Looking to use video marketing as a tool to grow your business? Use these 10 tips and strategies
By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to a study done by Cisco.
Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it's not the here and now. YouTube currently receives more than 1 Billion unique visitors a month and is the second largest search engine after Google. Video can give you access to a huge audience but video marketing is frequently an afterthought while it's value demands top priority in your content marketing plan.
Online video is quickly becoming a key means for people to satisfy their information and entertainment needs, businesses that fail to include it in their online marketing strategy will do so at their peril.
In this article we'll dive into 10 actionable tips to increase your YouTube presence so you can…
The essentials of social listening and brand management
Thanks to today’s technology, it is now easier than ever to project your opinion online and use the opinions of others in your buying processes. In less than a few minutes, you can learn what people believe about a product or service, why they hate or love it, and what their experience with it was like.
As a consumer, this is great news – there’s a world full of opinions and reviews opening in front of your eyes before you even consider making a purchase.
As a business owner, though, this may not be so great if you don’t handle your online reputation properly.
But what is online reputation management anyway–and, more importantly, how do you make sure you correctly apply it to your particular business?
The Construction and De-Construction of Online Reputation
To understand how online reputation works, imagine a house being built, brick by brick. What…
Social media strategy and planning essentials
This is part 9 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at reporting for social media; in this blog, I discuss what tools you can use to help plan and manage your social campaigns.
Please note that this list isn’t exhaustive. There’s a wide range of tools available, and each person I know uses a different mix depending on business needs. This blog aims to show you the types of tool you need to evaluate; you should then do your own research to find out what gives you're the functionality you need.
Measurement tools
Let’s start by getting the fundamentals put in place. To do social media intelligently, you need to underpin your planning and decision making with accurate data.
Google Analytics campaign tracking
My first port of call is always web analytics + URL campaign tracking. I’m going to…
How to avoid the common mistakes of programmatic advertising
Access to digital display ad inventory is becoming commoditized. It used to be that marketers and brands worked with publishers independently, leading to “handshake deals” that often left smaller players out in the cold.
Thanks to online trade desks and programmatic ads, this is changing. Most trade desks and platforms cooperate, and with the democratization of ad inventory, marketers and competitors operate on a relatively equal playing field.
It’s great that the playing field is equal, but that doesn’t mean marketers can mix a martini and call it a day just yet. The failure or success of your campaigns is ultimately up to you, and there are plenty of obstacles to pay attention to. And as with most things in life, you as a marketer need to play an active role in your media buying to guarantee you’re getting the best results.
The Hangover
Traditional trading…
You may be focusing on the wrong metrics and missing the most important KPIs
As a digital marketing professional, you may have once expected that your job would involve a lot of creativity – you’d spend your days creating innovative advertisements, writing engaging copy, maybe even crafting catchy memes. And of course, you do work on these tasks, but unless your company has a committed marketing analytics professional on staff, you also likely spend much of your day surrounded by numbers, working hard to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. All those numbers, taken together, are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Unfortunately, sometimes the numbers piling up on your desk indicate that your marketing strategy isn’t working out as well as you’d hoped. That’s when it’s time to take your ad campaigns and KPIs back to the drawing board.
Here are a few analytics strategies you can try to kick start your…
How Trade Shows can thrive when combined with Digital Marketing
Trade shows were once the cornerstone of one’s calendar. Before the days of Google Hangouts, Skype and in fact e-mail, trade shows were a hub for industry professionals to network and for businesses to launch initiatives which they hoped would keep consumers and competitors talking for months to come. As Lima Curtis discussed in her article, what made trade shows so special is quickly being surpassed and made irrelevant in the digital age. Despite this trend, trade shows for pretty much every industry imaginable continue year on year and hundreds of thousands of people annually clear a space on their calendar to attend.
So when products and services can be launched in an instant online, fellow professionals can be contacted with the click of a button and all of…
Get the right strategy in place before you start testing
Starting and running a conversion programme is all about asking the right questions. The questions you want to ask of the tests themselves, but also the questions you need to ask yourself and your team to get the most out of the programme.
Here are our 18 chronological questions to ask yourself and your team if you have recently started a conversion optimisation programme.
Before you test
1. Are a broad range of specialisms feeding into the optimisation programme?
The most effective optimisation programmes need input from strategists, user-centred designers, front end developers, copywriters and analysts.
2. What sources are you using to feed into the ideation process?
Typically the highest quality tests (i.e. the ones that will deliver the biggest uplifts and/or provide the greatest insight into the business) make use of a number of the following techniques/sources: persuasion/emotion/trust (PET), heuristics, user research (remote or moderated)…
Introducing Expanded Text Ads.
Previously, the standard AdWords text ads that appear at the top and bottom of Google search results had a headline of up to 25 characters, and then two description lines of up to 35 characters each. They looked like this:
or, if you put a full stop at the end of your first description line, Google would move that description line up to be next to the headline, and your ad would look like this:
With the introduction of Expanded Text Ads, advertisers can now have two headlines of up to 30 characters each, plus a single description line of up to 80 characters. So the total space you’ve got available to put your message across has leapt from 95 characters to 140 characters. That’s nearly a 50% increase!
The display URL that appears in the ads has changed too – instead of being…
How to build and nurture online communities
A surefire way to build trust and foster brand loyalty is to establish an online community or membership site. It provides your audience with a sense of belongingness, exclusiveness, and the reassurance that your company is looking out for your valued customers. However, before you get ahead of yourself, remember that a successful community is not easy to establish. It requires extensive planning, research, and time and effort in order to set up an engaging platform.
The first step in creating an evergreen community is understand the how the best in the business have done it in their respective markets. Below are seven of the best online communities or membership sites operating today:
1. Blogging on Your Own Terms
Membership sites do not have to be complicated. For example, Blogging on Your Own Terms by Daniela Uslan is built completely on Facebook. It is a community…
Jakob Bignert examines the spectre of automated merchandising and tries to reassure us that there is nothing to worry about – no seriously, you’ll be fine!
Since the industrial revolution, automation in the workplace has been met with extreme reactions. As a business owner you would rub your hands in glee as you realised you could punch out more widgets, more quickly while employing fewer people.
However, if fate had dealt you a different hand, you’d be quaking in your boots as you realised your widget making skills were no longer required and unemployment beckoned.
Retail automation
Retail, though, has seen remarkably few significant step changes when it comes to automation. And understandably; buy products, display them attractively, take the money, count it, bank it and repeat. OK, an oversimplification I grant you, but you get the point.
There are some though:
Cash registers and subsequent EPOS systems have removed the need for a counting…
