the brand and its offerings.

On the other hand, social media marketing campaigns usually target larger audiences. For example, the thousands of people following a certain brand would all qualify for a “Like and Share” contest, even if they haven’t purchased anything.

Why not use both?

One of the main concerns about using both social selling and social media marketing is the cost. Small and mid-sized businesses would think twice about spending for both instead of focusing on one solid approach.

But that shouldn’t stop anyone from exploring and implementing both approaches simultaneously. The key is having the right tools and technologies to run both social selling and marketing at the same time.

Social media marketing uses tools like Hootsuite or Sprout for scheduling, approving, and responding to different posts on different social networking platforms.

Social selling requires tools that help them reach individual audiences, so CRMs that let them share content and messages to specific users would be very useful. They can also benefit from an integrated phone system that lets them connect and contact leads immediately.

As long as they can get an affordable service provider for the above mentioned tools and technologies, even SMBs can benefit from using both approaches.

Are you currently using either strategy? Does one work better for you than the other, or do you advocate using both simultaneously? Share your thoughts below!

The post Between social selling and social media marketing, is there a clear choice for your business? appeared first on Trade Ready.