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

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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.

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Why Your Content Strategy Needs Consistency

By now, most businesses understand that content creation is integral to the success of any digital marketing strategy they deploy. Everyone has heard the famous phrase, “Content is king.” The saying is perhaps a tad overused now in marketing spaces, but it is repeated again and again for a reason—because it’s true! However, content is only king when it is consistent.

Unfortunately, barren blogs and empty social media pages often read as untrustworthy to potential customers. Today’s customers expect much more dedication and online engagement from brands than ever before.

What can more consistent content creation do for your business?

Audience Engagement

You can’t expect to build a loyal following with one-off blog posts, occasional social media posts, or infrequent email newsletters. People simply won’t stick around. Why? Even if a business releases high-quality content, infrequent or random distribution of the content will cause that business to get lost in the crowd. With a veritable ocean of content available to them, today’s consumers won’t wait around—they will move on and most likely forget about your brand. Content is a competitive space. Consistency will help distinguish your business in the crowd.

Businesses must build a consistent content routine and condition their audience to expect new, engaging content. This will keep customers frequently engaged and coming back to the business’s website or social media pages at regular intervals. A business starting with little-to-no following may be discouraged with frequent posting in the beginning, but content is one of the most effective marketing methods for a reason. Though it may take time to build, consistent content is a digital marketing tactic that contributes to long-term growth and sustainability.

Brand Recognition

Consistent content makes your brand memorable.

When you release content consistently, your brand presence is repeatedly appearing before your target audience. Consistency affects the mind. When people frequently see and recognize your brand—whether that be by seeing your logo, graphics, or colors—your business increases its chances of increasing leads conversions and driving sale goals.

People prefer to buy new products from brands that are familiar to them. Consistent content gives your business the opportunity to become familiar with a wider audience. High-quality content reinforces positive brand experiences, captures your audience’s attention, and keeps them coming back so they can build that recognition and familiarity.

Authority & Trust

Consumers are looking to see what businesses have to say and what knowledge they have to share. Producing and sharing informational content that answers questions, educates, and showcases expertise positions your business an industry expert. This type of content provides proof of your business’s experience and establishes your authority. If consumers do not feel confident in your business’s expertise, they will have difficulty to trusting your products or services.

Consistently demonstrating your industry knowledge not only positions your business as a leader, but it is essential to gain your audience’s trust and confidence. In addition, the regular posting of such content doubly reinforces your business’s reliability because your audience implicitly trusts you turn out valuable content.

Improve SEO

The more consistent and high-quality your content is, the more positive impact it will have on your SEO efforts. Search engines reward the frequency at which websites publish new content. Not only that, but written content allows businesses to optimize their website with more keywords and phrases.

As a result, this makes content marketing tactics like blogs a powerful SEO tool. Online visibility grows your business’s authority and strengthens customer trust. Increased visibility also directly improves website traffic.

Make Content Distribution a Priority

How often is your business publishing content? Could your business benefit from staying more engaged with your customers?

When it comes to content, consistency is key to create an impact with your audience. In terms of frequency and deployment, automation is your ally. Automation tools can help you schedule and deploy content like blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters to increase your customer engagement and reach your customers at the right times.

Struggling to create engaging content in addition to running your business? Sun Sign Designs can help you there, too. Contact us today for a free strategy session!

Key Insights into the New Digital Buyer

Marketing and sales are constantly evolving. But they have evolved even more rapidly in the last decade as everything has increasingly moved to a digital space. Today’s digital buyers are not like traditional customers focused on price or functionality. In short, today’s digital buyers are independent, informed, and demanding. How can your business meet their expectations?

Buyers are more empowered

Technology has transformed the way buyers consume information. The Internet has broken down barriers. Now, digital buyers are empowered by the amount of information they have access to. As a result, they have gained more control over their own shopping experience and buyer’s journey. They don’t need to wait for a business to tell them what they need and why. Instead, buyers are in the driver’s seat. They are accustomed to doing their own research and gathering information on their own terms before coming to a definitive decision.

Today’s buyers find their own solutions and wait much later in the sales process or buyer’s journey before interacting with a business. The best things business’s can do is meet digital buyers where they are and deliver the research sources they are seeking in the form of blogs, news articles, infographics, white papers, webinars, podcasts, and more. As a result, when buyers are seeking information, your business can be seen as a trusted source.

Buyers are brand sophisticated

Today’s digital buyers have many brands knocking on their doors and they are selective about who they let in. Why? Because they know what a strong brand looks like and what a strong brand will deliver. Today’s buyers know the nuances of marketing and can easily detect when brands are missing the mark. In a day and age where buyers are positively overwhelmed with options, they will not work with brands that do not have a solid brand identity or cohesive messaging.

Buyers are tech savvy

The new digital buyer is incredibly tech savvy and spends a good majority of their time online. Selling to a digitally-connected audience means businesses must keep up with technology and strengthen their digital presence. The migration of selling to digital spaces has acclimated buyers to virtual engagement and virtual experiences. As a result, businesses must market through multiple online channels and stay accessible to multiple devices.

Buyers demand meaningful engagement

The new digital buyer wants authenticity and connection. Despite their reliance on virtual channels, today’s buyers still want human authenticity and a personal touch. Whether on social media or through personalized email marketing, buyers want to be seen as unique individuals and catered to accordingly.  For businesses, this is where consumer data comes into play. You can only engage your audience when you know who they are and what they want. Analytic tools and data management platforms help businesses better understand their audience and segment their communications accordingly.

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

Buyers want a superior experience

Today’s buyers crave unique, memorable experiences, both in the content they consume and throughout their buyer’s journey. Price isn’t everything to today’s buyers. Their thought process focuses less on cost of a product and more about the overall buyer experience. Is your brand content unique or unexpected? Did your content entertain and educate? Are your brand communications personalized to their needs? Was working with your business frictionless and convenient? At the end of the day, the best buyer experience wins the most sales.

Today’s buyers have high expectations and they aren’t willing to settle.  Is your business equipped with the digital marketing tools needed to keep up?

Trending Now: Micro Video Content

Many businesses tend to emphasize long-form content in the marketing materials they produce for their audience, such as news articles, case studies, white papers, or webinars. The goal of long-form content is to provide valuable information to your reader, increase audience engagement, and aid customers in their buyer’s journey with your business. Not to mention, long-form content increases online visibility by improving your search engine rankings.

However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for short-term content in your digital marketing strategy. On the contrary, one only has to look at social media to see the booming success of one type of short-term content in particular: micro videos.

What is Micro Video Content?

Micro videos are very short video clips that run from a few seconds to one minute. You need only scroll through some social media channels to see how videos even a few seconds long can garner massive views. This may not seem like enough time to convince your viewer to buy your products or work with your business—and you are mostly right. But this isn’t the point of micro video content.

What is the Goal of Micro Video Content?

Micro videos serve your audience bite-sized, brand-driven content that is easily digestible. Your brand can readily capture your audience’s attention and deliver small doses of your brand story, mission, products, and services. It is an incredibly effective strategy to build your brand presence and establish authority. The major goal of micro video content is to pique your audience’s attention enough that they will then go to your website and peruse your offerings with more interest to convert.

What other aspects of micro video content make them so popular and effective?

Micro Videos Capture Attention

Micro videos are popular because they are so straightforward and easy to consume. Viewers don’t go back-and-forth deliberating about watching your video because it is only a handful of seconds—what do they have to lose? Research suggests you have approximately 8 seconds to effectively hold your audience’s attention before their fidgety thumb scrolls onward.

Essentially, micro video content caters to our short attention spans, especially when we are on social media and expect short-form content. The message is short and sweet, but still emblazoned in our mind. As a result, people can easily watch micro videos on the go, in-between breaks, or whenever they have a spare minute to scroll through social media—slowly but surely building your brand presence in their mind.

Micro Videos Force You to be Concise

Micro videos will force you to keep your content and message focused. You only have a few seconds to a minute to get your message across. As a result, you can’t be going in several different directions. Keeping your videos short and messaging concise not only forces you to communicate better, but it also keeps your viewers more engaged and less likely swipe.

Micro Videos Entertain & Educate

Micro videos are becoming so popular and effective because they combine entertainment and education. It satisfies the viewer’s need to be entertained, but it also offers the unexpected value proposition of learning something new and interesting. Brands have increasingly used micro video content to show their audience how to use their products or services, display industry knowledge, and to start discussions and conversations on important industry topics.

Micro Videos are Shareable & Mobile-Friendly

Micro videos are designed for social shares. Video content is already more shareable on social media than written content, and micro videos even more so because people know it won’t take up too much of someone else’s time if they send it to them. Social media algorithms recognize these shares, which positively boost your brand’s page, website, online presence, and even SEO rankings.

Micro Videos Improve ROI on Long-Form Content

Once viewers are exposed to the brand, they are much more likely to dive into long-form content on the brand’s website. As a result, the impressive share-ability of micro video content often give businesses increased ROI’s on their long-form content.

What do you think about micro video content? Do you think it is an effective marketing strategy that is here to stay? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Interested in discussing how short-form content like micro video fits in your business’s marketing strategy? Contact Sun Sign Designs today!

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What Does ADA Compliance Mean for Your Website?

Disability affects 1 in 4 Americans. Is your website accessible to them?

What is ADA Compliance?

The federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is often associated with physical locations and accommodations certain businesses must make for people with disabilities. You might think of wheelchair accessibility or Braille for visually-impaired customers. However, ADA also extends to the digital sphere.

ADA Compliance refers to the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design. In 2010, the United States Department of Justice passed these digital accessibility standards for all public organizations to follow, so those with disabilities have access to all electronic information and technology. The Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil rights law that mandates the inclusion of all people, especially those with disabilities, in all sectors of public life.

Who Needs to Follow ADA Compliance?

ADA Compliance is sometimes confused with 508 Compliance, which strictly applies to federal agencies and federal departments. On the other hand, ADA Compliance applies to the general public, specifically to businesses, nonprofits, local governments, and state governments. In short, if your business or organization caters to the general public, then your website must be ADA Compliant.

Since ADA Compliance broadly encompasses all electronic information and technology, which includes the Internet and the websites on it, it is more likely than not that your website needs to be ADA Compliant.

Who is Responsible for ADA Compliance?

In most cases of noncompliance, it is completely unintentional. Even though website owners aren’t intentionally ignoring these standards, they will be held completely liable. Every website owner is solely responsible for developing a website that offers “reasonable accessibility.” Regardless of who builds and develops the website, it is the website owner that is responsible for implementing the accessibility standards and personally liable for noncompliance.

What Happens if Your Website Isn’t ADA Compliant?

Failure to meet ADA Compliance can result in lawsuits, legal fees, hefty fines, potential settlements, public relations problems, and damage to your brand reputation. Even if website owners are unaware of ADA Compliance standards, they will still be held completely liable. First-time violations can result in fines from $55,000-$75,000 and then a $150,000 fine for every repeat violation. In addition to these fines, citizens can file lawsuits against your business or organization for being unable to access it, which could result in a large settlement.

If your website is not ADA Compliant, you can end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and lawsuits. What can you do?

Becoming ADA Compliant

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.

But what does an ADA-complaint website look like exactly? Well, there are no clear regulations. However, websites must make an effort to offer “reasonable accessibility” to people with disabilities. Unlike ADA Compliance, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) isn’t a legal requirement. However, it provides helpful recommendations for businesses looking to improve their digital accessibility. WCAG focuses on assisting individuals with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. Some digital accommodations include: providing text alternative for images,providing transcript or captions for audio and video content, allowing keyboard navigation and operation, and more.

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!