BREAKING

Monday, February 10, 2020

Instituto Cervantes Presents Discussion “Intramuros, the Underrated Jewel of Manila”



Wazzup Pilipinas!

Cognizant of the importance of Intramuros as a key symbol of Philippine heritage, the Instituto Cervantes, with the collaboration of the Embassy of Spain and the Intramuros Administration, presents “Intramuros, the Underrated Jewel”, a round-table discussion in which various Spanish and Filipino experts on fortifications will tackle the challenges of conservation of the walled city. The forum will be held on February 18, Tuesday, at 2 PM at the Intramuros branch of Instituto Cervantes, located at Plaza San Luis Complex, Real St., Intramuros.

The walled City of Manila is a cultural icon with historical significance for the Filipinos. Destroyed during the Second World War, the city has risen from its ruins, with the Philippine government entrusting the preservation of the historical site to the Intramuros Administration, whose mandate is to ensure that the general appearance of Intramuros shall conform to Philippine-Spanish architecture of the 16th to the 19th century. 





Various Spanish experts on fortifications of this period –Alfredo J. Morales, Ignacio J. López Hernández, Manuel Gámez Casado, and Pedro Luengo– and Intramuros Administrator Atty. Guiller B. Asido, will discuss the exceptional historical worth, as well as explore the challenges of proper conservation and highlight the significance of Intramuros, whose design mostly corresponds to the eighteenth-century, and is a remarkable case in the international historical heritage scene.

Morales is a historian from the Universidad de Sevilla, where he obtained his Doctorate in Art History and is currently a professor of Art History at the Faculty of Geography and History in the same university. He collaborates with UNESCO as an expert in historical heritage in different projects developed in Latin America.

López Hernández is a professor at the Universidad de Almería and Doctor in History - specializing in Art History - from the Universidad de Sevilla. He also has a degree in Art History and a Master's Degree in Andalusian and Latin American Artistic Heritage. He has published different articles, chapters and a monograph on the history of engineering and engineers in Cuba and the Caribbean America.

Gámez Casado graduated in Art History from the Universidad de Sevilla and earned his Master in Andalusian Artistic Heritage and its Ibero-American projection from the same university. His post-doctoral thesis on military engineering in the Viceroyalty of New Granada during the eighteenth century was given a secondary award in research and investigation category. His publications analyze the work of Spanish military engineers in the Modern Age, in America and in other territories belonging to the Spanish Crown.

Luengo is a member of the Department of Art History of the Universidad de Sevilla and is a Doctor of Art History from the same institution with his thesis "Intramuros: Arquitectura en Manila, 1739-1788". He has conducted research stays in different international centers at San Agustin Museum (Manila) in 2009, at the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Mexico) in 2010, at the European University Institute (Florence) in 2011, among others.

Lastly, Atty. Asido is the current Administrator of Intramuros Administration. He is a graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santos Tomas, with the following degrees – Master of Laws (Cum Laude), Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts, major in Literature. He has also served in various capacities in the Philippines’ Tourism Infrastructure, as well as in the Office of the Presidential Adviser for Political Affairs; the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines and the Department of Health.

The round-table discussion will be moderated by Dr. Javier Galván, Director of Instituto Cervantes de Manila. Dr. Galván obtained his Doctorate in Architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid, on the topic: “Architecture in the Philippines from Spanish period.”

The round-table at Instituto Cervantes is open to the public. Admission is free. For further information, please check out Instituto Cervantes’ Facebook page: www.facebook.com/InstitutoCervantesManila, or call Instituto Cervantes at (632) 8526 1482.

“PUENTES: Bridging Lands through Bodies of Water” Exhibit to Open at Museo El Deposito on 15 February 2020




Wazzup Pilipinas!

The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP), together with the College of Saint Benilde, Center for Service Learning and A. B. Photography, will open the “PUENTES: Bridging Lands through Bodies of Water” at the Museo El Deposito in the City of San Juan on15 February 2020, Saturday, 2:00 p.m.



Since ancient times, bridges have been constructed not only to ease travel and transport of goods, but also to connect communities separated by rivers and gorges. The first stone bridges in the country were built during the Spanish period, becoming lasting colonial legacies that changed the urban and rural terrain of the Philippines.




This exhibit features the historical significance of these stone bridges, particularly in Metropolitan Manila. The history of how each bridge was constructed gives us a glimpse of the beginnings of a systematized way of public works in the Spanish Philippines, and brings to the fore the engineering and labor forces that contributed to the nascent development of the country’s infrastructure.



The NHCP is the national government agency mandated to promote and preserve Philippine history and heritage through its administration of national shrines, museums, research and publication, conservation, and marking of historic sites and structures.



For more information, contact the Museo El Deposito via telephone number (02) 8753-5439 or email museoeldeposito@gmail.com.

Lead Generation Strategy



Wazzup Pilipinas!

A lead is a person or a business interested in the service or product your business is offering to the market. This is the simplest explanation and depending on the industry we would have to add more criteria into this original definition. As a company, you will also have to define the characteristics of a lead, expanding it to cover the specifics of a so-called qualified lead.

According to HubSpot’s research, generating traffic and leads is the number one marketing challenge for companies.


Image source: HubSpot Research

In this article, we will focus on the best strategies to generate leads.

1. Targeting

The first step is to find out your target audience, to find an answer on who is interested in your product or service.

Every company would love to sell to everybody, but that’s almost never the case. You always have to find a niche, big or small, that has a problem which your company could solve. Answer the following questions:


  • Who is your audience?
  • Which problem are they trying to solve?
  • What is the average age of your audience?
  • Where are they from?
  • What is their profession/job position?
  • What are their hobbies and interests? etc.


The more you narrow down your audience, the easier it will be to create effective campaigns to reach out to them.

According to the Harvard Business Review, targeted ads are significantly more effective than non-targeted ads across all audiences.

2. Website conversions

Your website has to be compact and user-friendly on every device. It should be easy for a new visitor to navigate to the most important part of your page – product or service inquiry!

If you visit the websites of the biggest accommodation brokers like Booking or Airbnb, you will notice that the first thing they are offering is to search for your next accommodation. If a new visitor wants to find Support or About us page, they can do that easily, the site is easy to navigate.

The most important asset for those sites is generating good leads. After a lead generation, they give their maximum effort to turn these leads into customers.

Image source: HubSpot

3. Landing pages

You’re probably going to promote your business on Facebook and many other channels.

From those channels, your campaigns have to lead users somewhere, where they could convert from leads to customers.

That site will be your landing page and they have to be designed and written to focus on important things only. You have to find a balance between what’s important for your company and what’s important for your customer. Your customer wants a simple design, a clear and precise explanation about the service or product and an easy way to pay. According to research, you only have about 8 seconds of landing page viewing before the customer decides whether they’re in or out.

Your company wants to find out some personal details about the customer and encourage them to buy the product or service. If there`s no chance you can do it by yourself, opt for specially designed tools like Top Essay Writing that can help you create relevant up-to-date content.

You have to find a balance between these two and ask the lowest number of questions possible on the landing page and provide easy checkout. To connect this with our first lead generation strategy, targeting, Design Advisor states that targeting your landing pages correctly can increase conversion rates by up to 300%.

4. Ranking on Google

If your business is not ranked on the first page of Google search results for relevant keywords, then you’re doing something wrong.

If it’s not ranked in the top 3 results, you’re still not giving it your all.

I’ve seen a lot of search results where the company doesn’t show up in the first 5 search results, even when you type in the company name. You have to prevent that from happening and you have to fight with competitors.

Depending on the type of your business and how your business conducts sales, you could use the #1 search result to send your leads to a dedicated landing page or to promote your phone number. When they call your company, your sales agent can finalize the process.

5. Buying Leads

Huge search aggregators have appeared in most of today’s industries.

These supply-demand connectors receive most of the traffic and it’s really hard to compete with them in inbound marketing.

There is a saying “If you can’t beat them, join them”, but in this instance, it’s “If you can’t beat them, buy from them”. Buying leads is a recommended strategy if you have a sales team that can convert those leads by performing outbound calls or e-mails later on.

This is especially recommended for telemarketing. Most of these aggregators have business models based on selling leads to a 3rd party because it’s impossible for them to gain revenue from their visitors.

The most important thing when buying leads is to check the quality of these leads and to check how many competitors are buying those same leads. The best way to measure quality is to test those leads first and measure their conversion rate.

6. Email

If you would perform a research on online marketing courses, you would find that most of them emphasize e-mails and how to collect those from your visitors. The traditional way is to use discounts, gifts and promotions as a way to convince visitors to sign-up to your newsletter.





Image source: Ascend2

The updated approach is to create some form of free content (usually a small book or collection of articles) as your bargain offer for customer email; also known as a content upgrade. In exchange for this exclusive content, users will sign-up to your newsletter list.

7. Content management

This strategy is focused on long-term planning.

You have to establish yourself in your industry as a thought leader by providing a lot of content via blog or Facebook or YouTube in order to gain trust from the audience.

Later on, this will serve as a great tool for inbound marketing because you will have solved one colossal obstacle – gaining the trust of your potential customer. Once they trust you, they will purchase online or reach out to you via e-mail or by calling you to buy your product or service.

According to Marketo, 93% of B2B companies claim that content marketing generates a larger number of leads than traditional marketing efforts.

8. High-quality CRM and Automation

This last step should unite all your efforts and tools into one. You must have a centralized digital system to track and analyze your leads from the moment they entered your system to the final conversion. You have to track your returning customers as well.

Image source: Ascend2

Conclusion

Every sales strategy must have a sales cycle explained in detail. Try to answer some of these questions to clearly outline your lead conversion strategy.


  • What are our actions when we find a lead?
  • Which tools are we going to use to reach out to our leads?
  • How often do we follow up with our leads?


The sales cycle must be thoroughly examined and created in such a way that we know exactly what to do in each step and which action to perform, from the moment our lead enters the system till the moment of purchase and everything that happens afterward.

Author’s bio. Daniela McVicker is a blogger and a freelance writer who works closely with B2B and B2C businesses providing blog writing, copywriting, and ghostwriting services. Currently, she blogs for many authoritative sources. When Daniela isn’t writing, she loves to travel, read romance and science fiction, and try new wines.
Ang Pambansang Blog ng Pilipinas Wazzup Pilipinas and the Umalohokans. Ang Pambansang Blog ng Pilipinas celebrating 10th year of online presence
 
Copyright © 2013 Wazzup Pilipinas News and Events
Design by FBTemplates | BTT