Qasim Raza

4 Ways To Increase Social Media Engagement Of Your Business The digital world has become tremendously noisy. Every day, the average consumer is bombarded with content from brands, because it has become that easy to do so. Create some communication collateral, choose a target audience, buy access to this audience at a nominal budget and click publish and voila! You’re in the faces of thousands of prospective users and buyers. But that’s the thing about something that’s so easy to do-everybody can do it! So how do you stand out – That’s the name of the game for most social media managers. Fake likes and fake followers are aplenty, and the importance of these vanity metrics is reducing by the day. The north-star metric for social media assets is and has always been engagement. How to evoke an intended reaction from an audience? A lot of promotional marketing boils down to this. With a multifold increase in “social noise” that social media users encounter on a daily basi...

What are Marketing Blogs and How Do they   Benefit your Business? Marketing Blogs … we’ve seen them, we’ve heard them. They trend one minute, they disappear the next minute. Millions of people around the globe have gotten the idea in their heads that blogs are the ‘in-thing ‘and no one wants to be left behind. One thing that remains constant is the fact that blogs are here to stay, in particular, marketing blogs which are very versatile. So, what is a Blog Anyway? “Weblog” was the term previously used to refer to blogs and was then shortened to just “blog.” The first blogs appeared in the 1990’s and were basically personal online diaries where people would write stuff about themselves and their lives. During this time, blogs were pretty much just websites: you had to update them manually keeping in mind that people then weren’t very familiar with the internet so blogs were only left to the “smart” ones who knew how to handle web pages. This was a huge turn off fo...

Creating a Mutually-beneficial Relationship Between PR and Content Marketing Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” That sounds a lot like what PR pros are charged with, doesn’t it? After all, modern public relations is focused on engaging with an audience of influencers in order to get your message heard and support your organization’s business objectives. As a PR professional, you are spending your days tracking industry editorial trends, talking to journalists and editors about the content that their audiences want, and honing pitches to obtain coverage or place contributed articles for business partners. PR is full of moments that create the exact kind of insight that would help your content team prioritize material that’s going to...

My 5 favorite things about working in PR/marketing/communications: As I consider my experience, I’ve been involved in a variety of PR, communications, and marketing roles even before I recognized them as such. PR and marketing are all around us. Music, sports, healthcare… anything worth talking about. If you’re involved in PR, you understand it’s an industry like no other and one that is constantly evolving. One day you could be producing a video and the next buckled down in a “war room” environment to tackle a crisis. Whatever the case, it’s an exciting industry that many gravitate towards. Below are my five favorite things about working in PR/marketing/communications. What are yours?                                      1) PR is everywhere! Public relations and communications is a career path ...

Product Marketing’s Role in Driving B2B Revenue Many B2B companies under-appreciate the impact of effective product marketing and its critical role in helping to generate revenue. Perhaps I value it higher because I’ve had a product marketing role at several major software companies and also been responsible for the function as CMO or VP of marketing. In my opinion, the lack of quality product marketing is a big hindrance to B2B marketing and sales success. Lindsay Kolowich, senior marketing manager at HubSpot, has a brief and spot-on definition of product marketing: “Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product.” Many great companies are led by individuals who, despite their title, are very good product marketers. Examples include Elon Musk, Steve...