Creating amazing content is a conscious choice. Content marketers make this choice every day, as they decide what to craft and publish on their organization’s blogs and social media platforms.
They know what great content is; something that educates entertains, or inspires their readers and followers; it is content that gets conversions, gets published on a regular basis by their followers and will be responded to and shared with their connections.
The problem is this: There is a lot of great content out there that is published every day. To stand out from the others means to go beyond the “great” and to enter the realm of “incredible,” (or awesome) that place where content is so engaging and compelling that readers cannot ignore it and must share. How do you get to this place?
Are you creating valuable content with authentic brand storytelling to attract, educate and nurture customer for increased sales? Before you start social posting, email marketing, PR and sales pitches, I believe that content marketing plan should come first.
Social advertising and marketing are becoming less and less effective by the minute; as a forward-thinking marketer and business owner, you got to find a better way. Virality with brand storytelling is almost mainstream now and if you have not caught up with word-of-mouth marketing through social media, events and develop advocates to help you create the fiery momentum in your business, then now is the time to get cracking and really strategise and build your marketing actions around it.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues, and offer them valuable content that nurtures their buying journey.
For me, as a dance teacher, and digital marketing trainer with a digital agency. These two business endeavours are very distinct and delivery a very separate brand story, but my values are similar. To help my community build dance and business confidence.
For each of them, I create a content marketing plan and a brand story to help my audience connect with me and also the valuable journey unfolds with creativity and excitement. As much as possible I try to produce content in collaboration with my audience. An example is a short video below from a survey through social media on what they like most and about coming to dance classes and favourite moments captured that is outside of dance classes. I use their words, created this collage and short impactful video in a minute. I then use this in our social media posts and campaigns to outreach for new prospect within the similar interest and seeking those values and experience.
So here are the 3 key benefits if you employ content marketing well:
1. Increased brand and service awareness to attract customers right for you. This means higher value transactions and relationships.
2. Cost savings: Less spend on non-targeted advertising and promotions and less time spent on inquiries as people already build a trusted relationship with you online. You do need to follow through to deliver the expected service experience well
3. Better customers who have more loyalty: Acquire desirable customers that buy into the vision and valuable relations with you and your enterprise promise.
Editorial calendars can be useful for a range of content marketing tasks.
Can be used to help guide customers through complex buying cycles.
Can be used to manage the process of scaling content marketing for use in different geographic regions.
Can be used to align all the content-related efforts of the various teams operating across an enterprise.
Sharing your content calendar with your sales, marketing, HR, public relations, or other business partners and team members can make it easier for them to understand your efforts – and to alert your team when they are involved in an upcoming event that might inspire new content ideas.
Here is an example of an editorial planning template the I use for my business and help my clients to update and create theirs too.
Get your own content marketing and editorial planning tool.
I create content marketing plans with entrepreneurs and their team who want to grow their visibility and brand story online. We workshop your content marketing editorial plan with a planning tool that includes generating topics that matter, content format, which will flow through to your social media plans on what to posts, campaign and email marketing. I recommend you to start planning your content strategy and map it out well with your buyer’s journey as your starting point, so the rest can flow from there.
If you have any question and would like to create a consistent and valuable plan for your business, do get in touch. I work best with wellness driven, innovation focussed businesses with positive environmental causes.
Find out about our NZTE co-funded training programs. New Zealand businesses that are GST registered could potentially qualify up to 50% funding for training and development for digital marketing.
Have you read about 'Steps to create amazing shareable content?"
Getting social right in your business can have huge impact.
The importance of social media continues to grow and change how we communicate with one another. As business owners, it is not your job to be on social media ALL the time. Unless, your critical business delivery depends on it. i.e: You are a social media coordinator 100%, content marketing, posting and customer service is what you are engaged to do.
You are messing with your business growth if interacting on social media is taking up any more than 5-10% of your work time.
Your job as a business owner, managing director, administrator, marketer of your own business is to be creating the strategy for your business and making sure it is done. Your job is to be brainstorming what needs to be fixed, what needs to be improved and what needs to be done to drive your business forward. Your job is to do the one thing that no one else can do in your business.
~Leonie Dawson creator of a Shining Biz and Life academy. Founder of a million turn-over online business that depends on social media marketing as one of hers keys sales and marketing funnel.
Example of Facebook ad campaign
Social media means the collective of online communication channels, portals and websites dedicated to facilitating community-based interactions, sharing and collaborations. Through these channels, users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. Social media allow people to socially interact, converse, network and share with one another online; Popular social media sites and applications include Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter, Pininterest, Instagram & WeChat.
Social Media Marketing is defined as the process of gaining attention, interest and desire to generate website traffic, and sales conversion through social media sites.
Latest social media statistics of consumer adoption and usage:
Social networks are now so well established, that there is a core ‘top 5’ social networks that don’t change much from year-to-year. But, the most popular social media sites vary a lot by level of usage in different countries and demographics. Understanding these differences in popularity of different social networks is really important when targeting specific audiences. When comparing the most popular social networks it’s best to review them by active account usage, not just the number of user accounts. We’ll also see that some social networks are growing more rapidly than others, while some are now in decline.
Get Social Media Marketing: The 4 step plan
Are you using social media effectively to grow your business interactions, following and transactions?
The first step starts with having intention, I have been researching and helping busineses to define them objectives and you would use this list to define what is your objectives for using social media for you business and personal brand.
Here are common objectives that brands and business have:
Create Awareness
Build a community and following
Turn following into potential customers or advocates
Get more website traffic and online store visits
Educate with content and curated posts to nurture your prospects interest.
Create events and attend events
Be part of social networking and listening
Promote sales and offers of products and services
Generate leads and sales interest to nurture with email marketing
Generate PR opportunities and monitor reputation online
Use it as a channel to receive feedback
Like some help and guidance to get you started?
If you have been dappling with Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin before and not have a written and clear plan for engagement to build and nurture an audience to become a customer, we can help.
Get Social Media Marketing Workshop
is designed to work with you to plan and take action with support from plan, to customer targeting, brand design and action a campaign.
Attend this comprehensive Social Media Training workshop conducted by Revive Me Marketing to level up your social media marketing skills and actions, specific to your business and industry.
Give your business the best chance at realising good returns on investment into social media marketing, and avoid the common pitfalls many brands and businesses make.
Activate better Social Media Marketing actions with a strategy and monthly plan
Prepare a Social Media Marketing Plan for the year, integrated with offline marketing efforts.
Save time by using tools and apps demonstrated in the course.
Outcomes of Get Social Media Marketing:
Profile update: Get a Facebook Marketing checklist to guide your actions
Create a Strategy: Define your objectives and target audience
Launch a Facebook Ads Campaign: Get support and guidance to launch a campaign
Website Traffic | Lead Generation| Brand Awareness| Post Engagement| Online Store Visits
Investment: $900+GST |$450+GST with NZTE Capability Voucher.
Last week of April, I was at King and Queen Hotel Suites in New Plymouth, taking 360 VR photos to promote the establishment as an Accommodation Support Partner to Taranaki Arts Trail, as part of the annual 3 day Artist Open Studios event in June 2018.
Sharing 360 degree photos on Facebook on YouTube seem pretty straightforward. And I started to research on how to embed these media onto a web page.
There are plenty of options, and the web researcher in me had to scowl for the best practice, applications, hosting and social sharing available for these stunning 360 images.
Self hosting option
The first article I read was from Google and it takes about needing to add scripts and using Javascript API on code and host the files somewhere else of viewing.
It then requires the web developer to add image as an iframe with html.
The easy way:
Other way is to use 3rd party application providers that allow you to upload the file and then generate a html file for embedding.
There were a few providers out there. Theta360, the device manufacturer has sharing uploads but caps files at 5MB, so not ideal for 360 video captures.On the Theta360 forum, one user mentioned that he noticed that 360 degree video uploads onto YouTube had varying results.
‘Videos play fine in 360 on YouTube, but the embeds seem to sometimes work and sometimes not when put on pages elsewhere.’Another user advise to ’embedding 360 photo on a website using Kuula’ https://blog.kuula.co/embed-editor-on-kuula/
I have noticed that some VR videos on YouTube have logos embedded on it and videos are being edited and stitch as this is starting to get more popular and mainstream to reocrd and post 360 media onto 3rd party applications providers with player app, like Kuula, if you need to add your own logo to the embed, you will need to get a PRO (paid) subscription as a service.
My mission was to look for a provider that offer an easy upload and sharing solution, which allow setting the orientation of the image, ability to auto-pan around the image when it first loads and potentially create a collection of images that link to each other as a virtual tour.
So here are my test embeds for two of the images I captured.
1st embed I have used is from 360player. 360player.io
The 2nd embed is with roundme.com/ which provides virtual tour and multiple panaroma pictures shown as a collection. To get a pro embed, it cost $15US for the lifetime.
roundme.com
They also offer a full screen version.
It was first to sign up and claims to be forever free to use. There some first to add as you would when you upload any media on to a hosting provider for web. There was title, description, tags fields to fill in. However I was disappointed at the orientation the picture has default to and could find easy way to lock the viewing orientation the the right angle that I wantedhttps://360player.io/.
This third one embed is from Veer.tv. 360 photos are uploaded as individual files, with description and #tags field options.
Frames can be resized easily. This image of the Premium Suite at King and Queen Hotel Suite is sized at 480px by 350px.
If you own a business – small, mid-sized or even large – there are three goals you are undoubtedly want to achieve:
1. Driving more traffic
2. Educating your customers about your products or services
3. Converting the users into customers and earn their loyalty
And, how are you making it happen? Online and offline marketing? Hiring professionals in the sales department? Email marketing? Or even cold calls? And, we believe that you must be having a strong social media presence as well and doing everything that is in your power to make the most out of your online presence? Great!
Now, what?
You have to keep one thing in your mind that the online market is a very competitive space and if you were not catching up with the new marketing trends and offering the best avenues to your customers to consume fresh content, your brand would soon be an old story.
What if we told you that there is one more marketing tactic that can help you to achieve your goals mentioned above, drive more traffic and generate more qualified leads?
No, it’s not a “magic trick.”
It’s also not a “black hat” method.
It’s none other than Video Marketing, and it works amazingly well.
Well, when it comes to an article about Video Marketing, almost every individual in business probably has the following response: “Yes, we get it! Video IS important!” We know that you very well understand the power of video marketing. However, the chances are, you are not using it effectively.
Why is your company ignoring this incredible tactic?
Do you have doubts about this trend and questions like; ‘is it even worth to create videos for promoting your business?’
The answer is simple: Yes, it is; every single penny and time spent on it.
Here are three powerful reasons that will establish the power of video. It is one of the most effective digital marketing tools today that can drive more traffic and convert hesitant users into loyal customers.
Video Boosts Conversions, Sales, and More Organic Traffic
When Hubspot surveyed the amount of video content users watch in a typical day, the average response they received was 1.5 hours. However, 15% told them that they watch more than 3 hours per day. It clearly explains that if you are NOT tapping the Video Marketing domain, then you must be losing out on the traffic that could be grown organically without being too sales-y.
For instance, create a video of your offerings (product or services) and educate your users and make them aware of your strength. Let them know what to expect before they commit to your services. In short, videos not only helped in increasing user engagement but also convince the users to buy a product or service helped them in making a better buying decision.
Here’s a fascinating example from Taranaki Arts Trail to showcase the event to visitors :
We embeded this on the customer website, facebook page, event post and ran a Facebook Ad campaign to drive excitement and attract customer awareness to come to this free event.
Videos Show Great ROI
Someone rightly said, “The play button is the most compelling Call to Action on the web.”
Adding a product video on your landing page can increase conversions by manifolds and provide a good return on investment. According to the study, “addingvideo on a landing page can increase conversion by 80%.” Even though producing a professional video is not yet the most straightforward or cheapest task, but once you invest your time, it will surely start paying off big time. Besides, it’s not necessary to always create a perfect video. You can use your mobile and put out a spontaneous video to entertain your users, and that’s the beauty of this medium. Moreover, if you Google, you will find many online video editing tools that are affordable and can add a billion stars to your video.
Why do we need content marketing? Well, it all boils down to creating trust between the brand and users and videos play a critical part in it. Trust is the foundation of conversions and sales, and the whole purpose of content marketing is building long-term relationships with the users on an emotional level. A video does it all; it engages the audience in a better way and ignites emotions. When they start trusting the brand, get useful and interesting information about your company and then you don’t have to coax them into buying your product or service.
An excellent way to use videos to build trust with your customers is to capture your best customers singing your praises. Just record the interview with your customers and show their side of the story.
Another great example of creating trust and increasing user base is what all the YouTubers do; they literally bare their soul in front of their audience and try to win their hearts and trust. People look up to them before trying new cream or a car or even check out their reviews on a particular restaurant. Big companies hire them to review their products and work to drive traffic back to their website.
Video Usage is on the RISE.
99% of those who already do use video, say they’ll continue to do so in 2018.
65% of those who don’t currently use video, say they plan to start in 2018.
We all watch a lot of videos.
We all love to share videos.
Marketers are advocating video marketing, and they know how to do their jobs.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram – video is ruling everywhere.
From virtual reality to live streaming to 360-degree videos, marketers are going immersive. Consumers can step into both the real-world views and fantastical experiences that brands are creating as they have never been able to before. All the awe-inspiring and boundary-dissolving video marketing trends are changing the way businesses produce and consumers consuming content, and this is just a start.
Ready to find out how 2018 is going BIG on Video Marketing?
Top Three Video Marketing Trends in 2018
Live Video or Live Streaming
No less than 13% of web traffic from video comes directly from live videos.
Are you familiar with the latest terminology – FOMO (fear of missing out) or in other words – Curiosity? Live video is gaining popularity day by day, and the only reason behind this is users’ growing inquisitiveness. They want to know what’s new and what’s happening in people’s lives, they are fascinated about ‘behind the scenes’ video clippings, and that’s how companies, celebrities and almost all are gaining popularity through feeding on the Humans’ natural characteristic.
Live video is the most prominent trend of 2018, and it is continuously picking speed. With live videos, you give exactly what your followers want: instant connection, feedback, and indulgence. You can boost excitement and promote engagement through live Q&A sessions, hosting live how-to sessions, offer helpful tips, showcasing product launches, sneak peek of important events or even making customers a part of your daily activities like gym sessions or food.
The thrill of interacting in real-time with a celebrity, brand, or friend is what pushes the increased engagement rates, and that’s why marketers suggest to NOT missing out the opportunity to make users a part of your life by going live.
With tools like Facebook Live, Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live and a range of streaming apps like BeLive and Zoom for beginners and OBS Studio and Wirecast for more seasoned videographers, live streaming is 100 percent accessible for everyone.
The companies can enjoy numerous advantages of a live video:
Live videos are more economical. No need to edit the video.
Live streaming is fun.
It brings out the human side of a brand and users could connect emotionally.
Live video increases the quality of views.
In 2018, the trend is expected to get even more intense and more interactive.
360-degree Videos
The 360-degree video was first introduced in 2014, and however, it had a slow yet exciting start, today you will witness more and more brands using this tactic to create a sense of thrill for their customers. Whether it’s a product launch or an adventurous sport, 360° videos are making a big comeback in 2018. The use of omnidirectional cameras is used to grasp a spherical video capture of a space. You get new paths to interactive customer experience through an immersive technology. AR engages users far beyond many of mobile technologies we’ve seen in the past. There are numerous ways of implementation: interactive print, augmented commerce or, for instance, live activations.
360 was already a trend in, but it is set to explode in 2018. Considering 360° videos, Google has found that despite lower view-through rate they had 46 percent higher click-through rate compared to standard video versions, which makes them cost-effective with its lower cost-per-view. However, not everyone is ready to adopt such technologies just yet, but the trend is catching up, and companies are acknowledging the engagement rate it brings in.
For example:
Fly side-by- side with astronauts in this the first ever 3D Virtual Reality film shot in space.
Explainer Videos Won’t Stop Being a Hype
Studies show that 74% of users who watched an explainer-video about a product subsequently bought it.
Explainer videos continue to be a great way to get a brief yet memorable summary about your product or services. In just a few minutes, viewers get a fair idea of your expertise and how the brand could be their choice, or not. The effectiveness of explainer videos is enormous: they are short, showing a definite problem and a viable solution and leaving space to bring out your creativity and impress the audience with an overall video watching experience.
The cost of producing explainer videos may have prevented marketers from using them in the past. But advances in technology make it possible to create a high-quality explainer video using the camera and software on the phone in your pocket.
According to Wyzowl’s survey, “74% of the people interviewed who watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service ended up buying it.”
An explainer video is an excellent way for a brand to tell its story.
For example: Yum Yum’s explainer video for their client explainer video for their client Stack that Money is short and very interesting.
Final words? Better start crafting your exciting brand videos NOW!
There is no denying that we all love to watch videos more than reading content. A Video makes content consumption easier and fun. Today, there are numerous and attention-grabbing ways to disseminate information about the brand, products, and services. From Live streaming to 360-degree videos, there is no limit to attract the target audience.
If you think about it, the effectiveness of video is not even that surprising. Visual content plays an integral part in transmitting information to our brain. Users remember a video more than an article that could sometimes be boring or too lengthy to finish. So, if pictures can boost massive engagement then imagine what videos (moving images) could do to your business.
Let’s just say ‘video is like a PIZZA, even if it’s not perfect, nobody says NO to it.’
If you are serious about digital marketing, you must consider video into this mix too.
Watch out for our Video Marketing Capability Development Training. We are working on it and launching it as a live workshop on 31st May 2018.
