Proshark Blog

Proshark appoints sales veteran TJ Robinson as VP Sales

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 20:47:26 GMT

Sales Veteran TJ Robinson Joins Proshark as VP of Sales

New ParagraphProshark is growing and has recently hired top sales executive TJ Robinson as their new Vice President of Sales.

August 01, 2022: Proshark is pleased to announce that they have recently appointed leading sales executive TJ Robinson as their new Vice President of Sales. A renowned sales veteran, Mr. Robinson will be bringing in a wealth of professional experience in sales leadership across multiple industries, spanning across 20+ years.

The Top 5 SEO Mistakes That Every Business Should Avoid

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 16:37:51 GMT

Organic traffic typically makes up 60 - 70% of a sites traffic and tends to be the highest converting form of traffic. Here's the top 5 SEO mistakes to avoid hurting your business's Search Engine Rankings or losing your organic traffic.

First of all, we want to commend you for actually thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s not sexy, or fun (unless you’re nerds like us). It’s not easy to understand, there’s math and research and…ok, we see your eyes glaze over. But SEO tweaks work . They work to generate more traffic to your website and therefore, more revenue.

A research firm called Sistrix recently did a study of billions of Google search results. They found that 28.5% of people searching for a term on Google click on the very first organic result. The 10th result on the page had only a 2.5% click rate.

The importance of this study cannot be overstated. It means that a potential customer or client is 10 times more likely to buy from a company that is on the first page of Google than they are to research customer reviews. There seems to be an assumption that the first option is the best option, and very few people have the time to do a deep dive into consumer reports.

So, let’s get to it the meaty bits here: SEO is a powerful tool that can be used incorrectly. It can throw people off track, confuse people, and invite the wrong kind of business or client into your life. We’ll unpack this now.

Mistake #1: Stuffing your Meta Keywords

Meta descriptions appear below your listing in a Search Engine and are best used to encourage clicks. This means, write them for the people searching, not for search engines. Gone are the days of term - term - term - term….this is boring for people, and not eye-catching.

For example, consider the difference between these two meta descriptions for a fancy sock company:

Description 1: Socks - fancy - warm - socks - family - unique - colorful - playful - whacky - dress - formal - cottage - socks- vacation - boardroom - business

Description 2: Fancy socks to dress up your business attire, or warmer options for your cottage or vacation. Make a statement or give a unique gift to someone special!

The first description can actually get you penalized by Google algorithms: it uses the keyword three times in the meta description. Just give an overview, use enticing descriptive copy, and write for the customer, not a robot!

Mistake #2: Using Content Exclusively Generated By AI

Artificially created website content (there are various AI copy generating apps online) are not inherently negative. In truth, they are also improving all the time. BUT: AI text generators rely on statistical patterns. While some content follows predictable structures, such as FAQ chat posts and simple report inquiries, AI has not developed to the extent that it can discern natural language. You need a human writer to convey the actual meaning of words and sentences. Oh, and add a little personality here and there for readability!

Publish engaging, thought-leadership style articles and people can tell the difference. Be authentic and invest your time in writing good content! If you’re not a writer, find one of the many websites online such as Upwork or Elance which offer writing and copy-editing services.

Mistake #3: Duplicating Content On Your Site

Repeating the exact same content over and over again on your site confuses your users as well as search engines. If a search engine can’t decide which content is the original, all of it will take a hit in the rankings.

More importantly, your conversion rates will crash. Your users don’t want to read the same thing over and over again on your site. User experience will suffer greatly, and people will click away from your web pages out of sheer boredom and frustration.

Google sees the duplication of site content as a lack of effort, and in some cases, as plagiarism. Make it a point to write new content and to write it well!

Mistake #4: Buying Backlinks

Buying backlinks, for those who don’t know, is the all-too common practice of paying to have your website link appear on another website: usually a directory or coupon site, etc.

There are 3 main reasons not to buy backlinks:

One: You’re almost definitely wasting money. Buying clicks from sites like directories or forums will have little to no real impact on your rankings. Google is able to identify quality links from links that come from sites without any real traffic. Plus if you're buying links a lot of times you're dealing with spamier sites that actually hurt your rankings.

Two: Link purchasing is directly against Google Webmaster Guidelines . In fact, buying backlinks can result in the dreaded Manual Penalty. In fact Google placed even more emphasis on weeding out what they consider spammy backlink profiles on sites with their core algorithm updates at the beginning of 2022. This can cause dramatic drops in your search rankings or even your site being completely removed from Google!

Mistake #5: Using misleading or sensationalized headlines!

Facebook and Google both identify phrases commonly used in clickbait style headlines, such as FREE, or WIN, etc. Links posted from sites or pages that consistently use clickbait headlines appear lower in the newsfeed and search listings.

Even worse, this type of headline diminishes trust with your audience. People are getting used to this type of approach and it is resulting in lower traffic totals. The assumption is that nothing is really free, they will wind up getting spammed if they provide their email just to enter a draw, and the overall experience they have with your brand will be hella negative.

Clickbait headlines also tend to result in higher bounce rates and a poor user experience which hurts your overall brand image.

The SEO Takeaway:

Good marketing is only a mystery if you do NOT think about your potential customers as if they were actual, intelligent, busy people. You can’t capture attention and interest with sales copy anymore. You need to build a solid audience by providing high quality content. Who are the people you are selling to? Are you helping them with a problem? How are you helping them? What is your area of expertise? Tweaking your SEO is important, but only when you have a grounded, compassionate way of communicating respectfully to your expanding audience. Niche down, solve a problem, and do it with grace and style.

And then test and tweak away until you have mastered the art of Search Engine Optimization!

If you want guidance on your SEO strategy or any other of your digital marketing needs Proshark is a full-stack digital marketing agency and software development company.

We are your premier one-stop agency for all of your marketing needs.

Our goal is simple – drive results for our clients our clients.

We deliver the knowledge and skills needed to grow your business and results that help your business thrive!

At Proshark, we know you have a choice and we want that choice to be us. We consider ourselves partners in your business and look forward to making it a journey filled with success.

Do's and Don'ts of Highly Converting Websites

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 14:12:38 GMT

What You Need to Know About Highly Converting Websites and Conversion Rate Optimization

Sometimes we focus so much on our social media marketing and search engine optimization that we forget a hugely important fact: is our website ready for all the traffic we are sending to it?

If you think your site is ready to convert traffic, a good test is to invite a friend or family member (or any third party person) to try to purchase a product or service on your site. What questions do they have?

What problems do they encounter?

The fact is, you are not the best person to test your own website and create a customer journey, because you know your offers far too well.

We have a quick guide here to help you conceptualize all the things you need to do and know about creating a highly converting website.

DO Focus on User Experience

It is amazing to note how many websites simply fail to state the most obvious, foundational message on their homepage: We are X, and we offer Y to people looking for Z.

It’s so simple yet, often people overthink their own messaging, and confuse the heck out of their site visitors.

Make it easy for your visitors to go where they need to go. “Are you looking for Y? Here it is!” Simple yet, many websites offer too many options up front and not enough clarity to guide the audience.

Don’t make users guess what your brand is, what you offer, and what sets you apart from other options in the market. Make clear, bold statements, and follow through on these claims.

DON’T Create a Cluttered Layout

Sidebars! Sliders! Pop ups! Columns of images and text! Very little negative space.

These features can be used advantageously, but not if they are combined to present a million clickable options “above the fold.”

Many people think they need to show everything they are about right up front.

You do not.

You can feature something, you can give your visitor some visual “rest areas” on your homepage, and we guarantee, this will entice people to keep looking, reading, learning, and spending time on your site.

Remember the old adage: “If you confuse, you lose.” Literally, you will lose people. Your traffic will take one look, and if they have to spend more than a couple of seconds trying to find what they need, they will click away and never return.

Clean and contemporary should be your guiding design principles .

If your homepage looks like a flyer, you need to be more strategic with placement and typeface usage.

DO use Catchy Headlines and Calls-To-Action (that actually match!)

Just so we are sure that you’re on the same page, a “ call-to-action ” is usually a button or link that goes right underneath a catchy headline.

“Have you been in an accident, but have been turned away by other injury lawyers?” CALL US TODAY People often fear that if their headlines are too specific, they will lose people who don’t identify with them. However, this isn’t how it works. A good headline will invite everyone to be interested.

In the above example, some people will have been told that they don’t have a case, perhaps, but the rest of the visitors reading that headline will think, “Gee, what would these guys say to me if that were to happen? What sets them apart?”

A good headline will prove that you are different from the “other guys” without actually saying, “we’re not like the other guys.”

Make sure you deliver on what your call-to-actions promise.

In our example, if your first-line responders don’t have anecdotes about how they won a court case for a client who had been previously turned away, they are not likely to come across as trustworthy in that very first phone call.

Remember what your homepage CTAs say, and why, and when someone contacts you, find out right away how they found you so you can make good on your promise.

DON’T Stray from your Brand Colors

Use the services of a professional designer to ensure your brand colors actually align with each other to create a specific look and feel. This is known as having a complimentary palette, and it will cement your relationship with your audience.

Perhaps all your brand colors are on the same tonal register, such as, they are all pastel tones, or they clash strategically to incite a specific feeling such as “rebellious,” or “1980s chic.”

Do some research into the psychological impact of various colors on the Western mind. There are many online resources available on this topic, and you need to understand what moods and feelings you actually have in your paintbox.

Remember, brand consistency (even if it’s just color consistency) breeds comfortability, and comfortability leads to conversions.

DO Set Up Effective Navigation

Organize your content into categories that users can browse if they wish.

Visitors to your website are more likely to actually pull the trigger on a sale if they find what they need early in the user journey through your website.

Easy navigation gives the impression that you know what you’re doing, and you understand your audience very well.

DON’T Fill a Page with Long Paragraphs

It was Shakespeare (ironically) who wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Do not take a paragraph to say something that a single sentence could easily accomplish.

Just like your layout (images, text, containers) you don’t want your site to be cluttered with text. Some people think that if they break up their text with headlines, secondary headlines, and body texts, they don’t need to be ultra-brief.

Nope!

Cut out all secondary headings and get straight to the point. If you need to explain a lot more about a product or service, save it for a secondary page, such as a product page.

Don’t put it on your homepage or top-level pages.

Use strategically injected images and videos to cut up paragraphs of text. For example, don’t say that you offer three main types of services, simply use icons to show the three types of services you offer.

People can figure out what you’re saying based on this layout. If you can say something using an image or an infographic, do that!

DO Make your Site Visually Attractive

In 2017, Vistaprint surveyed over 1800 participants about website aesthetics: 42% said they would not purchase from an “ugly” website. The way your site looks really, really matters and there is a dollar value assigned to your design decisions.

Sometimes, a website isn’t just unattractive, it also lacks compelling graphic design or imagery. The images you use should reflect your brand’s personality and be of the highest quality.

When in doubt, clean and contemporary should be your visual effect.

Images are not the only visual consideration, you also need to think about engaging your audience with interactive content. Use a combination of media to communicate your Unique Selling Proposition.

DON’T Use too Many Images

Many companies make the mistake of having far too many images on their site, hoping to keep things visually stimulating for their audience.

This is a mistake: there should be a nice ratio of images to text to headings to “white” or negative space.

SEO Tip: Search Engines cannot read images, so make sure you are optimizing their titles and metadata to get the most SEO value out of them that you can.

DO Test for Functionality!

It is amazing how many websites are created in a relative vacuum, and released to the public after only one person has tested links and pathways!

404 Pages are common, copy that describes a product and no link to a product page, and other navigational errors are far too standard. Doing this kind of test is often the very first thing that a digital marketing company will undertake.

These errors are commonplace and they lead to high bounce rates and low conversion rates.

Functionality considerations should also include “need-to-know” copy, such as return policies, shipping details, store locators, and product search bars.

DON’T Compromise on Speed

Sites that are slow to load are simply abandoned.

You can easily run a test to see how fast your site is , and there are online tools that will compare

your site to others in your vertical (ie. your competitors). The results can be quite sobering.

Three seconds tends to be the ultimate limit for consumer patience these days. After that time, the little spinning loading ball gets scraped for a site that feels more trustworthy.

A company’s competency is determined in a split second by all of these factors, but speed might actually be the most important first impression that your company will give.

What slows down your site? Well, videos and large images are the main culprits. Website builders might be in a rush, and upload high resolution images that are over 2 MB, for example. Videos may seem like a good idea, but even embedded videos can take up a large amount of load time.

DO Create a Focused Customer Journey

Have you taken the time to map out the customer journey for all your products or services? A well crafted customer journey allows you to know what information and resources your visitors are going to need during the buying process. And more importantly, at what point they’re going to need it.

Providing the right information at the right time is key to creating a high performing digital funnel .

DON’T Forget to Optimize for Conversions

Make sure it is easy to “add to cart” or access social proof such as customer reviews to increase the chances that someone will cross that bridge from being a lead to being a customer.

As you can see, there are a multitude of considerations that could take your site from a 1% conversion rate to a 10% conversion rate. Imagine! Even if you just went from 1% to 2%, you would be doubling your revenue.

Whether it’s site speed, conversion optimization, or designing your customer journey, Proshark is here to help . You have your website, right? If not put us to work for you!

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Website Redesign Checklist: How to Know if You Need a New Website or Website Redesign

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 02:44:35 GMT

How do you really know if you need a new website or a website redesign?

There are a lot of reasons that you may need a website redesign or even a completely new website. Every digital agency out there is telling you to fix this or fix that or that you need to trash everything and start over with them. Some of them have valid claims and some are just trying to drum up business. Naturally you ask yourself, “How do I know if I really need a new website or a website redesign?”

Are websites even really that important?

First, I will share a conversation I had the other day with a prospective client. His website was one of the free ones that aren’t really free and it was pieced together on an antiquated WordPress CMS (Content Management System). A comment he made to me was, “A website is not that important. I never made $100,000 sale on a website.” The skepticism is understandable given all the noise we hear in the marketplace surrounding how much money we can make using our digital footprint.

In our conversation, I pointed out that some websites are built for e-commerce (to bring in money) and some websites are built to increase trust, but almost every single website has become an integral component of the sales process. Regardless, if clients are spending money today, users now visit websites and check out reviews before making a buying decision. In the past, when a prospective client was making a purchase decision, they keyed off their interaction with the representative of the company.

Because technology has opened the world to a much wider offer base, by nature people need to have a way to filter out the excess noise. Now, a prospective client visits your website, your social media and reviews before they make a decision whether to even go to the next step. Once they have gone through the filtering process, they may talk to you as a representative of the company. Then, if you can get them to talk to you, at that point, you have the opportunity to convert them into clients.

My question to the prospective client was this, “I agree that a website does not close a sale, but as a first impression of you and your company, because your website is substandard, how many opportunities to talk to potential clients did you lose?” That prospect is now a good client of ours and it just so happened that he initially came in off of our website.

Are you going to get to the checklist you promised?

We are getting there, but there is one last thing before we do. Above, we demonstrated how important a website is to your business. In the new digital era, your website is your new office. It is where prospects will go to check out your products or services. Your website, as your first impression, is where potential clients will make their decision whether or not to start or continue a conversation with you.

The next most common rebuttal we hear is this, “I have a website and it serves its purpose.” Our response is this, “You have a website and from the face of your website, it may be attractive enough and it may not push prospective clients away, but is it doing what you really need it to do?” As people, when we visit websites, we look at them through a subjective lens and we make assessments of that site based on our personal experiences and preferences.

The Internet sees your website completely differently and this is not always an easy concept to explain.

First comes security. If you are on the largest and most commonly used CMS on the planet with about 42% of the market share, get off before it is too late. Ignoring poor performance, this platform has multiple security breaches and anytime you have plugins built by third parties, it is nearly impossible to control security and you open yourself up to hackers. Hacking is bad now and it is only getting worse. Since COVID, online threats have increased more than 5x and there are an average of 30,000 new security breaches every single day on WordPress sites alone. What is worse, even a minimal loss of data can significantly damage online reputation and put many small companies out of business.

Second, website performance is becoming a key factor in ranking on Google along with most other search engines. Google started with its “Mobile First” initiative, which has now morphed into Core Web Vitals. What started as a way to measure website speed has been incorporated into Google ranking algorithms to promote good performance and penalize poor performance, especially on mobile devices since that is what 80+ percent of the population is using.

We can easily test your site to determine performance levels and even give you a free needs assessment to determine if you meet the new minimum standard of performance. Just schedule a call with one of our experts and we will give you a full performance report.

Another test of performance is stability. If you wake up in the morning dreading opening your site because your CMS updated and you don’t even know if your site will be up and available for your visitors, then you are on the wrong platform. Stability is considered 99.99% uptime, which means that your site, barring extraordinary circumstances, should always be available. In the tech world, there is a methodology behind this called backwards testing and compatibility. Inability to follow this methodology results in down time, broken plugins and even complete site failure.

Finally, there is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is the combination of speed with content and context of your site. It used to be that you create a page with a keyword and that keyword would get ranked based on the word itself and whether that word was relevant to the rest of the site (meta descriptions, title, content and even keyword tags). That was the beginning of Google algorithms. Now it is a completely different animal and fighting the ranking battle takes an arsenal of tools.

Even though search engine ranking is a vast collection of measurements including performance, keyword context, traffic and a multitude of other variables, it can be boiled down into one word – Relevance. In 2021, Google introduced changes to their algorithms that significantly impacted the relevance of many sites, and they are still introducing even more changes that will adversely affect website owners. Going forward, Google will be introducing changes to privacy and data security requirements, more dependence on performance and site hardening (protection against hacking) and an entirely new approach to the concept of cohorts.

If you want to learn more about these changes and how they might impact you, schedule a call and speak to one of our experts.

After taking all the factors above into consideration, this is how the Internet sees your site before a visitor even reaches your front door, but now hopefully you see why it has to be part of the conversation. If spend a fortune on redesign or creating a completely new site and you do it on a platform with poor security or performance, then you are pretty much just burning money.

Checklist: The 10 Website Traps for the New Digital Marketing Landscape

Now that you have a foundation for other factors that can affect your website, we can dive into how we determine if you need a website redesign, if you need a complete rebuild or if you don’t need anything at all. Remember, if you want us to run an assessment for you, there is no charge. You can schedule a call or you can go to our website to fill out a quick request.

1. If you are on WordPress then, from a security perspective, you need to think about switching platforms sooner rather than later.

You can do a simple site migration, you can do a full-blown site relaunch, or you can do anything in between, but most importantly, you need to move to a secure platform. Speak with an expert to find out about migrating your site and potentially making some changes when you do. From an economic perspective, it may make sense to incorporate some highly necessary changes with the migration of your site as a cost saving process. We can help you with this process.

2. Does your website score at least 60 on Google’s Core Web Vitals test?

Go here , put in your web address, then click Analyze and you will get a score for how Google sees your site. A score of 50 is marginal, but if you didn’t get at least 60, then your ranking is most likely getting penalized. Other things that can be impacted by slow loading sites include abandonment, rage clicking, bad reviews and more. Below is a graph depicting where different platforms rank in the performance category. This can be a complex issue so let us know if you have any questions or want to schedule a call with an expert.

3. Do you have a Customer Journey mapped out and designed to lead visitors down a particular path to becoming customers?

This gets often overlooked and is an important component of your analytics. When a visitor comes to your site, they do certain things. If they come from an ad or other campaign, you have about 1.5 seconds before they decide to leave or further interact with your site.

If you are able to keep them on the site, then where do you want them to go? Most website owners just throw up information on a page and don’t have a clue what to do with users as they are browsing through a site. However, the journey your customer takes is critical and something you should pay close attention to when building your site. If you don’t have a customer journey or if the flow of your site just doesn’t lead anywhere, then it is probably time to make those changes.

4. Are your pages keyword coordinated and does your site meet relevant content requirements?

Like we said earlier, it used to be easy. Just create a page with a keyword on it, use the keyword in the first paragraph and then use it 5 to 10 times throughout the page and you would rank. Not anymore. The algorithms have become so complex that even Google has a hard time keeping up with what is required to rank.

Now it is about site relevance. How do your keywords mesh with the rest of your site and how do they compare with your competitors and what keywords is your competition using? To be effective in the digital marketing world, you have to understand every aspect of your digital footprint and how you interact with both your visitors and with other similar sites on the web. If your site does not take these things into account, then it is most likely time for at least a content overhaul. Talk to us to find out more.

5. Is your site generating the data you need to support marketing efforts and to maximize your community?

One of the things we have not discussed in detail here is the move by Big Tech to fence off the data they have control over. When Apple launched IOS 14.5, they flipped the switch on data gathering and tracking by third parties. Now, for Apple, you have to opt-in to be tracked by third party advertisers like Facebook (and all other advertisers that aren’t Apple). They did this in the name of privacy, and everyone applauded Apple for being so in tune with privacy rights. What Apple failed to mention (to everyone) is that now, only Apple can advertise to IOS users so it creates more of a monopoly on their data.

Here is a chart that represents the impact to Facebook ad revenues since the IOS 14.5 launch in April of 2021 (Source: eMarketer | Insider Intelligence).

The hit on Facebook ad revenues depicted above is the result of impact of IOS (Apple) privacy changes and Apple owns approximately 40% of the market. Android (Google) owns the other 60% of the market and they just announced that they are mirroring the privacy actions of Apple by 2023 at the latest. Not a bright outlook for any third-party marketers.

The point here is that data will be vital in the coming years and if you are not collecting data from your consumers now, you will be dependent on Big Tech to provide marketing channels. The time is now to begin gathering information from your customers so you can start construction on the community that will support your business.

6. Are you using disparate landing pages, funnels or external sources of advertising that are siphoning off your web traffic?

Another huge change in how Google (and the rest of the Internet) sees your site is how relevant you are compared to others in your industry. If you aren’t big or don’t own enough space online, then you cannot be as relevant as some of those who own more visibility and traffic, right?

While this may not be the complete truth of online search today, it is clearly heading in that direction. This means that you must “own” 100% of your traffic. Every time you offload a sales funnel or landing page, every time you send someone to your course hosted on a different platform, you are giving away your authority. You need to capture this traffic in your numbers so that whenever you run a promotion or ad, you get the benefit of all the sessions created, not another company. Keep your traffic.

7. Are the analytics you generate enough to tell you what you really need to know?

This is a complex topic that we are going to boil down into a couple of paragraphs for now. Truth is that this topic could easily be a book by itself, but we will do the best we can. First, imagine your website as a blip on a map. You are one in 1.92 billion websites in the world according to a Google search. That is a lot of blips.

Imagine how many of those blips use Google Analytics which is hands down the most popular analytics tool in the market. When you think about it this way, it is kind of scary that Google houses all that information about all of the websites, traffic, visitors and demographics for most of the billions of websites, but remember one thing, this is just the data that they give you access to in their platform.

There is a wealth of information that you may or may not be capturing, but that you certainly aren’t utilizing on your website and most of it is readily available. Imagine if you knew exactly the path that most of your visitors take when they land on your home page. What if you could reverse engineer the actions most of the people who actually made purchases on your site took to get to your store. All of this data is available to you right now, you just didn’t know it. If you want to find out more about capturing this data, simply schedule a call to talk to one of our experts.

8. Do users find information on your site easily or do they have to dig to get product or service information?

It is critical to find the right balance of information when looking at your website content, but equally critical is how the content is laid out or arranged on your site. The best way to think about this is to offer one block of information at a time. While it is enticing to just do a data dump on a page, the result is typically that the reader becomes disoriented or confused about what you are trying to tell them. Make each section clear, clean and simple and don’t make your visitors chase the information. They are trying to buy from you, or they wouldn’t be on your site, so make it easy.

One of the most frequent questions we get for non-ecommerce sites is whether you should post pricing on the site. Here is a simple rule of thumb, if you offer a value ladder that walks up pricing from under $100 up, then make sure you put the basic offers on the site. If you offer limited products or services that are expensive and require justification then don’t put pricing on your site, but encourage the visitor to reach out to you via contact form or by scheduling a call.

If your site is not laid out well, if your content is confusing or not helpful, or if it is difficult for your users to find out about your offers, then you are probably in need of a website redesign. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to know, so if you would like us to perform a free website needs analysis just fill out this quick form and we will get one over to you.

9. Are your Calls to Action simple or difficult? Are there barriers to prospective clients contacting you?

This mistake is not as common as some of the others, but it still deserves attention. Part of this problem belongs in customer journey, part of it belongs in site layout and the rest belongs in content. What happens when you go to a site and they tell you all about the service they offer, but never give you a clear understanding of the next step or “Call to Action”? You quickly become disenchanted with the site and will typically leave before taking action.

The same is true for those sites where you go to a page and there it is, bright as day. A great big, red Schedule a Call button is right there in front of you, but you haven’t been given any context or details about the offer itself. This is just as big a turnoff as not providing a clear path to purchase. These mistakes are a little harder to spot and usually occur when someone not familiar with content flow is creating the site.

The one mistake here that is huge and that we need to call out, is that websites are inexpensive enough to where you don’t really need to do them yourself. In fact, you shouldn’t do the website yourself. Let an expert do it for you so you can focus on building your business. Whether you need a redesign or a completely new website, have it built by someone that knows what they are doing and can deliver the entire package. If you currently have a website, get a free website needs analysis .

Surprisingly, less than 70% of small businesses still don’t have a website so don’t feel bad if you don’t have one yet or if you feel yours is subpar. Talk to one of our experts and we can give you the information you need with no obligation.

10. Does your website demonstrate your values and what your company (or you) finds important in the marketplace?

Finally, the last item on the checklist. This item is one of the most prevalent and missed issues for websites today for inexperienced and experienced web designers and developers today. The reason is not because of their design or development skills. The reason is because the market is changing rapidly and what used to work from a marketing perspective just doesn’t work anymore.

The sheer noise and volume of digital marketing that exists today, even compared to just last year, is unmanageable by the typical consumer. The level of noise and unsolicited activity is quickly forcing changes in consumer behavior that agencies and companies just don’t know how to deal with, especially given the current marketing toolset. If an agency specializes in one form of marketing, then how can that agency know whether their marketing channels will work with your organization? Simple answer is that they can’t.

Consumers, by necessity, apply filters to the noise they hear. This is why you see them validating company experiences via reviews and why you see them investigating companies before the consumer even interacts with the company. You see the number of touchpoints (the number of times a company ad is seen or the exposure to a company) required for the prospective consumer to take action has increased significantly. Companies on the other hand, because they are not informed, are simply trying to throw more dollars at what is not working.

For these reasons, we have started doing things differently. Following the idea that repeating the same action expecting a different outcome as the definition of insanity, a different market demands different actions. The only way to logically approach marketing is to develop custom-tailored plans based on the unique characteristics of a company, its products or services and by matching the values of that company with consumers. Rather than just run blind ads to sell your products, successful companies are beginning to build communities of like-minded individuals, provide them with value as they begin to build trust with the organization leading to a more robust and habitual purchase of products or services.

This means that an agency or marketing department, to represent your company effectively, must know who you are. They will have to know your company culture and what it stands for before they can build campaigns that produce. Agencies will need to intimately know your consumers, your competitors and your products or services before they can recommend marketing channels for that will help you build communities and build deep-value, cost-effective channels that will help you grow.

To learn more about the deep-dive process that we utilize, simply visit the DMSR (Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap) section of our website to see how we dig in and learn everything there is to know about your company and your products and services so we can intelligently recommend a marketing strategy that makes sense for you and your organization. I you would like to explore your options with one of our representatives, simply Schedule a Call here.

Make Press Releases, Interviews and Public Awareness Work For You

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 06:58:51 GMT

Do Press Releases and Public Awareness Pieces Work?

The short answer is "yes, absolutely".

All outreach methods including podcasts, video interviews, e-magazine articles, e-magazine interviews and so many more outbound "press" pieces are fantastic for getting people or other companies to "see you". Getting invited to be on a high-profile podcast or getting an interview or article in a top-tier or mid-tier publication can provide significant exposure to your business. A lot of our readers ask if these channels are still relevant and our answer is that, due to recent and upcoming changes in the marketing and privacy landscape, Public Awareness is becoming even more relevant than it was before.

During the remainder of this year, and by no later than the first part of next year, businesses need to make a dramatic shift in marketing. We have been saying this for the last year now and it is coming true (see "We've Been Telling You About The Google Privacy Transition for a Year" ).

For you, the business owner, this means making major changes to how you get exposure and how you interact with consumers and potential clients. What used to be about just running ads to get new business is morphing into an expertise-based movement to Public Awareness as a starting point that builds into an interactive community who has expressed interest in what you offer.

In other words, paid ads used to effectively cut through the "noise" in the marketplace, but that effectiveness is quickly diminishing. So what now?

Public Awareness is a new buzz word for a reason. Podcasts, Anchor Brand Exposure (Bloomberg, Nasdaq, etc...), Press Releases and other high-exposure, traditional channels are becoming popular again because they help build a brand. Getting your business out over these channels is only half the battle and failing to execute the second half is where most people fall down.

Imagine paying to continuously run ads over some of the major channels and networks. How expensive would that be? Obviously, for most SMB organizations, the idea of continuously running expensive ads is cost prohibitive. Another argument that naysayers use against returning to the more traditional exposure model of marketing is that it doesn't work. This is where most companies don't know how to do what is necessary to make this type of marketing succeed.

So how do they work?

Let's say you run an article or press release through Bloomberg, some other mid-tier, top tier channel or even multiple channels and networks for between $1,000 and $10,000 or more. You get this beautiful write-up published that gives a great description of some unique facet of how you can help your clients. By the way, we can show you how to do this or you can find out more. Just schedule a call with one of our reps.

Or say you even do a high-dollar interview with Forbes or other Tier 1 provider. The piece runs and is perfect in every way. You told all your friends and colleagues and they have 'oohed' and 'aahed' at how great the piece was. The phone might even ring a bit more than usual for a week or two and you may have even gotten some leads, but these are distant leads since they don't have a relationship with your company and in the end they just don't pan out.

You throw up your hands after spending that much money and vow never to do that type of marketing again. Guess what, you are 90% of the population and you missed the most important step in this type of campaign.

How did you miss it and why didn't anyone tell you?

Most PR firms are not digital marketing agencies, but a few smart agencies are becoming Public Awareness firms and a few smart PR firms are partnering with digital marketing agencies. Why? It is the job of the Public Relations firm to get the exposure, not to increase your business directly. They get the article published and then typically move on to the next article or interview. They get paid per each publication so the model makes sense to them, but from a cost effectiveness perspective, it may not make sense for you.

This leads us to the missing piece of the puzzle. The exposure you received from whatever publication you were in is far reaching, but not pervasive. That is, unless you make it that way. Most articles and interviews are evergreen or at least have a reasonable shelf life, but 99% of the time (unless it is a unicorn), your article will not drive major traffic to their channel so they will run it and just leave it there. They have done their job.

It is up to you to promote the article and maximize the authority you received. "What?" You heard it correctly, you have to make the authority stay alive. Some people understand this which is why you see "As Seen On..." on their LinkedIn profile and why you see authority logos on their websites, but that only has minimal impact since people were inbound already.

How can you keep your authority alive and make the most out of your article or interview? Funny you should ask ;)

At Proshark, we are finishing up our Public Awarenes Syndication Service (PASS) that will help you keep the authority alive. There are different levels to PASS, but the primary goal is to take your publication and keep it on the forefront of exposure by getting it in front of relevant audiences to use it as a tool to generate traffic, build interest and increase trust between your brand and the public.

If you would like to know more about PASS, just schedule a call with us.

Telling You About The Google Privacy Transition for a Year

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 18:40:39 GMT

Here's What the Google Privacy Transition Means for You...

The Affects of the IOS Privacy Changes are Already Impacting Digital Marketing

Apple's changes to IOS privacy impacted 40% of the market when they changed tracking from default to opt-in. They now allow consumers to choose whether third-party marketers could see what they are doing online. The ability to track online activity by user has fueled retargeting and pixel tracking for platforms such as Facebook ads and many others since the beginning of digital marketing.

We have been saying for the last year now that Google, who owns Android (the other 60% of the market) would soon follow suit. This closes down tracking and targeting for the rest of the market and leaves third party ad platforms out in the cold when it comes to being able to identify and market to users based on identity.

Google's Privacy Changes are Full Speed Ahead

According to CNBC's article about Google's planned privacy changes , Google just announced that they are enacting the same policies on Android as Apple, which wiped out more than $232 billion in Facebook value alone, not to mention many other third-party ad platforms that rely on the ability to track consumers online. Everybody is cheering on this huge privacy push, but it is a bit premature to break out the champagne.

Here is the bigger news that always seems to get left out of the story.

Why the big push for privacy and why now?

Well, what Apple didn’t tell you was that since the IOS 14 release date (when the new privacy policy was implemented), Apple Search Ad sales have soared taking much of Facebook’s share. Nothing to see here, right? They didn’t let you know that, just because third-party can’t track you, you are still tracked – by them

So What Is the Real Point of the Changes?

Same thing is going to happen with Google and their 60% market share. The rest of the third-party ads disappears for those who are not currently working on solutions. So, what does this mean? It means that, to access Google and Apple users, you are going to have to go through them directly and lack of competition is never a good thing.

There are those of us working diligently on the problem and we are really close to having solutions, but these moves by Big Tech are just an indicator or what is coming down the road. They will continue to fence off their data because it is the most valuable commodity they own.

We've been telling people about this wave of Digital Transformation , start collecting data now before it is all gone. As a company, your community is your strongest asset and you need to start building for that now, not tomorrow. As the old saying goes, "It's best to dig your well before you're thirsty." And from what we're seeing the thirst is already setting in for a lot of businesses.

Step-by-Step Digital Marketing Strategy Development for 2022

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:08:21 GMT

Create a MAP (Marketing Action Plan) and

In the course of a single month, business owners are bombarded with probably hundreds of marketing offers, suggestions and tips from digital marketing agencies just like ours. Are we wrong?

Doubt it. There’s no shortage of quick fix solutions and thinly veiled sales offers written in the language of marketing gurus and single service agencies.

You’re sick of it, we get it.

Here’s the thing though, you are like a general contractor. You’re the big cheese! The head honcho or honcha! You need to know what you and your staff are doing, or not doing, at all times or the house you built will fall down around your ears.

So, we’ve created this document to help you get savvy. There’s no way around it, so we suggest you just buckle up and take 10 minutes for this quick read. Why? Well…

Aren’t you sick of being taken advantage of?

Marketing is a skilled trade that moves at an accelerated pace. If you try to coast along for even 6 months doing what you’ve always done, the landscape can change and suddenly you’ve gone off the road completely. Worse, there’s always someone around to charge you a sizeable fortune to put you right again. Haven’t you had enough?

Understand the basics and spot the silver-tongued highway robbers.

That’s it in a nutshell. General contractors are not experts in drywalling, cement mixing and tiling, but they know enough to spot a good or a bad deal when they hear it. So read this, accept that you have to know it, and reach out to us if you have any questions!

Ready? Ok, great. You just decided to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars.

OVERVIEW

What is digital marketing anyway? Well, it’s the sweet, sweet mix of digital alchemy that makes up the soup that is your marketing strategy. It includes everything from email marketing to landing pages to social media strategy. Basically it is every method that people used to market themselves what seems like 100 years ago, including word of mouth marketing. Then for digital marketing, they just shoved onto the internet. This worked for a little while, but not so much anymore. We are betting that is what your bottom line says.

But it’s not just the final output. Digital marketing strategy includes a whole host of preparatory work that needs to be completed for the emails and social media posts to actually work. THIS is the part that most businesses fail to do when they decide to do their marketing in-house, without any consultancy at all, or they use agencies without a plan. It’s kind of like asking your staff to nail up some boards to make a wall, but the house has no foundation or flooring. You will stay dry (maybe) but you’ll quickly sink into the mud. And growth? Well, let’s just say you won’t ever have a second story.

PREP WORK

Competitive Analysis: Yes, yes, we know...now come the boring words that your eyes glaze over. We’ll make it quick, like ripping off a band-aid. Competitive analysis is looking at what the other guys are doing in order to stand out, not so you can do what they are doing!

This is a common misconception. “Just find a competitor and copy them.” Some marketers actually suggest this. Don’t do that. You need to have a Unique Selling Proposition, which means you have to stand above, not blend in with the crowd. Typically, this is where a SWOT analysis comes in. A good marketer will assess your unique Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in your particular vertical, so you can create messaging that speaks to your unique value.

State of Brand Analysis: Here’s another one that business owners overlook. We promise this is not just a make-work task. It is essential for a marketer to know where to start. In essence, if a digital marketing firm has not audited your social media, read your customer reviews, taken a deep dive into your social media and email metrics, how can they assess your brand?

Analyses should assess the difference between who you want to reach with your marketing and who you are actually reaching, and what the response is. If your brand is a person, a marketer should be able to tell you what that person’s actual character is, rather than who they think they are. It’s kind of a big deal.

Industry Benchmarks: Right, so after assessing where you’re at, you need to know where you are going. What’s the context of your success? If you believe you should be profitable with an email list of 2,000 leads, what’s the basis of that assumption?

A good marketer will be able to tell you that in your industry, you need to reach a certain level of production, distribution, sales calls, asset creation, almost everything you do needs to reach a certain threshold before you can sit back and watch the Benjamins accumulate.

Target Market Analysis: Oh, the warlike language! The militaristic “campaigns”! The overtly aggressive language of marketing! Have you ever wondered why marketing language is so warlike? Well, that’s because of the advertising men and women who returned from the second world war and got jobs on Madison Avenue in New York City, and approached the new “television in every home” reality like they were invading armies in people’s homes.

The actual war is for people’s attention. How could they interrupt your day, and invade your time? The truth is, it is the same as it has always been and not much has changed. You still need to find a “way in” to people’s hearts and minds, but these days it’s more about what particular group of people you care about. As a business owner, asking how you can help your customer while adding value to their lives is what the new marketing is all about,

Understanding all of the above (Competitive Analysis, Brand Analysis, and Industry Benchmarks) is essentially understanding where you are coming from, and who you should target with your marketing copy and strategy .

Customer/Client Avatar Development: Most business owners we work with roll their eyes at this part…that is, until we actually sit down with them and build out an in-depth profile of their ideal customer or client.

Think of it in the context of real life. If you have a roommate, you don’t know much about, you never talk to them about their personal lives, and in your head, they just exist for the sole purpose of paying your rent...how much warmth and friendliness is there when you interact? When we are face to face with another human, we understand the importance of showing an interest in who they are, so we can form a stronger connection. For some reason, when it comes to the people who actually help you pay your mortgage and put your kids through college, there is a resistance to knowing them deeply. Let that go. This is non-negotiable. If you are blasting out content without a crystal-clear picture of the people reading your content, you’re operating in a vacuum because nobody is listening.

Market Pricing Comparison: This is an easy one, but let’s just reiterate that a good digital marketer will be able to tell you who else is in your industry, what they are charging for their services or goods, and why you should be on par with them or possibly even radically higher or

lower than them, based on your USP.

Unique Selling Proposition: We’ve alluded to the USP already, but it’s the thing that sets you apart. “Excellent customer service” is NOT a USP. If it is something that everyone in every industry should be doing and, even if they were (which they aren't), excellent customer service is not a Unique Selling Proposition.

An example of a unique selling position for a yoga studio, for example, is offering free daycare for parents who wish to take their morning class. It is clear, it has value, it is simple, and it makes that yoga studio stand out as being particularly valuable to a certain group of people. Most importantly, it is something other yoga studios most likely don't offer. Another type of USP is a pizza company who says, “30 minutes or it’s free.” That kind of guarantee sets them apart from another pizza company who says, “Ready and hot in 30 minutes or less.”

A good digital marketer will work with you on what you can offer as a USP, because 95% of business owners do not actually have one!

OWNED MEDIA

A lot of the above is intended to optimize your outgoing messaging, as in your emails and social media posts. That is not owned media, and it could also be paid media. But what happens with incoming traffic that arrives on your site, which is owned by you? Are you able to convert leads once they land on your website? And the website itself, is it working for you or is it just sitting there in the digital stratosphere, waiting for YOU to send it traffic?

The following are a list of strategies that any digital marketer should have up their sleeve. A comprehensive strategy includes the following tweaks and boosts.

SEO: The number one way you can make your website work FOR you, rather than you working like a dog to send traffic to it, is Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to have your website as the very first result if someone searches for the type of products or services you offer. Most people understand this much, but it’s important here to list the types of actions that a good digital marketer will recommend:

Page titles: When looking for a page, a search engine such as Google will compare the title of the page to that of the requested search. Therefore, your page titles should be accurate. Don’t attempt to be ironic or funny, just give the engine, and therefore the potential lead, exactly the information that they are looking for.

Meta tags: A meta tag is the summary of the page that is shown in the search engine underneath the page title. It helps the search engine determine whether or not the information they are looking for is there.

URL: The URL for every page on your site should be short but descriptive. The permalink should not contain random characters, symbols or random numbers such as 3498. Search engine robots view this as gibberish and will ignore these types of URLs. Also, your website's directory structure should be simple and easy to navigate.

Optimized use of images: The name of an image, along with the "alt" attribute, tells the search engine what the image is about. If a visitor is unable to access the images on your site the "alt" attribute will display text instead. This gives your page a boost and every image can provide extra keywords which enrich your page content in the “eyes” of search engines.

Appropriate heading tags: If used properly, heading tags really help your website's overall organizational flow and also tell readers when a topic transition is occurring. Trick here, they have to be used properly and they have a clear hierarchy.

Site Health Analysis: Various diagnostic tools exist online that a good digital marketer will make use of, such as heat map apps that can tell you what people do when they land on your homepage.

Google Analytics is another great tool that tells you what the most popular page or blog on your website is, how long people stay on that page, and host of other important information such as who the visitor is, what their age is, where they are located and so on.

Bounce Rate is one of the most important metrics for you to know, for example, as it tells you how many people check out your homepage and leave without looking. You will want to know what percentage of people do this so that if you make changes to your homepage or menu, you will see a positive change in this area over time.

User experience recommendations: Once the overall site health is analyzed, a good digital marketer will make recommendations according to their findings. User experience isn’t a loose explanation of how a marketer “thinks” and user “feels” when they are on your site: it is a data driven recommendation for how to improve your website’s structure so your visitors actually find what they need and you make a sale (aka “conversion”).

Typically, recommendations are along the lines of “less is more,” and you will be asked to simplify your menu options, categorize your site content differently, and also upload smaller images so that your pages load faster, or use a slightly different color palette or font so that your website is easier to read.

A huge recommendation of the past few years is to become “mobile first,” which does NOT mean “you can read the site more or less online.” Mobile-first means that the experience of your website on a mobile device is completely different.

Content is adapted to the format of a phone or tablet. Often this means simplifying your copy even further so your visitors don’t have to scroll forever to get to your footer, removing non-mobile-friendly content such as PDFs and tables, and a host of other recommendations.

Conversion optimization recommendations: Yep, this is the good stuff. Show me the money, right? Your website should automate sales as much as possible for you, otherwise we’d be doing business like we did in the ‘80s, with a notepad, a rotary phone, and a Rolodex. Remove yourself from interactions with your customers as much as possible (while still being intimate and human-centric in your marketing....yes, it’s a paradox. We’ll get into that later).

If you can reduce friction, and capture impulse buys, even if the goal is just to get an email address, your website is working for you. In order to optimize conversions, solid digital marketing will suggest interactive features such as allowing your visitors to schedule a call with you, an ecommerce section for your site to sell digital content, or lead capture forms such as the one you filled out to obtain this stellar document! (Wink wink!)

Traffic capture system layout: This is where a good digital marketer will break out the big guns. Imagine that your website or landing page is the body of an octopus. Working out all the arms of the octopus and explaining to you why each arm is in each separate touchpoint (ie. Facebook, billboards, flyers) and how traffic is funneled from that touchpoint to the correct page on your site, and what then happens once they are on your page...this is the magic of digital marketing. A beautiful, sensible, automated system. Let them come to you! It’s an ambush. Hopefully it’s a love-ambush, but when it comes to conversions, the ambush is the most important part, scarily enough.

STRATEGY

After all the above prep work and analyses, a strategy is born. Once a digital marketer knows your business inside and out, they can make tailored recommendations that fit your needs. Believe it or not, some businesses shouldn’t bother with things like tv or radio ads! True story. Some should focus on email marketing. Yep, you read that right. Most agencies may not be able to fulfill some of these channels, but a good digital marketer will still identify the need and a great digital marketer will fulfill those obscure channels for you.

However, there are digital recommendations that are based around the following areas of focus:

Platform recommendations: As alluded to above, not everyone needs a Facebook Page or Group.

Some might only need a Group, and maybe Facebook isn’t the best place. Maybe one of the newer virtual communities are better for you, such as Mighty Networks or even Clubhouse. TikTok has surprisingly been a huge boon to the trades and manufacturers...something very few people are aware of, but a good digital marketer will know about this trend.

Email platforms are all different too. Some, such as MailChimp, do not have a very beautiful visual approach, but FloDesk is known for having exceptionally useful tools for creating astonishing beautiful emails. Klaviyo is a powerful tool, as you can automate email marketing flows, and they also have an SMS component so you can start texting your customers

A good digital marketer will be experienced in all of these and more, including podcast production, video editing software, and even tools to easily syndicate your content across multiple platforms.

Content posting recommendations: Part of your “tech stack” should include apps that improve your workflow. If you are still creating a piece of content, then opening up multiple tabs, posting natively to each platform, not really scheduling anything...you should probably talk to a digital marketing consultant, like, yesterday. Imagine how much more money you would make if you could work 6 days a week? (Ok, let’s be honest, most business owners work 7 days a week, but you get our point...imagine an 8-day week.)

Posting on one platform that will publish to multiple platforms could easily give you an entire extra day every week, in terms of hours of labor saved. If you’re paying staff to do it, even more reason to save the time!

Content marketing: Who you should be helping with your products and services and how you are capturing their attention is the entire point of your content. Most companies never move past the “inform” stage, and simply tell their audience about boring updates to their business, like a new staff member or a new piece of furniture in their office. BORING.

Many businesses just post about their products, and they think people will be interested enough to click through. Nope! It simply doesn’t work like that, not anymore. People are searching for search terms related to their lived reality. How do I make more money? How do I have kinder kids? How do I make my wife like me again? People are dealing with some serious personal problems, and if you can’t help them with these larger life questions, they are not going to be interested in you.

A good digital marketer will provide you with Blog Topic recommendations and Email campaigns that speak to the pain points of your audience. They will explain how to treat your readers like people, not like potential customers.

Ad budget recommendations: Here’s a giant hint, have one! Simply have an ad budget! It is phenomenal how many times we come across businesses who simply have not accounted for paid advertising at all in their business plan. (Actually...many don’t even have a business plan!)

Most people don’t have a budget, probably because subconsciously, they know this is where they could waste thousands of dollars...sometimes thousands of dollars a day. Should ads be spent on Facebook boosts? Facebook ad campaigns? Google ads ? Google AdWords? Influencers? Affiliate marketers? There is no one answer to these questions. It depends on your business and your resources, such as available staff and production capacity.

Ad targeting recommendations: Ad targeting just isn’t what it used to be. There are changes and trends happening all the time, and social media platform changes such as the iOS.14 update which eviscerated interest targeting on Facebook and Instagram ads, and the iOS.15 update which eviscerated engagement tracking via email marketing.

A good digital marketer will know what platforms and strategies are currently useful and possible and will keep you informed of changes as they occur in this world.

Ad creative recommendations: So...most ads are terrible. Right? You’ve seen them. “I have a thing! Here it is! You can buy it, it’s on sale too!” Snoresville. Good ad creative tells a story, and it’s a story about your audience, not about your product. After working with a good digital marketer, all kinds of stories will emerge from your current audience and from your own memory and creativity.

This is often a collaborative process, with content ideas unleashed by savvy probing and instigating by the marketing consultant. Sometimes these ads can be video, sometimes the ads are simply long-form ad copy recommendations. A story can be told in many different ways.

Landing page recommendations: Not every business, but 90% of businesses will hugely benefit from multiple landing pages . You can have hundreds! Most businesses don’t even have one. A landing page is not a page on your website. Sometimes called a “splash page” or a “squeeze page” it is designed to funnel traffic into a list for email or SMS marketing. Often when you land on a landing page, there is only ONE call to action. Well, two...you can either close the page or fill out a form.

The form could be a request for an estimate, booking a meeting, or subscribing to a list, but usually it isn’t a link to another page. The value of a landing page is that your visitor becomes a lead. This means they do not click a button and read MORE content on your site: they do not leave the page unless they actually give you something in return, and that something is data. Capturing Email addresses are the most common goal of a landing page. Email addresses are called leads, and they remain leads until they are converted to customers. We have WAY more to say on this process below.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ANALYSIS

We’ve alluded to it lots, but to reiterate: the big guns, the main thrust, the...ok that’s enough of the toxic masculinity rhetoric...the largest gift? Ummm….still awkward...ok, the greatest gift that a digital marketing consultant can give to you is crystal clear explanation of how your audience moves through your various channels and becomes a customer, rather than just a lead (or worse, just a visitor).

Top of funnel page value: When people discover you, they are considered to be “cold” traffic. Let’s pretend these are the people at the tip of the octopus’ tentacles, and they are just feeling you out, seeing how much further they wish to know about you. A good digital marketer will be able to recommend the copy, graphics and call to action for your landing pages, OR identify whether top of funnel traffic is totally happy converting via your homepage (usually not).

Behavioral tracking and value analysis is how a digital marketer will determine whether the top of funnel page is working to turn your visitor into a lead, by successfully capturing their email address. In rare cases, the top of funnel traffic converts straight into a customer and skips the process of becoming a lead. But for the most part, this requires prior knowledge of the final product...like if Obama were to offer a one hour one-on-one public speaking session for under $1000, he would be just fine with cold traffic.

Customer trend identification and mapping: Most businesses need to learn and grow and tweak and relearn and grow...it is a data-driven, incremental process that requires testing and retesting. Sometimes changing just one single word on a landing page will alter the conversion rate by a percent or two.

A good digital marketer will assess what your visitors actually do on your landing pages and will be able to map their journey for the purposes of keeping them on the page longer and directing them to accept the call to action.

Channel effectiveness analysis: When you first publish a landing page, you usually promote it across all your social media channels and email and TikTok and from your homepage and on and on and on...eventually, you will want to know which is the most effective means of promotion. As in, “Hey, nobody who got to this page via Twitter converted, but 5% of the people who came here via Facebook did convert. Henceforth, I shall increase my promotion efforts on Facebook! Hurrah!” That kind of thing.

Attribution analysis: The only way you can really know how someone landed on your page is that you tag ‘em. Yup, like a goat or a sheep. Tag ‘em and bag ‘em, as we say in the biz. (Ok, fine, we don’t really.) A tag is like a unique signature that is only useful if you have a robust CRM or Customer Relationship Management tool.

In Intercom, for example, you can see how long a customer has been with you, what their average order is, what their overall order value has been since the dawn of time, and any other attributes that you set up, such as “opened email about losing weight.” Sometimes these attributes can also be UTM tracking info, such as, “first discovered us via Facebook ad.”

KPI ANALYSIS

And here we get to the “good to have” metrics, that make you all warm and fuzzy and your staff all pleased and satisfied, and every stakeholder basically pleased as punch. Are you growing over time? Yes, usually. But a good digital marketer will be able to tell you how and why. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators, and they vary for each business, but generally touch on the following:

Social lift analytics: Vanity metrics are, for example, Facebook Page Likes and Instagram Follows, and generally they don’t mean anything. However, if a potential customer is assessing your business versus “the other guys,” and you have 600 followers and they have 6,000 followers...you do look like you are less on the ball, less established, and less trustworthy. It’s still important to slowly grow over time, and this is a fact that isn’t going away anytime soon.

Website traffic: As with vanity metics, it’s important to know how many people land on your site, so you can track performance over time. Not all of them convert, but if the trend is good, you can at least feel good about the direction and focus on conversion if that is where the snare is.

CVR (Conversion Rate): Usually, this is the most important KPI that a business owner wants to know, and we are assuming you know what this means. How many people land on your site and then decide to pull out their wallet and give you their hard earned dollarbucks? This is CVR. Usually a healthy CVR is around 10%, but it really depends on the industry.

CPA (Cost per Acquisition): Beware the CVR without also assessing the CPA! Imagine that you are spending $40 on Facebook ads just to get one person to purchase your item that is worth $60. After you account for staffing, shipping, and all your overhead expenses, you are probably losing money on that item. Therefore, a good digital marketer will say, “Heyo, don’t spend money on ads for that product. Bundle it with some other products, mate, or you’ll lose the shirt off your back.”

As a general rule of thumb, your CPA should be less than half the value of the item you are selling. An eternal rule of business is, the person who spends the least amount of money to acquire a customer, wins.

CPC (Cost per Click): This is where some of that acquisition cost comes in. CPC or Pay-per-click is an advertising model in which you, as a business owner, pay a publisher (such as Google) when your ad is clicked. Usually this is for top-of-funnel traffic, such as Google Ads or remarketing campaigns...it’s basically the digital form of interruption marketing and it’s going out of style in a big way, in favor of good content that gets organically shared.

Why SMB's Should Hire an Agency for Their Digital Marketing Strategy

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:31:02 GMT

Snakes, Vines, and Pits...The Challenges of Digital Marketing Explained

Have you ever walked through a jungle? Maybe you can imagine it. The quicksand, the roots that trip you up, the predators stalking you, the dark, dense foliage…

Yeah, so that’s the internet. Full stop. Do not pass go.

The vast ecosystem of platforms, apps and tools available to the small to medium business (SMB) owner to choose from for their marketing has never been more dense or populated. It’s almost impossible to figure out which social media platform will help your business grow, and which is just throwing money at quicksand...which task you need an agency for, and which should be handled in-house.

Security and redundancy have never been more important. The number of companies we’ve worked with who are rebranding after they were hacked, or who built a whole network on a platform that disappeared, is staggering. (Remember Google+? Vine?)

With all of these perils lurking ahead, behind, above, and below, you need one simple thing to get through to the other side: a reliable map.

Of course, a map is only useful if it was charted by someone who knows the way. Which is where we get to the point. If we could summarize what digital marketing agencies (DMAs) do in metaphorical terms it would be this:

“A Good Digital Marketing Agency helps determine your destination, assesses the terrain, and provides a map to get there as quickly and safely as possible. A great one takes the journey with you.”

It is very important that you understand these three stages in that process, so let’s dive further into this metaphor. Your DMA is a proverbial guide through the jungle.

A Digital Destination: Do I really need to set one?

We love SMB owners. You are adventurous people, able to take risks and set out into the unknown!

Your charisma and visions are extraordinary, and infectious. But, most of you are quite comfortable not knowing where you’re going. You love the journey, and you have faith that you will get somewhere if you keep striving. The problem is, your staff aren’t so thrilled following you around and around in the jungle in a circle. And it’s easy for your audience to get lost in that process as well.

So that’s where a Digital Marketing Agency comes in.

What’s the end goal? What are some of the landmarks to know we’re going in the right direction (KPIs), and what are some ways we can measure progress (stats and metrics)? Owners often hate this process, but their staff and team members absolutely need it because they cannot read your mind. They want to know exactly what the goal is, and how to measure their own value and success along the way. Equally important is consistency with your messaging so you can capture inbound organic traffic. Then making sure you capitalize as much as possible off of that traffic.

Assessment: Why can’t I just wing my marketing?

Woe to the business owner who thinks, “Hey, my uncle Vince owned a business, I’ll just ask him for advice and save money.” Think back to our metaphor of a DMA as a guide through the jungle. Are you more likely to want a guide who has one tour under their belt, or a guide who has twenty or thirty tours? How about two to three hundred tours?

The value of working with a DMA stems from the experience they bring. They have been through the jungle so many times that they can actually draw you a map.

Most SMB owners are starting their first business, or maybe their second, but a DMA has had experience with hundreds of businesses. They’ve seen strategies that work over and over again, and they can see how you stack up against the competition, and against the elements working against (or for) you.

Cartography: Who needs a digital map anyway?

Don’t really want a map for my digital strategy? Why don’t I set out and hope for the best?

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but history has shown that this doesn’t usually go well. You’ve heard the stat about how 90% of all businesses fail, and it’s no secret why: they ALL hoped for the best.

The ones who make it, that glorious 10% who are buying boats and sending their kids to Harvard, those are the ones who had a plan and stuck to it. They used a map, which means they didn’t waste time. They didn’t go down side roads and dead ends. They didn’t pay a bunch of money for a bunch of useless tools to stuff into their packs, dragging them down and slowing their progress.

We might be getting a little wrapped up in the metaphor, but you catch our drift. You’ll never see a seasoned adventurer set out without a compass, a map and usually even a guide, so don’t just hope for the best in the jungle of the internet either.

Here’s some even better news: a DMA, at least a good one, doesn’t just hand you any old map.

They craft one for your unique business circumstances and priorities. They will take the time to understand your weaknesses and strengths, as well as understand the current market trends. They identify where you have gaps and where you can optimize your current marketing efforts. A true Full-Stack Digital Marketing Agency will provide you with tailored advice based on communication with you, your data, and the experience they bring to the table.

To summarize, the internet is a jungle because it is growing and changing every day. You might be one of the lucky 10 that can hack your way to the other side successfully eventually, but it will take you several times longer than if you had an experienced guide and an accurate map of the best ways to go.

If you are a DIY business owner, and you have all the resources and time you need to keep hacking away until you get there, then great! We salute you and we will continue to post insights, share resources, and be available for your questions along the way.

But we all know most people don’t have that kind of time or those type of resources.

If you want to see growth and profitability, connect with a Digital Marketing Agency, like Proshark that can provide you with a digital roadmap and a strategy for the journey. You’ve put in this much work, let’s charge ahead together with confidence!

10 Ways a Marketing Agency Can Help Your Business

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 17:59:00 GMT

While the benefits of hiring an accountant or bookkeeper for your business may seem obvious, the benefits of a full-service marketing agency may not be so clear. Yet in today's digital environment, there are few things you will hire for your business more important than a digital marketing agency. And with all of the options out there, it's probably also one of the most difficult areas to hire in. Here are a few ways that a marketing agency can help your business and what you should consider when hiring one.

Marketing Strategy

This is the most obvious way in which a marketing agency can help your business succeed. Trying to successfully grow your business without an effective strategy can lead to chaos and unpredictable results. Sadly, over 40% of businesses approach marketing this way. We recommend a different approach. A full-service marketing agency can help your business implement a guiding strategy that will create cohesiveness across all aspects of your marketing. Each piece will work in agreement with the next.

When hiring a digital marketing agency ensure they have a full team at your disposal to help you implement that strategy and bring it to life. Also ensure that they are approaching your strategy from a holistic view. Today's consumer is mostly digital savi and are expecting the brands they do business with to be present and engaged on the platforms that they are.

Brand Identity

A marketing agency can help you get to the heart of what you do and why. This is key to creating a brand identity that will drive every aspect of your brand including how you sound, how your website looks, how your employees answer the phone, and even the elevator pitch you give to a prospective client.

Your brand identity is much more than just a logo. It includes several key components including creative development, brand standards and guidelines, brand differentiators, a brand personality and tone, copywriting, graphic design, logo development, and competitive analysis. With a team of experienced marketers, you can nail down your business’ specific brand identity and create a brand strategy that is the driving force behind your business.

Website

The third way a marketing agency can help your business is with professional web design, development, and management. Generic websites no longer cut it in today’s business world. Customers are looking for a web experience that is easy to use and answers their questions quickly. A marketing agency can help you design a site that is professional and visually appealing. They will also be experienced in the latest web technology to make sure your website functions at peak performance while meeting your customers’ expectations.

Choose a full-service marketing agency, that provides peace of mind knowing someone is managing your website at all times and is able to show you what gains you are making. As the hub of all your digital marketing activities, it’s imperative that your website is kept up to date and glitches are prevented or resolved quickly and you should only choose an agency that is able to provide that level of service and has a track record doing so.

Search engine optimization

Over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine result. If your business cannot be easily found on Google and other major search engines, it could be missing a large number of new customer opportunities. A marketing agency can help ensure your business is visible online through keyword research, site architecture optimization, and creative content creation.

Ensure that the agency you choose is up to date on all the latest SEO changes. That they understand Core Health Vitals and what that means for your site's rankings. What the latest Search Algorithm update is and what the impact to your site is. Not to mention they should understand all aspects of local, on page, and off page SEO.

Pay-Pe r-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) management platforms like Google AdWords allow businesses to place sponsored ads in search engine results, typically on the first page. The benefits of PPC advertising are numerous but managing it can be overwhelming and time-consuming for many small businesses.

A marketing agency should be able to not only manage PPC advertising for you, but also assess your business’s current position in the marketplace, perform competitor analysis, and look at how your customers view and talk about your products in order to create a customized campaign that will generate more sales and leads.

Content Creation

Content creation is one of the best ways to generate buzz around your business today. Whether it’s through blog posts, white papers, social media content, e-books, infographics, or case studies, content marketing is a great way to build brand relationships online. The problem is it is probably one of the most time-consuming methods of marketing out there. As a business owner, having a dedicated marketing agency managing your content marketing program can be invaluable if they are equipped to produce a variety of content types. Choose an agency that is adept at a wide variety of content medium and how they play into each level of the customer journey.

Video Creation, Optimization, and Syndication

Video can help boost your business’s success in social media and search results by generating leads and improving engagement. It’s no longer reserved for businesses with an extravagant marketing budget either. Choose a marketing agency that has a team of marketers who can handle video production from strategy, script-writing, and production to sharing the videos post-production.

The agency should be not only able to syndicate your video content but also optimize the copy and format for conversion and SEO.

Social Media Marketing

Social media may seem like an easy thing to manage in-house but building an effective social media presence takes time and effort. That’s where a marketing agency comes in. From determining the right platforms to join to creating content calendars, a social media team can help develop a customized strategy for social media success.

Collateral Design and Creation

An effective brand presence is one that works consistently across all marketing channels – including print collateral. Well-designed marketing collateral, like business cards, sales sheets, brochures, or banners, can keep your business top of mind with consumers and help them make educated buying decisions. A marketing agency can help you create pieces that fit seamlessly and cohesively into your brand standards. They will keep all of your brand pieces on file so new pieces can be printed easily and quickly.

Analytics

A marketing agency can provide your business with the resources, software, and analytics to report on the success of your marketing strategy once it’s implemented. Marketing shouldn’t be guesswork. Hiring an agency to regularly examine the data and analytics and then interpret them into actionable steps is an invaluable resource for any business.

In the end, having a marketing agency means having a team of innovators dedicated to the growth and success of your business. While you’re focusing on what you do best, a team of web developers, copywriters, designers, and account managers are working on your behalf to develop and grow your brand through customized strategies. If you haven't found the right Digital Agency for your business, find out what Proshark can do for your business.

source Addison Clark

Do Looks Really Matter... For My Website?

jordan@proshark.com (Jordan Phillips) — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 15:23:07 GMT

How important is your website's design to potential clients?

We've all heard it before: "You only get one chance to make a first impression." This saying is typically used in the context of meeting someone for the first time and trying to find out what they are like. The same holds true when people visit your website for the first time. If you want visitors to become customers, then you need to focus on making sure your site has what they're looking for in a business's website.

The reason why many businesses fail at increasing their conversion rate of visitors to customers, is because they spend too much time trying to increase traffic without focusing on converting that traffic into sales or leads. In this blog post, we will discuss 11 ways that you can improve your website's design that will increase conversion rates and generate more revenue for your business!

We have all thought it before, whether you're struggling with yet another site builder or just staring into the empty abyss of whitespace on your current site. We have all wondered the same thing: Are my customers really going to care if this isn't perfect? Well the answer, like everything else in life, is a complicated yes AND no.

Today's consumers are more digitally savvy than ever before in history. Traditional buying behaviour is transforming. We are watching the percentage of online sales continue to climb year after. This is even more true since COVID pushed so many consumers to online purchasing.

While they might not have a programming degree or advance marketing degree, consumers know what they're looking for when it comes to a business and its website. If your business doesn't have a well designed website, you are likely losing out on potential customers.

So what are your site's visitors looking for when they come to your site?

#1. Website Functionality

Many consumers want to get a feel for your business right away. This means that your site needs to function properly and load quickly. They don't have time to wait around while the page loads. If it's taking too long, they'll likely move on from your site in search of something else that meets their business needs better.

Take into account all devices when designing a websites functionality or you will lose out on potential customers who are using smart phones or tablets as opposed to desktop computers when visiting sites online.

In addition, make sure there is easy navigation between pages on your site so visitors can easily find what they're looking for without having trouble navigating through tabs and menus trying figure out where each link leads

Does everything on your site, work the way it should?

Do all the buttons go to the right places?
Are all the links in proper working order?
Do all the contact forms actually go to an email you will check and answer?
Is your information and pricing all accurate and up to date?

All these things contribute to a client's ability to get to know you through your site.

Every click is them asking questions about you, your company, and your product or service and every time something doesn't work on your site, you jeopardize them leaving and never returning.

Its less about how appealing the button or form is and more about if it will properly serve its purpose for the client.

#2 . Customer Journey Organization

While it can be easy to get excited over all the content you want to put on display for you and your business, it is crucial to keep it organized. Websites should tell a story and lead the potential customer along their customer journey in a way that supports it.

There should be an ebb and flow of information, interactive forms, and product displays. This allows the consumer to browse your site without getting overwhelmed or breaking trust. When the organization isn't there, one of two things usually tend to happen in a customer's mind.

The first is that the become overwhelmed and inundated with too much info too fast. They can't focus on the key parts of your brand or product/service and that breeds uncertainty

and hesitation about doing business with you. Nothing shuts a sale down faster than confusion.

The second possibility is that you break trust with that potential client. If they don't feel secure on your site and are not given the ability to feel like they are in control of the sale, the unspoken trust that comes with e-commerce sales can shatter in an instant, something we should hope to avoid at all costs. Organize your content in a way that is clear, concise, and easy to process to help avoid losing these potential sales.

#3. Quality Site Content

While cool graphics, designs, and text fonts are all great additions to a site, they cannot compare to the importance of the pictures/images on your site. Use photos that give a real sense of your business and also appeal to the people you want as customers. Use high-quality images with clear, crisp resolutions, because this is one way consumers judge whether or not they can trust a business based on its website design.

While there are a couple minor exceptions, (i.e. customer product review photos, client testimonial photos, etc.) a mediocre image should be avoided at all costs. A bad photo will make your business look unprofessional and untrustworthy, so it is important to have a good eye for choosing the right images to represent you.

If custom photos aren't in the budget for your business, use appropriate paid or free stock images in their stead. Thankfully technology allows most of us to have access to amazing, high-quality images at the click of the button, but there are lots of other photo resources available should you need them.

Site content doesn't just stop at the quality of your images. The quality of the information you provide on it is also being judged. Does your site's blogs and resources answer the questions that the visitors are going to ask themselves along their customer journey? Does it help guide them along the difficult journey of deciding what product/service will fit their need and

why your business is the one that can best serve them?

And does it answer those questions in a presentation and format that they can most relate with?

#4 Website Navigation

Another thing business owners should consider when creating their website design is how easy it is for customers to navigate. When people visit a website, they expect everything to be where it’s supposed to be and easy to find; if not, they will quickly leave and go somewhere else. Navigation includes having clear menus with concise labels and using an intuitive layout that makes sense (e.g., make it easy to find your contact information instead of burying it at the bottom of your site).

Make sure that all key information and important resources are highlighted and easy for visitors to navigate to. Avoid making the overall flow of the site being confusing towards site visitors or they will lose patience and simply leave.

#5 Clear CTA's

Potential customers don't want to have to wonder around your site blindly. They would like to be guided on the customer journey in a way that supports their purchasing process. Placing clear and concise CTA's throughout your website can help with this.

CTA stands for Call To Action, which is a term used in marketing to describe an instruction given to the viewer of a commercial or advertisement to provoke an immediate response, usually involving the purchase of a product or service. In website design, these are buttons, links, or text that encourages visitors to do something such as subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper, or make a purchase.

Make sure your CTA's are:

Easy to see and understand
Located prominently on each page
Designed in line with the overall look and feel of your site
Written in persuasive language that entices customers to take action

At the end of the day how your site looks should reflect you and your business. It should be a place you are proud to show off rather than a URL you cringe at on the back of your business card. While it doesn't have to be anything extravagant or ostentatious, keeping it functional, organized, and quality-focused, with an eye towards conversion points can help you reach your business reach more people and convert them into customers more efficiently.

Concerned at whether your site is making the right impression or optimized to turn visitors into customers?

Let our team of experts take a look and give you actionable recommendations on how to boost your online sales.

Find The Right Digital Marketing Agency For Your Retail Business

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 16:59:04 GMT

Retailers have many disparate tasks to complete in a day. From restocking store shelves to fulfilling orders to inventory management, retail entrepreneurs have plenty to keep them busy.

One item that tops many retail to-do lists is marketing their products, but unless you have a background in the discipline, digital marketing can be an intimidating task for merchants whose time is already overextended.

Digital marketing is a wide umbrella encompassing a number of subcategories, including content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising (among many others). Many business owners already have too much on their plate, so it’s difficult to master all these functions and expertly execute them on a regular basis.

Most companies need help with some digital marketing function, particularly generating leads and traffic for their business.

Rather than struggling to do everything yourself, it may be time to consider bringing in a pro. Hiring a digital marketing expert can make the job easier and provide a great return on your investment.

The Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketer or Agency

An agency or freelancer can help retailers with a range of services, from redesigning a complicated ecommerce site to running a national campaign.

Here’s one example from a digital agency that recently helped a footwear brand increase overall revenue and returns on investment for its retail business through a paid marketing campaign.

Digital services for this client include paid marketing, audience building and refinement, growth planning, and campaign development and optimization.

Assess Your Needs and Budget

Before you outsource your digital marketing, establish your objectives and decide what role a digital agency will play in helping you achieve your goals. Are you launching a new product or trying to reach a new market? Are you rebranding in the hopes of growing your business? Are you ready to invest in paid social ads to increase your direct-to-consumer revenue?

Other questions to ask yourself before speaking with a digital marketing agency include:

What is your budget for digital marketing efforts?

How much time do have to invest in working with a digital marketing agency?

If you have an in-house marketing team, what is your team good at, and what areas do you need help with?

Understanding your own needs will allow you to give potential marketing partners a concise idea of your objectives and budget.

Do Your Research

Look for an agency with case studies of work with past clients it’s willing to share. Choose a partner that has worked with companies like yours before. That could include agencies who have worked with retailers or even other merchants in your specific niche.

Also, ensure their marketing specialization aligns with your goals. For example, if you want to ramp up your company blog, look for a digital marketing agency that offers content writing, blogging, and SEO services — not one whose primary focus is paid social ads. An agency can have an impressive track record and still not be the best fit for your specific business.

Be sure to choose an agency that keeps up to date with the latest digital marketing trends. Experience is valuable, but the digital landscape changes every day, and it is important your future partner knows how to keep up.

Be Sure the Agency is Transparent

Lack of transparency should be a red flag. When you look at an agency’s website, look for its address, client list, and an in-depth about page. If you feel like the agency is hiding something or you have to dig for information, your intuition is likely right.

If you ask them for case study examples and they don’t have anything to share with you, they might be hiding the fact that they haven’t successfully delivered the results they claim they can achieve.

A digital marketing agency with proven success should also have no problem providing you with a few references. Companies that have had a positive experience with the agency will be happy to speak with you and recommend their services.

If you see testimonials on the agency’s website, that’s also great social proof. It is still a good idea to speak with past and present clients to better understand how working with the agency can help your business grow.

Don’t Rush Decision Making and Think About the Long Haul

It is important to view your work with a digital marketing agency as a strategic partnership that can help you grow your business long-term. Finding the right partner can take time, but it is better than making an impulsive decision and hiring an agency that doesn’t understand your business or whom you don’t enjoy working with.

An agency relationship can range from six months to spanning multiple years, depending on your needs.

Choose the Best Value, Not the Best Price

Picking a digital marketing agency just because it offers the cheapest rate could hurt you in the long run. Take time to compare price versus the services offered, then choose an agency that’s the best fit for your business.

Moving Forward with Finding the Right Digital Marketing Agency For Your Business

In the end, the most important questions to ask yourself about a potential digital marketing partner are: Can they get the job done? Can I afford their fees? Will I like working with them? If you can answer yes to these three points, it will be easier to build a long-term relationship with your agency and partner in scaling your business.

by Alexis Damen, Shopify

Why a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy Is Vital for SMB’s Today

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 16:58:56 GMT

Are you a small business owner wondering how you can continue to capitalize on your online marketing efforts despite the many changes happening every day? Were you hit by recent changes to the Google algorithm ? Or have you lost your entire retargeting audience thanks to new privacy changes?

If so then you're in the right place. Because, while digital marketing strategy for small businesses might not be what it used to be, it's still vitally important to your business.

Your small business digital marketing strategy must be on point if you want to scale your business in today's environment. Keep reading to learn why having a cohesive strategy is more important now than ever.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing includes any campaign in which you use the internet to connect with your audience to promote your brand or business. It is an umbrella term that can combine several different tactics including email marketing, social media marketing, organic SEO marketing, and paid advertising online.

As a small business owner, you might wear many hats, but you're not a startup anymore and you can't continue to bootstrap your business. It's time to start outsourcing certain aspects of your business, and your digital marketing strategy is a key area for you to consider working with an expert.

And if you've recently been hit by the many changes in the Google algorithm or the push for new privacy laws then you might be wondering if your digital marketing efforts are still worth it.

Why Having a Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses Is Necessary

Digital marketing has become increasingly critical for small businesses. With the explosive growth of social media, online search engines, and mobile devices it’s hard to imagine a world without digital marketing. SMBs are constantly working on ways to find more customers through various mediums while keeping costs low. Having an effective digital strategy can be so useful because it provides insights into where future opportunities lie as well as what works best in specific situations.

With all the changes happening in today’s rapidly changing technology landscape like exponential growth of social media platforms such as Facebook & Twitter, increased usage of smartphones which makes product discovery easier than ever before while allowing consumers to make purchase

decisions quickly. It also gives companies access to valuable customer data allowing them to map out what is the most effective approach to their audience and who that audience actually is.

Increasing The Right Traffic Increases Sales

The first reason that digital marketing is integral to the growth of your small business, is the need for more traffic to your website. Your website is your digital storefront. You need new traffic each month to stay in business and not just new traffic, but the right kind of new traffic.

You can get this with a robust digital marketing strategy that is well designed, executed, and well-targeted. Increasing well-targeted traffic to your website will bring you new leads which will, in turn, lead to increased sales.

What if you could promise your sales team new qualified leads each and every month?

Digital marketing is the solution that can provide this for your business.

There are 5.4 million Google searches per minute, 325.65 million per hour, 7.81 billion per day, 54.71 billion per week, 237.75 billion per month, and 2.85 trillion per year

Inbound Organic Search Traffic Converts Better

As you gro w your traffic, it’s important that your sales team reaches out to qualified leads every week. The best way to ensure they have the right kind of leads is a strategy that includes search engine optimization (SEO). Organic search engine traffic tends to convert better because over 80% of people said they searched for a product before purchasing one. If you come up in searches with the information someone needs to make an informed decision about buying something, then they are much more likely be receptive when receiving offers from your business

Digital Marketing Is Cost-Effective

On average, digital marketing is more cost-effective than other forms of outbound marketing. Traditional forms of marketing included large budgets for television advertising, billboards, and magazine spreads. Unfortunately, only large brands could compete in such a market.

Luckily for you, today small businesses across the country and even the globe, can compete for their share of the marketing pie thanks to digital marketing. Organic traffic through search engines is free once you’ve written the content. And social media offers an avenue for connecting directly with your audience every day with the exact information and resources they’re looking for.

An expert marketing agency can guide you through the challenges of creating an online presence and help you to reach your target audience. Now is not the time abandon your strategies – adjust them to what’s working instead and that’s what a comprehensive digital marketing strategy will allow you to do!

Social Marketing Increases Awareness and Engagement

Thanks to social media marketing you can reach your audience any time of the day or night. People are on their phones increasingly more each year. Today, more than 50% of the world’s population is on social media for an average of 2.5 hours each day.

If you want to reach your audience, you must be present and engaged on social media. People want to work with businesses they trust. And the best way to build that trust is to interact with them on social media.

Don’t post to your feed each day and then disappear. Instead, take the time to reply to any comments from the next day or answer any questions. Reach out to anyone who tagged your business and thank them personally.

This sort of personalized connection is what your audience is looking for when it comes to choosing who they do business with. They want to feel a sense of community with the companies that they are hiring.

Marketing Automation Allows You to Scale

Are you still posting to social media manually each day? When do you write your marketing emails, the day of your sale or in advance? If you’re not creating and scheduling your marketing material in advance, then you will never be able to scale your business.

Automated marketing is the key to moving your business to the next level. You can’t continue to create content the day you want to publish, post or send it. This leads to haphazard content that doesn’t lead your audience to your end goal.

This sort of fragmented marketing approach is the reason why so many small businesses don’t see the kind of results they want from their marketing campaigns. When you work with an expert agency you will first work on creating your campaign goals and then creating content that naturally leads your audience towards those results.

You Need a New Cohesive Strategy

As you can see now is the time to look at adjusting marketing strategy to what is actually working in the changing digital landscape. Change is inevitable in business. And the businesses that can adapt are the ones who succeed in the long run.

It can be hard to create a solid digital marketing strategy for small businesses. You have a business to run, and you don’t have time to keep track of all the new changes or updates. Instead, work with a digital marketing agency so you can get back to working on your business instead of spending all day on the internet.

If you’re ready to see how we can help you scale to the next level, regardless of what new changes may come, reach out to us today to schedule your free discovery call.

The New Era of Digital Marketing and What It Means for SMB's

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:58:58 GMT

Public Policy on Privacy and How It Will Impact Marketing

While it seems that privacy is just now having an impact on digital marketing in the United States, the move towards privacy has been gaining steam to the chagrin of advertisers, marketers, and agencies ever since the enactment of the GDPR in the EU back in April 2016. Since the beginning of the Internet, there has always been policy surrounding protection of privacy on the web. It was loosely framed and rarely enforced until the European Union took a far more drastic approach to privacy protection with the passing of the GDPR. In fact, this move became the genesis of a renewed effort toward global privacy enforcement. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation – European Union) is a set of regulations they passed enforcing strict guidelines for the use and collection of personal data. Any company doing business in the EU must follow all GDPR regulations. Out of the actions that have been taken stateside, the most notorious move to privacy in the United States came with the highly publicized CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act – California, USA) enacted in June of 2018, replacing the Consumer Right to Privacy Act, a more vague and flawed version of the CCPA.

Both the GDPR and CCPA have yet to be enforced to a Draconian level, but things are constantly moving in that direction.

These laws, supposedly for the purpose of protecting consumers, in reality are tools in the belts of each respective government that can be used under the guise of privacy protection for the purpose of going after any company doing business online. Understanding the market was in the direct path of a push to privacy policy, this is where Proshark, and other “knowledgeable” agencies, began pushing the concept of “Community”. Operating within a sphere of known individuals and companies collectively pursuing a goal of conducting business primarily within groups or associative collections of individuals and businesses.

Utilizing resources on a collective basis is the best and only way to circumvent the need to succumb to privacy policies coming down the road.

This push to community began before the passing of the CCPA in 2018 because the writing was clearly on the wall with regard to where the United States and therefore, the major tech players were heading.

The problem is that too many businesses and agencies got caught behind the curve and are now either scrambling to catch up or declaring the billions they have spent on ineffective marketing as a sunk cost.

Today, as two of the most prominent tech companies in the US begin changing the way American companies market to their consumers, we are seeing only the beginning of a paradigm shift.

The current trends are just the tip of the iceberg. More and more tech companies will fall into line as this shift continues to gain momentum. The end result is definitely in favor, by default, of consumer privacy.

The fallout to the digital marketing world will be significant for those who are not prepared.

What used to work yesterday for generating marketing ROI, will not effectively work tomorrow.

What does this mean for agencies?

The number of agencies over the past five years has exploded. The most aggressive ramp up during the COVID period of 2020 to 2021. When labor markets shifted and people needed to find a job. Many businesses were founded or moved online, leading to a tremendous need for digital marketers – those who knew how to market to the online consumer. Much like when real estate markets heat up, everyone and their mother becomes an agent and an expert in real estate. The same is true of digital marketing. Everyone moved to the new money and everyone became a digital marketing expert overnight.

So what is the problem with the oversaturation of marketing “experts”?

The problem is twofold. First, the majority of digital marketers are not experts. They won leads and accounts by default, but businesses eventually found out the hard way that most digital marketers could not get themselves out of a paper bag with paid ads. Add to that the absurd amount of sheer “noise” in the marketplace. The amount of emails, ads, communications, paid ads, retargeting and other means of connecting, and Marketing Return on Investment can’t help but drop significantly. Second, Digital marketers, at least the inexperienced ones, don’t know what to do so they continue with the same methodologies in a dying landscape.

"At the end of the day, more 'noise' will not win."

Work with agencies that understand the digital marketing landscape.

Finally, develop a Marketing Strategy with an agency that understands the importance of a surgical approach in today’s market. Your strategy is more important than ever in this changing environment so find an agency that will dig into your business to truly understand it and then make recommendations customized to your specific requirements. This way you will not waste your time or your money, because many of the techniques that worked even last year are no longer viable.

Where is the Proof of this great marketing transformation?

This all sounds like great theory, but where is the proof that things are changing? This is a valid question and one that is easy to answer. If you need evidence that the rug is getting pulled from under your feet, simply take a look at what the major players are doing that will negatively impact online advertising. This is what we call “Doomsday Marketing”, not because marketing is dead, but because the fallout resulting from the changes below and those to come shortly will drastically reduce the number of digital marketing agencies and drastically reduce effectiveness of online efforts to reach consumers. That is, unless you are prepared.

Who pays the price of ineffective marketing agencies?

Companies trying to sell their products and services using methodologies that have not adjusted to a changing market.

What can your business do to thrive in this new reality?

Shift your thinking and create a mid-term (1 year) specific Marketing Strategy.

Don’t know how?

We can help.

Coming back to “Community”, this will be the keyword for the rest of the 2020’s and probably beyond.

Work to build or enter a known sphere of business with a common purpose or goal in order to build a following loyal to your product or service.

iOS 14 Pixel Apocalypse

One of the most recent public changes was the adjustment to the privacy rules by Apple. This is where Apple made it a requirement that their consumers must actively allow tracking and activity sharing before Apple will allow pixels and cookie tracking on an iOS device.

What does this mean for marketing?

Because most people will not allow this type of tracking by choice, ads like FB retargeting become useless since no pixel can be placed to track a user’s behavior. Impact: FB and other pixel tracking technologies no longer provide the ROI necessary to justify expenditure on FB ads. This means advertisers are looking for any means possible to reach their target markets with initial and retargeting ads. Intuitive agencies have come up with multiple solutions to address this issue and they work with their clients to develop the most effective resolutions.

Google Ecosphere

While Apple changes are the most broadcast in terms of public knowledge, the more dangerous megalodon lurking in the waters is Google. Apple is overt and well-publicized while Google is making smaller, more insidious changes that are designed to improve their ecosystem as much (if not more) than protect the privacy of their consumers.

Google Android

Google is soon to follow suit with iOS on android platforms in regard to pixel and cookie tracking. While Apple is doing this for the sheer privacy protection of their consumer, Google is doing this with a dual purpose in mind. First is their pursuit of privacy, but more importantly for them is the control of their advertising ecosphere and the business oriented participants on their system. With regard to privacy, Google is cracking down on advertisers for more control of advertising, plus they are projected to come out with their own privacy adjustments shortly, to follow suit with iOS. There is a great deal of activity surrounding Google in addition to their privacy changes. The most important is FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts).

Google FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts)

We have been saying over the last few years that “Community” will become the most effective advertising methodology for the next decade. FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts is the proof of this concept in that this Google initiative is the first in the rollout of policies to move away from pixel and cookie tracking of private consumers (at least by advertisers). Google has long had the cohorts link in their GA (Google Analytics) platform, but now they will use it to overshadow their pixel and cookie tracking efforts. What does this mean? It means that they will, for the first time, focus more on “Community” than technology in delivering a view of consumer activity and journey. This is a major shift in their external philosophy of KYC (Know Your Customer) from the technology side of the fence, but it is also a means for them to control the privacy narrative and enforce policies that increase dependency on their platforms. If they use cohorts as an algorithm measurement, then how will you be able to use anything other than their platform to rank on Google. All they have to do next is charge for it.

Google Advertising – Censorship of a Platform

As Digital Marketers, we have always known the dark side of Google. Like Facebook, they have an extremely subjective side to their ad bans and what it means to violate advertising policy. Many of their restrictions are unbiased and objective, but many of them are not and determination of violation is left to the discretion of an individual, who may or may not subjectively determine that your ad violates a policy. We are not worried about the rules that are easy to follow, but what about the ones where there is room for interpretation? If you fall on the bad side of that determination and ultimate ban, you could always go back and make adjustments and rerun again. Starting September of 2021, Google is implementing a 3-strike rule. Three bans and you are out as an advertiser. This conveniently makes it much easier for Google to force everyone to operate within their confines and strictly according to their advertising definitions. Effectively, their platform will be censored to the products and services they feel are appropriate and nothing else. Also, remember, this is the first move to restricting ads on the biggest platform in the world.

So what’s the next step for Google?

Limiting what will show in search results based on category and content. Whoever does your digital marketing will need to know these waters like the back of their hand to help you navigate. What many companies don’t realize is that dependency on digital marketers will become much greater as more and more business ad accounts get permanently banned.

Google Ranking Algorithms

The last item we need to discuss involves where Google is going with regard to ranking and the highly secretive world of the Google algorithm and their Core Updates. 2021 was a really big year in the world of Google Core Web Vital updates. The two primary categories for the update include Page Experience and Core Web Vitals. To break it out into basic terms, Google is moving much faster and farther to the mobile platform. So much so, that they are now penalizing sites that do not perform well on mobile. New Paragraph

What does this mean for businesses?

It means that Google is declaring war on the biggest web development platform in the world. Google will focus on responsiveness to mobile design, but more importantly, they will focus on a metric termed Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Why is that a problem you ask? If the LCP metric doesn’t meet their minimum time of about 3 seconds, then Google will penalize the site ranking significantly. These updates were implemented June 21 and July 21 with many site owners not understanding why their ranking has dropped through the floor and why their traffic is down significantly. WordPress (WP) has about 25% of the sites in the world – not a small number.

The problem Google has with WordPress sites (but has not come out and directly said so) is that WP loads slowly on mobile due to the sheer size and overhead of the platform. A typical WP site with any content or plugins will load LCP on mobile between 6 to 9 seconds if the page is fully optimized and around 13 seconds or more on mobile if the page is not optimized. This measurement, at face value, indicates that WP will never be able to meet minimum Google standards, even fully optimized. Designed to provide a better user experience, this change will cause a huge push toward optimizing and rebuilding websites around the world. At Proshark, we focus and provide technologies that load LCP between 2 to 3 seconds which will impact user experience and increase ranking in the Google search engine organically.

Doomsday Marketing

Now you can see why we call it Doomsday Marketing, not because we think that marketing will end, just the effectiveness of marketing as we know it. Above are just a few of the trends in the Digital Marketing world that are seriously impacting the ability for companies to connect with consumers. There is no question that the fallout rate for agencies will be extremely high and that companies will pay (or have paid) a great deal of money for ineffective advertising because the agency they chose did not understand the ramifications of these changes. There will be a trending period of challenges in the Digital Marketing world during the process of elimination of these marketers and agencies while they are able to hold on and provide services with a continuing diminishing return until the only ones that are left are those who are able to get ahead, and stay ahead of the curve.

Note that whether you are an advertiser or a digital marketer, the trend is going to be to move toward building a community where you can freely interact outside the confines of big tech and the limitations they are implementing to inhibit your advertising capacity in the name of privacy. This means moving to automated and integrated systems in addition to knowing your consumer intimately to determine, define and refine the campaigns you send in their direction. This means analyzing your data to the point that you know your avatar to the nth degree. If you are not on a system that helps you do this, move to it. If you are not moving in this direction, then you are moving away from what the future of marketing online will become. We will explore each of the items above in more detail, especially as their impact begins to take shape and new avenues begin to present themselves as we move into a new marketing age.

What Can A Digital Marketing Agency Do For Me?

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 16:59:05 GMT

Is it really worth the time and money to hire a digital marketing agency?

The world of marketing has changed

It’s not a matter of predicting where marketing is heading. We’re living it, right here, right now. Traditional marketing is failing to reach audiences like it used to. Even in its heyday traditional marketing wasn’t considered a precision approach. It was a numbers game, one that simply doesn’t work anymore. Newspapers and magazines are all but obsolete, and TV and radio are declining. There are still some decent brand buys out there for the savvy digital agency.

Out of the ashes of the traditional marketing model comes “Digital Marketing”. Simply put, it’s the most effective way to market a business today and for the foreseeable future.

Implementing traditional marketing strategies for your company is like breaking out your old FM radio and hoping that you pick up a few stations. Digital marketing is streaming your favorite song straight to your mobile device. You target a specific audience and keep ideal leads and buyers coming to you 24/7.

What is Digital Marketing?

Since digital marketing has taken over, what is it exactly?

Digital marketing is data-driven, laser-targeted and highly focused brand promotion multiple technology channels.

While the umbrella term, “Digital Marketing,” can include mobile apps, podcasts, and other forms of digital media, the internet is the center of all tools and channels at a digital marketer’s disposal.

Digital marketing is exceedingly organized, highly targeted, and delivers measurable results in real-time.

There is no guesswork involved. Strategies are tested continually in order to see what’s working and what isn’t. You’re able to measure results and implement strategy adjustments immediately.

When you have a highly skilled outreach agency executing the marketing activities for your brand using the most effective channels for your product or industry, that is when you are working with a digital marketing agency.

What is a Digital Marketing Agency?

A digital marketing agency is different from your traditional marketing agency in that they are typically focused on results-based marketing in the digital world. Measurable marketing and ROI is the name of the game.

A legitimate digital marketing agency doesn’t practice “spray and pray” marketing. Gone are the radio or TV spots and magazine ads. In their place come a team of strategists, digital marketing consultants, creatives, and developers that work together from the ground up to deliver quantifiable results. A digital marketing agency is a brand-development and lead-generating engine.

Digital Marketing Agency vs. Marketing Agency

Marketing agencies still dance on both sides of the marketing line, often pushing traditional or merely creative initiatives. Companies want a beautiful website—but they also need a website that converts visitors to results-focused outcomes, such as leads or purchases. Unfortunately, many marketing agencies don’t have the know-how or internal skill set in place to deliver both.

What a Digital Marketing Agency Should Do

Now that I’ve made digital marketing agencies sound like teams of superheroes, you’re probably wondering what it is that they typically do. Let’s review the top three areas digital agencies focus on.

Digital Marketing Agencies Improve your Business

A great digital marketing agency has the means to take over your marketing from top to bottom. For starters, their business expertise allows them to evaluate your brand’s needs and develop a powerful strategy that maximizes profits.

They’ll work with your company to improve efficiency and productivity. With their help, you’ll better define your objectives and set measurable goals.

Moreover, the focus on data and targeting requires a clear definition of your target buyer, which is typically more specific than companies currently have in place. When working with a digital marketing agency you’ll determine exactly who your ideal buyer is and analyze their buying journey. Like I said, digital marketing is highly targeted.

When you know your target well, you’ll determine what your messaging and benefits should be to speak directly with your ideal buyer. Your unique selling proposition as it aligns to your ideal buyer is what forms a connection with the people who buy from your company.

Digital Marketing Agencies Master Your Brand Online

As digital marketing revolves around your online presence, a digital marketing agency will work extensively on developing your online hub. This can, and usually does, take many forms.

A highly effective, buyer-focused website allows you to showcase your brand online. From there a digital marketing agency will help you determine which platforms and channels should be used to reach your ideal buyers.

A skilled digital marketing agency will position your company as a market leader by creating content that allows you to establish your brand authority and expertise online. As true experts, an agency team will execute the most modern and effective content strategies in order to provide the best possible organic search rankings.

They will create and implement expert social media marketing strategies that deliver a marketing ROI beyond anything traditional marketing could ever hope to deliver. Social media, when done well, will be focused on the context of the channel and yet fit into the overall marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Agencies Boost ROI

One of the most important services a digital marketing agency provides is a steady and reliable boost in your return on investment. Higher ROI means one thing, higher profits.

There is no settling in digital marketing. A good digital marketing agency will never stop testing and reworking its strategy in order to boost your ROI and improve its overall efficacy.

Digital marketing agencies evaluate your website traffic, determine the best online platforms to invest in, and continually maintain the balance between your marketing activities and the results they provide.

Working with a digital marketing agency means more leads converting to customers. That means long-term sales growth.

One more thing to think about: To do everything a digital marketing agency does, requires that you hire a marketing strategist, marketing manager, designers, copywriters, and developers to build your own digital marketing department. Consider what your money buys when hiring a digital marketing agency versus bringing on full-time staff members. Talk about making the right investment!

What We Do Differently

We aren’t your average digital marketing agency. We focus on partnering for the growth of your business. Each member of our team learns the ins and outs of your business as if it was their own. In that way, our work reflects the soul of your brand while providing results tailored to your businesses’ specific needs.

There is no one-size-fits-all digital marketing agency. We know we can’t help everyone. We only work with companies looking for a partner who will provide Done-for-You results. We want to take charge of your marketing and lead your business to its most profitable year yet.

Get a Free Strategy Session

No matter how or where you’re currently marketing your business, one thing is for sure: A skilled digital marketing agency will take your marketing, brand awareness, ROI, and overall profitability to new levels. Want to know more about how a highly skilled digital marketing agency can help your business? Schedule a free strategy session with our experts today.

by Peter Lang, UHURU

Keep in touch with site visitors and boost loyalty

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 00:34:59 GMT

There are so many good reasons to communicate with site visitors. Tell them about sales and new products or update them with tips and information.

Here are some reasons to make blogging part of your regular routine.

Blogging is an easy way to engage with site visitors

Writing a blog post is easy once you get the hang of it. Posts don’t need to be long or complicated. Just write about what you know, and do your best to write well.

Show customers your personality

When you write a blog post, you can really let your personality shine through. This can be a great tool for showing your distinct personality.

Blogging is a terrific form of communication

Blogs are a great communication tool. They tend to be longer than social media posts, which gives you plenty of space for sharing insights, handy tips and more.

It’s a great way to support and boost SEO

Search engines like sites that regularly post fresh content, and a blog is a great way of doing this. With relevant metadata for every post so search engines can find your content.

Drive traffic to your site

Every time you add a new post, people who have subscribed to it will have a reason to come back to your site. If the post is a good read, they’ll share it with others, bringing even more traffic!

Blogging is free

Maintaining a blog on your site is absolutely free. You can hire bloggers if you like or assign regularly blogging tasks to everyone in your company.

A natural way to build your brand

A blog is a wonderful way to build your brand’s distinct voice. Write about issues that are related to your industry and your customers.

Tips for writing great posts that increase your site traffic

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:34:59 GMT

Write about something you know. If you don’t know much about a specific topic that will interest your readers, invite an expert to write about it.

Speak to your audience

You know your audience better than anyone else, so keep them in mind as you write your blog posts. Write about things they care about. If you have a company Facebook page, look here to find topics to write about

Take a few moments to plan your post

Once you have a great idea for a post, write the first draft. Some people like to start with the title and then work on the paragraphs. Other people like to start with subtitles and go from there. Choose the method that works for you.

Don’t forget to add images

Be sure to include a few high-quality images in your blog. Images break up the text and make it more readable. They can also convey emotions or ideas that are hard to put into words.

Edit carefully before posting

Once you’re happy with the text, put it aside for a day or two, and then re-read it. You’ll probably find a few things you want to add, and a couple more that you want to remove. Have a friend or colleague look it over to make sure there are no mistakes. When your post is error-free, set it up in your blog and publish.

How a Digital Marketing Agency Can Increase Your Revenue

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Thu, 13 May 2021 16:59:01 GMT

Marketing is critical to your business. Knowing which strategies will be effective and understanding how to combine different tactics across a variety of channels can result in a level of complexity you don’t feel you have the expertise – or time – in-house to pull off.

If you believe you can’t afford to hire a digital marketing agency, but also know you can’t afford to continue throwing money at marketing services without tangible results, it may be time to reconsider your marketing approach and consider taking the plunge.

After experiencing significant lost time, money and opportunities, more and more small businesses are recognizing that hiring an agency can deliver more leads and increased revenue. A digital agency may just be the medicine you need to get well.

How exactly does a marketing agency help increase revenue?

Through Defined Processes

Setting specific and measurable objectives is one of the first steps to marketing success. If you don’t understand exactly what you hope to accomplish through your efforts, it will be impossible to determine what your Return on Investment (ROI) is.

And that’s a significant concern for business owners. According to HubSpot, proving the ROI of a company’s marketing activities is one of the top concerns for business owners.

If you’re a numbers person, this ROI Calculator is designed to give you a simple idea of what your ROI would be if you invested your money in an inbound marketing program versus something like the stock market.

By Implementing Best Practices

When businesses attempt to do too much – like juggling marketing efforts as well as running day-to-day operations – it is so easy to lose focus and even lose your company. When you seek medical attention, you don’t buy gauze and tape then hope it works. You go to the doctor who, with training and experience, prescribes the right medicine. Digital marketing is the same.

There are many ways to spend marketing dollars. But if you’re not basing those investment choices on the strategies and tactics that are proven to be successful, you aren’t going to get any real value out of what you spend.

A qualified digital marketing agency knows what works and what doesn’t work. They already know the best methods for driving traffic and converting sales. That’s because the agency does this all day, every day. They will help you determine which approach and channels you should be investing in.

In fact, generating traffic and converting that traffic is a top concern for 63% of business owners when it comes to marketing their company.

By Allowing You To Spend Less on Internal Staff

Developing and executing strategic marketing plans and campaigns requires knowledge and experience. Hiring an internal team with a variety of skill sets you need is costly and requires the very knowledge that you are trying to hire. It is a roll of the dice and it just isn’t practical.

In addition to salary, you’ll want to consider the cost of benefits, such as health insurance, paid time off and other ways to attract top candidates.

When you hire a marketing agency, on the other hand, you get access to an entire team of experts. These are pros who know every aspect of marketing, creative content developers, graphic artists, social media managers, web developers, marketing analytics experts and more.

Through Valuable Experience That Saves Time

Developing and executing strategies is time-consuming. Experts who do it for a living are efficient and have solid, repeatable processes in place.

These questions can help you determine just how much time you are spending on your marketing plan or how much more time you need to spend to make it even partially effective.

Do you have a lead generation process and sales funnel that you constantly monitor and update?
Are you tracking which marketing efforts are resulting in more website traffic?
Does your team understand website or social media analytics?
Does your team battle with the constant need for fresh, creative content?

The dollar value of your time saved due to an agency’s efficiencies will offset the cost of the agency fees.

By Focusing On Results

If a marketing agency is consistently unsuccessful, it won’t stay in business!

Remember, professionals WANT to deliver results for your business. That’s how they earn more business.

A successful marketing agency is motivated to consistently deliver value to its clients and has processes in place to deliver the highest possible ROI. When assessing agencies, look specifically for a proven track record, review customer success stories and follow-up on client references.

You may be holding onto the notion that you don’t have the budget to hire a marketing agency, but working with an agency actually allows you to better control costs while driving more business through proven strategies executed by professionals who are trained to consistently analyze and optimize their methods for delivering results.

by Olivia Walls, Intouch-Marketing

Instagram Business Wednesday. We are back at it every Wed.

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 16:58:59 GMT

Instagram Business Wednesday

Wednesdays are when businesses promotion day on Instagram by @itsjoelphillips. This series takes a look at companies and individuals who are doing something unique or are just doing the daily grind. The purpose is more than just showcasing. It is about taking a look at the organization to see why it is doing well or what could be done to improve it.

Most times, business leaders are too close to objectively see what is going right or what can be improved with the company they run. It is difficult sometimes to see how you are progressing to your longer-term vision when you are focused on daily operations. This is a mistake that is far too common, especially with the inundation of information and requirements that many owners and managers face every single day.

One of the most valuable tools often neglected is the feedback loop. If you open your doors so people can see inside, you will find that many will provide constructive criticism and that is what this is all about. Constructive ways to make your company better. There will always be haters in the social media world, but if you can get past them, you will find a wealth of valuable messaging regarding the public perception of how you are doing as a business leader.

This is not an easy step sometimes as we don’t always appreciate criticism, but it is a necessary step if you want to learn what it will take to grow and scale your company. The best companies have a 360 degree view of their performance both internally and externally. They have developed strategic initiatives to reach short, mid and longer-term goals and they typically have a good sense of their product or service and how these are perceived in the marketplace.

The Instagram Business Wednesday is meant to be a promotion of sorts to followers designed to allow companies to begin developing relationships with potential clients. Today’s marketing world is a different place than several years ago. It used to be solely about the product or service requiring 7 or so touchpoints for the potential client to make a purchase decision.

Today’s consumer demands more interaction with an average of 12 to 17 touchpoints to make a purchase decision. The first 7 to 10 touchpoints are still about what the company offers and the remaining touchpoints are more about who the buyer is dealing with as a company. In other words, it is about the relationship that the company builds with the consumer and this part is no longer optional. So if you are not building communities, then you are falling behind. It’s a new world out there.

How Do I Get My Business Promoted?

There are a couple of things you need to get your business promoted.

Submit a DM to @itsjoelphillips or submit via our contact page telling us why your business should be promoted. Also, be sure to list some unique factors about your business or how you operate.
Make sure your submission is in by Friday to be listed the following week.
If you don’t get listed you are welcome to submit again the following week.
If you have any questions, please submit them via the links above.

Joel Phillips is the founder and CEO of Proshark, Intelligent Digital Marketing Solutions. With over 30 years of management and leadership experience, his passion is helping business thrive and succeed. With a background in both start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, he has expertise in strategic planning, turnaround, crisis management, growth & scaling as well as exit strategy. Find out more at joelphillips.info.

Ten Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 17:59:06 GMT

While the benefits of hiring an accountant or bookkeeper for your business may seem obvious, the benefits of a full-service marketing agency may not be so clear. Here are a few ways that a marketing agency can help your business.

Focus On Running Your Business

In most cases, online marketing means hiring new expertise to run the campaigns. It’s rare, especially for small businesses, to have the talent internally. Plus, it will need some of your time and attention as you’ll be working with an external team and your internal team to coordinate. Don’t forget that it will also take resources and time to just set up the team and the campaign itself. Having internal resources working hand in hand with your new agency improves overall performance and ROI.

This can be quite time-consuming, and an agency can come in handy to lift this burden off your shoulder. You don’t want to spend months training your team. That time can otherwise be used for growing your business from the inside.

With an agency, you simply need to share your goals and their timeframe.

There is no training, onboarding or managing another team. All the elements of your online marketing are handled internally by the agency’s team. This frees you up to run your business better.

You Cut Down the Overall Costs

When deliberating over hiring a digital marketing agency, many businesses usually compare the cost of an in-house operation to the price of the agency. You’ll be surprised to learn that an agency is much less costly over time.

Agencies work as independent contractors, so you eliminate the need for payroll taxes. You also cut the recurring costs of having full-time employees such as benefits, health care costs, and salaries.

Some of the tools you need to run the campaigns can also come at a hefty one-time payment or subscriptions. Most reputable agencies already have the essential digital marketing tools, so you won’t need to spend a dime to get one.

Work with Experts

For most small businesses, you just can’t hire digital marketing experts at the onset of your campaign. This is something that takes time and thorough consideration of the types of expertise you need. Plus, it can be time-consuming (or impossible) for your team to understand all online marketing techniques, such as SEO strategies and social media marketing. Let’s not even talk about keeping up to date on all of the above, which is constantly changing.

Instead, with a digital marketing agency, you can get access to a team of experienced and qualified experts who do this all day every day, and twice on weekends. Their expertise and tools are their product, and in large measure, they can be applied to virtually any business or organization.

The common question we get is whether it is cheaper to hire an agency or a consultant, and for a long time the answer has been “it depends”.

Measured January 2020:

The average hourly rate for digital marketing consultants worldwide is $140.29 per hour.

The average hourly rate for US-only digital marketing consultants is $161.57.

So how much would an agency be in comparison. Yep, it still depends on the exact mix of services that is required to meet your goals, however, it’s NOT $161.57 per hour (which equates to a $336,066 annual salary without benefits).

According to WebFX, the average cost for digital marketing services in 2020 ranges from $2500 to $12,000 per month for small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs). The large range here is due to the “a-la-carte” pricing approach that allows an individual business to pick and choose the products or services that make sense to them.

In almost all cases, you get what you pay for in terms of digital marketing services. So “cheap” services often don’t drive the results you want. That is why it’s critical to set a reasonable digital marketing budget. If you try to make your price range as low as possible, you’ll get what you pay for, unfortunately.

What is a reasonable budget, though?

While several factors influence digital marketing budgets, like the size of your company and the scope of your project, the average digital marketing budget in 2020 ranges from $30,000 to $145,000 per year for SMBs. Keep in mind that digital marketing is an ongoing strategy, so your budget may change as you grow.

Stay Relevant to Your Industry

At this point, you must understand that research is important before launching any campaign. You need to learn about your industry, your competitors and the latest marketing practices in your segment.

The onus of industry-relevant marketing practices is on the agency. They’re tasked to research your market and identify your competition. Plus, they should follow the latest developments in digital marketing to ensure quantifiable results.

They should also identify and research your target audience to learn and understand their behavior, preferences, and interests. This is to ensure the adopted marketing strategies yield the maximum results possible and to keep your business abreast of relevant developments.

It is also very important to remember, if you do hire an expert, listen to that expert. Of course nobody knows YOUR business like you do, but you do not know it all. As Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry famously growled, “A man (or woman – hey, it was a different time) has to know his limitations.”

You Can Get New Ideas

In digital marketing, it’s important to note that not all things will work for you. Some can offer disappointing results while others can be quite useful.

A good agency will give you great ideas on what techniques will give you results. They’ll provide a new perspective to some of the things that your team had already been doing. They will assess your marketing efforts and create new ideas based on the viewpoint of the consumers. These projects work best when it’s a truly collaborative effort. Your unique knowledge and that of the agency together for a 1+1=3 scenario.

For example, when it comes to social media marketing, a digital marketing agency will help you understand where your target audience is mostly available. This is not always intuitive and perhaps they have “moved” as new tools and platforms became available. They’ll determine what content appeals to the most and how they share and consume it. This will help to streamline your social media campaigns. It’s not an exact science by any means in the beginning. The advantage of a digital marketing agency is that as data from winning and “not-so” winning campaigns are collected, decisions going forward can be made based on actual real-world data and results.

It’s a Scalable Service

One thing that makes a digital marketing agency your best bet for online growth is their scalability.

In a normal setting, you’d need to increase the size of your team whenever your business needs grow, or you want to launch something new. This means that your business will need additional resources to support and fuel the growth.

With a marketing agency, that’s not the case. There will be no constraints on your current team and no need to expand your team.

A good agency can usually accommodate your needs as your business grows. Having a scalable and flexible agency is important, especially when expanding the services you want to include in your campaigns. More expertise, still a one-stop shop with the right agency.

They Offer Measurable Results

No business wants to make investments that bring no results.

With so many marketing methods in digital marketing landscape, it can be difficult to know the real ROI. However, an agency helps by determining the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These indicators help to figure out how your marketing campaigns are performing in relation to your objectives.

Also, they will identify the important metrics to follow across different channels to determine the effectiveness of each campaign. You’ll also get monthly or quarterly reports on your campaigns and a normally a website audit to help you make sound marketing decisions with regards to improving your online foundation.

Typically, a digital marketing agency offers clear insights into how your current keywords are performing and how potential customers are engaging with your content and brand. Beyond that, optimizing your content for new keywords is an area of expertise that few business owners care to learn or do, while it is an agency’s bread and butter.

They Have the Tools

Let’s face it. Digital marketing requires the use of different tools for the many different jobs they perform to streamline each campaign. Unfortunately, there is nothing akin to a one-tool-for-all when it comes to marketing.

Most of these tools are premium services, and the costs increase with the addition of certain features or size of your email lists. You will need analytics, keyword research, competitor analysis, paid search management, and automation tools.

The cumulative cost of using these online marketing tools can be quite hefty for small and mid-size businesses. Digital marketing services already have these tools in place to help you make the most of your campaigns. You don’t need to worry about the recurring costs that you’re likely to incur with their use, nor the onboarding fees and paid training that is normally required just to get started.

You Get Professionalism for Your Native Ads

With the growth of native advertising, marketers are spending time and resources to learn more about it. The ability to display organic ads on various media platforms changes how customers interact with that content.

Unfortunately, knowing where to show your native ads can be an arduous process. As such, you can benefit from data-driven solutions offered by a digital marketing agency to determine the best placement and content distribution plan.

Native advertising offers a natural and organic way to display ads. When done right, it can provide a robust experience to boost your ROI.

Enjoy the Power of Storytelling

Your in-house marketing team (that might be just YOU!) works tirelessly to promote your products and services. This helps you to know what to improve and what to eliminate to make the product as attractive and viable as possible.

While all these happens, your digital marketing agency is busy defining and spreading your brand’s message across different channels and platforms. They help to generate positive PR about your products and services. This contributes to improving your visibility and image; brand awareness.

Ideally, story telling involves creating compelling and engaging messages that connect and resonate with the target audience. Your agency achieves this by understanding your audience’s needs and pairing them up with the right solutions.

Choosing the Right Agency

Before you wander off in search for a marketing company to work with, you may want to pump the brakes first. There’s a good number of businesses out there, but not all of them will offer what they claim.

Digital marketing is a slow and continuous process,y from those companies that promise instant or quick results. Determine the main limitations and specialties of a firm before making your decision.

Let them tell you the primary industries they cover, and they must share with you some of the tools and techniques they use. If necessary, you can ask for reports of their past and current projects to examine their performance.

Also, determine the online performances of the agency’s web properties. Their ranking on search engines helps to reinforce your relationship with them. Don’t forget to confirm their experience in the industry.

Grow Your Business With a Digital Marketing Agency

One fact is that digital marketing has the power to grow your business faster than most marketing techniques and certainly faster than you could do yourself internally.

Hiring a digital marketing agency allows you to get started with your campaigns almost immediately. You don’t need to navigate the learning curve or set up a team. It’s possible to see your campaigns live within weeks after creating a strategy.

Start by first understanding your needs and sharing them with the agency. Digital campaigns work best if all parties are on the same page. Plus, your agency should enjoy the freedom of making decisions that best suit your interests and budget plan.

by Staff, Digital Neighbor

40 Hacking Statistics That Will Scare You

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 17:59:08 GMT

Have you ever considered that nearly every electronic device can be hacked?

I know I have.

Today we’ll look at some hacking statistics to illustrate the impact of hackers’ activities in modern society. Naturally, hacks are a great concern for website owners – that’s why all reviews here on Hosting Tribunal focus heavily on security – but the truth is that all Web denizens are susceptible to hacking activity.

In the text below you will find some fantastic stats which will help us to find out:

Which is the biggest bank heist that was pulled off by cybercriminals?
Which is the most significant data breach of our time?
Are ATMs vulnerable to hacker attacks?
When did the first hack happen?

Also, we’ll visit the dark web’s markets to see how much it costs to buy a new identity.

Now let’s get this show on the road with some hacking stats.

Scary Hacking Statistics (Editor’s Choice):

There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds .
Russian hackers are the fastest.
300,000 new malware is created every day.
Multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.
You can become an American citizen for $6,000 .
The average cost of data breaches will be about 150 million in 2020 .
The cybersecurity budget in the US is $14.98 billion .

Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Let’s delve in deeper and find more details about each one.

Outrageous Hacking Statistics

Some of the cyber breaches are audacious, others outrageous, yet others simply stunning.

1. There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds.

(Source: Security magazine)

By the time the average person takes a selfie and uploads it to Instagram, the next hacker attack has already taken place.

2. Cybercrime is more profitable than the global illegal drug trade.

(Source: Cybersecurity Ventures)

The profit from the illegal drug industry amounts to around $400 billion annually. For comparison, cybercriminals have earned a total of around $600 billion in 2018.

3. Hackers steal 75 records every second.

(Source: Breach Level Index)

Cybersecurity facts show us the average number of record stolen per second. Breaches are actually a lot rarer than that – it’s just that each breach allows for a lot of records to be stolen.

4. 66% of businesses attacked by hackers weren’t confident they could recover.

(Source: Fortune)

Most businesses don’t really know if they’re prepared for a cyber attack. Actually, 75% of all businesses don’t even have a formal cyber attack response plan.

Cyber attacks statistics reveal that in 2018:

5. 73% of black hat hackers said traditional firewall and antivirus security is irrelevant or obsolete.

(Source: Thycotic.com)

According to the same survey, 80% of hackers say “humans are the most responsible for security breaches”.

6. The cybersecurity budget in the US was $14.98 billion in 2019.

(Source: Statista)

In just two years, the U.S. cybersecurity budget rose by almost 14%. It used to be just $13.15 billion in 2017.

Like everything, there’s a balance in the cyber-world as well. Hacking facts show that:

7. White hat hackers earned over $19 million in bounties in 2018.

(Source: HackerOne)

What’s interesting here is that 81% of them learned their craft mostly through blogs and educational materials online. Only 6% completed a formal class.

8. There are over 715,000 cybersecurity experts employed in the US alone.

(Source: Cyberseek)

There were 313,735 job openings for cybersecurity experts until August 2018. This number will continue to grow as we’ll see a bit later. Cybersecurity statistics assure us this will be one of the best paying jobs in the near future.

Are you learning stuff? Good, those stats are awesome. All these numbers look impressive, don’t they? There are more to come, but let’s pause for a second to see the world through hackers’ eyes.

For example – if you see new technology, the first logical question you may pose is – “What does it do?”

Hackers see it differently, though – their question is “What can I make it do?”

These statistics on hacking may not help us understand how a hacker thinks, but we can make some definitive conclusions about their nature.

First off, let me explain the difference between a black hat hacker , a white hat hacker , and grey hat hacker .

Black hat hackers are hackers with criminal intent.

White hat hackers are hired to test the security of a system. They have permission to do it.

Grey hat hackers don’t have criminal motives, but once they start exploiting a system, they can break some laws.

Now that we have the basics, let’s continue with some…

Scary Hacker Statistics

The things below are checked facts, not empty statements.

9. Russian hackers can infiltrate a computer network in 18 minutes.

(Source: Crowdstrike)

Want to reread the above stat? 18 minutes. I drink my morning coffee longer than that.

Russian hackers aren’t wasting any time when they put their mind to it. North Korean hackers need just under two and a half hours. Chinese ones take longer – about 4 hours.

10. Hackers are the average American’s biggest fear.

(Source: Statista)

71% of Americans are wary of hackers stealing their credit card or financial info. Considering how many cyber attacks happen per day in the US, we can understand why that is. US citizens also worry about the possibility of identity theft – 67%.

The possibility of being assaulted or killed by a co-worker where you work – 7%. I sure don’t want to go to their office.

11. You can purchase a consumer account for $1 on the dark market.

(Source: RSA)

You can buy a bus ticket for a dollar. Or you can buy a ticket to an ecommerce site. The choice is yours.

When looking at data breach statistics, we can see that billions of records have been stolen. This created an abundance of credentials for sale, which reflects on their price. Bank accounts still cost more – between $3 and $24 a piece. Most other online accounts cost $1 or less.

12. More than 6,000 online criminal marketplaces sell ransomware products and services.

(Source: McAfee)

A total of 45,000 products are on sale there. If we add all non-ransomware products and services, the number will easily exceed 1 million.

13. 444,259 ransomware attacks took place worldwide in 2018.

(Source: Statista)

Almost 1 in 4 (100,907) occurred within the consumer marketplace.

Hacking statistics for 2020 also show us that:

14. Hackers create 300,000 new pieces of malware daily.

(Source: McAfee)

I guess some people’s fingers never sleep. Let’s hope cybersecurity specialists are up to the task.

And speaking of cybersecurity specialists:

15. There will be 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs openings in 2021.

(Source: Cybersecurityventures)

There are almost 314,000 job openings for cybersecurity specialists in the US alone as of October 2018. Cybersecurity Ventures expects that cybercrime will more than triple the number of job openings over the next five years.

Now let’s have a break from the hacking statistics for a while.

See, hackers are like you and me in a way. They are curious about the world and themselves. Some of them describe hacking as an adrenaline rush. All people have “their thing” – some dance, some climb mountains and so on. Hackers exploit vulnerabilities. Come to think of it – it’s like a puzzle. Put all the right pieces together, and voila.

Now let’s imagine a situation. You are in a hotel. There is a TV in your room. What do you see? “A TV”, most of you would say. What does a hacker see? A gateway to the hotel’s network. It’s similar to any other target.

How and Why Were Companies Hacked in 2018

Businesses are deemed a lucrative and often easy prey. However good security measures the likes of SiteGround and HostGator provide, business owners must be ever vigilant.

16. 65% of companies have over 1,000 stale user accounts.

(Source: Varonis)

Stale accounts and outdated permissions are targets for exploitation and malicious use. Hackers desire data, and they can get it by hijacking an account.

While we’re on the topic:

17. 32% of black hat hackers admit privileged accounts are their number one way to hack systems.

(Source: Thycotic)

Seizing such an account could be pretty easy with a simple phishing attack.

18. 75% of all attacked business reported fraudulent emails.

(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2018)

Fraudulent emails as part of a phishing strategy are still a hacker’s favorite tool to obtain credentials.

Computer hacking statistics also show that:

19. 15% of UK businesses lost control over a network to a hacker.

(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2018)

Unauthorized use of systems, computers or servers from outside entities rose by 5% in 2018.

20. Companies protect only 3% of their folders.

(Source: Varonis)

And 88% of companies with over 1 million folders have over 100,000 folders open to everyone. Certainly makes a hacker’s job easier.

Lousy protection is one of the main reasons why…

21. 43% of UK businesses have reported breaches or attacks in the last 12 months.

(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2018)

Cyber attack statistics show 72% of large companies report such events.

22. Up until March 2019, more than 14 billion data records had been lost or stolen.

(Source: Breach Level Index)

The exact number as of March 27, 2019, was 14,717,618,286. Only 4% of these breaches were “Secure Breaches”, meaning the data was encrypted and therefore rendered useless.

So far we’ve looked at the possibilities for hackers to cause damage. Now let’s check out some examples of their handiwork:

How Giants Fall – Data Breach Statistics

The numbers in some of the biggest data breaches are stupefyingly big.

23. Yahoo’s data breach – 3 billion compromised accounts.

(Source: CSO)

It’s quite a story. In 2016 Yahoo admits the truth about the most significant data breach in history. They publicly state that 500 million users’ accounts were compromised in 2014.

Later the company declared there was another breach in 2013 with another 1 billion compromised accounts. Finally, in 2017, Yahoo said the whole truth – the attacks had compromised a total of 3 billion user accounts.

It is still the most significant data breach in history.

One of the recent big hacks happened in 2017, when…

24. 209,000 payment card numbers and expiration dates were stolen from Equifax.

(Source: Reuters)

146.6 million names, dates of birth and 145.5 million US social security numbers were taken as well from the credit monitoring firm.

25. Marriot International – 500 million users’ data stolen.

(Source: CSO)

In 2018 Marriot International discovered attackers, who had remained in the system since 2014. The hackers stole the credit card numbers and expiration dates of more than 100 million customers. The other 400 million lost “only” some part of their private info – names, passport numbers.

And here’s what the hacked companies will have to pay in 2020:

26. The cost of data breaches will increase to $150 million in 2020.

(Source: Juniper Research)

As cloud adoption trends show, more and more businesses get interconnected, which means more targets become available. Not only that, the amount and importance of data stored online precludes the increased value that hackers can extract.

Since we started talking about money, I want to ask you a question – where is the money?

Once upon a time, there were some people with lots of money. They had so much money, they had to build a house for their money. And that’s how banks appeared.

In the next section, we’ll take a look at the banks hacked in 2018. What do criminals do with banks? They rob them. Cybercriminals do the pretty much the same thing, in a more subtle way.

27. Hackers siphoned off $13.4 million from Cosmos Bank in India.

(Source: Hindustan Times)

In 2018 Cybercriminals hacked the bank’s servers on August 11 and 13. The culprits stole the card details of around 12,000 Visa cards.

Long story short – the hackers made it rain 15,000 transactions later.

The next one is really exciting. It makes Jesse James look like a harmless kid on the path of righteousness (his dad was a preacher).

One of the most interesting hacking facts online is that:

28. The Carbanak gang of hackers has stolen over $1 billion in total.

(Source: Kaspersky, Securelist)

We can’t classify this as the biggest bank robbery in history, but it sure is interesting. They targeted around 100 banks around the world, and it took 2-4 months to siphon the money out from each one. The losses per bank were up to $10 million each. The cybercriminals started to test the Carbanak malware in 2013, and it’s still on the loose.

The good news is in 2018 the authorities caught the mastermind in Spain.

These next few cyber hacking statistics visualize how much cybercrime can cost us.

29. Cybercrime cost the world almost $600 billion in 2018.

(Source: McAfee)

This number amounts to 0.8% of the global GDP.

To acquire such amounts of money, black hat hackers need specific tools. You can’t find most of them just anywhere. Where do they get them? Let’s find out.

Dark Market Stats

The dark web’s customers may find almost everything there. Thankfully the light side has some tricks prepared to change the cyber attacks statistics in 2020.

30. 68% of black hat hackers say multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.

(Source: Thycotic)

Use 2FA whenever possible. Just a tip.

The dark web can’t help you much with 2FA, but there’s a lot of stuff you can buy if you have some Bitcoins ready.

31. For as low as $1.25 you can get a Netflix account.

(Source: Wondershare, dr.fone)

Netflix streaming is one of the standard hacking services and widely available. For a small fee, you’ll receive the email and password of someone’s Netflix account. Just imagine how many people’s credentials have been hacked or stolen for the price to get this low.

32. You can purchase the WinPot malware for 1 bitcoin.

(Source: Securelist)

Don’t know what WinPot does? Nothing much �� It only makes the ATMs by a popular ATM vendor dispense all the cash from their cassettes.

By the way, did you know that

33. 92% of ATMs are vulnerable to hacker attacks.

(Source: PTSecurity)

There are several ways to hack an ATM, but consider this – if your card data is stolen, then 100% of ATMs would be vulnerable to this kind of attack.

When talking about the dark web and hackers, a question arises – How many hackers are there?

No one knows.

But we can make an educated guess based on the following stat:

34. The Tor network had more than 2.2 million users in 2017.

(Source: Europol)

The dark web hosted almost 60,000 unique onion domains, and around 57% of them hosted illegal content.

And one more interesting fact for the dark market, before we move on:

35. You can become an American citizen for $6,000.

(Source: Blackhat)

You can also buy a fake passport + driving license + ID card from different countries if you can spare 700-900 euro. (approx. $787-$1010 at the exchange rate at the time of writing)

Let’s move on from the hacking statistics of 2018.

Hacking isn’t all about criminal masterminds and cybersecurity. Sometimes it’s fun, and I have a list for you.

Curious Hacks

Not all cyber attacks are malicious or vicious. Hackers have a wicked sense of humor.

36. Operation Cupcake

(Source: Washington Post)

In 2011 MI-6 took down the instructions for bomb-making from an online al-Qaeda magazine and replaced them with recipes for cake. I guess the Taliban didn’t fall for it since there were no exploding muffins in the last eight years.

37. #Lil’ Trump

(Source: Eonline)

This is one of the hacking facts I’ll cherish in my memory. In 2013 Donald Trump’s Twitter account was hacked, and the hacker posted some Lil’ Wayne lyrics.

38. Thunderstruck

(Source: Daily Mail)

In 2012, Iran’s nuclear facilities were under cyberattack. The hackers forced workers at two of the nuclear facilities to listen to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck repeatedly at full volume. Even if you’re a fan, it can still annoy you at some point.

39. Friendless Samy

(Source: YouTube)

In 2005 Samy Kamkar took down MySpace. For our younger readers, MySpace was a social network like Facebook, only cooler. If someone shuts down Facebook now, it would be one of the biggest hacks of 2020. However, Samy didn’t want to shut down MySpace. All he wanted was…some friends. To achieve his dream he wrote a worm, exploiting a vulnerability in MySpace. Infected profiles became “friends” to Samy’s page. And then their friends as well and so on. It took Samy a day to get a million friends on his page. MySpace couldn’t take it.

40. The first hack

(Source: TheAtlantic)

In 1903 Guglielmo Marconi (the father of modern radio) was ready to transmit a message via the first wireless broadcasting technology. It used the same system as the telegraph. When he was prepared to send the message, the apparatus began to tap out a message in Morse code. The word was “RATS”, repeated over and over again.

The first of the many hacking cases to appear in history happened because the radio’s channel wasn’t as private as Marconi thought. More than a century later and after incredible technological advances we still face similar problems.

Conclusion

Well, that’s all folks. I hope you found this article helpful and interesting. We learned some cool facts together and we saw the world of hackers is not just about money. Curiosity and ethics play a large role as well.

Stay safe.

This article is reprinted from the original article found on hostingtribunal.com

Bulk Email vs Spam: What is the Difference?

joel@proshark.com (Joel Phillips) — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:59:09 GMT

If you want to get into a heated debate, then discuss bulk email vs spam. This topic will continue to be controversial as long as email remains the #1 ROI (Return On Investment) in the digital marketing world. To begin to understand the difference, we have to look at the definitions as a starting point. Before we do that, let’s look at a few Bulk Email Myths that will get answered along the way.

How Much to Send Bulk Email?

Bulk Email Myths

Everyone tells me bulk email is illegal – False
bulk email is the same as Spam – False
Is bulk email a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? – False
I can bulk email without following the rules – False

Spam is without question one of the most abusive sources of email we get everyday in our inbox no matter how strong we set our inbox spam filter. The problem, nobody can even get the definition of spam correct, not even Merriam-Webster. Using the part of the definition that is correct, we define it as the following;

Spam

(noun) irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients.
(verb) send the same message indiscriminately to (large numbers of recipients) on the Internet.

How is Bulk Email Different?

So that is the same as bulk email, right? Wrong. We will use an analogy that we can all relate to. You walk to the mailbox to get your mail. You open up the box and there are all the flyers and credit card offers and catalogs that you hate to get because you never look at them so you just have to throw them away.

Some of those ads just sent out to all addresses blindly without regard to who might be on the other end. You want to call or send a letter to the company to stop receiving those ads, but there is no phone number or address on the advertisement. Finally, you get in touch with the company to remove yourself from their mailing list, but you keep getting the ad week after week with no end. You file a complaint and even talk to anyone who will listen to get yourself off of the mailing list. All to no avail. That is spam.

Bulk Email & CAN-SPAM

Bulk email, by comparison, are ads that you receive, but they are clearly marked as ads. When you want to no longer receive these ads, you have a clearly defined way of stopping them. These can be sent to unsolicited recipients (any address) as advertisement for products or services, but you have to follow the rules. In fact, the United States CAN-SPAM Act, Canada’s CASL laws and UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations all have regulations regarding recipients and whether they can receive unsolicited mail (CAN-SPAM – Wikipedia). That is the difference between Bulk Email vs Spam.

In the US, since the Act was passed, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has largely not enforced any of these guidelines anyway. Even so, it is still important from a liability perspective to make sure that you follow the rules. Nobody likes “junk” mail, but as long as it is effective companies will continue to use it for a good reason. It produces results. That is where an ESP (Email Service Provider) who is knowledgeable on the rules and guidelines comes into play. Bulk email is not the same as spam, but it can easily cross over the line and become spam which opens you up to liability.

Proshark is an expert in email services, list cleaning and email management. Bulk email wisely.

Proshark Blog

Proshark appoints sales veteran TJ Robinson as VP Sales

Sales Veteran TJ Robinson Joins Proshark as VP of Sales

The Top 5 SEO Mistakes That Every Business Should Avoid

Organic traffic typically makes up 60 - 70% of a sites traffic and tends to be the highest converting form of traffic. Here's the top 5 SEO mistakes to avoid hurting your business's Search Engine Rankings or losing your organic traffic.

Mistake #1: Stuffing your Meta Keywords

Mistake #2: Using Content Exclusively Generated By AI

Mistake #3: Duplicating Content On Your Site

Mistake #4: Buying Backlinks

Mistake #5: Using misleading or sensationalized headlines!

The SEO Takeaway:

Do's and Don'ts of Highly Converting Websites

What You Need to Know About Highly Converting Websites and Conversion Rate Optimization

DO Focus on User Experience

DON’T Create a Cluttered Layout

DO use Catchy Headlines and Calls-To-Action (that actually match!)

DON’T Stray from your Brand Colors

DO Set Up Effective Navigation

DON’T Fill a Page with Long Paragraphs

DO Make your Site Visually Attractive

DON’T Use too Many Images

DO Test for Functionality!

DON’T Compromise on Speed

DO Create a Focused Customer Journey

DON’T Forget to Optimize for Conversions

Website Redesign Checklist: How to Know if You Need a New Website or Website Redesign

How do you really know if you need a new website or a website redesign?

Are websites even really that important?

Are you going to get to the checklist you promised?

Checklist: The 10 Website Traps for the New Digital Marketing Landscape

Make Press Releases, Interviews and Public Awareness Work For You

Do Press Releases and Public Awareness Pieces Work?

So how do they work?

How did you miss it and why didn't anyone tell you?

Telling You About The Google Privacy Transition for a Year

Here's What the Google Privacy Transition Means for You...

The Affects of the IOS Privacy Changes are Already Impacting Digital Marketing

Google's Privacy Changes are Full Speed Ahead

So What Is the Real Point of the Changes?

Step-by-Step Digital Marketing Strategy Development for 2022

You’re sick of it, we get it.

Aren’t you sick of being taken advantage of?

Understand the basics and spot the silver-tongued highway robbers.

OVERVIEW

PREP WORK

OWNED MEDIA

STRATEGY

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ANALYSIS

KPI ANALYSIS

Why SMB's Should Hire an Agency for Their Digital Marketing Strategy

Snakes, Vines, and Pits...The Challenges of Digital Marketing Explained

A Digital Destination: Do I really need to set one?

Assessment: Why can’t I just wing my marketing?

Cartography: Who needs a digital map anyway? ﻿

10 Ways a Marketing Agency Can Help Your Business

Marketing Strategy

Brand Identity

Website

Search engine optimization

Pay-Pe r-Click Advertising

Content Creation

Video Creation, Optimization, and Syndication

Social Media Marketing

Collateral Design and Creation ﻿

Analytics

Do Looks Really Matter... For My Website?

How important is your website's design to potential clients?

#1. Website Functionality

#2 . Customer Journey Organization

#3. Quality Site Content

#4 Website Navigation ﻿

#5 Clear CTA's

Find The Right Digital Marketing Agency For Your Retail Business

The Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketer or Agency

Assess Your Needs and Budget

Do Your Research

Be Sure the Agency is Transparent

Don’t Rush Decision Making and Think About the Long Haul

Choose the Best Value, Not the Best Price

Moving Forward with Finding the Right Digital Marketing Agency For Your Business

Cartography: Who needs a digital map anyway?

Collateral Design and Creation

#4 Website Navigation

You Need a New Cohesive Strategy

Where is the Proof of this great marketing transformation?

Focus On Running Your Business