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General Data Protection Regulation: What You Should Know

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If you’re in the digital marketing or analytics industry, you have probably been inundated by communication from vendors and partners regarding the General Data Protection Regulation, often referred to as (GDPR). Below, we’ve highlighted what GDPR is, why you should care, what impact it will have on your business, and what actions you need to take.

What is GDPR?

GDPR standardizes data protection law across all European Union (EU) countries and imposes strict rules on how personally identifiable information can be collected, stored, and used. The law goes into effect on  May 25th, 2018, and all organizations working with the data of EU citizens must comply or face heavy fines. GDPR applies to every business that collects data from customers in the EU, regardless of the company size, location, or intentions.

Why should you care?

GDPR applies to all organizations that handle the personal data of EU residence. Many companies located outside the EU are unaware that the new EU data regulation applies to them. If an organization offers any products, services, or information to EU residents, it must meet all GDPR compliance requirements. Gartner predicted that up to 50% of American firms will not be compliant. Those organizations that do comply with the required transparency should help to build brand trust and equity among consumers.  

How GDPR impacts your business?

Fines for noncompliance can be significant. A maximum fine of 4% of global revenues can be applied to companies that fail to gain user consent or violate core data security expectations. Lesser fines of 1-2% of revenues can be applied in situations where a company keeps incomplete records or implements insufficient data controls. GDPR requires organizations to appoint a Data Processing Officer (DPO) for EU government entities or public bodies or a company that either processes or monitors data subjects or sensitive information for citizens of the EU on a large scale.

What actions should your business take?

Below are a few steps that can help guide you for GDPR compliance:

  1. Create Procedures for Breach Notifications
  2. Determine if you’re a controller or a processor. The regulation breaks out responsibility for protecting data into two roles: controllers and processors.
  3. Audit your data and know which technologies are being used on your website
  4. Take the time to understand what data your business is collecting and why.
  5. Review what consent and disclosure look like for your customers. Get the consumer’s blessing on data collection.
  6. Evaluate exactly what third-party processors are collecting, where that data is going and how it’s being used.
  7. Keep a document on data processing and create a process to refresh the documentation periodically
  8. If a breach occurs, take action to inform regulators within 72 hours and be
    ready to inform consumers as quickly as possible.

GDPR Impact on the United States

In our opinion, it’s a matter of time before the US government takes action on data collection.  With Facebook data privacy being a “hot button” issue currently, antitrust questioning, data collection, and consumer privacy are on the radar of the US government and citizens who watched the Congressional hearings. You would think that the US government is closely watching and measuring the impact of the GDPR to see if it’s worth considering within the US.

Resources:

https://www.pandadoc.com/gdpr

https://www.observepoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/GDPR-ASAP-a-7-step-guide-to-prepare-for-the-general-data-protection-regulation.pdf

https://blog.pipedrive.com/2018/03/gdpr-compliance/

https://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/security-and-risk-strategy/7-steps-to-gdpr-for-us-companies/a/d-id/1329235?

Why Your Brand Should Be Using LinkedIn

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In an era of ever-increasing online interaction, social media is one of the most easily-accessible and useful tools in your business arsenal. While Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have rightly earned their status as social media heavyweights, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn’s punch when it comes to promoting your business and boosting your sales. From lifting the lid on internal talent, to curating content: here are some key reasons why your business needs to embrace LinkedIn.

The Right Audience

Over 500 million professionals are on LinkedIn, and as it’s a social channel created for business interaction; its users are already there with their business hats on. On other social media channels, users might have primarily logged on for amusement, friendship etc.; on LinkedIn they are already in the right networking mindset, so it’s the perfect place to execute your business marketing strategy.

Not only are these people switched on and engaged, they are also probably more likely to be key decision-makers and engaged industry professionals. The perfect people your business should be talking to…

However; that doesn’t mean that you should go overboard and hard-sell, or forget the human side of business. Following top entrepreneurs will give you a good yardstick to follow, as they often balance business updates with engaging inspirational posts and stories.

Showcase Your Brand

LinkedIn lets you create a company page for free, which includes space for your company logo as well as a description about the brand. From here you can publish and share content — the first step for getting noticed.

It’s an easy, simple, and pain-free way of getting your message out into the world — and can also become a central spoke for employee engagement and content curation efforts. Use LinkedIn updates to welcome new team members, share company milestones, and cover any relevant industry events.

As well as being an excellent platform to highlight your brand ethos and vision, 64% of social referrals to company websites come from LinkedIn, so it’s also successful at directing potential clients/associates to your homepage.

Clever Content Marketing

Great content marketing material should educate, inform, or entertain your users. LinkedIn is ideal for promoting informative blog content or useful, practical advice about running a business. You will also find that inspirational people stories or anecdotes do well on LinkedIn, as does any relevant event coverage.

When planning out your LinkedIn strategy, make sure you mix up post formats and messages so as not to not have a brand that’s on social ‘autopilot’. You need to get to grips with brand storytelling, not broadcasting.

Just remember that images and links are key to well-performing posts on LinkedIn – 98% of posts with images receive more comments and posts with links in have a 200% higher engagement rate.

You should also encourage team members to publish native content on LinkedIn. The platform gets a lot of engagement, and it’s a fantastic place for events roundups, and short, reflective posts.

Connect with other experts

80% of all B2B leads come from LinkedIn. If you run a B2B company, LinkedIn provides the perfect opportunity to reach out to potential clients and form strong business bonds. It’s a great way to give back to your community of clients and associates — you can share their content, endorse them, and generally keep in touch.

Even if you have a consumer-facing company, you can still utilize LinkedIn’s large wealth of contacts by forging alliances for things like partnership marketing. It’s also ideal for scouting out new suppliers and distributors if you run an e-commerce business.

The rules of social networking are shifting, but the basics still ring true: listen, be authentic, and connect with meaning.

Another level of interaction

LinkedIn prioritizes relationship building. Whenever you send an invite to someone to ‘connect’ with you, instead of a blanket request being whizzed straight out, you can fully personalize the invite to explain why you’re getting in touch, where you found their details etc. You can also use the ‘cold’ mail option on LinkedIn: this is a scalable sales channel.

There is also the groups section where you can opt to meet with people who have similar interests. By joining groups that are populated by your target audience, you can then use this as a forum to promote your content. (But again: have respect for community).

A useful research tool

LinkedIn not only helps you promote your company and engage with clients and consumers, it’s also the perfect place to suss out the competition, talent spot, and generally keep your fingers on the industry pulse. If some of your rivals have a bigger presence, you can observe what they do and which circles they operate in.

LinkedIn is a place where many interesting conversations take place, but you run the risk of missing out on them, if you don’t engage. It’s a good idea to earmark some ‘engagement’ time in your social calendar, to help you unearth conversations that are worth listening too. Don’t forget that a roundup post of content found on LinkedIn is a quick way to leverage the channel elsewhere.

Whether it’s for building your brand reputation, making important business connections or distributing your content marketing, LinkedIn can truly transform your company. Leverage the power of LinkedIn for your marketing strategy and you’ll see increased engagement, SEO clout, and sales. If what we’ve said isn’t enough to convince you, just check out how these successful CEOs use it to their advantage.

Victoria Greene is a content consultant. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on how companies can improve the way they represent their brand. She is passionate about using her experience to help brands improve their reach across a variety of different social or content channels.

DaBrian Marketing Partners with Pipedrive to Deliver Integrated Sales and Marketing Solution

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DaBrian Marketing Group added Pipedrive to its suite of client solutions. The strategic move will help area businesses improve their lead nurturing processes and accelerate sales cycles by fully integrating their marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. DaBrian will provide configuration, integrations, support and consulting to better align sales & marketing efforts for clients and allow them to extract the most value from Pipedrive.

Automatically Update Contacts

DaBrian Marketing Group’s marketing automation solution fully integrates with Pipedrive, allowing businesses to instantly sync contact information across both platforms. Any customers or leads added to or updated by sales and support teams are instantly connected with marketing efforts, and vice versa – eliminating the need for manual import/export. The automation removes human error from the data entry process and saves time. After an initial set-up by DaBrian Marketing Group, Pipedrive’s continuous integration does all the work to keep marketing, sales and support information aligned. This ensures consistency in data between systems and enhances database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.

Push Marketing Insights to Sales Team

Businesses can now use Pipedrive to connect leads directly to the campaigns that generated them, allowing managers to focus their teams’ sales efforts and providing context to those sales conversations. DaBrian’s marketing automation platform will identify the most effective marketing channels and the most active prospects, directing the sales team where to increase efforts. Integrating marketing information with Pipedrive also allows members of the sales team to more effectively target prospects and personalize their messages. Better understanding the sources, preferred channels and interactions of prospects with marketing efforts arms sales forces with the insights they need to close more deals.

Simple CRM that Drives Profits

Pipedrive was developed by salespeople, for salespeople. In addition to integrating information between marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management systems, Pipedrive helps simplify and organize the sales process. Users can be up and running in less than 3 minutes and it’s easy to add or remove team members. Salespeople are notified about key prospect activities to ensure timely follow-up. And the solution comes with native mobile applications to increase convenience and productivity. An attractive user interface and graphic pipeline representations further increase usability and effectiveness. The CRM starts at $10 per user, per month for subscription.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s digital marketing services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by seasoned sales pros, Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution designed to help salespeople rather than control them. It is built on a proven selling framework that gives visibility into the pipeline and drives actions that push deals to close consistently. Pipedrive is serving more than 60,000 customers worldwide with corporate offices in New York and Estonia. Pipedrive ranks no. 14 on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private software companies. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com.

Do B2B Companies Really Need Digital Marketing?

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Have you ever said your business-to-business (B2B) company doesn’t need digital marketing, that it’s only something business-to-consumer (B2C) needs? If you have, unfortunately you’re not alone. You’ve probably offered reasons like your customers know who you are, or your buyers already know what they want and don’t need to look online. Or perhaps even the classic “that’s why we pay sales reps”. Without debating the merits of those statements, here’s something else you might want to consider. According to an Accenture study, 94% of B2B buyers conduct online research at some point in the buying process (p4). So if that alone is not enough, here are 3 more reasons.

Buyers control the Buying Process

Why B2B Companies need Digital Marketing

Image Source: Hubspot
Buyers have the means and resources available to conduct extensive research before they contact a sales representative and this is exactly what they do. You can see above, business-to-business buyers turn first to Search and then to company websites as they begin the buyer’s journey. Your company needs to be there and be ready for this.

Buyers Don’t Trust Sales Reps

We know that may come as a surprise to many of you, but it’s true. In fact, according to the Hubspot Sales Perception Survey Q1 2016, less than 7% of buyers find information from people in sales business units to be very trustworthy. So now what? According to a study by Blue Nile Research, buyers turn to customer reviews and case studies, instead. Your company needs to have an effective and comprehensive plan in place to ensure your potential buyers find a compelling story that demonstrates your expertise, experience and results.

Why B2B Companies need Digital Marketing

Image Source: Louis Foong
Data Source: Blue Nile

B2B Buyers Don’t Work In A Vacuum

If you believe there is only ONE person making the buying decision, then frankly, you’re being naïve. Even the owner and sole employee of a company are subject to outside stimuli. This person has gatekeepers that will try to block access and he or she will have influencers that, well, have an influence whether they know it or not. This person has friends, customers and suppliers to talk with He or she may even have a significant other that has nothing to do with the business but who supports the same cause or charity that your company does. The point is that many people have access to the decision maker and, consciously or not, often contribute in some way. Through proper research, experience and analytics, you can identify and reach these targets using the appropriate channels.

Why B2B Companies need Digital Marketing

Image courtesy of StratoServe

What it all Means? B2B Companies Need Digital Marketing

It’s fairly simple, really. It comes down to the fact that B2B buyers are people. So, it should be no surprise that their decisions follow a very similar journey as an individual consumer making any significant purchase. The touch points along the journey may vary depending on the product or service, but you can be certain the buyer is conducting research online, searching for solutions and then, a brand that might provide it. The buyer will look at your competitors’ websites. Make sure your website is found, as well. Customer reviews, data sheets, and blogs will be read. Social Media will be scrutinized. If you have a sound strategy, consistent messaging across platforms, and you provide information that saves time and money, your chances of securing a potential customer increase. If you don’t have these things….well, do you really need us to say it? Of course, these are not the only reasons, so let us know your top three. We’d love to hear from you!

Why B2B Companies need Digital Marketing
Why B2B Companies need Digital Marketing

Image Source: MediaFly
Data Source: Forrester

If you would like to talk about your challenges, and how we can help, please call us. We’re sure you’ll be glad you did.

DaBrian Marketing Redesigns South Mountain YMCA’s Website Pro Bono

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South Mountain YMCA New Website

30 May, 2016 (Reading, PA) – DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC has developed and redesigned South Mountain YMCA’s website, pro bono.

The South Mountain YMCA provides camping experiences as well as educational and outdoor programs that build personal leadership, character, and life skills while developing care, honesty, respect, and responsibility in young people, families, and communities.

Nathan Brant, Chief Executive Officer of South Mountain YMCA, said,

“We cannot begin to express what an incredible gift this is. As a charity serving kids, families, and schools, a good website significantly increases the positive impact we can have on our community. This beautiful online presence will drive awareness of our programs and services, assist families in learning about transformative experiences for their children, and help educators plan for environmental and outdoor education field trips. We cannot thank the team at DaBrian Marketing enough.”  

South Mountain YMCA emphasizes three main goals of their new website: an improved experience for its users, a more effective attraction of their target audience, and the creation of a unique, intuitive aesthetic.  South Mountain YMCA’s satisfaction with the new website speaks to the analysis-based, creative web design that DaBrian Marketing Group produces.

Visit the New South Mountain YMCA  website to learn more about their youth- and family-oriented programs as well as the most recent work by DaBrian Marketing Group’s team.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency, focused on providing original and strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses, that want to create digital awareness, increase return on investment (ROI), and identify insights that not only will help achieve goals but will also help to increase your business’s efficiencies. DaBrian Marketing Group’s services include email marketing, search engine optimization, website design, web analytics, social media marketing and more. Company headquarters are centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DMG, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

5 B2B Web Design Trends to Consider in 2016

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Web Design Trends
created by freepik.com

Introduction:

Back in March 2015 I wrote a blog which covered “Five New Web Design Trends for 2015”. Although several of these trends have managed to survive 2015, there are some additional trends that could affect the usability of your B2B website. In this blog, I will go over five (5) additional trends that can help improve usability, increase website traffic, and help drive conversions.

1. More Unique & Creative Typography

With the emergence of affordable or free web-safe fonts options like Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit, typography is becoming much more unique, and creative. On many B2B websites, headers are becoming much bolder and body text is appearing much larger in size. In addition to latest evolution of the Cascading Style Sheets language, CSS3, styling typography will offer unlimited options on how it’s presented on the web going forward. Sites like StephenCraver utilizes great use of typography to carry the layout of the site.

According to HTTP Archive, the use of custom fonts has increased over the past year. Bolder, more unique typefaces will continue to be used in B2B web design going forward. While designers may still play it safe when it comes to choosing fonts for readable type and body copy, expect to see more unique and experimental font being used for website headers and supporting text.

2. Cards, Cards, and Even More Cards

As you browse the web, you may notice that many B2B companies are leaning more towards a card design look. This web design trend is most common on social media platforms, and most commonly associated with Pinterest, however many companies have adapted this trend and you should see more of it in 2016. Several other notable sites utilizing this trend are ESPN, Dribble, The Guardian, and Amazon.

3. Less Photography, More Illustrations

Before 2016, they were plenty of B2B websites that were overloaded with stock images as means of telling their brand story. If the appropriate images aren’t chosen, this direction could cause a big disconnect between your business and potential clients. In 2016, you will notice that many businesses will move away from stock photography (especially if they are not personable) and rely more on illustration graphics to tell their story.

You will find illustration being implemented in a variety of ways such as, large-scale, hero images and backgrounds, or on much smaller scales such as icons and user interface elements. Two nice examples of websites utilizing illustrations as it’s main source of graphics are McWhopper and Ice & Sky which combine large background illustrations and animation to tell their brand story.

4. Bolder use of color

In 2015, B2B companies who implemented flat design into their website more than likely utilized a color palette which was just a flat as the design itself. With that being said, 2016 promises to be much more colorful than years past.

Color has always been one of the most single important tools for expressing a company’s brand story or message. In prior years, many B2B companies stuck to “web-safe” palettes because of the some technology limitations. If you are looking for color inspiration websites like Adobe Color CC, Paletton, Coolors can help you put together some interesting color palettes. A couple examples of good color implementation on their websites are Bose and History Of Icons.

5. Keep On Scrolling and Less Reloading

To scroll, or not to scroll. This has always been a highly debatable topic for many. It seems that more people are finding it easier to scroll down a page rather than clicking, and loading another page. This is more relevant to smartphones users browsing on slow or limited data networks. Whether on mobile or desktop, scrolling can be a very effective way of telling a company’s brand story. If your B2B website is accustom to getting a high volume of mobile traffic, scrolling would be a much better user experience than a page refresh on any device.

Websites using a Parallax scrolling effect are often implemented as a way to tell a story and make layouts more dynamically appealing. Scrolling allows the content to be incrementally readable, allowing more options and visibility to other Micro Interactions. One of my favorite scrolling or parallax designs is the Lexus website. This website implements an excellent one-page design with sections that lead to other Call To Actions (CTAs) or micro interactions.

Conclusion

While it may not be necessary to implement every new trend into your website, many of them have the potential to improve user experience. Before following new trends, it is best that you have some knowledge of what they are and how they can affect your business. Once you have a strategy in place, implementing new trends and having the ability to test them will help you streamline that process. This will help you adapt to a trend that best reflects you and your business goals.