Cyberwalker Blog

Introducing Samcart courses

So let’s talk about Samcart Courses. We have worked with a lot of online course platforms over the years including Kajabi, Teachable, Kartra, Podia and several others in the sector. But the one we have been really impressed with is an online product called Samcart Courses.

The platform was developed by Scott and Brian Moran who are the brains behind online shopping cart software that was founded in 2013. They built the online payments tool called yep, Samcart, which we use in our businesses and sell more than USD $10K per month via the platform.

Learn about the Samcart Courses platform (webinar).

How much time and money should you spend on marketing your startup?

When you are starting your own business, it can often be tricky to know how to divide your time and your budget most effectively to deal with each of the different aspects of successfully running a company. One of the most important aspects to consider is marketing.

How much of your time to invest in marketing

When you are first starting your business and have not yet built brand awareness, marketing is one of the most essential ways to spend your time. When you start out, you are likely to have significantly more time than you have money to spend, especially if you have not yet built a customer/client base. During these early stages, you may even be able to spend the majority of your time on marketing (as long as you do not neglect other vital aspects of running a business).

This time can be taken to try out different marketing techniques and channels, choose your brand personality, and generally work out what works best for you. Once you have set up reliable marketing channels, the time needed to spend on marketing can decrease, but you will still need to regularly update and monitor channels such as social media accounts. As you gain more business, time spent on marketing can likely be reduced, usually to somewhere between 10% and 20% of your total weekly working hours. As time spent is reduced, financial investment in things like paid ads can likely increase.

How much of your budget to invest in marketing

There are many expenses associated with starting your own business. For example, if you are starting a business in the state of Florida, you are legally required by the government to have workers compensation insurance if you employ four or more members of staff, and/or if your business is in the construction sector.

Deciding what percentage of your business’ budget to invest in marketing can depend on what sector your business is a part of. Not only do certain sectors have fewer expenses than others, but taking an active approach to marketing is also more essential in some sectors than in others (although some marketing is vital in all sectors). Businesses in sectors such as banking, transportation, and energy have on average some of the lowest percentages of their budgets spent on marketing (usually less than 10%), whereas consumer goods providers spend around a quarter of their budget on marketing.

If you are not sure how much of your budget to allocate, a good general rule-of-thumb recommended by business experts is to aim for approximately 10% if you are looking to grow your business, although this can be reduced to around 5% if you just want to simply maintain your current level of brand visibility. When starting out and aiming to get clients/customers, marketing will be more important and worth more funding than later on when you have a consistent client/customer base. Of course, the specific percentage of your budget will also depend on your sector and overheads.

How data analytics can help you

Using data analytics can help you to identify the most profitable marketing channels for your business, which can make your time and your financial investments more efficient in future.

Being adaptable to changing circumstances and regularly revising your marketing budget, strategy, and timetable can help you to create improved ROIs on your marketing activities.

How Social Media Branding Can Transform Client Relations

Are you looking for strategies to improve audience engagement on social media platforms? Branding can help make this a reality. Let’s delve into the details of how it works.

What Is Branding?

Branding is a marketing strategy that involves developing an identity to set your business apart from others. It includes elements like your name, logo, and the way you communicate.

When you create your brand identity, you lead consumers to understand what they can expect from your company. On social networks, you have access to a large audience of potential customers.

How Branding Can Transform Your Social Networks

Maybe you’re wondering if social media branding is worth the investment. Here are some of the most critical benefits:

Immediate Brand Recognition

When you take the necessary steps to differentiate your brand from others, social media users will instantly recognize your company. In this way, you can attract attention amid busy Facebook and Instagram feeds.

Increased Trust

Building a brand requires consistency. You need to express the same mission and values repeatedly. It’s also essential to maintain a unique tone and voice in your publications.

When your social platforms show that your company has a unique and attractive personality, you’ll earn your audience’s confidence. They’ll understand they can trust this business to maintain a consistent nature and values.

Basics of Social Media Branding

Now that we’ve seen some advantages of branding let’s look at how to make it happen. How can you develop a consistent style for your social media content?

First, you’ll need to define how you want to portray your brand. Essential elements include:

  • Logo
  • Profile and cover images
  • Username
  • What to include in the description of your organization?
  • Image styles
  • Palette – for example, bold or pastel colors, one tone or several
  • Personality – Is your brand friendly, sophisticated, intelligent, or informal?
  • How you deal with competitors

Once you decide on your brand attributes, you’ll need to post frequently enough that users see your publications and interact. Usually, this means making new content available daily.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can make processes more efficient, as Octopart blog articles explain. However, people crave human interaction, and it’s essential that your social media interactions feel personal and not mechanical.

Posting Strategies

Many specific strategies can help you get excellent results quickly. Popular tactics that top brands apply on social media include:

  • Tags and mentions
  • Hashtags
  • Captions
  • Educational content
  • Specific content for each platform

When you tag or mention a person or business in a post, they get a notification. As a result, they may become curious and engage with your content. They might even share it so more people see it.

Hashtags make your content searchable and help potential customers find your brand. They also drive engagement.

By putting captions on the links, you share, you lead your followers to understand why the post is relevant to your brand. You may also succeed in convincing them to interact with the publication.

Teaching your audience is another essential strategy since many people turn to social networks for educational content. When followers understand they can count on you to provide accurate and relevant information about your specialty, they’ll keep coming back to learn more.

If you have social media accounts on multiple platforms, you’ll need to adapt your content to fit each platform’s unique style. What works on Facebook might not do well on Instagram or Twitter. Every site has best practices that inform how you must post.

Refining and Reworking Your Strategies

When you start implementing these strategies, you’ll need to test what works best for each platform. Study insights and analytics at least once a month and make any necessary adjustments. Constant monitoring allows you to continue improving your brand recognition.

Summing It Up

Social media branding can make immense positive changes in the way people respond to your company. It can bring quicker recognition and greater trust.

Clearly defining your brand image and using specific strategies can bring excellent results. Consistent evaluation is necessary to improve any weak areas you identify. Doing all these things can transform the way an online audience relates to your brand.

Why Cyber Security Marketing is a Must

Whether you’re a vendor or a creator of cybersecurity software, marketing your product is critically important for your business’ success. Moreover, as cybersecurity experts are more than aware, informing consumers, workers, and business leaders about the threats they might come across online can dramatically reduce phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks – saving businesses billions of dollars each year. Getting your message out when you’re a cybersecurity provider might feel difficult, but this article argues that it’s an absolute must for anyone working in this crucial space.

New Threats

Most businesses and individuals are aware of cyber threats. They may have had a social media profile hacked in the past, or there might have been news stories about some of the most famous data breaches in recent history. However, consumers and business leaders, many of whom already use a cybersecurity system, are less aware of the developing nature of online threats. This is a key message to communicate to consumers: the ever-changing nature of online threats. This means that businesses should always review their cybersecurity offerings and should be prepared to switch providers if they find a blind spot in their protection at any time.

New Platforms

While the likes of Microsoft Teams and Slack have been around for many months, the cybersecurity risks and provisions that serve businesses on these relatively new platforms have only followed suit fairly recently. The result is that thousands of businesses are using online communication and team collaboration platforms which contain well-known backdoors that hackers can penetrate to extract data or inject malware. These Microsoft Teams protection tips, courtesy of McAfee, go to show just how important new security systems are in protecting businesses that have rushed to onboard with new platforms – especially since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Varied Providers

There are dozens of different cybersecurity providers online – all of which offer slightly different packages to businesses that use different forms of technology in their backend. CEOs and business leaders are simply not equipped to scour through the online space to find the perfect cybersecurity solution for their firm and, even if they had the time, they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. Instead, cybersecurity providers can communicate the benefits of their product through smart marketing, including guest posts on tech websites and features in comparison lists and online reviews. 

More Customers, More Data

As any cybersecurity whizz will tell you, the more customers they serve, the more data they receive on the capacity of their product to protect businesses. With this additional data, engineers are able to spot patterns of attacks and data breaches more easily, leaving them with plenty of information that they’ll use to patch up weaknesses in your product, making for a more competitive cybersecurity solution over time. This is a final, important benefit of marketing your cybersecurity product: the more consumers use it, the more insights you’ll receive on how you can tweak and improve it over time. 

These four points serve to urge cybersecurity firms, consultants, and professionals to market their knowledge and the products they sell for the good of businesses across the world. 

Why Do You Need to Use Captions?

Video content without any closed captions is like a musician or band playing to an empty auditorium. You may feel as though you have put all of your hard work into creating something, but you are not playing to a full audience. You need to know that we live in an online oriented society and it is no longer an option to create content that is not captioned. People all across the world are now engaging with content all the time and every single one of them has very different needs. If you use captions then you may find that it is very easy for you to engage with all of them and reach them efficiently.

It makes your content watchable without sound


In this day and age, people are always on the go. You don’t want to be blaring your device to all and sundry. Captioning makes it easier than ever for people to watch streams and this means that your audience can watch whatever they want with ease. If they are on public transport and they do not have any earphones or if they are in a very quiet place where they are unable to play sound then you can still engage your viewers without having to worry about this. Some 83% of people in the US watch media without sound, and 80% of people are more likely to watch a video when the captions are available rather than just skipping through. The main reason for this is because captions make watching videos much easier.

Boosting your Audience Attention

Captions make it much easier for you to capture your audience’s attention and keep it. Videos that have a longer viewing time need captions because this will help you to get your message across and it will also make it much easier for you to rocket the potential of your content from run-of-the-mill content to great content. Captions have been found to boost the comprehension of the video and audio content and can also create a positive learning experience among students too.

Improving Accessibility

Did you know that 5% of the world’s population has hearing issues? This is a huge amount when you think about it. In fact, it equates to around 460 million people. They won’t be able to access your content if you do not provide them with some kind of caption.

Captions will support those who are hard of hearing or deaf and it will also encourage them to follow your content. The more accurate the captions are, the better. This is one of the many reasons why you should invest in audio descriptions as well as captions because it helps people to have a better understanding of what you are showing them, and it also helps them to feel much more connected to your media. In the world of business, captioning is incredibly important as it shows your audience that you care about them and it also means that you can get way more engagement out of every video that you show.

How to generate captions for video

You can generate captions for your video using a service like Rev.com

Why Do You Need to Use Captions?

Introducing Samcart courses

So let’s talk about Samcart Courses. We have worked with a lot of online course platforms over the years including Kajabi, Teachable, Kartra, Podia and several others in the sector. But the one we have been really impressed with is an online product called Samcart Courses. The platform was developed by Scott and Brian Moran who …

Continue reading “Introducing Samcart courses”

Why Cyber Security Marketing is a Must

Whether you’re a vendor or a creator of cybersecurity software, marketing your product is critically important for your business’ success. Moreover, as cybersecurity experts are more than aware, informing consumers, workers, and business leaders about the threats they might come across online can dramatically reduce phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks – saving businesses billions of …

Continue reading “Why Cyber Security Marketing is a Must”

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