Data Driven Business

In the simplest possible sense, data drives business. Analyzing data is an integral part of growing any business. Even if you have been in business for decades, you can get an edge by aggregating the right data. A thorough understanding of how to use data is a priority for businesses.

Customer Data

Your customers have come to expect that you know their buying habits, and the data you collect is a crucial asset to being able to provide top-quality service. However, the danger in relying on raw data is that it can end up being worthless. Instead, your aim is to create useful metrics that can provide the basis for predictive analytics.

We use sales analytics to provide the basis for sales forecasting. The business depends on accurate forecasts, so we use data to make sure that we are better positioned to predict customer behavior. We also use data analytics to develop a timeline of what leads to sales success and what potential obstacles might halt progress.

Social Marketing

Your social media strategy should be the central element of your social marketing program. Social media can be an effective marketing platform, but it also needs to be used in a comprehensive way that stretches across other platforms. Additionally, you need to use social media as a conduit for getting customers on-board to the other social media platforms.

The data collected for social marketing can provide the basis for managing an effective social media campaign. There are multiple social media sites that offer analytical data that can be used to track trends. A data-driven social media marketing plan relies on data, and you need to get it from the actual customers.

Data drives social marketing. You need to plan your social media marketing program in advance. Ideally, you want to have a well-formed social media marketing plan that can be adapted to different environments, which means it should be relevant. Using analytics is an important part of your social marketing strategy. You need to set up data-driven metrics that provide you with the basis for analyzing the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

Your social media marketing strategy should also include efforts to monitor the use of your social media channels. You can use surveys to understand how customers engage with your social media channels. A social media analytics dashboard allows you to view all of your social media efforts and understand how they interact with each other.

User Behavior

One of the main goals of social media marketing is to reach a customer segment that has been identified. Identifying users who are likely to engage with your content and then focusing your social media marketing efforts on them is vital. This leads to better metrics for social marketing. Social analytics are particularly useful for figuring out which social media channels are performing well.

The more data you collect on social media, the more you will understand your customers. It’s important to consider the user behavior that is driving the behavior of your customers. Different social media channels will have different user profiles, so you need to identify the profiles of your users and optimize your social marketing efforts on those channels.

Surveys

With many businesses relying on customer surveys as the basis for social marketing campaigns, it’s important to use the data you collect to generate metrics. After you survey your customers, you need to create an objective metric and then measure that against your ideal target audience. Using data is one way of determining whether your social marketing efforts are working.

Audience Measurement

Audience measurement should be a key part of your marketing plan. An audience measure consists of key metrics that are measured against the ideal target audience. You can measure how successful you are in reaching the ideal audience and use it as the basis for future efforts. Another approach is to identify a series of target audiences, such as teens or young adults. You can then apply the entire marketing plan to one audience and measure it against another target audience.

Marketing Planning

The goal is to have your entire marketing program planned by the time you start building a marketing plan. A marketing plan should be tailored to the customer profile of your business. It is important to understand that marketing is a long-term process, but you can use it as a way to learn and grow. It’s also important to involve your sales team so that they understand what you are looking to achieve in the future.

Open-Source Battle: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress

The three most common content management systems are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. They are a must have in the world of websites, but just because they are quite common, it does not mean that their use is to be implemented everywhere.

Therefore, you should know each application’s features to use the right tool for the right job. The Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress-open source CMS comparison is very essential for all those who want to do their website operations correctly.

Drupal’s Features

The Drupal features include categorization of content, providing site statistics reporting, content translation, contact form, templates and so much more, in fact, this is the content management system with many features.

Joomla’s Features

Joomla, on the other hand, has web links, polls, pages, and multiple-level menu systems, news feed, article, banner, search, and modules.

WordPress Features

WordPress also has the same features, but its dominant feature is blogging, which has password protection, notification, emotions, permalinks, and many others which makes it the best product in the blog world.

So how does one know which CMS application will work for their website?

It is good to do as the experts say.

What the Experts Say?

A blog website will go quite well with a WordPress application. If the website is a standard one, then Joomla is the best while Drupal is suitable for multiple webmasters or websites with massive content.

The Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress open source CMS comparison helps you to understand what you can and cannot do with these applications.

What Was the Goal?

As much as one might say that one application is better than the other, it is a good idea to not only differentiate them based on the features but also get to know what experts think of each application and what each application will achieve in the end.

WordPress was developed to do a particular thing. Thus it can never be customized, and if one tries to do so, they will end up messing everything.

One good thing about the inability of WordPress to be modified is that it is simple to use and one does not need a lot of IT information to go about it.

For those who love hand coding then Drupal is the best because it is developer friendly and one can create great websites with it, but experts are quick to alert users that just because it is developer sufficient, it does not necessarily mean that it is user-friendly.

Drupal Expensive?

They also say that the publishing of Drupal websites takes a lot of time and money. If you want a CMS application that will provide an enormous capacity for development and customization, then Joomla is the thing for you. Even though it is not user-friendly as many would love it to be, it is still the best for all sorts of users be they designers, developers or administrators. It is not as powerful as Drupal, but it is also another application that is easier to teach and use.

From all these one will discover that the Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress-open source CMS comparison is a good way not to decide which is the best of the best but which CMS application is the best for you.

Let’s Encrypt Certificates at Siteground

If you are looking to run a legitimate online business, and if you plan to accept any money online for products or services, you’re going to need to make sure that your site is as protected and as secure as humanly possible – and that means taking full advantage of the SSL protection.

Siteground’s commitment to provide free SSL certificates are acknowledged by many industry figures. Reviews about Siteground.com praise the company not only for the free certificates but also for the outstanding overall quality of their services.

Basic Security

Every single day, hundreds of billions of web pages are accessed, and the overwhelming majority provide for some safety and security to protect your personal and private information. However, basic security isn’t enough to give you the kind of peace of mind you need when ordering something online – primarily when you are providing complete and total strangers over the internet with your contact information, your billing information, and information about your credit card, debit card, or bank account.

With an SSL certificate, however, you’re able to move from the HTTP to the HTTPS protocol – securing and encrypting ALL of the traffic that moves across your website.

SSL & Certified Authorities

Unfortunately, the only way you’re going to be able to move from one protocol to another is to buy SSL certification from a certified authority you know you can trust. That’s where working with SiteGround comes into play.

You no longer need to be hosting your site on a VPS or a dedicated server to leverage SSL technology.

New advancements in the world of web hosting have allowed anyone with any web hosting plan or package – from the most basic shared web hosting to the most advanced dedicated hosting and everything in between – to now have the opportunity to use SSL technology.

In the past, folks were only able to leverage SSL certification when they had a VPS or a dedicated hosting plan. Today, with SiteGround, you’re going to be able to rock and roll with SSL protection on any of their packages (all without having to spend a mountain of money on encryption along the way).

Believe it or not, SiteGround provides 100% free SSL certificates through the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL program.

What is an SSL certificate in the first place?

As we alluded to above, SSL certification is going to allow you to provide a more safe and secure platform for data flow and transfer across your website and your Web server. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a standardized encryption solution that provides a 100% secure, 100% private, and 100% encrypted tunnel for traffic to move through your site between your browser and your server.

This is the kind of protection used by ALL legitimate websites, especially those that are looking to sell products or services. Visit any website that offers something for sale, and you’ll find that the prefix before the web address is HTTPS instead of HTTP, and many of them are green or have little green lock symbols to reflect the security as well.

How to implement SSL technology

The only way you are going to be able to implement SSL technology is by purchasing a legitimate SSL certificate from a licensed and certified authority.

This certificate is only going to be issued after necessary information has been collected, including your name, your domain name, your company name or your DBA, and a physical address that can be independently verified. All SSL certificates also have an expiration date, issuance date, and details regarding the Certificate Authority behind the actual issuing of that license in particular.

When a visitor connects to your secure website, the browser itself is going to see if the certificate is valid, if it is up to date, and if it is legitimate. Before any connection is made, the browser independently verifies that the Issuing Certificate Authority can be trusted, and wants this “handshake” is completed your brought directly to the website that you are trying to visit in the first place.

If the Issuing Certificate Authority is not that, if the certificate itself has expired, or if there was trouble along the way your browser will alert you to these details and give you the option to avoid moving forward or move forward with a warning that lets you know that your information may not be completely protected.

What’s Changed?

Let’s Encrypt is a major Issuing Certificate Authority online today, providing 100% free SSL certificates to website owners.

In the past, the only way to get your hands on SSL certification was to spend a pretty decent chunk of change on one, and then you had to renew your SSL certification on a regular basis – forking over even more money along the way.

Today, to dramatically improve the security of online business, the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL program is run for the benefit of the public. Supported by a public benefit organization based out of California, it is a certified authority and can issue SSL certificates in an open-source kind of way. This provides you with the technical tools, solutions, and certificates you need to succeed today, without having to spend a small fortune on SSL legitimacy.

Moving forward with SiteGround

At the end of the day, you have the option, and the opportunity to move forward with a SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate 100% free of charge and with no strings attached – OR you have the opportunity to move forward with SSL certification that you pay for directly and that you use to protect your website all the same.

Speed at Siteground

Both certificates are going to function the same, and both certificates are going to provide you with the safety, security, and stability you need to run an online operation these days. At the same time, your SiteGround SSL certificate isn’t going to be transferable off of the SiteGround platform whereas your public or paid SSL certificate can be more effortlessly moved around should you bounce from one host to another.

It’s up to you to figure out whether or not the SiteGround Let’s Encrypt SSL is right for you or if you should move forward with a more traditional option. It’s nice to know that a web host has your back and is looking for new and innovative ways to help you (as a modern business) save as much money as you can.