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How can DoD companies leverage firewall security audit report?

A robust firewall setup is one of the essential elements of any cyber defense strategy  and CMMC solution. The use of comprehensive statistics via firewall vulnerability testing solutions and firewall security assessments are two methods for ensuring your ports and web filters are running at maximum capacity.

Using Firewall Penetration Testing Software and Audit Reports

There are two critical factors to consider while enhancing your firewall security analytics:

  • Make the most of firewall vulnerability assessment reports by adapting them to your specific requirements
  • Using targeted programs to get the most out of firewall penetration testing tools

How to Make the Most of Firewall Security Audit Reports

Firewall security audit enhancement is dependent on how your firewall applications are configured. The more comprehensive and complicated your firewall configurations are, the more traffic types they are intended to inspect and the more valuable insights they give your businesses during audits. Similarly, the more firewalls you install or, the more screening levels they offer, the more you may learn about what they allow and prevent.

Firewalls are an essential but often overlooked component of any organization’s comprehensive cybersecurity infrastructure deployment. Regardless of their underlying nature, their layouts will give a focal point for the inspection they provide.

As a result, the specific emphasis should determine firewall security assessments. This applies to both how and where they are deployed (through hardware or software or a screening scope that covers online apps) and the precise goals they are intended to serve.

Strategy for Firewall Security Audits: Concentrate on Known Security flaws

Firewalls often serve as a foundational exterior layer that keeps undesired traffic from guarded areas. These areas might be as large as your whole IT and security environment or as small as internal corridors within a single system. In any case, routers are an essential component of comprehensive threat and vulnerability analysis, reducing the number and severity of attacks.

The finest firewall settings are supported by comprehensive, up-to-date risk intelligence. When security systems and the numerous instruments they utilize are guided by the dangers most prevalent to enterprises similar to yours, they are most effective and successful.

As a result, one of the best methods to assess the efficacy of your firewalls is to concentrate on their capacity to discover and neutralize any weaknesses or threats that may damage your company. These include, among other things, dangers, liabilities, and cyberattack tactics common to your business, area, or client base. This skill may be evaluated by scanning illegal or authorized content for common dangers or signs.

How to Increase the Effectiveness of Firewall Penetration Testing Tools

Another important aspect of firewall optimization is firewall penetration testing. Pen testing is a sophisticated approach to examining defenses that entails executing an assault or so-called “ethical hack” on your systems to monitor the ” attacker’s behavior.” This can be extended to an organization’s overall cyberdefense network or a specific component.

Companies can do two types of penetration tests throughout any or all systems:

External: These assaults start from the outside, with the tester having no prior understanding of the organization’s processes and no proximal or virtual access to data. These tests often concentrate on the tester’s first point of access to the system.

Internal: These assaults commence with the tester presuming previous knowledge of the organization’s cyberdefenses, CMMC compliance requirements or access rights to internal systems or data. These tests concentrate on how an intruder travels once within your defenses.

A pen test concentrating on firewalls will almost always be mostly — if not entirely — external. On the other hand, companies may enhance their firewall pen-testing ROI by incorporating an internal audit.…

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How to use Digital Marketing to Reach more Audience Online?

You can have the most visually beautiful online business with a simple layout, high-quality products supported by excellent customer service, and unlimited marketing funds. However, none of these counts until you reach and engage the correct audience for your business.

Digital marketing Virginia professionals suggest that you must first determine your brand’s relevant audience to bring the correct traffic to your internet store and improve sales. You want to know who they are, what they treasure, and how they utilize each platform at different points of their purchasing journey, from curiosity to choice and advocacy.

The following are some strategies for identifying and engaging the correct audience through digital marketing.

  1. Discover What Is Valuable to Your Audience

As company owners, you must be having access to nearly endless amounts of data. Google Analytics and Search Console can show you how customers found your business and what they did after they arrived. Facebook Insights and Ad Manager may tell you about your followers’ and customers’ age, geography, relationship position, preferences, and habits. Social media monitoring technologies can inform you what your consumers think about your firm and products and what other topics they are interested in.

2. Speak the Language of Your Audience

If you use a too formal tone, you’ll never get along with Belieber preteen girls. And your flowery wording and exclamation marks will almost certainly alienate senior sports car enthusiasts. You must speak your audience’s language to engage and interact with them. This includes employing the right tone and voice and including real words and phrases people use.

3. Understand Your Organic Keywords

Organic search is usually the most important source of visitors for any website, be it for Virginia Beach IT companies. It’s critical to understand what keywords are driving customers to your shop, why those keywords are being used, and what level those customers are in. 

You may better meet your audience’s needs by discovering relevant search phrases and the user intent driving them. Blog postings, FAQs, learning centers, and resource sections are some common places to find informational content. Product category webpages and product pages provide navigational and transactional elements.

You may use resources like Ahrefs or BuzzSumo to find out which other websites are presently dominating a search phrase. These platforms will display the number of backlinks, the publisher, publication date, and other information. Investigate what your rivals or the most successful companies are doing, and then duplicate it with your distinctive tone and style.

4. Retargeting allows you to stay top of mind.

Customers who arrive at your business early in their purchasing journey — through an educational keyword search, a guest blog post link, a display ad, or any other method — are unlikely to make a purchase. That’s normal and understandable. Through remarketing, you may keep those clients in the contemplation phase and bring them back to your business.

Many digital outlets provide retargeting marketing choices. AdWords may be used for search remarketing, Google Display Network or a DSP, or Facebook for desktop and mobile device retargeting. Knowing who your intended audience is and which channels they utilize can help you determine which channels are suitable for your remarketing activities. The list of integrations provided above is helpful in establishing channel ROI from ad campaigns and can serve as a good starting point for identifying where retargeting may make the most sense for your company.

Gaining a thorough grasp of your clients and what inspires them can assist you in defining a more targeted audience. Only then can you leverage digital platforms to reach that demographic, resulting in greater quality traffic, better on-site interaction, and, most crucially, more revenue.…

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Three eCommerce Marketing Automation Trends That Prevailed 2022

You may say a lot about the digital marketing business, but you can’t claim it’s mundane.

Digital marketing Virginia Beach professionals and business owners always have something new to learn, whether it’s a game-changing technology that’s upending the industry or new trends and ideas to help you fine-tune your own plan to sell more from your business and remain ahead of the competition.

When it comes to technological advances, 2022 has not disappointed.

1. Automation’s Continued Rise

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “automation”? If you’re like most marketers, you’re definitely thinking of email automation – automatic nurturing drips, promotions, and other such things. However, automation entails far more than simply emails.

SMS automation, chatbots, and other tools may all be automated to provide consumers with a fantastic online experience – and marketers with the data they seek.

Ascend2 discovered that over 75% of customer lifecycle were automated to some level in February 2022. Advertisers have more time to improve communications, analyze data, and guarantee that every point of contact is a chance for success by streamlining more and more tasks along the customer experience.

Furthermore, automation systems assist marketers in gathering more information about prospective clients, allowing for not just more, but more relevant communication.

Marketing departments, for example, may set up abandoned cart SMS notifications, inaction emails, page-closing pop – up ads that offer users promotional coupons based on their history – the options are limitless.

As more teams begin to use automation, it is evident that those that do not will be at a competitive loss in the future.

2. Email is Still King

Email has long been an important component of any digital marketing strategy for Virginia Beach IT companies, but with advancements in automation and data collection, email campaigns are now more effective than ever.

Before we proceed, it is critical to distinguish between an automated email and a promotional email.

Sales advertisement are one-time messages that firms send out manually, such as a weekly email offering special deals, discounts, new items, and other promotional-style messaging. Messages prompted by user activity, such as when a user discards a basket, subscribes to a newspaper, or makes a purchase, are examples of automated messages.

Marketers may benefit greatly from the data utilised to deliver automated email campaigns. You may send emails based on a shopper’s prior purchases to propose new things they would want to buy next. If a customer abandons an item in their shopping cart, you may give them a reminder, a promotional code, and even a few comparable goods that may complement their purchase. Personalizing email correspondence and detailed messaging are critical components of every effective digital marketing strategy and may significantly increase your bottom line.

3. SMS Marketing is Growing in Popularity

SMS marketing is a novel approach that has offered marketers a direct route to their customers in recent years. Customers choosing to provide a brand their personal cell phone number is no easy undertaking, so creating a campaign might be difficult. But if done correctly, that challenge may provide wonderful results.

Why has SMS marketing become so popular? Because it allows marketers to communicate with patrons who opt-in on the same devices from which they purchase. In 2021, mobile commerce is expected to grow by 12.2%. SMS is a key differentiator for mobile commerce because of its capacity to engage with clients on such a personal level. 

However, tremendous power comes with great responsibility. Consider SMS texts to be more personal and urgent than emails. Begin with automatic messages driven by your customers’ actions, then progress to promotional communications around major events, holidays, or discounts.

Keep your communications brief and simple to ensure they are beneficial to your customers.

In 2021, SMS drove 106% more orders than in 2020. Omnisend —

These developments indicate a definite shift toward more useful, data-driven engagement between businesses and their consumers.

If you don’t use technology that enable this type of communication in your firm, you risk slipping behind. …

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Tips to Increase Holiday Sales This Festive Season

The holiday shopping time is the busiest season for businesses of all kinds.

Online companies, whether small brands or big corporate powerhouses, rely on occasions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to start off the ultimate sales season. The only difficulty is that these shopping days are essential to more than just your company. Your competitors are doing the same. Thus, digital marketing Virginia Beach firms suggest brands prepare for the holiday season in advance.

How can you ensure that your eCommerce shop succeeds? Use these methods to boost your Christmas online shopping revenues.

  1. Improve Your E-commerce Website’s Conversion Rates

With so much Christmas shopping taking place online, your eCommerce platform must be running optimally. Minor testing on your site should be performed throughout the year to ensure top performance over the holidays.

Consider it like training. You’ve been working hard all year to build an operational powerhouse that will pay off over Christmas.

  1. Make your site mobile-friendly.

As per eMarketer, mobile commerce revenues will total $360 billion by 2021. That figure is predicted to nearly treble to $710 billion by 2025.

With so many customers accessing your business via mobile devices, your store must be optimized for both desktop and mobile browsing.

Here are some mobile optimization tips:

  • Run a Google Mobile-Friendly assessment and implement the recommended changes.
  • Based on the buyer’s geolocation, personalize delivery estimates and product availability.
  • Use the above-the-fold space to highlight the best offers.
  • To boost website performance, enable dynamic page serving.
  • Pop-ups and sidebars should be avoided for mobile users since they increase friction.
  • To avoid errors, pre-fill customer information at checkout.
  • Allow guests to send their shopping lists in order to complete their purchases on the desktop.
  • Add support for digital wallets to expedite the checkout process.
  1. Offer Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL).

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) finance, which allows consumers to pay for their goods in installments with no interest or penalties as long as they complete their payments on time, is a crucial instrument for Christmas retail sales this year.

Brands can target a younger market with new payment options like Affirm, who may not have been able to buy using standard financing options like credit cards and the related worries about interest charges, extra costs, and revolving credit. As a result, for firms aiming to capitalize on the holidays, providing BNPL tools is a necessity.

Not only do today’s buyers appreciate the ability to use several payment methods, but shops may profit from offering “as low as 0% APR deals” using Affirm as a strategy to attract new business over the holidays.

Learn more about how Affirm may help your company improve sales this holiday season.

  1. Improve your pop-ups, forms, and website message.

During annual content re-optimization, site micro-copy – button names, call-to-actions, surveys, and pop-ups — is frequently forgotten. But why is that? These minor changes to Virginia Beach IT companies websites can provide a sense of joy and encourage conversions.

During the Christmas season, most eCommerce shop owners are only able to perform a few A/B tests to optimize every cranny of their website. So pick your priorities:

Pop-ups and banners on the website

Make your regular pop-ups more seasonal. Change the colors, message, and value proposition to better complement the seasonal campaign. However, don’t go overboard and bury your usual brand voice behind the seasonal marketing craziness, or you risk alienating certain customers.

Forms for billing and shipping

These forms are by far the most prone to errors and frequently confuse customers. Make everyone’s job easy by:

  • Filling in the blanks for returning clients.
  • The shipping address is being validated automatically.
  • A drop-down option for house numbers based on zip code is provided.
  • Service notifications concerning shipment timeframes and potential delays are displayed.
  • Including tooltips in required fields that may cause misunderstanding.
  • Adding more microcopy to describe what information you want.
  1. On-page CTAs

The most difficult to optimize are call-to-actions. A few weeks before the campaign’s premiere, try trying different versions. To accomplish this:

Add a hotspot tool to your website and sales pages to see which areas attract users’ attention.

Make multiple CTA versions for various components. Create more descriptive button text, such as “ask pricing” instead of “request quotation.” Change the product descriptions as well. Increase the number of product characteristics, inject more character into your content, or experiment with new eCommerce copywriting methods.

Perform several A/B tests to evaluate the efficacy of new and old components. Scale what works for you. Remove what doesn’t work.…

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How to choose social media channel for your brand?

Brands that ignore the reach and power of social media advertising are overlooking major digital avenues for client connection in today’s digital age. As per Hootsuite’s 2022 Social Trends Report, 80 percent of advertisers perceive value in social networking sites and are certain of a Return on Investment (ROI) since it may assist gather vital consumer insights and increase other marketing initiatives. Thus, experts at digital marketing agency Virginia suggest brands to choose social media channels carefully.

Marketers may use social media to increase lead acquisition, and a well-executed social media plan can enhance search results, attract more website visitors, and raise conversion rates.

But how can you create a successful social media strategy if you have no idea which platforms to use? With so many alternatives, deciding if your company should use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok to develop an online presence may be difficult.

What are the goals of your social media strategy?

It’s critical to be able to connect your social media platforms to your strategy’s high-level goals. If you can’t articulate why or how a certain platform will enable you to reach your objectives, you should probably avoid using it.

To raise brand recognition, use social media.

Since a first start, choose well-established channels with a vast audience, allowing you to target a diverse group of people. If you know your personas and discover that marketing on a network like TikTok, for instance, might help you connect with a younger, more visual population, keep popular and specialized platforms in mind.

Paid marketing is one of the most successful ways to raise brand recognition and expand reach. So spend some time researching the various social media advertising choices. For example, Facebook’s marketing platform is well-known for delivering remarkable returns.

What social media platforms do you target audience use?

You must evaluate where your audience interacts online once you’ve linked your objectives with your social media platform decision. If your client category is 70-year-old ladies, creating an Instagram profile for your small business IT solutions company may waste time. Similarly, if you’re exclusively targeting guys, there may not be a compelling case for marketing your business on Pinterest.

Social media analytics inform the finest and most successful social media tactics. These data-driven analytics will guarantee that your strategy and channels of choice provide the most relevant, tailored strategy possible, increasing your conversion possibilities.

What channels do your rivals use?

Considering what social media platforms your rivals use is just as essential as studying your target audience’s platforms. This will serve as a benchmark against which you may assess industry activities and make judgments.

What kind of content do they post, for example? Do they make content for specific platforms? How often do they update it? What percentage of their posts receive likes or shares? Examining how involved your rivals are on social media and how well their audience responds to what they publish can offer you valuable data that you can use to ensure your strategy’s effectiveness.

What type of content do you want to make?

This is an essential subject since there are many forms of content, some of which will complement your company goals and brand image and others that will not. Furthermore, some material types will be better suited to some social networks than others.

If you’d like to contribute industry news, corporate announcements, or whitepapers,

These content types are often suited for B2B audiences, primarily found on professional sites like LinkedIn. Suppose you have a business Twitter account or a personal one that you use for work. In that case, these are also great places to connect with other professionals and share industry-specific material.…

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How is Blockchain Technology Transforming Gaming Industry?

Blockchain technology is currently one of the most popular subjects. The technology, which was formerly thought to be only for bitcoin, is now being used in production in real estate industries.

Blockchain technology has now found a home in the gaming business with the demand for app development Virginia Beach companies specialized in gaming apps increasing. According to Statistica research, when asked about the impact of blockchain on the gaming business, 23 percent of gaming players claimed that blockchain had rendered games significantly safer and more efficient.

However, many individuals are still ignorant of blockchain’s function in this industry. So, in this section, we will go through the importance of blockchain technology in game creation quickly.

How Can Blockchain Be Used in Gaming?

Blockchain technology is a novel and inventive method of storing data and tracking transactions. It employs decentralization to ensure that no centralized controlling corporation or government body exists. Instead, data is distributed over a network of nodes (laptops) operating blockchain software.

In the gaming business, blockchain innovation has already made an appearance.

Blockchain gaming is a word used to characterize a network or game that includes a cryptocurrency or token aspect. The technology lets corporations build business structures and monetize their products while also providing fascinating and convenient methods for gamers to play and participate in games they enjoy.

Furthermore, blockchain technology enables the online transparent circulation of digital commodities such as NFTs. It allows players to possess virtual property without relying on a third entity, such as a publisher, programmer, or authority. This manner, players may keep their assets safe and use them between devices without incident.

The Advantages of Using Blockchain in Gaming

Blockchain is a game-changing innovation that has had a massive influence on the technology sector. It is impossible to find an industry that has not been influenced by blockchain somehow, and gaming is no different.

When creators and managed service provider accept the potential of incorporating blockchain into their games, the opportunities for game creation are limitless.

Gamers will also be able to market their properties and wealth, buy/sell virtual products for bitcoin, play online games, interact with other gamers worldwide, and engage with blockchain-based game elements.

Here are a few examples of how blockchain technology might impact gaming:

  • Using coins to purchase new weaponry or skins in video games
  • Tokens earned when playing multiplayer games
  • Obtaining prizes for performing specified in-game activities
  • Using vouchers to view your account instead

NFTs’ Role in the Gaming Industry

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a newer idea in the gaming industry. Nonetheless, the importance and potential of NFT are apparent.

NFTs are digital resources that are distinct and distinct from one another. What distinguishes them from fungible currencies is that each coin is unique. Identifying these distinctions permits them to retain their worth throughout time.

The ability of non-fungible tokens to be monitored and confirmed, thanks to blockchain infrastructure, is the essential feature. NFTs may be uploaded to the Ethereum blockchain as metadata, with each token traceable via an ERC721 smart contract.

Individual products, such as antiques or event tickets, can therefore be freely exchanged inside their communities without intervention from organized 3rd parties.

NFT development services, on the other hand, are critical to the future of video games. This is because they enable actual virtual possession of in-game assets, such as collected cards and magical artifacts in a fantasy game, and a specific subject’s gear and attire.

These NFTs will alter the way gamers engage with one another by allowing them to safely and instantaneously exchange or lend their in-game assets on a blockchain.…

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