Keith Coppersmith | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer | Telecom Marketing Content Writer

5 Tools to Improve Cybersecurity and Keep Your Company Safe

October 7, 2020 by Keith Coppersmith Leave a Comment

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure data safety and protect your personal and professional data in the online realm, whether you’re operating as a one-man show or if you’re running your very own business. The risks of someone trying to breach your data center and steal sensitive business information from under your nose is becoming increasingly prevalent in this digital age, simply because hackers and scammers stand to gain a lot by throwing malware at your firewall and trying to coerce your employees into relinquishing valuable information.

Needless to say, you can’t allow this to happen if you want to preserve your brand’s reputation and keep your company from going under quickly. And remember, recovering from a data breach can be next to impossible in this competitive modern business world. This is why you need to focus on elevating your cybersecurity in 2020, and you can achieve this by integrating the right tools into your system. Here are the solutions you need.

Start by optimizing your antivirus software

First things first, you can start by optimizing your antivirus software to fit the exact requirements of your company, and every device in your network. Keep in mind that you can’t just run an antivirus straight out of the box and hope that it will satisfy all of your needs, which is why you need to analyze its features and functionalities, and spend some time optimizing the settings. If you have a cloud-based firewall, your provider needs to scale it to fit your needs and maximize network security on all fronts.

Why go through all this trouble? Simply put, hackers have become very skilled at what they do, and they are nowadays able to create sophisticated malware that can pass through most firewalls without a hitch, which is why you need a powerful solution and why you should combine a software firewall with a hardware firewall as well – more on the latter in a bit.

Stay in control of your entire network

Nowadays, you have to stay in control of your network and monitor all inbound traffic in order to minimize and spot potential threats, maximize bandwidth availability, and simply keep your data and your employees safe. After all, you need to know exactly what your employees are doing in the online world in order to prevent them from installing malicious software or go to any shady websites where they might pick up a piece of malware.

To do this, you can integrate a web monitoring tool, also known as a secure web gateway, to retain full control of your entire network. This tool is excellent for real-time deep traffic inspection, and it will allow you to prevent access to suspicious websites. You can also use it for early risk detection so that you can stop a potential cyber-attack before it even gets a chance to strike.

Add a hardware firewall to your system

One of the most powerful cybersecurity solutions you can implement nowadays is the hardware firewall. This is a piece of equipment that can keep your entire network safe, and it acts as a barrier between you and the outside world. The tool will provide you with complete visibility of your network, as modern firewall hardware features real-time detection and rapid response functionalities, along with layered security and granular traffic inspection that allows you to identify every user in your network.

Maintenance and upkeep for hardware firewalls is minimal, and you can even set it up quickly as it usually boasts a simplified deployment system that you can use to integrate it quickly even if you don’t have a dedicated IT staff. These and many other benefits make the hardware firewall one of the top solutions for companies of every size.

Educate your employees on cybersecurity

Of course, you can’t hope to keep your company safe if your employees don’t know the first thing about data security. More often than not, it won’t be the firewall that fails you, but an unwitting employee who gave away a valuable piece of information to the wrong person. This is why you need to focus on employee education and training.

You can do this the old-fashioned way and bring in cybersecurity experts to conduct workshops, or you can use a dedicated training tool. In the case of the latter, there are many specialized training platforms that utilize videos and online testing to educate employees on data protection and then test their knowledge using a realistic scenario.

Implement penetration testing tools

Last but not least, it’s important to run regular security audits and put your security measures to the test. Your IT experts should use the same tools and methods the hackers use to try to uncover any weak points in your system and use them to gain entry into your data center. Running these tests regularly will ensure you’re always pathing up security holes and staying one step ahead of the cyber criminals.

Wrapping up

Data security is becoming an increasing concern for companies around the world as hackers and scammers become more proficient in their trade. To prevent cyber-attacks, be sure to use these tools that will elevate the safety of your data and your employees.

4 Innovative Ways to Boost Brand Awareness

June 24, 2020 by Keith Coppersmith Leave a Comment

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Brand awareness represents how familiar people are with your brand and how they recall it. It inspires brand loyalty and retains customers. Most importantly, it maximizes sales. Customers would rather purchase from brands they are familiar with.

However, remember that brand awareness goes beyond your logo, product names, and mission statements. Here are 4 powerful tactics to use to boost brand awareness.

Create Shareable Infographics

To earn backlinks from reputable sites and boost social media shares, you need to create authentic, valuable, and visually appealing content.

That is where infographics shine. Research says that infographics can boost your website traffic by 12%. Moreover, HubSpot emphasizes that articles with infographics earn 178% more links than articles without authentic visuals.

Given that, it is not surprising that many B2B and B2C businesses are investing in infographics. For example, Domain.me hires Infostarters to create infographics for their blog. Each infographic is highly informative, easy-to-follow, and backed by the latest data. To maximize brand memorability, Domain.me always inserts their logo at the bottom of the infographic. As such, their infographics drive lots of organic traffic and shares. For example, the infographic about digital nomads earned 2.640 website visits, 650 shares, and 30 quality backlinks.

Boost Customer Support

Customer satisfaction is the foundation of your brand awareness. It determines how your target audience will perceive you. According to Zendesk, 87% of consumers will tell others about positive brand experiences, while 95% of them would share negative experiences.

Bad publicity may compromise the brand reputation you have been building for years. To prevent that, you need to provide spotless customer service.

In 2020 and beyond, customers do not want to waste time waiting for your feedback via email. They want to communicate with your brand 1:1, in real-time. That is why you need to provide omnichannel customer support.

Fortunately, the line between online and offline customer support has never been thinner.

For example, did you know you can switch from traditional business phone service to an online phone system? Some of the best-rated VoIP service providers, including Nextiva, OnSip, and Jive, allow companies to integrate their phone systems with their CRM tools to collect and synchronize customer data. They even offer comprehensive customer analytics and brand sentiment analytics, allowing your customer service agents to personalize customer interactions.

Another major customer support channel is chat. Apart from providing live chat service on your website, IM apps, and social networks, you should also invest in chatbots that will provide customers with personalized, 24/7 feedback.

Finally, listen to your customers on social networks. Many social media listening tools, including Hootsuite and Sprout Social, allow you to monitor brand mentions and hashtags so you can provide faster feedback on social. You can also use this data to measure brand sentiment.

Partner with Influencers

Did you know that 40% of Twitter users made a purchase after seeing a tweet from an influencer? Precisely because of that, you should start investing in influencer marketing.

When investing in influencer marketing, it is important to partner with the right influencer. First, they should be in the same or similar niche. If you are a healthcare organization, promotions by a fashion influencer would not make any sense, since you do not target the same audiences. Second, an influencer should share your values so they can send the right message to their followers.

Sure, you do not need to hire celebrity influencers to promote your brand. There are many micro- and nano-influencers that may get your brand noticed by the right people. Google even says that people trust micro-influencers more than traditional celebrities because they can relate to them.

Invest in Paid Brand Promotion

Organic brand promotion channels, such as SEO, email marketing, or social networks, take lots of time before they start delivering the desired results. To maximize your brand exposure faster, you need to combine your organic marketing campaigns with paid ones:

Paid social media promotion

This is one of the most impactful, and yet, most challenging paid brand promotion channels. Each social network has different rules for running paid ads.

For example, on Instagram, you can buy promoted posts, display ads within its regular content feed, or place ads within Instagram Stories.

Facebook also adds multiple promotion formats, including pins, boosts, and ads. All ad campaigns are managed via its Power Editor and Ads Manager, where you should set your budget, maximum bid amount, goals, keywords, etc.

Invest in native advertising

Native ads show your high-quality content on relevant third-party websites. They are designed not to disrupt user experiences – they are in line with the format, topic, and tone of the article a user is reading.

Use search engine marketing

Research says that 75% of users do not scroll past the first page of Google. That is why you should purchase sponsored listings to appear at the top of Google’s noisy search results.

Conclusions

Building and boosting band awareness does not have to be as tedious as it seems. That is why you should plan it strategically.

Start by improving your content marketing strategy. Apart from traditional blog articles, create shareable and link-worthy content such as infographics.

Strengthen customer service to get people to spread positive experiences.

Work with influencers to gain customers’ trust and boost brand exposure.

Invest in paid content promotion channels to boost brand exposure faster.

Finally, keep testing your marketing tactics to see which ones deliver the best results.

5 Reasons Why the Look of Your Website is Vital for Your Business

May 16, 2020 by Keith Coppersmith Leave a Comment

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The clerks in your brick-and-mortar store (assuming that you have one) represent your brand and all of its values when interacting with customers. You have specific policies in terms of appropriate attire expected from your employees, as well as attitudes, and the knowledge required to do their jobs well. If a customer were to be greeted with a confused shrug every time they had a question, they’d likely never come back to your store. The same would happen if the clerk were wearing a tutu skirt and a bikini top, selling urns.

It’s no different with your website. Merely replace the confused shrug with a messy, ad-riddled landing page, or a missing security certificate from your check-out page. It’s annoying, doesn’t elicit trust, and it sure as hell won’t inspire anyone to come back any time soon.

It’s evident from these simple, but not isolated examples that the aesthetics of your site can be vital for the perception your customers have of your brand and the potential outcomes of those interactions.

Establishing trustworthiness

If a brand experiments with colors, it can be construed as playful and adaptive to a specific campaign or digital environment, but it can also be seen as confusing. Consistency in the visual presentation of your brand on your site enables your customers to recall your brand, connect the dots, and feel comfortable trusting you with their money. If your logo, overall website design, and imagery are all drastically -different from how you present yourself on, say, social media or in your store, you risk losing their trust.

Let your customers immediately recognize your brand as soon as they land on your website. The visual content should match your identity and your promise, and allow them to see you as truthful and transparent.

Increasing website traffic

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Do the numbers agree with your assessment of your website and its look and feel? If not, you have an opportunity to tap into the data you collect and see where your site fails to impress your audience. As you’ll notice, your customers will consistently spend more time on well-designed pages, read well-structured articles, and purchase well-represented products.

Maximizing the potential of your website’s look starts with using your digital marketing reporting software to understand the gaps in your existing design and spot the most attractive segments based on various KPIs. From your bounce rate, average time per page, all the way to the average duration of each session on your site, you can use the information to then adapt the layout, navigation, and other visual elements of your site that are stifling your traffic and conversions.

Showcasing your security assurance

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Customers are getting smarter every day, and they will only leave their most sensitive information (and their cash) with brands whose website clearly indicates security measures across the board. So, if you’ve managed to impress your customer with a stellar website, superb track record from other customers based on testimonials, and you’ve defeated your competitors with your product selection, it’s time to seal the deal – quite literally so.

Using security seals and badges on your site lets you send a clear message with the help of these simple, straightforward visuals: it’s safe to buy from us. It would be a pity to have spent all that time on tweaking your website structure only to fail so majestically because of such a simple omission. Make sure that each relevant page of your site strategically emphasizes your trust seals and security measures to make your customers feel safe with your brand.

Enabling brand awareness through consistency

Another long-term consequence of design consistency on your site is stronger brand awareness. In turn, brand awareness is the gateway to customer loyalty that no business can afford to neglect. The overarching look of your site creates the necessary basis for brand recognition, only to build on that wave of relevance to help customers associate specific emotions, values, and promises that your brand stands for.

The look of your site plays more than a marginal role in this process, because the visuals, the navigation, and the layout of your site all need to correspond with your identity traits such as your innovative spirit, generosity, honesty, and integrity. One smart design solution at a time, and you have an entire business development strategy built into your website.

The site you build and continue developing for your brand is not merely a digital storefront, but also an extension of your brand identity, of your values, your promise, mission, and vision. The more you invest in updating your identity while retaining its essence through content creation, the greater your chances are to stand out for your target audience and be remembered for future purchases.

Add to that, the appeal of your site will inspire them to recommend you to others, which will inevitably create an opportune loop for growth. To conclude, there’s nothing superficial about appearance. It’s as functional and substantial as every other aspect of your brand, and it should be treated accordingly.

Why Small Businesses Need SEO More Than Ever in 2020

March 9, 2020 by Keith Coppersmith Leave a Comment

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As you may have probably heard by now, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is no longer considered to be an optional marketing strategy but rather mandatory. The main reason is that the online market is growing to be more competitive and overcrowded each year.

2020 is finally here and you can pretty much guess the situation; SEO became more important than ever. This is especially true for small businesses. Many SMBs need a way to stand out in such a competitive environment, as well as gain a much-needed competitive advantage over well-established and better-funded companies that are already favoring a good presence in the market.

Competing in such a dynamic landscape is difficult enough as it is. Without marketing, small companies and especially new ones wouldn’t stand a chance against those who came first. Fortunately, SEO and the rest of the marketing strategies can give everyone a fighting chance. With that in mind, here are a few reasons why small businesses need SEO more than ever.

SEO is cost-effective

It’s no secret that the budget SMBs commonly have cannot compare to that of the large enterprises and popular brands. If a company has enough funds to launch a large-scale marketing campaign that will cover every important marketing aspect, then how does a small company compete against that with a tight enough budget as it is?

The answer is cost-effective marketing strategies, such as SEO. Using the budget wisely is essential for SMBs. You cannot overspend on marketing if that will leave you without enough funds to develop your products or grow your business efficiently. That’s why you need a strategy that will ensure your money’s worth. This is exactly how SEO works.

You can spend as much as you can and still get viable results from it. Whether those results are portrayed as more web traffic, improved visibility, greater exposure or anything else, it will be beneficial for your small business. The key, however, is knowing in which SEO tactics to invest so that you can benefit from it even with a small budget.

Being visible is vital

Visibility in the online world is of the utmost importance, especially in 2020. Consumers tend to do a lot of research before they decide to make a purchase or devote their attention to a business. SEO helps your visibility increase by helping you rank well on search engines, such as Google.

But how does that benefit my business, you ask? Here are a few benefits of being visible online and ranking well on search engines.

The majority of consumers won’t go beyond the first page of search results.
Appearing on the first page of search results is considered to be a recommendation as far as consumers are concerned.
Between 70% and 80% of consumers focus on organic results while ignoring paid ads.
Consumers look for reviews and content regarding products and services.
They prefer content that matches their intent.
The first page of search results captures up to 92% of website traffic and clicks compared to the second page that captures only 6%.
Ranking well for relevant keywords increases organic web traffic.
Content that ranks well makes you authoritative and thus more sought-after.

You need those conversions

As mentioned before, the majority of search engine users ignore paid ads and focus on organic results. By ranking well on search engines, you become more visible, easily findable and more accessible to consumers.

Organic search complements organic web traffic and such leads are more willing to convert once they find your business and your website online.

In other words, consumers that have the intent of finding a specific product or service are already willing to make a purchase. Finding your business in their search results simplifies the entire process. That’s why matching your keywords and your content with that of consumer intent is essential.

However, many SMBs aren’t really sure how to achieve that. Fortunately, there’s always an option to consider effective white label SEO. What it means is that you partner up with an agency that will promote your product via SEO while you take responsibility for selling that very same product.

Your competitors are on it or are they?

Every business is looking for a way to gain a competitive advantage and outrun their competitors. SEO can be that advantage if you know how to use it. What you probably didn’t know is that large companies often don’t bother with SEO.

As you may know, SEO takes time to produce any viable results, which is why many companies simply give up on it instead of investing in SEO further. In other words, you may compete with other SMBs regarding SEO than against large companies, which is a better situation considering your limited budget.

You have more chances of outrunning fellow small companies than popular brands and other SMBs are most certainly using SEO. All the more reason for you to start using SEO too if you haven’t started using it by now.

SEO grows to be more and more important every year. As the market becomes more complex to navigate, SMBs need a way to overcome challenges and obstacles the market will have in store for them. That’s why SEO is one of the surest ways to make a name for yourself in such a competitive environment.

How Can You Turn Your Name Into a Brand

January 19, 2020 by Keith Coppersmith Leave a Comment

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When developing your marketing strategy, your personal brand can be as important as your corporate one, and help you grow your business much faster. Personal branding can also help you get more clients, land you a better job or more sales. It can bring you recognition and respect, raising the odds of gaining more influence and more success. Still, to turn your name into a brand successfully, you will need a strategic approach. Here are the most important steps you need to take.

Know your purpose

A personal brand is a reflection of who you are. It’s what you will be remembered by and recognized for in the industry of your choice. Your personal branding efforts should begin with a serious assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, your interests as well as the skills you have mastered. Put a special focus on discovering your competitive advantages over all the others in your niche. Are those your marketing or social skills? Your personality?

This will be your unique value proposition – the extra value you will bring to the lives of your target audience, a particular answer to the challenges they face and the reason they will distinguish you from your competition. However, you won’t be able to offer an adequate solution to your target audience’s problems unless you’ve defined them. Make sure you have a clear insight into the characteristics of your ideal customer, their needs, desires and pain points so that you can address them with your branding campaign.

Choose your name wisely

If your personal name is unique, or you’re already well-known by it in your industry, you can use it as your personal brand name. It may be that you already have a reputation as a trustworthy source of information in your line of work, so you can use it to build on that reputation.

When using your personal name for branding purposes, there are a few more things you should pay attention to:

Is your name unique? Would you benefit from using a differentiator, such as a middle name initial or a tagline?
Is your name easy for people to spell and pronounce?
Can you imagine the possibility of your personal name limiting the expansion of your business?
Do you stand for the values your business stands for?
Is there an available domain you can buy that corresponds to your name?

If for any reason you find that it’s not a good idea to use your personal name for branding purposes, try to create a name that is a combination of your career direction and your name, which is simple and memorable.

Establish your look

The visuals you use in your personal branding campaign are of extreme importance too. The advantage of personal branding is its human side, so don’t be afraid to show off and present a great photo of you. This will help you establish trust in your target audience and add credibility. It’s best to use a photo of you while working –facilitating a meeting or autographing your book, but a photo of you looking into the lens and smiling can also serve this purpose well.

You should also decide on the logo, as well as the color palette and the fonts you will use, to make your personal brand recognizable and consistent on all platforms.

Have a website

After you’ve chosen your brand name and established your personal brand’s visual identity, the next step is having your own website. Building a website doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. You can make a perfectly functional website even if you opt for a standard one, created with WordPress, Wix or Joomla.

Make sure your website is registered by your brand name. If you’re using your own name for branding purposes or want to add your business a more intimate feel, you should check out .me TLD domains and consider the most personal domain extension on the market.

Create content

If you want your brand to become recognizable, you need to constantly and consistently create content that will show your expertise and reflect your brand. Your starting point should be a blog – websites with blogs have 97% more links and 434% more indexed webpages. It is also the best way to improve the SEO rankings of your website and bring more organic traffic.

Make sure the content pieces you create are focused on your target audience and not yourself. Your posts should add value to their lives, addressing their pain points and their needs in a way that is easy to grasp. You can also use social media channels to share the content you create in your social media circles or the groups you are a member of and engage with your target audience. Always look for ways to connect with people using your content, so make it diverse and use a variety of media types, such as podcasts, webinars, videos, eBooks, etc.

And remember, you can’t develop a personal brand unless it genuinely feels personal. Don’t be afraid to show your target audience your authentic self – your story, opinions and values, even if it feels a bit risky.