Are online customer reviews trustworthy?
A quick and simple answer is yes. In general, you can trust reviews online. For one, a lot of platforms have been successful in their efforts to crack down on fake and unverified reviews. They no longer let anonymous reviewers post on their sites.
Online reviews provide consumers with detailed feedback from their point of view. This provides readers with a perspective other than that of the business. The business is likewise not always capable of providing such feedback.
It is important, however, for users to exercise due diligence when browsing online reviews. It is a good idea to read numerous reviews of the same product. This can help you appreciate and understand the product through a wide variety of customer experiences.
When reading reviews, you also need to be selective on what to believe and which ones to take with a grain of salt. For example, if you come across a review that seems too exceptional to be true, then it probably is something to be skeptical about.
Written By: Adam Bennett | June 28, 2021
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
From its inception, social media was designed to be a way to connect with people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and other social media sites provide innovative ways to connect with friends, businesses, share recipes and even find your soulmate. With all the benefits, it also seems to be where there are people there are criminals and scalawags that want to take your hard-earned money. Unfortunately, the global pandemic didn’t help matters as the sites and apps became a haven for scammers.
According to the FTC, “people lost money to scams that started on social media more than tripled in the past year, with a sharp increase in the second quarter of 2020.”
As you can see reports of social media scams are nothing new. Many of the reports to the FTC had an e-commerce hook, where often an ad was shown targeting a particular audience. Often times the ads look legitimate but the company name may be unusual or “fishy” sounding.
Here are a few common scams by the platform they are most likely found on:
Twitter traps
One of the more popular Twitter Traps is the “Twitter Cash Starter Kit.” In this scam, you can use Twitter to make money from home by paying a small sign-up fee for the kit. To purchase the kit, you need to provide a credit card number. Sound familiar?
In another scam, you’re contacted by a “bot” (software that mimics a human being) pretending to give you access to a “pay-for-follower” service. If you take the bait, your bank or credit card information may be compromised. You could be accused of distributing spam and may be banished from the networking platform.
Facebook cons
With more than two billion active monthly users, Facebook is a prime target for rip-off artists. One type of scam is called “catfishing.” The crook trolls the user base to find a victim, then begins establishing trust and building a relationship. Once an online “friendship” is in place, the crook agrees to meet the victim offline. Unfortunately, the “friend” needs travel funds or help with some other financial crisis. That’s when they ask you to provide the requisite funds, preferably via wire transfer.
Snapchat hoaxes
You receive a message that your “memories” (photos) will be deleted unless you copy a message and share it with friends. The goal, of course, is to gain access to your online contacts and exploit them.
YouTube
Gift card generating scams are extremely common. Many videos will redirect a user to a website that claims to “generate” mobile game resources or gift cards. There is usually some of to “hack” that you have to do as well.
According to Elijah Bouma-Sims and Bradley Reaves of North Carolina State University in their article “A First Look at Scams on YouTube,” they state that,
Before these gift card generators provide the currency or gift cards that they claim they can produce, they state that “human verification” is required to prevent overuse of the tool. This “verification” is achieved through a web survey or application download, likely providing a stream of income to scammers. The videos try to increase the realism of these scams by showing a gift card being redeemed or in-game currency rapidly increasing. Gift card generators often pretend to try automatic verification before requiring a survey or app download. In this way, these scams take advantage of fake feedback to try to fool users into thinking the scam is legitimate.
While this particular type of scam does not seem to harm a user’s device or extract private information, it does mislead users and uses them to earn money. Additionally, with the scam’s prevalence on terms related to mobile games, young adults and even children may be particularly vulnerable.
Final Thoughts
The above social media scams may sound alarming, but there are ways you can protect yourself and your personal data. Consider the following:
- Set privacy controls.
- Choose strong passwords.
- Use caution when sharing personal information online.
- Never send money or give credit card information to someone you don’t know.
If you are just getting started with social media or if you find yourself in need of help managing your social media accounts for your small business or organization, feel free to reach out, we are here to help you with your social media management and marketing!
Written By: Hannah Kilpatrick | June 24, 2021
Hannah Kilpatrick Cube Creative DesignHannah Kilpatrick graduated from Western Carolina University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Communication with a Minor in Marketing and a Concentration in Public Relations. She has been around social media since its creation. (Meaning, she was in the first grade when Facebook became available to the general public.) As our very own professional Gen-Z, Hannah is a whiz when it comes to social media creation and paid advertising.
As someone who makes their living helping small businesses grow, I am often asked about advertising on the internet. An acquaintance, friend, prospect, or client will ask what do you think about Facebook ads, Google Ads, or Pay-per-click (PPC). My reply is usually it depends. Not to be vague, but it is an impossible answer without more context. With that being said, I see many pros and cons of them. In this post, I will attempt to educate you on how we got here, the pros and cons of using Google Search Ads so you can make an informed decision as to what is best for you and your business. I will also give you a few tips if you choose to go at it alone.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 21, 2021
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
If your private school's enrollment has been declining recently, it may be the best time to consider automating your marketing campaign. Around 50% of school leaders say that enrollment has been dwindling during the pandemic, adding that the phenomenon is observable in the pre-school level up to the secondary level.
With a marketing automation tool, you can free yourself from attending to smaller tasks and focus on the part of your funnel that needs more of your attention.
Faced with this challenge, you need to boost your private school marketing campaign, and one of the ways to do it is to automate your processes. Salesforce reported that nearly 70% of marketing leaders depend on marketing automation, and 1 out of every 5 of them plan to use a new marketing automation platform soon.
Written By: Adam Bennett | June 17, 2021
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
According to a report by CNBC, "American companies hold an estimated 11 million meetings every day." Now that was pre-pandemic, but that is still a lot of meetings!
Now I am sure we have all walked away from a meeting and said that was a complete waste of time, that could have been an email, or I don't even know where I was there. We have also been in meetings where people are so disengaged it is not even funny. Take the person who stays on their phone the entire time as if to say I have better things to do.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 14, 2021
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
If searchers search for a specific business in your area, it's important to appear near the top to get the maximum benefit. The question is, how do you ensure that you are showing up? The answer is simple, by utilizing local search engine optimization (Local SEO) techniques.
If you think of SEO as a broad category, local SEO is but a subsection of it. However, if you are looking to attract local businesses, then local SEO is key to your success. Organic SEO refers to any method of marketing that relies on natural, organic listings in the search results instead of paid links such as paid social media marketing or pay per click (PPC). For most small businesses, paid social or PPC can be cost-prohibitive. However, utilizing organic SEO techniques, you ensure your website ranks for key searches.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 10, 2021
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
Think about this, today’s school-age children have grown up with the internet being nearly at their fingertips. For most, Google has always been around, and “smartphones” have always been in their parent’s pockets. These kids will use their cell phones, laptops, or tablets to communicate, entertain, and learn new information.
If you were to show them a phonebook, an encyclopedia, a card catalog, or a printed map, they may look at you dumbfounded and say, “Bruh.” This is code for why you are using such an outdated and archaic method to find something.
To those of us who grew up and can remember when the internet wasn’t in our pocket or a voice command away, we know those items were how you found information. Now they are found in museums, antique stores, and possibly at the Grandparents’ house.
Having an online presence is a necessity. Your private school’s website and social media accounts should constantly produce new enrollment and brand awareness opportunities. If you are a principal, headmaster, or over admissions in some way and you realize that your website or social media isn’t producing, then you should consider spending time make sure they maximize their purposes.
Let’s address your website as you have the most control over it. You will want visitors to navigate through your website on a particular path. Think of it as a good story, but one where they can jump in at almost any part and realize exactly what is happening.
Think about this, as you perform a search, you are taken to a page that should have the answer to your question. Chances are this isn’t going to be the front page of the website that you may have agonized over to make sure it was perfect. A prospective parent may come to a blog or a landing page. These need the same amount of attention as your front page, and they need to drive traffic to your appointment page or at least take them into the next step of their journey.
Before we go any further, let us address the website. Your website should be indicative of what your school looks and feels like. This means carrying the same school colors and feel throughout. If your school is very conservative, make sure the website conveys that. If your school is focused on technology, an edgier look may work. In other words, your school’s website is what prospective parents see first, and as we all know, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
If you have a good clean website design that conveys the same feel as your school, this will ensure that your users and prospective parents will spend time on your site, reading your content, and clicking on your call to action (CTA) buttons. If they have a good experience, they will be more likely to return. This will happen more often if they are finding the answers to questions. As a general rule, you always offer them a way to dig deeper through links to other content and CTA buttons. This will help them if they are trying to decide if they want to enroll their child or children.
Written By: Adam Bennett | June 07, 2021
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
Before going any further, let us agree on one thing. The main goals of your website are to leave a lasting impression, to educate, and to inform your prospective clients. To achieve this, you need a functional and high-quality website.
Sure, you can sign up for an online web design course or use one of the many do-it-yourself web page building solutions you can find online. You can even ask your neighborhood whiz kid to put together a decent website for you. It may only cost you some pizza money.
However, you need to understand that what you are investing in is a website that will showcase your business to your customers. You can best do that with a website that provides a great user experience, reliability, and design.
Having said that, here are some factors to consider when choosing between do-it-yourself websites and professionally made ones:
Written By: Adam Bennett | June 04, 2021
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
Which is better, a small digital marketing agency or a large one? The short answer is it depends on your needs. Don’t you love the vagueness there! Before we dive into this topic, let’s first examine what the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) says is a small business based on their table of standards.
If you are a Wireless Telecommunications Carrier (except Satellite), you are considered a small business if you employ 1,500 or fewer. Motor Vehicle Parts (Used) Merchant Wholesalers or, the junkyard, is 100 or less. Now you might think that they would base the size on the number of people employed. Well, you would be wrong. Supermarkets and Other Grocery (except Convenience) Stores need to have $35 million dollars in total income to qualify. So that means if your local, regional grocery store chain is $35 million in size, then they would be considered a small business.
Take Cube Creative as an example, we consider ourselves to be a digital marketing agency. The SBA doesn’t have a classification for that. Therefore, I looked at what might be closest, which varied from $16.5 million to $30 million.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider an agency with $16.5 million a small business. Therefore, for this post’s purpose, I want to reference Dunbar's Number and look at it as in the number of clients an agency actively manages. You may be asking what is Dunbar’s Number is and what does it have to do with a small agency versus a large agency.
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.
Ideally, it is somewhere around 150 people. This includes your work colleagues, clients, family, and friends, or any other interpersonal relationships you might have. Therefore an agency that has around 100-150 active monthly clients is a good starting number as this is most likely spread across a handful of people.
Let’s look at a small agency versus a large agency.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 01, 2021
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
If you are a small business owner or you have been tasked with helping to make a small business you know how hard it is to get the word out and get the business noticed. Now one would think that if we as consumers are going online at a rate of 97% then we should be able to find your small business. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Now the bigger question is not WHY is it harder but WHAT can we do about it. Below we look at the nine reasons why SEO is harder and six things you can do about it.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | May 25, 2021
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
As a growing business, it's more important than ever to have a social media presence. Whether your business is new to the social media scene or whether you gave it a try and got overwhelmed, there is a valid place for social media in your online marketing plan.
Written By: Hannah Kilpatrick | May 21, 2021
Hannah Kilpatrick Cube Creative DesignHannah Kilpatrick graduated from Western Carolina University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Communication with a Minor in Marketing and a Concentration in Public Relations. She has been around social media since its creation. (Meaning, she was in the first grade when Facebook became available to the general public.) As our very own professional Gen-Z, Hannah is a whiz when it comes to social media creation and paid advertising.
The goal of private school marketing strategies is to entice potential students to attend and apply to your school. Having cohesive strategies is crucial for making your educational brand relevant to your demographic both in the short and long terms.
If you want your school to be at the top of the educational spectrum, staying up to date with the latest school marketing trends and implementing them constantly is important. Fortunately, agencies such as Cube Creative Design exist to meet your needs. With its slew of sophisticated services, We can be your school’s reliable partner for meeting its digital marketing needs.
This post looks at three major trends to monitor how to market a school and how to ensure its continued growth. We’ll discuss the rationale behind what we think should be your focus demographics, how you can effectively reach out to them, and how you can maintain their loyalty to your brand of education through a solid online presence and digital marketing strategies.
Written By: Adam Bennett | May 19, 2021
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.