“Telemarketing campaigns should be targeted to meet a company’s specific marketing needs. This can be done by cleansing a database to selling new business and anywhere in between.“

– Bill Kerth, Movere Teleservices

The following article appears in, Virtual Sales

Most people mistakenly believe that using telemarketers is limited in use to cold calling sales activities. But telemarketing can be used to turn many opportunities into business, there are literally hundreds of ways to do this but these are our Top 10 ways to use telemarketing.
ONE: Appointment Setting

Appointment setting is, always has, and always will be, a primary way that companies generate new business. Organisations usually place a great deal of emphasis on appointment setting, and also a significant proportion of their budget. Why do they do this? Because there’s no more effective way to close a sale than a chance to sit down with a prospective client in a face-to-face meeting. Appointment setting is a cost effective and intelligent use of telemarketers to generate new business for your organisation.

TWO: Seminar Booking

In recent years, telemarketing has proven itself to bring exceptional results for those individuals and organisations that deliver seminars. It doesn’t matter how good your seminar is; if delegates aren’t booking you’re losing out. Using a telemarketing team to book your seminars means getting the good news out to people that could greatly benefit from attending your seminars.

Working from existing mailing lists or cold calling people with industry links to the seminar subject or topic is a great way to put a telemarketing team to work for your seminars.

THREE: The Follow Up

Using follow up calls is a powerful and effective way to make the most of your direct mail or email marketing. The recipient has already had the opportunity to consider your offer by mail and now telemarketing offers a renewed chance to capitalise on that offer for both parties.

Follow Up calls can also be made after literature or sales enquiries, chasing up interested parties and converting prospects that may have otherwise dithered undecidedly about purchasing your goods or services from a brochure. Follow up interest by using a dedicated telemarketing team to convert interest into action.

FOUR: Market Research

One of the truly time-tested uses of telemarketing is market research, often used for product review and customer feedback. However, these days it can be used to cover a full range of quantitative and qualitative data collection.

Using the latest integrated technology, telemarketing interviewers can handle everything from small executive level surveying to mass nationwide customer feedback questioning. Doing Market Research via the telephone is a highly cost effective method of conducting large-scale market research and can cover vast geographical locations from a single base. Of course, given the right permissions, data gleaned from your market research telemarketing can be used to target the prospects for your next telemarketing campaign.

FIVE: Customer Reactivation

Your organisation should keep a record of all current customers and all those people that were customers but are not actively buying from you. Telemarketing is an effective way to reconnect with and reactivate your dormant customer database and using data that you already have in your systems. By using telemarketing, your company can win you up to 50% of your past customers back!

SIX: Collections

Outstanding invoices and missed payments can really cripple a business and hinder a company’s progress and development. If you’re struggling to recoup outstanding sums, then telemarketing can be an effective method of collecting what’s owed to your company. Working from a list of your debtors, a tele-collections team can identify individuals or companies that owe your organisation money and ensure that you have the correct contact details for them. If you then wish to take a payment, these can be handled through an automated system or passed through to your own payment teams.

SEVEN: Selling Advertising Space

When you’ve got space to sell, you can’t rely on people just coming to you. You need a team of dedicated telemarketers that can directly sell your space to the people that need to advertise. This isn’t simply cold calling; it’s designing a campaign to target those businesses and individuals that might benefit most from the opportunity to use your advertising space. A team of experienced telemarketers can target likely clients and more effectively approach hundreds of potential clients, rapidly improving your chances of new business generation.

EIGHT: Database Cleansing

The information in your database is quickly out of date. By using telemarketers to work through your data, you can correct, delete or amend the details of your existing customers, leads or prospects. By making sure that your data is up to date and accurate, you can increase the rate at which your sales staff can make sales. Data cleansing may also be a legal requirement in various industry sectors, so it also keeps your nose clean with industry’s regulators. Make your existing data work for you by purging useless existing data.

NINE: Lead Generation

Using telemarketers to generate leads means increased sales revenue and greatly reduces the amount it costs to make a sale. When you use telemarketers to generate your leads, you free up your sales teams to do what their good at – which is making sales!

TEN: Selling to Existing Customers

Last, but certainly not least, telemarketing provides a successful route to improving sales by selling directly to those that are already using your products or services. Existing customers are much more easily converted because you don’t need to convince them of your expertise, reputation or benefits.

With an existing customer, you can use telemarketing to offer extended service, upgrades and further features on something they’ve already bought, or offer them a completely new product or service. If the existing customer is happy with what they bought from you in the past, the worst that can happen is that they will simply reject your new offer. But since they were willing to listen in the first place, it wasn’t a hardship and you can still call them again in the future with new offers.

Telemarketing offers organisations of all sizes the opportunity to expand and develop their customer base with reduce costs and impressive results.

Learn More about Movere Teleservices.

“Hybrid cloud computing has been the answer for our clients real-world challenges. It provides the right blend of flexibility and performance, and appears to be the answer to the frequent question of “what’s next?”

– Patrick Torney – eDot

The following article written by: Brian Butte, Network World

Over the years, I’ve learned that predicting what will happen in emerging technologies is much easier than predicting when it will happen. Case in point: hybrid clouds. Many of us in the cloud community predicted in 2009 that cloudbursting would be the impetus for an explosion in public cloud consumption; and I went so far as picking 2010 as the beginning of the transition.

Well, my prediction was sound in direction but way off the mark in timing. Since 2009, I’ve learned that the barriers to hybrid cloud are more numerous than originally anticipated — something I’ll address in greater depth in a future post. However, seeing mass adoption on the horizon in 2016 (I’m crossing my fingers this time), it’s important to move the conversation forward by providing some introspection on where the hybrid cloud is today.

How quickly are enterprises moving to hybrid cloud solutions?

Interest and consumption are beginning to ramp up quickly. Companies are realizing that there is a bigger difference between private cloud, which tends to be nothing more than mass virtualization, and public cloud than they were led to believe. It’s the reason why so many private cloud implementations fail to meet their goals; so many, in fact, that it’s become a staple topic of conferences and blogs. As a result, IT leaders are making a rapid shift in the direction of public cloud by adopting hybrid cloud. The combination of private and public cloud gives IT the tools required to help the business innovate and iterate faster at a lower cost.

How satisfied are enterprises once they get to the hybrid cloud?

Few companies feel that they are there yet, so the promise exceeds the realization; but the scales are tipping. Using a private or public cloud is easy; however, mixing them to deliver a service is quite challenging. Application, integration, and data architectures need to be revisited, sometimes tweaked, while other times overhauled. New tools for deployment, monitoring, and management are required. Additionally, IT teams must develop new skills to collaborate more closely. Organizations with strong DevOps teams have already surmounted many of these obstacles, thereby smoothing their transitional path to hybrid cloud. However, this still remains the exception, not the rule. Beyond the technology stack, there are still tough lessons to be learned in compliance, operational support, and financial management.

Today, the benefits of the hybrid cloud manifest themselves primarily as lower-cost and higher-speed; however, without proper management of the provisioning and de-provisioning cycles, the cost equation can quickly turn upside down. A properly configured hybrid cloud solution changes the conversation between IT and the business as it shortens timeframes and expands possibilities.

What’s next beyond today’s hybrid clouds?

Hybrid clouds represent an important step in the transition of IT from technology manager to solution provider. Deploying hybrid cloud solutions will help companies become comfortable with public cloud security, operations, and financial management. Although there will be challenges and hurdles, over the next five years companies will seek to offload as much of their technology stack as possible to the public cloud, driven not only by the economic benefits and shared resources, but also the freedom to choose among multiple vendors on their terms. Cloud-dependent technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), real-time analytics, and collaboration, will continue to evolve the end-customer relationship, which in turn will require public cloud solutions to meet scale and time-to-market-challenges. As private data centers give way to the public cloud, public cloud itself will transform from a regional to a local focus.

Deploying hybrid clouds is the next step beyond private clouds in the evolution of cloud computing. The stakes are high, as those who figure it out first will gain a significant advantage in agility, efficiency, and elasticity unshared by their market rivals. Now is the time to start plotting the path to the future and to move up the cloud learning curve.

Learn More about eDot.

“Giles Goodwin does a great job describing two different ad technologies online, and where they are both heading. A key point he makes is that regardless of the technology, it is still an exercise in advertising. Therefore, it should be guided by a team trained in powerful visual communication.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Giles Goodwin Ad Week

It seems the writing’s on the wall for the banner ad.

In 2015, “banner blindness” is real and irrevocable: More than 80 percent of digital ads go ignored, while 63 percent of millennials use ad-blocking software to eliminate them entirely. Meanwhile, native-ad platforms tout that users look at their promos 52 percent more frequently than they look at banners, and are more likely to share them with others.

The conclusion feels obvious. By 2017, spending on native ads on social sites alone is expected to rise to $5 billion. Soon, native will be king, and the digital banner will join the browser pop-up in the graveyard of outdated, digital-marketing schemes.

But the obvious conclusion is the wrong conclusion. There is hope for the humble little banner. (Just look at this creative campaign from Post-It Notes in Russia, where the annoyance of banner ad retargeting was brilliantly turned into a helpful reminder service.)

New technological improvements will soon bring its content into the 21st century—enough so to challenge native advertising’s supposedly inevitable ascendance.

Don’t Blame the Banner—Blame Limited Creative

Over the past decade, ad tech has brought tremendous innovations to two components of digital ad platforms: media buying and data management. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) allow for buying media at massive scale and high precision. Supply-side platforms (SSPs) let publishers maximize their fill and yield. Data-management platforms (DMPs) support massive data sets and provide the stats used to execute targeted campaigns across the entire Internet. Ad exchanges support real-time bidding at sub-second speeds.

The last component of the banner ad—creative—hasn’t kept up with the rest of the team. (By “creative,” I mean the actual image, file, or application served up inside the banner box.) Advertisers routinely buy a million-dollar campaign with great inventory at massive scale and deliver a static ad creative that could have been served up in 1998.

That’s a huge problem. Most banner ad creative doesn’t live up to users’ expectations for what it’s like to use a modern website or app. No wonder we’ve grown to distrust them.

The tools to create better banners are already at our fingertips. Ad retargeting and dynamic creative optimization can improve the relevance of each ad’s message. Rich media replaces static images with animated and sometimes interactive graphics, often in HTML5 that works across mobile devices and desktops.

In all of these cases, however, the file that loads inside the banner box is just that, a file served up to the user. The real game-changer will be a new player in the ad-tech stack: the programmatic creative platform.

To Revive the Banner, Tech and Creative Unite

Programmatic creative platforms do more than just deliver files to users. They empower ad designers to transform banner boxes into interactive canvases—ad content that will finally live up to the user experience of the media around them. These ads provide value to the end user, whether through entertainment, an improved visual experience, interesting information, or just an opportunity to play. Their message can shift based on the user’s location, gender, and browsing habits, or even what the weather is like in their area that day.

These canvases let designers build what are essentially mini-interactive apps, which apply all the user experience innovations that the mobile app revolution has taught us. Research has shown that branded mobile apps, unlike banner ads, are often perceived by users as “useful,” and have a positive persuasive impact on the user’s interest in the brand. Imagine deploying this powerful tool directly on a website or within an article, without the need to download a full app.

Already, the tide is shifting toward these more immersive—but also more useful—types of ad experiences. The New York Times is rolling out a new mobile ad format deploying large, immersive ads at seven moments when readership spikes during the day, including lunchtime and the end of work hours. These ads will introduce content like the Times’ morning and evening briefings, and free up the rest of its mobile content from distracting (and tiny) interstitial banner ads.

This is why I’m optimistic about the future of the banner. If programmatic creative platforms gain large scale traction, we will start seeing fewer static banners, more relevant content, and increasingly compelling applications served in those banner boxes. And users will respond accordingly.

Advertising Can’t Live on Native Alone

One last reason banner ads are here to stay: Native ads will never fully replace them. Native’s ability to blend in with surrounding content has protected it from the banner’s erosion in click-through rate. But it has also imposed enormous creative constraints. Native ads don’t provide the “interactive canvas” for designers that banners do—especially banners empowered by programmatic creative platforms.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big proponent of native. But I don’t believe that its growth will be at the expense of the banner. Instead, smart advertisers and publishers will invest in new technology for both.

The next big thing in Web advertising won’t be the death of the banner—it’ll be this blended approach.

Learn more about The eDot Family of Companies.

“Don’t waste the time or money scheduling an appointment that is destined to get canceled. Invest in a thorough appointment setting process that will ensure both parties are excited to take the next step.“

– Bill Kerth, Movere Teleservices

The following article appears in, Virtual Sales

Setting, arranging and keeping appointments can be the difference between making a great sale, or losing it. Appointments, whether they be by telephone or email, are the basis for building and maintaining a great business relationship. Here are some vital appointment setting tips to help you navigate those important conversations.

Only offer two or three options

Although it is important to set up an appointment that works well for all parties, offering too manyoptions is an easy way to lose the appointment altogether. Make things easy for the client by giving them few decisions so that they can make them quickly. Remember, always try to agree on an appointment time that is as convenient for your prospect as possible.

Call your prospect

Make things as easy as you can for your prospect. Call them at their chosen time via their chosen method, whether that is by smartphone, Skype or work phone. Being flexible with your communication also makes you appear more professional and organised.

Set an agenda

Have a list of notes ready (or a script, if you use one), to make sure that you remember to mention everything during the call. Whether it is your initial call or the closing call it’s always helpful to have notes that will keep you on track. For example, if the prospect has a few worries about your product or service, you may want to jot down a few answers and reassurances.

Schedule time before and after

It’s important to schedule at least ten minutes before and after the appointment. This gives you time to prepare to call your prospect, ensuring that you know exactly what the call is about and who you’re talking to. Evaluating for ten minutes afterwards is also essential, so that you can note down whether you have to call the prospect back, whether you need to collect payment, or whether you’ve set up a payment plan. This is especially important if you have multiple appointments set up across one day, as it also allows you to keep track during your busy schedule.

Update your appointment schedule

Use a shareable appointment schedule. This means that you can share your appointments with your colleagues. It also means that they can make notes or add information to your calendar. This is an excellent way to ensure that anyone who needs to know about your appointments can get all of the information they need, with just a couple of clicks. A good example of this type of software is Google Calendar.

Confirm, confirm and confirm again

Ensuring that both you and your prospect know exactly when your appointment is essential. Double-check the appointment time and date at the end of the phone call, set a calendar date and it may even be a good idea to send a brief email to the client a day or two before the appointment.

These tips will prevent any confusion as to the date, time or place. They will also help you to have a smooth and successful meeting.

For more telemarketing tips and tricks, and to learn more about appointment setting, get in touch with Virtual Sales Limited today. We’re telemarketing specialists and we’re here to help.

Learn More about Movere Teleservices.

“Getty Images is not only the world’s leading source of editorial photographic images, but they are leaders in the study and understanding of the power of visuals. It is fact that images communicate faster and with more impact than words. When combined properly, images and concise words are your most powerful sales tool, impacting every level of your company branding, including your sales team. This 2013 article from Getty is a tremendous primer on visually-driven brand impact.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Curve

We’ve all seen the statistics, and there’s no doubt that content marketing is vastly more effective when images or video are added.

Brands that use visual content have found that it encourages greater engagement with their customers. This is very understandable, as visual storytelling is something that goes back to caveman days. Visuals help us tell our stories quickly with impact and emotion. But they have to be the right visuals. And when the visual is a powerful one, be it an image or video, the effect is magnified.

Powerful visuals + evoke emotions = Deeper engagement

Powerful visuals evoke emotions, driving a deeper engagement and more profound change in behavior. So what makes an image or video powerful, so it causes an emotional reaction and encourages this deeper level of engagement that a content marketer needs to be successful?

At Getty Images, we spend a great deal of time asking ourselves  – what makes a powerful visual?

Of course the craft of the image matters – composition, lighting, style etc. But there are other factors that might not be so obvious and perhaps most people never think about.

Four factors that make a powerful visual:

1. Authenticity

The consumer wants to believe that the people they are seeing are real… what they’re doing and how they’re acting is real.  A nice example of this is the realness of Jennifer Lawrence – which fans of the Oscars loved – versus the varnished, old-Hollywood look and feel of Anne Hathaway. This real-world trend shows up in our subject-based archive as well.

At Getty Images, we’ve seen this trend play out with a change in the type of imagery we’ve been selling over the past five years. Our most popular 2007 baby versus 2012 baby shows the latter is clearly more candid. It’s not the perfect moment, but it is a real moment. And our 2007 womanversus 2012 woman shows quite a change, not just in her look, but in her attitude.

This is the kind of change we’ve seen in just five years. The visual language changes faster today than ever before thanks to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook – we can no longer think in decades – i.e. The 50’s housewife, the 80’s business man. You have to keep up or you will seem dated.

Dove is an example of a marketer that has nailed authenticity and benefitted from it.  H&M is another example, with the use of Jennie Runk, the plus-size model to demonstrate the range of sizes in its beachwear campaign. And MasterCard – real people, real moments. The hair isn’t perfect, the lighting isn’t perfect. But it works.

2. Cultural Relevancy

Diversity and inclusiveness are issues that are very culturally relevant today. Of course not everybody is on board with these or any social shifts, but if you’re a content marketer it’s usually good business not to be stuck in the past.

Even mainstream advertisers like Cheerios are willing to accept any negative reactions to achieve a deeper emotional connection. One of the more high-profile reactions to the commercial and the backlash was a customer-created Tumblr to highlight a more positive, authentic view of mixed-race families. That risk is clearly worth it when you create this kind of relationship with the consumer. It’s also not surprising that cultural relevancy and authenticity go hand in hand. 

3. Sensory Currency

This is a very strong trend right now. As technology takes over more and more of our lives, we’ve seen a desire for things that are ‘real’ like human contact and old-time, hands-on activities and professions. This trend combines nostalgia and a new appreciation for traditional skills, and seeing handmade products re-establishes the connection between maker and consumer.

Archetypes are classic characters that have been used to tell stories for hundreds, if not thousands of years – and the 12 classic archetypes are still just as powerful of a storytelling tool today.

Examples we see quite often are the hero archetype and more specifically, a Goddess of the Hunt. Recent cultural examples of this include The Hunger Games, or Disney’s Brave.

And then there’s the caregiver. Quite often the caregiver archetype today isn’t a woman at all, but the father as seen in this advertisement for Chase Private Client.  This is quite a shift socially – another example of cultural relevance.

Key takeaways

Powerful visuals evoke deeper emotions and result in a deeper engagement with your content. That’s why as a content marketer, knowing how to identify emotionally powerful images is so important. Content marketing is about telling a story and creating a closer connection to the consumer, and powerful visuals, whether they’re still images or video, make that easier and more effective.

Learn more about The eDot Family of Companies.

“It’s difficult to discuss the real-world concerns of network security without scare tactics, this article is better than most.”

– Patrick Torney – eDot

The following article written by: Limor Kessem, Security Intelligence

When did the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement really start? Did it begin with gadget lovers bringing their new toys into the office, or with people hooking MP3 players into their corporate PC? Or did it only begin when employees declined to use their corporate-issued phone or laptop? Either way, BYOD is an evolving and unstoppable trend that is rather challenging to control no matter how stringent a policy companies enforce in that regard.

This brings us to the rather evident subject of security. Most organizations’ security teams have already understood that limiting BYOD is futile. Policing it is resource-intensive, and counting on employees to do the right thing is likely to be the root of disaster. Most organizations are working to enable BYOD in the most secure way possible by allowing certain types of devices into their network, enforcing policies, demanding certain mobile apps be downloaded, imposing long password requirements for mobile screen locks or using a variety of authentication schemes.

How Can BYOD Compromise Security?

These measures are great, and they surely add a significant layer of security to the overall BYOD concept within any organization. However, what should your security team do if John, who just flew in from California, walks into your office sporting a new, nifty Android smartwatch, and your policy only allows iOS devices into the corporate network?

What if John is a senior researcher for the company, and he just signed up for a fitness wearable that collects way too much information about him, to which he is entirely oblivious? John might be OK with giving up a bit of his own privacy for a shiny new gadget, but are you ready to do the same? How about the very real scenario of John’s Android-based smartphone getting infected with malware that is now collecting his SMS content and emails, listening in on his phone calls with business associates and granting an attacker an insider view of his research?

Worse yet, the cybercriminal has access to John’s Gmail account directly from the app on the watch. As a matter of fact, he has already sent you, the chief executive officer, a spear-phishing email from that address, which you opened yesterday and unknowingly installed a remote access Trojan on your corporate PC. Does this sound farfetched? Think again.

These risks are as real as it gets. How many employees like John are walking in and out of the office every day? What other devices and insecure apps are they running straight onto the company Wi-Fi, plugging into their corporate endpoints or reusing their corporate password on? With that in mind, it’s easy to see how much wider an attacker’s window of opportunity is to successfully carry out espionage, disruption and corruption tasks.

The average enterprise has more than 2,000 unsafe or malicious apps installed on staff mobile devices, exposing sensitive information and performing suspicious actions, according to new research. Of these, 85 percent expose sensitive phone data such as device location, call history, contacts, SMS logs and SIM information. A further 37 percent apparently perform “suspicious” actions, such as recording phone conversations, installing or uninstalling apps, running additional programs or checking to see whether the device is rooted or jailbroken. That does not make any security professional feel cozy inside.

Applying BYOD Security Policies

So how do we wrap our heads and our security around BYOD with a mobile marketplace that is rapidly expanding into new devices, operating systems and a new slew of wearables? These devices are impossible to control because of their inherent mobility and their dynamic content in terms of apps and how they are used by users and app developers.

What remains a constant of sorts is the enterprise’s own endpoints, be they mobile or fixed, and the security applied to them from within.

At the end of the day, employees’ personal devices and wearables can be looked at as a doorway for attackers targeting the organization. They will be used for reconnaissance and for preparatory tasks such as spear phishing. Attackers will use that door to find an endpoint. Only from there will they be able to work toward their actual malicious goals.

So what can organizations do to secure their employees and lower the potential of an eventual breach through risky devices?

1. Educate Often

Teach employees about mobile malware, the exorbitant amount of malware strains in circulation today, what malware does and how it does it. Explain what links BYOD with the company’s information security, and list best practices.

2. Have Presence on the Device and Secure It

Enforce security policies on the devices employees use to carry out business, including the Virtual Private Network connection through an application you provide. Bolster security from inside your application by using a solution such as IBM Security Trusteer Mobile SDK™.

3. Expect the Next Step — Your Endpoints

Attackers might begin an attack in a mobile device, but their stronghold will come from eventually compromising an endpoint. Fortunately, endpoints are precisely where the organization’s security has the most power to detect, sabotage or stop the attack from seeing eventual success. A highly secure endpoint, where exploitation attempts fail, malware installations are sabotaged and data exfiltration dissipates, can stop the progress of an advanced attack and alert security teams to the attacker’s presence.

We live in a brave new era where only the evolving survive. Organizations nowadays must adopt progress and enable it with a progressive attitude. Doing so should not come at the expense of putting the business in jeopardy. As the threat landscape constantly morphs, we must outsmart threats using layers, ingenuity and technological innovation so that no matter which trend may come, it won’t have to spell out a security snafu.

Learn More about eDot.