Plus examples of what make an effective explainer video
Oscar Wilde used to say that experience is the name we give to our mistakes. However, you don’t need to be as seasoned as good ol’ Oscar to know that. When it comes to video marketing, you can’t afford to make those mistakes in the first place. Especially when it comes to creating explainer videos.
Developing explainer videos capable of summing up who you are in under 90 secs can be truly challenging. You can’t go into it blindfolded and full-out swinging – you need to have some certainties from the get go.
But before diving into the specifics and giving you some much-needed insight on the things that you should never do, there’s a question that perhaps you might be asking yourself right now:
Where exactly do explainer videos fit into my marketing strategy?
Well,…
How to effectively use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Hashtags, you either love them or hate them. Having become part of our culture, we use them every day on social media. As more social platforms use hashtags it has become confusing on how and when to use them.
In this post, we are going to look at how many hashtags you should be using and which ones are best to help you expand your reach beyond your followers.
What is a hashtag?
Firstly let's look at what a hashtag actually is. The correct definition of a hashtag according to the Oxford dictionary is:
'A word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media websites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify messages on a specific topic'.
The evolution of the hashtag in marketing started in 2007 when Twitter used them to categorize discussed topics. Now, Hashtags are used worldwide making it…
Working with large numbers of smaller influencers is a logistical challenge, and requires the right set of tools
How would you like to recruit an army of influential people -- each with hundreds or even thousands of loyal followers -- to promote your brand?
If this sounds good to you, then you understand the rising popularity of micro-influencer marketing. Micro-influencers can sway opinions, there are millions of them, and many are already eager to work with brands. In fact, you likely already have micro-influencers among your brand’s customer and fan base.
Ready? Not so fast. In order to get results with micro-influencer marketing, you need to scale your campaign across hundreds, even thousands of influencers (depending on your needs). These are real people, not ad units, and there’s no simple way to automate the process of getting these individual influencers to promote you, let alone handle logistics like negotiation, content creation, and payments.…
Make sure you avoid these classic campaign planning mistakes
We’ve all seen it. The #fail where a company that’s big enough to know better, completely messes up.
The odd thing is that this continues to happen and I guess until the machines take over, that will continue. Whether it’s politics or business, rarely do organisations learn from their predecessors.
At Smart Insights we share best practice, hope that you find our content useful and can apply this directly to your organisations, so in this new guide we have explored 10 marketing campaign planning mistakes, with case study companies such as Absolut Vodka, Admiral Insurance, British Airways, Coca-Cola, HMV, Kodak, McDonald's, Southern Rail, Starbucks, and Waitrose, as well as the two primary candidates in the US presidential campaign and the recent Olympics.
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Use video to enhance your digital marketing strategy
Days of old fashioned mass ads “spray and pray” approach to advertising are long gone now and what the modern day advertisers need today is more precise targeting. Video is one approach you may not have considered.
Video advertising today is organized more along the lines of a precise laser, rather than of an advertising equivalent of “shotgun” marketing. If the leads are what you are after in your online business, with 61 percent of successful businesses stating that they use video as a marketing tool. The very same tool helps them carve out revenue for themselves, as the research done by Eyeview demonstrated that using video on a landing page alone can increase conversion rates by 80 percent. The future of advertising is here and it offers lucrative propositions for those who can recognize it for what it genuinely is.
Brain as an Additional…
How to leverage the power of social media analytics to expand your audience
These days, if you are looking to expand your audience, you should definitely try your luck on social media, simply because everyone is there. However, the problem with being present on social media, and using it to reach out to your audience, is that it can eat up a lot of your time. For instance, if you have a killer post that will provide value to the readers, you will need to come up with a headline that will grab their attention, which is usually very divided, as well as find an image that will reel them in, maybe even include hashtags, and so on.
To make matters even worse, it's a shot in the dark, because even if it works like a charm, you will have no idea whatsoever why it worked.
According to Arthur Mitchell, who is the…
Internal links are important for ranking high on search engines
As a lanky teenager, basketball was always my sport of choice at school; I scored three pointers for fun, towering above my classmates to effortlessly send the ball sailing into the net. (Or at least that’s how I like to remember the pinnacle of my sporting achievements.)
Now, as a seasoned SEO professional, I’m reminded of my days shooting hoops when I come across websites that neglect to build internal links. It may sound a strange analogy, but hear me out.
Placing an internal link from one page to another is like a free throw, a simple chance to score points unopposed. Links give you a chance to direct website visitors to related content, while, in the background, they also point search engine bots in the direction of your most important pages,…
A study from market research company Forrester found that more marketers are focusing on performance-based marketing. Performance marketing is “the new normal,” according to Forrester. Performance advertising is a competitive differentiator today; it will be table stakes tomorrow.
What is performance marketing? Performance marketing uses clearly defined and measurable business objectives as the basis of payment or optimization. This includes cost-per-action (CPA) models, such as affiliate marketing, and programmatic ads that optimize based on real-time performance metrics.
How Performance Marketing Works
The Basics
The CPA model of payment is critical to understanding how performance marketing works. Advertisers and marketing companies are paid only when a specific action, such as a sale, lead or click, is completed.
This model is what separates performance marketing from other forms of advertising. In traditional advertising, fees are paid up front and do not depend on the success of the ads. Advertisers in performance marketing only pay for successful…
6 top tips for creating a strategic social video on a budget
It only takes one train journey or a merry stroll through our towns to notice people of all demographics are glued to their phones. Much of the content they’re consuming is video and not just any video but mobile first video on social channels.
In the marketing world, whenever video is mentioned there is a misconception that it’s budget breaking and therefore it’s overlooked in favour of less engaging formats. However, there are a number of cost saving hacks, which can be applied at different stages of the marketing funnel. These range from the use of phone footage and user generated content (UGC) through to ad spend and obtaining efficiencies through effective targeting. With that in mind, let’s explore how to incorporate video into your social strategies, even on a small budget in order to meet your objectives.
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Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter content strategy
Just like snowflakes, no two social media platforms are alike. Yet marketers often take the one-size-fits-all approach to social media advertising, applying the same methodology to all clients and campaigns regardless of objectives and using the same creative across all marketing channels.
While this approach is undoubtedly easier, it doesn’t take into account that each social media platform has different types of users at different parts of the purchasing funnel. You could be inadvertently sending conversion-focused messaging to someone who’s still in the brand awareness stage, which is risky because 41 percent of social media users say they won’t hesitate to unfollow a brand that shares irrelevant information.
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