Digital Marketing News in the Tampa Bay Area and Vestal New York.

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ADA Compliance: 5 Website Accessibility Resolutions for Your Business

The New Year presents a fresh start and new opportunities to improve your business. With the start of the New Year, now is the perfect time to reflect on your business and decide what you want to do different.

Sun Sign Designs is encouraging all businesses to add this goal to their list:

Ensure Your Website is ADA Compliant.

Digital accessibility provides people with disabilities the opportunity to interact with digital content confidently and independently. Making digital accessibility a priority for your business’s website is the best New Year’s resolution. Why? Because everyone deserves the opportunity to access and enjoy your business’s website without difficulty.

With more than 1 billion people around the world using assistive technology, there is an obvious need for websites to be accessible to all of their users. Through this one resolution, your business will become more inclusive, expand audience reach, mitigate legal risk, and enhance brand reputation.

What is ADA Compliance?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legally requires businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Your business’s website falls under Title III of ADA and is considered a place of public accommodation. As a result, the website owner is solely responsible for developing a website that offers “reasonable accessibility.” Failure to meet ADA compliance can result in lawsuits, fines, and damage to your brand reputation—but most importantly, it prevents a portion of your audience from using your website.

What Your Business Can Do To Improve Digital Accessibility This Year

In today’s age, digital experiences pervade nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s important to make those experiences available to everyone. What can your business do this year to improve its digital accessibility?

  1. Perform a Digital Accessibility Audit

Learning where your website currently lacks ADA Compliance is the first step to improving your digital accessibility. Evaluating your website and finding its shortcomings in digital accessibility will give your business a clear path to move toward a more inclusive digital experience. When done right, the audit will help your business identify accessibility barriers on your website and help you understand how well your digital content currently conforms to accessibility standards like WCAG.

  1. Get Familiar with WCAG Guidelines

Unlike ADA Compliance, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) isn’t a legal requirement. However, it is the most-referenced set of standards in website accessibility lawsuits and is widely considered the best way to achieve website accessibility. In fact, even certain court rulings have ordered businesses in breach of ADA to rebuild their websites with WCAG standards in mind. Even though WCAG isn’t mentioned specifically in ADA, it does provide the gold standard for website accessibility.

WCAG is a set of digital accessibility standards that focus on assisting individuals with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. It is organized into four major categories: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Review POUR in more depth here.

  1. Focus on User Experience

When designing your website, focus on the experience of all users. This means your website’s elements are easily accessible to all. No user will have to ask for features that will accommodate them. Rather, those inclusive features will be available as soon as they land on your site. How can you provide inclusive features as soon as your customers land on your website? Read on below.

  1. Implement an Accessibility Tool

Digital accessibility tools like widgets make websites immediately available to every web user and ensure websites are ADA compliant.  Using an accessibility widget is an affordable solution that simplifies and streamlines digital accessibility. Widgets provide an interface that allows all users to customize the website to their individual needs. As a result, users can personally adjust your site’s design to suit their accessibility needs. This could include changing font sizes, switching to keyboard navigation, using a screen reader, changing color contrasts, and more.

Sun Sign Designs offers a full suite of digital accessibility solutions to help your business’s website meet ADA Compliance. There’s no need to overhaul your website and rewrite code—we will seamlessly integrate our AI-powered accessibility widget into your website. We offer a secure and easy compliance solution that doesn’t require reworking your entire site.

  1. Have an Accessibility Statement

By making a good-faith effort to achieve reasonable accessibility for people with disabilities, businesses can avoid potential fines, lawsuits, and losing valued customers. With that said, it is also important for your business to have a statement outlining your ADA Compliance efforts and inviting users to give your business feedback.

With an accessibility statement, your business will show users that you care about accessibility and about them, provide customers information about the accessibility of your content, demonstrate social responsibility, and display a strong commitment to inclusivity on the Internet.

 

Want to discuss digital accessibility and ADA Compliance in more depth? Contact us today to schedule a strategy session.

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How Infographics Benefit Your Content Strategy

Are you taking advantage of infographics as a part of your content strategy?  If not, you are missing out on a valuable, highly shareable digital marketing tool.

What is an Infographic?

An infographic is a collection of images, or graphics, paired with written copy to provide a visualization of data or information. Infographics summarize data and present information in an engaging, easy-to-understand way. The average consumer is much more likely to quickly peruse an infographic rather than commit time to reading a long article. Infographics offer enhanced readability and a low time commitment, two aspects that are important to consumers.

Quickly Educate & Engage

The mind processes images much faster than words. As a result, the visual nature of infographics helps speed up the rate at which information is processed. Consumers can then process information more quickly and come to a decision faster. Not only that but, as humans, we naturally gravitate toward visual elements. As a result, infographics are extremely effective at grabbing our attention and engaging our interest.

In addition, since infographics breakdown information piece-by-piece, they are great for presenting complex ideas in a digestible way. As a result, infographics will help businesses communicate complicated industry-specific topics in an easy-to-understand and approachable way.

Improve Content Shareability

Infographics are also highly shareable and increase a business’s content exposure. According to marketing research, infographics receive about three times more likes and shares on social media than any other type of content.

Infographics are also incredibly versatile and can help businesses get more mileage out of their content. They can be used in a monthly newsletter, incorporated in a press release, posted on social media, used in blog posts, and even have their own page on a website.

Enhance Brand Awareness

Infographics provide a great opportunity to enhance brand awareness by incorporating brand font, brand logos, brand colors, and other brand-specific information. When a business’s target consumer encounters these infographics, they become more aware of that brand and associate that brand with its industry. These branding efforts also help differentiate a business’s infographics from other infographics.

Build Brand Credibility

Creating infographics with authoritative, industry-specific information naturally positions a business as a leader and expert in their field. When seen as a trustworthy source of information, businesses also position their products or services as worthy of consumer trust.

Boost SEO

Finally, infographics are great for building stronger SEO. As more people share content (e.g. an infographic) that is linked back to your website, you will build backlinks and generate website traffic, both of which increase importance in search engine rankings.

Types of Infographics

Although infographics share basic elements—images and written text— there are many different kinds of infographics that are more effective than others for certain data sets.

Informational Infographic: Informational infographics usually communicate a new or specialized topic. They use descriptive headers and illustrative icons to help communicate each point clearly.

Visual Infographic: A visual infographic is a piece of text woven together with images. It is often used to make a plain article or story more engaging and interesting to the reader.

List-based Infographic: List-based infographics share collections of tips, lists of resources, and more listed information in a straightforward, numbered fashion.

How-To Infographic: A how-to infographic provides step-by-step instructions to outline a process and make it easier to understand. For example, businesses can use how-to infographics to outline the steps needed to effectively use their products or services.

Map Infographic: This is a geographic infographic that presents location-based data. Map infographics can be used to present and share data trends based on geographic locations.

Comparison Infographic: A comparison infographic compares two ideas, concepts, or objects. It can highlight the differences or highlight the similarities between two things. It could also prove that one option is better or worse than the other.

Data Visualization: Data visualization is a type of statistical infographic. It illustrates complex data through charts, graphs, and design. This type of infographic makes facts and statistics easier to absorb and more interesting to read. For example, data visualizations could be used to communicate survey results or present data to back up an argument.

Flowchart Infographic: Flowchart infographics simplify and break down complex processes into easy-to-understand steps. Businesses could use flowchart infographics to explain industry-specific practices or complex processes.

Timeline Infographic: Timeline infographics tell a chronological story. It can show how something has changed over time, show how one thing leads to another, and highlight important dates or the history of something.

Animated Infographics: If your audience enjoys innovative creative content, then they will love animated infographics. Animated infographics incorporate micro-animations in an infographic design to add an element of unexpected liveliness to the imagery.

 

Does your business want to drive more quality traffic and engagement across platforms? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss custom infographics and content tools that will energize your marketing strategy.

Personalized Email Marketing: 4 Tactics to Re-Engage Your Customers

Email marketing remains one of the most direct ways to get in touch with your customers and offer your products or services—but did you know email personalization more than doubles engagement and results?

In the context of email marketing, personalization is the act of leveraging customer data to create targeted, customized email communications. Types of customer data used in personalized email marketing can include your customer’s first name, the last product they bought, demographics like age, gender, or location, and much more.

Why does email personalization have such a marked effect? Because today’s consumers do not want to be treated like just another number. In fact, they expect businesses to treat them as unique individuals. Email personalization is a necessary way to help your customers feel seen and that your business understands their wants and needs

Personalization gets more emails opened, read, and acted on. It naturally increases engagement and builds better customer relationships. And all that activity equals more conversions, sales, and growth for your business.

Personalization is a vital component to any email marketing campaign. What tactics should your business use?

  1. Personalized Subject Lines

Personalized subject lines are the most basic personalization tactic, but effective nonetheless. Subject lines are often what determine if an email gets opened or not. Crafting subject lines is much more than writing a snappy tagline that will hook your readers’ interest—it is all about personal relevance to the reader.

Customers don’t want to be treated like a number—they want to be seen and treated as an individual and valued as a customer. Personalized subject lines will help your business achieve this! Subject lines that increase open rates include:

  • First names
  • Interests
  • Milestones (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
  • Transaction history
  • Urgency (“Hey [name], you left this in your cart!”)
  • Recommendations
  1. List Segmentation

Don’t assume your target audience is all interested in the same products, services, or content. Generic, bulk emails are not valuable to your customers. Old customers receiving promotional content meant for new customers, customers receiving the same email many times, or customers receiving discounts for a product they have already purchased can lead people to unsubscribe from email lists.

The solution? Break up your email list into small targeted sections, so customers receive content that is relevant to them. When customers receive relevant emails, they are far more likely to open and engage with them and continue building their relationship with your brand. Successful segmentation strategies include:

  • Demographics (age, gender, location, job, income, etc.)
  • Purchasing habits or transaction history
  • Web behavior (pages visited, scrolling behavior, etc.)
  • Engagement level (dormant subscribers vs. engaged subscribers)
  • Stage in Sales Funnel or Buyer’s Journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision)

Personalization and list segmentation go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other. Once you have targeted a specific segment, then you can find the personalization tactic that will work best for them.

  1. Personalized Content

Personalized “limited-time” special offers are highly influential in re-engaging customers through email. Sending out promos, coupons, discount codes, or product recommendations to targeted segments of your audience (e.g. inactive subscribers) is a winning personalization tactic that creates a sense of urgency and inspires follow-through.

However, personalization isn’t just for promotional emails. Building out creative, informative, educational, or entertaining content adds a different dimension of value to your emails besides money-savings. Find out what your customers are interested in seeing. Would they watch an informational video, download a whitepaper, or read a client case study? Knowing your audience’s interests is a crucial first step before investing time and money in content creation.

  1. Behavior Triggers

Behavior-triggered emails are automatic reactions to how customers are interacting with your products or services. This is a type of automated tactic that determines what a customer will see next. This could be an abandoned cart email, a welcome email, or useful instructional information once a customer has bought a product.

These drip campaigns, continuously “drip,” or send a certain number of personalized emails over a set period of time, based on the actions that the customer takes. Highly personalized and targeted, drip campaigns are great at reengaging dormant customers, driving one-off visitors back to your website and increasing conversions. Some examples of behavior-triggered emails include:

  • Welcome emails
  • Event registration (e.g. webinar)
  • Changing contact or profile information
  • Abandoned cart reminders
  • Product page exit
  • Shipping cost exit

Get Started with Personalized Email Marketing Today

Personalization builds relationships with the people who matter most to your business. When you prioritize personalization in email marketing, you put your customers first. Do you need help building a list you can segment, finding ways to collect useful data, or creating a personalized email campaign that converts? Contact Sun Sign Designs today for a consultation.

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When to Use Long-Form Content vs. Short-Form Content

There is no universal rule when it comes to the length of your content.

Long-form content and short-form content are both essential digital marketing tools. Though it has long been a topic of debate, one isn’t better than the other. However, there are certain situations where one will work better than the other, given the purpose of the content.

Long-Form Content

Long-form content is typically 1,200 words or more. It is standard practice to choose a long-form format when you are covering an educational topic that requires an in-depth explanation or analysis. Long-form content is also an ideal format for “evergreen” topics that will remain relevant to your customers over time. Types of long-form content include:

When should you to use long-form content? Long-form content is best suited to the early stages of your sales funnel, or the early stages of the buyer’s journey, when your target customer’s awareness of your business is low. With little awareness of your products or services, these customers need more comprehensive materials to learn about your brand and offerings.

Long-form content is also generally used in complex business-to-business sales, technical product markets, and high-end product or service markets because they need more detailed explanations. High-end product brands, in particular, require more copy to pitch their audience and convince them that their products or services are worth the higher price mark.

Short-Form Content

Short-form content is typically less than 1,200 words. It is well-loved because it is easy to consume and mobile-friendly. This type of content is useful when you cover seasonal topics that do not need extensive copy, when you want to convey a single idea, or when you create product and service pages where copy isn’t the main focus. Types of short-form content include.

When should you use short-form content? Short-form has the most impact when your customers are already familiar with your brand and trust your products or services. Also, commonly-used products or services don’t require long-form copy explanations to “sell” them since people already see them essential. Additionally, there are several digital marketing tools that require short-form copy, such as PPC ads, lists, social media posts, or email copy.

Which is Better for SEO?

Is long-form content or short-form content better for SEO? This question has long been up for debate. The short answer is: technically no, neither content form is better than the other for SEO efforts. Google Search Advocate John Mueller has explicitly stated that word count is not a ranking factor and that word count is not used to evaluate content quality. What search engines like Google care about the most is satisfying the user.

However, based on studies, it appears long-form content often outperforms short-form content in search rankings. Why? Most likely, it is because long-form content has the most space to properly answer user queries and optimize for keyword searches. On average, people stay longer on long-form content, indicating that the content was high quality and useful to them. This is likely the reason why people thought word count had a direct impact on ranking.

Keep in mind: this doesn’t mean that short-form content cannot be equally useful. Both long-form and short-form content have their place in every successful content strategy.

So How Do You Choose?

How do you know which content form to use? Ask these questions to help you find the best copy length.

Who is your target audience?

Knowing who you are writing for is the most important consideration when creating content. Who are they and what are they looking for? What are their interests and pain points? How do they like to consume information? It’s important to distinguish if your typical customer prefers a how-to video instead of a 2,000 word guide, or vice versa, before going all in on your content creation. In addition, identifying topics of high-interest will also show your business where word count matters the most.

What stage of the buyer’s journey are they in?

Where are they in your sales funnel? Knowing where a customer is at in their buyer’s journey with your business will help you understand what kind of information they are looking for and how much. For example, new customers will want as much information as possible about your offerings, the problems you solve, and how you fare against competition, whereas loyal customers may only seek short-form news announcements, such as product launches or upcoming sales.

Read Creating Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey or Resources That Optimize Your Website to the Buyer’s Journey next!

Is your topic evergreen or seasonal?

Is your topic an informative one that will stay relevant over time or a seasonal one that is short-lived before becoming irrelevant? Businesses tend to use long-form content for more “timeless” topics that will always remain important to their customers.

What is your business’s goal for the content?

Why are you creating this content in the first place? What is the content’s purpose? Is it to entertain, educate, inform, inspire, or convert? When you identify your goals for the content, you will know what content length will work best. For example, if your goal is to entertain a follower on social media, you may opt for something short and sweet. On the other hand, if your goal is to build authority on a subject, you will want to a long-form format to cover as much information as possible.

 

 

Is your content meeting the needs of your audience and building your business? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss your content strategy and content creation today.

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Four Types of Content Every Business Needs

Is your content creation goal-driven or aimless? The content your business creates should be driven by what you want to achieve with your audience.

Content is used in a variety of ways depending on its purpose. It can inform people of new information, attempt to sell a product or service, attract people to read your articles or follow your social media, give your brand a personal feel, and more. Businesses can achieve quite a lot through content creation, but the question is: does your business know what it’s trying to achieve with its content?

Let’s go over the four types of content every business needs and the purpose of each.

Content to Entertain

Creating entertaining content is a great opportunity to connect with your audience in a basic human-to-human level. What is meant by “entertaining”? Something that entertains, or interests, your audience will appeal to their emotions and personality. For example, this content could use humor, nostalgia, or interactivity to spark amusement and engagement. This type of content is highly shareable and especially suited to get in touch with people who haven’t heard of your brand, products, or services.

Content to entertain helps break the ice, so to speak. It casually introduces your brand to your target audience and sparks brand awareness without pushing “salesy” copy. Establishing this “just like me” aspect of your business is important to building an initial connection and trust with your audience. Entertaining content could include:

  • Quizzes or polls
  • Competitions or contests
  • Sharing viral content
  • Games
  • Branded videos

Content to Educate

A majority of content marketing focuses on audience education and general helpfulness. It focuses less on entertaining your audience and more on helping your audience solve their challenges. Educational content is poised at the beginning of your sales funnel. It should be less about plugging your products or services and more about helping your audience identify a problem or a need and offering potential solutions.

What happens when someone becomes aware they have a problem or a need? They research for a solution. If your business wants to be seen as a potential solution or an authoritative source, then you need educational content to guide their research process. Educational content could include:

Content to Inspire

Like entertaining content, inspiring content similarly taps into your audience’s emotional response. Inspiring content aims to deeply resonate with your audience. This could be stories of success, triumph, self-improvement, and more uplifting themes. Content that inspires often takes the form of:

Content to Convert

Finally, content to convert is meant to nudge your audience to action, whether that is signing up for a newsletter or buying a product. Content to convert is sales focused. It is the last push your potential customers need to be convinced to try your brand, which includes answering final questions and addressing concerns. This content category uses facts, figures, and other rationale to promote your offerings. Content types focused on converting include:

Every business’s content strategy employs all four of these content types. What kinds of content does your business need more of? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss your content strategy and content creation today.

Want to read more about content creation? Read Creating Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey or Resources That Optimize Your Website to the Buyer’s Journey next!

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Does Your Business Meet These Four Major Standards for Website Accessibility?

Digital accessibility is focused on designing or adapting digital spaces, content, and tools—like websites or apps—so people with disabilities can use them. Digital accessibility provides people with disabilities the opportunity to interact with digital content confidently and independently.

With more than 1 billion people around the world using assistive technology, such as text-to-speech software, there is an obvious need for websites to be accessible to all of their users. How accessible is your business’s website?

What is ADA Compliance?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legally requires businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Your business’s website falls under Title III of ADA and is considered a place of public accommodation. As a result, the website owner is solely responsible for developing a website that offers “reasonable accessibility.” Failure to meet ADA compliance can result in lawsuits, fines, and damage to your brand reputation—but most importantly, it prevents a portion of your audience from using your website.

What is WCAG?

Unlike ADA Compliance, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) isn’t a legal requirement. However, it is the most-referenced set of standards in website accessibility lawsuits and is widely considered the best way to achieve website accessibility. In fact, even certain court rulings have ordered businesses in breach of ADA to rebuild their websites with WCAG standards in mind. Even though WCAG isn’t mentioned specifically in ADA, it does provide the gold standard for website accessibility.

WCAG is a set of digital accessibility standards that focus on assisting individuals with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. It is organized into four major categories: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR).

1. Perceivable

All content and website components must be presented in a way all users can perceive. This means every user who visits your website should have the means to perceive, or comprehend, information, such as your website’s text, images, or video. Users must be given the option to achieve this either directly or through alternative options, such as text alternatives like a text transcript or audio captions for a video.

2. Operable

User interface components and navigation must be operable for all users. This means all website users should have the ability to navigate your website and use its features. Users should not have an issue using main navigation, a search bar, or other tools. Websites can implement keyboard accessibility to allow users to navigate the site and find content via their keyboard.

3. Understandable

Your website, content, and digital operations must perform in a way and be accessed in a way that is easy to predict and understand. This means users must be able to understand the information and the basic operation of the website, being both readable and predictable.

4. Robust

Your website and content must be “robust” enough so they are compatible with assistive technologies and can be reliably interpreted by assistive technologies. Essentially, your website must provide all site visitors with the same experience.

WCAG Compliance Levels

WCAG Compliance has different levels of conformance depending on how much a website implements. Each level consists of higher adherence with more robust, comprehensive standards.

A: This is the most basic level. It is fairly easy to achieve with minimal impact to a website’s structure or design.

AA: This level is the most commonly referenced in legal proceedings. According to previous rulings, achieving AA standards of WCAG compliance makes a website acceptably accessible.

AAA: This is the most comprehensive standard for digital accessibility and includes a higher set of benchmarks in order to achieve it.

Digital Accessibility Benefits

Maintaining an ADA-compliant website helps protect your business against potential lawsuits and fines in addition to providing inclusive accommodations for all of your customers. ADA-compliant websites expand audience reach, enrich SEO efforts, improve brand reputation, enhance user experience, and offer businesses tax benefits.

By making a good-faith effort to achieve reasonable accessibility for people with disabilities, businesses can avoid potential fines, lawsuits, and losing valued customers.

Is Your Business ADA Compliant?

Does your business need help becoming ADA Compliant?

Sun Sign Designs offers a full suite of digital accessibility solutions to help your website meet ADA Compliance. There’s no need to overhaul your website and rewrite code—we will seamlessly integrate our AI-powered accessibility widget into your website. We offer a secure and easy compliance solution that doesn’t require reworking your entire site.

To find out more about ADA website compliance and how you can protect your business, contact Sun Sign Designs today!

The 5 Types of Brand Personality — Which Ones Fit Your Business?

Just like every person has a personality, so does every business.

An individual’s personality naturally influences how others will view them and interact with them. Your brand’s personality has the same impact on your audience—it directly determines if a customer will bond with (and use) your business.

How can you create a brand personality that is relatable to your target audience and drives customer acquisition?

What is a Brand Personality?

Brand personality is the part of your brand that your customers will most identify with and build a relationship with. It is a collection of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral traits that are unique to your brand and should remain consistent over time. Brand personality is largely visible in the most important aspects of your business’s marketing strategy: brand messaging (slogans, website copy, mission statements) brand imagery (logos, fonts, colors, designs), brand storytelling, and content (blogs, email campaigns, podcasts, videos, social posts).

However, brand personality is more than a collection of adjectives. It personifies your brand into a near human entity—to the point that when your customers “meet” your brand on social media, in search engine results, or in their inbox, they’ll immediately know if they have found a kindred spirit or not.

Customers are more likely to purchase from a brand or work with a business if the brand’s personality is similar to their own. Learning your customers’ core personality traits, hobbies, behaviors, values, mental outlooks, and lifestyle choices will help you build a highly-effective, relatable brand personality that attracts your audience.

Asking yourself questions like—Are my customers introverts or extroverts? Optimists or pessimists? Spontaneous or planners? Outdoorsy or homebodies? Old fashioned or trendy?—will help you identify core personality traits to incorporate in your branding and market positioning.

Why Define Brand Personality?

Brand personality plays a large role in brand positioning and driving competitive differentiation. In a competitive marketplace, your business must stand out. Thankfully, the same product or service can be marketed in distinct, memorable ways depending on your brand’s personality. Every business has the opportunity to find their niche and stand out in the crowd.

Not to mention, brand personality gives a face and voice to your brand, allowing your customers to effectively interact and engage with your business. As a result, your business will strengthen brand awareness, improve engagement, increase customer acquisition, and secure customer loyalty.

The Five Types of Brand Personality

If your business were a person, your brand personality is how you would describe it. Where does your business (and your ideal customer!) fit in? These five dimensions of brand personality were first defined by marketing expert Jennifer Aaker in 1997, and they remain a popular marketing model today.

Sincerity

When you think of this brand personality, people think of the terms: honest, heartfelt, cheerful, and genuine. Sincerity is a down-to-earth brand personality that usually emphasizes family values, honesty & openness, wholesomeness, sentimentality, family ownership, handmade craftsmanship, or small town roots.

Excitement

Does your business pride itself on its daring, imaginative nature? Excitement is a spirited brand personality that best appeals to those who love innovation, originality, and imagination. It is progressive, passionate, energetic, cutting edge, trendy, daring, and has a particular appeal to youth. For example, this brand personality is often seen in sports apparel marketing.

Competence

Is your business branding its experience and competency? Competence is a dimension of brand personality that focuses on intelligence, success, and expertise. It also emphasizes trust, security, and reliability. This is an ideal brand personality for businesses that want to be viewed as capable, knowledgeable, successful leaders that can be depended upon.

Sophistication

Charming, refined, and elegant! Sophistication is a brand personality that appeals to luxury, exclusivity, and class. These brands evoke upper-class glamour, femininity, and sophistication. Contrary to its initial impression, this brand personality doesn’t always mean a higher price, but a more stylish, refined brand experience. It is worldly, polished, and minimalist. This brand personality is commonly seen in makeup, personal care products, and luxury vehicles.

Ruggedness

Does your brand prize all things outdoorsy and active? Ruggedness is a brand personality that emphasizes the outdoors, toughness, masculinity, strength, bravery, and brawn. This type of personality is often used to play up the durability and quality of products or services in extreme situations.

Can your brand be identified by one or more of these personalities?

Add Dimension to Your Brand Personality

Is your brand personality authentic to your organization and relatable to your ideal customer? Does your ideal customer look at your brand and think, “We have a lot in common”? Your brand should mirror the characteristics your target audience values the most—as well as the values they hope and aspire to develop.

Authentic, consistent brand personality builds a strong foundation for your brand identity and clear direction for your marketing strategies. Need help focusing your brand? Contact Sun Sign Designs for a consultation today.

Tell a Compelling Story with Your Data

What is Data Storytelling?

Telling a story with numbers? It may sound strange, but your data insights can inspire a marketing narrative that touches your audience and motivates them to act. Data storytelling is a way to effectively communicate information to a specific audience through a compelling narrative.

Data storytelling is comprised of three main components: data, narrative, and visualizations. Through narrative and visualizations, data insights are put into context for your audience, better understood by your audience, and more likely to inspire action from your audience.

Data

Your data will dictate the direction of your narrative. Is there something you want to prove or disprove to your audience? A point or message you would like to back with numbers? The first part of data storytelling is, of course, collecting the objective data needed to prove or disprove your theory. After gathering and analyzing your data, you will then be able to define the purpose and direction of your story and choose a compelling perspective.

Narrative

Data can often be abstract and difficult to understand. A verbal, written, or visual narrative—the storyline—is created to simplify complicated data insights and effectively communicate them to your audience in a clear, memorable way. Stories provide a human touch to your data. Your data points become characters with their own voice and stories to tell.

While factual information has its place, narrative elements add living, breathing dimension to your data insights. As a result, your audience can see themselves reflected in your story and connect on an emotional level to the challenges and solutions presented. They can empathize with the pain points or challenges presented and are more invested when your products or services are discussed as a solution.

What actions would you like your audience to take after encountering your data story? This answer needs to be in the forefront as you craft your storyline. Just like any good story, your data narrative will need a beginning, middle, and end—preferably with actionable insights and key takeaways that help your audience with their decision-making process. A good rule of thumb is to begin with a question and end with an insight.

Visualizations

The visualization tools your business uses to display your data narrative will play an important role in determining how receptive your audience will be. Visualization tools, such as videos, infographics, photography, animation, illustration, charts, or graphs, make complex data more digestible and compelling to your audience. It will help your audience see, interact with, and better understand your data in an approachable and engaging way.

Why is Data Storytelling Powerful?

Spreadsheets or stories? As a society, we have a natural preference for stories over numbers. If you want to get into your audience’s head and convey a message in a way they understand, stories are the way to go. Stories engage multiple parts of our brains and unlock an emotional response—something pure numbers cannot do. Evoking an emotional response empowers your marketing message to be remembered and acted upon.

Stories make information more memorable, persuasive, and engaging for audiences. Data stories simplify complicated information, so an audience can more readily understand it, engage with the content, and quickly make a confident decision based on the information.

A common example of data storytelling that you have likely encountered is a road safety video. Whether it is about wearing your seatbelt or not texting and driving, these videos will often present tragic real-life scenarios to bring increased awareness. This is much more memorable and compelling than listing statistics or percentages alone.

Tell a Story with Your Data

Would your business like to craft a compelling data narrative that inspires your audience to action? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss data storytelling in more depth and what it can do for your business.

The Types of Data Every Business Should Collect

Data-driven marketing is continuing to grow—and for good reason. It has allowed businesses to build personalized marketing strategies, create better customer experiences, generate relevant leads, and retain loyal customers based on strong empirical evidence.

The value of data doesn’t reside in the numbers it reveals. Rather, the real value of data resides in what a business decides to do with it. Data can have a huge impact on a business. Whether you have 100 customers or 100,000 customers, it is never too early or too late to start collecting useful data that will improve your business’s decision-making and bottom line.

So what types of data should every business be collecting?

Demographic Data

Let’s get back to the basics. Who is your average customer? Who makes up your audience? Basic customer data forms your business’s most fundamental understanding of your customers and relationships. Collecting statistical data about age, gender, income, location, education, job title, family status, and more allows your business to divide your audience in broad strokes and build specific audience profiles. Basic demographic data allows businesses to identify their key customers in a large marketplace, understand their customers, and how to effectively connect with them.

Why is this important? Because today’s buyers expect personalized customer experiences and for business to implicitly understand their needs, preferences, and problems. Customers expect to be fully seen and understood when consuming your business’s marketing materials. As a result, your business needs to know exactly who they are talking to.

Discovery Data

How did your customers discover your business? This is one of the most crucial questions for your business to answer. It will give you invaluable insights into your marketing strategy and where your business needs to place its attention. The goal in collecting this data is to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and discover which tool works best.

For example, your business may find a majority of customers discover you from a certain social media channel. With this knowledge, your business can then confidently focus on building a stronger brand presence there. On the other hand, if you find a majority of your customers discover your business through blogs or industry-related new articles on search engines, then investing in more written content will be a priority.

Engagement Analytics

How does your audience interact with your business’s content and marketing materials? A business’s audience plays a crucial role in its growth and success. Your marketing strategy’s success directly depends upon audience engagement. Understanding audience engagement is now a nonnegotiable factor in increasing marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Engagement data points can include: activity on your website or digital event, email open rates, resources downloaded, time spent on a page or watching a video, time spent on an event like a webinar or podcast, pages per session, and much more.

Where is your audience’s virtual pulse the strongest? Do your customers prefer to interact with your brand on social media pages, in their inboxes, or directly on your website? Knowing these answers will help your business readjust when needed and stay present where your customers want you.

Behavioral Data

You know who your customers are—but do you know how they act? Behavioral data focuses on customer purchasing habits, spending habits, customer journey stages, engagement level, and brand interactions. Essentially, this type of data collection narrows in on what your customers do rather than who they are.

It is a type of targeting that is particularly effective in discovering customer purchase patterns and spending trends. For example, you can discover whether your customers are more likely to shop online or in-store, how often they use coupons, or how likely they would shop a sale.

Perhaps most importantly, behavioral data helps your business understand what kind of shoppers or clients your customers are. Are your customers complex shoppers that actively research the best option before purchasing? Are your customers variety seekers that enjoy trying out different brands even when they enjoy a certain brand’s product? Or are your customers habitual shoppers that frequently return to familiar brands without much thought? Knowing how your audience approaches their buying process is invaluable information that will optimize your marketing approach.

Purchase Decision Data

What inspires your customers to convert? What drives their buying decisions? Unlocking this answer is key to creating effective marketing materials that drive real results. Purchase decision data allows businesses to discover what influences their audience to convert with a certain brand. For instance, are your customers swayed by personal factors, such as company missions and core values that align with their own beliefs? Or are your customers inspired to convert based on societal trends and cultural fads?

When your business discovers what influences your audience, you can adjust your marketing messages accordingly to create communications that resonate with your customers and move them to action.

Transactional Data & Buying Behavior

Transactional data and buying behavior data can include: price points your customers shop at, if they buy with discounts or promos, a preference for certain products or brands, purchase frequency, time of purchase, method of purchase, and more. By collecting this basic transactional data, businesses can then identify common buying behaviors among their customers.

Consequently, by understanding their customers’ specific buying behaviors, businesses can create effective strategies around those behaviors. Not only does this add value to the customer’s shopping experience, but it also increases conversion rates.

Start Using Your Data Like a Valuable Resource

Imagine the impact when your business starts leveraging data to better understand your customers. Data-driven approaches empower your business to confidently optimize your marketing strategy and deliver greater customer experiences.

Do you want to collect and use data to improve your customer conversion and retention? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss a viable data & analytics strategy that will work for your business.

Are You Leveraging Data for Stronger Customer Relationships?

More and more businesses today are becoming customer-centric or client-centric, which means, at the core of every business strategy, there is a heavy emphasis on customer satisfaction and fulfillment. Why? Because at the end of the day, a business’s success depends not only on its products or services, but on its rapport with its customers.

Turning Information into Strong Relationships

Anything a business can do to strengthen and deepen their customer relationships now is an actionable move toward long-term sustainability and growth later. This is where data comes in. Data is much more than numbers and percentages. It is invaluable knowledge that unlocks the formula to customer conversion and customer retention. By truly understanding your customer’s background, personality, wants, and needs, your business has the answers on how to best please them and keep them.

Who are Your High-Value Customers? Why Do They Continually Convert?

Not all customers are created equal—businesses have to locate their prime customers to target them and generate revenue. High-value customers are the ones who are the most visible to your business in terms of engagement or conversion. Why do they convert more so than other demographics? What aspects of your brand messaging, products, or services speak to them?

Identifying these nuances in your customer data allows your business to place them at the center of your marketing strategy and build off these insights. This data helps you make business decisions with more confidence since you know exactly who and where your target is.

Who are Your Potential Customers? Why Aren’t They Converting?

When do potential customers leave your website or social media pages? By locating when customers abandon their cart or unsubscribe from email lists, your business can double-down to identify the trigger that halted their buyer’s journey with your brand. As a result, businesses may find that their pages loaded too slow and need to optimize their site speed in order for more potential customers to convert. Businesses may find that there are not enough call-to-actions on their landing pages or that their banner placement is poor in their emails. This type of data allows businesses to continually optimize and improve for their customers in actionable, result-driven ways.

How Do Your Customers Act?

How do you customers act? The more types of data you collect on an individual, the better you’ll be able to understand and cater to their needs and expectations. This type of behavioral data focuses on uncovering customer purchasing habits, their customer journey stage at time of conversion, engagement level, and brand interactions. Essentially, it helps your business focus on what your customers do in addition to who they are—this knowledge allow your business to cater to their specific habits.

This type of data collection is particularly effective in discovering customer purchasing patterns and spending trends. For example, a business could discover whether their customers are more likely to shop online or in-store, how often they use coupons, if promos make them convert, or how likely they would shop a sale.

But perhaps most importantly, behavioral and transactional data helps your business understand what kind of shoppers your customers are. Do they actively research the best options before purchasing? If they do, then maybe your business invests in more blogs, white papers, and research material. Do they enjoy variety and often try out many different brands? If they do, what can your business do to make your products or services feel constantly new? Or are they creatures of habit and frequently return to the same brands without much thought?

Knowing how your audience approaches their buying process is invaluable information that will optimize your marketing and sales approach.

How Do Your Customers Like to Engage?  

The more your customer’s engage with you, the more data your business can gather to further personalize your marketing messaging. Where are your customers engaging with your business the most? Which social media channels are the preferred means of engagement? Do your customers engage more in their inboxes or on discussion boards? Knowing where to go to engage and converse with your audience is critical for building lasting, loyal relationships that carry your business long-term.

Start Using Your Data Like a Valuable Resource

Imagine the impact when your business starts leveraging data to better understand your customers. Data-driven approaches empower your business to confidently optimize your marketing strategy and deliver greater customer experiences.

Do you want to collect and use data to improve your customer conversion and retention? Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss a viable data & analytics strategy that will work for your business.