25 Signs You Need Help Marketing.

Digital Marketing

Marketers find the right audience for your business and convert passive shoppers into active buyers. The most successful companies in the world get ahead of the competition and thrive thanks to quality marketing. 

Even if your business is already growing, it can always grow faster. Marketing can help. If you run a company without a marketing team, or have one filled only with junior associates, here are 25 reasons you may want to recruit experienced marketers or hire an agency.

25 Signs You Need Help Digital Marketin

1. You would rather look at company financials than Google Analytics. Data is powerful, but if you do not know how to harness the power of your website analytics you are severely missing out. 

2. You get overwhelmed thinking about advertising, content and social media. Your business loses out on a lot of opportunity by not engaging in any marketing activities. Of course, you should not make the even graver mistake of hiring an intern to manage all of these things. 

3. Your idea of marketing is a $50 ad in a local newspaper or a $15,000 TV spot. Targeting, you say. What targeting? 

4. You either don’t know what real-time bidding (RTB) or programmatic buying are, or have never heard of them. Surely, advertising isn’t that complicated…. 

Related: Perform Powerful Personalized Marketing in 4 Easy Steps:

5. Your business gets a lot of website traffic but a relatively low number of sales -- less than 1 percent. It is time to polish up your conversion funnel to capture more visitor value. 

6. Your site hasn’t had a makeover since 2012. In fact, you probably haven’t touched it since it was first created. 

7. People have a hard time trying to find your company on Google. You shouldn’t settle for third or fourth position for your own brand name. 

8. You love referral programs such as Uber’s “Give $20. Get $20” but the thought doesn’t even cross your mind about applying that to your business. It is a lot easier than you think! 

9. Email newsletters make you cringe. You are also inclined to hit spam when you get more than one email from a company or its representatives.

10. You rarely survey your customers and simply make assumptions about who they are, what they do, how much they make, where they live, and why they love your brand.

 Related: How Long Before Your Customers Trust You? Two Years.

11. You like the idea of having lots of fans and followers on social media, but have no idea how you would even engage them. Funny cat pictures do not count. 

12. You are unfamiliar with the terms bounce rate, call-to-action, click through, and impressions. You also think that sort of gibberish wouldn’t even apply to your business. 

13. Your sales team has a hard time explaining what you do, how your product or service differentiates itself from competitors and applicable use cases for your offerings. Marketing helps provide collateral and copy so others understand your company a lot better. 

14. You love a good billboard ad and you hate clicking anything on the web. Wait, seriously? 

15. You think you are smarter than your customers. In a day and age where customers have real voice and will not be silenced, you better be prepared to put your ego aside and actively learn from potential buyers.

 Related: 5 Keys to Unlocking the Power of Google Analytics

16. You imagine getting your company into The New York Times is impossible to do. It is hard, but by targeting the right writer with the perfect story angle, you can headline the front page of the business section. 

17. You are not familiar with inbound marketing or outbound marketing. It is all just advertising, right? Wrong. 

18. You enjoy the idea of an endless flow of new customers but regularly forget about engaging your already existing and loyal clients. 

19. You create all of your images in Microsoft Paint or PowerPoint. You believe tools such as Canva and Photoshop have too much going on. 

20. You wonder why YouTube is so popular. That is because brands that spend money on quality video get tremendous ROI. 

Related: 5 Signs That It's Time to Outsource Your Marketing

21. Anything related to marketing is done with a set-it and forget-it philosophy. If it works, why tweak it? Or, if it doesn’t work, give it more time. Unfortunately, you only throw away money this way. 

22. You haven’t heard of Seth Godin, Brian Clark or Dharmesh Shah. You wonder if they are supposed to be reality show stars or something. 

23. You believe companies like Charmin, GoPro and American Express would have grown anyways, without needing to invest so heavily in marketing. You’d be wrong. 

24. You never thought to tie in the ongoing marketing initiatives you have into a larger, structured campaign. Marketing impact multiplies when tactics are complimentary and cohesive. 

25. You hate the idea of a company blog, though you spend a majority of your time reading articles created and published by like-minded brands.

AK-47s transformed into jewelry and watches, thanks to a chance meeting in a TED hallway

The metal in this watch was once an AK-47. Through the company Fonderie 47, social entrepreneur Peter Thum has helped decommission 45,000 of these assault rifles in Africa. 

The watch looks both futuristic and retro at the same time. A swirl of visible gears and carefully calibrated dials, it charts time in an unusual way — the hour jumps into place at the top, the minute is marked in a semicircle along the bottom, and the seconds swoop above. It’s a statement watch, the kind of piece that people inevitably ask about.

This watch — which at $195,000 is no small investment — comes in a rose or white gold finish. But the metal underneath has a history. Before being crafted into a high-end timepiece, this metal formed an AK-47. Each watch has the serial number of the weapon destroyed to create it displayed across the side. And each purchase funds the destruction of an additional thousand assault rifles in Africa.

This watch was dreamed up by social entrepreneur Peter Thum, the founder of Ethos Water and a TED attendee. Thum calls the AK-47 “the most infamous and destructive gun in the world” and through the company Fonderie 47, he transforms these weapons into jewelry — rings, cuffs, earrings, necklaces and more. The watch is the company’s pièce de résistance.

The idea for Fonderie 47 was born out of a chance meeting at TED2009, when Thum struck up a conversation with fellow entrepreneur John Zapolski. “We met in between sessions in the lobby,” Thum remembers. “Like a lot of people at TED, you meet in the hallways — and then they become people that you know and interact with for the rest of your life.”

As the two talked, they discovered that they had both recently traveled to Tanzania. “I don’t remember how we got to this topic, but the subject of security and guns came up,” says Thum. “We were talking about the AK-47, and we both said, ‘We should talk about this more.’”

The AK-47 is a gun designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov for the Soviet military in 1947. While it has become one of the most widely used shoulder weapons in the world, in Africa it is especially prevalent. Because of its low cost, ease of use and long-term durability, the AK-47 has become the gun of choice for rebels, militia members and terrorists in Africa. (An interesting watch: the PBS Frontline special, “On the trail of an AK-47.”) In April, Al-Shabaab gunmen used AK-47s in a horrifying attack on a university in Kenya that left 148 people dead. The curve of the AK-47’s magazine has become eerily iconic in images from conflict regions.

A stockpile of AK-47s and other assault rifles. Thum makes these weapons the raw material for something beautiful.

Both Thum and Zapolski were concerned about the proliferation of assault rifles in Africa and wanted to come up with an idea to take AK-47s specifically out of circulation. They wondered: could they transform these weapons into something benign — even something beautiful?

“John was thinking about an art installation. I said, ‘I think we should try to make it into something that would live in the world, something that would be a part of people’s lives and that would get talked about,’” says Thum. “The idea evolved from there … We focused on watches because they are also mechanical — but at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of things that human beings make … The AK-47 is not a refined thing. Swiss watchmaking, at its highest levels, is probably one of the most refined things that human beings do. So it seemed compelling to take this object that was about death and destruction and make it into something that was also a machine, but one of beauty.”

Creating this watch ended up being a much bigger challenge than Thum and Zapolski, who left the company in 2012, originally imagined.

“It might have taken us longer to finish the first watch than it took Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel,” says Thum. (History buffs will note that is almost true, though not quite.)

The first issue: figuring out how to get AK-47s in an ethical way. The solution came in 2011, when Thum got permission to transform AK-47s confiscated in Virunga National Park in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This stunning park is in the North Kivu province, a 
seat of conflict since 1998.

Examining  cache of confiscated weaponry.

The next hurdle: getting the AK-47s to the United States, which has strict laws about the import of weapons. “We made a lot of different attempts and tried a lot of different angles, all of them legal,” says Thum. The solution: destroying the weapons locally and then transporting them. “We brought them back in our luggage,” recalls Thum. “We brought them across the border of the Congo and Rwanda, and then checked our bags at the airport in Kigali and flew back to New York.”

And yet, this method led to another challenge — finding people who would work with the material. “The steel looked like junk,” says Thum. “People who make luxury jewelry and watches are accustomed to working with materials that are easier to work with — precious metals like 18-karat gold and 24-karat gold that are soft and have low melting temperatures, With steel, the melting temperature is much higher. Their equipment isn’t really built to work with it.”

Thum found an initial collaborator in a friend of a friend, a blacksmith who proposed building a forge to heat the steel to a high temperature. He then pounded the metal using an anvil and hammer into molds, in order to create usable parts. Because the effects of the economic recession were still being felt at the time, Thum says he actually had an easy time finding factories willing to take the project on.

Thum landed on the name Fonderie 47 — “fonderie,” because it’s French for “foundry,” and “47” for “AK-47.” In 2011, he began talking to investors — including many from the TED community — and offering the first products.

The brand has grown steadily ever since. James de Givenchy created a collection for Fonderie 47, and the watch was designed by Adrian Glessing and produced by Swiss watchmaker David Candaux. Every purchase funds the destruction of more AK-47s.

“As of the end of last year, we destroyed a little over 45,000 assault rifles in [the Congo and Burundi],” says Thum.

Before becoming jewelry, these weapons are destroyed locally. Fonderie 47 works with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mines Advisory Group to destroy weapons.

The real value here is that these guns are unlikely to be replaced. “There’s a significant difference in the economic value of the AK-47 in Africa versus the global trading price,” says Thum. “The upper end of the price range for an AK-47 type weapon is $534 and the lower end of the range is $349. So if you look at the value of 45,000 AK-47s that are legacy weapons, it would cost between $15 and $24 million to replace them.”

In the summer of 2012, Thum and his wife, actress Cara Buono, had the idea to take things a step further and create products made out of weapons secured in the United States. They founded a new brand, Liberty United, to make pendants, charms and rings.

“The idea was very similar,” say Thum. “We partnered with American cities and police departments to give us guns from buyback [programs] or evidence that had been released from crimes. We take guns and bullets as material and transform it.”

So far, Liberty United is working with police departments in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Syracuse, New York; Cook County, Illinois; and Newburgh, New York. The price of these pieces tends to be lower, and the design is overseen more tightly by the company, as fabrication is done in New York and Rhode Island

Liberty United is a different spin on the same idea—this line of jewelry is crafted from the metal of weapons collected by buyback programs in the United States.

Both companies physically transform weapons. But beyond that, both also have at the core of their business model funding further work to defuse violence. Fonderie 47 gives financial support to Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a Nobel Peace Prize laureate that secures and destroys weapons in Angola, Cambodia, the Congo, Libya and Iraq. And Liberty United funds a variety of youth education programs in cities, including the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network’s Youth Violence Reduction Partnership and the Syracuse Model Neighborhood Facility’s Journey 2 Manhood Program.

This makes sense, as Thum is one of the pioneers of the social entrepreneurship movement. “When I first came up with the idea for Ethos Water in 2001, there was almost no information about companies like this,” says Thum, noting that Ben & Jerry’s, Newman’s Own and The Body Shop were virtually the only companies out there with a social good component at the time. “We’ve gone from very few of these companies as examples to almost every college and business school having courses taught on social entrepreneurship.”

The fact that people are learning about social entrepreneurship has the domino effect: it gets people interested in starting these businesses, creates more demand on a consumer level, and pushes large companies to enter the arena too.

Ethos Water got Americans to think about the global water crisis in a way many hadn’t before, says Thum. “It was a tool that used consumerism to flip a switch in people’s minds about the importance of the issue by getting them involved at a very light-touch level,” he says. (Watch his talk on social entrepreneurship from TEDxSMU below.) “The idea for Fonderie 47 is similar. The gun issue in Africa is one that hasn’t received the same kind of attention in the United States as other issues. I think in large part because it’s complicated and not easy to solve.”

He continues, “The good thing about the growth of this field of people becoming social entrepreneurs — whether they are doing so in a pure non-profit environment, a pure for-profit approach, a hybrid business, or by trying to alter large organizations — is that each idea can be viewed as an experiment.”

He’s excited to see what happens with Fonderie 47 and Liberty United. “The more experiments you run, the more people you have trying, the more likely it is that one of those people will come up with a recipe that makes a change.”

Flowering Thunder: Top 5 Richest People in India 2015A record yearfo...

Flowering Thunder: Top 5 Richest People in India 2015
A record yearfo...: Top 5 Richest People in India 2015 A record year for India. The latest FORBES list feature 90 Indian billionaires with a collective ne...

Top 5 Richest People in India 2015

A record year for India. The latest FORBES list feature 90 Indian billionaires with a collective net worth of $295 billion; an increase of 28 newcomers. According to the magazine, Mukesh Ambani is no longer the richest person in India.

Let’s see the top 10 richest people in India of 2015, according to FORBES.

Sunil Mittal

Sunil Mittal (Net Worth: $7.8 Billion)

Owning India’s biggest mobile operator, Indian telecom tycoon Sunil Mittal has built himself a fortune in only 57 years of life. His company Bharti Airtel is world’s fourth-largest telecom by number of subscribers. In 2014, Bharti Airtel crossed a milestone of 300 million customers.

Kumar Birla

Kumar Birla (Net Worth: $9.2 Billion)

After inheriting the Aditya Birla Group, a commodities conglomerate in 1995, Kumar felt the need to increase his fortune, so he bought businesses becoming the country’s largest cement producer. In a move to solidify the group’s cement business, his UltraTech Cement acquire two Indian cement units from rival Jaypee Group for a reported $870 million.

Godrej Family

Godrej Family (Net Worth: $11.6 Billion)

The owner of Godrej Group, a 117- year-old consumer goods conglomerate, Adi Godrej prides himself with the achievement of his children who run Godrej Properties, group’s biggest business. The family’s wealth, which until this year was listed under group chairman Adi Godrej, rose along with the value of its vast estate in suburban mumbai.

Shiv Nadar 

Shiv Nadar (Net Worth: $12.5 Billion)

Tech billionaire Shiv Nadar is the owner of HCL Group, a large software producer with customers such as Boeing, Microsoft and Cisco. He co-founder  HCL Group which added $3.7 billion to his fortune on rising shares of software outfit HCL Technologies. Nadar has also expanded into healthcare with HCL Avitas, to build a chain of clinics in partnership with John Hopkins Medicine International.

Hinduja Brothers

 Hinduja Brothers (Net Worth: $13.3 Billion)

London based Indian billionaire brothers Srichand and Gopichand run a multinational company with diverse business from banking and healthcare to trucks. Their fortune is up by 50%, thanks to a rebound in the auto sector that boosted shares of their Indian truck-maker, Ashok Leyland.

The brothers are planning to invest as much as $10 billion in reviving stalled infrastructure and power projects in Indai, thanks to the new business-friendly the government have put in place.

How to Develop Telepathy

Telepathy is one of the most beautiful Psychic Powers. It is known as mind to mind communication, (Tele means- distance and pathy means- feelings) Which is exchanging feelings between two minds and in an advanced stages this can be done between multiple minds. When we learn new things it takes some time for us to learn effectively but if we compare this time with others then we can find different results for different persons..ie, some people learn much faster and others much slower. This happens two to lack of: -belief psychic powers in existence, concentration power, self believe, patience and persistence. So before developing any kind of psychic power this one Should develop Those above abilities ... then powers can be developed much more faster. It is a guide in which one can learn Telepathy and Mind Reading.

Find someone (a receiver) to-whom you will send the telepathic message (Tm).

Find a place where nobody will be incendio disturb you. Now calm your mind relax.

Whatever you have written in your diary psychic read it with feelings and try to visualize 

That you are actually telling it to your receiver.

Fill your message with right feelings.

Now with closed or opened eyes visualize your receiver.

 You can only visualize His face 1-2 feet (0.3-0.6 m) away from you

That you are actually telling it to your receiver.

A telepathic message Reaches maximum speed faster than light. Your intuition will tell you That it reached.

 

Ask your receiver about your message and tell him the time of His message receiving.If  he responds positively about His receiving then you have successfully send your message.

Remember: Ask him in such a way That he can never understand about your telepathy act. Or else he can think as you and make you freak negative.The power is yours Not His it is you who is Increasing or tapping into the unused power.

Daily practice and you will be Able to do this much more effectively and easily.

Once you master this ability, you will see how useful it is it needs no network boundary it can pass though almost anything.