How To Market Technology In Digital Era
Marketing of technology or technology-driven products/services is substantially different than the marketing of other goods and services. Technology Marketing is one of the most fascinating and dynamic of all the marketing verticals. It is based on the combination and aggregation of technical depth and business understanding, with the appreciation of decision-making patterns. Technology buying, especially in businesses—which is the most important consumer of information-driven marketing—is predicated on realizing its value in complex contexts. A technology marketer is enabled by digital technologies to address the multiplicities of buyer’s journey. The decision-making approaches, processes and influences vary greatly by the type of technologies, usage, business purpose, and decision-making context. The technology marketer, for example, would do well by enabling immersion and extensive information where the business purposes are critical and technology approaches have matured. On the other hand, leap-of-faith situations such as adopting newer technology approaches or building a newer business model, might require a collaborative exploration approach requiring deeper involvement in the customer’s business models. Technology marketers benefit greatly as they assimilate and adopt the digital trends. These trends harbinger significant changes in the market and the product, and at the same time necessitate the change in how technology is marketed. The important insights include increasing consumerization, importance of audience centricity, use of data and analytics, social media and changing preferences of capital and operational expenditures. Emerging digital trends, changing customer preferences, and decision-making approaches have made digital transformation of technology marketing inevitable. Organizations are integrating technologies such as mobile, social, cloud, analytics, smart devices (IoT) etc.,to transform business models and functions of technology marketing with key focus on understanding and engaging the customer.These technologies, along with potential for greater automation, providea platform and enable a valuable digital transformation of technology marketing. At Advaiya,we identify key aspects of successful technology marketing to be value realization, effective audience marketing, enriching account relationships, powering sales teams and processes and enhancing partner effectiveness. All of these aspects have the potential to be transformed digitally to be more successful. Value realization Technology marketing is an enlightened view of marketing that encompasses identifying, building, communicating and realizing the value of technology. Technology marketers have to be part of the entire technology lifecycle from product strategy to its adoption and support in the customer organization. In the digital era, it means that the technology marketer would have more insight and sensitivity about how technology being marketed can impact the customer. Honed into the usage, trends and actively consuming the feedback—which is enabled by digital and social communication—the technology marketer today, builds (and rebuilds) right positioning and messaging, as well as digital assets which not only communicate value but also enable value realization. Digital capabilities leveraged by technology marketers would allow them to understand their audience better, contextualize their messages and make reasoned and relevant argument about value. Effective audience marketing The tech marketers’ arsenal for customer engagement will have to expand to include rich new media options, involvement possibilities, and tools for smartly addressing relevant concerns of right audience at right time.The technology buying process has many participants and multiple roles and personas are involved. A marketer has to identify the right message for right persona at right time. These could be users, end-customers, stakeholders, IT professionals, developers, reviewers, etc. Digital abilities around gaining insights about concerns and preferences of users of technology, stakeholders and the decision makers, allow technology companies to design and present their products better as well as engage deeper with their customers. Marketers would use targeted digital tools helping the users compare, assess, and try their technology offerings. With growing use of mobile, social, big data, cloud and smart devices among consumers, technology marketers can easily tailor information, products and services to customers based on customer context (such as location, identity, intentions) and increase customer engagement. Understanding customer persona, pertinent as it is, would leverage social media, data analysis, and other emerging digital capabilities. Enriched account relationship Digital transformation of account relationship would mean that tech organizations would be able to participate in their clients’ businesses in a much deeper way, allowing them to address their customer concerns proactively, and also transform the way technology products and services are packaged, marketed and sold. Intelligent and creative use of IoT, analytics, social and behavioral data would mean that technology marketers would be able to partake in and influence the outcomes relevant to their clients in a much more involved manner.Automated targeted tools would enable technology marketers to transform the product experience for customer in terms of outcomes relevant to them. The potential is to enable engagement based on customer success, rather than merely transactional product sales. Field enablement Digital transformation of sales teams on field will help them to deliver the right information, content and options to customers at right time and capitalize the opportunities. As tech organizations evolve to be more engaged with their customers, the sales teams would morph into involved consultants—and this can only be enabled by digitally enabling and empowering the field. Analytics, tools and data that drive sales are getting sophisticated in the transforming digital era. Personalized sites targeted for specific business or organization provide insights from customer interaction. Data driven analytics enables to optimize sales process and efforts. Sales digital transformation would improve sales effectiveness and increase revenue thereafter. With Big Data and cloud, now it’s all about making smart data driven marketing decisions. It helps technology marketers to gain better customer insights, improve supply chain and power campaigns and promotions of technologies. Cloud enables to get data from across various touch points on one integrated platform. This helps marketers to easily analyze the trends in real-time and tailor products and services for better customer experience. Partner engagement: Partners being the key enablers in scaling the business, digital transformation of partner engagement cannot be overlooked. The emerging digital trends have started refining how technology vendors approach market with their partners. Organizations have started moving away from the traditional approach of partner portal consisting barely of marketing programs,
Why Do Tech Implementations Fail?
It’s daunting to see organizations spending millions of dollars, effort and time implementing a new technology, only to discover it gathering dust after it goes live. Despite the importance of technology adoption, organizations fear that the investments, workflow changes, and many other potential moves might not go well as expected. Geoffrey Moore in his book “Crossing the Chasm” explains the theory of Technology Adoption Lifecycle where he focuses on groups of individuals and their willingness to embrace change in the market. He represented such kind of behavior with a bell curve where there is a chasm. Failing to cross this chasm, often results in technology implementation failure. The technology adoption lifecycle consists of the five stages – Innovators (ones who are ahead of their peers and often have great ideas), Early Adopters (often try out new things and believe in experimentation), Early Majority (often known for asking “Why?”), Late Majority (more skeptical and want proof that things will work before they try it), and Laggards (fear change). Each of these stages in the technology adoption lifecycle help in better understanding of the individual’s behavior and the segment in which that person currently exists. Achieving a successful tech rollout means focusing on driving adoption and ensuring every person that lie in each of the stages mentioned above, understand the benefits of working in a new way and at the same time embrace the solutions being provided. So, to get your employees adopt that technology to turn your tech implementation into a breeze implementation, let’s understand the barriers that hinder the tech adoption. The Impracticality of Standards Setting of unrealistic standards and expecting returns out of it without proper planning will lead in an inevitable failure. Therefore, it is recommended to have a concrete discussion or a visioning exercise with the team or the key stakeholders on the business goals that the tech change is intended to accomplish, to make it realistic and attainable. Undefined Outcomes Just as a ship without a rudder gets lost in a typhoon; similarly, a tech implementation without a defined outcome doesn’t perform as expected when faced with uncertainties. So, to prevent such situation, assessing the business needs and goals is the first step to defining business outcomes. The business results can have some defined quantifiable metrics to judge its success such as efficiency, worker satisfaction, etc. A clear business outcome will serve as a guiding light throughout the launch and rollout planning, and it will also help secure buy-in across the organization. Overlooking the Key Stakeholders Identifying the leadership team and key stakeholders who are supreme at getting people excited about new technology helps in driving a successful adoption strategy and achieve end-user adoption. Influential people such as CFOs, PMOs and many other who are decision makers of the organizations can start to set out a vision for their organization; they make that vision seem attainable by taking the helm of the people, processes, and technology to bring technology implementations to a definite conclusion. They have the greatest influence on company culture and can actively communicate the value and benefit throughout the organization. The Absence of an Adoption Plan and Timeline Using an outdated planning model that doesn’t align with business objectives and end users’ needs, will quickly capsize, if not hit by an iceberg of employee resistance. Hence it’s critical to develop a plan with realistic milestones and an accompanying timeline that focuses on company outcomes and end user concerns. The adoption plan should contain a mix of activities that maximize impact and approval. Such activities may include organization announcements or newsletters, engagement events, and training. Announcements and Newsletters are great for creating a buzz within the organization. Engagement events are a perfect place to create a party-like atmosphere where you can further motivate and encourage with contests, giveaways, and recognition. And training is essential to ensure that employees know how to use the tech implementation to get their work done. Failure to Measure Progress and Address User Feedback A final reason for tech implementation failure is not measuring advances in deployment and overlooking the end user experiences. As stated above, a technology adoption must meet the needs of everyone for it to be a productive and sustainable investment. To achieve this, it is important to measure the progress against the defined benchmarks and collect user feedback before, during, and after any technology change. This will help evangelize the change across the organization, thereby driving higher adoption and implementation success rates. For example, user surveys are an efficient way to collect quantitative and qualitative data from users. To make the most out of your survey, it is recommended to circulate a survey shortly before the deployment as a baseline. Soon after the deployment, release another survey to gain insights about user’s experiences and ensure to adjust the plan. Driving adoption is a continuous cycle and doesn’t end after its implementation. Continuous innovation and adding business value by conducting a visioning exercise with key stakeholders, creating an adoption plan that aligns with business objectives, providing additional training on best practices and iterating new learnings, will enable your tech implementation to be a successful one and for the most part, smooth sailing.
Reinforce Self-service BI with Data Discovery Platform
Ever changing market needs, rapidly shifting business contexts and increased competition demand businesses to make important decisions quickly. To gain a competitive edge and ensure long-term success, business decision makers want to access data at all times, wherever they are. Further, organizations generate a huge volume of data at a high velocity. And hence, IT teams are under great stress as they are facing several challenges, like combining data from disparate sources, ensuring data security & governance, and providing high quality data to deliver valuable insights. At the same time, business users no more want to rely on IT for getting access to the useful information to do their jobs. Data discovery has a central role in enabling business and IT to address these challenges and needs. While generally, more data lead to more opportunities for more relevant insights, the right data has to be discoverable and easy to surface. What this means is that organizations need to have tools allowing accumulation and structuring of data from multiple systems, and information sources.. Data discovery, thus, is one of the more relevant technology areas. The traditional technical means could be very tedious, time-consuming and labor intensive. On the other side, business users are demanding greater speed, ease of use, and instant visibility. Modern data discovery technology is about gathering data from different sources, including legacy systems and processes in such a way that it allows meaningful insights to users flexibly and quickly. Data discovery solutions also have to address challenges of consistency (as business users keep multiple copies of same data), handling multiple source systems and changes happening there, and governance (including, access controls, auditability, and version control). Since data discovery profits both IT and the business, it’s important for each group to take steps towards evaluation and adoption of a data discovery platform. Many BI solution providers are continually building new capabilities to make the data discovery more powerful, governed and easily manageable. Today, many tools are available that support governed data discovery and each of these tools offers a unique approach to data discovery and, thus self-service Bl. According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2016, the main focus in the coming years for BI industry would be on self-service analytics and governed data discovery. TimeXtender is a leading solution for data discovery. Its Discovery Hub approach allows highly automated creation of modern data warehouses built on a powerful operational data exchange. This, in conjunction with data visualization and reporting tools like Qlik, Power BI, Tableau etc., allow business users to gain insights via self-service BI feeding on data discovery across all relevant information sources. As a premier TimeXtender Partner, and having Microsoft Gold competence, Advaiya’s BI and Analytics practice is focused on building and providing BI solutions with visualization and data discovery platforms.
Estimating SharePoint licensing requirements
Most of the time when you are pitching a SharePoint based solution, your customer asks about ballpark costs of licensing and hardware, and the total cost of acquisition, which help them set their budgets. Here is how you can start to get a good estimate on the overall cost of SharePoint license acquisition. Most of the enterprise customers have dedicated licensing advisors or resource persons to advise on licensing and software budgeting. However, finding a total cost can be tricky in case you are thinking to implement a SharePoint solution on premise. While SharePoint is available as a part of Office 365 in both cloud as well as on premise, this article focuses on the understanding of licensing costs of implementing SharePoint solution on premise. All license estimates are based on Microsoft Open License without Software Assurance. Here, we would be making several assumptions to understand the total cost of licensing, and note that I am not covering the total cost of ownership (TCO) in this article, as it involves several other factors and considerations. To begin, let’s take a scenario where an organization is planning to implement SharePoint on premise for their own users, and there are no external users involved. Some of the users would be using advanced features like Business Intelligence solutions. So what would be the license requirements of implementing a SharePoint solution alone? (You can refer the link that describes SharePoint 2016 Licensing: https://products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-licensing-overview) This article explains that for using SharePoint 2016 in an organization, the below three components are required – SharePoint Server 2016 – For each running instance of Server software SharePoint Standard CAL – CALs are Client access licenses required by each person or device accessing a SharePoint Server SharePoint Enterprise CAL – For accessing advanced features like business applications and business intelligence. Now let’s build the scenario further and imagine that the organization has 500 users, out of which 50 would be accessing advanced functionality (Enterprise CAL). Thus, the SharePoint licensing structure based on sizing and capacity planning for different functions implemented would be: (On a side note can get start from here for sizing and capacity planning) Table 1: SharePoint Licenses SharePoint Server 2016 2- 4 (web servers, content database servers and application server roles) SharePoint Standard CAL 500 SharePoint Enterprise CAL 50 (You can refer the link to get started on sizing and capacity planning) How we calculated numbers for CALs? Simple – as explained in the scenario above that the organization has 500 users, out of which 50 would be using advanced functionality like Business Intelligence and Business solutions – they would need Enterprise CAL. But why 500 Standard CAL, and not 450 as 50 users are already using Enterprise CAL? The reason is – SharePoint Enterprise CAL is additive – to access the Enterprise Edition features of SharePoint, a person/device must have both SharePoint Standard CAL and SharePoint Enterprise CAL. So this was all about initial licensing calculation, but what about pre-requisites? Let’s find out. Server License We begin with SharePoint Server pre-requisites, which are required for installation and deployment – Each SharePoint Web Server or Application Server requires Windows Server License, and Content database server requires SQL Server license that in turn requires Windows Server as a pre-requisite. Look at the table below for licensing pre-requisites for Servers. Table 2: Pre-requisites for Sharepoint, based on the assumptions: Role Numbers Pre-requisites Numbers Front-end web servers and application servers 2 Windows Server 2 Database Servers 2 SQL Server 2 Windows Server 2 In this case, total number of licenses required for server are: SharePoint Server – 2 (It does not need a SharePoint license for systems hosting SQL Server software if SharePoint Server components are installed on different hardware than SQL Server) Windows Server – 4 (Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter) SQL Server -2 (This only applies for full SQL Server databases and not for SQL Server Express) Client License We talked about server licensing requirements, but what about clients (persons or devices) accessing these services? We have already covered SharePoint CAL in Table 1 with explanation for each type of CAL, now let’s dig deep. If we check licensing terms (old but relevant) – users who access SharePoint need a Windows Server CAL, except when a user anonymously accesses SharePoint from the Internet. In our scenario, all users are internal and will require a Windows CAL. Now comes SQL Server CALs: Microsoft recommends that every user of every version of SharePoint counts as a user of SQL Server that hosts the SharePoint database. Such multiplexing means that every user and device needs to be licensed to access SQL server. For SQL server licensed as server-plus-CAL, each user and device accessing SharePoint will require a CAL for SQL server. Two exceptions to these guidelines are: ? No need for a SharePoint Server license for systems hosting SQL Server software, if SharePoint Server components are installed on different hardware than SQL Server. ? No need for an SQL server license, if SharePoint is installed on a single server with a built-in database—like in the case of deploying a small number of websites, where one wants to minimize administrative overhead. Thus, for above 500 users, we would require SQL CAL and Windows CAL, both. In case Windows Server and SQL Servers are processor based license, then no respective CALs are required to access these servers; otherwise for each user you will require a Windows and SQL CAL. So if we recalculate CALs, they would come out to be as listed in the table below: Table 3: Client Access Licenses (CALs) SharePoint Standard CAL 500 SharePoint Enterprise CAL 50 Windows CAL 500 SQL CAL 500 (Assuming that server licenses are not processor based) Thus, depending on the scenario and server license acquisition types, you have to consider licensing costs for pre-requisites and clients. In the above scenario, Windows Server, SQL Servers and their respective CALs were considered. In case you are budgeting only for SharePoint Servers and CALs, make sure that
Persona development for customer centric marketing
Persona development is a process of developing composite and realistic representations of key segments of your audience, which helps you deliver relevant and useful content to them. It is mostly based on user research and web analytics. Here we will understand the benefits of personas, and steps to creating effective personas. Top 5 benefits of personas Creates a targeted sales approach: An effective buyer persona assists your sales team by giving them a set model, which they can use in interactions with their customers. It helps them have a better idea of what kind of customer personalities they are dealing with and other related traits. Provides fluidity for your company strategy: You can alter your buyer personas adapting to new changes. This type of fluidity allows you to understand how your targets might have changed over time. Promotes organizational unity: Well documented personas will help to have clear ideas throughout your organization, serving as a single version of truth for everybody. It helps – customer service representatives, administrators, marketing and sales team, and all members who interact directly or indirectly with the customers – in increasing customer satisfaction and retention rates. Improves lead generation: An effective buyer-centric approach will assist in improving lead generation efficiency by generating quality information about target clients. The companies who have revised their buyer personas within last six months are found to be seven times more likely to exceed leads and revenue goals. Upgrades product positioning and development: Maintaining buyer personas and updating it periodically helps in upgrading existing products to a position higher. It helps in targeting new features that the buyer is looking for in your product. Steps to creating personas Now let us look into the steps to develop an effective buyer persona. Here, the aim is to create a focused description of your user(s) and what he/she wishes to accomplish. Step1: Finding the users Questions to be asked: Who are the target users? How many users are there? What do they do with the system? Strategies used: Quantitative data collection Outcome: Detailed user report Step 2: Building a hypothesis based on buyer persona Question to be asked: What are the differences among the users? Strategies used: Analyzing the materials Grouping the users based on interest and other factors Outcome: A detailed draft description of the target groups. Step 3: Verifications and finding user pattern Questions to be asked: Data based on persona, like interest, likes/dislikes, values, etc. Data based on a situation, like area of work and conditions of work. Data based on scenarios, like work strategies and goals. Strategies used: Quantitative data collection with categorization. Outcomes Detailed report with categories. Step 4: Constructing persona Questions to be asked User/body (name, age, image) Nature (introvert/extrovert) Education Background (occupation, etc.) Emotions and attitude toward the technology and information Personal behavior and traits Strategies Used Categorization Outcomes Description of categories Step 5: Defining situations Questions to be asked: What are the needs of this buyer persona? What are the situations in which it will be effective? Strategies used Analyzing situation and needs based on the target audience Outcomes Situation report in which persona is effective Step 6: Validations Question to be asked Do you know someone interested in this particular product or services? Strategies used People who know about the persona, read and comment on the persona description Outcomes Validation Summary Report Step 7: Creating scenarios and ongoing development Question to be asked What happens when a buyer persona uses the technology in giving situation and scenario Strategies used Usability tests to be carried out for a new data collection Outcomes: Scenarios, use cases Foundation document These steps will be helpful if a company is collecting qualitative data on its prospective customers to get a strong understanding of who its customers are and why they do what they do, and motivation factors. Here is a persona development example: Documenting personas is vital to keeping everybody focused on the same segment of audience, and thus is increasingly becoming an integral part of businesses’ marketing strategy. How are you developing buyer personas for better conversions?
Technology marketing in digital era
Marketing of technology or technology-driven products/services, especially to the businesses, is substantially different than marketing of other goods and services. It is based on the combination and aggregation of technical depth and business understanding, with appreciation of decision making patterns. Business audiences consume information driven marketing and base their decisions on realizing value under complex contexts. The technology buying process has many participants, and multiple roles and personas are involved. A marketer has to identify right message for right person at right time. These could be users, end-customers, stakeholders, IT professionals, developers, reviewers, etc. Hence, technology marketing needs to have a focus on valued information and communication to influence decision making. Digital trends harbinger significant changes in the market and the product, and at the same time necessitate change in how technology is marketed. The important realizations include increasing consumerization, importance of audience centricity, use of data and analytics, social media and changing preferences of capital and operational expenditures. Digital capabilities leveraged by technology marketers would allow them to understand their audience better, contextualize their messages and make reasoned and relevant argument about value. Digital abilities around gaining insights about concerns and preferences of users of technology, stakeholders and decision makers, allow technology companies to design and present their products better as well as engage deeper with their customers. Marketers would use targeted digital tools helping users compare, assess, and try their technology offerings. The tech marketers’ arsenal for customer engagement will have to expand to include rich new media options, involvement possibilities, and tools for smartly addressing relevant concerns of right audience at right time. Understanding customer persona would leverage social media, data analysis, and other emerging digital capabilities. Account relationship would transform as tech organizations participate in their customers’ businesses in a much deeper way, allowing them to address their customers’ concerns proactively, and also transform the way technology products and services are packaged, marketed and sold. Technologies for IoT, analytics, social and behavioral data would mean that technology marketers would be able to partake in and influence the outcomes relevant to their clients in a much more involved manner. Digital transformation of sales teams on field will help technology marketers to deliver right information, content and options to customers at right time and capitalize the opportunities. Analytics, tools and data that drive sales are getting sophisticated in transforming the digital era. It helps technology marketers to gain better customer insights, improve supply chain and power campaigns, and promotions of technologies. With rising use of mobile, social and cloud among consumers, technology vendors are empowering partners with automated targeted tools and marketing collaterals. To know more about these key aspects of successful technology marketing, please visit How To Market Technology In Digital Era
An approach towards influencer marketing
Today, organizations have an option of large number of channels to reach out to their customers. To boost their marketing capabilities further, organizations now need a smart way to present their offerings, which would impact or influence customers deeply, and help build loyal relationship with them. Influencer marketing, a form of marketing that targets specific influential individuals or communities rather than direct consumers, provides a good way to deal with this situation. Influencers have the capability to influence consumer behavior, and shape the decisions taken by a large number of audience, either directly or indirectly. Such influencers may include celebrities like sports person, journalists, analysts and famous authors, or may be common individuals like bloggers, active social networkers, or may be even the office colleagues whom your consumers trust. Any audience under direct or indirect contact with these influencers can easily get inclined towards the brand or product promoted by him or her, while a negative feedback by them may result in an adverse effect on the brand. For any brand, the easiest way towards influencer marketing is to identify top influencers from the existing followers of your brand. This provides an advantage of leveraging existing fans and followers to target more business, which is often considered as an economical option. But when organizations are planning to invest greatly on this, they may target national or global influencers to have much wider impact. Harnessing the power of influencer marketing involves following stages: Influencer Identification – The very first step is to identify right influencers or influencer communities that suit your requirements. Various individuals and communities have a varying scope of influence across various mediums including social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), publications (books, blogs, media publications), public events, social forums and so on. Thus, the right influencer for you would pretty much depend upon your marketing strategy. For instance, if you are working on a strategy to improve your brand presence across social networks, you will probably look for influencers or communities active across those social networks (basically social media influencers), having a decent number of followers or members and where the content gets propagated at a rapid pace. Identification of right Influencers or Influencing communities can be best performed via a detailed analysis in a statistical manner. This involves gathering information about all the potential candidates or user groups, and doing deep analysis on them based on their activities and attributes. Influencer Activation – Activation of influencer refers to driving the influencer’s impact in favor of your brand. For any brand, there are fair chances of having negative influencers, which may include unsatisfied customers, competitor products and firms or some social activities having conflicting thoughts to what your brand is promoting. Thus, you need to strategize in a way to reduce the impact of the negative influence, while promoting positive influences and also converting the neutral influences to have a positive outlook towards your brand. An optimal strategy for this would again depend on your business requirement and your branding strategy, and what exact outcome is required from the influencers or the influencer communities. For instance, if you want your influencers to talk about your new offerings, you may want to introduce them with your new offerings first, and ask them for reviews. If you want them to simply talk about existing offerings, you might have to engage them with new content to talk about. And to cover-up the negative influencers, you can set up appropriate influencer marketing campaigns to identify and mobilize the right influencers to share and promote your content across desired channels. For organizations who thrive on new innovative marketing strategies, integrating Influencer Marketing with their existing marketing strategy would be a good way to proceed. Influencer Marketing leverages a trust-based marketing that is based on natural human instincts. This helps organizations establish better loyalty and stronger relationship with the consumers and influence consumer behavior in more human way than any other form of marketing. To read more about influencer marketing, and how it can help your organization, visit Advaiya Influencer Marketing Offering.
Importance of persona development for strategic marketing
In the modern digital era, like any business strategy, audiences are also undergoing continual shifts, transformations and evolution. People are becoming more and more demanding and looking for things specific to their needs and habits. It is essential for businesses to understand what their ideal prospects do and why they do so. People are unique and so are their demands, therefore businesses need to design, develop and deliver right product, service or information to right audience, at right time. To gain insights into targeted market or audience; personas are vital components. An in-depth analysis about precise audience in the form of persona development helps to know prospects better and create content that connects with them. For any product/service/information to be successful, it needs to be customized based on specific persona needs, traits and pain-points. Doing so is a very significant step as each member in the buying team has different roles and responsibilities. Persona-based development and marketing is becoming crucial to achieve success. It is always considered that if the content is similar for everyone, then it is not useful for anyone. Creating persona-targeted messaging which resonates each stage of the buying cycle, offers a better buying experience and lead to an increased bottom line for the business. For understanding any specific persona, basic components are demographic details, roles and responsibilities, goals and challenges, hobbies and interests, decision competence, KPIs and drivers, decision matrix, and communication channels. After the identification of all these components, the audience can be further separated into types of users; buyer, evaluator, influencer of any product or service. Once businesses develop personas and get to know the right audience, it becomes easier for them to develop a clear and targeted marketing strategy. The ultimate goal of all targeted communication is to highlight a business’s expertise, and increase the audience’s affinity towards the business. Let us help you identify the right audience for your business. Whether you need to better align your sales and marketing, build a new website, create a compelling content strategy, Advaiya persona development offering can help you build personas to accelerate customer experience management. Our experts in user experience persona development use a simple yet agile approach to create a customized solution specific to your objective. You can contact us for more details on our approach and methodology.
Quickest way to set up a MongoDB on Windows
We had already discussed about the basics of NoSQL in our previous article. Here, let’s have a look at various considerations for deployment and configuration of NoSQL. MongoDB supports a variety of platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Solaris for installation to provide document-oriented database. This article will cover MongoDB installation and hands-on experience on Windows platform. Following are the step-by-step instruction for MongoDB deployment on Windows: Compatibility Check 1. MongoDB supports four versions of Windows including Windows 64-bit 2008 R2+, Windows 64-bit 2008 R2+ legacy, Windows 64-bit legacy and Windows 32-bit. For installation, you need to identify your Windows version, and ensure that it is supported by MongoDB. a. To check your Windows version, press ‘Windows + R’ keys to open Windows Run, type “MSINFO32” and press ‘Enter’ to open the ‘System Information’ window. b. In the ‘System Information’ window, the System Summary Tab provides information about operating system name and version. Download and Install 2. Download MongoDB setup from official site of MongoDB. Here you can find the latest setup file: https://www.mongodb.org/downloads?_ga=1.208203799.465445206.1432014970 3. Go to the download location and run the executable file for MongoDB. MongoDB allows users to deploy MongoDB by simply running .exe file or can be deployed using command prompt. While installing, if you choose ‘Complete Install’ option, all the configuration files will be installed on the default location at “SystemDrive:Program FilesMongoDB”. To define a custom location and components for installation, you can select the Custom Install option. 4. Verify installation by navigating to the specified installation folder. Folder might contain more than ten executable files including mongod.exe, mongo.exe, mongodump.exe, mongorestore.exe, mongoimport.exe, mongoexport.exe, mongostat.exe, and mongotop.exe. Setup and configuration 5. Setup a data directory to store all data. a. Go to Command Prompt, navigate to the path where you want to create data directory and type md datadb command. 6. To start with MongoDB, first you need to start a daemon of MongoDB. On the command prompt, go to the installation folder. 7. Run Mongod.exe command to execute the file. This starts the MongoDB database and displays a message ‘Waiting for connections’. This indicates that the MongoDB is now running. 8. Open new command prompt to connect with MongoDB (leaving the current command prompt as is). 9. On the new command prompt, go to the installation folder location and run the command mongo.exe. 10. The above step will connect the console with the MongoDB server. You can verify the connection status of MongoDB in both of the command prompt. You MongoDB database is now ready.