Moving beyond the “Hobe NA” (It won’t happen) culture that Kolkata is stereotyped as, Kolkata still happens to be the city which is economically placed third, and has an overwhelming majority of traditional businesses which are doing pretty well. But not to their fullest.

This is where Information Technology chips in. This includes, but is not restricted, to just having a website. Often when I talk to traditional business owners about blogging and digital media promotions, they seem confused. Most haven’t had good prior experiences either. If you’re one of these people, NASSCOM Product Conclave is where you should be – You get to meet the right people, share requirements, gain knowledge, broaden your horizon and at the end of the day, expand your business.

In this blog post, I would, in my own little ways try to explain how technology might help a traditional business owner in Kolkata.

NASSCOM Product Conclave Kolkata 2016 is poised to become the biggest of such conclaves. I’m happy that Kolkata Bloggers has been given an opportunity to partner.

Not just website, have a digital marketing plan.

Just having a working website even with the best design would not help you if your website is not found on either the social media or on search engines. While you make the budgets for marketing, keep a separate fund for the digital promotions.

Digital marketing makes your brand visible to the larger audience, preferably with shared interest. The aim is to reach out to people, showcase your product or services, enthuse them, and convert them.

It could either be done over the search engines or the popular social media platforms. At the end of every marketing campaign, you could track the entire process of marketing, the number of people who had seen your brand, how many went to your website, how many placed their enquiries and finally how many became your customer. You’d know whether the campaign was a success.

You’d be surprised to know that digital marketing will cost you way less than any advertisement on newspapers or hoardings. You also stay in touch with prospective customers whom you could approach later. This also has archival value and helps in bridging the gap between the brand and its customers by direct communication. Things that traditional advertisements would never offer you.

Create stories about your brand.

People love stories. Positive stories enhance the brand. When you know what you want to say, how would you? This is where Blogging comes to action.

A major aspect of blogging is – story telling and how you are telling it. While all the analytics would tell you whether people are reading it, what kind of stories they prefer to consume and how they consume it, the core of blogging remains the story telling part.

Should the story be in text? A general reader who skims through, either reads 28% of the text. Should it be via graphics and illustrations? Would it not be very costly and time consuming to create a range of graphics? Should it then be short films or animations? There is the need of brain storming. Now you know why!

Use newer tools.

Use newer tools to organise your business; to synchronise people’s efforts, stay updated with everyone’s work and at the end of the day generate reports for clarity. That’s what a simple ERP software does. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.

Then there are tools as simple as GPS system in your employees phones which would allow you to know if they are stuck somewhere on the field. Sales Force is something every uninitiated should get introduced to.

Then there are CRMs, email automation, scheduling automation or simpler tools like Skype that makes life easy for businessmen. One just needs to take the first step and start using them.

Use Technology, Be on Top.

And trust me, I’m just very young. This city is hosting one of the biggest IT Product Conclaves where you could learn from the experts.

NASSCOM Product Conclave Kolkata has speakers like Amit Jain (President, Uber India), Alok Kejriwal (CEO, Games2win), C.P. Gurnani (CEO, Tech Mahindra) to name a few.

The Digital Marketing workshop would be conducted by Dr. Som Singh of Unspun Technologies.

Analytics workshop would be conducted by Aarti Kapur of Fractal Analytics. She had previously done her masters from ISB Hyderabad, MS from University of Texas and B.Tech from IIT Delhi before ensuring that she has a unparalleled career path.

Ameen Haque of Storywalla, will enrapture the audience when he delivers his session on story telling for business. For blogging, you could always discuss things with me. I’d be present there too because Kolkata Bloggers is a partner to this event.

Other workshops include Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Robotics by Kavi Arya (IIT Bombay) and Product Management workshops by Alok Kejriwal.

IT is here to make people’s lives easy. This I say not as the blogger but as a computer engineer. We solve problems of all businesses to facilitate its better functioning leading to its growth.

Kolkata is privileged to host such events which aim to bridge the divide between the IT and the non IT world. And this time, we’re are reaching out to the non-IT businesses for their problem solving.  It’s kind of a red carpet for them this time.

Dear Business owner, if this does not excite you, I do not know what will.

I will be there, click here to continue.