Web and Mobile Integrations are Saving the Day but What is Making this Integration Possible?

Web services or API is the key to such developments. Let us try to understand how enterprises are making the most through their webservice development:

Coming to the importance of Webservices Development / API development for your Business applications, it is a fact that the largest user base of the Web APIs belongs to the web development space. Yet, end users can also benefit from them. Let’s take a look how:

1. Integration : APIs enable the web developer to integrate the applications with advanced functions.
2. Interactivity: End users find it easier to interact with the application.
3. Creates value for providers: A well coded API can become the brand of a provider.
4. Adapts the mobile interface: Lightweight APIs make it possible for faster downloads, upgrades in case of mobile.
5. Expandable: APIs that are expandable make it possible for OS upgrades in phones and tables

Different enterprises are using web-mobile integrations in their own customized ways. We need to understand how these integrations are being effective in increasing their visibility as well as their sales. Lets quickly go through the various forms of enterprises and the different integrations they are going through:

1. B2C

These are enterprises which directly face the end user. An integrated app for such enterprises becomes indispensable. This can allow tapping of the festive seasons for more ROI. The integration needs to concentrate on performance of the mobile application. e.g. Facebook after launching a hybrid app got a head start in the initial days of the smartphone market. Once the smartphone market grew out of bounds, Facebook released its native version for iOS and Android and chucked out the previous hybrid app.

This way Facebook didn’t have compromise on its performance and also could go launch themselves before the peak time had arrived. B2C enterprises are making using of these integrations to respond to customer instantly whenever an opportunity knocks. Native versions shall be required when there’s too much traffic. This shall only make the application more scalable and will give the users a better experience.

2. B2B

These enterprises deal with other enterprises. The web-mobile integration will have to be thus used a little differently for the benefit of such enterprises. Usually such enterprises have a range of applications with its own set of functionality designed for its respective partners and stakeholders.

These companies use a mobile framework or API alongside another reference application. This reference sometimes serves to integrate backend processes for big partners to collaborate or also can be used as a mobile application for clients without the basic IT teams or third party vendors.

3. ISV

Technology and product enterprises use these integrations to add value to their old customers. Software product companies get started by enabling the existing customers to write their own mobile applications via APIs. Examples include SAP, Salesforce; among others

What Makes These Integrations Great?

Let’s try to understand by a simple example of how these integrations are actually so useful. Let’s take into consideration the example of recruitments that are now integrated on the mobile. Ultimate Recruiter’s Guide to Mobile for 2015 notes that 3 in 5 job seekers are now using mobile devices for jobs and 51 % of applications submitted on Indeed.com are via mobile. With the use of ATS (Application Tracking System) and the right integration, even recruitment methods will undergo a makeover. Responsive designs have enabled better rankings of mobile friendly pages.

Web mobile integrations have created new scope for customer interaction, retention and means of communication. Enterprises no longer need to depend on a website but have more customizable means to establish relationships with their customers. API development has made these integrations possible. They also are great time savers. Sharing is made possible because of these integrations. Sometimes it has to be agreed that third party webservices meet a sudden death when companies decide to intentionally block, limit or shut down APIs. Take for example: Shutting down Google Health led to an end of all the applications that had its APIs. Nevertheless, integrations have made it possible for more interconnectedness. There is more interlinking and the internet has become more navigable. So let’s quickly outline how the internet has become friendlier.

The post Ways How Web And Mobile Integrations Are Saving The Day appeared first on Classic Informatics.

Web development has entered into an exciting phase as it enters 2016. It is going through a complete makeover and hence it becomes interesting to predict what awaits us in 2016. As time rides by, a lot of visual information and graphic appeal becomes defunct. So what would stay and to what shall we bid farewell remains an important question at this juncture? What are we looking forward to then in terms of look, content, branding and data management? Seems like 2016 is the year when a lot of elements of the webpage shall see the new and bury the old. Lets run over the contents quickly. 

• Background images

Website speed and performance have become one of the primary factors as we approach 2016. With internet spreading across the globe and reaching out to the remotest corners of the planet, the web is being served on portable platforms. High quality background images are going to be a matter of the past. Innovations in typography are expected as they will be required to replace the background images. So say hello to your blank background and say yes to speed, better performance and better text.

This brings us to the point of the “almost flat design approach”. It is not that it is a new trend for background images to take the backseat – we have been gradually reaching this point over some good period of time. The following image illustrates the almost flat design approach. In this, the idea of a complete flat design is negated by using depth to elements to create a sort of balance and appeal.

Back in 2014, high quality images were the trend and it had gained its share of popularity only to take the downfall in 2015. By 2016, we expect the same trend to continue.

• Card Based Design

The card based design is indeed the current trend now and it shall only continue to be so. In this re-architecture of the web, cards enable the user to create a personalized space with individual content. With internet gradually shifting from computers to tablets, from laptops to the mobile phone, the card based design has become a great design pattern. Already the big guns like Twitter and Google have made the move to cards. The Google Search has become more personalized with the introduction of Google cards in mobile phones.

In the evolution of the modern civilization, cards have always played an important role in trade, celebrations, funerals and intimate events. Hence there is a psychological impact made by the cards as they enable the user to have an intimate space within the larger scope of the world wide web. In the fast paced pay per click world, cards have become story telling agents and effectively push stories quickly. The success story of Pininterest highlights the impact of the card based design. 2016 shall just see more of it as more websites take the baton and move to cards.

So, say hello to more information in less time.

• Digital first branding

Brands do no longer work if they haven’t yet embraced the digital revolution. Brand retention value has been transfigured and digitized. 2016 sees the same trend as it reaches its culmination point and more brands take the plunge into digitizing themselves.

According to Aberdeen research, a 336% quicker conversion rate of vistor to buyer year over year has been achieved by companies that use mobile touch points. The customer lifetime value also increases by 4.8% v/s the 0.3 % for those who do not acknowledge the digitization move.

Digital first branding enables users to interact with brands which adds value to the relationship between a customer and a brand. The rules of branding have definitely changed and web development shall have to appreciate the same and adapt. A swipe to new information is now deemed more personal and interactive than a static piece of information. New advances in UI design shall be accompanied with enhanced interactive tools. Be ready for the micro-experience.

• Open Data

It is a historic moment to quote that open data has become a reality. According to a report in the “The Guardian”, open data has entered digital policy packages and transparency initiatives across the developed countries. There are still setbacks to the same but open data has a bright future. In predicting upcoming trends in web development, 2016 open data ranks as one of the pioneers that shall redeem its true value and importance. It’s been 5 years since the first pan global meet on open data took place in Warsaw and now it is here to stay to offer public service and value.

• Responsive Design Evolved

This has already reached its culmination point and yet it shall keep continuing being the industry standard. With new inventions coming up and newer platforms being accessed for the web, responsive design is a pre-requisite for every website. The focus area in responsive design has been navigation. The input method is expected to go through a change in the 2016. Audio input already exists in the form of Siri and hence with the rise of wearables like the Apple Watch, even other sensory inputs shall be involved. From screen agnosticism we shall gradually move to screen independence.

• Isomorphic javascript

Termed as the future of the web, 2016 shall see more of websites adopting isomorphic javascript. The advantage of an isomorphic javascript is performance as it takes into account the best of both the client side and server side programming. New players in frameworks other than Reach and Meteor will join in. Isomorphic javascript makes programming straightforward and enable UIs with a more interactive feel to the same.

• Vibrant Design

With the almost flat design approach to the web, a flash of colors to add depth and visual appeal will be the trend. Websites will become more vibrant with various interesting color schemes. Look forward to vibrant headers and quirky illustrations painted in a flat backdrop with a range of colors.

What’s hot in 2016 might not be in 2017. Till then, let’s hope the predictions roll for good as web development ages by another year. The future of web development can be safely translated as a trend of an interactive user experience.

The post Predicting Upcoming Trends in Web Development 2016 appeared first on Classic Informatics.

Where do Enterprises Go Wrong?

Is is important for enterprises to fix this issue and complete the transition. It has to be understood also that it is not a simple job to move these mission critical applications. Security is the highest concern. It also involves the availability of the technology to support these apps. Since the cloud is still going through its maturing phase, there’s scepticism as well as complexity involved in making the shift. This has created a gap in strategy between the critical apps and the non critical apps.

However, this too shall pass. New innovations in cloud technology to meet the demands of the mission critical apps are already around. With time, a more mature and stable phase of cloud shall emerge which will make it more convenient for enterprises to move their critical apps to the cloud. Then the benefits of cost, efficiency and agility will come a full circle and not be limited to non critical apps.

Let’s try to understand as to how enterprises can make the complete transition before their competitors start making benefits out of the same. The approach to cloud services definitely needs to shift from infrastructure to application-centric(SAAS Application Development). Lets outline the 3 steps involved in reaching out to our goal:

1. Identify a new route to availability

High availability is the first key and is absolutely non-negotiable. But then if we look at the recent Microsoft’s Azure cloud service outage, we can see for ourselves the downside of high availability. If you think that spotty availability is the only obstacle, then you are wrong.

• It’s therefore important to chart new route to availability rather than looking at it as a one way street.
• The orthodox hardware based infrastructure centric approach doesn’t match with the fluid dynamics of the cloud environment.
• The application centric approach comes into use now when we approach availability with the concept of software defined availability. Recovery becomes much more simplified via this approach.

This minimizes the risk involved in moving the critical apps to the cloud and doesn’t require any re-engineering. Also it is a time and cost effective approach. This simplifies most of the complexity involved in the transition.

2. Strengthen the orchestration abilities

Orchestrating the cloud resources is the next step for a successful transition. Exact pocketing of data where it needs to be(the right time, the right place aphorism) is taken care by strong orchestration capabilities. Its noteworthy to point out that critical applications do not have a static requirement. They are also fluid in nature and do not remain mission critical at every point of the timeline.

For example in a Christmas season, a payment processing application becomes critical and during the start of every month, financial services in the form of salary transactions become critical. Hence scalability needs to be incorporated according to the need and time.

• A dynamic application configuration approach will also reduce the need for rewriting applications.
• Dynamic orchestration in the cloud enables deployment of an application only when that degree of maximum availability is required.
• Without any interruption of any services, this saves money and effectively manages the computing resources.

3. Tapping open source technologies

Open source definitely cuts down on costs. Proprietary technology always bring along with it expensive licenses, fees and miscellaneous expenses.

• Tapping open source technologies like Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, OpenStack can drastically change the ball game and make cloud services more profitable than they otherwise were.
• These technologies also provide the enterprise with software defined availability and allow strong orchestration.

Open source technology is here to stay and is only bound to grow. Hence harnessing the power at the earliest would be a wise business policy.

Conclusion

 To be a step ahead in the race for cloud applications, the critical apps need to be immediately moved to the cloud. It is indeed a complex and a risky affair but then with the right kind of approach the risks can be minimized. Before the competitors fasten their belts, enterprises need to make the move and look forward to having a successful transition to the cloud. With cloud getting into its mature stage, the prospects only look brighter. The traditional methods of hosting applications need to be given up for good and cloud needs to be embraced in the most effective way possible. The leap to the cloud is easy if done the right way.

Remember to tickmark the following before making that move:

The post Moving Mission Critical Applications to Cloud appeared first on Classic Informatics.

In a competitive scenario, you will need to be prepared to fight the basics. For instance, you will need to have to decide between outsourcing projects versus choosing the seemingly more reliable option of staff augmentation. Here is a look at what a normal IT Consulting firm has to take care for instance.

For them, staff training is important, as well as the question of security. Staff augmentation can take care of both these incidents but it might not be able to solve network or software issues that the in-house team cannot handle. For that, they might need to outsource the projects.

What is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation can be a great way to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies. If you’re looking to expand strategically and are looking for more human resource, staff augmentation is the way to go. Staff augmentation refers to where can add in staff to your organization as you want. Staff augmentation refers to adding in staff as per the needs of the company. You do not permanently hire the employees so you can scale up and down as needed, offering you the flexibility to manage important projects and needs as well as avoiding the liabilities of hiring full time employees. After the work is complete, the staff will no longer need to be paid by the employer.

What is Project Outsourcing?

Suppose you’ve a specific task that needs to be done. You might not have the staff expertise to do it. This can put you in a dilemma. What do you do to ensure that you’re right on track with the project? Project outsourcing helps outsource specific tasks and resources with other people or agencies. Sometimes, project outsourcing can even take the shape of staff augmentation, but in a different way. Let’s say you outsource the work to Company B, which uses staff augmentation in its own workplace to complete it.

The Statistics

The wrong strategy can have an effect on employee morale. For one, the wrong HR strategy made an employee vent his frustration on the company, equating employees with staff augmentation. A recent survey stated that the outsourcing market in the U.K. is expected to grow, with service providers meeting expectations more often than not. The survey, carried out by Whitelane Research in collaboration with PA Consulting Group, had 69% of respondents stating that they will increase the amount of IT services that they get from their service providers.

So, which one’s the better option?

That’s the billion-dollar question. It’s like asking, should I prefer a Chocolate or a Strawberry cake. You need a strategy that can help you complete your projects on time and within budget.

Let’s talk about investing in project outsourcing while not compromising on staff augmentation. Here is a table for what works for both and where they lack in.

The post Project Outsourcing Vs. Staff Augmentation appeared first on Classic Informatics.

1. Huge Customer Base

Thanks to the social network – more than a billion people are now connected on the same platform. So an enterprise that acknowledges the power of the web is going to exist for the billion online users for whom everyday new content is being created.

These users are being converted into customers via inbound and content marketing. This has ensured the right traffic to the products they want to own or the services they seek. Every other second innumerable leads are tracked to find potential customers. To reach to a huge customer base has become easy and users are a click away if an enterprise understands how to leverage the power of the web.

• The mobile revolution has just spearheaded the same and markets like Korea and Japan have responded to the same already positively.
• The other countries on the same page are Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.
• Also the customer demographic has become youth centric and hence the web’s user base that is pre-dominantly the youth can be targeted via the proper approach to enterprise application development and enterprise web development.

The first step even before having a website is to have a Linkedin profile for the enterprise – this enhances the visibility of the enterprise and makes it available for notice by the huge customer base. It also adds a layer of credibility. For enterprises who have always followed the traditional methods should understand that their customers are already online if they are not.

2. A store that never closes

The web is a store that never closes – the customers never sleep. Across various time zones, different users at different points of time are seeking out products and services and choosing content to read from that leads to these services.

• According to a study made by Lloyds Bank and Go ON UK, it reflected that 1.2 million small business owners did not have the simple digital skills and have thus not been able to avail the power the web beholds.
• It is simple mathematics as to whether a 9-5 store that has its share of weekends would do well or a 24 * 7 store.
• Web enables customer interaction at every hour. This enables enhanced customer satisfaction, feedback and increases the conversion rate of customers into trusted customers.

3. Networking opportunities

The power of the web primarily lies in networking. Customers have become tech savvy. They demand better applications, interactive content and improved services. Networking can facilitate potential investors to find enterprising businesses.

Networking can be used to find clients on a pan global scale and to reach out to customers in a more effective manner. Enterprise application development needs to be stressed upon to develop applications that tend to the demands of the Web 2.0. customers.

The mobile revolution has already impacted enterprises by making them create content for the mobile phone.

• By the next year, wearables will be the next in thing and enterprises will have to drive networking via that medium.
• Inbound marketing and content marketing approaches can help enterprises create an effective profitable network of customers.
• Take the case of ecommerce and how it has boomed. In ecommerce it can be noticed as to how customer interaction takes place before buying a service or a product. The enterprise exists at the helm of service and product demands and possible customers and users interact via the web development model of the enterprise.

 4. Cost Effective

Incorporating an enterprise web development model is cost effective. The idea of creating a brand has become outmoded with flexible branding being the in thing for customers.

• The web allows aplenty cost effective solutions to customize branding and personalize it for individual customers.
• The direct channels of luring a customer to buying a service or a product via advertisement and expensive marketing platforms have been replaced by content and inbound marketing which don’t cost a dime.
• Customers are now rather driven by content than by interruptive commercials, print ads and radio ads.
• Customers communicate via the application the enterprise builds for the required customer engagement. Hence an enterprise application development model needs to be integrated to harness the power of the web.

 5. Communication

From an one sided affair of communication between a customer and an enterprise, we have moved into an interactive phase. How is interaction monitored, channelized and harnessed? The web does provide channels to maintain the degrees of freedom that communication deserves.

• According to the platform being used for the communication, applications need to be sized and structured to make it comfortable for the user to navigate.
• For instance banking transactions also happen via the web but then if the platform being used is the mobile phone, then a busy web page will defeat the idea of the banking transaction and it is bound to fail causing inconvenience to the customer.

For an engaging communication, applications should be designed according to the suitability of the platform the potential customer is going to use. There’s a lot more to how enterprises can leverage the power of web. The power of web exists in infinite possibilities and it is hence important for enterprises to harness it as soon as possible.

Huge customer base, a store that never closes, networking opportunities, cost effective, communication

Enterprise Web Development, Enterprise Application Development

The post How Can Enterprises Leverage The Power Of Web? appeared first on Classic Informatics.

No doubt, enterprises are reaching the pinnacle of success after employing the right set of digital marketing strategies. Special stress on strategies (just in case you overlooked!).

Just having an enterprise page on Facebook, a profile on LinkedIn and twitter doesn’t work.

You should have a strategy. You need to allocate resources for each digital channel (email marketing, SEO, SMM, PPC, content marketing and the likes) you want to invest into and look upon to get results.

Randomly posting and updating once or twice in a month will surely not help, and this is the reason that you are not getting enough returns via enterprise digital marketing.

Sounds true?

Now let’s have a look at some of the mind blowing statistics.

• As many as 50% of the companies are making use of enterprise digital marketing, but sadly, don’t have any plan or strategy to execute that!
• As many as 83% of the consumers were found reporting that they were not happy with the experience of social media marketing that brands cater.

And guess what, you can simply win the race by staying ahead in competition – making the most out of social media marketing – leveraging the best out of social media channels – strategizing and planning the digital marketing campaigns to provide a better experience to your customers and more!

But Why Having A Digital Marketing Strategy Is As Important As Having Digital Marketing Itself?

• To have a proper direction

If you are one of those companies which is not yet making use of a proper digital marketing strategy – do you clearly have your goals defined?

What you want to achieve?

Are you going to focus more on gaining new customers or engaging the existing ones?

A proper strategy is thus necessary to provide clarity on the goals without which it is more likely that you won’t achieve them.

• Be agile enough to stay ahead

Look at various online brands – Dell, Google, Amazon, eBay – they all are dynamic – have wonderful digital marketing strategies – have their own voice digitally and thus manage to stay ahead. Where do you lie?

Clearly, without a proper strategy, you cannot achieve anything – let it be digital marketing.

Now that you are convinced of having a proper strategy for your business, let’s see how to do it?

Ways to Have a Productive Digital Marketing Strategy

• Are you personal enough?

Personalisation is a major factor that attracts customers – and this is what the global corporations focus on!

As many as 37 percent of the enterprises consider personalisation as one of their top priorities.

But how do you get more personal with customers?

This is fairly simple!

You can make use of automated tools – like adding the first name to an email that you send to your customer. Or wishing your customer the happy birthday.

Won’t you like such gestures?

• Are you using the technology the right way?

If you study the digital marketing strategies of global enterprises, it is easy to conclude that they employ technologies in order to manage social media, content, data and audiences well.

Making use of cloud marketing solutions or software that aim to improve customer satisfaction could be a good idea.

Your chosen marketing technology should be fully integrated with your existing system – and should be secure and scalable with perfect customer services.

• Choose the digital marketing channels wisely

You can choose to have paid media or owned media accounts.

Paid media includes sponsored posts and articles. While owned media helps an organization to manage the customer experience.

This occupies 31 percent of the expenditure and includes having websites, email lists, databases, apps and other stuff.

Why Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Alright, so all set to employ a digital marketing strategy?

Go ahead!

So what medium are you going to start with?

Amid email marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing – which one do you choose?

Confused?

Allow us to help you and provide you with enough reasons why social media marketing should be in your list!

• 46% of the web users will look upon social media before they purchase anything.
• 37% of the twitter users will surely make a purchase from the brand that they follow.
• And yes, the biggest of all – more than 72% of the users active on internet are also active on social media.

This thus concludes that social media marketing for enterprises is the way to go!

Of course, you simply won’t like to ignore a platform that already has so many active users.

But then again, just social media marketing for enterprises won’t work without any strategy.

And how will it?

As already discussed, you need to employ a proper strategy to make the things work out for you.

Proper strategy involves everything – the correct timings of the post, the engaging content generation, the study of the collected stats and data, the paid ads – everything!

How to Play Your Cards Well With Right Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing strategy is a summary of all the stuff that you intend to do – the current status of our social media accounts and where you want to see them in next six months and the tools you would be making use to reach those goals.

Keep your social media strategy to the point, achievable and realistic.

Let’s see how to do that.

• Are you clear with your business goals?

Every single strategy you employ caters to the success of your goal.

You can’t just blindly move ahead without knowing your goals. Further, without proper goals you won’t have any way to gauge your success levels.

Your goals could vary depending on your plans, but there are a few goals that all companies should have in their strategy – increasing awareness of your brand, reducing costs, retaining customers and so on.

• Did you set marketing objectives?

You need to see your way through to the end.

Set yourself objectives of marketing that you’ll accomplish, in order to stay successful. Goals are nothing without a proper objective.

Let’s say, one of your goals was to generate leads. So how many leads you expect to generate to call it a success? Make sure that your objectives are time bound, realistic and achievable.

• Who are your targeted audiences?

There are a lot of people on social media who would not serve the purpose of making your business a success.

Hence, be very prudent when it comes to identifying the customers who will be useful to you.

You should have sufficient info about age, occupation, interests, demography, interest, habits about your customers.

• Are you close enough to your competitors?

Just working on your business would not be completely fruitful.

You need to know of your rival businesses as well, so that you make new strategies to outrun them in the race.

How many posts are they doing per day? Are they running any contests? And so on.

• What all channels and tactics are going to cater to?

You can create profiles in all social media networks and keep posting stuff. But, that is no way going to help you.

Research on which channel is best for your business and work specifically on it, with tactics that assure success.

• Is the content engaging enough?

The content you choose to put up in the social media plays an imperative role as well.

Be selective and cautious about content you put up as that will have an impact on your customers.

Users won’t bother to give 2 seconds to the boring content, and soon it will be lost in the news feed. Definitely not what you want!

• How much do you have in your pocket?

Make budget plans that will fit your business investments. Of course, if your monthly budget is of $100 and you are planning to achieve the targets of $500, you are sure to create a mess.

You could choose to do all of this on your own or choose to do better by selecting a social media marketing agency to do it.

By hiring an agency, you not only save a lot of time which you can utilize for other things that would improvise the quality of the business you are promoting.

But, choosing a marketing agency also guarantees you of the tools and technologies, data and stats, strategies and plans that they will be using to ensure that you reach the top.

This definitely is difficult to achieve otherwise.

So, when do you plan to include digital initiatives in your marketing strategy or are you doing it already? Do you have any questions or points to add here? Please feel free to leave your comments below and thanks for reading!

The post A Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing for Enterprises appeared first on Classic Informatics.

So, if you fall under the same radar, then you are not alone.

It hardly costs you anything to present yourself on the social media. But, it is of no use if you just waste your time without employing proper strategies.

And, here come the social media marketing and/or content marketing agencies.

But, how can they help?

And, why they should be able meet your requirements?

All these we answer in this article to simplify your decision. Take a look.

 1) Comes with Rich Experience

Well… creating an account on social media is easy, but building a presence is not.

You can ask your friends to connect to you to get a couple of Likes or Followers on your social channels.

But, that is not going to hike your business figures. That may get you started, but it is not an effective way for long-term sustainability and growth.

After all, how many friends have you got? And, are they your target audience? Can you limit your business to just 100-200 people?

So, you need someone who can guide you right from getting started.

A social media agency can help you here. They have a rich set of experience with advanced knowledge under their belt.

For example, you might learn how to do Facebook advertising by reading some online blogs.

But, do you know you can target audience better by using Facebook custom audience feature? And, what kind of Facebook messages can get your page most likes?

Being present on social media may get you queries from existing and potential customers. And, a couple of them could be customer complaints as well.

You may think that you can answer them on your own. While, yes, you can but a single casual reply to a complaint can damage your business.

Add the bad word of mouth on top of that.

You know it takes years to build a business and minutes to shut it down. So, can you afford such casualties?

But, a social media agency knows how to respond to such queries.

Also, an experienced social media agency can help you with many tips and strategies. This will ensure you would not have to go for the trial and error phase.

Knowing things does not help, until you know how to use this knowledge to your benefit.

That is where content marketing or social media marketing agencies can be of great help.

2) Saves Time

You can set up your profile on several social networks. But, do you have time for activities like curation, posting, and replying to queries?

Let us say, you populated the social media channels by posting content from other sources that you find interesting. But, how can you ensure those are actually interesting?

You may not have various content sources the way social media agencies have.

And, you need to dedicate time to gain knowledge about the content sources. But, can you afford to spend time on such mundane tasks?

A social media agency can help you here as well.

It can save you a lot of time that you could use in enhancing your business.

So, while you focus on growing your business, your social media agency focuses on your brand image through social media. Thus, parallel growth processes happen.

This way you can increase your growth with the same amount of time and investment involved.

3) Access to Necessary Tools 

How can you find potential leads on Twitter?

You might find it by following your target audience and skimming through tweets. But, what if you have a larger set of audience?

Especially if you are targeting a wide range of consumers. Do you think that job would be that easy?

But, a social media agency can do it quickly using the social media monitoring tool.

In fact, they use various tools to get the right leads.

With the help of tools, the agency can understand what your target audience is talking about.

Once you catch the pulse of target users, it is easy to convert those leads into prospects.

All this gets done within a couple of minutes using the tools. A good social media agency will know when to use which tool.

Also, do you know you can drive traffic to your website by sharing  content?

Well… a tool called Snip.ly can help drive traffic to your page.

Tools such as BuzzSumo can help you find the current trending of the type of content your readers want.

But, you may not know about such tools until you stay on top of every happening in the social media industry.

And this is where an agency becomes the savior.

4) Cost Effectiveness

Yes, giving a considerable amount to a marketing agency might seem like a burning a hole in the pocket.

But, wait a minute.

Have you calculated the expenses for employing an in-house marketing resource?

Allow us to do that for you. Let us start with the recruitment.

To reach a well-deserving employee, you would need to advertise. You will pay the local newspapers. And, the recruitment agency would take around 20 percent of your employee’s first salary.

And, if you managed to skip this expenditure by using job portals, his or her salary will be the biggest expenditure. Correct?

Wait. What about income tax, national insurance or any other taxes that might be applicable in your state?

Further, you need to provide your employees with the employers’ liability insurance.

This might cost somewhere between 5 -10 million pounds. And, if you fail to do this, you might even get to enjoy a penalty of 2500 pounds a day.

Add to this the other stuff like sickness, maternity, and flexible working. Now, add training, infrastructure, and other related costs.

Do you still think in-house hiring is a better idea?

But, with agencies, you do not have to make such hefty investments.

You can sign up a fixed fee contract that could be payable monthly, quarterly, or yearly. And, the amount will always be less than the total expenditure made on your in-house resource.

Imagine what all you can do with the saved money!

5) Get to see from a Third Person’s Perspective

A third person perspective is necessary while evaluating strategies, content, and results. To widen the reach, it is important that you keep yourself in the shoes of your audiences.

A marketing group that resides outside the company provides healthy insights of the customer’s point of view. It is always good to have an extra pair of eyes. Isn’t it?

Traits to Look for While Choosing the Right Social Media Agency

1) Precious pitching

The ideas that your agency pitches are crucial for your business. So, ensure that the agency staff is innovative enough to offer viable ideas.

2) Customized solutions

Check if the agency is capable of offering customized solutions that cater to your needs.

3) Knowledge matters

The agency you choose must have enough knowledge, and that comes only with experience. Choose an experienced agency that can meet your requirements.

4) Goodwill

In any industry, having goodwill is important. Do investigate the about the agency’s past records and clients. This will ensure that the agency you are selecting has a good reputation in the industry.

5) Budget

You need to be cautious about how much you are paying the agency. You must cross-check the budget they have fixed.

Now that you know the reasons to choose a social media agency, go ahead and hire one!

The post Why You Should Hire an Agency to do Content and Social Media Marketing appeared first on Classic Informatics.

This is all thanks to high-end PHP frameworks.

Agile application development is now not only easy, but it is also faster.

These high-end PHP frameworks come to your rescue when time is a big issue and you want to implement those high-end functionalities in your application in the least possible time.

Image credit: Flickr

This is thus the time that you need to look at popular PHP frameworks.

Without any delay, let us take a look at the top PHP frameworks that would help you develop agile and secure applications.

Laravel

Packed with a lot of interesting features, a tempting engine and other development related stuff, Laravel provides your application with a reliable and tested environment.

Painless routing, a robust library and powerful ORM along with simple authentication are some of the features that make Laravel the first choice for developers.

• Allows you to easily manage third-party packages with its tool composer.
• Has an easy to comprehend syntax.
• Eliminates testing hassles with its built-in unit testing.
• Allows you to manage client and server routes through Restful routing.
• Provides you with the flexibility to craft enthusiasts’ small businesses into big enterprise applications all in one go!

Phalcon

Named as one of the fastest PHP frameworks that the industry has ever witnessed, Phalcon provides you with an array of features.

They include asset management, security and translations, which make it one of the most preferred MVC frameworks boosted by PHP.

Consider Phalcon to develop micro application and high-end MVC applications with multi modules.

• Easy to grasp and learn.
• More cost effective than other frameworks.
• Allows you to use selected objects or a whole framework due to its loosely coupled nature.
• Has a powerful design.
• Has neat API.
• Allows you to easily create software through the direct injection feature of Phalcon.

Symfony

Symfony 2 is another PHP framework that you can choose to build websites and web applications. Witnessing 1,000,000 downloads till date; Symfony is currently backed up by an amazing support of 300,000 developers.

• Allows easy configuration with event dispatcher and dependency injectors.
• Allows for easy customisation as per your needs.
• Allows you to deploy a micro framework and there is thus no need to deal with the entire framework.
• Is highly extensible.
• Validate roles easily and helps you boost productivity.

Yii

Yii is another high-performance framework. The beauty of this framework lies in its features that allow you to focus on the code while all the messy work can be managed behind the scenes.

Although many tasks in Yii are automated, you might still have to dig through the framework a bit more to know it inside out.

• Is equipped with a powerful caching system for loading the web applications quickly.
• Integrates with third-party codes easily. And, guess what, the codes from the Zend and Pear frameworks can also be used in the Yii web application.
• Is a highly secured framework. It boosts some advanced security measures, such as injection attacks, cross-site scripting and input validation.
• Has RBAC-based built-in authentication support.
• Is highly compatible with Ajax and jQuery which allows you to create highly scalable and versatile UIs.
• Can easily be integrated with both relational and non-relational databases.

Zend

Zend is the preferred PHP framework if you want to build a high performing web application. Packed with secure coding tools, the Zend framework showcases various important features, such as extensibility and modularity.

• Has highly deployable API-centric applications.
• Follows an agile design methodology.
• Has a drag-and-drop editor.
• Has instant debugging.
• Includes PHP unit testing tools.

Things to Keep in Mind While Choosing a PHP Framework

• What do you expect from the framework?

Even though familiarity is an important element when choosing a framework, functionality should also be considered.

This is because a CMS might not be suitable for an eCommerce application. You must thus first relax and analyse your requirements. Only thereafter can you proceed to compare the myriad of options that are available to you.

• What about the documentation?

Always choose and go for a framework that comes with a lot of documentation and training. You never know when you might need it!

No matter how much expertise you have in a framework, it always appears to be hazy six months down the line. Under such circumstances, documentation comes to the rescue.

• Does the framework have an active user base and is it actively being developed?

Writing code that is not perfectly coupled with your chosen framework is time consuming.

At that time, you are left with only two choices: Stay with the framework and continue to do its maintenance all by yourself or simply do the coding again with a new framework.

Neither choice is favourable nor should you thus always take a look at the framework’s community and active user base before you settle on one.

Still puzzled about which one to choose for PHP web development? This table might help!

So, which framework do you plan to choose for PHP development?

The post A Definitive Guide to PHP Frameworks for Development appeared first on Classic Informatics.

They have both been major contributors to website and enterprise applications for many years now.

Python, Django, Ruby on Rails and a lot of others have challenged their survival.

But these two languages have always emerged stronger, all thanks to the feature set that they possess and the flexibility that they provide to developers.

PHP development and ASP.NET development have been in a neck and neck competition with each other for the title as the best.

And have thus forced CTOs and enterprise owners to make the difficult decision of which one to choose for their enterprise application?

So let us find out more about these two languages!

ASP.NET and PHP at a Glance

• ASP

Active Server Page (also known as ASP) is scripting language mainly used on the server side which was developed by Microsoft.

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It is a more powerful server side language and hosts an array of features, including links to the backend, session, and state management, and handling request and response parameters.

A webpage that has been designed using ASP will include static HTML tags and dynamic validation using JavaScript or VBScript. Dynamic generation of HTML and CSS is also possible with ASP.NET.

How Does ASP.NET Work?

You request an ASP page which is on a server and the corresponding page fetches the information from the database.

This then dynamically generates the HTML code for you to present your requested data and it sends it to you to view in a browser.

• PHP

PHP is a scripting language. PHP is mostly found embedded with HTML code, or is even served as a standalone program.

It processes the code using an interpreter in the web server or Common Gateway Interface (CGI). PHP can also be used as a command line scripting in GUI applications. It has the ability to be integrated with various database systems.

ASP.NET Development vs PHP Development – Which One to Choose for Enterprise Applications?

ASP.NET and PHP are both versatile languages used in larger web application development and have the ability to scale a lot. Each has its own strengths to support your application.

The choice between the two should be based on your application and its environmental parameters, such as traffic, scaling, and cost.

• Business Size

The size of your business is an important factor to consider when deciding which language you should go for.

Firstly, PHP was essentially designed as a web language, while ASP.NET was crafted for designing enterprise applications.

Secondly, ASP.NET is easy at scaling and easily gears big projects, while smaller projects work better in PHP. Furthermore, ASP.NET has industrial strength, which provides robustness and power to your application.

• Time and Pricing

PHP is an open source language and runs on any open source platform which overtakes ASP, since ASP is cost-effective and requires larger resources and more support than PHP.

Time is also another big factor to consider. PHP is easy to deploy and develop. It is easier to install and set up on development machines than ASP.

• Lightweight

ASP.NET requires huge libraries to be integrated, while PHP is simple to use with basic options.

ASP.NET also only supports Internet Information Server (IIS) servers, while PHP supports various servers.

ASP.NET furthermore uses server space and accessing the data every time from the server makes its performance suffer.

Since PHP uses built-in memory, it is easy to access the data faster and so PHP stands at the top due to its faster execution.

Here is a quick comparison table that will help you better understand the differences between the two.

Both languages are good in their way. It is up to the business types to choose the one that is best suited for them.

If cost is not a factor and your application is huge, you can go for ASP.NET Development.

If you are a startup or a small-sized business where cost is a huge factor, it would be best to choose an open source language like PHP.

So which one did you choose?

The post ASP.NET vs PHP for Enterprise Applications appeared first on Classic Informatics.

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon not only helps you by improving your wardrobe, but also helps you with your cloud application development too!

AWS is by far the best way you could host your application on the cloud.

Hosting an application using AWS has many advantages.

First of all, it is highly reliable.

Secondly, it has cost effective computing resources on which you could host your application.

It also has various components which make your application hosting process a lot easier and more flexible.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why you need to host your application with AWS.

AWS Components that Make Your Application Hosting Experience worth It

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Commonly known as Amazon EC2, this component offers compute capacity in the cloud which is actually resizable. It also gives you APIs and full management consoles so that you can manage the computer resources.

• Amazon Simple Storage Service

This component offers a web services interface that is easy to use and that can save and retain any quantity of data from anywhere around the world at any given time. It is easily available, safe and has good durability.

• Amazon Relational Database Service

Commonly known as Amazon RDS, this component eases the whole setting up process and operation and can scale databases in the cloud that are relational.

It offers a resizable database capacity while simultaneously handling databases of administration works that are time consuming.

• Amazon Cloud Front

Amazon Cloud Front gives a content delivery system that is globally distributed and of great performance.

Your app could make use of this component to effortlessly share stream content with less latency and a greater data transfer pace.

• Amazon Simple Queue Services

This component gives a highly secured queuing system with high performance. It gives you a chance to distribute the work among the application processes.

• Amazon Devpay

Amazon Devpay can be used for services related to account management and online billing that would ease your way through the selling of applications.

It is not only those components that make AWS what it is! AWS is further recommended because it has a lot of advantages.

Advantages of AWS Hosting

• Very Easy to Operate

AWS was designed while keeping in mind the vision of all application providers, vendors, and ISVs who should be able to quickly and safely host their applications.

Irrespective of the kind of applications being hosted, whether existing ones or SaaS based, you can always use the AWS management console or web services APIs.

These are aptly documented in order to gain access to the application hosting platform of AWS.

• Highly Flexible

AWS will allow you to choose the operating system, web application platform, programming language, database and various services you require.

Using AWS, you can access a virtual atmosphere that would allow you to load the services and software that the application needs.

This also makes the migration process easier for applications that already exist, while also conserving options for building other solutions.

• Highly Economical

The only expenditure you will have is the electricity and other resources that you would use. Since there are no contracts that last for a long time and upfront commitments, AWS is highly cost effective.

• Very Reliable

When you use AWS, you are exposed to the benefits of a secure global computing infrastructure that is very reliable and scalable.

Incidentally, this happens to be the virtual spine of Amazon’s online businesses that rake in billions of dollars.

• High Performance

You can easily scale your application up or down, depending on the demand. This can be done by using AWS tools, elastic load balancing as well as auto scaling.

Supported by the enormous infrastructure that Amazon has, you can easily avail access to storage and computing resources whenever you require them.

• Highly Secure

AWS uses an end to and characteristic to safeguard and harden the infrastructure which includes operational, software and physical measures.

Okay, so now you have decided to host your application on AWS. But how are you going to do it?

Since doing it yourself might be a risky and time consuming task, resorting to AWS implementation specialists would be the best solutions.

Why Hire an AWS Implementation Specialist for Cloud Solution Development?

• They Know It inside out

From elastic block storage to the type of performance that can be expected, an AWS professional knows it all.

Furthermore, you cannot take the risk of backing up your data in the wrong way. Only a professional and well experienced developer knows the art of using the snapshot facility via API call and about other techniques.

It is better that you leave a few tasks to only be done by them.

• Do You Know about Server Management Skills?

AWS is all about cloud computation and you cannot expect yourself to be a master of all trades.

It takes a considerable amount of time and monitoring the health of the server and various tools are used for that which you might not be aware of.

While AWS is still in its infant stage, the service is definitely giving startups a tailspin!

So, when do you plan to host your application with AWS? Do you have any questions or points to add here?

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