EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

When regional stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were first issued in early 2020, the general expectation was that societal changes would only be temporary. As people hunkered down in homes around the world, they expressed a collective confidence that life would eventually (perhaps after only a few weeks) return to normal. Over time, the realization that the pandemic has, in many ways, changed the world forever has slowly been gaining acceptance. Of course, it seems likely that at some point medical science will discover the means to control and perhaps even eradicate the illness, and eventually people will feel free to emerge from their homes. However, many of the fundamental changes to day-to-day activities and lifestyles that have been adopted are likely to persist well into the future.

Syndicate, Syndicate, Syndicate

We are a multi-media generation that offers unlimited media choices to information consumers. Buyers can choose from mobile apps, videos, websites, podcasts, or printed media. They consume infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, slide shares, webinars, interactive sites, and e-learning systems. They can find their media via search, social streams, mashups, or journalistic consolidation sites.

The Magic of the Buying Cycle

Increasing sales and revenue with digital marketing involves far more than generating leads. Too many marketers have focused their efforts almost entirely on demand generation at the expense of proactively moving leads through the funnel and closing more deals. EMA supports a balanced digital marketing approach that focuses on moving buyers forward at all points in their buying journey.

The Search for the Right Persona

Savvy marketers want to better understand buyer personas relevant to the products and solutions in their portfolio. However, not every marketer understands the importance of prioritizing the search for the right persona. Persona creation can be laborious and getting agreement on personas can be even more challenging, but it is worth the effort. Once you create a persona, it becomes the guide for every person in your organization entering a dialogue with a customer or potential buyer.

UEM for user experience management and RPA for robotic process automation are two IT acronyms that continue to elude well-understood definitions, albeit for somewhat opposite reasons. UEM goes back decades, first emerging out of primarily network-centric management, becoming a cornerstone of business service management, and later being consumed by application performance management (APM) much to its own detriment. RPA is comparatively recent, evolving out of screen scraping into far richer technical options that are diverse in nature, with many RPA vendors contending with and replacing the more consultancy-driven platforms for business process management (BPM).

Before the recent COVID -19 pandemic, most companies looked at unified communications and collaborations (UC&C) solutions as important technology often used by sales and marketing teams as part of their process, but not necessarily a critical part of the business infrastructure. With work from home (WFH) becoming the mandated norm, businesses have come to look at UC&C solutions as mission-critical tools, allowing managers and leaders to communicate with their employees and employees to conduct some semblance of normal business.

On Friday, the FBI released an alert warning of increased scams related to the Coronavirus outbreak. From the FBI announcement:

A article was recently released by Bloomberg news discussing the market share of various cloud providers, and their methods and rankings need  to be re-examined.

The best webinars are personalized and targeted. They are personalized by carefully considering and engaging those who will be attending the webinar. They are targeted by understanding the buying phase and persona of the audience. In other words, a webinar created with the audience in mind maps perfectly into digital marketing strategies created and carefully considers the different stages of the buying cycle. This is the way we do webinars here at EMA.

Webinars are boring…until you think outside the box and utilize creative ideas to wake up the minds of your attendees. Pick one of these ten creative options to revitalize your webinars in 2020.