buy custom Internal Risk Assessment of Wal-Mart Stores essay

buy custom Internal Risk Assessment of Wal-Mart Stores essay Walmart, formerly known as Walmart stores is an American public multinational that manages big retail warehouses and departmental stores. Walmart is ranked by Forbes as the 18th worlds largest company by size and the biggest by revenue. Walmart was incorporated about 40 years ago in the rural Arkansas by Sam Walton. Since then, the company has extensively expanded its operations to a tune of achieving gross revenue close to $250 billion. Walmart has extended its activities from making its own products such as OlRoy dog food and e vitamins to banking, sale of used cars, travel and Internet access. Chain has a large customer base of over 150 million customers per week who frequent the 8,800 Walmart retail units in 15 different nations. 2010, Walmart recorded sales revenue of $405 billion, a target that was facilitated by the2.1 million workers employed by Walmart. This paper will look into the strengths and weaknesses experienced by Walmart during marketing, the management, human resou rces, and finance as well as research development. Furthermore, the paper will briefly analyze how various internal dynamics of organizations affect Walmarts planned business stability. Strengths and Weaknesses Walmart has developed to have a status in the providence of low-priced product variety. Walmart has experienced considerable growth, by establishing its global operations and extending to countries like China, Mexico and Canada. As a market mover and determiner, Walmart has enjoyed significant strengths that other small-retailers dream of; Walmart has a powerful brand that is associated with money value, repute for convenience, as well as a wide range of products. The corporation has a core capability relating to its use of information technology to sustain its international system of logistics. For instance, the top management can be able to predict the performance of individual products from one store to another at a glance. Furthermore, the existence of information technology has helped in streamlining Walmarts procurement process. Human resources development and management are a key strength that is unique to Walmart. The company has acknowledged the importance of people in its operations, a factor that has led Wal-Mart to invest a great deal of money and time to train employees on how to handle and retain customers (Marketing, 2011). Regardless of its sizable strengths, both globally and in the United States, Walmart too has its weaknesses. Members of the public have successively and outrageous accused Walmart with under pricing its products, a situation that has kicked out a significant number of small-retailers. Since Wal-Mart deals with several different lines of products, such as food stationary and clothing, there is little or no flexibility s compared to other competitors who deal in specialized products. For being the worlds largest retailer Walmart is bound to suffer from managerial and control problems due to the huge flow of customers, employees and cash. Marketing Walmarts marketing objective is specific and to the spot; low prices. Walmarts purpose in marketing remains true to its founder Waltson, who once said that if people were to work together, they would experience a reduced cost of living for everybody as well as provide the world with chance to save and have a better life (Walmart, 2010). By offering low priced products, Walmart has been able to stick to its marketing goals. Considering the size of the retailer, some locals in the United States have prevented the establishment of Walmart in their local market. When launched, Walmart retail stores have led to economic collision by kicking small retailers out of business due to low prices, and product variety. Walmart has remained the largest retail employer in the United States. The corporation has put into place measures that ensure equal promotional and hiring practices to both external and internal applicants. The presence of career preference in Walmart makes it possible for employees to pre-apply for positions based on their various interests in different careers. During the past over ten years, Walmart has recorded an upward trend in the number of sexual related law suits. Female employees have been seeking compensation amounting to billions of dollars in damages with claims of underpayment and fewer job promotions. Such accusations of gender discrimination have led to skilled manpower seeking emplo yment in other Walmart competitors. Management and Finance Walmarts supply-chain management is exceptionally cost efficient. An effective inventory control system allows Walmart track its merchandise. The corporation handles one of the biggest global distribution operations, consisting of over 40 regional distribution stores. The tracking and shipping procedures have allowed Walmart to retain proper stock on the store shelves, as well as on their online store. Walmart does not have an official mission statement. The purpose of a mission statement is to provide employees, investors and consumers with a formal business direction and description, as well as providing an attention for focus. The absence of females in the top and well paying managerial position an image that Walmart would not want to display as this would damage the companys reputation towards its support for women. Walmart owns one of the most advanced development and research departments in the world. This has led to the development of innovative ways of offering goodss and services, a factor that has largely contributed to the Walmarts persistent success. However, some of its retail stores have been opened without conducting a proper prior research causing an overall poor performance. At the end of the 2009/2010 financial years, Wal-Marts gross revenue was projected at $408,214 million while the over-all cash flow was estimated to be $14.1 billion. The companys financial ratios can be considered as strength as they have always been above the standard of the industry. Managerial Forces: Control on Planned Business Stability The managerial forces of Wal-Mart have a great potential; achievement comes with imperfections that have been a basis of numerous confrontations and inconsistencies inside the business. The guarantee to supply the end user with the lowest probable cost is unquestionable. To attain the small charge, reduction of expenditure has become a passion in customs of the corporation. Reduction of costs has facilitated the satisfaction of customers since they save money; but it has also been the origin of shortcomings among workers. Payment for personnel is an immense subject matter at Wal-Mart. Long working hours and extensions along with poor wages has impinged on the workers and has ruined the personnel admiration for the corporation. Although long working hours has reduced managerial costs, it has also generated an unfair working atmosphere for employees. This type of administration has just materialized in recent years unlike in the past, especially when the company was under the management of Sam Walton, this form of operational state was not heard of. The unreasonable dealing of staff has stained the corporations picture. Based on fair operational business environment in the United States, Wal-Mart has been thought of as one of the most terrible companies. The inequitable working circumstances have generated disagreements inside the company, and the outcome has been the filing of numerous unjustified employment complaints. Conclusion Generally, Wal-Mart attends to clients and associates over 200 million times every week at over 8,838 selling entities in 55 diverse standards in 15 states. The company made sales of $405 billion during the 2010 financial year, and it internationally hires 2.1 million acquaintances (Wal-Mart, 2010). Walmart has developed to have a name for supplying products at low costs, handiness, and product range. The strengths of the company consist of a dominant trade name, interior proficiency concerning logistics, and a concentration on employees. On the other hand, the company weaknesses consist of not having the suppleness owing to its diversity in merchandise, and because of its magnitude may not manage the full market needs. Buy custom Internal Risk Assessment of Wal-Mart Stores essay

How to Align Content Marketing and Social Media in 9 Steps

How to Align Content Marketing and Social Media in 9 Steps Ask a business owner with a strong online presence and they’ll tell you- content marketing is one of the quickest, most successful ways to increase organic traffic. And, ask anyone and they’ll tell you- of course you need to manage your social media pages to grow your business and your customer base. But if you’re tackling both of these initiatives and not doing them in sync, you’re doing it wrong.    Creating and distributing content allows your business to reach new audiences, position your CEOs as a thought leader, and answer all of your customer’s most common questions while (hopefully) converting those clicks into sales. Likewise, businesses rely on social media to act as the face of the brand and often, as the prime distribution channel for content. Because your business’s social media pages are where your customers likely engage with you the most, they can be invaluable sources of feedback. Good content marketing and social media often have the same common goals- to increase site traffic, ramp up conversions, and build a general audience of devoted users. Because many of these objectives overlap, it is essential that your content marketing and social media presence are effectively aligned to get the most out of your audience and to reach as many people as possible. What is ? is the best marketing management platform to organize and execute all your marketing projects. That includes content + social media integrations that make scheduling and promoting content easy, all in one place. See it in action. How to Align Your Content Marketing and Social Media Presence in 9 Steps Table of Contents: Plan Ahead With Task Management Software Compare Metrics Monthly Target New Audiences Based on Engagement Use Graphics to Promote Content on Social Media Integrate Social Media Elements Into Blog Posts Use Blog Content for Facebook Live Material Launch a Cross-Promotional Content Series Across Channels Use Top Writers for Twitter Chats, Reddit AMAs, and Quora Originate New Content Ideas From Social Media Followers and Polls Bonus: Coordinate Content + Social Media With One Free Calendar Template If theres one thing content marketing and social media have in common, its this: success starts with planning. And they each work best when theyre planned and executed together in one place. The most effective way to plan and schedule all your content + social media posts is to use a calendar. Like the one included here below. With this free Excel template, you can: Plan your content calendar. Know what youll publish and work ahead. Schedule social media promotion. Line up posting days and times to make sure your content gets seen. Improve content + social visibility. When everything is planned in one calendar, your entire team can stay in the loop. Download it now, then follow each of the nine steps in this post to bring your content and social worlds together. 1. Plan Ahead With Task Management Software One of the most essential steps to aligning your content marketing and social media teams is planning within the same task management tool on shared boards or calendars. A task manager such as   can be a great tool to keep your team aligned and to track marketing plans holistically. By sharing calendars between all marketing team stakeholders, social media leaders can plan promotion for upcoming content initiatives, while content marketing teams can review social posts and make suggestions for captions and creatives. On , social media managers can be tagged prior to posts being published so that social posts can be planned in-line. Source: https://www.getapp.com/marketing-software/a// It’s essential that content marketing and social media teams coordinate within planning software to share new content and suggest improvements to content distribution efforts. With the right task management software, you can help ensure that your team is publishing content  at the right cadence and giving readers a reason to return day after day, week after week. 2. Compare Metrics and Engagement in Monthly Sessions In addition to planning in a common task management tool, content marketing and social media teams should meet in person frequently to compare overall performance metrics and traffic wins and losses. Use these meetings to align objectives for the following month and quarter, and ensure that your business’s content marketing efforts are working. Frequent meetings can help uncover trends in performance and engagement and better align future content plans. With multiple team members working on various initiatives, big picture metrics can easily be forgotten or pushed aside. Keep your team focused on the end goal- whether that’s signups or conversions or something else- and make sure that everyone is working towards the same KPIs. Unsure where to start? Focus on overall site traffic (sessions or pageviews) from social platforms and the number of  conversions through call-to-actions within blog content. To stay on track in these meetings, follow these steps. Both teams should come prepared with wins, losses and overall metrics. Focus both on the metrics that relate to respective platforms (sessions, engagement, shares) as well as the long term goal metrics (sign-ups, conversions, sales). In the meeting, brainstorm on how both teams can better align goals, whether that means the social media team re-shares successful content multiple times, or content creates more pieces covering topics that Facebook users are eating up. Keep the conversation going throughout the month by sending a weekly round-up email with one big win and one big loss every Friday. Determining how metrics can be shared effectively and solutions can be gleaned and applied from them will help both teams succeed in the long run. If your content marketing and social media teams are one in the same, it’s still important to set aside time to align thinking and compare successes between platforms. Recommended Reading: The Best Times to Post on Social Media Based on Research 3. Target New Audiences Based on Engagement So you’ve instituted a monthly metrics session- now what? Once you’ve begun to uncover trends and insights between platforms and on your blog, it’s time to put this data to work. Hone in on what’s working (and, of course, what’s not) and look for new audiences you can tap into. Once you’ve begun to uncover trends and insights between platforms and on your blog, it’s time...For example, social media can target specific hashtags, post content in different Facebook or LinkedIn groups, or work with other influencers or businesses to start new social swaps. Step 1: To interact with new groups on Facebook, search for a particular keyword, filter for groups, join the group, and interact with other users. Step 2: On LinkedIn, the sidebar on the left-hand side of your homepage will display different relevant hashtags and new groups to explore. Use both of these tools to promote relevant content to new audiences. Step 3: On Twitter, add relevant, popular hashtags, like G2 Crowd did below to your tweets to increase engagement in new audiences. In turn, the blog can cover different topics that work specifically on Facebook or produce content in different formats like video, listicle, or slideshow depending on how they perform on new platforms. When targeting new audiences, social media and content marketing teams should ensure that they don’t neglect their core audience in pursuit of expanding exposure to new niches or audience segments. 4. Creatively Market Content With Graphics or Clips on Social Media One common content marketing tactic is to create e-books to thoroughly explain a topic, secure leads, or introduce a new product. These are longer form guides that can be key to increasing conversion, but they also take a lot of effort and time to produce, so it’s important to ensure that social is aligned before the work begins. Creating a series of graphics made specific for social media platforms can be a great way to promote an e-book or tease it’s release before it’s widely circulated. For example, if an upcoming e-book lists a number of steps for improving your business’s online security, you could design a colorful graphic for each step with a brief description. The release of these graphics daily will pique the interest of social media followers to download the e-book and read the rest of the steps. If there are no steps to list, excellent pull quotes from the e-book can be equally effective. With a tool such as Canva, you can access and edit great free designs in a couple of minutes, as I did below. Step 1: To get started, sign up for Canva and create your first design. Step 2:   Then select a layout and edit the text, background, and colors. Step 3: Once your edits are complete, you’ll have a beautiful graphic to market your e-book. This tactic can be employed for YouTube or embedded videos as well by cutting a particularly good clip or a few clips from the video and releasing them on social media, and directing followers to a link if they’d like to watch the full video. On Facebook, this approach will yield many more views  than a typical post because Facebook videos results in 135% more organic reach than photos, on average. For best results, the content creator and social media team should coordinate on which steps, quotes, or clips would be best received by a social audience. With ’s scheduling feature, you can determine and schedule posts at the best time for your audience. 5. Integrate Popular Social Media Elements Into Blog Posts One of the best aspects of online blogs, as opposed to traditional media, is the room for innovation and creativity in communicating information non-traditionally. For example, as emojis have gained widespread use in wordlessly communicating emotions through text messaging and social media, they have also gained use in blogs to spice up content. To stay ahead of the curve and keep up with new trends, social media teams should communicate to content marketers what social audiences respond well to and what can be implemented on blogs to keep content relevant and interesting. To stay ahead of the curve and keep up with new trends, social media teams should communicate to...Because of the speed and frequency of communication on social media, new trends can be tried and proven much more effectively here than on your blog. A few different elements from social media that can be added to blogs could be videos, gifs, image slideshows, and memes, depending on how they’re received on social media. A great use of gifs can be found on ’s The Skimmer’s Guide to , which very creatively utilizes gifs throughout to keep the reader engaged. Of course, when applying any of these elements, content marketing teams should use discretion. For a more serious topic or professional guide, a meme or gif may not be appropriate. Likewise, a video or image slideshow could be distracting from core text or break the attention of the reader. By testing engagement on both social media and in blog content with new elements, teams can safely innovate and stay ahead of the communication curve. Recommended Reading: The Best Content Calendar Template to Get Organized All Year 6. Use Blog Content for Facebook Live Material You can’t get it right every single time. One of the unfortunate facts of creating content is that many of the posts you create may go unseen. But consider this- a post that didn’t quite work in one form could be repurposed and utilized in a whole different way. For example, a blog post that didn’t quite catch on in written form could be turned into a video script and presented to a Facebook or Instagram Live audience. Another example could be taking steps from a blog post, creating graphics from it, and uploading them as a slideshow on Instagram to be flipped through. Step 1: To get started, select the right blog post that would be interesting to your Facebook audience. Step 2: Choose parts of the post that could be succinctly summarized in a 15-minute Facebook Live. Look for clear steps that are actionable and easy to describe. Once found, write a script with an introduction, the subjects you’d like to cover, and a conclusion. Step 3: Promote the Facebook Live on different social media accounts. Step 4: To launch the Facebook Live, go to your Facebook page and click ‘Live’ in the action panel. Though you can’t make every single post work, it’s a good idea to narrow in on blog posts that you’d like to give a little more â€Å"juice† to. Task social media teams to come up with ideas that could work based on existing content and work from there. If you want to do a Facebook Live, consider whether you have relevant content you can reference in the chat or edit to make a scrip. Don’t look at low clicks as a failure- look at it as an opportunity to innovate and improve. Recommended Reading: 49 Facebook Marketing Tips to Get Better Results Right Now 7. Launch a Cross-Promotional Content Series Across Channels One great way to increase engagement across all channels and create a cohesive content marketing experience is to launch a series that can work across many platforms. For example, a new content vertical could launch in conjunction with a YouTube series that’s also cut down shorter snippets for Facebook. Say your goal is to gain YouTube subscribers for a new account- you could plan a content series that embeds a new YouTube video in every post, enticing readers to click through and (hopefully) subscribe. Neil Patel, an expert on digital marketing,   promotes across multiple channels including YouTube, e-books, blog posts, and social media, which has made his name omnipresent in the marketing space. If you’re building a presence on YouTube and have a popular blog, try the following tactic that Patel utilized. Step 1: After creating a couple videos for YouTube, write a comprehensive blog post on a complementary topic. For example, Neil wrote a blog post explaining that everything he has taught about SEO was wrong: Step 2: Then,   embed the YouTube video, which is a natural next step in the blog post’s call-to-action into the near end of the blog post. This will encourage readers to watch the video, increasing your viewership, and perhaps then watch the next video in sequence or even, subscribe to your channel! To promote an e-book or report, a social media team could release a series of videos on Facebook or Twitter explaining aspects of the e-book or report’s findings with attached links to the piece of content itself. In addition, selections from the content could be published on LinkedIn either under the brand or executives’ profiles with links to the content included. Recommended Reading: How to Promote Your Blog With 107 Content Promotion Tactics 8. Use Top Writers for Twitter Chats, Reddit AMAs, and Quora Twitter chats (public conversations within a unique hashtag) are excellent ways to interact with other companies in your space, gain followers, and assert your brand as a thought leader on a specific subject. Likewise, a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), where executives answer common questions about a topic or the company itself, is an excellent tactic to increase engagement and publicity in a niche community. For upcoming chats and AMAs, social media teams should coordinate with writers or company executives to ensure they’re on hand when questions begin to roll in and to provide comprehensive responses that wow participants. Tap into your blog to come up with new topics to cover and angles to take. Quora, a platform where users ask and answer questions, is another place where social media and content marketers should coordinate engagement. For the sake of optics on Quora, it can be better if individuals at a company create an account and answer questions, rather than brands. The writers who handle the blog can be excellent resources to answer questions and provide invaluable insight. Step 1: After signing up for a Quora account, a writer simply must answer a few questions in their niche before Quora and other users begin asking them for other answers. Once in your account, click Answer to find the right question. Step 2: Write your answer and click submit. Try different answer formats like steps and lists, adding useful images, and making your responses long and comprehensive to receive recognition and upvotes. 9. Originate New Content Ideas From Social Media Followers and Polls Social media followers who regularly interact with content are often a brand’s most engaged audience with untapped feedback to provide. To come up with creative new ideas for content creation, poll your social audiences with direct questions about topics they’d like covered or content mediums they like most. Step 1: To poll followers on Twitter, add your question then click Add poll. Step 2: Add poll answer options and click Tweet. Integrating more polls and surveys is a great way to plan future content and gather meaningful feedback from those who are more dedicated to your brand.