Playground Safety_ Signs It Needs An Inspection

The fear of taking your kid to a playground only for a swing to fail, sending your kid 15 feet up into the sky, is something no parent or kid should go through.

Public playgrounds should be a safe area for your kids. There could be surefire signs that the playground needs to be re-evaluated and worked on.

Why Playground Safety Is Important

There is only one reason, but this reason is the only reason you ever need, and that is to prevent injuries to your kids.

Every year over 200 000 kids are sent to the hospital emergency room with a playground-related injury.

It is essential to look for signs of failure in the playground area. Checking for improper flooring, faulty equipment and ensuring there is enough safe space is necessary. 

Fall Protection Is A Must

Kids and even adults are prone to falling. For kids, this is a more common occurrence. The balance and coordination of kids are tested in these play parks. Having suitable absorption flooring will help reduce the damage your kid will take when they hit the floor.

It is essential to know what kinds of surfaces are recommended and which falls are not standard.

Recommended Flooring: 

Sand

Pea gravel

Recycled rubber mulch

Wood mulch that was not CCA treated

Wood chips

Any other materials tested to ASTM F1292 standards.

Avoid flooring that will have a profound impact on your kids, like concrete, grass, asphalt, dirt, carpet, or CCA treated wood mulch.

Is There Adequate Spacing Between Playing Equipment

Your kids are curious little cookies. They twist and turn and try their darndest to explore any space they can. This can be dangerous if the playground has hazardous spaces.

By this, we were referring to kids’ ability to harm themselves by getting stuck between spaces. 

If the play park has guard rails or borders for protection, it needs to follow specific safety standards. This is one of the more dangerous aspects of play parks and needs to be taken seriously. Head entrapment can lead to possible strangulation and even death.

There should be at least 3-5 feet of spacing between each play structure that allows for open space or easy maneuverability.

There has to be at least a 24-inch space between each swing set and 30 inches between the swing and the frame.

All openings for an enclosed area should be over 9 inches.

Structures that are less than 30 inches high require 6 feet of space.

Structures that are higher than 30 inches require 9 feet of space.

Your Metals and Wood Structures Are Rotting

Keeping rust to a minimum is the best possible way to make sure metal structures are solid and safe. Rust not only makes it a possible injury hazard, but it’s hazardous to kids consuming rotting materials.

Wood materials may cause splintering if it is not looked after. Splintering can be hazardous to kids and quite troublesome to remove. Use recommended woods like cedar or redwood, which are bug and rot-resistant.

A certified safety officer needs to inspect the playgrounds to ensure kids aren’t getting harmed in the same space they want to have fun in. These are vital signs to look out for in keeping injury to a minimum. After all, our kids are our world, and we don’t want to put them in any extra danger.

You can also visit Creative Recreational Systems for more information.

Why Marketing Analytics Has Not Lived Up To Its Promise

It has been observed in recent times that more and more companies are showing a marked increase in the budget they allocate to marketing analytics. However, despite this increase, the expected results seem to fall shy of initial expectations. This article explores the mechanics behind this unproductivity and why this marketing analytics have not been able to deliver all that they promise to firms. 

1.Data Strains

On the surface, it may seem like data collection and organization should efficiently integrate with marketing analytics. However, data stems from all sorts of services and forms, including cell phones, PCs, and customer support groups. Typically, it is interpreted and stored haphazardly as opposed to a structured set of goals. Therefore, compatibility with marketing analytics is affected. To streamline the process, it is essential to understand how much data you actually require and how you will eventually process it. This step is to be done before the actual data collection to ensure the maximum matching potential.

2.    Shortage of Data Analysts 

A recent survey held for marketing strategists revealed that only a tiny percentage of companies have properly trained employees that understand the dynamics of marketing analytics. This leads to a gap in expected marketing potential and reality. While hiring data analysts, employers must test them for a comprehensive overview of the job description and ensure that they have the right capabilities required of their post. Some noteworthy factors include:

•    Ability to clearly define the pitfalls 

•    Sound understanding of data mapping and background algorithms

•    Clarity and acknowledgment of the firm’s goals 

•    Ability to communicate with their team consistently 

•    Streamlining the best possible solution for any potential hold-ups 

3.    Forming the Right Mix

Once you have some sound knowledge of how data works, and what your data analysts must entail, then it is time to bring it all together and invest in the ideal mixture of employees and distribution of knowledge. As the head of marketing, you need to find the right balance between the two. The irony lies in the fact that even the most useful data cannot help you if your data analysts are clueless as to how they have to process it. On the contrary, even the most qualified and talented data analysts cannot process data efficiently; because it will be extremely unnerving to have to differentiate actual valuable information for small junk files. This will, in turn, have a dire effect on productivity.  

Conclusion

Whether you are a CEO or the head of marketing at your firm, there is much pressure riding on you. Therefore it is incredibly vital to keep the points as mentioned above in mind to make the best use of marketing analytics. This tool is specially designed to assist you in your business endeavors so that you can challenge yourself as a company and reach your ultimate potential at the end of every marketing campaign.

READ MORE: Conversational Marketing

Creating a Buyer Personal

The Research Outlets You Should Pay Attention To

Making a buyer persona for your company calls for a lot of work and dedication. You may have an idea of who your target customer is already, but that doesn’t mean you know all the details. In fact, many people tend to miss out on important data simply because they make too many assumptions about their clientele. 

There are several ways that you can learn more about your target audience while you’re trying to build your buyer persona. Additionally, most of these methods are free or have very little charge! Plus, the information you’ll gain in return is sure more than make up for your spending in the long run.

Talk to Your Tech and Sales Departments

Before you start the process of creating fantastic buyer personas, you should make sure you’ve looked at the information that’s already available to you! This will come in the form of data that has been captured by your IT and Sales Departments. Ask both teams to look at the data they’ve pulled from past work. This should give you a general idea of what groups of people tend to naturally gravitate towards your product.

Reach Out to Your Current Customers

The next way you can add to your buyer persona is to personally reach out to your current customers. These are people who have already seen the worth of your product and will be able to share their unique perspectives! Prepare a quiz that can be taken by your customers that asks for detailed information regarding their purchases and their personal habits. Make sure your customers know you’re conducting this research to better serve their needs.

Implement Cookies on Your Website

Don’t forget to take advantage of data that can be gathered off your website! It’s a common practice to use cookies to track what your customers’ habits are online so you can get a better idea of their preferences and shopping tendencies. Adding cookies to your website will give you fantastic data that you can extract other details from later!

Treat a Current Customer as a Buyer Personal

When you create your buyer persona pages, check them against the personas of current customers you have that fit within your target audience. You can easily accomplish this by finding that customer’s social media pages and using the information from their posts to gauge how accurate your profile is. Try using a few current customers to make sure you’re not working with an outlier or exception.

Don’t Be Afraid to Go Deep

The more questions and demographics you add to your buyer persona, the more accurate your sales pitch and copy will be when you use the persona later on. Don’t be afraid to go deep and really examine the heart of your customers’ shopping habits. This includes examining their motivations. If you understand what motivates them to buy your products, you’ll also be able to better address any concerns they may have with making a purchase. All of this information will help you when it comes to making more sales!

READ MORE: New Email Trends for 2023

New Email Trends for 2022

Email marketing has always been a fantastic way to reach your customers – but are you taking advantage of the best practices to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your marketing campaigns? Email marketing is about more than just sending out a blast of marketing emails. If you want to succeed with an email campaign, you’ll want to take the needs and preferences of your target audience into consideration.

Frequency

With email marketing being the most powerful instrument in your digital marketing tool belt, you’ll want to make sure you keep in touch with your target audience base. One of the biggest mistakes you can make, however, is to spam your readers with an excess of information. If you’re going to make an email campaign, try to ensure that you give your customers the respect they deserve. You may need their attention, but that doesn’t mean you can disrespect their time.

A great way to avoid doing this is to take note of the frequency with which your customers check their emails. If you have a customer that opens their email frequently and seems to be engaging with the content you can use a more frequent emails. If you have a customer that doesn’t interact with your emails as often, however, you should only send out emails periodically. This will help to improve their reception to the emails you do send.

Personalization

The days of being able to send out mass batches of information without consideration to your customer base are over. If you don’t start customizing your emails for your consumer base, you won’t have much luck with getting your emails to convert. Personalization can be a long and intricate process, but there are several things you can do in order to make your content more personal.

One of the first things to implement would be the creation of a buyer persona. A buyer persona will help to make the copy you write in your marketing campaigns more targeted and personal. You’ll be able to form a sense of community and brand loyalty by simply taking a little extra time to think about your target audience’s needs and desires.

Another good thing to consider is to find a way to filter out offers in campaigns that your customers have already taken advantage of. For example, you don’t want to send an email trying to persuade your customer to become a premium member if they’ve already bought your premium membership plan.

Consumer Privacy Regulation

Certain states and countries have different privacy laws that you’ll need to take into consideration before you start your campaign. It’s important for you to make sure that you always get the permission of your customers to use their data to format your emails.

As the world becomes increasingly technological, respecting basic consumer privacy rights will become even more important to your clientele. You’ll find that the more consideration you give to the privacy needs of your customers, the more they will respect your company and continue to do business with you.

READ MORE: Examples of Successful conversation Marketing Campaigns

The Motivation of Your Buyer Personal

Examining the Details that Really Matter

There are many aspects of a buyer persona that are important when it comes to understanding how to craft (and use) the perfect buyer persona. Few are more important, however, than understanding the motivations of your customers. The motivation of your customer helps you understand what features and functionality of your product really intrigue and provide usefulness for your customers. It also helps to determine many of the thoughts and questions they’ll have while researching your products to determine if its a good fit.

There are many different things that go into the motivation of your buyer persona, but few are more important than being able to understand and predict your customer’s thoughts and feelings concerning making a purchase. What functions and features may constitute as a ‘deal breaker’? What types of standards do your customers hold? What does it take to make your customers feel personally invested in your brand? All of this and more can be understood with a good buyer persona!

Why Does Your Customer Need Your Product?

Before you do anything else, you should first determine why your client needs your product. What features, functions, or feelings does it give your customers? If your product is a planner, your customer would need your product to help them stay organized. If your product was a phone, your customer would need your product to help them communicate with people in their work life and personal life. If your product is a computer, your client could need the product to create documents or to do in-depth research.

The important takeaway here, is that your client always has a reason that they need your product. Understanding that reason will help you determine which features you should market the hardest and which features will not interest the majority of your customers.

Why Does Your Customer Want Your Product?

Although this question may appear to be similar to the first question we asked, it is noticeably different. In fact, this difference is often one of the biggest selling points. Before you determine your advertising campaign, make sure you understand why your customers want your products. If you sell computers they may need your product to do work for their company, but they may want your product because it has impressive battery life. Likewise, if you sell phones they may need your product to contact other people, but they may want your product because it has an amazing selfie camera!

What Standards to Your Customers Have?

Lastly, make sure you understand the standards your customers have. Your products should be durable, easy to use, and dependable for starters. Then, take into account any other expectations your customers may have. For instance, are your customers environmentally conscious? If so, try to make your manufacturing process ‘green’. It’s also wise to make your products easily recyclable if possible.

READ MORE: Top Email Marketing Trends For 2023

Why Snapchat is Important for Business

A key element of success in business is mastering the art of gaining publicity for your services and products. As Stuart H said, “doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. Only you know what you are doing.”

Conventional publicity being so expensive, SnapChat is an inexpensive medium that start-ups and even established brands can use to reach their target audience and increase their sales margin

A good place to start would be by helping those without a background understanding get to know what SnapChat is.

SnapChat is a mobile application used for networking, messaging, communication and content creation. 75% of SnapChat users are under 34 and according to Omnicore, over 3 billion snaps of photos and videos are posted everyday on SnapChat.

Let us see how Snapchat can help you take your business to the next level.

Increasing Social Media Presence.

According to Statista, SnapChat reached 210 million daily users, with daily video views of more than 14 billion. It is the most used platform among generation Z, aged 10-24 years.

With each of the SnapChat users taking approximately 30 minutes everyday on SnapChat, it is an effective platform for marketing your business, thanks to its real time and vanishing content.

This is a huge platform for those businesses that have a younger demographic as a target audience.

Building Brand Awareness.

Research on consumers psychology shows that people associate a known brand with trust and are more willing to buy a product from a well-known brand than from a lesser known brand, regardless of the quality of the product. Business is all about awareness.

Having a SnapChat account and using it frequently to publicize your business can help them to recognize that your brand exists, which will subconsciously put it in their list of brand alternatives when making purchases.

Sharing important updates and behind the scenes content.

Buyers are not just interested in purchasing products from your business.

They also want to be let in on the work culture, ethos and environment of your business. Sharing photos of staff meeting, CSR activities and expected updates can make your target feel a beyond-purchase connection with your business.

Increasing your engagement with Geofilters

Geofilters are special filter overlays for snaps that can only be viewed by people in a certain location. They are pretty graphics that improve the quality of your snaps.

Geofilters are a fun way to inject your creativity to your snaps before you share them with friends. If cleverly done, geofilters can steadily build you a legion of fans, who can very easily translate into sales.

Sharing coupons and contests

Almost everyone likes freebies. Giveaways are an important way to increase sales.

If you are holding a contest, just ask SnapChatters to send a photo related to the product you sale, with the best entry winning a token.

You can also use the features on SnapChat to make a coupon which you can give away to the users on the platform.

READ MORE: Pinterest Statistics That Proves It to Be A Viable Marketing Tool

How Brands can improve sales with Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is not something that is relatively new. It is a means of marketing that has been around ever since the inception of trade itself. Overtime, enhanced approaches has been made to conversational marketing with the introduction of instant messaging and chatbots.

It’s sad to see many business today try to engage in conversational marketing in a wrong and annoying way. Imagine a random stranger approaches you and tries to sell you a product that is how some brands engage in conversational marketing. Imagine visiting a website and within a few seconds a chatbot pops up, annoying right? I find it annoying in the same way I find pop up ads annoying and so those so many other customers. So many other customers find this annoying and tend to opt out of the page without properly going through the website.

Brands can improve their conversational marketing through the following

Proper Timing: Before initiating a conversational conversation, it’s important to get the right timing. This can be achieved by allowing the visitor go the website first. The Chabot can initiate a conversation once the visitors visits a priority page or after spending a specific amount of time on the website. By initiating the conversation after sometime, you have given the visitor an opportunity to understand the website and such visitor would probably be more interested in a conversation at this point.

Hyper-Contextualize Bot Conversations: Chabot’s should be able to be programed to respond to messages contextually. It is important to develop chatbots that can keep up conversations in relation to the current context and give the appropriate reply to customer’s message. This give the customer the feel of having a real conversation. This helps build quality leads. The conversation should be handed over to an active sales team once it gets beyond the chatbots AI capabilities and is confirmed to be a quality lead.

Sales is in the Detail: Nothing gets a buyer more interested in  product like having  feel of the product being able to specifically meeting their need. This makes the customer believe that a particular product was tailored to meet their need. A great chatbot can serve as a shopping assistance, we all feel good talking about ourselves. The chatbot pays detailed attention to the customer’s searches and asks relevant questions, the Chatbot is able to make great suggestions from details gotten from the customer. Most customers appreciate this as it saves them time in getting the needed products. A clear example can be seen in some ecommerce websites. 

Sales is in the Detail: Nothing gets a buyer more interested in product like having feel of the product being able to specifically meeting their need. This makes the customer believe that a particular product was tailored to meet their need. A great chatbot can serve as a shopping assistance, we all feel good talking about ourselves. The chatbot pays detailed attention to the customer’s searches and asks relevant questions, the Chatbot is able to make great suggestions from details gotten from the customer. Most customers appreciate this as it saves them time in getting the needed products. A clear example can be seen in some ecommerce websites.

Relevant Answers with less conversations: Sometimes, some customers just need the answers to some common questions. Most times, some customers are not in line for the sales peach and that should also be respected. Such customers just need answers to their questions without feeling bored or engaging in what they see as unnecessary conversations. The chatbots should be able to provide real time answers to some commonly asked questions. This is one common form of conversational marketing as most websites has a frequently asked question section where visitors can find the answers to some frequently asked questions. The chatbots can source for and deliver relevant answers to the visitors quickly.

Quality leads: It is important that sales representatives only respond to the relevant customers to avoid time wasting. Chatbots can engage in meaningful conversations with customers and has the ability to determine which customers qualify as quality leads. The chatbot then transfers such leads to real sales persons for proper follow up and properly a sales conversation.

Every brand has to put in the above listed measures in place as can increase sales with great margins if properly implemented.

READ MORE: How to increase Instagram engagement

MOBILE MARKETING IN THE NEW DECADE: WHAT TO EXPECT

Mobile marketing has taken the marketing industry by storm. With its relevance and practice getting more and more common, every year, new mobile marketing trends are birthed. Some are replaced, some are modified, while others stay constant. It is beginning to play a key role in digital marketing, revolutionizing the entire industry.

As marketing continually evolves at a rapid rate, new mobile marketing trends are predicted to be implemented, getting evolved year in year out. Marketers have been attempting to predict which new mobile marketing trend would emerge in 2022, in order for them to completely focus their attention straight to those new channels, so as to gain an edge and a competitive advantage in the industry. Intensive research has gone into what new mobile marketing trends would emerge based on behavioral studies and patterns.

So far, it is certain that in 2022, digital marketing would rely on:

  • Mobile apps/Smartphone
  • Social media
  • Video
  • Internet services.

Without further ado, below are the predicted new social media trends to hit the world in the year 2022:

  • Voice search: Even though in the past decade, voice searches have had a bad reputation; not being comprehensive enough. Towards the new decade, there has been noticeable improvements in voice search software like Siri, Google Now, and so on.
  • Video: Marketers have studied patterns of customers and rated this mobile marketing trend as one to make its big break in the new decade. Most people prefer to watch an engaging two minute video than to read 500 words of text, and private corporations have realized this, tapped into it, and recorded results that are off the charts.
  • In-App marketing: One major feature that rates this trend high is the ability of get customer feedback, which is a key factor in successful marketing.
  • 5G connection: Who doesn’t like fast network? With the advent of this 5G, all the above trend would thrive.
  • Chat bots: The major thing people do on their mobile devices is chatting. Chat bots would only continue to improve and revolutionize the market place. 

MORE INFO: MOBILE MARKETING

How To Make More Detailed Buyer Personasl

Take the Time to Study Your Demographic 

Running a business these days hinges on your ability to connect with your customers. After all, there are countless other competing companies they could purchase similar products from – what makes your company special? 


Often times, this question comes down to one factor: how well do you know your customers? Brand loyalty is created when a customer feels that they are understood and valued by the brands they buy from. If you want to make sure you maintain the loyalty of your customers, you need to make sure that you put a lot of time and effort into building your buyer personas. 

What Buyer Personas Can Do For Your Company

Buyer personas help to ensure that you’re able to make deeper connections to your target audience and make them feel like an integral part of your company’s culture. Your website and advertising copy will make them feel as though they were the person the copy was personally directed towards. This will give them heightened brand loyalty, and increase the likelihood of your customers checking up on your website and social media pages. 

Important Demographics 

There are many important demographics you should consider while putting together your buyer persona. Each demographic will give you key information that you will need to build your persona. Additionally, it will help to determine other questions you should research to create your buyer personal. 

One of the first demographics you should look for is age. Although individuality is an important factor in people’s purchasing decisions, it can’t be helped that people within the same age ranges tend to have many things in common. This is mostly due to the types of technology and historical events each age group has experienced at important phases of their lives. An example of this can be seen with Baby Boomers, who are more reluctant to use technology than Gen Y. 

Another demographic that will be important to factor in is gender. Men and women are socialized into society differently. Because of this, they tend to have different habits when it comes to making informed shopping decisions. Men are more likely to be persuaded by statistics and facts, while women are more likely to be persuaded by being able to envision themselves use the product. 

You should also pay attention to the average household income of your target audience. This will be an important determining factor in what kinds of products you can market to your audience. An individual who lives in a household that makes over $100,000 per year is much more likely to make an impulse buy than an individual who lives in a household that only pulls in $30,000 per year. If you want to be able to appeal to both of these demographics, you’ll have to figure out how to make a cost efficient product that exceeds all of their needs and demands. Otherwise, you’ll need to stay with one group in this demographic to ensure good results.

READ MORE: How To Make More Detailed Buyer Personas

Research Your Marketing Strategy for 2022

An effective marketing strategy must always have research to back it up. Don’t just randomly think of a marketing strategy without having some idea whether it will be effective or not. 

A lot of business people make the mistake of assuming that a certain marketing strategy will be effective. But if you haven’t reviewed case studies of your competition or looked into the newest trends in your industry, then you could end up wasting your time and money on an ineffective marketing strategy. 

How to Plan a Winning Marketing Strategy

First, do not assume you know everything about your industry. The business world moves quickly, so things change all the time in every industry. For this reason, it is imperative that you conduct thorough research into the current market of your industry. You can start by reviewing the following:

  • The newest product or service trends. See if you can create a new strategy which implements or tests this trend in your organization. 
  • Study what other businesses in your field are doing and see which strategies are working for them. 
  • Don’t assume you know your audience. Remember that people’s interests change all the time. Conduct new research on your audience each year to see if their needs have changed. 

Put the Research into Action

Compile this information and create a new marketing strategy for 2020 which revolves around it. 

For example, let’s say you run a clothing company and the target market for blue jeans happens to be men between the ages of 18 and 35. You could redirect your marketing campaigns online to target this specific demographic. If you use Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, they make it easy to promote your ads toward any particular age group or gender that you want. You can even set which location you want your target audience to be. 

Collaboration

Collaborate with your team members constantly. This includes your senior leadership, product team, sales team, and customer service team. Each one of these teams has their own designated leader. They should all be kept in the loop about your marketing strategy so that they can create their own separate strategies for their individual departments. Once they put their minds together, the overall business goals of the company can be met. 

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