Category: Digital Branding

Digital Branding

8 Tips to Protect Your Startup from Cyberattacks

Tech is evolving fast and you more or less have no choice but to digitize your business to compete. However, this is not without its demerits as organized hackers and criminals have come out full throttle to take the slightest benefit from any security loopholes in business systems. That is why, as a startup owner, you need to take serious considerations of the security measures to put in place to evade cybersecurity attacks. Now, let’s explore the crucial steps that you can consider implementing to protect your business from cybercrime.

Ways to Protect your Business from Cyber Attacks

Use secure file sharing

While sharing files over the internet, you are at risk of attackers or even malware that may distort your documents. To ensure that your data is safe from any form of attack, go for secure file sharing with secure data room as you collaborate on files in your work environment. Go for a service that offers end-to-end encryption that will protect you from external hackers while letting you take control of your data

As a rule of thumb, you can always double-check permission settings so that you can determine who to allow to view your documents. Moreover, you can run audits on your files to see who is accessing them. If you no longer need the file, you can opt to remove it from the cloud altogether.

Update your software regularly

Outdated software is prone to cyber-attacks, malware, and viruses. To keep the files of your startup safe, you need to ensure that the software you are using to carry out your business transactions is up to date and patched for vulnerabilities frequently. That will deny any unauthorized third parties access to your system via the bugs in outdated software.

Enforce the use of strong passwords

Ensure that all your team members with corporate emails and profiles on your website create strong passwords for accessing the system. Remember, hackers take advantage of weak passwords to gain entry into a system, thereby corrupting your data and stealing your information. You should encourage your workers to create a strong password of about ten characters long, with a mix of letters and numbers. Additionally, forbid your team members from sharing their passwords with unauthorized parties. They should also keep changing their passwords frequently.

Educate your team members about email and email use

Make sure to teach your team members about malware and phishing attacks and urge them not to open attachments from unknown sources. Ask them to report any suspicious emails that they may receive. This will ensure that they don’t get to fall into the traps of hackers.

Backup your files

The need to have a backup for all your business files cannot be overstated. You should make sure to back up your files as often as you can. Remember that the backup drives should only connect to the machine during the backup, and after that, you should disconnect to minimize the risk that they may be affected. Ideally, go for automated backups to make things a little easier for you.

Use a reliable antivirus software suite

Choose a good antivirus software, whether free or paid, that provides maximum protection against viruses, malware, and internet threats. Ensure to take a lot of caution so that each time a USB stick is inserted into your business PC, you should make sure to scan it before using it. Always turn on the safe browsing feature of the antivirus to avoid accidentally visiting any malicious websites.

Take caution while visiting websites

You should also switch to HTTPS from HTTP as far as your site is concerned. The HTTPS protocol for browsing uses encryption techniques and is more secure than HTTP. Make sure that essential places like the ones for email and financial payments contain the secure HTTPS protocol.

Find the best security solutions for your business

Choosing the right security solution is essential as it gives you a chance to get the desired level of protection necessary for your business. Top cybersecurity solutions are designed in a way that gives protection to your business against things like Man in The Middle (MITM) attacks, and other vulnerabilities. So, find a security solution that’s ready and simple to use. You can hire experts to find vulnerabilities in your business and implement the best solutions.

Conclusion

While technology has come in handy to make running business easy, the challenge of cybersecurity threat cannot be underestimated. You should ensure that you take the necessary measures to protect your business from any threats. Don’t wait for a breach that can destroy your business!

Digital BrandingLegal BrandingPersonal Branding

How Can SEO Online Marketing Bring About a Transformation in Your Business?

With the number of marketing strategies that are available for your business, it is probably one of the most difficult jobs to decipher the ones that are going to be the best fit for the organization. Before you decide to spend a bulk amount on any particular strategy, it is a must that you know about all the strategies that are available for your business, especially important ones, which include search engine optimization. Nobody in the business world can deny that SEO is necessary. However, most of them have a similar question, what SEO online marketing is and what is the working pattern? According to https://www.entrepreneur.com, not having a proper strategy for onsite content is not a good idea when it comes to SEO online marketing.

SEO online marketing

SEO is a popular marketing strategy and it is extremely effective as well. The results of search engine optimization can indeed take a little time to show up but it is going to be worth your wait. Search engine optimization helps in improving the online presence of your business, which helps in making sure that you are having a good ranking in the search engines. 

When your website has a high rank in search engines, it is undoubtedly going to yield a lot more clicks from all the users. Based on the clicks that you are receiving, people are going to look at the website, and when they look at the website, they will come across services and products that are going to interest them. 

Apart from that, when your site has a high rank, you are going to come across important revenue and conversions. Online SEO marketing is known to combine both off the page as well as on-page strategies, which work together to make sure that the job is done.

On-page SEO is the change that can be made physically to the website to make sure that the website has a high rank. This includes:

  • Targeting keywords and implementing them
  • Creation of content
  • Optimizing page speed

Off-page SEO refers to the different strategies, which do not take place on the website for increasing ranking. The examples include:

  • Link building
  • Email marketing
  • Marketing on social media

When you decide to hire professionals of online impact marketing, they are going to use both so that you get the ideal results.

Given below is a list of the reasons why online marketing can help in changing the business for good.

Thousands of people are searching in Google constantly

When you are implementing online SEO within the marketing strategy, you are marketing the business to numerous people, and the figure is almost 67000 people per second. When you are using SEO for marketing services and products, you are making the offerings of your company available to a huge user base, which will provide the chance of making sure that customers are interested in your business. This is going to result in better and higher conversions. Without SEO, there is hardly any chance that the target audience is going to stumble upon your website and purchase products.

People ignore paid advertisements

Few paid advertisements indeed provide an amazing way of advertising the business but according to statistics, 80% of the users do not pay attention to paid advertisements that appear within the search results. This means that you have a much better chance of target consumers clicking on the website if it is getting displayed organically within the search results. Organic ranking means that the website has to be there as a result right below the paid advertisements. You will not have to invest money if you are interested in ranking organically, however, one important requirement that you cannot avoid is a great SEO campaign. 

Companies are constantly implementing SEO

If you are interested in staying many steps ahead of the competitors, search engine optimization is undoubtedly a must. 61% of organizations have stated that the biggest priority that they have is growing the campaigns. This is undoubtedly a high percentage and if you are not opting for SEO campaigns, your business is going to fall behind. It is going to be overshadowed by those companies, which focus on SEO strongly. This is why you need to make sure that you have a great campaign prepared. 

SEO helps in boosting conversions

When compared with traditional marketing, the rate of conversion of search engine optimization is extremely high. With the help of any traditional marketing strategy, you are going to see a 1.7% conversion rate. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, you are going to observe the conversion rate of 14.6%. This is a huge difference and illustrates the reason why SEO is a great marketing strategy. 

Local SEO is effective

If you are running your business locally, SEO has to be added to the marketing strategy without any second thoughts. After the users search for a local business, 88% are going to visit the business and make a decision within the next 24 hours. Therefore, to make this happen, you need to ensure that you are implementing a great SEO strategy. 

Can SEO online marketing be done by the business?

You need to understand that there are several dynamic parts associated when we are discussing SEO. Most of the business owners have one question, which is whether SEO can be handled within the organization itself. It is important to know that a single person can handle the campaign but to make sure that the results are coming; enormous hard work has to be put in. SEO is not at all a strategy that you set and forget about, you have to take constant care and monitor the results. Since the business has different aspects to be taken care of, it is always suggested that a professional does the job. However, if you want to do it on your own, make sure that you are focusing on the changing tactics and strategies of SEO constantly. 

Conclusion

Without ideal SEO strategies, your business will hardly get the limelight that you are interested in getting for it. Make sure that you understand all that has been mentioned above so that you can plan your strategies and implement them accordingly.

Digital Branding

Top 5 Website’s Features to Become Mandatory in Following Years

Internet marketing is the most important way of reaching new customers today. Web design is the presentation of your expertise, the way you approach new users or clients, so it is indeed extremely important that quality your website is optimized for your target group. Before we go deeper into the most influential aspect of Internet marketing – features for your website, let’s discuss how a good website is different from a great website.

Is Your Website Good or Great?

Today, it is way easier than 5 years ago to design and develop a decent website within a few days. Progress of different tools made it now, more than ever, possible to launch a fine looking website with less coding than before. Website builders, templates, themes, and layouts are there as well to help you upgrade a simple site to the professional one. Plus, with improving your website you are enhancing your business opportunities!

Considering all listed above, and the fact that internet users are accustomed to seeing websites all the time, on all their devices, it is necessary to have a superior quality website in terms to keep your customers interested! Everyone browsing the internet today can draw a distinction between cheap (PBN, community) site or custom and highly efficient one. Aesthetics have been improving over the last few years, so now we all want impressive features and super cool design.

Besides visuals, a “great” website provides smooth handing – what is also important nowadays to point out: “user friendly experience”. There is no space for a great site to “fail to perform” – it has to keep going on any task with no glitch.

Here are the 5 features we found extremely important to keep implemented and up-to-date to your site in order to rock it up on the www:

1. Invest in your site – chose features smart!

One of the main issues a lot of small or new businesses face at the first stage of developing their online appearance is – lowering the cost for the website in terms of having more budget for the following stages. If you really want to offer tangible value to your visitors and potential shoppers, then don’t hesitate to invest in certain features for your website. Your website should offer tangible value for visitors – so use interactive features to utilize the services available on the site. Customers love to create a sense of interaction, so think about the optimization of emails and offering them the news they are really in need of! Browse for the best WordPress web-design company which can help you with a custom website with totally unique features!

2. Keep in touch – chose the right and unique contact forms

Let’s not keep in look at how your content should be relevant and awesome in terms of visitors to assign to your contact forms. Also, let’s imagine that you did your homework and almost everyone wants an update from your awesome website!

Contact forms are there to help you get through your audience, and keep them informed. You should use them to introduce on-trend new features, frequently asked questions, personal touch or some “unique” offer for loyal customers!

3. Everybody loves Polls!

Here human nature already played a big role! All of us love to participate in discussions. More than ever, on the internet, those discussions can be “anonymous” – well not quite anonymous but you can “hide” under some pseudonym if needed.

Your site is there for people, so what people need- you provide! Make amazing polls from time to time or some other interactive features where people can vote or choose and that way feel needed from your site. Make people more involved in your business and they will come back to you!

4. What is going on behind the scenes?

No need for explaining this in detail – everyone loves to gossip and to see what it is “really” like to do something. So for having people more interested in what you do, a smart move is to do behind the scenes videos or blog posts or images, where you can share some of your funnies and fails. We are all human beings, we all fail – so why not share your weak spot with others?

It can only make you stronger 🙂 Also – don’t forget to add value to those videos, for instance why you chose to do that type of business and what exactly inspired you.

5. Reveal-Based Features

Sometimes we are attracted to things we can’t have. These characteristics are of great value when we talk about customer engagement and online marketing. One way to use this for your business is to introduce a sense of excitement among the visitors. For this purpose, you could try introducing reveal-based features. For instance, you can add games that require all the users to do a certain action prior to accessing the promotion.

Maybe those certain spots made you think more about why is it mandatory to have a super great and highly effective website, in the ocean of average or decent sites. Measure pros and cons and get into the game of “how to engage more”! Many Software development company in Houston follow the above mentioned principlesin roder to attract the visitors.

Digital Branding

How Business Branding Affects Talent Recruitment

There is no doubt that as an employer, you want to hire the greatest talent from the pool of job seekers. This may seem an easy task on paper, but finding the right talent is easier said than done. Now, did you know that branding affects talent recruitment? Yes, you need to present to prospective job seekers the best image of your organization through active branding. Let’s expound more on how fine-tuning branding can help improve your talent recruitment.

How Branding Affects Recruitment

Talent attraction

For starters, branding is a valuable strategy in conveying that ubiquitous experience to clients, employees, and even job seekers! Branding announces to everyone your identity as a business, your mission, and your vision. Your brand also expresses the qualities you uphold, your workplace culture and what makes it great to work in your organization.

In other words, branding gives prospective employees a reason to yearn and desire to join your organization. Branding inspires people to want to work for your organization.  As such, when you put up an opening, you will have top talents eager to join your team.

Quick employee referrals

Branding also involves developing and providing the best work experience for your employees. This is to say that branding starts internally from within the organization. This is achieved through rewarding the talents that are already working in your organization by compensating them satisfactorily, providing a humane working environment, and also creating deep and necessary interpersonal skills and networking. This affects the recruitment process in a straightforward albeit interesting way: when a position opens up, the employees are confident in recommending and making referrals to the best talent for the post, as they understand the culture of the organization and also the capabilities of the prospective employees so that they know he or she is a great fit for the position. This makes the process of recruiting new hires less tedious and saves on time and money that could otherwise have been spent on advertising and conducting the interviews.

Easy to reach potential candidates

Now, having a great presence on social media in this time and age is a great way of branding an organization. This is also a nice way to attract top talent. Why? Well, most job seekers have social media accounts these days. They can interact with your brand directly through them and that desire to join your team can sprout from what they see in your profiles.

You will even attract a lot of applications from which you are likely to get great talent. Of course, this can only happen if you can sieve through a large number of applications that might come through, to find the right fit. As a recruiting HR team, find out what an HRIS is and how it can assist in handling the recruitment and onboarding process. Basically, this is one useful system that fine-tunes human resource functions in a centralized paradigm. With An HRIS tool like this one, human resources management can be much more efficient and streamlined.

Creating industry networks for more accurate hiring

Part of branding also involves attending events related to your niche. This is important in giving your company visibility. You get to interact with other industry players, create personal contacts and connections. It is obvious that with subsequent follow-ups, you get to create great relationships and relevant information sources that have the power to build both the corporate and employer brands. Well, inter-organizational networks can also prove very resourceful when looking for top employees in areas that you will find it hard to recruit.

Candidate Job readiness

On the part of the prospective employee, branding affects them in the sense that they get to know what exactly is needed for one to work for the organization they desire. This means that when an opening comes up, they are already in line with the right documents, skills, and experience to translate to their workplace. It also means that the employees know what to expect in terms of perks, compensation, and the kind of culture to find ahead.

As such, they are not only driven by the colossus salary or monetary value, but by their passion to be part of the organization. Research has shown that people are driven by passion work more efficiently and post greater results than those working for money. It will, therefore, be a win for your organization as you are bound to recruit employees eager to be part of your team.

Final word

In a nutshell, branding can help in refining the hiring process. It does so by attracting the best talent to work for the company. Having a good image out there can help you attract passionate employees, thus translating to productivity.

Digital Branding

Social Media – Use And Abuse with Anonymous Blog “The Doe”

When people hear the term “fake news“, their usual first thought is about those social-media posts that contain inconceivable and bizarre stories. While the posts that are shared on different social media channels happens to be an aspect that is most visible, there is a lot more to “fake news” than an exaggerated article title on a social media feed. The Doe is an anonymous newspaper that provides a safe space for honest, straightforward thought-provoking news and is central in the fight against fake news. They discuss the use and abuse of social media in the world of news at the moment.

Cyber Propaganda And Fake News

Fake news often appears to be new. However, it usually just the platform that has been used that is new. Propaganda has been in use and around for hundreds of years, and the Internet has become the most current form of communication that is abused to tell lies and spread misinformation.

A Fire Triangle is a representation of 3 elements that are needed for a fire to burn. This includes fuel, heat, and oxygen. In a similar way, “fake news” needs 3 items in order to succeed. These items combined represent the Fake News Triangle. When one of these factors is missing, the misinformation and lies are not able to reach targeted audiences and spread.

The Fake News Triangle

The initial requirement includes services and tools to spread and manipulate a message across specific social media platforms or networks and many of these are sold across several online communities all over the world. There is a wide range of services and tools available, with some that are somewhat simple (paid followers/likes, etc.), while others are a bit more unusual, with services that promise to overstuff online polls. There are even services that force the owners of websites to remove stories. Regardless of what tactic is used, the services and tools for social media promotions are available from outside and the inside of the underground scenes.

In order for these types of tools to become useful, social channels need to be present as the platforms to spread propaganda. With more and more people spending a lot more of their time on such sites to gather information and to keep up-to-date with the current news, their importance when it comes to spreading fake stories and news should not be underestimated. However, there are differences between just putting up a propaganda post and turning the post into something targeted audiences consume. We give information on the types of techniques that spammers use to attract users into watching or reading their stories.

Analyzing social media provides us with more of an understanding of relationships that occur between bots and recipients of a social media promotion when it comes to platforms such as Twitter. This offers us a good idea of the organization and scope of these campaigns that are attempting to manipulate the opinions of the public.

Finally, propaganda campaigns are also always accompanied by the question: why? We talk about the motivations and goals behind these fake stories and news. In some cases, it is simply the desire to make profits through advertising. While in other situations, the goals may vary from political to criminal. Regardless of what the motive might be, how successful the propaganda campaign will be is based on the way that it has an impact on the “real world”.

Users, companies, and governments, have started to become more aware of the seriousness of manipulating public opinion, which has manifested in the form “fake news”.

Governments have started to realize that propaganda and “fake news” is something that needs to be dealt with. Many different government agencies have now started to set up services that are focused on exposing these stories, that they believe are false. Some government entities have even started to consider imposing regulations along with punishing and fining websites that have published this misinformation.

There is plenty of room for opinion-based reporting without it becoming fake news. Thedoe is a great source for this.

Some of the targets linked to the latest regulations include social-networking services. This will make misinformation and fake news extremely bad for businesses, and this is why they have taken the necessary steps to avoid it. These steps include suspending suspicious accounts/bots, adding in features that allow their users to file a report on fake news, and hiring additional personnel to assist with handling such reports.

However, at the end of the day, users need to become more informed and educated. In our paper, we go over the main signals to look out for when it comes to fake news, which will help readers to determine whether the posts they are reading are real or fake. We also go over the psychology linked to fake news in the way of explaining what makes these types of campaigns work, along with how they convince readers. When readers are aware of these techniques we hope that it will empower them to resist these misleading stories and information.

Boosting your company's digital image
Digital Branding

How to Boost Your Company’s Digital Image

In today’s world, so much of life operates on the internet. Although this has an impact on everyday society and social interactions, it also has significant repercussions on how businesses operate. Of course, the quality of a company’s products and customer service are still incredibly important in retaining customers and earning referrals. But, increasingly, a company is not viable in the long-term unless it has an excellent digital image.

That is, every business must have an effective and appealing internet presence if it is going to be successful. Therefore, factors such as social media activity and website layout should be important to you as you grow or build your business. Here are a few ways you can begin to create a reliable and viable internet presence for your company.

Make your website design clear

21185368 – website template

Clean Up Your Website and Other Professional Profiles

If your company has been around for a while, chances are your website has, too. Even if it’s only been a few years since you updated and upgraded your website, it’s probably time to do it again. Effective websites should be aesthetically appealing, simple, and easy to navigate. Especially if your website was created a while ago, it may be overly busy or bright, since that used to be the preferred style online. Today, however, that style doesn’t fly anymore. Your website should have clean, simple colors and easy-to-read fonts.

Every page on your site should be accessible via a “map” that runs either on the side or on the top of the website. This will make sure that your visitors can get anywhere on the website that they’d like to, with one simple click. While you’re redoing the style of your website, also update any old content, and double check for typos or grammatical errors. Small typos on the front page of your website will turn away customers before they even have a chance to figure out what your company is all about.

Maximize website SEO

Make Use of SEO for your Website

Even the most beautiful and functional website is useless unless people are actually visiting. After you’ve upgraded and modernized your website, it’s time to boost the number of visitors. To increase traffic to your website, make use of SEO — search engine optimization. SEO runs on a number of factors, one of the most important of which is keyword use. Do some research and find out the most relevant keywords used when people search for companies such as yours. Then, incorporate those keywords throughout your website content, so that your website will begin to appear higher in search engines’ results.

Be warned not to overuse keywords, however. This can get your website marked as “spam,” and can also turn visitors away if the content does not read naturally and fluidly. For instance, a digital marketing firm may make good use of the keyword “Above The Fold Media – SEO firm” by utilizing it in website headers or photo captions. However, attempting to weave a phrase such as that into the text of blog posts may prove tricky and ultimately be detrimental to the company’s SEO rankings.

Check out this video by SEO link builder Julian Goldie and learn more about keyword research:

 

 

Stay Up-to-Date with Social Media

While you’re paying attention to your website, don’t forget to make use of social media as well. Make sure that your company has an official and accurate Facebook page, and check it regularly so that you can respond quickly to any comments or messages. If relevant to your company, also consider starting a Twitter or Instagram account, so that you can interact with your customer base and earn followers through your posts.

Keep in mind that internet trends can change quickly, so it’s important to be in tune with your customer base. Pay attention to any feedback you get from customers, and you’ll be well on your way to creating an appealing internet presence for your company.

Social media promotion
Digital Branding

8 Powerful Ways to Promote Your Product in Social Media

Social media has become an innate part of everyday life for a lot of people all over the world. Not only is it a universal tool but it is also quite powerful. You can use social media for personal purposes but a lot of businesses have also found social media to be useful when it comes to promoting their products to a wide variety of audiences.

If you don’t have a social media presence as a business, you might find that you lose out on opportunities with potential clients. On that note, you should try and learn how to utilize social media to help power up your business. Here are several ways you can do that.

Social media marketing

Ideas To Promote Your Business On Social Media

Partner with Bloggers and Influencers

The great thing about social media is that it gives normal, average people the chance to become noticed and generate a solid following. They can have a variety of interests so if you have a particular niche as a business, you’re bound to find an influencer or blogger that has the following filled with your target customers.

Some businesses can get away with partnering with bloggers and influencers regardless of who their followers mainly are. However, to ensure that you aren’t wasting your money partnering with certain bloggers and influencers you want to do your research and figure out who their main audience is.

Knowing what you want from your influencers and bloggers will ensure that you have a smoother transaction with them. After all, not all of them know how to deal with business transactions so you should take charge.

Create Explainer Videos

There are plenty of ways you can advertise your products online. From online image ads to sponsored content, you will have plenty of avenues to promote your product on social media. For particular products, one content that you should invest in is explainer videos.

Plenty of experienced branding agency Auckland based know that you should create explainer videos for your products. The types of products that will most need explainer videos are software if you’re selling them. Having an explainer video will make it simpler for your customers to understand how to use your product.

Even if you have a product that might seem like a no-brainer, like clothes, it might be great to have an “explainer” video. It doesn’t really explain how to use the product. It just shows how it looks on a video.

Social media sharing

Share on Social Media

The most important task that you should do for your business’s social media is to share the content in some form on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be every day. As long as you are consistent and have a schedule for when you post, then you should be able to build a considerable size for your community on social media.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should be constantly sharing posts that are promoting your products. It can feel like you’re a always showing ad so people might be irritated. You should share not only content that you produce but also content that other fans of your products have produced. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your community.

Run Social Media Contests

One way to attract attention to your social media accounts is by running a social media contest to give out awards on those who engage with the contest. Before you run any social media contests, you first have to make sure that you aren’t breaking any rules for specific social media platforms that you are running it in.

Use Email Marketing

Many people might think that email is no longer a popular avenue to communicate with your target audience. However, every expert marketer knows that email marketing is still a strong avenue that can attract a lot of attention to your business.

Use email newsletters as a way to share relevant information with your subscribers as well as an avenue to share promotions and sales to them.

Create In-Store Promotions

If you have physical locations then you might as well create promotions online that will persuade anyone who sees it go to your store location. One way to do that is by creating a sale that is only applied inside your physical location. You can also market a specific product that is only available at particular branches.

Offer an Upgrade or Trade-In

If the product that you are offering isn’t a physical product and is instead a service, then you might want to create offers for upgrades or trade-ins. These upgrades are best marketed towards your more loyal customers is so that you can continue to have them with you for a long time.

Loyal customers will be an advocate for your brand without you even asking them to as long as you treat them well consistently.

Share Customer Reviews

Making use of the positive reviews that you get from previous customers will help potential customers that are on the fence about whether they should use your product or not. Sharing these reviews on social media every once in a while can help persuade them to be a customer too.

Use social media for business

Over To You

Social media as a powerful tool and it would be a shame as a business owner if you don’t utilize this for the growth of your business. The ways listed above are but a drop in the ocean when it comes to how you can make the most out of your social media presence for your business. Apply them in your next marketing plan and you will surely realize growth in your business.

Digital BrandingPersonal Branding

An Expert’s Guide to Generating Leads on Facebook

Marketing isn’t always straightforward, and for many marketers and entrepreneurs, generating leads is a challenge. Facebook is a great platform to help you generate more leads. It’s a place where you can turn a conversation into customer loyalty and purchases, as well as getting to know your customers even better. Let’s see what it takes to generate leads on Facebook.

Why Facebook Is An Ideal Platform To Generate Leads On

There are a couple of reasons why Facebook is one of the best platforms to generate leads. And while you might have read that Facebook’s network growth has slowed down, they still have over 2.50 billion monthly active users. So, if you create a well-strategized presence focused on both organic and paid advertising methods, your possibilities on this platform are endless.

Another reason to use Facebook is that you can set different objectives as your goal with a campaign, which is something that most other platforms are not able to provide, even in 2020.  But not just that, the platform has made its name in lead generation with thanks to one of marketing’s golden rules: ‘know your audience.’ And while many marketers, such as yourself, might think that they already know their audience, the data you’ll gather when advertising on Facebook, might say otherwise.

Building Engagement And Expertise

f you want to start generating organic Facebook likes, it is essential to remember that you’re going to need to build a community that trusts you and create a lot of engagement.

Engagement And Community Building

Increasing or building brand engagement is important because the trust you create will eventually trigger more purchases. People are engaged with your content if they like, click, and comment. To make sure this happens, you will have to create value for your audience by writing exciting content, showing entertaining videos, and answering questions about your product/service.

You can also utilize customer reviews to build more trust. But if you do, it is an essential thing to keep in mind that you have to remember to always reply to messages, customer reviews, and questions. This will help you build a relationship with your potential customers, which will eventually generate more leads. 

Another thing you can do to improve the engagement with your brand and products is to build a community on Facebook. When you start with creating your community, you need to take a good look at yourself. A community is not about making a profit (or at least not directly); it is about personal success and helping others to succeed too. It creates mutually beneficial relationships that add value to your business, your own life, and that of the other community members.

When building a community, you can introduce the expert approach. This means you share valuable, expert level, information about topics that relate to your audience and product. The aim is to trigger a more in-depth conversation or discussion. You do this by asking questions and making comments as well as inviting others to share content too. Once you have established brand engagement and trust, you’re ready to start with Facebook Advertising. 

Facebook Advertising

Advertising is used for many different things, and such is the case with Facebook Advertising as well. Objectives like doing market research, getting customer feedback, and increasing conversion can be applied to create advertisements on Facebook. In this paragraph, we will focus on Facebook Lead Ads. 

Facebook Lead Ads are promotion forms that allow marketers, or anyone else who is interested in the matter, to collect information from possible customers. You’re also able to connect with prospects, get them to sign-up for newsletters, demo requests, and blog notifications. 

And by using dynamic creative, you can make sure to deliver the right message, at the right time to the right person.

Facebook lead generation lets you sync with your company’s CRM, which allows you to follow-up quicker and more efficiently. When you create a lead ad and someone clicks on it, they get presented with a unique form that automatically selects the information on their profile. After that, the users only need to confirm with a few clicks, super easy. You get the data into your CRM and will be able to give this new possible customer a quick call. You should also check out onlineacademy.com/ if you’re looking for some of the best training on Facebook advertising. This will help you cut your learning curve in half and go straight to making profits for your clients or your ecommerce website.

A tip for creating leads ads that will convert is that people are more willing to help you if you help them. Meaning, if you offer something in return for the data that you need, users are often more inclined to fill out the form. 

Building campaigns

Building campaigns with Facebook is relatively easy. The first thing you will have to do is to set a goal for your campaign. Facebook offers three different categories of objectives to choose from awareness, consideration, and conversion. If you’re going to get more leads, you’ll need to select conversion. These are the next steps to building a campaign:

  • Specify the ad set, that will determine how your ad will run. Think about this carefully, because targetting will make or break your campaign. 
  • After you’ve selected all the qualities of your possible customers, it’s time to build and test your ad creative. You can choose from different formats that are set up, which makes it easy to run. 
  • Once this is done, you are ready to launch your campaign. 

Statistics

After you’ve set up your campaign and it is running, it’s time to take a look at Facebook Statistics. We’ve selected the five most important measurements to keep track of to maximize your Return On Investment with Facebook Ads. 

1. The first is impressions, also known as the number of times your ad is shown and seen.

2. The number of clicks and the click-through-rate shows how interested people are in your ad. You can calculate the CTR by dividing the number of clicks through the number of impressions. 

3. Conversion rate, the conversion relates to the actions taken on your website after users come from your ad. 

4. Return on ads spend is defined as revenue divided by the costs of the ads. 

5. Lifetime value is the projected value that a customer will have during his or her entire life. In marketing, you often set a goal as to how much you want that value to be.

Increasing click-through rates

The click-through rate (CTR) of your ads is one of the best ways to understand how your audience is responding to your ads. There are a couple of things that will help you increase your CTR. 

The first is to distill your audience. You are increasing your CTR through audience redefining means that you will only select the users who are most likely to click on your ad. Let’s say that you noticed that men between 20 and 30 are clicking the most, and women of the same age group almost not at all. You should retarget your audience to men between 20 and 30. This means you are targetting the highest quality audience, which will increase your click-through rate. In other words, you are shifting from volume to value-based marketing. 

Another aspect of improving your CTR is content. The images and text you use play a huge role in your CTR. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for this one; you will have to test to figure out what works for your audience. 

Facebook Messenger

Another way of reaching your audience is through Facebook Messenger. Through a messenger, you will be able to engage in actual, live conversations with your prospects. These conversations can help you gather more information and ask in-depth questions.

It is also possible to create ads that have a click-through to a messenger. If you set up an automated chat, you will be able to get an excellent and full idea of who your potential customers are and what they are looking for in a product.  

Facebook’s messages objective is a tool that will help start even more conversations. Through this tool, your ad gets delivered to people who are statistically most likely to want to have a conversation with your business. 

Conclusion

We hope that after reading this article, you feel comfortable enough about generating leads on Facebook to give it a try. The platform offers great flexibility when it comes to marketing goals and has an immense network of possible customers. Facebook Advertising and Facebook Messenger allow you to get to know and understand your potential customers. If you are patient enough to build your audience’s engagement and earn their trust, you will soon be swimming in leads.

Digital Branding

Email Marketing 2020: A Guide on How You Can Properly Use Email Marketing

Without a doubt, email marketing can do wonders for your business. So, if you are quite new to it, you will need a guide to email marketing to know how it all plays out. 

But first, let us explain why email marketing is important. 

Importance of Email Marketing

Email marketing harnesses the power email to create meaningful relationships with your audience. 

This also allows you to capture important information from your audience by letting them subscribe to your email list. That way, you can send exclusive content and easily build rapport with them.

When done right, email marketing will not just let you build a relationship with your audience. You can also use email to compel to make a transaction with you. Hence, email marketing can be a viable stream of income for your business.

Mind you, there are tons of tips and guides online that lets you learn how email marketing can generate a return on investment. 

Types of Emails

Now that you know why you need email marketing for your business, it is time to get familiar with various types of emails:

1. Marketing Emails

These are either promotional or informational emails sent out to users who asked you to keep them updated.

Marketing emails are usually sent in the form of newsletters, announcements, sales promotions, follow-ups, press releases, surveys, and so on. Check out these email copywriting tips in order to write high-converting email copy.

2. Transaction Emails

Transactional emails are usually automated and sent out based on site visitors’ activities. Examples of these are order tracking, welcome messages, received payments, registration confirmation, and so on. 

If you have sent a transactional email to a user and they have at least completed one action, then they will likely want to engage with you again.

Usually, these are considered as trusted emails and have higher open rates because they provide a lot of opportunities for engagement and cross-selling. 

3. Operational Emails

This kind of email provides important data about your business. Examples of these are maintenance plans, holiday closures, changes to the availability of your services, and so on. 

While you might think that operational emails don’t have much impact on your sales, you still have to be consistent on it for trust and engagement purposes. 

There’s likely a hidden value in these messages. Although most of them tend to be informative, they help improve your sales and the value of your image. 

Let’s say your site will be down for maintenance, informing your subscribers about it and describing the updates you will perform is a great way to remind them of the kind of value that you provide. 

Strategies for Email Marketing

As mentioned earlier, email marketing can bring in ROI for your business as long as it is done properly. That said, we have listed down eight tactics that can help you build a successful email marketing campaign:

1. Know Your Audience

According to Kevin Urrutia of VoyMedia Marketing Agency NYC, having a deep understanding of your target audience is one of the important things that you have to take into consideration before you start sending emails. 

Ask yourself these questions:

  • How and when do they prefer to be communicated to?
  • Is there a specific language or slang that would resonate with them more?
  • What kind of action or activities make them stand out from the rest of the population?

2. Personalize Your Emails

Nowadays, neither blast nor batch emails will not work and would lead to high conversion or engagement rates.

Personalization is not a new concept but it is still picking up traction, which makes it increasingly important.

3. Think Quality Over Frequency

Email marketing is an excellent tool for communicating digitally. But you should also prioritize quality over quantity. 

For instance, sending too many emails to your subscribers cannot help you achieve your desired results. Worse, they will unsubscribe the moment they feel overwhelmed with the emails that you send.

Worst, they might even mark you as spam. 

4. Make it Easy to Unsubscribe

Although on the surface, you look like you are providing clients with an easy way to opt-out, if users want you to remove your name from their list and they could not easily do so, they will flag you as spam.

This can pose problems for you later on. 

5. Find the Perfect Time

Knowing what’s the perfect time to send your emails is no easy feat. But although there is no silver bullet answer to that, having an audience insight could come in handy.

For instance, you can try sending out emails during “off times.” For example, in the afternoon when people are less likely to open their inbox because they are busy having lunch. You can also try sending emails in the evening when everyone’s having dinner or they are fast asleep. 

Sending emails on top of the hour increases the chances that your email will be delayed, and will not reach your recipient as you originally intended it. 

6. Make Emails Mobile-Friendly

What is the first thing that most people do in the morning? Well, most of them reach for their phones.

In relation to this, do you know that 66% of email opens happen in phones and tablets? If your email is not optimized for these devices, then you could be missing out on a higher open rate. 

7. Keep it Out of Spam Folder

If you send out poorly constructed emails and are flagged by users as spam, then your emails are less likely to see the light of day.

Poorly formatted emails will hurt you in the long run. Also, note that every spam filter works differently.

An email might pass through one filter and then flagged and caught up in another. To learn more about this, check out MailChimp‘s guide for a comprehensive explanation of how those filters work. 

8. Always be Testing

Do not send out anything if you are not sure that it is working properly.

Double-check your emails and see if you want them to look the way you want them to be before you send them out. 

View them first on Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, and different mobile devices before you decide to finalize your drafts. 

Over to You

Email marketing can be a powerful tool to drive more sales and revenue to your business. It also has proven itself to have a greater reach and ROI than any marketing channel out there.

So, follow the tips we have outlined in this guide so that you can easily get your hands on email marketing.

Digital Branding

Apt Use of Directional Cues in Designing Great User Experience for your Target Audience

For web designers, making sure that they are one step ahead in creating the next great web design, they have to think out of the box. But sometimes that is not enough; they need to think about how to use the User Experience (UX) to their advantage. For designers, making users act upon their design can make a design work big time. For this, they need to make the users read the content of the website, follow the directional cues and click on the call to action buttons.

If you are not sure about the directional cues aspect that I mentioned in the last paragraph, don’t worry as this whole blog post is about how directional cues can be important in making a website work. And especially the design aspect can use the directional cues to make a website work. But why does a website have to offer directional cues in the first place? I will try to answer this question and other aspects in detail, so read on.

Directional Cues: The Basics

UX is one of the best ways for designers to make sure that they are on top of their game. By making a visitor get hooked on a website is no mean feat. There are virtually billions of websites out there on the internet, and on average, a user visits thousands of websites in his lifetime, if not more. But we like only a few dozen of them and visit them frequently. So, what can make a website tick? It is the directional cues through UX that can make the difference and is one of the most happening trends in design.

For all the businesses working in Dubai and other regional cities, they need a website so that they can attract the target audience. Thus, the role of the designers is one of the most important ones for the success of a website and, eventually the business it is representing.

A directional cue is not something that we usually don’t come across. Pointers call to action buttons Curves and lines all can be a directional cue as they can offer a cue to the user as to where we must go or use the website accordingly so that the website owners can benefit from it. First of all, let us talk about content and how it influences the choice of a website visitor.

Content to Die for

We all are aware of the famous phrase “content is the king”. The design can surely get the attention of the visitors of a website, but it is the content that can make all the difference. Right from the CTAs to special discount offers, there are many ways in which you can make content work for you big time. The use of directional cues in content is one of the best ways in which a positive result for the business can be achieved.

Let me explain what the directional cue in this context can be of great use.

Think of directional cues as something that will offer your visitors an option so that they can use your website in an easy uncomplicated way. You need to offer visitors the use that they can use to get along with the website without thinking about what will happen if we click on the icon power button. The visitors don’t have to predict what will happen next as you need to use queues so that they know where they are headed.

Everything mentioned above is very important for your future as a business. You are investing much time and money on your website, and so is the visitor on your website. He is also investing is time to find the product that you are selling.  If you want him to become your customer and also offer a positive word of mouth in social circles, you need to use directional cues smartly.

So how can you do this? Let me explain.

Getting Along with Directional Cues

The use of arrows and single points is one of the easiest ways to offer your visitors an option to choose what he is looking for. For example, if you are offering a flight booking on your website, you need to offer a functional and accessible search button. In this way, you will be able to offer your visitor I cleared optional so that he can book a flight in an easy and hassle-free way.

The art of offering directional cues can be mastered throughout a period. For designers, it isn’t easy because they have to work with different industries and businesses, and they have to find how they can create a design exactly according to the requirements. Observing direct marketing is one way to make things better in this concern.

Let me offer you an example so that you can understand my viewpoint easily.

Direct marketing professionals base their sale campaign so that they have every chance to get the attention of their target market. The use of print media in this concern is what makes them truly effective. The use of brochures and flyers is one effective way in this regard as word of mouth can play an important role. And print advertising for direct marketing is one easy way to get the job done effectively and within their budget.

The use of visual guidelines for tracking the target market is one easy way that works for them.

Use of Colors in Directional Cues

Most of my readers will not understand how directional cues can be mastered with colors, so here it goes. Your color palette is a powerful tool to make your reader aware of what you are offering them. It can improve the user experience far better than any other technique. The use of red color, for example, in a text, can make a visitor stop and notice what’s the message. This is just one of the ways to use colors to your advantage.

If you are nor comfortable with the use of color schemes or color the buttons in a specific way, you can always get the support of a website design dubai firm having the expertise in this concern. In this way, you will be better off in reaching your ultimate goal, that is, good traffic on your website and ultimately good sales.

Over to you

Please offer your valuable feedback for this blog or ask any question by using the comments section below.