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

Using Customer Reviews to Enhance the Buyer’s Journey

When it comes to committing to an online purchase, do reviews influence buyers?

Think about it. When purchasing a new product, which do you implicitly trust more: the sales-pitch copy found on a product’s landing page or the customer reviews of the product? During the buyer’s journey, people consistently consult reviews and testimonials to see if they trust the product, service, and seller.

Reviews are one of the most valuable informational sources used by buyers to inform their purchase decisions. Though your business may offer a variety of useful content, customers still rely on personal experiences to learn more about your brand and products. And a review is just that: an honest reflection of a customer’s experience with your products and brand.

Objectivity & Authenticity

Customers don’t want to hear how great your products are just from your company alone—they also want to hear from real people who have used your products. Reviews from verified customers and reviews without your business’s marketing buzzwords secure the buyer’s trust. Verified, authentic reviews allow your potential customers to get a sense of how your products or services perform and how your business treats its customers.

Though customer reviews may be featured on your website or social media, they are viewed as objective information from an outside source. Why? Because they are coming from people who are unaffiliated with your business. Most importantly, they are coming from people who were previously in the same position as the potential buyers reading reviews. Consequently, potential buyers can connect and trust these unofficial ambassadors of your brand.

Social Validation

Customer reviews also serve to validate your potential customer’s perception of your products and brand. For example, a buyer may view your website and immediately feel your products are high quality based off of the first-rate website design, copy, or product images. Once the potential buyer reads positive reviews on the brand, their initial reaction to your brand is socially validated. Why is this important? Because this potential buyer now immediately becomes a part of a community based around the love of your business. This sense of social belonging is incredibly strong and effective in triggering purchases and brand loyalty.

Using Reviews during the Buyer’s Journey

As more and more content becomes available online, it can be difficult for buyers to determine what’s relevant and needed to make important purchase decisions. Though customer reviews are usually short and simple, these candid summaries of your brand and products can provide just as much informational insight as a long-form blog or guide. As a result, customer reviews and testimonials can be used as every stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, and decision).

Awareness

In the awareness stage, a person becomes aware of a problem or need and look for answers, resources, research data, opinions, and insight. Reviews and testimonials that detail how a product or service solved the customer’s problem or need are particularly useful in the awareness stage because it helps the buyer understand their problem more and it alerts them to a potential solution.

Consideration

Conversely, the customer may start their buyer’s journey with a certain type of product or service already in mind. As a result, the customer will search for the product, generally without any awareness of existing brands that may meet their needs. Businesses with reviews on their products will show up in the search results.

Consequently, your potential customer will lean toward products with reviews rather than products with no reviews. These product reviews will then jumpstart the buyer’s journey specifically with your brand. Generally, customers are not aware of the brands they are interested in until the decision stage. But customer reviews can jumpstart their awareness of your brand. Potential customers then may go to your brand’s website, product landing pages, or your social media.

Buyers using reviews during evaluation want an efficient way to find specific details about how a product works in different situations. Reviews can also help them compare the strengths and weaknesses of products on their shortlist and gather important surface information.

Decision

Customer reviews are perhaps the most important during the decision stage of the buyer’s journey because they have the potential to “seal the deal” for both buyer and seller. At this stage, the buyer is committed to making a purchase, but they are uncertain where from. If customers are looking at an unknown brand or an expensive product, they are even more likely to assess customer reviews before purchasing. In this stage, customers want to be certain of the product quality and the brand experience.

Does Your Business Have a Customer Review Strategy?

Is your business ready to benefit from customer-generated content like reviews and testimonials? Customer reviews have a powerful impact on your brand and your success—we’ll help you put a review strategy in place that increases the participation of your current customers and secures new ones.

Contact Sun Sign Designs today for a free strategy session!

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Resources That Optimize Your Website to the Buyer’s Journey

If you want to improve your business’s sales in today’s online marketplace, your website must feature highly targeted content. Especially since your website is likely the first touch point a potential customer will have with your business. As a result, it must be optimized to the buyer’s journey to usher your leads from the beginning to the end of their purchasing process.

Is your website using these resources to nurture and convert leads?

Blogs

The most commonly used resources used in the awareness stage are blogs or articles. Blogs are the perfect format to write purely informational copy that help answer common questions and solve problems. They are easy to understand and comprehensive enough to answer initial questions. Educational and informative blogs also showcase your business’s industry expertise and positions your business as a leader, demonstrating why customers should trust your business.

Your business can use blog posts for every stage of the buyer’s journey. However, the content and tone looks a little different for each stage. For buyers in the awareness stage, blogs should be free of sales-focused copy and unnecessary brand acknowledgements. Why? Because in the awareness stage, buyers are simply looking to educate themselves about their problem or need. They are not ready to be “sold” yet. In the consideration stage, blog posts should have more in-depth content on different solutions that can solve the buyer’s problem. In the decision stage, blog posts can become sales-focused and discuss why buyers should choose your business over competition.

Educational Guides & Infographics

Educational written guides and infographics are also ideal for the awareness stage because they are highly informative, easy to consume, and easy to share. Infographics in particular are visually engaging and relay information in a fun, interesting way. In addition, infographics do especially well on social media. Both the written guide and infographic should remain focused on providing educational content that matters to their audience, not on selling your products or services.

In the consideration stage, buyers have a more complete understanding of their problem or need, but they have not identified a specific solution. As a result, they need resources discussing the pros and cons of various solutions. After reading an educational blog or watching an explainer video, solution-focused guides, eBooks, and whitepapers that customers can freely download on your website are the perfect next step. You can even link these consideration stage resources in your awareness stage blog posts to gently usher your leads to the next buyer’s journey stage. .

Videos

Video is an incredibly popular format to consume content. Videos are visually engaging and deliver information in a fraction of the time it takes to read a blog. Like blogs, videos can deliver purely informational content to answer common questions and solve initial problems. How-to videos and Q&A videos are great types of content for the awareness stage while comparison videos (in which your products or services can be directly compared to your competition) work well in the consideration stage. However, in both the awareness stage and consideration stage, it is important to remain authentic and not salesy. These videos are not meant to be commercials or advertisements, but helpful resources for potential customers.

Product Photography & Product Demos

Custom photography allows customers to get a close-up look and accurate depiction of a business’s products. Product photography is especially important in the decision stage because the quality of the images will directly influence a buyer’s purchase decision. If your business features low-quality product images, buyers will directly correlate the image quality to the product quality. The opposite is true as well: high-quality images suggest high-quality products. Consequently, low-quality product imagery deters buyers from entering in your sales funnel.

For the consideration stage or the decision stage, product demo videos or live demonstration webinars allow your potential buyers to see how your product compares to your competitors. Buyers want to learn how to use your product and all of its features and see how it stacks up to the competition. Product demos and webinars allow your business to educate your audience about your products, show how your brand differs from competition, and give a sales pitch.

Case Studies

In the decision stage, buyers want to know why they should choose to purchase from a certain brand. As a result, they are most interested in seeing how your business has solved other people’s problems and met their needs. Case studies provide a great format to show your leads how your business has achieved positive results. In addition, case studies don’t always have to be written—they can also be done as videos.

Customer Testimonials & Reviews

In the decision stage, the buyer is finally ready to make a purchase. At this point, the buyer has completed extensive research, understands their problem or need, and has an ideal solution in mind. Now, they may seek additional information on why they should choose a particular brand.

Your business’s goal in the decision stage should be to answer final questions, address common customer concerns, and ultimately convince buyers to choose their brand over the competition. As a result, customer testimonials and reviews are essential additions to your website. Buyers will seek out customer reviews to evaluate a brand, select a product, and feel confident about committing to a purchase.

Let your clients tell the story. Every potential customer wants to know the experience others have had before committing to a brand. Whether it is a written review or a video testimonial, your customers can powerfully endorse your business and establish your credibility by sharing their personal experiences.

Tailor Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

We will help you tailor your marketing strategies and content to hook your customers at each stage of their buyer’s journey. Contact Sun Sign Designs if your business is ready to create a compelling content experience that engages your audience and makes you stand out from the competition.

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Creating Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Content plays an essential role in moving people through the buyer’s journey and successfully through your sales funnel.

It helps your prospective customers learn about your business and gather relevant information about your products or services while learning more about their problem or need. In addition, content positions your business as an expert in your industry, earning customer trust.

Plus, content is much more than blogs. Businesses have endless content options these days, including: videos, podcasts, images, social media posts, educational guides, infographics, interviews, surveys, email newsletters, landing pages, and more.

However, your potential customers need the right content at the right time to move them through their buyer’s journey and motivate them to convert with your business. The buyer’s journey consists of three main stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. Let’s look at the best types of content needed for each stage.

Awareness Stage Content

In the awareness stage, the buyer becomes aware they have a problem or need. As a result, their awareness jumpstarts a research process for more information on their problem. The buyer will go to search engines to research their problem and educate themselves on a particular topic.

At this early stage in the buyer’s journey, content doesn’t need to be sales-focused. Buyers are not ready to make a final decision or purchase yet. People are looking for answers, resources, research data, opinions, and insight.

As a result, content in the awareness stage should be educational and informative as well as comprehensive and easy to understand. Content types that works well in the awareness stage includes: educational blogs, videos, social media posts, webinars, articles, infographics, and podcasts.

Consideration Stage Content

In the consideration stage, the buyer has a more complete understanding of their problem or need, but they are still not ready to buy yet. Instead, buyers evaluate potential solutions and look at their best options. Since buyers have a better understanding of their problem or need, the consideration stage introduces the research of specific types of products and services in more detail.

Content that is useful in this stage includes: free eBooks, downloadable guides, white papers, free trials, quizzes, and explainer videos. Blogs are still effective in this stage. However, the tone and topics used will differ from the awareness stage. For example, blogs in the consideration stage are more sales-focused, concentrating on the brand’s products and services in comparison to competition.

Decision Stage Content

After extensive research, the buyer is finally ready to make a purchase. At this point, the buyer has completed their research, understands their problem or need, and has an ideal solution in mind. Now, they may seek additional information on why they should choose a particular brand.

The business’s goal in the decision stage should be to answer final questions, address common customer concerns, and ultimately convince buyers to choose their brand over the competition. Content needed to convert customers in this stage includes: product demos, case studies, FAQs page, product landing pages, customer reviews, and customer testimonials.

Why Should You Create Content for the Buyer’s Journey Stages?

The prospects and leads attracted through your business’s marketing efforts usually don’t come to your website ready to buy. Though you have captured their interest, many are still gathering information. With the right types of content available, your business can give them the answers and solutions they are seeking and gently usher them to convert without overwhelming them with sales-focused copy or ads. As a result, content creation centered on the buyer’s journey allows your business to constantly nurture your prospects and convince them to convert.

Tailor Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

We will help you tailor your marketing strategies and content to hook your customers at each stage of their buyer’s journey. Contact Sun Sign Designs if your business is ready to create a compelling content experience that engages your audience and makes you stand out from the competition.

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Inside the Buyer’s Journey: Your Guide to Each Stage

Understanding the different stages of the buyer’s journey is crucial if your business wants capture potential customers and successfully propel them through your sales funnel. When you fully understand each stage of the buyer’s journey, your business has the opportunity to better position your products or services at each stage.

Becoming intimately familiar with who your buyer is, their pain points and needs, and what kind of journey they take on their path to purchasing is the most successful sales tactic in a day and age where buyers hold all the power.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey describes each phase a buyer goes through on their pathway to purchasing. Buyers do not often purchase on a whim. Plus, even when customers do make impulsive purchases, it is difficult for businesses to track and market to spontaneous buyers with no clear purchasing patterns. These days, customers are flooded with options, so they take their time researching before making a commitment. This includes researching, evaluating, and weighing each option.

Understanding each stage of your customers’ buyer’s journey is incredibly valuable to businesses because they can clearly see how buyers progress from one stage to the next—which will be an important framework for crafting a successful marketing strategy. The three stages of the buyer’s journey are awareness, consideration, and decision.

Stage 1: Awareness

The first stage of the buyer’s journey is the buyer becoming aware that they have a problem or they are experiencing symptoms of a pain point. The buyer’s goal in the awareness stage is to clearly identify their problem and give their problem a name. As a result, buyer’s enter into an initial research phase (usually using a search engine) in which they may look for informational resources like white papers or blogs to clearly define and better understand their problem.

Example: Laura is experiencing itchy, red skin and rashes. She knows she has sensitive skin but hasn’t experienced this before. After researching her condition and reading many articles, she determines that she is most likely experiencing a reaction to her new laundry detergent.

Stage 2: Consideration

In the second stage of the buyer’s journey, the buyer has given a name to their problem and clearly defined their situation. In the consideration stage, the buyer enters into more rigorous research to understand all available methods or approaches to solving their problem.

Example: Laura is now interested in how she can solve her problem. After more research, Laura learns about many laundry detergent ingredients that could be causing her skin reaction and about skin lotions that could soothe her inflamed skin.

Stage 3: Decision

In the third and final stage of the buyer’s journey, the buyer has chosen and decided upon the method that will solve their problem. They will now search and make a list of businesses that align with their chosen method and make a final purchase decision with one of them.

Example: Laura decides to change her laundry detergent rather than buy a soothing lotion. She narrows down her list to businesses that have fragrance-free, hypoallergenic laundry detergents. After perusing each brand, she makes a purchase decision and buys a new laundry detergent.

Buyer’s Journey Insight

The common phases of the buyer’s journey show you that making a sale takes time. In fact, if your business zeroes in on prospects and tries to close the sales loop too early, you will most likely scare them off. Why? Because buyers want to trust your business before making a purchase with you.

As a result, businesses must tailor their content to build customer trust at each stage of the buyer’s journey. For example, if Laura saw educational content from a certain brand in the awareness stage and consideration stage, she is more likely to make a purchase with that brand in the decision stage. Brands that tailor their marketing to be solution-focused make their sales process more efficient and effective. Consequently, by the time a potential customer is at the end of their buyer’s journey, they recognize and trust your brand.

Tailor Your Marketing to the Buyer’s Journey

We will help you tailor your marketing strategies to hook your customers at each stage of their buyer’s journey. Contact Sun Sign Designs if your business is ready to use customer-focused digital marketing tactics that earn customer trust and loyalty.

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How Can Data Management Transform Your Business?

Businesses have access to more data now than ever before—from customer data to product data, transactional data, marketing data, and social media data. This data helps businesses gain actionable insights and drive strategic decisions that improve their offerings and operations.

Every business’s data is a highly valuable resource, no matter the size of the business. Consequently, data management and data security are integral processes to keep your data secure and functional and to uphold your professional reputation. Most importantly, data is the foundation of every organization’s knowledge—the knowledge they use to make intelligent and informed decisions.

As businesses are increasingly using their data to drive competitive advantages, data management has become more integral to their success. Businesses need quick access to actionable data to make strategic decisions they are confident about.

What is Data Management?

Data management is the process of collecting, storing, organizing, and protecting data in a cost-effective, secure, and efficient manner. Data management systems consolidate and organize data, eliminate costly duplicates, and provide increased visibility with indexing and seachability. Essentially, it transforms a business’s fragmented information into useful, actionable insights.

Improve Data Quality & Reliability

Data management increases the quality of data and information available to a business. It seeks to store and organize relevant, meaningful, and actionable data—data that will help the growth of the business in some way. Proper data management will help businesses filter out meaningless, unhelpful data.

Just because businesses can collect and store large amounts of data, doesn’t necessarily mean they should. Strategic data management initiatives help businesses create data strategies that focus on quality over quantity, resulting in better search results and reliable analysis.

Improve Decision-Making

Data is the most powerful asset any business or organization can have. It helps make sounder business-related decisions, product enhancements, and marketing campaigns, which build better customer relationships and customer experiences.  Data is an incredibly useful tool for predicting trends, finding potential leads, and prospecting in general.

However, when you have poor data management, it can be difficult to trust any data analysis. That’s why businesses need proper data management to find reliable and accurate analytics that will drive successful decisions, such as new product launches or new marketing campaign styles.

Improve Operational Productivity

For your data to be an asset, it needs to be productive. What does it mean to be productive with your data? It means quickly distributing your data to the people who need it and in a form they can easily understand it. As a result, employees will have an easier time finding, understanding, and relaying important information. For instance, they will not need to scramble and conduct the same research over and over again to get the data they need. If your data is scattered and fragmented, it is rendered virtually unusable.

Data management also empowers businesses to complete basic operational processes, such as accounting, auditing, and business planning, more efficiently. Subsequently, all transactional data will be readily available, organized, and easy to implement. If data is inaccurate, mismanaged, or error-prone, it can waste time and resources and make the simplest tasks become time-intensive.

Improve Data Security & Recovery

Data security is the most important part of your data management strategy. Strong data security ensures that vital company information is backed up and retrievable should the primary source become unavailable. Most businesses cannot afford long downtimes and lost data. As a result, securing your data means protecting your business’s operations and your business’s reputation at all times.

It’s Time to Use Your Data Like a Valuable Resource

Data management needs to be connected to your overall business plan in order to use your data in a way that aligns with and drives your company goals. Do you find that your data is fragmented and difficult to find and use? We’ll help you find the right data management tools and implement a data management strategy to optimize your business’s productivity and improve your operations.

Contact Sun Sign Designs today to discuss your data management plan.

Building a Brand Persona with Analytics & Segmentation

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. Believe it or not, but your brand’s personality directly affects whether or not a visitor will click a button on your website, fill out a form, or make a purchase.

Delivering the right marketing message always means understanding your audience and their needs. Your brand personality and brand persona will serve as constant reminders of who you are trying to reach.

How can you create a brand persona that compels your audience to stay and convert?

What is a Brand Persona?

A brand persona is a compilation of the personality traits, attitudes, values, and beliefs that your brand showcases on a regular basis to better relate to its audience. Brand personas give a literal face and voice to your business in the form of a recognizable and relatable character or idea.

A brand persona has the potential to create an authentic connection between your business and your customers. Successful brand personas also help your business better connect with your audience segment and form a lasting relationship. However, the opposite is true as well. A brand persona also has the potential to irritate, bore, or displease your target audience when they are poorly crafted.

Consequently, the best brand personas are created when a business first considers its brand in terms of its relationship to the consumer. Why? Because the personality traits, attitudes, values, and beliefs of your target audience tell you exactly what your customers want to hear and how they want to hear it. As a result, part of your marketing strategy lies in discovering your target audience’s personality and knowing the precise tone and voice needed to initiate meaningful customer conversations.

What Personality Trait Would Best Fit Your Brand Persona?

Well, it all depends on your customers.

Your brand persona’s personality will aim to elicit an emotional response from your consumers—specifically with the intention of inciting positive actions, whether that be interacting with your social media, leaving a glowing review, or making a purchase. Customers are more likely to purchase from a brand if its personality is similar to their own. There are five main types of brand personalities—do you know where your customers would fit in?

Sincerity: This is a down-to-earth brand personality that usually emphasizes family values, sincerity, honesty, wholesomeness, sentimentality, family ownership, handmade craftsmanship, or small town roots.

Excitement: This is a spirited brand personality that best appeals to those who love innovation, originality, and imagination. It is progressive, cutting edge, trendy, daring, and has a particular appeal to youth.

Competence: This brand personality emphasizes trust and security. This is best for brands that want to project their expertise and capability in their field. These brands want to be viewed as reliable, intelligent, and as successful leaders.

Sophistication: This 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.

Ruggedness: This brand personality emphasizes masculinity, toughness, strength, and the outdoors.

The Need for Analytics & Segmentation

The purpose of brand personas is to infuse your brand with a memorable personality. Your brand persona creates realistic representations of your target audience that they can relate to and connect with. As a result, these representations need to be based on customer research and analytics to build accurate customer representations. For this reason, your brand will need to research and understand your audience with data analytics, demographics, and even psychographics.

Demographic segmentation will categorize your audience by statistical data about: age, gender, income, location, family situation, education, ethnicity, etc. It is an important tool needed to divide your market in broad strokes and build audience profiles. Will your brand persona need to cater to an older or younger crowd? To married couples or single individuals?

Psychographic segmentation will categorize your audience by factors that relate to one’s personality or character, such as: personality traits, values, lifestyle, interests, motivations, priorities, and even conscious vs. subconscious beliefs.

Are your customers introverts or extroverts? Optimists or pessimists? Spontaneous or planners? Old fashioned or trendy? Learning your customers’ core personality traits, hobbies, behaviors, values, mental outlooks, and lifestyle choices will help you build a highly-effective, relatable brand persona that attracts your audience.

Do You Know Your Customers?

Your marketing strategies derive strength from knowing your customers. Is your business ready to create highly-precise marketing campaigns that truly connect with your audience and transform them into loyal customers? Sun Sign Designs will help you understand your audience and tailor your digital marketing tactics, so your business is the clear solution to your customer’s problems, wants, or needs. Contact us today for a consultation.

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How Well Do You Really Know Your Audience?

Do you actually know your audience?

Your first reaction may be to say, of course!

But pause for a moment. Do you know exactly what to say in your marketing?

If you don’t know the messaging that sparks conversions, then you may not know your customers as well as you think. Knowing your audience helps you discover the content and messages people care about. As a result, you will know the precise tone and voice needed to initiate meaningful customer conversations and create value-specific propositions.

The best marketing messages come from your customers. It’s time to get to know them with these audience research techniques.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographics is the study of populations. It uses statistics to study the makeup of groups of people. Demographic segmentation categorizes audiences by statistical data about: age, gender, income, location, family situation, education, ethnicity, etc. It is an important tool needed to divide your market in broad strokes and build audience profiles. However, it will only take you so far in understanding your customers.

Obviously, it is important to know if your business is talking to parents in their 40s versus single people in their 20s—there’s a big difference in tone and voice between these two targets. However, demographic data doesn’t tell you how your audience feels. So when it comes to audience research, it is important not to stop with demographics.

Behavioral Segmentation

How do your customers act? Behavioral segmentation focuses on uncovering customer purchasing habits, spending habits, customer journey stage, engagement level, and brand interactions. Behavioral segmentation focuses 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 segmentation helps you understand what kind of shoppers 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.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation categorizes audiences by factors that relate to one’s personality or character, such as: personality traits, values, lifestyle, interests, motivations, priorities, and even conscious vs. subconscious beliefs.

This type of segmentation can be more difficult to uncover since it is not data-driven like demographics. However, psychographic information is one of the most important audience research tools because it gives you invaluable insight into how your customers feel. It delves into the motivations behind behavior rather than tracking the behavior itself and tells you why the customer buys. For example, a business that knows its customers value luxury status and exclusivity may create “members-only” loyalty tiers to motivate purchasing behaviors.

Are your customers introverts or extroverts? Optimists or pessimists? Spontaneous or planners? Strong environmentalists? Vegans? This may seem like trivial information to learn, but personality traits, hobbies, values, mental outlooks, and lifestyle choices all have strong correlations to buying behavior.

You’ll learn exactly how to position your products or services to engage their interest and trust. For example, if your audience is surveyed as largely introverted, your business may choose to use imagery of people enjoying their alone time in your marketing materials to better connect with them. Introverted customers who see marketing images with crowds, large parties, or outgoing behavior may feel misunderstood by your brand.

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation categorizes customers by using a defined geographic boundary, such as ZIP codes, city, country, time zone, language, cultural preferences, climate, radius to a certain location, and whether customers live in urban or rural areas. This is the simplest form of segmentation and easy to implement.

People living in urban areas may have different experiences and needs than those living in suburban or rural areas. Geographic segmentation works well for small businesses who need to target specific, localized areas as well as large, national businesses who want to find regional hotspots.

Do You Know Exactly What Your Customers Want to Hear?

Is your business ready to create highly-precise marketing campaigns that truly connect with your audience and transform them into loyal customers? Sun Sign Designs will help you understand your audience and tailor your digital marketing tactics, so your business is the clear solution to your customer’s problems, wants, or needs. Contact us today for a consultation.

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Looking for Valuable Insights? Demographics Yield Major Marketing Benefits

Anything that can help your business better understand your audience is a good thing.

If you don’t know who your target customers are, then you definitely don’t know their wants and needs—and if your business doesn’t know your customers’ wants and needs, then your marketing efforts have no clear direction. How can you convince your customers they need your business if your business doesn’t know what they need?

Knowing and understanding customer needs is at the center of every successful business. Why? Because businesses that intimately understand their audience can tailor their marketing tactics to be the clear solution to their customers’ problems, wants, or needs. Their marketing campaigns are never a shot in the dark, but incredibly accurate.

Demographics & Demographic Segmentation

The reality is: not everyone can be your business’s ideal customer. Demographics and demographic segmentation help your business narrow your focus to find your business’s best customer, the one who provides the most value to your business.

Demographics are key to every business’s marketing strategy because they help identify individual members of their audience by certain characteristics, wants, and needs. With demographics, businesses can see who their brand appeals to the most by age, location, gender, job, income, education level, and more. Demographic segmentation is a type of market segmentation that divides this target market into even smaller categories based on these demographic categories.

As a result, this demographic data shared among customers drives even more precise (i.e. successful) digital marketing campaigns. When you know the groups of people who are most likely to buy from your business, it is easier to find them, understand them, and offer a product or service that appeals to them.

Create Precise, Effective Marketing Campaigns

The more information that is collected, the more your customers can be segmented into smaller groups with shared attributes. Demographic segmentation helps businesses understand which products or services certain members of their audience want more than others. As a result, marketing campaigns become more precise and reduce the cost per lead or per sale. This focuses your marketing efforts, streamlines resources effectively, and creates a refined, receptive customer base.

Monitor Market Shifts and Trends

Demographics ensure that businesses are never lagging behind in a constantly changing marketplace.

Demographic data is essential to monitor societal trends and shifts. It helps businesses track, monitor, and analyze the customer journey. When changes in customer behaviors, wants, or needs are detected, businesses can then make effective changes to their marketing strategy. It ensures the right products, services, communications, and campaigns are still being targeted to the right people. Identifying customer trends in demographic data can also help businesses make better market predictions and customize their services accordingly.

Optimize User Experience and Improve Relevance

Demographic segmentation isn’t only better for businesses. It is also hugely valuable to customers. With demographic segmentation, customers aren’t just another faceless person in a large crowd. Instead, they receive highly-personalized experiences that make them feel special and seen.

Today’s customers crave these customized experiences. They want to receive relevant communications, products, and services that are actually of interest to them. Customers remember these positive experiences, and they will continue to seek that experience and return to your brand. Improved customer experiences organically develop customer loyalty and drive up retention rates.

Is Your Marketing Strategy Driven by Demographic Data?

By segmenting your audience, your business can create highly precise, personalized marketing campaigns that truly connect with individuals and convert them into loyal customers. Contact Sun Sign Designs if your business is ready to deploy data-driven digital marketing tactics that work.

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Data Analytics is Key for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Your business’s digital marketing decisions need to be backed by data. Otherwise, without objective analytics, your business risks throwing your time and marketing budget into strategies that don’t give you the desired results.

What is Marketing Analytics and Why is it Important?

Marketing analytics measure the performance of marketing efforts from multiple data sources. By studying the data gathered, businesses can find patterns between customer behaviors and conversion rates. The goal of marketing analytics is to use these findings to optimize future marketing strategies. As a result, businesses have data that improves marketing decision-making and helps them achieve a higher ROI.

Digital marketing analytics are crucial for assessing your progress and fine-tuning your approach for the best possible end results. By using analytic tools and techniques, your business can see which content performs well, where you’re reaching your target audience, which marketing channels have the best engagement, and the journey your target audience is taking before converting into paying customers. What else can marketing analytics do for your business?

Understand Your Target Customers

Every successful marketing strategy relies on the strong understanding of your target audience. Customer analytics are like cheat codes your business can use to better connect with your target consumer. These analytics closely examine customer information and customer behavior to uncover the characteristics that make your business’s most profitable customer.

Customer analytics create a single, accurate window into the best practices businesses can use to acquire and retain high-value customers. The better understanding businesses have of their ideal customer’s buying habits and lifestyle, the more specialized the customer experience can become. Successful businesses know the personalized messaging, ads, and content that resonate the most with their customers. Put simply, insightful customer analytics lead to more effective marketing campaigns and stronger results.

Find Areas That Need Growth

If you don’t know what’s broken, then you can’t fix it. Marketing analytics plainly show you where your business is performing well and which areas need improvement. For example, if your nurture emails are not driving engagement and leading customers down the sales funnel, then marketing analytics can help you pinpoint where the problem lies and why.

Metrics like open-rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates help businesses understand how engaged current email subscribers are. These metrics provide quantifiable answers to questions like: Why didn’t certain subscribers click the link with the special offer? Was the written call-to-action effective or not? Did my subject line follow best practices? Was the digital banner eye-catching enough for subscribers to pause and read it?

Discover New Opportunities

Sustained growth and profitability is never guaranteed. Businesses cannot remain static in their marketing approaches and expect exponential growth. There are always optimizations to be had and changes to be made. Data is central in providing fresh perspective and new approaches. It helps businesses find new, profitable angles to explore and experiment with.

Data unlocks discovery—your business can discover trends and patterns it has previously overlooked. For example, through a complementary product analysis, a business may find its customers typically purchase one product with another. As a result, the business may create an exclusive members-only bundle that leads to an increase of member sign-ups.

Fine-Tune Marketing Campaigns

With marketing analytics, your business doesn’t have to wait to see how your marketing campaign is doing until after it’s over. Analytics can help your business identify and solve problems in the midst of a campaign to improve your performance and maximize your results. Essentially, it takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out exactly where you are going wrong. Instead, the data shows you, and your business can take immediate action.

For example, a business may find its email marketing campaign to increase website visitors isn’t converting. Why aren’t people clicking the link to their website? Is their call-to-action ineffective? Is their digital banner unattractive? So they turn to the data to pinpoint the problem, and their analytic tools reveal that their email open rates are low.

Knowing this, the business now has several options to fine-tune their campaign. They may further segment their email list or personalize the email’s subject line to increase the email’s relevancy to the customer and, therefore, increase their chances of opening the email.

Leverage the Power of Marketing Analytics

Regardless of your business’s size, marketing analytics provide invaluable data that can help drive growth. Most likely, you know the wealth of benefits marketing analytics has to offer. However, like many businesses, you may feel overwhelmed by the prospect of analyzing massive amounts of data. Sun Sign Designs has the solution to make marketing analytics far less daunting.

Marketing analytics software automatically collects, organizes, and correlates relevant data to unlock the constructive insights needed to improve your marketing performance. These analytic tools can report on the past, analyze the present, and predict the future. As a result, your business can understand and optimize every phase of a campaign lifecycle.

Interested in how marketing analytics software can improve your digital marketing strategy? Contact Sun Sign Designs today.

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The Do’s and Don’ts of Personalized Email Marketing

We all understand the power of personalization. Receiving emails tailored to our interests makes us feel seen and understood. These personal touches create authentic, lasting connections.

With personalization, people will open, read, and act on more emails. It naturally increases engagement and fosters customer loyalty. And all that activity equals more conversions, sales, and growth for your business. Personalization is a vital component to any marketing campaign. However, there are still ways personalization can go wrong.

What should and shouldn’t your business do with email personalization?

Don’t Use Generic Personalization

It must sound contradictory—how can personalization be generic? But it can be. Simply adding a first name, referencing a recent purchase, or keeping the email copy standard are all empty approaches. Customers can see that considerable thought and effort were not put in, making them feel like just another number. These customers will opt for brands that focus on providing them a specialized experience. In order for your customers to feel seen and valued, businesses must understand their target audience and be thoughtful about the content they send to them.

Don’t Overdo the Personalization

Generic emails and overly-personalized emails both can turn off customers. Be careful with how much personalization is used in an email. You want to offer your customers a customized experience, but you don’t want to take liberties with their data and make them feel uncomfortable. Setting an appropriate balance will help your customers feel seen—not stalked!

Do Build Out Creative Content

Although personalized special offers are influential factors in customers engaging with emails, sending out too many promotional offers can make your email marketing campaign look like a coupon program. 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.

What are your customers interested in seeing? Would they watch a how-to video or read a client case study? Knowing your audience’s interests is a crucial first step before investing time and money in content creation.

Don’t Send Mass Emails

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 already purchased can lead people to unsubscribe from email lists. Customers quickly become aggravated with mass emails that assume their interests align with the majority.

Do Segment Your Audience

Do divide your audience into targeted segments. Don’t assume your target audience is all interested in the same products, services, or content. List segmentation is a highly successful personalization practice that businesses need to take advantage of. By breaking up your email list into small, targeted sections, you ensure your customers are receiving content that is relevant to them. When customer receive relevant emails, they are far more likely to open and engage with them and continue building their relationship with your brand.

Do Personalize the Email Subject Line

Don’t underestimate the power of a good subject line. Your content may be killer, but what’s the point if subscribers won’t open the email? Email inboxes are crowded places and if you don’t grab your customer’s attention with relevance, your business’s emails may be sent to junk mail. To create a personalized subject line that grabs your subscribers’ attention, call on valuable data to find something that will stand out, such as location, milestones, transaction history, and more.

Don’t Personalize Every Email Just Because You Can

Just because you can personalize an email doesn’t mean you should. It’s tempting to personalize all of your email communications when you have the ability to do so—but it doesn’t mean your customers will appreciate it. Just like you don’t want to make customers feel uncomfortable with the personal details you use in emails, you also don’t want to annoy them with how often you personalize your emails. When it comes to personalization, take the quality-over-quantity approach.

Do Use Automation to Your Advantage

Do take advantage of automation software to automatically send out personalized communications. Automation allows your business to easily segment, target, and personalize messages, saving your business major time and preventing manual errors. Your business can even track the performance of the emails and know when it needs to pivot.

Interested in crafting an email marketing campaign that leverages personalization and automation? Contact Sun Sign Designs to get started today.