Why Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software streamlines, automates and quantifies the output of marketing tasks and workflows. It lessens chaos, reduces the need for human interaction and gives sales and marketing departments metrics that help prove the impact of their efforts on revenue.

What it consists of:

Marketing programs 

Once emails are set up before the associated campaign or event, marketing automation software ensures emails are sent out throughout the campaign without human intervention. Likewise, the associated social media messages, SMS and recorded phone calls are also sent out as scheduled by the software itself.

Landing Pages 

All online marketing programs must be linked to landing pages. Marketing automation ensures that the customer activity is tracked at the landing page. Information captured about the customer through web forms is directed to a mailing list, to be used for future campaigns. Landing page forms also facilitate demographic profiling of your lead, helping you to target relevant marketing campaigns to him or her.

Lead Generation 

Lead generation is the output of any activity such as email and social campaigns, online advertising etc that causes a person to be interested in your product or service. Once effective content is created for the activity, marketing automation ensures that the content reaches a large target audience as you’ve scheduled.

Lead Scoring 

Through marketing automation, the demographic information you capture online about the lead is scored according to how much the lead fits your target profile. Similarly, each online user activity on your website/landing page and other contact points is allocated a score depending on how much a part of the buying process it is. Informed prediction of consumer buying activity based on such lead scoring can help in targeting the leads with the right automated marketing activity for their level of interest and buying capacity, thus maximizing revenue.

Lead Management 

Based on lead scores, marketing automation sends the selected nurturing and marketing efforts (emails, SMSs, recorded voice calls etc) to the relevant set of leads. This ensures that the nurturing and marketing is differentiated based on how likely or how ready the lead is to buy. Marketing automation also adds the leads to the customer database once they buy something.

Leveraging and Retention of Customer Base 

Existing customers, too need to be sent messages that show you value them. Up-selling or cross-selling to is an efficacious way of ensuring high returns. Marketing automation sends the scheduled messages in chosen forms to your customers as part of facilitating further sales.

CRM Integration 

Once your marketing automation software helps generate customers, it’s the turn of your customer relationship management or CRM software to organize, track, and manage all of your customer information, activities, and conversations and to provide your sales, marketing and customer service teams with customer information. You use the information sent by your CRM to your marketing automation software which then sends out messages to customer segments to result in retention and further sales. Data relating to these efforts is in turn fed to your CRM. This interdependence is why your marketing automation software needs to integrate with your CRM software.

Marketing Analytics 

Marketing automation software has inbuilt capabilities of marketing analytics to allow you to monitor campaigns and their outcomes. This allows you to quantify the success of your effort as well as to choose which efforts are really paying dividends.

CMS Integration

Every single marketing effort needs large-scale content creation and management. And all of this needs collaborative efforts facilitated by a powerful CMS. The marketing automation you choose should necessarily integrate with an effective CMS.

To learn how Valuebound can help you with adopting marketing automation, contact us. We are a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. 

Valuebound proudly announces the release of a module that integrates Vimeo API’s with a Drupal website. Now you can upload/share videos from a Drupal website to Vimeo using Vimeo Video Uploader. This module serves as an efficient media management solution for multimedia assets like videos.

Vimeo is a popular video sharing website that serves as a platform to store and showcase videos by professional as well as amateur film-makers. This website also doubles as a social networking platform that lets you upload original videos, clips of popular television shows and commercials. The uploads are accepted in a multitude of formats including ASF, MOV, WMV, MP4, MPEG, 3GP, 3ivX and 3VX. A free Vimeo account lets you upload about 500 MB of video files per week while there is a 5GB limit on Vimeo Plus accounts.

Requirements

The Vimeo Video Uploader has a single dependency in Video Embed Field. Another requirement that needs to be taken care of before installing this module is the creation of an App. on Vimeo . You need to get the App. authenticated by Vimeo to acquire the account details that will be required during the configuration of this module :

# Vimeo User ID
# Client ID
# Client Secret
# Access token
# Access token secret

Installation & Configuration

Step I

The Vimeo Video Uploader can be installed manually by unpacking this module on your Drupal website by placing it in /sites/all/modules. This module can be enabled at admin/modules.

Step II

The Library api of Vimeo can be downloaded from https://github.com/vimeo/vimeo.php. Next you need to create a folder called "vimeo-lib-api" to place the downloaded vimeo.php file in it.

Step III

Next comes the Configuration part wherein you will have to navigate to the Configuration Page via admin/config/media/vimeo_video_uploader.

You will need to update the authenticated Vimeo App. details on the configuration page while selecting the content type from which the video needs to be uploaded to Vimeo.

To finally upload the video you will need to save the changes made on the configuration page. You can download the module here. 

Valuebound is a regular contributor of code to the Drupal Community. We at Valuebound understand your unique business needs and cater to them with our enterprise level web solutions. For more information on our service offerings or customize this module, please Contact Us.

Valuebound is a boutique Drupal development services company offering expert consulting, development, training and support. We have successfully delivered many advanced Drupal projects across the globe and across verticals. Our expertise in Drupal development of web platforms is unparalleled.

We are on the look out for highly energetic and qualified IT Marketing Executives to join our team at Bangalore. The job profile would include identifying potential markets as well as pitching to clients. Freshers with exceptional communication and presentation skills are welcome to join us as Trainee Marketing Executives.

You would also need to work closely with our engineering team to communicate client requirements. You would also identify and help implement marketing strategies that need to be part of our offerings to effectively meet client requirements.

Roles & Responsibilities:
Handling business development for our Drupal services, solutions and training
Developing Marketing/Sales Strategies
Keeping a tab on the Client Network
Cold calling and generating leads
Researching and analyzing industries in order to identify new business opportunities

Skill Required:
Rapid learner who thrives in a fast-paced and demanding environment
Excellent quantitative/analytic skills, ability to multi-task, and attention to detail
Strong written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills

Requirements:
Travelling is required.
You should preferably have your own vehicle.

Please send your resume to careers@valuebound.com. You can also call us at +91 808 804 8711.

Recently, we worked on a multi-site Drupal 7 project where we required a certain site specific CSS. In our project, all sites were using one common theme, though each of them had unique configuration and content.

Googling for a solution showed up a few methods, but none of them worked exactly as we needed. For instance, the Adaptive theme module has settings to add site-name-hidden class if Site Name display is not selected on theme settings page. However, we did not want the site name hidden; we wanted it to be shown.

Finally we were able to by using context module. And these are the screenshots showing how you, too, can do it:

Step 1: Add new context

Step 2: Add new condition

Step 3: Add Reaction

You are done. After saving you should be able to see your sitename in bodyclass.

 

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

A number of IT giants in India are using Drupal. For these enterprises, their Drupal platforms are essentially powerful marketing tools. They use Drupal because it accommodates marketing efforts rapidly enough for the organization to reach the market with its offerings on schedule. It is vital that the CMS platform enable business hypothesis testing approaches that help make fast, evidence-based marketing decisions. Drupal not only does so, but can continually and rapidly accommodate changes of any range and scale that typically follow such testing. A high tech Drupal platform would handle the following marketing aspects rapidly:

Promotion of products and services

Drupal can handle huge volumes of dynamic input. What is special about Drupal’s way of displaying content is its powerful taxonomy and contextual filters that create custom content displays of a variety, complexity and utility unparalleled in the world of open source CMS. This enhances a company's marketing effort by providing solid evidence of the marketer's claims to prospective clients.

Innovating marketing campaigns

IT companies need to not just innovate products rapidly, but to make it visible in the market before the competition does so. The challenge then is that marketing campaigns are not foolproof. They need to be varied and tested to determine which campaign is getting the most results. Drupal facilitates A/B testing at a fast pace, enabling marketers to determine the most efficacious campaign options. This helps IT enterprises to keep up with constantly changing markets and requirements for innovation.Once the IT organization identifies its best campaigns, Drupal enables cloning and redeployment of similar campaigns with required tweaks, thus reducing marketing time long after creation of the initial campaign.

Localization of marketing campaigns

Drupal's embedded multi-lingual capabilities make it easy for a marketing initiative to be rapidly launched or cloned and redeployed in multiple languages. The configuration and layout remain similar, but the language changes to exponentially increase the campaign's success. Fast tweaking of campaign layouts and configurations to accommodate cultural preferences or to comply with local legislation is also easy with Drupal.

Collaborative campaign creation 

Marketing departments of IT firms are typically spread out across geographies. Drupal has a strong focus on enabling collaborative content creation with robust facilities for the associated communication. Communication is focussed on the business topic and does not need to be filtered out by users. This makes every aspect of strategizing, testing, deploying faster and simpler in a way that does not need additional planning and organization by busy project managers. Collaborators can work on their core activity rapidly when the platform automates a major part of the organization.

The above benefits of Drupal are the reason why a number of IT giants in India are currently using Drupal. A few of them are:

HCL Technologies

Mindtree

[24]7

Disclaimer: The respective screenshots, logos and other identification belong solely to the companies they represent.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Agile development is aimed at creating an online business platform suited to business needs that prevail at the end of the development cycle. This simple article skips out the technicalities. To save your time, we explain Agile from your point of view.

Do I really need Agile?

When you hire a developer for your business platform, if you are absolutely certain what you want your platform to look like and the tasks it should execute, you don’t really need Agile. You agree on a fixed budget, a fixed delivery time, and maybe suggest minor changes within the agreed bounds. Agility would cost you more in such a case. A perfect example of this case would be if you want an exact replica of an existing online platform.

However, it is more often that you have only a rough idea of what you want from your platform. If you want to periodically see what it looks like at different stages, so that you can change what you don’t like, or create new features and functions, or add something to what exists, you definitely need Agile development.

Additionally, if your platform is complex and needs months to create, it may have to meet business needs that have changed by then. The backend workflows / interfaces of your platform might need to change by the time it is ready. In a worst case scenario, you might need to end up with a product radically different from your initial brief to the developers. Agile is especially meant to resolve these issues in a way that you have complete control over changes.

How will Agile work?

Your development partner will break down your project into multiple parts in such a way that you can see and try out a completed platform with some of the desired functions at frequent intervals. Each time, you will actually be able to test out whether these functions are doing what you thought they would do. You will be able to easily think what changes might be needed. You might get ideas about new features. You and your managers and consultants can discuss changes that will benefit your business because you already have a platform you can see and handle.

Will Agile help me save time and money?

The benefit of Agile is that since your platform development is in parts, if anything needs to be scrapped or radically altered, only a small part of your project is affected. This will reduce your costs and your time. Traditional methods of developing the whole platform and then incorporating changes will be like doing it all over again. Agile gives you freedom to evolve a solution more suited to business needs that prevail at the end of the development cycle.

Also, as discussed before, your project will be composed of parts. To save time, some parts can easily be done simultaneously, but then, that would necessitate larger teams and more costs. The benefit is that your platform is up and benefitting your business very early.

What are the drawbacks of Agile ?

Because Agile will incorporate so many of your revisions, insights, enhancements, innovations and other changes, your development expert will not be able to give you a fixed cost and delivery time. You will get a range instead. Should you have major changes, even this range might get extended. However, imagine reworking major parts of your traditionally developed platform once it is completely ready, and it becomes clearer why Agile is the way to go for a flexible process in which your needs are a constant priority.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Web Platforms - Futuristic equals great UX

The website interface has currently evolved to be an intricately planned out way to provide revenue and reputation for enterprises. Sensibilities have evolved, too, and futuristic no longer means glitzy. All the planning and development is intense and complex so as to result in an uncomplicated interface that is minimalistic and user-friendly, light on the eyes and has minimal lag during transitions. That is, it has a high user experience (UX) quotient. It's a lot like planning an easy to operate spaceship to travel to Mars. The more advanced and intricate the back-end work, the more user-friendly your spaceship controls.

Why UX is essential for hi-tech enterprises - Enter Drupal

If you as an enterprise need to deliver a mind-boggling amount of information and content to anyone who matters for your revenue and brand building efforts, then the more you tire out your user, the more you decrease your business benefit. Engaging and interesting your user through well-written content and alluring design is no longer enough. The data, in simple language, is way too big!  

It is therefore, vital to optimize the information retrieval process in terms of time and effort, and to make the huge assimilation of data seem pleasant and worthwhile. To please the user when they retrieve information on your site, and to please them enough after the prolonged process so they spend money and time for you, your platform backend needs to be an Olympic gold medalist in the world of CMS platforms. In the open source world, Drupal wins these honours hands down for its brilliantly developed capabilities of accommodating highly complex content derivation and challenges of delivering content in easily assimilable forms.

How Drupal provides enhanced UX for hi-tech enterprises

A lot many visionary businesses needing large scale content derivation and delivery are now using Drupal 7 in their sites to ease the information retrieval process and strongly impact their revenues and reputations. Whether it is providing your users with accessibility features to easily adjust interface contrast, color schemes, text sizes or target content to a user based on the field of interest he or she indicates on your site, Drupal can accommodate every revenue-enhancing innovation.  And all the complex content management across platforms and across all your features is done using the leanest possible backend. Additionally, the coding to provide you a leading edge Drupal platform can be done in a lean way, too, by skilful Drupal developers. This is because Drupal’s focus right from the start, has been on enabling clean, bug-free architecture for content-intensive enterprises across all sizes.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Why hire a website developer

Many startups opt for a site the proprietors can install and design themselves. If your resources are limited, there is no harm in starting out this way. But remember, if site building software is designed to be layperson-friendly, scaling up and enhancing your site will be limited by the very user-friendliness of your site making software. As your business scales up, a limited site can severely impact your ability to focus on your core business. In the initial days of your startup, you may have the time to launch your own solution. Your resourcefulness may pay off and boost your brand and revenue. But when you opt for an overhaul or a migration, your internet presence is bound to get hit.

Are boutique development organizations reliable?

A little research will show up hundreds of well known sites across the world that have been developed by boutique Drupal organisations. Which is why, in the Drupal world, evidence of high-quality past work and satisfied clients across sizes, cultures and domains are a must for the organization you choose. Do not hesitate to ask to speak to their clients. Capable boutique organisations should have scores of reputable clients you can freely speak to.

The size of the CMS developer should have no bearing on the quality of their clientele if they are genuinely capable.  And where Drupal developers are concerned, the tremendous skill and experience required by the team should supersede any size considerations. 

How will they reduce my costs?

Well, firstly, their overheads will not be as much as an industry giant’s. Secondly, their location would often lead to substantial savings. Quality developers will give you transparent access to their project management software for you to be able to observe your project materialize.

Also, even small teams would have expert strategists with experience in guiding clients ranging from startups to large enterprises. They would help you set up a rapidly deployable lightweight site that can accommodate relevant changes and enhancements of very high degree while maintaining full security and functionality.

This would ensure you can pay as your site grows in stages and even in spurts. If the initial development strategy for your site is good, future modifications and enhancements will be smooth and less expensive than for a poorly planned site.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Using Wordpress : Rationale and user case scenarios

For a simple website that will not need complex content displays in the future, Wordpress that will be the easiest to set up and maintain. Consider the following possibilities:

• Startup profile:  A boutique stocking only perfumes for online sale / enquiries from discerning, wealthy clientele.

Advice: Your products are only of one type, and if you do not expect to diversify a lot, choose Wordpress. It will be light and easy to maintain, and secure within your business limits. Wordpress has actually got enough capabilities to handle small to medium changes in your system.

• Startup profile : An alternative medicine site, focusing on popular herbs such as ginseng and popular essential oils marketing to the whole world.

Advice: Your products might not be that numerous, but they will be fast-moving. The number of pages on your site will be fairly small. You might need to suddenly supply an industry behemoth or see surges in your sales due to increased awareness. You do need a CMS that can handle sharp spikes and large volumes. Wordpress has evolved; it will still be a quality solution;  you do however, have to opt for really capable hosting infrastructure or upgrade it later

Using Drupal and Joomla : Rationale and user case scenarios

Drupal is great for sites that will ultimately need features such as forums, blogs, news, analysis, demos, product displays, intranet etc that necessitate complex content creation and management. This is because Drupal can manage this intricacy with the leanest possible backend. Drupal can be used to rapidly set up a simple, inexpensive startup site that can accommodate very complex and large scale changes later. 

Joomla has been successfully used by reputed enterprises to create fairly intricate sites at lower costs than with Drupal. This is because, upto a certain level of intricacy and size, Joomla solutions do function as well as Drupal solutions. In fact, with a little bit of self-training in Joomla , it is possible for even an amateur to create a fairly sophisticated business site. You can reduce costs even further by doing so. This is a major attraction of Joomla that Drupal does not have. 

Should you take a quick look at recent trends, you will actually find Drupal and Joomla neck to neck for enterprises of medium complexity and scale. However, for sites needing tons of features tied up to intricate interaction of multiple data and content types at enormous volumes, you will find a clear trend in favor of Drupal. The following examples will make this clearer:

• Startup profile: A market analysis site providing complex analysis to industry decision makers.

Advice: The interactions between your various kinds of dynamic content are likely to get more intricate soon, and you will need to handle very large scale information and derive credible output efficiently. You need the leanest possible database and backend updated smoothly even during severe volume surges.You will need a CMS which will accommodate highly skilled development efforts that result in facilitating your analysis at the CMS level itself. We advise you to opt for Drupal.

• Startup profile: A corporate site which you yourself want to set up inexpensively. You would rather opt for a different solution later if needed.

Advice: Choose Joomla hands down. It lets amateurs create much more efficient large scale dynamic content than you ever can with Wordpress. You will face problems if you try to do this with Drupal. And you can always take care of future contingencies later as the topmost CMSs have superior migration capabilities already, and in future this capability is bound to increase.

We hope this information will help you obtain the right platform. We wish you success in realising  your business vision.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us

Open source software - Quality offerings at affordable rates

As a startup, you might feel anxious thinking about costs of website building software, and worry about having to change to a more complex software later on. The good news is there are cutting edge open source products out in the market for which the licensing fees are nil. With some of them, you can start off really basic and smoothly become more and more complex. And even the White House and NASA have used such open source products for their official sites. All enterprises nowadays use site creating software called CMS - content management system.

What is CMS - Why do all enterprises use it nowadays?

Websites nowadays no longer have only static pages. There is frequently released dynamic content in modern websites such as blogs, news, product pages, e commerce content, industry analysis, announcements and infinite other forms of dynamic site copy. To manage this, you need a site making software called CMS. Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are the leading open source CMSs.

Why we use Drupal for our start up clients

We ourselves prefer to service our start up clients with Drupal CMS as it allows us to rapidly set up a basic site that can be tweaked and enhanced and scaled very easily whenever needed. Our start up clients ask us enhance their site a bit each time they have to accommodate sudden growth spurts or changes, and Drupal is specially created to accommodate sudden changes even of very large scales while preserving earlier content and workflows admirably well. However, having worked with the non-Drupal CMSs as well, we consider all the three CMSs great for valid reasons, and the ultimate choice is yours.

Choosing a CMS - Coming up next...

In the next part of this series, we discuss what it is that you need to look for in an open source CMS software. Obviously, the focus would be on ease and speed of setting up a basic site, how exactly and how much you can enhance such a site, what you can do if there are unexpected changes, volume variations, demands for major workflow changes from a major client you suddenly land, and other such problems specific to your start up. In brief we shall focus on how to ensure your CMS meets your immediate needs while insuring you strongly for your future.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us