PSPINC Official Company Blog

Create an Effective Marketing Strategy with a SWOT Analysis

Apr

4

The key to a successful marketing campaign is an effective marketing strategy. But it’s hard to put one together if you don’t assess where the company currently stands. One of the most important parts of marketing is research. After all, you can’t market for a company without knowing anything about what the company does, how it operates, what it sells, and how it compares to others on the market. The best way to start the research process is with a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis also referred to as a situation analysis, stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It looks at what the company excels at, where it could improve, and where they stand amongst the competition while helping identify ways it could improve. It gives marketers a basic outline of the company, which will lead them to conduct further research on not only the company but also its competitors and their industry.

How to Create a SWOT Analysis

a woman standing in front of a white board with a swot analysis drawn on the board

Research should always be at the start of every marketing process. A SWOT analysis just makes it easier to organize that research. There’s basic information like a company’s name, history, among others. Then, you can look into identifying what makes this company different than others. What are the best parts of this company and where can they improve? It’s through this research that you’ll get a better idea of what the industry looks like as a whole and where this company fits in.

Creating the SWOT analysis after that is simple; instead of writing it all out in a report, draw out a two-by-two table, labeling each quadrant with Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Then, as your research progresses, fill them out with the appropriate data. It’s that easy. While this won’t be everything you need to know before creating an effective marketing plan, it will, at the very least, give you a good start. A SWOT analysis tells you what issues you should address and how the business can grow, all of which will only strengthen your overall marketing strategy and plan moving forward.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #blog #branding #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingonline #marketingresearch #marketingtips #research #sales #smallbusiness #socialmedia #swot #swotanalysis #tech #technology

Announcement: Mail Server Update

Apr

3

Dear valued customers,

Thank you for choosing Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

We are always looking to improve the services we offer you.
As such, we will be conducting mail server update.

You may experience delay in receiving emails for a few seconds during the time below.

The schedule is as follows:

* USA Pacific Daylight Time
- April 4th (Tue) 9:00 - 9:30am

* Japan Time
- April 5th (Wed) 1:00 - 1:30am

PSPINC provides services with uptimes of 99.9%

If you have any questions, please contact us at 1-800-232-3989 or email us at support@pspinc.com .

We would like to answer your questions by phone call.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 161 “Last Chance for 50% Off Pass Wizard Pro!”

Mar

30

Today is your last chance to get 50% off Pass Wizard Pro! As a fully encrypted system, you can store, manage, and even share passwords securely without worrying about forgetting or exposing them to potential cyber criminals. Pass Wizard Pro not only gives you the space to store and manage as many passwords as you want, but you can also add an extra layer of security with 2FA. All for just $0.84 a month (after taking 50% off)! Not to mention group features that make it easier to share select passwords securely.

To claim this deal, just sign up for Pass Wizard for free and upgrade to Pro. Then, when you check out, enter the promo code, PRO50, and you’ll get your first year of Pass Wizard Pro for 50% off! So, protect your passwords in a secure vault, perfect for personal and business uses. But hurry, this sale only lasts until the end of today!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #cyber #cybersecurity #discount #passwizard #passwordgenerator #passwordmanager #passwords #passwordsecurity #passwordstorage #passwordvault #promo #promocode #promotion #pspinc #sales #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web

Everything You Need to Know About the Potential TikTok Ban

Mar

28

TikTok is a short-form video-sharing app geared mostly toward Gen-Z. Content on the platform ranges from cooking videos to funny animal clips to practically anything you could think of. According to Business of Apps, as of January 2023, TikTok had almost two billion monthly active users globally. And this doesn’t even include users from China since the app uses a different name there. As of just last week, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, boasted that TikTok now has 150 million active monthly users in the U.S. alone. But this claim also comes amongst talks over a potential ban of the app.

TikTok’s Data Security Concerns

close-up of the settings app in the iOS interface

The app, while popular, poses privacy and data security practices for one big reason: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has ties to China. Other countries worldwide, including the U.S., have banned the app altogether or restricted its use in certain cases. For example, India placed a ban on not only TikTok but also other Chinese-owned apps like WeChat, and Pakistan banned the app at least four times. While the U.S., Canada, and Taiwan haven’t officially banned the app, government-issued devices only have restricted access to TikTok. However, there isn’t currently any hard proof of these privacy concerns; it’s more of a concern for what China could do with TikTok’s users’ data in the future.

To counteract this potential, the U.S. government created the RESTRICT Act. This bipartisan bill, in short, allows the secretary of Commerce to ban apps that pose a risk to U.S. national security. It doesn’t explicitly name TikTok, but it covers companies owned not only by China, but also by Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. Last week, Chew faced congress to answer questions they had over TikTok's data concerns. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to change the status quo as many representatives didn't seem to know much about how the app works. While this bill exists, U.S. lawmakers, including President Biden, aren’t pushing to ban the app. Instead, they’d much prefer it if a U.S.-owned company acquired ByteDance, removing its ties to China.

How Advertisers Are Responding

two women having a meeting in the office

Despite the uncertainty about the app’s future, advertisers are sticking with TikTok and are largely unfazed by it. Privacy and data security concerns on social media are nothing new to marketers. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is still a formidable force in the social media market today. Especially for marketers, as Facebook’s ad business has only gotten stronger since. So, it’s safe to say they were able to walk away mostly unscathed from the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2015. So, with this example in mind, marketers know the privacy issue concerns will eventually die down.

Marketers have experienced this wave of security concerns for social media in the past, only to see it ultimately pass. So, for now, advertisers are sticking with TikTok and keeping their ad spend on the platform. And for marketers who have employed a TikTok-first approach, they’re sticking with it, despite the threat of a ban. TikTok, for better or for worse, delivers droves of the Gen-Z audience, making it an attractive marketing platform. So, as far as advertisers are concerned, TikTok is here to stay.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertisers #advertising #app #branding #business #businesstips #cybersecurity #data #datasecurity #marketers #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingnews #marketingtips #security #smallbusiness #socialmedia #therestrictact #tiktok

Announcement: Mail Server Security Update

Mar

24

Dear valued customers,

Thank you for choosing Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

We are always looking to improve the services we offer you.
As such, we will be conducting mail server update.

You may experience delay in sending and receiving emails for a few seconds during the time below.

The schedule is as follows:

* USA Pacific Daylight Time
- March 28th (Tue) 9:00 - 9:30am

* Japan Time
- March 29th (Wed) 1:00 - 1:30am

PSPINC provides services with uptimes of 99.9%

If you have any questions, please contact us at 1-800-232-3989 or email us at support@pspinc.com .

We would like to answer your questions by phone call.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

Click It Audio service maintenace

Mar

23

Click It Audio Users,

We are going to do Click It Audio server maintenance.

There will be a period of about 15 minutes during Click It Audio service will not be able to access during the maintenance time below.

The schedule is as follows:

* USA Pacific Daylight Time
- March 27th (Mon) 5:00 - 5:30am

* Japan Time
- March 27th (Mon) 9:00 - 9:30pm

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

PSP Pilot: Company Search Results Update

Mar

23

1 Enhanced Company Search

Before:
Whenever a user searched, “PSP Pilot”, the only result that appeared was “PSP Pilot”.

After:
Now, when a user searches for “PSP Pilot”, the results page would show “PSP Pilot”, “PSP-Pilot”, “PSP&Pilot” etc.
※ The search results will now include partial matches rather than only showing exact matches.

2 New City Filter Added

• In addition to searching the company name, you can now search by city for companies that register a particular city name in their company address.
• Please note that this will only work if you check the “Location” filter box. Otherwise, it’ll grey out.
• This search box includes the same enhancement as the company search
• New autocomplete feature: when typing in the search box, it’ll suggest terms in the dropdown menu and allow you to automatically choose an option.

※You must type more than three letters to see the drop-down menu.
※Please make sure there is no blank space before the letters. It may cause the wrong result.
※This feature also isn’t sensitive to capitalization, so if you were to search for “san diego”, “san diego” and “SAN diego” would both display in the drop-down menu.

https://www.pspinc.com

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#PSPPilot #blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #clientdatabase #employeeportal #smallbusiness #taskmanagement #tech #technology #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 160 “Email Marketing Compared to Other Marketing Tactics”

Mar

23

One of the most effective marketing tactics today is email. With so many advancements in technology today, email still delivers the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing tactics. According to Omnisend, the average return per dollar spent on email marketing is $40. While social media and paid search are popular efforts, email marketing still delivers the best results. Why? Because everyone uses email. So, if anything, it makes it much more likely people will at least see your content whereas being seen on paid search and social media is determined by many other factors that are mostly out of your control.

The best way to ensure your email marketing campaign is successful is by having a definitive goal set in mind, testing email broadcasts, making emails visually appealing, tracking how well it performs and adjusting over time. And that’s exactly why we built NewsMAIL, our email marketing tool that makes it easy for businesses to easily create effective email marketing campaigns. Get started at just $20/month or take a look at some of our prepaid plans.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #email #google #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #newsmail #pspinc #seo #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #technology #web

How Recommendation Systems Work on Social Media

Mar

21

Have you ever liked a post about your local baseball team on social media, come back a day later, and see another post about baseball on your feed? That’s the recommendation algorithm doing its job. Recommendation systems, in short, predict based on a ranking system and will use those rankings to recommend items that they think users will like. And it’s widely what social media platforms use to populate users’ timelines.

The first wide-scale use of the recommendation algorithm was when Amazon started recommending users products in the late 1990s. And Netflix followed suit a year later in 2000. At the time, they started with a simple collaborative filtering technique. The general concept of collaborative filtering is customers who bought this also bought that. Amazon and Netflix have since refined their algorithms, and social media finally decided to adopt recommendation algorithms for themselves in 2010.

Social Media and Recommendation Systems

person scrolling Instagram feed on their phone

Today, recommendations largely dominate users’ social media feeds. This is evident by the For You page on TikTok and Twitter. Instead of just only showing posts from the people you’re following, it shows posts that their algorithms think you’d like based on past activity (likes, comments, replies, shares, etc.). Additionally, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds are also engagement-based by default, and the video recommendations section is the first thing you’ll see on YouTube’s homepage.

While social media platforms are relatively secretive about the specifics of how each of their algorithms works, one thing is clear: they reward posts that garner more engagement by showing them first. Even though every social media platform is different in its own ways, they all have similar goals: generate ad revenue, keep users happy, and encourage users to come back. The problem, however, is there’s no direct way to accomplish those goals when thinking about how platforms arrange content on users’ timelines. By focusing on engagement, the algorithm can then populate users’ feeds with more relevant posts, making it more likely they’ll stay on as well as return to the platform.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#amazon #blog #facebook #foryoupage #fyp #instagram #linkedin #marketing #marketingdigital #netflix #recommendations #socialmedia #socialmediaalgorithm #socialmediafeed #socialmediatimelines #tech #technology #tiktok #twitter #web #website #youtube

WebdeMail: New Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Feature

Mar

16

We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a two-factor authentication (2FA) feature to WebdeMail, which adds another layer of protection as it requires you to enter a code from an authenticator app in addition to entering your password when logging in. Using 2FA prevents unauthorized access from third parties, which enhance security.

How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication in WebdeMail

To enable the 2FA feature:
1. Log in to your WebdeMail account.
2. Select "Settings" from the menu in the lower left corner.
3. Select "2-Factor Authentication" in the settings.
4. Select "On".
5. Install an authenticator app on your smartphone.
General authenticator apps are supported, but we recommend:

・Google Authenticator
・Microsoft Authenticator

6. Scan the QR code with the authenticator app or enter the setting key into the authenticator app.
7. Enter the authentication code displayed on the authentication app in Step 3 of the 2-Factor Authentication setting page in WebdeMail and confirm the linkage.
8. Now when logging in to WebdeMail, you’ll need to enter the code displayed in the authenticator app after entering your password.

If you have any questions, please contact us at 1-800-232-3989 or email us at support@pspinc.com. We prefer to answer your questions by phone.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.