3 Legal Pitfalls You Should Avoid on Social Media

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 3 Legal Pitfalls You Should Avoid on Social MediaMany people use social media for private and business communications without knowing that what they post online can have serious legal ramifications. John Branca, an attorney who has represented pop superstars like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake, warns that even people who don’t have a media empire at stake should be aware of the pitfalls.

Revealing Others’ Personal Information

Be careful not to reveal personal information without permission, especially if you’re using your social media platforms for a business venture. For example, if you’re trying to promote your cosmetic dentistry practice, you shouldn’t post before and after photos of one of your patients without his or her consent. Be aware that the same privacy laws apply for your patients even when you’re trying to advertise your work on a satisfied client.

Committing Defamation

What you post on social media about others can be considered defamation if it is untrue and causes harm to their reputation. By sharing something negative about another person, you may be opening yourself up to legal action, even if you think it’s true but have no evidence.

Every entertainment lawyer can attest to times that major publications have paid dearly for posting rumors and falsehoods about famous clients. However, regular folks are at even greater risk for legal action because private citizens enjoy stricter protections against public calumny. Therefore, the best course of action is simply to keep any harmful information about others to yourself.

Using Copyrighted Material

Whenever you use a photo from someone else’s website or play music you don’t own the rights for in a post, the law considers it theft. Although you may not think about as you blare your favorite song in your latest dance video, it is illegal unless you have the artist’s consent. This can be a costly mistake if you’re forced to pay the artist.

Social media is a relatively new way to communicate, but the platforms require the same responsibility and knowledge of the law to shield you or your business from legal action.

How Can Brand Identity Boost Your Online Business?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Brand Identity|Brand Identity Design and How It Boosts Your E-CommerceIn the world of the internet, developing and maintaining a compelling and authoritative brand identity for your e-commerce organization is paramount for driving success and staying competitive. The e-commerce business environment is fiercely competitive and overwhelmed with too many businesses.

So, if you want to start your own business online, effective branding can help you achieve your business and marketing goals. Your brand identity allows you to attract the target audience, convey your brand message most effectively, project your values, and get ahead of the competition curve.

The success of your brand depends on how effective your brand identity is. This identity represents your business in all its splendor. Think of it as your business ID in the online business world. It’s how you present yourself to the world of consumers and one of your business’s most valuable assets.

The Importance of a Strong Brand Identity

There’s much more to your brand than just a logo. Although brand identity is the very personification of your business online, it’s just one aspect of effective branding. However, building a strong brand identity is the very foundation of your branding.

Here are a couple of good reasons why building a strong brand identity matters considerably for your success:

  • It allows you to develop a brand personality that your customers can relate to.
  • It helps shape the way your consumers perceive your business.
  • It projects the promises and expectations your business extends to your consumers in terms of trustworthiness, reliability, service, quality, and authoritativeness.
  • It helps establish a meaningful relationship with your target audience.
  • It helps create loyalty and trust from both your partners and customers.
  • It helps you become more relevant and competitive in your business niche.
  • It helps your consumers differentiate your brand from the competition.
  • It positively affects the purchasing decisions of your customers, directly resulting in higher profitability.

The Benefits of an Effective Brand Identity

A strong brand identity benefits your e-commerce business in several different ways.

1. Branding Makes Your Business Look Bigger and More Serious

We live in a visual world, where the average consumer’s attention span is no more than 5-10 seconds. Therefore, you need something captivating to grab the attention of your target audience.

When consumers see a professional brand that’s continuously providing consistent and relevant content on social media, website, and business cards, they start visualizing your company as worthy of their attention.

Modern consumers look for brands that offer real solutions to daily problems. More importantly, they won’t have any issues paying more if they perceive your business as well-organized and established.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Brand Identity|Brand Identity Design and How It Boosts Your E-Commerce2. Your Brand Identity Gives You a Relatable Persona

Building a brand around your business is as much about you as it is about your consumers. They need a brand they can relate to, put their trust in, and get more than they expect with each interaction.

If you want to stand out from the rest and make people buy your products or hire your services, you’ll need to work on your branding efforts. A good brand identity is what gives your business a personality that your consumers can relate to. With a good relationship comes trust and, ultimately, respect.

3. Trust and Loyalty

If a brand develops a loyal following, they won’t be having any trouble with getting ahead of the competition. More importantly, a strong and unique brand makes a difference in the marketplace too.
By conveying your brand’s values, you can build a meaningful and emotional long-term connection with your target audience. The main result of that connection will be improved customer loyalty.

When customers are loyal and happy, they tend to talk about you and recommend your brand to people they know. After all, word of mouth is still the number one marketing tool.

4. Conveys Stability

Building and investing in maintaining a strong brand identity allows you to present your business as authoritative, successful, prosperous, and stable. A well-organized and defined brand identity speaks volumes about your business and sends a clear message that you’re the one consumers should be talking to.

5. Makes Your Brand Memorable

Modern consumers are all about consistency. They appreciate brands that invest in an effort to satisfy their needs and overcome their expectations. Building a brand identity is all that and more.

Aside from providing your consumers with exceptional customer service and user experience, a strong brand identity helps your consumers memorize you and remember your business.

If you consistently keep your brand identity accessible via all available communication channels, your prospects will see your brand. The more they see your business, the more likely they are to reach out and contact you.

Tips on Developing a Strong Brand Identity

Since a strong brand identity is one of the main driving factors of success, the following tips should help you develop and take control of your brand identity in a way that matches your business and marketing strategy.

Start with a visual identity!

The first step toward developing a strong branding is creating your visual identity. It has to align with your business and marketing strategy and goals, as well as your business vision.

More importantly, it has to send a clear message about your company, culture, and mission. Hopefully, it will be enough to entice your target audience to start being interested in what you have to offer.
Pay special attention to your online reputation!

Regardless of how successful you are or how strong your brand identity is, monitoring your online reputation should always be your top priority.

It puts you in control over how potential prospects and loyal consumers perceive your business and allows you to take advantage of ongoing and upcoming trends in your industry.

It also allows you to contact satisfied consumers who will be more than happy to say a few positive words about you online. You can never have enough positive reviews.

Always Deliver Top-Quality User Experience!

Modern consumers are more demanding than ever. They expect you to exceed their expectations. Therefore, aim to deliver the best user experience with each interaction and across all available communication channels.

Conclusion

Starting a business online is all about creating a strong brand identity design. Having everything you need for your business is one side of the coin while getting everything you need for building effective branding is the other.

Only by putting the two pieces together will you get ahead of the competition curve and keep your consumers happy. Keep in mind that your business focuses and vision have to be aligned with your brand identity.

Focus your brand on your customers, and you will reach a broader target audience. If you need help with your brand identity design, hiring creative design companies is the best way to get on top of your brand identity game.

They have both skills and knowledge it takes to come up with an effective and competitive design that will put your e-commerce business on the world map.

7 Reasons Why You Can’t Do It Yourself

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There’s an app for that.
I’ve got a tool that does it for me.
It’ll be done in a few clicks.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Strategy|7 Reasons Why You Can’t Do It YourselfWe all love the idea of relying on software solutions and automated formulas to succeed digitally. Unfortunately, for solo entrepreneurs, technology serves a dual purpose, acting both as a fit-for-purpose tool and an advisor. Understandably so, when you are launching a venture with limited time and budget, it’s easy to fall in the trap of automated solutions. Yet, the tech-based DIY approach of small business owners isn’t always the most effective path to success.

The real question you want to ask is not which tool can plan your digital strategy on your behalf, but which expert can you trust with the job. Outsourcing may appear as a less cost-effective solution, but it is likely to drive more satisfying outcomes than any automated or smart tech tool. If you lack the skill set to tackle digital marketing and sales tasks, it’s important to remember that a tool that is easy to use doesn’t make you an expert. Just as anybody can use a hammer, only trained professionals can build a house. The same principle applies to your digital strategy. Here is what happens when you choose to do it yourself with an online tool.

Your website is not unique

WordPress, Wix and Squarespace are some of the most popular DIY web platforms that enable everyone to create a functioning and professional-looking site without preliminary skills. However, it’s fair to say that while building a website may only take a few minutes, the lasting impression could be ever shorter. Indeed, the fresh-out-of-the-box look suffers from the own limitation of its template. Your website ends up looking like any other site and becomes a forgettable experience in the digital world of possibilities. Creating a design that is unique, and that reflects your personality and brand is a conscious effort. Ideally, you want to reach out to a professional or develop your web building skills accordingly. Otherwise, your web presence could become unrecognizable from other sites and brands. More importantly, you may not be able to offer the functions and options you need or implement the tools that are meaningful to your business without affecting the design.

Your landing pages are not UX-optimised

Everybody understands the importance of landing pages to support online conversions. Your landing page serves as a conversion platform, targeting interesting leads and turning them into customers. Therefore, the landing page is a mini page that displays highly targeted content. Thankfully, a variety of online tools can let you create high-quality landing pages that are designed to grab users’ attention. However, a performing landing page requires dedicated skills, including specialist UI and UX knowledge to convert. Did you know that the majority of low-converting pages share issues that a trained UX designer would have avoided? Indeed, they are too cluttered and colorful, confusing readers. They also often fail to redirect visitors to the main site, which can affect the credibility of the landing page. These mistakes can be counterproductive and cost you a lot of profitable conversions.

You don’t have a sales strategy

What is an online sales strategy? A lot of solo entrepreneurs reach out to proven business formulas, such as sales funnels that map out the customers’ journey to making any kind of purchase. Sales funnels are hugely popular because, when they are correctly applied, they can do wonders for business growth. The automated selling strategy can virtually boost your profit on autopilot. Except that there’s one crucial condition if you’re going to deploy sales funnels: You need to have a solid understanding of digital marketing; otherwise you could be making costly and counterproductive sales funnel mistakes. From understanding how to integrate the funnel to your other digital marketing tools to directing traffic to the right places, digital marketing professionals bring their know-how to the sales formula. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a defined strategy, you can’t make the best use of this marketing tool.

You rely on machine recommendations blindly

Most small businesses rely on Google AdWords to create manageable online marketing campaigns. Google AdWords offers businesses of all sizes the opportunity to control their marketing spending and efforts. As a result, you can create a profitable ad campaign with a limited budget. Additionally, the smart tool also provides recommendations to help you improve your account. While this might sound like a fantastic opportunity for amateurs to build a high ROI campaign, there’s a catch. According to Google, there are as many as 60 different recommendations available to users, and many of them can contradict each other or fail to benefit your campaign. Understanding which recommendations to follow and which to ignore requires marketing knowledge. But if you don’t have sufficient experience, you may end up damaging your campaign by following automated suggestions. Ideally, you don’t want to automatically apply suggestions without being able to check them first. The option is often set on auto-apply in Google AdWords.

You can’t track everything

Google Analytics is another fantastic free tool made by Google for digital marketers. If you have a website, you most likely use Google Analytics to track your traffic and understand how visitors behave on the site. Most self-building web platforms allow you to enter the Google tracking code, aka a JavaScript that tells the tool how to track online activities.

However, tracking is not as easy as it seems. Say you want to know how many of your visitors are making a purchase online. You will need to track the “thank you” page that appears after a complete transaction. Thankfully, it is something you can set directly within Google Analytics. But if the goal you want to monitor doesn’t create a new URL, you need to track events, such as clicks, for example. Event tracking requires a new JS code, which you may not be able to implement on the site.

You are missing out on advanced solutions

Google Analytics is a free tool that can do so much for digital marketers. As a result, it is a favorite. Unfortunately, amateurs are unlikely to make the most out of the tool. While you will still benefit from using Analytics, even at a superficial level, you will need additional skills to gain a significant advantage. Google Analytics API offers extensive flexibility in analyzing users’ behaviors and automating reports. However, the API interface is only accessible to trained programmers, which is where outsourcing your digital activities can make a big difference. Using an API in Analytics can offer additional insights about users – that you wouldn’t have received otherwise. It also highlights potential trends, letting you connect Analytics data with other tools.

You lose your brand through automated solutions

How much can you automate? The answer: Almost everything. However, automation is not always the right approach to digital marketing. Indeed, you can use automation to set up email campaigns or build marketing funnels. But did you know that you could also automate content creation? Automated content is not only a reality, but it’s been part of digital way-of-life for a long time. AI can perform simple tasks, such as acting as a chatbot or completing sentences. The tech also lets AI create entire blog articles. Yet, smart tools don’t replace people. The moment you trust a machine to write your blog, you lose what makes your brand unique.

Automated tools play a huge role in building a business and managing online activities for solo entrepreneurs. But it’s essential to draw a line. While tools become more advanced and intelligent, they don’t replace professional experience, personality, and strategic knowledge. There is nothing wrong with using the right tools for the jobs. But remember that technology doesn’t make you an expert!

Choosing A Web Design Training Course

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Choosing A Web Design Training Course

Website design training is a must for all businesses. In the current day and age, the importance of having an attractive and effective website simply cannot be ignored. The only trouble is that there are so many web design courses for you to choose from, which can be a little bit confusing and overwhelming.

But, there is no need to panic, as we are going to give you a helping hand by giving you an insight into the key qualities that all web design training courses should have.

  • Private training – You should always look for a training instructor who is willing to provide you with private training. This ensures that you extract maximum value from the training course, and that the content you are being taught is entirely suited to the needs of your business.
  • A good reputation – You are advised to read reviews that have been left by people that have already taken the course. The same applies irrespective of whether you are looking for HTML training, an Adobe Illustrator course, or any other form of training. If you come across a lot of negative comments, you know to look elsewhere.
  • Various design platforms – What platforms are you going to be taught about creating a website on? Does the trainer have the flexibility to adapt to your needs? WordPress training may be something you want to look out for in this respect. If you take a look at a reputable website design company today, they may specialize in one platform, but they will have a basic understanding and have probably received training in a number of areas.
  • Impressive portfolio – Last but not least, take a look at the trainer’s website design portfolio. After all, why should you trust them to teach you about website design if they can’t create impressive websites themselves?
  • Their own website – This leads to the next point: if you are going to choose the right website design training company for you, you should look at their website first. After all, if the website is slow to load and difficult to navigate, this does not leave a very good impression, does it? For experts in website design, there are no excuses not to have an incredible website, and so this is definitely an area that we recommend paying a lot of attention to when you are looking for the best courses for you.
  • Practicalities – Last but not least, you will want to consider all of the practicalities, such as course time and location. You should also consider the price to make sure that this is something you are happy with as well. These are all the sort of things that you will know yourself what is right for you.

If you take the points that have been mentioned into account, you can be confident that you have found the best website design training for your needs. This is not an area you can afford to rush into and make a rash decision.

Can You Verify Mobile App Users and Is It Worth Your Time?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Verify Mobile App Users|Can You Verify Mobile App Users and Is It Worth Your Time?As an entrepreneur with a mobile app as either part of your business model or the whole thing, it’s a difficult part of the business to actively embrace. It’s certainly beneficial when people wish to engage with the brand in any fashion, but what’s it worth if it’s not known who they are? For this article, we look into verifying users, and what value it may hold.

Mobile App Strategic Business Models

Some companies offer mobile apps that will proving a meaningful way to interact with customers. The business models may include:

Advertising Based

An app that is monetized using advertising such as the Ad Mob platform from Google can be a primary revenue driver. This requires the app to be highly adopted and sticky enough that it’s frequently opened and used most days of the week. This leads to enough activity that ad revenue is reliably generated. However, millions of users are usually needed to profit substantially. It doesn’t require identification to be usable.

Subscription-based or Premium

A subscription-based model is essentially a premium version of the mobile app. There may also be a free version or a “freemium” one that is upgradable. Scant information through permitted access to certain aspects of the information stored on the mobile device provides little clarity. Taking a payment for the premium app may provide more, but it’s still not verified.

Lead Generator for Main Business

An app that acts as a lead generator for the main business serves a useful purpose. Being able to verify that they’re a real person either representing just themselves or on behalf of a business is useful. It ensures that valuable staff time won’t be wasted.

Supplemental to Main Business

An app that’s offered as a supplement to the main business is helpful too. It’s not always necessary to verify the user if they’re already a customer. However, it can provide greater clarity by using an automated tool to match their name to the phone number provided.

How Are Mobile App Users Verified?

There are companies that can provide a solution to enable quick verification in real-time on mobile app users. One such company is Cognito, found at https://cognitohq.com, which provides an SDK to developers to incorporate their sophisticated technology into their apps. By checking the entered information from a user such as their name and contact number, it’s possible to get a quick confirmation score on the validity of this information. Dummy phone numbers and even incorrectly types names will get appropriately flagged.

Does Verification Change the Game?

Yes, it does. With the number of mobile users growing every day and up to 40 percent of online shoppers now, companies realize that they cannot ignore this kind of growth.

Being able to “automagically” identify the users of a mobile app when they supply a couple of pieces of information is a game-changer. The company can then understand where they are located and glean some statistics that are officially known. This helps the business to offer advanced features in response to the supplied information as an incentive to users.

Identifying at least some of the users of your mobile app proves extremely beneficial to companies, especially when the app is publicly available, and anyone could be using it. They can then build more reliable profiles about whom their users are, including their demographics, and shape their offering accordingly.