Pathik Bhatt

Category: Marketing & Advertising

  • Tips For Entrepreneurs From Arpan Shah – CEO & Co-founder of PrintEco

    Arpan Shah CEO of PrintEcoI ran into Arpan Shah a few times when we were both at U of I in Champaign, but hadn’t seen him since. I came across PrintEco while browsing start-up companies in the Chicago area. Arpan started his business around a great tool that helps companies save paper and ink (and money). Read on to learn more about it.

    What gave you the idea for PrintEco?

    I saw a significant problem of wasteful printing at University of Illinois and during my internships. It was a big enough problem that I figured needed a simple solution. After gathering a lot of feedback, I came upon my current idea. It started out as a side project but kept snowballing from there. (more…)

  • The People of Taco Bell Versus the People of the DMV in Aurora IL

    Several times over the last couple years I have experienced something so rare that each of these experiences have nestled themselves into my memory. What are these experiences you ask? Excellent customer service at fast food restaurants and the DMV. No not just any fast food restaurants – specifically the Taco Bell in Aurora, IL near me (1000 N Farnsworth Ave Aurora, IL 60506) and the McDonald’s in Oak Brook, IL by my workplace.

    So where does the DMV come in? We’ll get to that later [shudder]. (more…)

  • Desi Wear Provides Great Service To Customers Who Don’t Pay

    Desi Wear showed they care by following up their free Desi United t-shirt giveaway on Facebook with great customer service – even though I wasn’t a paying customer. While the “ROI of social media” can be difficult to measure, the “ROI of caring” will always matter and payoff when you think big picture. Social media is just a tool that Desi Wear and others use to show their clients how they care. I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post if it wasn’t for their creative use of social media paired with customer service.

    Every so often Desi Wear gives away their cool desi t-shirts to people who like and share their posts on their Facebook. I happened to be the lucky winner chosen out of the 73 others who liked their post last month.

    desi wear facebook giveaway

    (more…)

  • Ravioli Oli Cares – Best Ravioli Restaurant in Oak Brook IL

    My boss had a Groupon for Ravioli Oli about a month ago and suggested we use it for a team lunch because the restaurant is near our Oakbrook Terrace office. As a vegetarian, ravioli is a popular item for me whenever I go out to Italian restaurants so I thought it was a great idea after seeing their online menu. You get six ravioli pieces (plenty for lunch), choose your filling and add a sauce. If you can’t decide on just one combination, you can go with their “Oli Duet” and try two different ravioli combos, 3 pieces in each.

    Ravioli Oli Plate

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  • Link Building Strategies for 2013 from SES Chicago

    I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 Search Engine Strategies Conference last week in Chicago (Twitter: #seschi) and saw several great presentations about link building strategies for 2013. Link building is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO), and the techniques required to acquire more links from other websites are becoming more and more time consuming. For years SEO’s have tried to find ways to automate and speed up link building by submitting to every Web directory that will give them a link. Google’s Penguin update earlier this year was launched to devalue links from those types of sites and to discourage site owners from pursuing more “black-hat” link building. (more…)

  • 10 Takeaways from the 2012 Dex Small Business Summit in Chicago

    I was pleasantly surprised by the size and quality of the (free) Small Business Summit in Chicago last week. They had a panel of quality speakers who all added value to the discussion. The panel members in no particular order: Carol Roth, Hedy Ratner, Mary McFarlin, Sara Glassford, and Troy Henikoff. The host, Barry Moltz, was entertaining, informative and generous enough to provide all the attendees with this book Small Town Rules.

    Without further adieu, here are the 10 takeaways for small business owners (and marketers) from the panel:

    1. All failures don’t have a valuable lesson to teach you.

    We are taught to hold onto our failures to try and glean some wisdom out of them, but often times there is nothing you could have done to change the outcome. Lesson: stop trying to figure out what you could have done better in the past and move on. (more…)

  • Conversion Rate Optimization Using AdWords Search Term Report

    Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is becoming part of every online marketer’s vocabulary and soon will disseminate into the general working public’s vocab too (just as SEO and PPC have). For those of you who don’t deal with websites much, SEO is search engine optimization (trying to get your site to rank on the first page of Google, Bing & Yahoo), and PPC is pay-per-click advertising (all those great banner ads all over the web and text ads you see when you search on Google). SEO and PPC are used to drive traffic to a website or blog, while CRO is focused on what happens when those visitors get to the site.

    Getting people to visit your site can be expensive, so you want the people coming to your website to be happy with the content they find. A conversion is a transaction that you want your site visitors to perform: placing and order, submitting a form and commenting on a post are all common examples. After you decide what you want your visitors to do, you should optimize (the “o” in CRO) your site to convince people to convert. The more you pay for your visitors, the more important CRO becomes to your business. This is why companies using PPC are also starting to invest in CRO.

    Interested in learning more? I recently wrote a blog post about this topic, check it out: How you can use the AdWords Search Term Report and custom web forms to optimize your conversion rate 

  • Advertising Doesn’t Negatively Affect American Culture

    Since I explored how advertising negatively affects us in an earlier blog post, it’s only fair that I explore the other side. We can blame a lot of things on advertising and mass-marketing, but some of those critiques should be self-directed. Ultimately, each individual is responsible for how their environment & situation affects them. The way our advertising looks today may also be another chicken and egg case where some may argue that advertising shaped American culture into what it is today, while others will say (more…)

  • Promoting The Gita

    Last Sunday in a pravachan (discourse/lecture) about the Gita, Dadaji stated how we promote and advertise good movies that we’ve seen, but we don’t do the same for the Gita. It’s true, how often have you seen a trailer on the tv or a giant sized poster marketing the benefits of the Gita? This was one of those recurring moments in pravachan where I felt like he was speaking directly to me. Who else besides a graphic designer was going to bother taking that statement at face value? That statement is what inspired this post and this:

     

    I’m sure many people have seen the original Pass It On ad and this quote before. Have either of them moved you to take action in any sort of way? Apparently, this supposed quote from Einstein has:

    I say “supposed” because there is an on-going debate about whether or not Einstein ever said this, and there don’t appear to be any sources for it. I found it ironic though that someone might have created a false advertisement for the Gita in the 1970’s by fabricating this quote AND that it actually works! This opens up a whole new can of worms though.

    One of the most important lessons from the Gita is that the motive behind an action is paramount, not the actual action itself. With that idea alone the Gita explains how to turn every action – even the routine, mundane ones – into an offering to God. So the dilemma here is that we have a positive result occurring by the creation of false quote – more people  are reading the Gita. Is that okay? Well, that depends…

    • Scenario 1: Bookstore owner has an overstock of Gitas in his inventory, “How do I get rid of these and make some money off of them?!”
    • Scenario 2: Gita devotee who genuinely wants to share its message, “How do I get the Western world to even know that this book exist, much less read it?!”

    Would you feel better about the quote if the person in scenario 2 created it? In the end isn’t it the same result? Why should it matter?

    Perhaps you’re curious about my motives as I write this post and ask you to share the ads below too. That’s fair. Here are my some of them:

    • I saw a design/marketing challenge that related to my interests so I had to accept it
    • I fully believe in the awesomeness of the Gita and want to try a creative approach of promoting it
    • I want to grow my personal brand (that’s why my site is in the corner of each ad)
    • I like messing around with social media
    There may be more, but I guess that’s between me and HIM.
    Now if those motives are alright by you and you share any sort of affection towards the Gita, please humor me and change your Facebook timeline background image to any of the following banners (or pick Einsteins from above).

    In the comments below, please share a quote, lesson, verse or anything you want to about why you think it’s worth sharing the Gita!

    Oh, btw here’s a link to the Gita, go explore!

  • Should My Business be on Pinterest

    Before you decide to start using Pinterest for business, ask yourself the following questions:

    1. Am I trying to reach women with my products or services?

    80% to 90% of Pinterest users are women depending on what reports you check. Men’s shaving product and cologne companies probably won’t benefit as much as home decor and fashion companies (see below for more categories) from being on Pinterest – that is unless those companies find a way to make those images appealing to women. Here’s an example of how men’s products can turn into women’s pins (pay special attention to the name of the board that it’s pinned on): (more…)