Understanding the digital marketing landscape isn’t only about studying metrics and analyzing the data. It’s about immersing in the consumer’s digital environment and viewing the marketing landscape from their perspective. This inevitably leads to the question, should I get a VPN? This is where VPNs come in handy.

How does a VPN Work?

Using a VPN on your desktop, smartphone, or tablet, is like giving your device a disguise. It tricks your device into thinking it’s on a local network with the VPN, instead of the network you’re actually on.

The VPN reroutes your device’s internet connection through its private server, not your usual internet service provider (ISP). This makes your device operate as if it’s part of the VPN’s network, and all your network traffic is sent over a secure connection.

The moment you activate a VPN program, it begins to encrypt, or code, all your data. This happens so rapidly that not even your ISP or WiFi provider can decipher it. This scrambled, coded data then travels to the VPN server, and from there, to its final destination.

What a VPN does is, it ensures your data remains unreadable until it gets to its intended destination. It establishes a safe passageway from your computer or phone to the internet, safeguarding your important information. This includes files you download, websites you visit, and interactions with individual apps, among other things.

10 possible ways a VPN can help with marketing

Now we know a few things about VPNs. Without any further ado, let’s explore the top 10 reasons why every marketer should consider incorporating a VPN into their digital marketing toolkit. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, these insights could change your approach to online marketing.

• Ensuring a Secure Connection

A VPN offers a safe, private internet connection, a necessity for every marketer. Whether you’re working from home or using public Wi-Fi in a café, a VPN protects against cybercriminals looking to exploit unsecured networks and steal sensitive data. Take the example of digital marketing agency teamDigital; they unintentionally risked client data when they exposed certain environment config files. Clients included big names like NFL, Mastercard, and Soundcloud. Until vulnerabilities like this are resolved, a VPN allows marketers to work securely by encrypting all their web activities.

• Protecting Client Data

Marketers often manage sensitive client information that must be shielded from cyber threats. VPNs encrypt this data, making it difficult for hackers to access. This extra layer of security for your client’s data builds trust with your customers.

• Preserving Network Speed

ISPs sometimes throttle bandwidth when they notice heavy data usage. As a marketer, you might find yourself in such a situation while conducting extensive market research or data analysis. A VPN can prevent ISPs from seeing your online activity, thus maintaining your connection speed unthrottled.

• Accessing Blocked Services

Some marketing tools and services may be blocked or have limited functionality in certain countries. Using a VPN, marketers can access these blocked services, ensuring they have all the necessary tools for a successful marketing campaign.

• Bypassing Censorship

Some countries implement restrictive internet controls, blocking access to specific websites or platforms. A VPN allows marketers to bypass these restrictions and access the information they need, particularly useful when targeting audiences in these regions or researching international competitors.

• Conducting Competitor Research

Marketers can use a VPN to change their IP address, enabling them to view competitors’ websites, blogs, ads, and keywords without revealing the traffic source. Monitoring competition can help marketers find SEO backlink opportunities or learn about negative customer feedback. However, it’s crucial not to cross into unethical practices.

• Enhancing SEO Efforts

Different parts of the world are interested in different trending topics and search keywords. With a VPN, a marketing team can ‘browse’ from a specific country or region, seeing what search engines display to people there. This is especially useful as businesses on the first page of search results capture about 92% of organic traffic.

• Streamlining Search Engine Marketing

Google suggests that companies earn $2 for each dollar spent on Google Ads. To maximize their effectiveness, marketers need to understand the biggest advertisers in specific locations and study their ads closely. With a VPN, they can see the online marketing landscape exactly as customers do.

• Optimizing YouTube Advertising

YouTube isn’t just a popular video platform; it’s the second most popular website overall. A VPN allows marketers to see YouTube ads as if they’re in other regions, allowing them to tweak their ads and content accordingly.

• Geo-Testing

VPNs can be used to ‘locate’ you in a specific place, handy for marketers who want to test how their content performs in different regions. Using a VPN to ‘travel’ digitally, marketers can review and optimize their content for various locations without leaving their desks.

Conclusion

All these points highlight why a VPN is a game-changer for marketers in our increasingly digital and global business world. As we face more cyber threats and intense global competition, a VPN isn’t just a nice-to-have extra. In fact, it’s a must-have for any marketer who wants to run a successful, secure operation, especially now it is easy to find vpn coupons online.

The post Top 10 Reasons Marketers Should Use a VPN appeared first on DMNews.

In this article, you will learn about the 8 best digital marketing strategies that can help you generate more reviews for your dental practice.

Create a website

Build a strong website. Make sure it has an appointment booking system. This can be as simple as having forms on your website where patients can submit their information and book appointments online. You could also have an online booking software that integrates with your existing website to make things easier. Ensure your website copy is optimized for local searches by targeting local keywords on each webpage. Your keywords should appear on the meta description and title of your website.

Invest in dental SEO

Dental SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is optimizing a dental website to rank higher in search engines like Google. It helps you attract more qualified leads. Moreover, dental SEO has many benefits, such as:

1. Increased website traffic: By ranking higher in search engines, a dental website will receive more organic traffic, leading to more new patients for the practice.
2. Increased credibility: A top ranking in search results can help build credibility for the practice. When a website ranks well, it can be perceived as more trustworthy and reputable.
3. Cost-effective marketing: SEO is a cost-effective way to market a dental practice. It is less expensive than other forms of online advertising and provides a higher ROI in the long run.
4. Long-term results: The results of SEO are long-lasting. Once a website ranks well, it will continue to receive traffic and leads as long as it maintains its ranking.

The Best Dental SEO practice to focus on are:

1. Create high-quality, relevant content: This includes blog posts, articles, and pages on the website that provide value to visitors and are related to dental services.
2. Use relevant keywords: Identify keywords that potential patients are using to find dental practices and incorporate them into the website’s content and meta tags.
3. Optimize website structure and navigation: A well-organized website that is easy to navigate will be more appealing to both users and search engines.
4. Build high-quality backlinks: Obtaining backlinks from reputable websites can help improve a website’s ranking in search results.
5. Use social media: Social media can help increase website traffic and improve search rankings. It is important to have a presence on multiple social media platforms, post updates, and share content regularly.

Make your dental practice mobile-friendly

It’s no secret that mobile devices are the preferred way to search for businesses. 61% of mobile users are more likely to pick a local business with a mobile site, according to a study.

Additionally, Google has announced that the more mobile-friendly the site, the higher it will rank in the search results on a mobile device, specifically on a smartphone. You can test whether or not your site is mobile-friendly by entering your URL into the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Use social media to grow your reach

Social media is an excellent way to reach and engage patients. Many dental practices use social media to communicate with their existing patients. Others also use it as a tool for growing their reach and awareness.

With the right content strategy, your social channels can be used to promote your dental practice and build brand awareness. You can also engage with current and potential patients and share patient testimonials and reviews, all while building authority and trust in your brand.

Claim your social media handles on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest. Then, start creating content. Include posts about before-after pictures, new equipment, or even fun contests with prizes.

Use text marketing to promote your dental practice

75% of all American millennials and Gen Zs prefer texting over phone calls. And almost 89% of consumers prefer texting over calls or emails when communicating with their healthcare providers. Strong communication with patients is key to the success of any dental office. But when your front desk is busy with appointments and procedures, the patient experience can suffer.

Text marketing is a cost-effective and efficient solution to this problem. It allows practices to send appointment reminders, special offers, and answers to patients’ queries automatically.

Sending timely text messages to your patients is a great way to engage, retain and convert them. You’ll keep your patients happy for years by providing relevant, timely, and helpful communication. But make sure your text messages are HIPAA compliant, or you risk getting in trouble with the law.

Utilize email marketing

Email marketing is an inexpensive way to remind patients about appointments or other important updates. It also lets you reach out to them about special offers, discounts, and new treatments. You can send personalized emails to send:

1. Appointment reminders: You can send emails 2 weeks before an appointment date reminding them of the upcoming visit, especially if it’s been a while since their last check-up.
2. Promotions/Discounts: If your practice offers special pricing or packages, it’s best to notify patients via email. So they don’t miss out on these opportunities!
3. Thank You Messages: When an existing patient refers a new patient to your practice, send them thank-you emails. Show your gratitude and give them a discount on their next visit!

Create a dental blog

Blogging is one of the best digital marketing strategies today. But it can be hard to keep up with if you’re not doing it regularly. Creating a blog for your dental practice will help increase brand awareness, show off your expertise, interact with patients and build trust and authority in the community.

So, how often should you blog? It depends on your goals and the type of content you create. Some dental practices blog daily, while others do it once a week or less often. But if you want to generate more leads, post a blog twice a week. Create a content calendar to stay consistent. You can write blogs about:

• Your practice’s news and updates.
• New technology in dentistry.
• Dental care tips and advice for patients.
• Industry trends that affect your practice.
• Patient Before-after case studies.
• Patient testimonials.

Promote your practice through video marketing

By sharing videos on social media, 67% of marketers say their return on investment (ROI) has been boosted. According to Wyzowl, 87% of businesses state that video has effectively generated more leads. And 81% of marketers feel its direct impact on sales.

Most people are visual learners. So, creating videos about your services is a great way to share your work with potential patients. Make video content for YouTube or TikTok to attract more patients and promote your dental practice.

You can use video in several ways, such as:

• Introduce new patients to your practice.
• Exhibit your work (before-and-after videos, testimonials).
• Patient testimonials or review videos.
• Respond to frequently asked questions.
• Provide educational dental tips and advice.
• Give your dental office tour to reduce anxiety.

Many free editing tools are available online if you can’t afford to hire a professional videographer. These tools will allow you to create nice-looking videos without breaking the bank. For example, iMovie or Windows Movie Maker on your computer or even YouTube’s own editing features (which are surprisingly good).

Conclusion

We hope these 8 strategies will help you generate more profits for your dental practice. If you want to promote your dental office, there is no better place than the Internet. With just a little effort and research, you can make your practice successful with these tactics.

The post 8 Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Your Dental Practice appeared first on DMNews.

1. Identify your target audience

When you try to know your clients, you show them that you care and that you’re not just some cold, distant professional. It’s the beginning of building trust, the foundation of any good relationship.

Here’s what you can do to uncover your audience’s unique characteristics and needs:

• Conduct market research: It’s about getting inside your audience’s heads and figuring out what makes them tick.
• Develop your buyer personas: A buyer persona is like a little snapshot of your dream customer. You must understand their pain points, motivations, and behaviors.
• Analyze your competitors: By observing what your competitors are doing, you can discover ways to do it even better.

 2. Create a strong online presence

You must have a strong online presence if you’re running a security company. Having a website that looks professional and provides a user-friendly experience is crucial. 

And don’t forget about social media! Keeping active accounts can help you connect with your audience.

Here’s how to start building that killer website and maintaining social media accounts:

• Make sure your website looks great on mobile devices: Keep it simple and easy to navigate with clear menus and organized content. 
• Invest in images that showcase your products or services: Images can draw people in and help spread the word about your brand. Use cloud storage to manage all your social media content with ease. It provides a safe and secure way to keep your data accessible.
• Include clear calls to action so visitors know what to do next: Whether filling out a contact form or giving you a call, make it easy for them to take that next step.
• If you can’t keep your site up and running consistently in-house, consider outsourcing this to avoid downtime and maintain your reputation. Choosing USWired’s managed IT services is a good option in this context.

Now, let’s talk about social media. 

• Respond to comments and messages: Share helpful resources, industry news, and insights that position you as an expert.
• Don’t forget to showcase your company culture: Let your followers know what it’s like to work with you.
• Drive traffic back to your site by promoting your website and blog posts on social media.

3. Use search engine optimization strategies

Search engine optimization (SEO) is tweaking your website to show up higher in search results. Let potential customers find you by focusing on specific keywords related to your services. 

You want people to trust you. So here are some tips for optimizing your website content for SEO:

• Research what people are searching for when they search for security services. 
• Use those keywords throughout your website, but don’t go overboard. 
• Make your meta descriptions super compelling and include your target keywords.
• Create high-quality content that provides value to people. 
• Use internal linking to make your website easier to navigate. It also helps search engines understand what your site is about.

4. Create an email marketing campaign

Email marketing is a mighty tool to connect with potential customers. You can focus your message on consumers with specific interests, demographics, or behaviors. 

To make your email campaigns the crème de la crème, here are some tips:

• Use segmentation to send messages to the right people. Group your email list based on demographics, behavior, and interests.
• Personalize your messages. Using the recipient’s name and tweaking your message will make them feel important. 
• Make your subject line catchy. It is the first thing people see, so make it clear, alluring, and relevant to the person reading it. 
• Your call-to-action (CTA) should be unambiguous and enthralling. Make it simple for people to take the next step. Use language that inspires action.
• Test different parts of your email campaigns, such as subject lines, CTAs, and content. Optimize based on what works best.

5. Create a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign

When potential customers search for security services, you want them to see your company front and center. With PPC advertising, you can make sure that happens. So, how do you create magnificent PPC campaigns? 

• Choose the right keywords – ones that are not only relevant to your company but also speak directly to your target audience.
• Ensure your ads reach the right people. By using geographic targeting and demographics, you can ensure that your message hits the mark.
• Your words need to be not just informative but compelling too. Using the right keywords and a strong call-to-action can encourage people to click through to your website.
• Keep testing and refining your campaigns. Use data to guide your decisions, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments based on what you learn.

6. Monitor your online reputation

Your online reputation is delicate. It can make or break your business in this digital age. 

Track your online reviews and respond to customer feedback with grace. Address any negative comments with urgency and compassion. Doing so can cultivate a positive online reputation. 

And take both physical and cybersecurity seriously. A data breach can be a total nightmare. It can cause damage to your reputation and shake investor confidence. It can also disrupt your business operations and relationships with customers. And the worst part? It can cost you an estimated $79 million in losses.

There’s a whole world of tools to help you stay safe in this crazy digital age. Password managers, VPN applications, and firewalls are a few things you should use. 

Are you struggling with your security company’s digital marketing efforts? These tips will guide you through the treacherous realm of digital marketing. With this knowledge, you’ll get ahead of the competition and entice more customers.

The post 6 Digital Marketing Tips for the Modern Security Company appeared first on DMNews.

As your organization makes the jump from California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to the CPRA, it is imperative that you revisit your privacy framework. This along with revisiting pertinent business practices ensures compliance. While you are at it, you may also want to check out the following necessary tools that can help you speed up the process, reduce errors, fortify security posture, automate data mapping, and streamline data subject request (DSR) fulfillment.

Top 4 CRPA Compliance Tools That Your Organization Must Consider

You can use a number of tools or a combination of a set of tools for this purpose. However, there are some highlighted tools that are instrumental in ensuring efficient compliance with the CPRA. Let’s take a look at those tools and learn why your organization needs them.

• Sensitive Data Classification

While the CPRA retains most of the provisions from the CCPA, such as the definition of personal information (PI), it introduces a new subset of PI that it labels as “sensitive personal information (SPI).” SEC. 14. Section 1798.140 of the CPRA defines SPI as any personal information that reveals a consumer’s financial account, driver’s license, social security number, password, credit card number, precise geolocation, racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, genetic data, and biometric information, to name a few.

To comply with the CPRA, organizations must treat SPI differently than personal information, and thus, ensure added layers of protection. For this reason, a sensitive data classification tool can greatly assist your organization with identifying SPI. A sensitive data classification tool can scan throughout your complex data environments to identify and classify all the personal information and sensitive personal information, its lineage, and flow. With a combination of pre-defined metadata templates along with the in-house knowledge of your team, the tool can catalog the entire data and inventory it in one single place.

• Data Mapping Automation

Data minimization restricts organizations from collecting excessive personal information. And restricting it to only information that is directly and reasonably necessary to achieve a specific purpose. Storage limitation, or data retention, requires organizations to retain or store personal information. This is for only as long as it accomplishes the purpose for which it was collected. Data minimization has been a part of the GDPR but wasn’t mandated in the CCPA. However, now they require it in the CPRA under Section 1798.100. The same section also discussed storage limitation provisions.

With a robust data mapping automation tool, your organization can efficiently map all the personal information accordingly. This is with the CPRA data minimization and storage limitation provisions. The tool will sift through the information, labeling the metadata with the purpose limitation and data retention period, enabling the organization to automate data purging or deletion when the information serves the purpose or when it is no longer needed.

Data mapping automation that can effectively handle purpose limitation and storage retention is not just an investment for CPRA compliance but also for consumers’ trust, seeing half of the Americans prefer not to use products or services due to privacy concerns.

• Personal Information Linking Automation

CCPA introduced us to five data subjects’ rights. However, the CPRA not only revises those rights but also adds four more to the list. The data subject rights under the CPRA range from rights to access and modification to the right to opt-out of selling and limited use or disclosure of sensitive personal information. However, the fulfillment or rejection of those rights comes with a 45-days window. Plus, if failed, an organization must suffer penalties due to non-compliance.

DSR fulfillment is easier said than done. Because of the massive data sprawl and the resulting unstructured data that organizations usually have. According to a survey, 56% of organizations cite “unstructured data” as the most difficult issue when it comes to responding to DSRs. Here, a PI linking automation tool can greatly assist.

A PI linking automation tool can sift through your arsenal of data assets to identify the personal information and link it to its respective owner. Apart from simply linking the data, it also gives you detailed insights into residency, data lineage, and its location, to name a few. With these insights at your disposal, you can not only speed up DSR fulfillment but also ensure timely breach notification.

• Universal Consent Management Tool

Consent is among those legal bases that organizations leverage to collect or process personal information. In the CPRA, consent must be “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indications.” Furthermore, certain actions wouldn’t be qualified as consent if they include any dark patterns, hovering, muting, or pausing a given piece of content, general actions taken by consumers, etc. Moreover, different devices or touch points exist from which you acquire consent. However, tracking all those touchpoints and maintaining a perfect record of all those consents can be a bane.

A universal consent management tool can enable organizations to gather consent. Then it dynamically synchronizes all the consent records in a seamless manner. Organizations can seamlessly collect consent from a myriad of touchpoints, including websites, SaaS applications, or other mobile applications. Furthermore, organizations can maintain an extensive track record of all the consents for auditing purposes.

Conclusion

This blog highlights the most important tools that can enable organizations to effectively comply with the California Privacy Rights Act. However, there are a great number of equally important tools that can help organizations automate other components of the CPRA. These include privacy notice automation, vendor assessment, data governance, and security posture management. You don’t need to sign up for a different set of tools to meet different components of the CPRA. You can achieve it with one solution.

The post How to Implement CPRA Compliance Strategy for Your Business? appeared first on DMNews.

Here’s how data encryption works and its benefits for businesses.

How to Encrypt Data?

There are several different ways to encrypt data. For one, you can encrypt your WiFi router to prevent unauthorized access to your network. WPA2 (WiFi Protected Access) is the latest security standard for WiFi encryption. Implement WPA2 in all routers your business uses. Most routers have WEP (an older protocol) or no encryption enabled.

Installing a VPN on all work devices is another way to encrypt data. The VPN will route your internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel (a third server.) When the traffic gets to its intended target, it will be impossible to tell where it came from.

Critical business data, particularly customer data, should be stored in an encrypted location. Luckily, there are many cloud storage services available that encrypt stored data. Most of them do so without any action needed to be taken by the user.

As great as cloud storage is, there’s nothing more secure than encrypted physical disks. They may not be the most convenient storage solution, but they can be used to store critical information that’s not used daily.

Benefits of Encrypting Data

According to an IBM report, the average data breach in 2021 cost organizations $4.24 million. The probability of a data breach is even more concerning. 30% of all businesses are likely to experience a breach. 

Data encryption plays a key role in protecting businesses from experiencing a breach and suffering tremendous financial and reputational consequences. Apart from that, here are some other benefits of encrypting business data.

Compliance with Regulations

Data encryption is a major priority in new regulations. As cyberattacks are becoming more dangerous to the general public, regulators are starting to implement stricter rules for businesses to follow. Companies that fail to comply with these regulations can face hefty fines and public slander.

Ensures Security Across All Work Devices

With remote work becoming prevalent, employees also are using more devices for work-related tasks than ever, ranging from cell phones to tablets to laptops. That’s why you should encourage employees to encrypt even their personal devices.

Data encryption plays a key role in ensuring that all data transfers and communication are done securely.

Protects Data in Transit

Data moving from one point to another is at the highest risk of a breach. Businesses perform thousands of data transfers each day, either with outside vendors, customers, or within the company.

A complete data encryption solution includes end-to-end encryption. This type of encryption ensures secure communication that prevents third parties from accessing or tampering with data in transit. Only the intended recipient can decrypt and access the files.

Retains Data Integrity

If data is unencrypted, hackers may be able to tamper with it, and neither the sender nor recipient would know. This can have grave consequences for a business and lead to horrible miscommunication. Encryption prevents hackers from tampering with business data and ensures that recipients always have accurate information.

The Cost of Data Encryption

Knowing all the benefits of data encryption, you may be wondering how much it costs. However, the answer varies depending on the type of encryption you want to use. For example, a VPN would cost around $120 a year per device. Whereas, cloud storage services cost around $0.02 a month per GB of storage. 

You can enable WPA2 encryption for free in your router’s network settings. Full disk encryption is the most costly, at around $230 per year. Whatever encryption you choose, it will be worth it because a data breach would cost your business thousands.

Final Thoughts

Data encryption is crucial for the current business environment. It allows organizations to transfer data and communicate securely. It’s also a major part of remaining compliant with increasingly stricter regulations. There are many ways to encrypt data. You can encrypt your Wifi router, install a VPN, or use an encrypted hard drive.

The post Top 4 Benefits of Using Data Encryption for Businesses appeared first on DMNews.

However, we live in a customer-centric era. Accordingly, it’s logical to see a uniform marketing or sales strategy bear few results.

The answer lies in identifying and catering to your prospects’ specific needs and wants. Likewise, it leads us to the composition of the target market. Let’s see what it is and why it’s essential to understand your prospects.

What is the composition of the target market?

As the name implies, the composition of the target market refers to the very people to whom you are trying to sell your products and services.

Let’s take your social media following, for instance. You can’t simply produce content for them with the notion that it will be engaging and improve the conversion rates.

The results are below the expected goals when you base marketing and sales only on customer names.

When you start thinking about it, there is a person with unique problems, needs, expectations, and behavior behind every name in your social media audience or email newsletter list. As a result, the composition of your target market can help you understand these people or companies if you are in the B2B sector.

Market Segmentation vs. Composition

Another vital thing to know regarding the composition of the market you are trying to penetrate or capitalize on is the difference between market segmentation and composition.

Market segmentation means dividing your target market into segments, subsets, or clusters. It follows extensive market research, providing enough data to facilitate segmentation. The data includes customers’ demographics, behavior, interests, priorities, income, academic achievement, etc.

Market research followed by segmentation helps you discover the composition of your target market. Dividing the target market into segments helps you truly understand your potential customer. Once you know your customers, you can improve critical business processes. Let’s see what those are, shall we?

The Benefits of Basing Business Decisions on Market Composition

When you consider whether or not to invest in market research and segmentation or buy the relevant data, a little bit of extra information can be of help. As a result, here are the most notable benefits if you decide to base your business decision on market composition.

1. Ability to identify the target audience.

One of the most critical benefits market composition can deliver to your marketing team is the ability to tell the target audience from the target market.

Not everyone in your target market is the target audience. The target audience is the people responsible for purchasing decisions, whether in a B2C or B2B niche.

The target audience is a specific segment of your target market. Once you discover it, you can also segment your target audience to deliver more relevant content and sales messages to each of the segments. Consequently, it leads to increased sales and makes your brand more competitive.

2. Better customer insights.

With hundreds and thousands of potential customers, it becomes increasingly challenging to know and understand them. Likewise, knowing that customers are reading your posts on social media, browsing your website, and subscribing to your email newsletter can make you rush your decisions.

When you know your market composition, there is no need to rush. You will have better customer insights. It enables you to make your marketing messaging more relevant, improve lead generation, and ultimately increase conversion rates.

3. Getting rid of the clutter of information.

One of the main obstacles between you and an insightful market composition is the information clutter. Businesses often have overly cluttered data sets as they don’t have the staff or tools to refine and declutter data.

They often buy ready-to-use market data from a relevant marketplace or have a third-party company cleanse and mine their market data. It helps them instantly get rid of the clutter of information and understand their customers.

4. Personalized marketing.

Personalized marketing is practically impossible when you don’t know your customers. To make prospects feel understood and appreciated, you need to know various things, such as their priorities and needs. That’s something only your market composition can tell you.

You can create content that engages customers personally once you understand them. With access to the correct data, personalized marketing becomes a streamlined activity for your marketing team.

5. Improved cost-efficiency and resource management.

Marketing campaigns can become costly, especially in saturated markets facing fierce competition. There is only one way to improve your marketing efforts’ resource management and cost-efficiency — you need to use the relevant data.

In this instance, market composition data can be a valuable asset. It can help you get a competitive advantage and get actionable insights into the market. You can also increase your profit potential and bottom line with improved business intelligence.

6. Better marketing results overall.

Basing decisions on market composition has a profound effect on your business efforts.

Whether it’s a B2C or B2B landscape, a business able to get better customer insights, get rid of the clutter of information, facilitate personalization, and run a cost-efficient operation will achieve better marketing results overall.

The strongest suit of leveraging market segmentation is probably the ability to identify your target audience in the target market. It enables you to aim your marketing messaging at decision-makers instead of the entire market.

What do you need to understand your customers?

We’ve already briefly addressed this question, but it deserves further discussion.

The data has all the answers you need. Market segmentation and composition are based on complete and clean data sets.

There are two ways to get a hold of it. You can combine the results of your market research with the data you already have in your CRM solution to segment the market and discover its composition. The other way includes obtaining data sets from a relevant data provider.

Conclusion

There is only one way to convert names in your social media following and email newsletter list into an engaged target audience. It all starts with gathering the necessary data through extensive market research.

Excelling at market segmentation can really help facilitate understanding the composition of the target market. With this data at your disposal, you will be able to run a data-driven operation, devise relevant marketing strategies, and increase lead generation.

The post Target Market: The Importance of Understanding Its Composition appeared first on DMNews.

Organizations continue to deal with the changes brought on by the CCPA. Now, they have to deal with the new obligations placed on them by the new CPRA. Some of the most significant changes the CPRA brings to the table include the following.

• The creation of the “sensitive personal data” category.
  • This prohibits the use of data related to a person’s race or ethnicity, genetic data, sexual orientation, and data about their health, among other information.
• A new regulatory authority, the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), will be created to enforce the CPRA.
• Links on all web pages on a website make it easier for users to opt-out of having their data shared, sold, or used.
• Limitations on how long businesses can retain users’ data.
• Increased consent requirements when collecting data on minors.

There is a slight silver lining in the fact that the CPRA will only apply to businesses that cater to at least 100,000 users, have $25 million in global revenue, and make at least 50% of this global revenue from selling or sharing users’ data.

For those businesses that it does apply to, their entire data collection and processing ecosystem will need to be overhauled.

What To Expect

More ominously, the provisions of the CPRA mean that personalized behavioral advertising or “targeted advertising” that has improved conversion rates for businesses in ten folds will no longer be possible.

For marketers, this will require a thorough evaluation of the entire organization’s marketing strategy.

Consider this; a business wants to launch a digital campaign in a particular county after January 2023. By law, the business and its website will need to ensure that users have easy access to opting out of behavioral advertising.

The result? The campaign will result in failure since the key indicators such as time spent on a page, user journey within the website, device used to access the website, and all other such information will no longer be available. In the end, creating campaigns that deliver promising conversions will become harder than ever before.

So, is this the end for digital marketers? After all, conversions are the bottom line when it comes to digital campaigns.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. Yes, organizations and businesses will find restrictions on the scale of data collection and processing restrictive. However, it will not end digital marketing, and there are various reasons why.

Change In the Air

For starters, Google recently announced that it would phase out cookies altogether from its ecosystem.

There has long been a debate over the ethics of cookies and their use in marketing campaigns. It doesn’t matter if it’s first-party cookies, third-party cookies, tracking cookies, or session cookies. Each facilitates the tracking of user activity in one way or another.

While the CPRA does not address the use of cookies directly, some of the provisions of the law ensure that users can easily opt out of having any of these stored on their devices, thus negating their entire purpose.

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) was Google’s first attempt at replacing cookies. The FLoC idea has been shelved, at least for now. However, the FLoC trials did open the way for a better alternative in Topics API.

The fundamental principle behind Topics is that it’ll learn about users’ interests based on their overall internet browsing patterns. Furthermore, it will only keep data for the past three weeks of any user’s browsing history. Google plans to restrict the number of topics it can triangulate on any user to around 300.

Why This Matters for Marketers

This will be of particular interest to marketers that’ll be operating within the confines of the CPRA.

Topics API will follow an interest-based advertising model rather than the behavioral model currently used by Google. Additionally, it will ensure that users have a greater degree of control over what ads they see based on their interests, which they can edit accordingly.

This means that while marketers may not have access to the grand number of users they could target via their behavioral targeted campaigns, topics API will ensure the users who see their ads have a higher internal reason for seeing their ads in the first place.

In other words, the number of potential customers targeted may be low, but these users will have a much higher chance of converting.

What Lies Ahead

These are exciting times. It may sound like a misnomer to some. Still, for privacy advocates and internet users, regulations like the CPRA are a monumental step in the right direction. It will help to provide adequate data privacy to users online.

Expectedly, this will come at a cost.

Certain marketing practices have become fundamental to the entire premise of digital marketing. Being able to monitor users on a website in real-time, to see how long their sessions last, where they’re visiting from, which language they use, which device they’re on, what’s the screen dimension of their device, etc. are all the sort of data that enabled marketers to design campaigns that promise better conversions.

More importantly, it allowed marketers to create campaigns that marketers knew aligned well with how their current and potential users behave online.

Right from which words spring their users to convert to which color schemes enhance the chances of elongating their browsing sessions, marketers had it all figured out.

The CPRA, like several other data protection regulations, will change that. New technologies and methodologies are constantly being developed. Perhaps marketing will become more about old-school creativity in campaigns. They may do this rather than the data-oriented approach that may seem dreary to some. And in a way, that’s what makes it exciting.

Whatever the case, a new era in marketing may soon be upon us. It will be so in California from January 2023. Marketers still have a few months to figure out how they will tackle this new digital reality. The quicker they do, the better their chances of succeeding will be.

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